Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (59 page)

Middlesex County, New Jersey, where we went to see the movie, is home to one of the highest concentrations of people of Indian origin in the United States. And since the United States is now the country outside South Asia with the most Indians in the world, Nainesh and his peers might be said to be living at the epicenter of the diaspora.

One might look to them, then, for a hint at its future: a people almost wholly identified with their new country, but still drawn to form connections to those of the same background. For this next generation of the diaspora, the lands settled by their ancestors are but distant homelands. India herself is not within their, or perhaps even their parents', living memory.

I
NDIA

My first clear memories are of India, vivid and colorful, like a handful of snapshots. Because I was four, my sense of chronology still loose, these images float like snippets of film: close-up on my own hand, lifting toward my mouth, hot fried nuts from a cone bought on the street. Across the way, a small girl, perhaps my age or a bit older, is starving. Her bones are thin, her eyes sunken and lined with kohl. She, her mother, and a baby sit on the sidewalk, begging—they are desperately poor, and I become desperate to help. I walk to her and give her my food.

My mother tells me that every day we stayed at that hotel, the Taj on the waterfront in Bombay, I gave that girl whatever food or money I was allowed to give away.

And somehow, in memory, this is connected with the story of Jaydeep: a need too big to fill, the desire and futility of the effort to help.

After we left Kalyaan that first afternoon, I kept thinking about the options we had laid out for him. Becoming a student was possible but unaffordable; he was willing, eager even, to work, but a student visa would not let him support himself. Marriage would be easiest in terms of paperwork, but it would be next to impossible to find an American citizen from our community willing to marry a tiny man from a poor family; girls with green cards had so many other options. A work visa seemed out of reach, particularly given the sudden bursting of the Internet economy's bubble; the trend now was toward outsourcing and "reverse migration," with H-1B holders going home and Indo-American entrepreneurs heading back to the subcontinent to make their money. The United States was no longer rolling out the welcome mat for educated immigrants as it had for my parents' generation, so many of whom ended up Americans almost by accident. Coming to America now seemed like a Gordian knot of laws and policies, and as I lay in bed trying to untangle it, I knew Jaydeep would also be lying awake.

***

When my research took me back to Mumbai alone, I decided to visit Jaydeep and his family again. In a bookstore I looked for a belated birthday gift, something that might help or encourage Jaydeep in his ambitions; perhaps something American. My eye fell on a small paperback: Dale Carnegie's
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
I had it wrapped.

At the house in Kalyaan I ate another meal with them, and asked to interview Jaydeep for the record.

"Why do you want to go to America?" I asked.

"That is big question!"

"Yeah."

"I make lots and lots of money," he said.

"Mmm. Anything else?"

"And my ambition is one of the billionaire person in the world."

"And you think that's easier in America than anywhere else?"

"That's easier
only
in America!"

"Only America, not India or Australia or somewhere else?"

"American style is also one of the best preferences of my life. That is also important, American style."

"Style meaning what?"

"The way to talk, and ... longs buildings..."

He had seen America's tall buildings on the BBC news. Whenever he bought a local newspaper, he would look at the currency exchange rate for American dollars. He memorized the names of states and cities. And in cybercafés he would pay twenty rupees an hour for time to browse websites for stories and pictures of America, degree programs, and advice on how to migrate.

Studies of voluntary migration have shown that it is rarely either the wealthiest or the poorest of any society who migrate. The rich are doing fine and have little incentive to uproot themselves, while the most desperate generally lack both resources and stamina for the journey. Somewhere in between are those who have access to information about the other world and can see the gap between their own lives and the dream. In terms of the old push-pull model of migration, India's problems—population, pollution, corruption, poverty—are overwhelming; the push factors for emigration are as strong as ever. And as global television
(Friends, The Bold and the Beautiful
) and free trade (Domino's Pizza, Tommy Hilfiger) sell the tastes and pleasures of American lifestyles, the pull is growing as well. Added to that are the dot-com successes returning home from the gold rush, for holiday, telling tales of overnight fortunes "over there." From the viewpoint of Jaydeep and others like him, the other side must have seemed a magical world, as indeed its marketers meant it to seem. And so it was America—not Australia or New Zealand or even Canada—that fired Jaydeep's imagination.

On our first visit, Jaydeep had bought an "American" cake to celebrate his birthday with us. Perhaps he intended the shared ritual, re-created from American television, as an auspicious way to inaugurate his American connection. But there were no candles, and we neither sang—it not seeming to be the tradition—nor ate, being afraid that the cream filling, unrefrigerated for hours, would distress our sensitive American stomachs.

After my second visit to Jaydeep's home, I had a vague dream. I was in a crowd of people, searching, waiting, pushing. We were all struggling and straining, though for a time I could not have said why. Then I saw—I was searching for a space on a ship. The ship that would leave Mumbai.

A few days later I boarded that airship, of course. For me and for anyone with an American passport, borders sometimes seem entirely arbitrary: imaginary lines etched on a globe, painted stripes to be stepped over as lightly as crossing the street. It is easy to forget that for others they are all but impregnable.

I think of myself as a small child leaving India, after only a brief visit, with India on my tongue: salty
bor
fruit pickled in vinegar, thick dark honey on rotli, words. And leaving my parents as a teenager, not pausing to look behind; but returning, with however much difficulty, each time. Perhaps we in the diaspora are always leaving India, or that part of India, real or imagined, which lives in our souls, memories, skins. And this constant journeying separates us, irrevocably, from those who do not or cannot leave.

After returning home, I stayed in touch with Jaydeep for a while. His e-mails were affectionate; he asked each time for my blessings, and spoke of me as a second mother—a notion that made me so uncomfortable I did not respond for a few days to each e-mail, and then did not remark on that reference. I supposed his gushing language was simply an effort to translate the affection already contained in our mother tongue, and my discomfort an American aversion to too much intimacy. After all, the Gujarati word for mother's sister or female cousin,
maasi,
contains the word
maa,
mother. We wrote back and forth, but there were gaps; sometimes I could not understand his English, nor he mine.

Eventually, perhaps when I proved impotent as a gateway to America, his messages took an aggressive turn. "You come and eat my food, I hope my interview helpful," he wrote bitterly. Then they became abusive, and I stopped writing back. His last e-mail to me was so furious that it was barely coherent.

Looking back at the notes of our first meeting, reading through the advice we gave him, I can see how useless and evasive we must have seemed. I feel sympathy for his dilemma, and along with it, sorrow: for the basic inequality between us, for his clear sense of betrayal. The implicit promise of my American presence in his life, my friendliness and empathy, was that I could help him, too, to become an American. That I cannot is a matter for legitimate frustration, even rage.

And his story reminds me that as migrants, the crime of abandonment never quite leaves us. Migration song is not only the melody line of the ones who leave; it is also the deep blue undertones of those who, unwilling, remain. The story of the not-diaspora, the ones we leave behind and who watch our accumulations with a mixture of envy and rage, is ever present, whether we choose to see it or not. And so the homeland is, perhaps, where we come to weep; to see what we were and might have been; to have our hearts broken, again and again.

L
ONDON

Five weeks after leaving Jaydeep, I was at another birthday party.

Traveling from India to England, it had occurred to me that I was reversing the journey of the first Englishmen to land in Surat. In the four centuries since, the differences between the two countries have eroded somewhat; bureaucracies in South Asia are dominated by the English language, while London's best food is cooked by South Asian immigrants. I landed in Finchley, a tidy suburb north of London; there, as it happened, my cousin's daughter Minal was turning sweet sixteen.

Where Jaydeep's mock-Western birthday party had struck me as ad hoc and slightly sad, Minal's was warm and filled with the simple luxuries that we in the West are used to taking for granted. The cake, picked up at a bakery, was of the right size and shape for a birthday, and unquestionably safe to eat; the electricity did not flicker out as we gathered around it; there were candles to be blown out and wished over. Gathered around the dinner table were a suitable party: the birthday girl and her sister; their parents; uncle, aunt, and cousins who lived down the road; a school friend; me, the visitor; and her grandmother, my father's eldest sister, Kamla, known as Kamu.

Aunt Kamu was seventy-five and had lived in London more than four decades. Born and raised in India, except for a brief stint in Fiji, she had been betrothed in infancy. India's new laws barring child marriage meant that the actual wedding waited until she was eighteen. Soon afterward her father arranged for her husband, Vallabh, to migrate to Suva and work at Narseys. Vallabh traveled to Fiji twice on the four-year stints allowed by migration laws of the time, eventually obtaining a British Commonwealth passport. With that, he decided to try his luck in London.

Kamu joined him in 1961 with their two sons. At first she found England terribly cold and gloomy; with little education and no English, everything was difficult to navigate. A third son and then a daughter were born. London was expensive, and no one was eager to rent a decent house to an immigrant family of six. They made do in a drafty apartment. And then the eldest boy, Harish, came down with leukemia.

Through the nightmare of shuttling him through public hospitals, trying to understand the doctors' questions and instructions, Kamu held her family together. She and her husband donated blood, were evicted from one apartment and moved into another, somehow kept the other children fed and clothed; and when despite everything Harish died, she vowed to learn English.
That
part of the ordeal, at least, would never happen again.

Minal's father, Chandraprakash, or Chando, was the second son. Now, so many years later, everyone thinks of him as the oldest brother, but he says he will always think of himself as the middle son. He and the youngest brother, Mukesh, eventually married and started their own families. They stayed with their parents for many years, until at last the house where they grew up started feeling far too small. Then Chando moved his family out, a few blocks away, and Mukesh and his family stayed. They still get together at least once a week for meals, and the children come and go easily from one home to the other. For years they ran a tailoring factory with industrial-grade sewing and cutting machines in their basement. Now Mukesh works as an accountant, and Chando runs a card shop; these enterprises, combined with savvy real-estate investments made by their father, enable them to live comfortably.

At Minal's birthday party I gave her a wire sculpture of our name that I had bought a couple of days earlier from a street vendor outside the Tate Gallery. I tried to give her some money, too, in a card; after all, I had stayed with the family a whole month while I researched diaspora history at the British Library. But Aunt Kamu made me take it back; then, after some haggling, we settled for a lesser amount.

Later, as we sprawled out on their parents' big bed, I interviewed Minal and her sister about their lives growing up in London. Sumita, or Sumi, was two years older, about to enter university; Minal was in her second year of high school.

Because Minal and I have the same name, I couldn't help comparing. Although I am more than twice her age, we have some similarities: both raised in English-speaking countries, we speak Gujarati with an accent and wear jeans and T-shirts a good deal of the time. These traits alone separate us from many of our relatives.

But in other ways, our experiences are completely different. Where I grew up as an invisible minority far away from any extended family, Minal and her sister have lived all their lives in an extensive network of community surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Owing to a completely different racial and colonial history, South Asians are one of Britain's most visible minorities. That, combined with the forces of globalization in recent years, means that South Asia is represented in the politics and popular culture around Minal to a degree I never experienced. A new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical with a Bollywood spin was about to premiere; the department store Selfridges was holding a month-long Bollywood-themed sale; and there was no shortage of groceries, restaurants, community resources, or role models. In teenage-girl-world, this meant, for example, that Minal and Sumi had crushes on Bollywood heroes whose posters adorned their bedroom walls. The sisters' tastes differed—Minal favored Hrithik Roshan, the gray-eyed star, while Sumi preferred long-haired bad boy Bobby Deol—but all of their icons of both male and female beauty came from Hindi films that streamed into their home at any hour of the day, thanks to satellite television. A generation earlier, the only access to such narratives had been by scratchy VHS, copied over and over, then rented from Indian stores or passed from household to household; theaters in the big Indian areas had shown Indian films, but not up in Finchley, a middle-class suburb of London. Now CDs and DVDs, Zee TV, MTV Asia, and MP3s bring the latest Indian popular culture to every diasporan who desires and can afford it. From Hong Kong (where the broadcasts originate) to Fiji (where they are recorded and then cut free of advertising for local rebroadcast), from London to South Africa to North America, my relatives follow the same soap operas and game shows and breathlessly await the latest re-leases of their favorite stars, all the while claiming that television is not so important to them. Minal's grandmother, my aunt, has learned in her seventies to program the VCR so that she never misses an episode of her favorite shows, though the shows do not matter to her at all, she says.