Marine Copes

Anuradha Bhagwati opens up in her memoir about her relationship with her brilliant parents, being bisexual and facing sexual harassment in the Marines

- Mandira Nayar

Anuradha Bhagwati was three and strapped to the seat of a Toyota when she realised that she was different. A driver sped up next to the car which her father was driving and started yelling. “I was too young to know much, but I knew that this man felt he was better than Dad. And this meant we were different. I looked away from the man’s face, which was red and white at the same time, because he reminded me of the monsters in my picture books,” she writes in her book, Unbecoming: A Memoir of Disobedience.

Her parents Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai are brilliant economists. Yet, in the America of the 1970s, they were just brown. Bhagwati, born in 1975, grew up in a predominantly white America. Her parents, the kind of academics who could win a Nobel, were trying to assimilate in a country where their intellect did not protect them from racism. In Unbecoming, Bhagwati writes bravely about being the only child of brilliant parents, defying them and joining the Marine Corps. Of being bisexual. Of battling sexism, racism and sexual harassment. And of finally finding the courage to become an activist to “change the landscape of America to make it safer for women and children”.