Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (46 page)

It was Vinay who convinced his anxious parents to stay calm amid the chaos of LAX.—Just wait, he repeated;—just wait. And they did. Finally, as in the happy ending of a Bollywood movie, the man walked up to them, they all exclaimed and embraced in relief, and they picked up their bags and went home with him. That was their first day in America.

Within a week, they heard through the Gujarati grapevine that someone knew someone who was looking for a responsible couple to manage a motel on Alvarado Street. Good, Mala thought, we can start to work. Though their hosts were generous, she felt uncomfortable being someone's guest indefinitely; the whole point was to start their new, American lives. So they took their luggage—the lost bag had arrived—and moved into the motel. The manager's quarters were cramped for a family of five, but if it all worked out, Mala thought, this job would be a convenient way station. They would learn how to manage things, save some money, and then perhaps buy their own motel, as so many had done before them.

By the turn of the millennium, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, which despite its inclusive name has always consisted mostly of Gujaratis, could boast that its members owned a full forty percent of the hotel and motel rooms in the United States. They had twenty thousand hotels with more than a million rooms, ranging from skid-row to high-end boutique, and were a fifty-billion-dollar economic force. If you have spent a night in the past decade in what the industry calls "economy lodging" (a Days Inn, Motel 6, or Holiday Inn Express, for example), it is more likely than not that you were staying in an Indian-owned room.

How that happened, over a period of twenty-five years or so, is a story that in its outlines is rather simple; anyone who has played the Monopoly board game can grasp it. First you cobble together enough dollars (property, cash, loans, whatnot) to buy a hotel on a well-traveled route. Soon the customers come through. You use the revenues you earn to buy more property. The key is to imagine that you are playing not strictly as an individual but as a real human being with family members whom you care about, or at least who you wish would move out of your living room. You don't want them to go bankrupt from paying rent to you, as in the board game; you'd rather have them running their own motels, or one of yours, and have casual passersby pay the rent.

The first Gujaratis to penetrate the motel game started out in San Francisco in the 1950s. As a port city, it had a constant flow of travelers as well as a steady supply of long-term hotel residents, men with drinking or other problems who never quite got it together to manage a place of their own. In the long tradition of immigrants finding an economic niche, a handful of Indians realized the benefits of managing, leasing, and eventually owning such motels. First and foremost, you did not have to pay rent yourself, cutting out one of the biggest line items in any household budget; second, the work did not require special credentials or education, or even fluent English. By 1963, a social scientist studying the phenomenon found twenty-two families owning dozens of the city's skid-row motels in the area between Third and Sixth streets just south of Market. All of them were from a particular Gujarati caste, the Patels, who would eventually come to dominate the industry to such an extent that today you can buy T-shirts celebrating the Patel-motel connection.

For the first Patels, the motels were not only a way of making a living; they were also community hubs, a place for new immigrants to stay while they got their footing. A few Gujaratis of other castes also entered the business, and some individuals struck out beyond San Francisco. What really made the trend take off nationwide was an unlikely combination of government investment in interstate highways, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and Walt Disney World.

I first heard this history from a Patel named Ramesh Gokal, one of the pioneers of the Indian motel business, who happened to be friends with some of my relatives in New Jersey. They had all emigrated at some point from South Africa, which gave them a solid basis for camaraderie. Gokal, a friendly and frankly intelligent man of whom it might be said that every subject is his favorite subject, was glad to outline for me the early history, which I later confirmed through other sources, that had shaped the economic landscape in which Mala and Madhukant found themselves in the late 1990s.

Mid-century, America was at the height of its love affair with the automobile. When Disneyland opened in Southern California in 1955, one of its star rides was Autopia, where Americans who had presumably driven miles to get there could enjoy driving bumper cars around a track. The following year President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, spreading $25 billion among the states to create what would become known as the interstate highway system. A decade later, a series of new connectors had been built, including the country's longest north-south routes: Interstates 75, 85, and 95, which connected the high-population regions of the Midwest and the Northeast all the way south to the tip of the Sunshine State. Flying over Florida in a helicopter in search of a location for his next great theme park, Walt Disney found the spot where the highways connected, a swamp near a sleepy town called Orlando. He began dredging it, and on October 1, 1971, Walt Disney World opened.

It was the beginning of a boom. Dozens of motor hotels, or motels, sprang up along the interstates leading into Florida. Families in cars, recreation vehicles, and caravans traveled up and down the highways, stopping overnight to refresh themselves and perhaps dip in the tiny cement pools. The motels' new owner-investors were mostly white, empty-nesters, former corporate executives looking for a relaxed retirement business. Having a motor inn along the interstate was, says Gokal, reaching back to his roots for an African analogy, like diamond mining.

Then, in the mid-1970s, the fuel crisis hit. Gas shortages and skyrocketing prices put an abrupt end to the era of autopia. It was time for the diamond miners to get out; their grown children did not want to inherit empty motels, and these were the years when, as Gokal put it, "you could lie on the interstate for an hour and a car wouldn't hit you."

Meanwhile, the number of Indians in the United States was creeping upward, thanks to the 1965 Immigration Act. Some of these professionals had hit the glass ceiling, or found themselves itching to be their own bosses; some, because of state-by-state licensing rules, were unable to practice in the field they had been educated in; some found themselves with extra capital they wanted to invest. A few were new immigrants arriving on business visas, which they obtained by agreeing to invest a certain amount of money in the American economy. Like Gokal, most had heard from their San Francisco relatives or connections about the easy money to be made in motels. California was already too pricey for most of them, but in the Midwest and South, they could find plenty of properties for sale, cheap. Gokal himself bought a twenty-six-room motel in North Carolina in 1976. By 1978, when he sold it, he owned five more. Eventually he became partners with the broker who was selling him the properties, and together they sold dozens of motels to other Indians. The Monopoly game was in full swing.

From Gokal's perspective, and the community's, the Indian buyers were bailing out the American sellers, offering them cash during a period when no one else would buy. Others, though, saw it as opportunism; you can imagine the conflict if some people are playing the game as lone rangers, while others are applying the ethics of teamwork and dealmaking. Half a dozen motel property brokers told the
Washington Post
in 1979 that they hated doing business with Indians, who were "a headache" and tended to do "things not customary in this country." Gokal's ancestors in South Africa would have found the arguments familiar: Indians lived so cheaply that they could undercut the white competition; they were dirty, the rooms smelled of curry, and so on. White owners put up "American-owned" signs, although it was a bit too late—like appealing to the public to stay at your Park Place when your opponent has built hotels all across the board. More significant forms of discrimination came from banks and insurers, who denied loans and policies to anyone named Patel, and from large hospitality chains that shut Indians out of buying their franchises. When the community tried to make up for these lapses, by self-insuring and loaning funds to one another, the Justice Department launched an investigation of a mafia family-type "scheme"—based on suspected immigration fraud, allegations of travelers' checks crossing state lines, and suspicious similarities in names.

Eventually, the Indian motel owners realized they needed to organize. With the help of a few key white allies in the industry and in state politics, they began using their collective economic clout to negotiate with bankers, insurers, and franchise chains. The president of Days Inn conducted an internal study rating his firm's Indian-owned properties versus others by a series of measures including quality of service, timeliness of franchise payments, and so on. Surprising themselves, his staff found that the franchise's Indian-owned inns were, on average, more profitable and of equal or higher quality. By 1985, the Associated Press was reporting that "nearly every exit of Interstate 75 in Georgia has an Indian motel owner." By 1994, a single company had six hundred Indian franchisees.

By 1999, when Mala and Madhukant entered the field, many Indians owned multiple motels or hotels. Property values were high, boosted by continuing demand from other Indo-American buyers. For newcomers with limited resources, the best place to get a foot in the door had become not the owner's desk but the manager's apartment.

Mala did not know the complex array of social and economic factors that led to the position she was taking, yet she and Madhukant were drawn to motel work for the same reasons as hundreds of other Gujaratis before them: housing included, little English needed, no experience necessary. The only job qualification seemed to be a willingness to be available twenty-four hours a day. Mala was used to hard work, and she understood the basics of how to handle customers and their moods. The hours and chores could be distributed among all family members; Vinay and even Mithun were old enough to take turns at the front desk.

Perhaps most importantly, they knew others had done it. At my brother's wedding Mala had met our second cousin from Orlando, whose husband's family owned four hotels around Disney World. In the Hollywood hills, just a few miles away from Mala's home, I interviewed an aunt who had come to America in the 1960s and raised her children behind the motel desk, pretending not to notice customers holding their noses at the curry smell; we talked at her dining room table, overlooking a sapphire lap pool that in turn overlooked a plunging valley, as a real-estate agent ushered a rap star through her custom-built home, which she was considering selling.

Such success stories were everywhere in the air. The motel business had been providing them to Indo-Americans for a quarter-century now, so Mala and Madhukant felt it was a good bet.

But for those starting out, the business was not glamorous. It meant cleaning rooms and dealing with people who ruined the sheets, stole towels and even lamps, called the manager's line with drunken giggles in the middle of the night. It meant shifts spread over twenty-four hours, which made family outings all but impossible. Still, Mala thought she was ready.

The problem, though, was that the owner had either left unclear instructions, or left instructions that were clearly at odds with what Mala and Madhukant had understood. The hired desk clerks refused to teach them anything about the office work, instead relegating them to maids' chores. Mala and Madhukant cleaned the rooms, did the laundry, swept the hallways; they were managers in name only, and as Mala would later say, "We didn't come to America to learn to be maids." That line of work she knew well enough.

After six weeks of clashing with the surly motel staff, they moved out. In an apartment on Vermont Avenue, with no furniture, they plotted their next move.

Across the street was a massive hospital, at least a dozen stories high. Mala looked at it every day and thought, There must be jobs there, sweeping or cleaning up at least. So she crossed the intersection and went in, and walked around the corridors—each one exactly the same.

After a couple of turns, she realized she was confused and lost. She didn't see any place to fill out an application, and she couldn't work up the courage to ask one of the passing nurses or doctors what to do. Finally she saw a green exit sign and hurried out, walking all the way around the building to get back home. She gave up the idea—how could she work there if she could not even find her way around?

Through the grapevine, they heard about another motel opportunity. They decided to try it again; perhaps Alvarado Street had just been an unlucky experience. This time it was a bigger hotel, with much more responsibility—an overwhelming amount. They started learning the job, managing the staff, and trying to understand the systems of reservations, check-ins and check-outs, and payments. They had been at the motel just a few weeks when a phone call came from Fiji: Madhukant's mother was dead.

Mala and her mother-in-law had never become friends. But when the older woman grew ill with old age, it was Mala who had washed her soiled clothes and bedding, helped her to use the toilet, and cleaned her body afterward—all part of the dharmic duty of a respectable daughter-in-law, wife, woman. In Lautoka for the funeral, Mala thought,
Well, perhaps now she's found happiness.
In any case it was good to be back in Fiji for a visit, and to see her family again.

They flew back to Los Angeles, but by now they had lost their motel position. Instead, they moved into an aging but affordable apartment complex in the area of Hollywood known as Little Armenia, near the apartment they had rented previously while in between motels. Again they looked for work.