Prachi Gupta was Hansel- An alien in her own story
Annie and Hansel: in fourth grade, the two characters leaped from writer Prachi Gupta’s imagination to the page, protagonists in an E.T.-esque tale of human-alien friendship.
Gupta’s experiences are seemingly absent from the short story: Annie is white, and her narrative doesn’t include a hint of Gupta’s Indian American background. Yet, as Gupta describes in her memoir, They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us, she now realizes that she was in the story—just not as Annie.
“I was Hansel, the alien android who wanted desperately to belong in Annie’s world, and let Annie define him by settling into the negative space around her,” she writes. “I had seen Annie as human but myself as a malleable hunk of metal, a sidekick to support a white girl on her journey of self-actualization. The story that I grew up telling myself was someone else’s—but, like my story about Annie and the android, I didn’t know that at the time.”
This dissonance is central to Gupta’s epistolary memoir, in which she documents her struggle to define her own story outside the bounds of the model-minority myth. Hemmed in by her volatile father’s strict gender expectations and by Eurocentric mental-health systems, hers is a narrative of reclamation: of learning to trust herself and write herself back into the story—as a human this time, not an android.
“I think that was the thing that was hardest for me: believing that my voice really mattered and that I could speak with conviction about my own experiences,” Gupta said in an interview with India Currents.
Filling in the gaps
They Called Us Exceptional, published in August 2023, is Gupta’s first foray into memoir writing. Yet shards of her story have surfaced in her journalistic work: “How Dadaji Became a Feminist,” published in 2017, explored her paternal grandfather’s evolution from rigid patriarch to resolute feminist. Her 2019 piece “Stories About My Brother,” equal parts analytical feature and personal essay, documents the toll gender and racial expectations took on her brother, Yush, a brilliant entrepreneur who—after beginning to dabble in men’s rights activism—died at 29 following a botched leg-lengthening surgery.
The memoir fills in the gaps between these narratives. Gupta and her brother grew up in 1990s white, suburban Pennsylvania, navigating their father’s controlling, erratic behavior; material wealth and success belied the household’s turmoil.
Prachi’s journey sees her unravel the threads of her father’s conflicting expectations: she is expected to be “an extension of his own greatness,” but also quiet and obedient. She struggles to reconcile her father’s version of Indianness—of the ideal Indian woman—with her own desires and with the paths of other women in her family, including her Buaji (aunt).
“I think you both [my parents] were proud that the world was impressed by my work,” she writes. “But the beliefs of the woman who had produced that work—I worried that woman shamed our family.”
Epistolary storytelling
The memoir’s unique format—it’s written as a series of letters from Gupta to her mother—immerses the reader in the relationships it discusses.
“I went back and I wrote every chapter as a letter to my mom because that was the driver of the book,” she told India Currents. “And I was like, ‘Why do I want to share this with her? What about this do I wish that she could understand and what would it mean to be able to share this with her?’”
Because of this format, cycles, and mirrors show up constantly: Gupta reflects on the appearances of her father’s and mother’s characters in her own. Hearing that her mother kept journals, she hazards that “the day you stopped writing, you stopped believing that your story could ever matter.”
In a way, then her memoir is a reclamation not just of her own story, but of her mother’s: in the last pages, the “I” becomes a “we.” “There are seemingly infinite Sitas and Ramas and ideas on how people can exist, but many of these versions have been overlooked or ignored in the mainstream because they don’t support what people in power want us to realize about who we are and who we can be in this world,” she writes.
Reframing and reinterpreting
There is no specific moment of realization, no Hollywood-style deus ex machina that saves Gupta. Rather, Gupta’s liberation from her father and his expectations—and in turn, white America’s expectations—is gradual; it evolves with her understanding of intersectional mental-health approaches and her writing and research.
“Our current model of psychiatry is very much based in that Western perspective that kind of separates the mind from the body,” she said in an interview with India Currents. “You’re treating this as an individual problem rather than looking at the whole system that’s creating these conditions. And that’s really more of a holistic perspective on mental health: looking at the relationship between the individual and the system that they’re operating in and seeing ‘Well, how is the system creating some of these imbalances?’”
Part of freeing herself from others’ control—whether it be her father’s or colonial narratives’—has been relearning Indian history alongside her own.
“India is so much more than these few ideas we have about what this very narrow version of Indian American identity that many of us grow up with is,” she told India Currents. “That’s not what it means to be Indian.”
This relearning has entailed breaking down labels—capitalism, patriarchy, personality disorder, abuse—which sometimes fail to address the full complexity of her and her family’s experiences. Through the memoir, Gupta hopes to “normalize the sense of confusion,” the dissonance, that she found herself struggling with what part of her father’s behavior was attributable to “Indian culture” as he defined it? Would it be a breach of filial duty to walk away from her family? Would she be playing the “American savior” by trying to bring her mother out of her father’s sphere of influence?
“Creating language around that sense of confusion is really empowering and it enables us to separate ourselves a little bit from what’s happening to us and say ‘Okay, those are not the same things,’” she said in an interview with India Currents. “I have more power as an individual than I thought I did because I am not everything that this system is telling me I am, and I can change how I respond to it or change how I see it.”
Rewriting her story
These realizations were fueled partially by growing literary exposure. Moving into college and beyond, Gupta left the majority-white authors of her childhood—from Lois Lowry to Carolyn Keene—for BIPOC writers whose work reflected her experiences, such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
“[Baldwin] wrote with such love and criticism, and I had never really seen that before, where you could write so critically about this thing that you also love, and speak so many harsh truths so simply and so beautifully,” she told India Currents. “Reading other writers of color do that and say ‘This is what happened,’ or ‘This is who I am, these are my perspectives,’ and do it so definitively, I think that taught me more than anything else about how to piece together my own story one day, because I didn’t have that confidence and I didn’t trust my own senses for a long time.”
Ultimately, Gupta’s story is not about healing her “brokenness,” not about smoothing rough edges or stitching wounds. Rather, it’s about writing herself back into her story, resetting the tempo and reintroducing the characters.
“To love myself was to accept myself as I am and to live in a way that honored my feelings, aligned with my values, and trusted my senses, even when the outside world wanted me to doubt or shrink myself,” she writes.
A message for all generations
Gupta’s story traces not only her own evolution but that of her dadaji (grandfather): he learns as she does, opening himself up to new ideas as he sees his granddaughter transition into adulthood. This concurrent growth provides flashes of hope in an otherwise painful story, and it echoed my own nana’s (maternal grandfather’s) disillusionment with patriarchy as his daughters grew up and had daughters of their own.
That’s, perhaps, what’s so valuable about They Called Us Exceptional. While Gupta’s and my life experiences are vastly different—I’m in a family of feminists, and our dynamics are, thankfully, not nearly so turbulent—there are echoes of her story in my own, especially in the majority-white cast of characters in the stories she wrote as a young girl.
The “we” at the end of the memoir, then, becomes something more than just Gupta and her mother: it encompasses every brown girl furiously scrawling out stories, entire galaxies in her eyes.
“They don’t want us to know that we can write our own stories,” she writes. “They don’t want us to know that we are infinite.”
