Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (40 page)

Step into the Wakari home of Mrs Bhanu Hajratwala and you can tell immediately by the delicate scent of spices wafting from the kitchen that this is no ordinary New Zealand home.

In fact, all it would take to make you feel you have entered a different world altogether would be for Mrs Hajratwala to greet you in her sari.

"But with all this snow lying around, I'm afraid you'll just have to forgive me for not wearing one today," the attractive mother of two, clad in Kiwi-style jumper and slacks, joked...

In the article my mother claimed to like the cold, but in fact the constant fog and drizzle wearied my parents. Having grown up in the tropics, they found the climate depressing: only one or two sweater-free days a year.

In New Zealand, even more than in Iowa, Bhanu and Bhupendra were conscious of themselves as representatives of a people, a race; and they sought to educate, to put the best face forward, as well as to build their own community. With friends, they started a local organization called the Dunedin India Society, made up of "people from all walks of life who are interested in the Indian way of life." The society celebrated festivals, held dinners, and published a spiral-bound cookbook as a fundraiser. When the town's cognoscenti sought advice on things Indian, it was the society's president, Bhupendra, who took the calls at his university office or at home.

One night well past midnight, Bhanu and Bhupendra were woken from a sound sleep by a call from the police station. A young Indian man had been found drunk out of his mind, with Bhupendra's business card in his pocket. Could Bhupendra come down and pick him up?

The young man was a refugee from Uganda whom my parents had befriended. His entire family had been massacred before his eyes by the henchmen of dictator Idi Amin, who shortly afterward had expelled all Indians from the country. In Uganda, as elsewhere, Indians—including Gujaratis—had formed a shopkeeper class. They became a prime target of the extreme and violent form of nationalism that the dictator espoused, their plight the most vivid and traumatic example of "pariah capitalism" that our diaspora had encountered. After the 1972 expulsion, thousands of refugees lived in camps for months and were eventually shuttled out of Africa to any country that would take them. Many ended up in England, while others were sponsored by charities and churches in the United States, Canada, Australia, West Germany, and New Zealand.

In Dunedin, a Protestant church had sponsored the young man and two other Ugandan families. One airport arrival was captured by an article in the local newspaper headlined A
SIANS
A
RRIVE
. The photograph showed three white men from the church and a Ugandan Indian family of five, all looking expectantly at my father, who, as translator, must have been the only person in town whose words they could mutually understand.

On a personal level, Bhanu and Bhupendra met with acceptance and respect. As ambassadors of their people, they performed remarkably.

But sometimes they longed for the easier comfort of home: to go offstage, to speak without translation, to be understood without anyone making a special effort. Despite outward signs of settling into New Zealand, Bhupendra's dream of returning to India remained alive. Dunedin India Society aside, the cultural isolation of their life in New Zealand was profound. The whole South Island of the nation had no Indian restaurants or grocery stores. Any cultural event had to be organized by my parents and a handful of others. The few dozen other Indians in Dunedin were mostly students or visiting scholars, who came over for meals but, unable to secure permanent permits, orbited home after a couple of years.

And Bhupendra felt a loyalty to his motherland. Even after a dozen years away, he still wanted to make a contribution. Bhanu, who had not lived in India since childhood, was game.

So Bhupendra wrote to his brothers in Fiji, asking if they would consider providing Narseys capital for a pharmaceuticals factory in India. He wrote to Indian universities seeking a position, and was asked to interview for a full professorship at the University of Bombay. He arranged to present a paper at an all-India pharmacy conference, so that the New Zealand university would subsidize his airfare and hotel expenses. In December 1975 all four of us went on a trip to India.

Those were the years when a visitor's first glimpse of scenic India, emerging from the Bombay airport and driving into the city, was the view of whole families crouching in giant sewer pipes at the edge of the world's largest slum. I was four years old, and wide awake.

—What are they doing? I asked my father.

But he was nearly as bewildered as I at the answer he gave me.—They don't have homes, they are living there.

For Bhupendra, it was the first trip back to Mother India in thirteen years. He was shocked. Everywhere we went, we were surrounded by desperately thin children who begged for the humblest of items: coins, chewing gum, even ballpoint pens—a commodity that, like blue jeans and cosmetics, was cheap and ubiquitous in the West but dear in India in those years. In Patna, the capital of India's poorest state, where Bhupendra presented his pharmacy paper, my parents remember being served dinner in a fine hotel by a waiter in a shabby uniform. He was so thin that he looked as if he rarely ate a full meal, and said he had eight school-going children to support. Bhupendra gave him eight ballpoint pens, a treat for the children, and tipped the man the entire price of the meal, saying,—Buy some good food for your children tonight.

I don't remember this incident; perhaps I was sleepy, or in bed already, or simply immune to the implications of the moment. Years later, hearing him talk about making this tiny gesture—"It was all I could do," he says—I realize the helplessness he must have felt. He was encountering a motherland in the grip of a social transformation so chaotic and massive that it seemed incomprehensible.

As an economy, India was screeching and grinding through a belated industrial revolution, experiencing the birth pains of shifting from a semifeudal British colony to a semisocialist democracy, trapped in a new cycle of dependence on massive foreign aid to stay afloat. As a nation-state less than twenty-five years old, the land had suffered partition and its accompanying near–civil war, a six-week war with China, and a war for Bangladeshi independence that had sent millions of refugees into India. As a people, Indians were midway through a population explosion that would leave them a billion strong by the millennium, with millions pouring from the villages into the cities to compete for scarce, low-paying jobs. Taken together, these national traumas shaped a grim day-to-day reality that left Bhupendra disoriented and disconnected from the country he had always considered home.

For Bhanu, the connection to India was even more remote: she had lived in India a few years as a child, in her ancestral village of Gandevi, but had returned to Fiji at age seven and never come back. In Bombay she was part tourist, part investigator, calling real-estate agents and viewing neighborhoods and apartments while Bhupendra went to interview at the campus. Entering its gates, he passed rows of beggars, and could not imagine hardening himself to the sight every day; was this the new India, or was it an India he had never noticed as a child?

He was offered the position, and asked for a higher salary. The man hiring him would not negotiate, but added,—Of course, you will be able to supplement it.

How?

By taking bribes from rich students, under the guise of "tutoring," in exchange for passing marks.

A sensation of betrayal runs through the brain-drain literature, and is mutual. Beginning in the 1960s, a war of words had been raging. Those who did not return home were called "gypsies" or "traitors." One Indian academic mocked the expatriates with their unreasonably spoiled wives, who wanted Brylcreem in tubes rather than in glass jars, and who complained during their occasional visits about even their posh lifestyles full of luxuries: "In India, cars are not promptly serviced, refrigerators become noisy, and telephones do not function." Another Indian science writer argued by analogy, comparing those who deserted their homeland to ungrateful children: "If the neighbours of a family are richer and have better living standard, then the children of the family cannot be expected to start living with the neighbour forgetting their own parents."

On the other side, an Oxford scholar observed that young scientists in India suffered "lack of appreciation of their work, insufficient means for research, difficulties in obtaining equipment and last but not the least, pettiness and jealousy" from older colleagues. A Yale University dean told the
New York Times
that he could not in good conscience advise a young Indian engineering graduate, offered a $10,000 job in the United States or Canada, to return home "where there is a high risk that he will be a clerk-typist for the next 10 years." The
Washington Post
reported that neither India's government nor its industry could absorb even half of the 600,000 graduates who moved into the job market each year, and the Indian government itself conceded that it was educating far more scientists than it could employ. A special Indian census of 245,000 scientific and technical personnel found that one in ten were jobless, while nearly two in ten were employed in fields outside their training "either on their own accord or due to the lack of opportunities in technical employment." If a man with a master's or doctoral degree in science was lucky enough to work in his field, he could expect to earn a median pay of about 300 rupees per month—approximately $50.

The census did not comment on or explore the possibilities for supplementary income.

My mother, recalling the trip of 1975, remembers sitting in their Bombay hotel room after the job interview, watching my father weep.

"He said, 'What have they done to my country?'" she tells me.

My father, listening quietly as she describes this, nods. "I felt that I had left my country, like a wife, to someone else for safekeeping, and—"

I am thinking about how I have seen my father cry only three times in my life. I watch his face for a trace of the anger or disappointment he must have felt then, although the evenness of his voice does not betray it. He sits in the stuffed beige recliner that is his customary spot in their comfortable family room, surrounded by a luxurious blend of Western and Indian décor, and suddenly, as he fails to finish his sentence, I see his eyes fill with an old grief. He drops his gaze and turns away.

Turning away from India, in 1975, was the end of a dream.

***

After India, we finished our jaunt through Asia, seeing the sights in Singapore and Thailand, getting stuck a few days in Manila. In some airports we had to stand in several lines, since legally I was an American, my father an Indian, my mother a Fijian, and my brother a Kiwi. Our passports filled up with purple, green, blue, and black circles and triangles and squares, the stamped authorizations of various nations.

Back in Dunedin, my father wrote a letter to his mother:—Now I don't think I can live in India. My heart is heavy with the poverty I've seen there. India has changed...

One of his brothers wrote back, rebuking him sharply:—India is as it has always been. You have become spoiled; it's you who have changed.

But my parents had made their decision, and were beyond the age of bowing to familial pressure. Independent of the wishes of the extended clan, they wanted to secure their own future now. The dream of home—of finding a place to settle down, raise their children, and get ahead—persisted.

Slowly all the reasons for staying in the South Pacific dissipated. Bhupendra's mother, Kaashi, passed away, and it was as if the possibility of making Fiji home expired with her. Bhanu's mother moved to Iowa to live with Champak and his bride, now the parents of two sons. Though my mother told the New Zealand newspaper reporter that we went to India every three years and to Fiji frequently, in truth we did not have money to travel much. It was difficult to save. Wages were low, expenses and taxes high, supporting a range of social services: daily milk delivery, free health care, nurses who made weekly home visits when children were born. My father's charts of savings showed no progress. My mother grew vegetables in the backyard, cut our hair at home, and sewed most of our clothes, including my father's ties; but while we were never poor, my parents felt they would never get ahead, as they could have in America.

At the university, my father was one of three Indians to hold the rank of senior lecturer. But none had ever been promoted. Assistant professor, the tenure-track position, was permanently out of reach, the dean told him apologetically. It was a white university in a white nation. My father had published papers, served on committees, earned the respect of students and colleagues. The dean would write the best recommendation letter he could.

So when I was seven years old the world changed again. My father was due for a sabbatical. We would use the year to try to move back to America, to leave behind the land of sheep. It was time to pursue, in earnest, the American dream.

The popular conception of inertia these days is of paralysis: someone stuck in a dead-end job or unable to make necessary life changes. But this is only one meaning of a scientific concept that consists of two corollaries: bodies at rest tend to remain at rest, but bodies in motion tend to continue to move. In the 1960s one Cornell University professor applied this idea to the brain drain. Creating a mathematical model of migration patterns, he coined the term "cumulative inertia" to describe the probability of moving in terms of the previous moves an individual has made. A federal study summarized the theory thus: "Briefly put, the more one moves, the more likely he is to move; the longer he stays in one place, the more likely he is to keep on staying. This tendency is quite evident in the data on mobility of PhD's." My father was one of these mobile PhDs, and the federal study, published in 1971, was as good an explanation as any for why my parents moved that winter to New Zealand—and why, seven years later, they were bringing us back to America.