In un articolo pubblicato su Longreads, la scrittrice di origini indiane Anjoli Roy ci accompagna in un viaggio alla scoperta del vissuto di suo padre, Subi, stimato medico conservatore e sostenitore di Donald Trump emigrato nel sud degli Stati Uniti – a Chapel Hill, nel North Carolina – agli inizi degli anni Cinquanta. Nel tentativo di rintracciare i meccanismi psicologici dietro la sua (all’apparenza) contraddittoria fede politica, l’autrice passa in rassegna una serie di testimonianze riguardanti i suoi trascorsi sociali e sportivi, puntando in particolare su quelli risalenti agli anni delle superiori, durante i quali un giovane e brillante Subi si distingueva, facendosi molto apprezzare dai suoi compagni, giocando nel ruolo di quarterback nella squadra di football della Chapel Hill High School. Nell’ultima parte del pezzo, riflettendo sulle informazioni contenute in un’e-mail – parte delle quali le erano già state riferite, in forma orale, dal medesimo autore del testo inviatole, ma, sostiene la Roy, sembrava avessero tutt’altro senso -, prova a chiarire, soprattutto a se stessa, le ragioni alla base di un presumibile equivoco.

For most of my life, I’ve been trying to make sense of my Southern-drawling, Tar Heels–loving, fiscally conservative, immigrant from India, gyno, deeply loving dad of three daughters. There have been some strange contradictions. When my sisters and I were little and our parents were still together, he and our mom would drop us off at Sunday school at a nondenominational Christian church in our hometown of Pasadena, CA, while they skipped service and went who knows where, enjoying the free babysitting. When I was 14 and he found out my friends were having sex, he gave me birth control pills to “help with my acne.” He answered my friends’ and my questions about bodily pathologies oftentimes connected to sex without judgment and always with a professionalism that told me I could count on him. But, for most of our childhoods, he was traveling on the lecture circuit. It wasn’t until I was an adult that he became more than the scruffy cheek kissing us goodbye in our sleep, or the dry-cleaned suits encased in soft plastic sleeves hanging on an empty door frame, not to be disturbed. Until then, he was the grumpy, tired person I mostly avoided on the rare occasions he was home. He was the distant guy my middle sister Maya and I drew countless pictures for, of shoes with a plus sign and then a bee — a visual representation of how to pronounce his name, Subi — which he’d hang dutifully in his office at county hospital.

Immagine da Flickr.