Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (41 page)

Bhupendra lined up a yearlong research fellowship with a respected professor at the University of Florida. Champak sponsored Bhanu through the sibling provision of the 1965 immigration law. Green cards for everyone but me, the U.S. citizen, came in the mail within months.

In Gainesville, though, it turned out that the professor had built his reputation by running a postdoctoral sweatshop for Indian and Chinese students. On top of a full week's work, seminars were held on weekends at the professor's home; once the door closed, no one was allowed to leave. At the lab, every trip to the bathroom was timed, every page of notebook paper counted.

After two weeks of working twelve-hour days, Saturdays and Sundays included, my father called his old professor, his angel, in Iowa City:—Please, get me out of here.

The University of Iowa offered him lab space, projects, administrative support: everything but a salary. We gave up the apartment and the rented furniture and made the two-day drive to Iowa City, where our brown Ford LTD promptly broke down. My father applied to other universities for work, and in the spring came a choice: Buffalo or Detroit. Some god flipped a coin, and in June 1979 we became Michiganders.

Bhanu stayed home, for the first and only extended period in her life, as a full-time housewife. That first year in Michigan, she wanted to get us children settled after the series of sudden moves and new schools. I started third grade, my brother started first, and because our mother was home, we walked home every day for a hot lunch.

Meanwhile she was battling with the state of Michigan to be recognized and certified as a physical therapist. After a lengthy exchange of letters and a series of hearings, the state's physical therapy board ruled that the three-year degree Bhanu had earned in Fiji, her twelve years of work experience, and her testimonial letters from several bosses were not equivalent to a four-year degree.

Bhanu was caught in a trap that snared, and continues to snare, many foreign-educated professionals in the United States. It is an imperfect mechanism of the brain drain that allows immigrants to be admitted on the basis of their skills but does not guarantee them the local licenses necessary to practice those skills. The professor who becomes a taxi driver, the doctor who opens a motel—these are stock characters in any South Asian community in the United States. Within a few years Indian doctors in Michigan would organize to combat the problem of licensing of foreign physicians and other medical professionals. But in 1980 there was no advocacy group lobbying for either individual cases or widespread change. Like Bhupendra, denied a license to practice pharmacy in Fiji more than a decade earlier, Bhanu found that she was required to go back to school.

And so my mother became a student again. A heavy steel-gray desk, a university leftover from my father's department, was transported downstairs; a faux-wood-paneled room off the basement with blue shag carpet was transformed into her study. She was given some credits for her previous course work, but she had to take or retake freshman composition, physics, biochemistry, and other subjects: a total of four semesters. She pulled out the rusty old study skills she had learned at her brother's side in Fiji and set to work. Champak, in Iowa, could not help her now, but my father did sometimes. And I remember quizzing her from handmade flashcards as she memorized such things as the small bones of the hands and feet: carpals, metacarpals, tarsals, metatarsals. For psychology, she navigated a wheelchair for part of a day and wrote about the experience of disability. I was eight, then nine years old. When I was nearly ten, she went to work at the Henry Ford Hospital in Dearborn, a thirty-minute commute away.

In New Zealand, Bhanu might have become small and huddled; our lives there were always slightly shabby, as if the gray of the skies had settled over our skins, clothes, hopes. In Fiji she would have been one of several daughters-in-law, bickering for position in a chaotic and quarrelsome extended family. In India she could have lived a life of middle- or upper-class privilege, with a household of maids to supervise.

In America my mother bloomed like a tropical flower, colorful with a thick, strong stem, petals as sturdy as bark. She became a career woman who, with my father's careful financial planning, built a physical therapy practice so successful that within a few years it was netting six-figure profits, and would eventually put both of her children through Ivy League–caliber universities. She never slacked off on what she saw as her main duties as wife and mother, waking at dawn to make breakfast and pack lunches for all of us, making sure we had a homemade dinner most nights of the week, even if we had to warm it up and eat before she herself came home from work. She served as a social hub for a community of Indian (mostly Gujarati) families whom my parents befriended in Michigan, who lavishly praised her cooking and entertaining skills. She kept up with family obligations, sent cards and gifts at the right occasions, remembered birthdays and important holidays, and took us as often as possible to visit our nearest relatives in Iowa and Toronto. She seemed tireless, though of course she was often tired, developing insomnia and suffering chronic shoulder pain from leaning into her clients' deep-tissue massages several hours a day. Later she would recall the Michigan years as a blur:
I can't believe we did so much, it was crazy!

Slowly we became—all four of us—American. For Bhupendra and Bhanu this would become clearer with each visit to India or Fiji. Although they tried to blend in, to do as the locals did, the mask was less and less perfect. The changes were physiological: they could not drink the water, had to be careful about what they ate, were bothered by pollution. Toughened instead to midwestern winters and life without housekeepers, they had become, in some barely perceptible way, softer. Toward the end of each trip they longed for the climate-controlled neatness of America's suburbs, the quiet order of their own lives.

The changes were also, of course, psychological. They found they simply could not understand
why
certain things were as they were,
how
people could stand to live that way. As their mothers and sisters described folk cures and beliefs, as their uncles and cousins quaffed whiskey and claimed it was good for their health, my parents listened politely, and afterward sympathized with each other over their people's ignorance. Over the years they fine-tuned a sensibility for when to intervene with real medical advice and when to let things be. They became accustomed to queries from relatives near and far: what should be done about an ache in the hip, what were the side effects of a medication, did a knee or shoulder warrant surgery, what did this paper from the doctors or the hospital mean? Such translation was a part of what they came to understand as their unofficial "social work," a service to the community whence they came. It was a connection but also a separation, a kind of setting apart—and setting above—that they negotiated, over a lifetime, together.

In time they found they were not the only ones. Their new Indian community in Michigan was composed of engineers and doctors, physical therapists and pharmacists—educated men and a few women like themselves, also far from home. The 1980 U.S. census, taken just as we moved to Michigan, found Indo-Americans to be the immigrant group with the highest proportion of university graduates and professionals. They also had the highest incomes of any major immigrant group, a fact that one pair of census analysts found remarkable, given that "almost 80 percent of these immigrants had been in the United States ten years or less." That U.S. immigration policy had been virtually designed to ensure this outcome was not mentioned, and rarely noted even by Indian immigrants themselves. What mattered was that they were no longer "Hindoos" who were "unfit for association with American people." Indo-Americans had become a "model minority."

In 1984, after waiting the requisite five years of continuous United States residence, my parents filed applications for U.S. citizenship. Bhanu's form listed a traffic ticket of $40 (paid), along with memberships in two physical therapy associations, the Gujarati Samaj (which my parents described on the form as "Indian Culture Society"), and the Canton Business and Professional Women's Association. Bhupendra's application listed five pharmacy associations, the Gujarati Samaj, and the science honor society Sigma Xi. Both provided their most recent addresses and occupations, ten fingerprints, and a bit of Gujarati script in the box labeled, "If your native language is in other than roman letters, write your name in your native alphabet in this space." They answered no to three questions about Communist involvement, two questions about Nazi affiliation, and various queries about whether they had ever been members of the nobility, mental patients, prostitutes, habitual drunkards, polygamists, drug traffickers, or deportees. They answered yes, they believed in the Constitution of the United States, and yes, they were willing to pledge allegiance to the United States and bear arms for it if required by law. On November 19, 1984, they were sworn in at Detroit's Cobo Hall as citizens of the United States. They were given naturalization certificates that confirmed their new citizenship status, listing them for identification purposes as being of "medium" complexion, with black hair and eyes, and noting their height and weight.

On each certificate, in a section for "distinctive marks," someone had typed, in capital letters, the word "
NONE
."

Where does one generation's story end, and the next begin? I am not a parent, but I have a sense that a parent's story must find some of its resolution in the next life—in the story of the child. This, at least, is the traditional belief, of which I caught a glimmer of understanding at my brother's wedding in 1998.

Our mother planned the wedding like a war. For months, a year ahead, she was making lists, dreaming of centerpieces and massive menus. Her own wedding had been such a simple affair, with only close family members, only tea and snacks. My brother's wedding, by contrast, featured five hundred guests, many of whom were treated to not one but several grand meals over the course of two August weekends. The previous winter, all four of us as well as my future sister-in-law had made an advance shopping mission to India, to buy the necessities: Dozens of outfits, so that all of the main players could change at least twice a day, with coordinating shoes and bangles and bindis. Stacks of saris to give away as gifts. Centerpieces for the tables; garlands and decorations for the doorways and altars. Multipage invitations, purchased after a day's selection in the stationery alley of Bombay, printed in Gujarati and English. Upon our return stateside, our mother set about requisitioning and organizing the food, dishes, holy items, and whatnot into large labeled boxes in the basement, arranged in chronological order for each day of the festivities.

No one could say she would have done more for an Indian daughter-in-law.

Behind the public festivities was a rough, raw story. My brother's bride was a Michigander of half-Finnish, quarter-Irish, quarter-Norwegian descent: a white girl. They had begun dating, secretly, in high school, my brother sneaking out the side door of the garage at night. When in college he revealed his love interest to our parents, they wept, raged, and tried to persuade him to change his ways. He broke up with Heidi, saying,—I can't do this to my parents. But within weeks they were seeing each other again.

By the time Nayan and Heidi moved from dating to engagement to marriage, my parents had bravely shifted with them. They paid for most of the wedding and a lavish scuba-diving honeymoon—unchaperoned—to Fiji. Besides the multiday Hindu wedding, they gamely participated in a Catholic wedding and separate country-club reception. Indian daughter-in-law or not, my mother would not be robbed of the pleasures of a grand wedding.

Because I was my mother's lieutenant, on call for anything that needed to be done, running hither and thither to retrieve items or make arrangements, the two weeks before and during the wedding are a blur. So I do not remember which day it was that I saw, between errands, one of my aunts sitting on the swing in my parents' family room, weeping.

Another aunt asked her what was wrong. Aunt #1 said she was remembering my grandmother, Kaashi, on her deathbed nearly thirty years earlier. Though Kaashi had eight children and more than twenty grandchildren, her last words—so this aunt said—were of my father:—Where will his day end?

By the time his mother died, Bhupendra had traveled from India to Fiji to America to New Zealand, but he did not yet seem settled. My aunt was weeping three decades later because my father's wandering had ended, in her eyes, in tragedy, with my brother's marriage to an "American" woman: the first white flower to blossom on the brown limbs of the family tree.

Failure, success; gain, loss. I do not think my parents see their lives or ours as tragedies, by any measure. Rather, they have adopted an admirable attitude of constant possibility. They travel frequently, and seem not to have lost the desire for novelty. Perhaps a lifetime of migrating creates such an openness, a continuation of the inertia toward motion.

"When we left San Francisco," my mother tells me, "we thought we would never come back."

We are crossing the Bay Bridge after an inordinately fancy dinner at an eighty-year-old castle built into the San Francisco cliffs. We are celebrating my birthday and my parents' anniversary, which fall on the same weekend. I live now in the city where I was born. They live in the suburbs one hour east, where they have moved for a sunny retirement after twenty harsh Michigan winters, and I am driving them home. Gazing at the bridge lights strung across the black waters, my mother says to my father in the back seat, "Who would have thought we would cross this bridge so many times?"