The New Yorker:

I was estranged from my own mother, so a friend tried to lend me his.

By Tara Westover

My friend Sukrit invited me to India.
His mother lived in Delhi. He said I should get out of England and give my eyes something new to look at. He wouldn’t be there—he was trapped in a biology lab at Stanford—but his mother would look after me. I could stay as long as I liked.

The invitation confused me. I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother. I pawed at the idea, then dismissed it. I did not want to go east; I wanted to go west. I was waiting for my family to reclaim me.

I don’t know where the hope lived or what it lived on. I had been estranged from my father for a year by then, but I was still telling myself that the estrangement was temporary, that the breach would heal. My mother was key. I thought she would convince my father, soften his heart. That’s how it happens in the Bible, when two souls fall out of kinship. God softens a heart. I wasn’t religious, not the way my father had raised me to be, but I believed in the softening of hearts. So I waited. For a letter. A phone call. I imagined my father saying, “Come home.” Of course I could not go to India. When my father called, I had to be ready.

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