Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (33 page)

In the university towns where he had lived until now, people were used to seeing foreign students; the Americans he had encountered were comfortable with, and even intrigued by, his ethnicity. Chicago in 1965 was another story entirely. Within a year, it would explode in race riots that would rock the nation. For Bhupendra, it was the site of his first encounters with the color line that W. E. B. Du Bois had called the problem of the twentieth century, the racially polarized America divided starkly into white and black—with no category but "black" for anyone who was, like Bhupendra, darker than a paper bag. In Chicago people either went out of their way to avoid him, mistaking him for a black man, or approached him speaking in Spanish, thinking he was Puerto Rican.

The week went by, and Bhupendra's billfold grew slimmer. On Friday morning, a two-line ad in the
Tribune
said simply, "Analytical Chemist. Gas Chromatography. Apply in person." Bhupendra had taken a special elective in the new technique and had written a paper on how it could be used to test for steroids in athletes' urine. The emerging technology, which measures the rate at which a molecule breaks down, would later be developed into such applications as the Breathalyzer test for drunk drivers.

Bhupendra drove out to Morton Grove, a northwestern suburb near the airport. His interviewer was the head of quality control and R&D at a firm called G. Barr Company. Bhupendra filled out an application and wrote down his grades—including an A in the gas chromatography course. The man interviewed him on the spot, without asking him for references.

—Do you know what a propellant is?

Bhupendra paused. It was Friday; without this job, it was quite possibly his last Friday in the country. But he decided it was risky to fib on a technical point.

—No, I don't, he replied,—but I have learned this much and I have come this far and I'm sure I can learn it.

—When can you start? was the next question.

—Now, he said.

He was hired to start on Monday, at a salary of seven hundred dollars a month, far beyond his expectations. But there was still one problem: how to meet his expenses on Friday and Saturday. He told his story to his new boss, who was so impressed—or pitied Bhupendra so much—that he took twenty dollars from his own pocket.—We'll take it out of your first paycheck, he said.

With that, Bhupendra set out to find an apartment.

He spent a few evenings after work looking for a place to stay, but Morton Grove was a white suburb. Apartment complexes bore the same offensive signs; many building managers refused to even open the door when he knocked. At last he found a motel with a low weekly rate. Within a few weeks, though, the manager told him he had to leave.

—But I'm paying you on time, aren't I?

The manager shook his head. Someone had complained about a dark man living permanently at the motel. He would have to go.

Drawing upon his limited experience in America for a solution, Bhupendra drove out to Evanston, the home of Northwestern University. There, on campus, he hoped to find a friendly refuge among people who were used to foreign students and visitors. At the student housing union, he found a listing for a shared apartment, four rooms. Three were occupied by white students, but the landlady was willing to rent the fourth to him. He sighed with relief, and settled in for a twenty-minute commute each way.

***

Over just such issues, America was exploding around him. In the summer of 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made Chicago a focal point of his civil rights campaign, and the city was awash in protest marches, fiery rhetoric, and violent backlash. Bhupendra paid enough attention to heed his coworkers when they warned him which white neighborhoods to avoid driving through, even innocently, and especially at night. Otherwise, he felt little personal involvement. Despite his experiences with racism in Chicago, it was not a problem that had much to do with him. He was a visitor in this country, not a part of its internal squabbles, and he intended to do his best to avoid getting caught up in them.

Bhupendra had jotted a quick note home to let the family know where he was working, but moving, and moving again, had led him to neglect his weekly letter home. Nearly a month went by, until one day a supervisor called him in and asked,—Have you written home lately?

It turned out that his uncle Magan, a Rotarian, had written from Fiji to the Rotary Club in Chicago saying,—I have lost my nephew. They looked up the company's name and called. Immediately Bhupendra rushed to send a cable home, letting them know that all was well.

Settling in, he found among his possessions a book given to him by a cousin long before, which he had never read:
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
by someone named Dale Carnegie. He opened it, skimmed the pages, and was captivated.

Carnegie's mass-market paperback, a popular bestseller that had sold millions of copies since its publication in 1936, was like a light bulb popping over Bhupendra's head, as he would say later. Bhupendra saw his own behavior illuminated—under the anecdotes of how
not
to behave. Still carrying the shock of America's perspective on his behavior, via his professor's "recommendation" letter, he was receptive to Carnegie's lessons about tact, negotiation, and seeing the other person's point of view. And he was young enough to change, to leap out of his old skin and into a new, perhaps more American, self.

When I interview relatives now about my father, it is as if this later self has eclipsed the impetuous young man he says he once was.—He was always
bhagvaan ni gaadi,
one brother says; the image is of a vehicle moving smoothly, frictionless, undisturbed by bumps and ruts on the ground; God's own train.—Your father sits in meditation, doesn't he? one cousin remembers:
dhyaan maa pare,
to fall into concentration, as if it were a deep well down which one might calmly, coolly, endlessly float.

Decades after his epiphany, my father would write in the front page of the copy he gave me as I finished college: "As I look back, I can see that I was self-righteous, arrogant and argumentative. Oh, yes, I 'won' all the arguments with my family & friends. I could catch them at every little point they misspoke. I was sharp. I knew it all. I could tell what they were doing wrong & how flawed their thinking was..."

And he added a wish: "May this book bring you life time of happiness as it has brought me."

My father spent the winter of 1965 and the spring, summer, fall, and early winter of 1966 practicing his new outlook on life in Chicago. Through the changing seasons he drove to work each morning, arriving at 8
A.M.
at his new company, which turned out to be an underarm deodorant factory owned by the Pittsburgh Railways Company. A train carrying pressurized gas pulled up behind the plant. Someone brought Bhupendra a sample from the tank. He tested it, using his new gas chromatography skills. Then he signed the piece of paper that allowed the assembly line to start. Gas pumped into hundreds of small aerosol cans that would become deodorants with different brand names, with slight variations in scent or formula. At 5
P.M.
he signed off to close the line, and drove home.

In his bachelor quarters he would open a can and heat something up on a hot plate, eat, read a bit, and go to bed. Occasionally he experimented with cooking, though he lacked most of the essential ingredients of Indian cuisine. Devon Avenue, tucked into the northwestern corner of Chicago just a few miles from Bhupendra's apartment, was not yet the Little India of shops and restaurants that it would become in the next decades, as tens of thousands of Indian immigrants streamed into the city. The latest census, in 1960, had found only sixty-eight natives of India in Chicago, and Devon was just another anonymous boulevard. Bhupendra made do with short-grain rice instead of basmati, and vegetable curries improvised with powdered garlic, ginger, and chili; the fresh ingredients were too exotic to be found in American grocery stores. Lacking also the essential spices of cumin, coriander, mustard seed, and turmeric, his concoctions did not taste much like home food; but they were the closest thing he had. He knew no one other than his coworkers and co-tenants, spent weekends driving around Chicago neighborhoods and trolling the stacks of the university libraries, and sometimes visited the city to tour the great museum.

One day he set out for the Art Institute with a more precise mission in mind. He pressed and put on his suit, packed his art portfolio, and traveled downtown to the venerable and dignified building on the lakefront whose broad steps, flanked by two marble lions, majestic columns, and arches, announced its importance. He had made an appointment to show his work to a professor there.

In the office, the professor marveled at his portfolio, particularly the "invisible" images etched by hand:—This is amazing; I've never seen anything like it. Bhupendra had secured a small exhibition at the student union back in Boulder, and now he hoped the professor could help him find his way in the Chicago art scene. But when Bhupendra asked how to go about showing his work, or studying further, the white professor's face hardened into an expression now familiar from landlords, employers, strangers:—All that is very difficult, he said.

Bhupendra stood, thanked him for his time, and went back to his room in Evanston.

In Chicago for a conference, I stand a few hundred yards from the Art Institute, on the shores of Lake Michigan, and think of my father's time here. Nearly forty years later, he tells his Chicago stories in more or less good humor, only hinting at the difficulties by saying, "I learned a lot about America the hard way." I can barely believe the doggedness of his quest for that first job, and the miracle of success. The lake is so vast it might be an ocean, the curve of its watery horizon stretching toward strange, unseen lands: Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan. Its waves, which appear blue from a distance, up close are green and murky, lapping fiercely against a concrete shore. Opposite, past the grand museums, is a downtown filled with old, imposing brick buildings; gleaming new skyscrapers that seem to be held up by glass alone; and the fierce chill wind that blows between them.

While in Boulder, Bhupendra had written long, chatty letters to his eldest sister in London. Perhaps he had rambled on a bit too long about a pretty girl named Penny, her sweet blue eyes. He realized this news must have traveled when his father wrote with a new offer:—There is a girl, if you are interested. She has studied...

American girls were good for movie-and-dinner dates, Bhupendra thought, but the cultural gap was so large that he had never seriously considered settling down with any of them. He knew he was not in danger of becoming "lost." But neither was he ready to marry.

He wrote back, equally neutral and practical in tone:—That's good, but I have no money to come to Fiji. I am saving for my PhD.

What holds a diaspora together across oceans, national boundaries, generations? Watching my cousins enter arranged marriages, I have wondered why a young person born and raised in Fiji or Hong Kong should feel any affinity to one raised in New Jersey or Toronto, even if they are from the same caste. But for my grandparents, the suitability of such a match was a given—and more than that, an urgent requirement.

My father had grown up in India, my mother in Fiji; the currents of their lives and families had, up to this point, carried them many thousands of miles apart. In a sense their marriage was arranged by education, within a world of possible prospects that was delineated by caste. Aside from their degrees, indeed, all that they shared was caste: a supposed purity of blood enforced by culture and economics, supported by a continuity of belief and a politics that these days we might call "identity."

Among Khatris the elements of this identity included religion, history, geography, food, and certain habits of drink, dress, and speech. In the 1980s in Michigan, my parents met a Khatri family in a grocery store when the wife overheard my parents discussing the selection of fish; she recognized the pronunciation of the word
(maachhli)
as distinct to our caste. Astonished and delighted to find each other, they developed a friendship that remains strong to this day.

In India, arranged marriage plays certain societal roles: solidifying alliances between families, ensuring continuity for the sake of the ancestors, maintaining entrenched power within the most powerful castes. In diaspora, arranged marriage is crucial for different reasons. Where geographical return is impossible or uncertain, marriage is itself a type of return. To join one's blood to the blood of one's caste is always a homecoming; one is no longer at risk of being "lost."

This simulated homecoming functions not only in the lives of individuals but also in the life of the community as a whole. As the Khatris became a diasporic people, arranged marriage was what ensured the survival and transmission of old ways of life. With each young person's wedding, everything worthwhile—identity, honor, community coherence—was either preserved or lost.

With so much at stake, no marriage could be left to the vagaries of youth, or to a thing as unruly as love.

In October 1965, Bhupendra's sister Lila, recently married in the time-honored manner, moved to Toronto with her new husband. On the telephone with her, perhaps Bhupendra heard loneliness; and he himself had not had any face-to-face contact with family for more than two years. He wanted to go and visit her.

But under the terms of his student visa, if he left the United States he would have to reapply from abroad. Bhupendra wrote an appeal explaining his dilemma, and addressed it to President Lyndon B. Johnson, White House, Washington, D.C.