Parmvir Bahia struggles to appease her parents’ desires for an Indian son-in-law while also satisfying her own desires to be a scientist.

Parmvir Bahia is a short, British-Indian, neuroscience PhD working at the University of South Florida. She studies the role of nerves in the respiratory system and how they might hold the key to understanding diseases like asthma and COPD. When not researching or writing long lists of self-describing adjectives she runs the science communication and outreach initiatives: taste of science – a science festival for adults, and a podcast called 2Scientists. She also enjoys running on trails and glasses of red wine, but not usually at the same time.

This story originally aired on February 8, 2019 in an episode titled “In Love with Science: Stories about loving science”.

Story Transcript

It’s a lovely day in England and by that I mean it’s not raining.  I’m eight years old and at my uncle’s wedding. I’m dressed up to the nines dancing around, but I think I’m awesome because I have no reason to assume otherwise.  

A random auntie comes over to speak to my mom and the subject turns to that of children.  My mom points out my two sisters and I and the auntie says, “Oh, no sons?”

“No,” says mom.  

“That’s okay,” she says unconvincingly.  “Girls are all right too.”

That’s when I realized that the boy-child is king and his birth is to be celebrated and the girls are reduced to what kind of marriage material we are and become a lifelong kind of damage control exercise.  “She's too fat, too thin, too tall, too dark. She can’t cook, she goes out too much, I've seen her with boys.”

And even aged eight, I’m getting super frustrated.  I’m like, “Fuck’s sake. What is it that they can do that I cannot?  Like, okay, you can pee standing up. I don't see anyone winning awards for that.”  

So for my parents and I, this is the beginning of a struggle between what I can and what I should do.  My dad, on the one hand, is teaching his daughters how to use power tools, how to change a light bulb, how to rewire a plug, and my mom, in the meanwhile, is telling me how, before I was born, she expected me to be a boy.  That kind of stings. She thought I'd be clever, an engineer or something, as if that’s something that’s not possible for a girl.

She goes ahead, though, and she names me ‘Parmvir’.  For those of you that don’t know, Sikh names are unisex.  But ‘Parmvir’ tends to go to boys because it means ‘The Greatest’ or ‘The One True Warrior’.  This does mean, though, mine taken with my middle name means I am ‘Warrior Princess’.

Admittedly, it would be much easier to be called ‘Xena’ than ‘Warrior Princess Parmvir’ but where’s the fun in that?  

So names aside, my sisters and I, being girls, had to be protected even on the mean, leafy suburban streets of London.  That meant no going out, no after-school activities, and definitely no boyfriends. We were to go from our parents’ house to our husband’s.  So in the absence of any kind of social life, it meant I put my head down and studied.

I realized that I loved science and I excelled at it and that’s something that my parents were proud of.  At some stage as an undergraduate, I realized that somebody would pay me to do experiments for a living. Like how awesome is that!  I loved the idea of being at the forefront of something new, being able to use super cool new techniques. When I first heard of fluorescent proteins or saw an action potential from a nerve, you should have seen my little face.  I was in nerd heaven.

As an idealistic twenty-year-old, I realized at some stage, to get ahead, I should probably get a PhD.  

“No.” mum says, “You're going to be too old by the time you're done.”  You realize she's insinuating I’m going to end up an old maid.

So I channel my inner Xena, I stand up for myself, and I remind her that she also had to battle with her family in India in order to get a masters.  She put off getting married until she got married to my dad at the ripe old age of 26. I wanted to share with her this was my dream. I knew that she hadn’t been able to live hers because when she moved to the U.K. she wasn’t confident enough with her English to carry on teaching, so that meant she ended up working in factories the rest of her life.  

“Fine,” she relinquishes, “but no one wants to marry an over-educated girl.”  

But I complete my PhD in pharmacology and I go on to do my first postdoc.  All the while, my family is rushing me to meet suitable boys, me fending them off whilst dating decidedly unsuitable boys.  I have a thing, you see, for tall, skinny, dark-haired, white men and I was staying very true to type. Of course, because I’m not meant to have a boyfriend, as far as they're concerned I don't have one.  

Now, the time comes to find a new job and I’m offered a neuroscience postdoc at the University of South Florida.  Aged thirty, the desire to marry me off is ramping up to fever pitch and so I’m ready to cross the Atlantic for that reason alone, even to Florida.  But as a scientist, I get to rationalize that it would look good on my CV to have a stint in the U.S. and so I packed my bags and I moved to Tampa.

There, in a new city with no friends, I sign up to a running club and that’s where I meet a cute and funny Spaniard called David, who also turns out to be a scientist.  We share in the scientific highs, we commiserate when another grant goes down the pan. He's also a big fan of outreach and science communication. If it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t be here today.  

We go from being acquaintances to friends, from friends to a couple.  And whether it was because I realize I trusted him with all of my passwords or - we’re like that - or that he makes me laugh until I cry, or whether it’s just his tolerance of this foul-mouthed, short-tempered, crazy woman that he tolerates with this superhuman patience that I realize that I don’t want to be with anybody else.  

So when my mom said no one wants to marry an over-educated girl, replace the ‘no one’ with ‘no nice Sikh boys’.  And I get it. They wanted me to marry someone of my own culture because the England they experienced as immigrants in the ‘70s was not the England I experienced as a first generation growing up there.  So they had these ideas about code of honor and continuing that culture.

David, in the meanwhile, is probably not finding this very easy to understand but he takes this all with amazingly good grace.  You may be wondering maybe I should have spoken to my parents. I’m sure everything would have been fine. Like what’s the worst that could happen?  

I heard the horror stories about, for example, a Sikh woman, a neighbor of ours, who married a Jamaican guy.  Her parents disowned her and so they’ve never met their awesome grandchildren. Or the girl who had a boyfriend of a different religion who knew her parents didn’t approve, who was trying to run away except the parents found out.  They killed her and they buried here in a concrete floor. And while there's no universe in which I imagine my parents ever trying to hurt me, there was a possibility they wouldn’t speak to me again.

So not wanting to confront this, David agreed to stay my not-so-little secret.  Until one random Sunday morning, he's babbling on about applying for a green card and how this would be so much easier if we were a couple.  

I’m like, “What?  What are you talking about?  You mean like a married couple?”  And that’s how he proposes, as awkwardly as only a computer scientist can.  How could I possibly say no?

Obviously, the time came to kind of ‘out’ myself from this secret.  As you may have realized, I’m not exactly a shy and retiring type. I have, as we say in the U.K., got a mouth on me.  At that time, I was thirty-three years old. I had a PhD and I traveled the world. I'd given talks at big conferences and yet the idea of raising the subject of David with my parents has me shitting bricks.  I try and convince myself that at this stage they'll be happy I’m marrying anybody but it’s not helping to calm the nerves at all.

So the time comes and it coincides with the trip to the U.K. for my sister’s big, fat, three-day Indian wedding.  With all the food, the clothes, the drunken dancing, this is just the icing on my shit cake.

After the festivities are over, everybody else has gone to bed.  It’s just my mom and I left on the sofa. She turns to be and the subject turns to the inevitable.  “So when are you going to find a nice boy to marry?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.  “Actually, Mom, do you remember David who got stranded in London for Christmas last year?”  

“Yes,” she says.  And I finally explain who he is, where he's from, what he does, all the shit they should have heard from me years ago.  

Then she says with the face of a lifelong vegetarian that’s just been offered a ham sandwich, “You are going to get married, right?  You’re not just going to live together?”

“Yes, mom.  That’s the plan.”  

“Okay,” she says.  

And I’m not sure I heard the exact words to share with you how relieved I was but that one little phrase meant the decades of pressure and expectation and guilt were finally lifted from my shoulders.  

She looks kind of sad.  I was trying not to kind of jump up and down on the sofa with joy.  Yay for happy endings. She can’t have been that sad, though. She turns to me at the end of it and says, “There are no Indians in Tampa?”

“All right, mom.”  

My dad, in the meanwhile, is too excited at the prospect of going to Spain for our wedding.  He seems to be overlooking the whiteness of his future son-in-law.

I'd love to tell you that my parents, everything that they did was for our benefit.  They honestly thought they were doing the best for us. And my mom in this story will have come across as complete hard-ass, which she is, but at the same time she is quirky, she is funny, she is the most forgiving person I know.  She loves her kids with all of her heart and now David is one of them. In fact, actually both of my parents adore him. He's free tech support as far as they're concerned.

While some cultural changes are very, very slow and painful, I’m now forty and my mom will still ask me if I've made David’s dinner.  Actually while I’m here, she's worried he's not eating properly. But it feels like, as a culture, my family is starting to come around.  

So I now have cousins, one married to Robby and one married to Steve.  David has met the clans both in the U.K. and in India, so he has been accepted.  But there's more than one kind of acceptance and there's one that we have to have for each other is academics because that’s weird, frankly, like it’s a weird situation to be in.  And our relationship works because of our shared love for science and the fact that we tolerate all the crap that comes with being a scientist. It works because he sees me as his equal and it works because I am that over-educated girl.  Thank you.