Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (34 page)

One day at work he received a phone call. The voice on the other end identified himself as an immigration officer from the Chicago office.—Did you write a letter to LBJ?

—Yes, Bhupendra said.

—Well, you could have just come in to our office. Come in and pick up your visa.

"The Immigration Service official is often the only representative of the Government encountered by the foreign student during his stay in this country," noted a commentary in the Immigration and Naturalization Service newsletter during this period. The INS saw itself as the first line in recruiting and welcoming skilled talent, a national priority. The commentary went on to stress the importance of providing "the student and his family with a lasting, favorable impression of our Government."

As for President Johnson, he can perhaps be forgiven for not answering Bhupendra's query personally. On October 3, 1965, the president was at a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty, signing the Immigration Act of 1965. Technically an amendment to the 1952 act, it was underplayed by nearly everyone, including its supporters. "This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill," Johnson announced. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or, really, add importantly to either our wealth or our power."

In fact, the act would reshape not only the daily lives of millions but also American immigration policy itself. It was a complete reversal of decades of exclusion. It abolished the racial "national origins" basis of immigration policy, substituting current nation of citizenship. And for the first time since 1882, it admitted Asians on the same terms as all other peoples of the world.

For the long-excluded Asians, the act was revolutionary. The barred zone was finally and unequivocally retired. Citizens of all nations could now compete on an equal basis in each category, although no nation could exceed twenty thousand per year. For those with skills and education, the act was a godsend. Of the seven new categories of "preference" that would guide decisions on who was allowed in, two were designed for them: "Needed workers" could apply with employer sponsorship, as skilled white workers had been able to do since 1952. And those with certain "urgently needed skills" could apply on their own behalf, without a job offer in hand; proof of training was enough.

At the same time, certain provisions of the law were crafted to preserve America's white majority. Even as the act opened up immigration from Asia, for example, it tightened Latino immigration, which had been fairly free of restrictions. And with four of seven preference categories reserved for immediate relatives of American citizens, policymakers had reason to believe that the ethnic makeup of the incoming population would still skew white.

The first provisions went into effect on December 1, 1965, and INS employees worked overtime through the holidays to handle the "initial flood of applications" from those eager to take advantage of the new openness. Within a year, the number of skilled immigrants admitted would double. By July 1968, the INS newsletter would note "several unintended and unexpected side effects." Chief among these was the fact that the two occupational categories—"needed workers" and those with "urgently needed skills"—were dominated by immigrants of color, particularly Asians. The act had "spurred demand in these categories to new highs," causing a years-long waiting list for some nationalities.

The eleven-and-a-half-page act of 1965 would alter the demographic makeup of America, redouble the worldwide ripples of anxiety about brain drain, and transform the fate of millions of people around the world, including my parents—whether or not they had yet realized that they wanted to become Americans.

In Toronto for two weeks that December, Bhupendra had a taste of family life for the first time in two years, playing with his sister's young children, buying them clothes and a red plastic car they could sit in and "drive." Lila and her husband, recently arrived, had little money. She would need a coat for winter, Bhupendra told her, and offered to buy her one. She demurred; she would make do with her sweater, she said.—Come on, you'll die, he said. She would wear her first winter coat, bought for an extravagant $150 and with fur on the collar, for more than ten years.

As for the matter at hand, the question of my father's future, it would have been my aunt's first natural line of inquiry:—So, brother, when are you getting married? And Bhupendra asked whether she knew the girl mentioned by his father.

I have heard two versions of what happened next.

According to my aunt, she praised Bhanu as the perfect girl for Bhupendra, and his response was,—In that case, sister, I'll marry her.

But my father, telling me the story, describes it differently: "She told me your mother was a snob, stuck-up, walked around with her nose in the air." He took his sister's opinion with a grain of salt, he says, and flew back to Chicago.

When Bhupendra received his letter of admission to the doctoral program at the University of Iowa, he wrote home with the good news. He would defer enrollment for one semester, in order to make the most of the eighteen months of work allowed on his student visa, then start his PhD program in January 1967. He planned to have saved $2,500 by that time: a full third of his income from the factory, and just enough to cover tuition, room, and board for one year.

Ratanji's next letter said,—We will pay the airfare; just come and see the girl.

Bhupendra wrote back that he would come for a visit but was making no promises about marriage. Each month, on green graph paper, he plotted his earnings, expenses, and savings: one millimeter equaled five dollars. By his calculations, he could not yet afford a wife, however lovely and talented the girl might be.

My mother did not know she was the subject of this transpacific correspondence.

In the three and a half years since her brother had left for America, Bhanu had grown up a great deal. She was twenty now, about to graduate from the physiotherapy program in which her father had enrolled her. But Narotam was not there to see it.

Bhanu had witnessed his final heart attack, tried to resuscitate him with her fledgling medical skills, mourned even as she tried to comfort and support her mother. They waited to tell Champak the news until his exams were over, several weeks later, but perhaps from his Iowa dormitory he sensed a disturbance: he failed the term. Bhanu's life was changed.

No more was she the daughter of a well-to-do businessman, able to buy whichever dress fabric suited her fancy. Her uncle Kalyaan tried to run the store alone for a while, but eventually it became insolvent. Kalyaan was taken in by Narseys, where Ratanji, an old friend of the family, set him behind the ladies' wear counter. Everyone knew that Kalyaan gave away more than he sold, trading handkerchiefs and pantyhose for "favors" from female customers, whom he took into a curtained fitting room for "payment." He kept a bottle of whiskey behind the counter and went to the club after work; arriving home late, drunk, and often violent, he vented his frustrations on his wife. From their side of the thin wall, Bhanu and her mother listened to the arguments, crashes, and weeping. They waited for the dull calm that came when at last he passed out.

By day, in the neat classrooms and smooth corridors of the hospital, Bhanu studied anatomy, physiology, all the things that could go wrong with the body, and the modalities a physiotherapist used to heal them: heat, exercise, massage. To work with patients who needed aquatherapy in the medical school's heated pool, she learned—alone among the Khatri girls she knew, and years after her parents had barred her from after-school swimming lessons—how to swim.

In her second year of physiotherapy school, Bhanu had to let go of her overseas dream. She had been chosen for a World Health Organization scholarship to continue studying physiotherapy in New Zealand, where medical facilities were more advanced. But her mother drew the line, knowing that her late husband would not have allowed it. The scholarship went to another girl in the program.

At home, finances grew tight; Bhanu had to go to a neighbor to borrow money for Champak's tuition. Relatives pressured the widow to get this last daughter—pretty, sociable, modest, and eminently eligible—married off. Bhanu was the right age, already overqualified for most of the island boys, and the brief wave of gossip over Champak's affair had blown over. Plenty of marriage offers were coming in; it was foolish not to take advantage of them.

And there was another issue, one that usually went unspoken, but that loomed large nonetheless. For girls there was no question of becoming "lost"; they were rarely allowed to wander far. But a girl could still be ruined, in fact or in reputation; she could be ensnared in
lafraa.

Lafraa
is translated, in my Gujarati–English dictionary, as "botheration," and further amplified as "improper worldly trouble or connection." For a respectable girl, even a hint of lafraa means trouble, a tangle of a particular romantic sort.

One afternoon a Narsey cousin stopped Bhanu as she walked home from the medical school, and asked whether she had Champak's address in America. She had it at home, she replied, and he said he would walk there with her. They were seen by several people sitting on porches as they passed, and by the time they reached home, Bhanu's aunt had been notified and was frantic with rage and shame. She barely waited for the boy to get the address and leave before shouting at Bhanu. And the next day the neighbor girls asked,—What were you doing with him?

—Doing? Bhanu said.—I wasn't
doing
anything.

In such a climate, a girl had to be careful. She understood her mother's worry, yet she did not want to marry a mere
dukaan-wala,
a shop boy; she was holding out for an educated man. And she wanted to finish school herself. She was enjoying her classes and practical training, and she knew marriage would end her professional aspirations.

To console her mother, Bhanu vowed that there would be no problems. When the time came, she promised, she would marry a boy chosen by her family. And in the meantime, she would finish school and steer clear of any lafraa. So when a boy slipped her a love note on the bus, or when she noticed one or two young men who just happened to be standing around every day as she walked from the bus to home, their eyes following her, she was not tempted. She remembered the drastic reaction to Champak's transgression; for her, any sign of "botheration" would mean immediate marriage and an end to her education and profession. No boy was worth that.

In December 1966, Bhanu bought her mother the first pair of shoes she had owned since traveling by ship from India: open-toed chappals, to wear to the physiotherapy graduation ceremony.

Around this time Bhanu also heard the second of what would later prove to be tiny hints of the future. She was choreographing a folk dance for a winter festival, and several of the young Narsey girls were in the troupe. The brother from America was in town, and sometimes chauffeured them to and from practice. On the last rehearsal before the performance, the older girls stayed back to make flower garlands. One of them, the daughter of Chiman Narsey, trying to get Bhanu's attention, shouted, "Bhanu kaaki, Bhanu kaaki!"

Bhanu looked at her, puzzled;
kaaki
was the word for a particular type of aunt, the wife of one's father's brother, and she was no kin to Chiman Narsey's daughter. Guiltily, the girl clapped a hand over her mouth. They must have been teasing one of the brothers at home, Bhanu thought, smiling. And she forgot all about it, almost.

Unknown to her, the young Narsey man who dropped his nieces off at dance practice was in Fiji with an agenda. It was not entirely his agenda, but his father's: Ratanji had been keeping an eye on his late friend's daughter, the young woman with the medical training. She was some kind of nurse, he had heard, well mannered and educated, an ideal match for his overeducated, wandering son.

He had even taken steps to ensure that there would be no complications.

Ratanji was a shrewd businessman who did not hesitate to play hardball. His drinking buddies were Fiji's powerful, the businessmen, bankers, and government officials whose favors could often be earned with a round of drinks or a bottle of Johnnie Walker Gold Label. Other Gujaratis came to him for help in navigating the bureaucracy, and he did an informal trade in obtaining licenses, passports, and visas for people. Information is power, and in this way he managed to know everyone's business while, like an experienced poker player, playing his own cards close to his chest.

Among Bhanu's potential suitors was a young college graduate from India whose father was working in Fiji. The father had asked Ratanji for help in obtaining a visa so that his son could visit Fiji to seek a bride. Bhanu, the only educated girl on the island, was of course of great interest.

Wanting his own son to be the prime candidate, Ratanji sat on the application for several months.—It's coming along, he assured the anxious father each time they met.

Now that Ratanji had succeeded, at last, in summoning Bhupendra to Fiji, he was trying to obtain his son's agreement to the match. But the boy, made headstrong perhaps by his years of independence, was causing a problem. He wanted first of all to see the girl.

It was an act that proved more difficult than it might seem. Arranging a meeting was out of the question; it would start the gossip rolling, and would reflect badly on both families if the match did not work out. Then a wedding came up, and Bhupendra's brother Ranchhod and their cousin Ratilal took charge of the matter.