Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (35 page)

At the wedding banquet, when Bhanu sat down to eat, they pointed her out to Bhupendra: a slender girl in a pink sari.

—Pretty, very nice, Bhupendra said.

As my father considered my mother for the first time, did he imagine what it would be like to have her as his wife, raise a family with her? Having visited the warmth and good foods of home, was he realizing that he had already spent three and a half years alone in America, fending for himself in the snowy plains of a foreign land? Or—more likely, more logically—were his thoughts already turning back to the challenges of survival and the semester ahead, to the precarious financial situation reflected on his graphs, and to his need to be, at least for the moment, free of spousal obligation?

Cousin Ratilal worried that the girl might be taller than Bhupendra. When Ranchhod noticed that all the guests were rising from their seats and walking through a certain doorway to wash their hands after eating, he positioned Bhupendra near the post and put himself and Ratilal in a spot across the way where they would have a good view. As she passed, they noted with satisfaction that she was an inch or two shorter.

They told Bhupendra she was a nurse; she wore white clothes to the hospital. One day Chiman came running with a newspaper with her name in it, the college results published. It said she had earned a diploma in physiotherapy.—What is that? they asked Bhupendra, who explained it as a sort of specialized nurse, who would massage your back or feet when they hurt. Truthfully, he did not know much more about the field than they.

But his mother, riveted by visions of a daughter-in-law to rub her tired legs at the end of the day, was thrilled. The pressure increased. A kind of impromptu family meeting was held: Everyone sat down at the kitchen table and asked Bhupendra,—When will you get married?

Again he objected.—I have three years of study left and only enough money for a year; if I take a wife, how will I support both of us?

—Leave her here, said Ratanji.

—No, that's not right.

Ratanji was furious. But Bhupendra, who was as stubborn as his father, held firm, and boarded a plane back to America alone.

As my mother in Fiji memorized the muscles and sinews of the body, my father in America was studying the molecular composition of pheromones. As my mother—slim, fair, lovely—was catching the eyes of local boys as she walked uphill toward the Fiji School of Medicine, my father—intense, dark, handsome—was going on dates in America, writing to one of his sisters about a girl with beautiful blue eyes. And as my mother was entering the virtually unknown world of the working professional Khatri woman, my father began to understand a little more about both America and himself.

Bhupendra flew back into the Chicago airport just as it reopened after a record twenty-three-inch snowfall. The city was virtually shut down, looters had raged through certain neighborhoods, and so much snow had fallen—an estimated seventy-five million tons in a ten-day period—that the city sent some south in railcars, as a post-Christmas present for the children of Florida.

To save a month's rent, Bhupendra had placed his car, with all of his belongings in it, in storage. Now he retrieved it—pleased to find that, despite the cold, it started—and drove toward Iowa City, 220 miles away, where the next phase of his academic career was to begin.

About an hour from his destination, he stopped at a roadside restaurant for a cup of tea. When he got back in the car, he pulled his seat belt on, a good habit he had developed even in those days when the law did not require it. A few minutes later, he hit a patch of black ice. The car spun, flipped over a few times, and landed in a ditch.

When he opened his eyes, all he saw was snow.

Unhurt but shaken, he climbed out of the car and saw that it was a complete wreck. He flagged down a snowplow, and then another motorist stopped. The driver offered him a ride and a deal: he would get the car towed and deliver Bhupendra's belongings to him if Bhupendra would sell him the car for fifty dollars. A week later, they met and Bhupendra gave him the title. On campus he would not need a car anyway.

He deposited his Chicago savings in the Iowa State Bank & Trust, wrote a rent check for a new apartment at ninety dollars a month, and went for an entry interview with his adviser, Seymour Blaug—a man as different from his previous adviser as India was from Iowa, a man he would come to think of as his angel.

—Do you have a scholarship? the professor asked.

— No.

—How are you paying for this?

Bhupendra told his story and said he had just over $2,500 saved up—enough for a year.

—Then how will you pay for next year?

—I have no idea, but something will come up.

—Do you have a job?

—I can't; my visa doesn't allow me to work.

— A teaching assistantship, then?

—No; I applied, but they do not give them to first-year foreign students.

—All right. Wait here.

After a few minutes Blaug returned and said he'd talked with the dean.

—You have a TA-ship that pays a stipend of $250 a month, and reduced tuition of $1,000, so now your money should last two years. But pay just a semester at a time. I'm giving you these classes, and if you get all A's, you will be eligible for a four-year international student scholarship.

Scholarship and fellowship programs for particularly gifted foreign students were enacted...

—No problem! said Bhupendra.

—It's very tough; your competition is all Indian and Chinese students.

—No problem, Bhupendra repeated. Heaven had been good to him throughout his academic life; surely getting A's now would not be a problem.

Bhupendra might not have been worried, but in 1967, the fact that his competition was all Chinese and Indian was a matter of great concern in the world beyond Iowa City. What had once been a trickle of Third World students into U.S. schools was becoming a tidal wave. That academic year, China and India accounted for about 11 percent, each, of the total number of foreign students in the United States. Canada, previously the largest supplier of foreign students, had slipped to third place. And large numbers of Third World students were responding to the 1965 law tailored for the world's intelligentsia: they were not going home.

The persistent tendency of educated people to migrate from areas of lesser to greater opportunity has, now, a certain inevitability; it has become an established, obvious phenomenon. In the late 1960s, however, it was both new and troubling. The loudest protests came not from U.S. xenophobes but from Third World patriots. The great mass of America's imported brain trust—70 percent of it, according to the most reliable figure—originated in what the United Nations termed LDCs: Less Developed Countries. Debate on the floor of the world body in 1967 and 1968 was fierce.

The LDCs, many of which had just barely achieved independence, saw the brain drain as a throwback to, and extension of, the bad old days of colonialism. Instead of being stripped of their minerals and natural resources, now they were being relieved—without compensation—of their most valuable resource, their brainpower. The representative from Dahomey called it an "odious bleeding" of Africa, a continuation of the slave trade; of Nigeria, it was noted that the nonreturn of a single medical graduate was a serious loss to that impoverished, doctor-sparse nation.

In response, the United States and other First World nations expounded a new philosophy they called "internationalist." Scholarship and ideas ought to be free, they argued. Developing nations, rather than maintaining a petty focus on national boundaries, should look at the big picture. Didn't all of mankind benefit from such achievements as reaching the moon?

The General Assembly passed a resolution expressing grave concern, and several U.N. bodies conducted studies. Scholars convened special sessions all over the world to consider the matter: 1967 in Lausanne, Switzerland; 1968 in Ditchley Park, England; 1972 in New Delhi. A 1967 bibliography on brain drain listed three thousand books and articles published by academic, governmental, and popular presses, with hundreds more expected to be included in future editions.

The Swiss conference, one of the first, opened with a dramatic and often-repeated, if ill-substantiated, statistic: over 90 percent of Asian students who came to the United States for training never returned home, according to the president of Cornell University, James A. Perkins. In
Foreign Affairs,
Perkins had written an influential article laying out the "cruel" dilemma for American policymakers: It was a contest not between greater and lesser powers in the world, but between U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic needs. "While with one hand we give laboratory equipment, train teachers, send our own teachers, build buildings," he wrote, "—all on the very simple propositions that the modernization of the underdeveloped world is in our immediate and demonstrated self-interest and that the critical component of a modernizing society is its modernizing men—with the other hand we take away not only the raw materials but the very people who have been so carefully trained to develop them." As one
UNESCO
writer wryly commented, "There is the gravest ground for suspecting that the existing pursuit of knowledge in the world is not directed to what is desirable or necessary in the interests of the world as a whole but may well be oriented almost exclusively to the needs and desires of the most advanced societies in the world."

A few American liberals were sympathetic not only to the Third World's dilemma but also to their own constituents, domestic trade unions; they made efforts to fight the tide. Senator Walter Mondale called the problem "particularly urgent" and, in 1966, introduced two ill-fated bills. One died in committee; the other, authorizing a $50,000 study by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, passed, but the study was never conducted. Instead, another was published that "seemed more concerned about accommodating [foreign medical graduates] in this country than with encouraging their return home," a later study noted.

Some nations made attempts to retain their talented young; India, for some years, refused to allow the TOEFL, the language test my father took in Fiji, to be administered within its borders. But this limited migration only slightly, to those who could afford a quick plane trip to Dubai or Sri Lanka to take the exam. The more draconian proposals of some Third World nationalists and First World liberals—seal the borders, deny permission to emigrate—were never seriously considered, and the waiting lines at U.S. embassies throughout Asia and Africa continued to grow over subsequent decades.

As globalization has rolled on, Americans' fears have morphed: now we fret about factory jobs going to Mexico and China, the outsourcing of call centers to India and Bangladesh, and illegal immigrants' impact on low-wage, low-skill American workers. Concern about highly educated newcomers seems quaint and has for the most part dissipated, though its echo remains in the occasional rhetorical barb aimed at H-1B workers in Silicon Valley. It is difficult to remember how in the 1960s and '70s the brain drain roused passions as heated as those surrounding our current immigration crises. If America could have acquired only my parents' brains, transplanted them like kidneys into jobless or skill-less Iowans and Michiganders, surely it would have: a white physical therapist, a white scientist, without problems of assimilation or language or race. But our brains are hardwired to our bodies and minds, and when my parents—and others of their generation, educated professionals with much-needed skills—came to the United States, they brought with them their whole history, the history of their skin.

At the peak of the debate, the question of return—which foreign students were going back home, in what numbers, and why—was both paramount and impossible to track. Logistically, students shifted apartments frequently and traveled back and forth internationally; often there was a gap of some months before the change of official status that could turn them from visiting aliens into permanent ones. And then, their intentions also shifted. A survey of Indian students in the United States, published in 1970, found that about half had planned at the beginning of their studies to return home. By the end (5.8 years later, on average), three out of four were planning to "drain."

But Bhupendra knew—didn't he?—that he planned to go home, either to Fiji or to India, just as soon as he had his PhD. And maybe a bit of work experience in America; that couldn't hurt, either.

***

At home in Fiji, Bhupendra's mother was making her own long-range plans. While Ratanji was fuming, Kaashi was scheming. Legs aching, she still wanted Bhanu as a daughter-in-law.

She decided to pay a visit to Bhanu's mother. After all, she had not one but two unmarried sons.

I try to envision my grandmothers meeting in the house on Foster Street in Suva, halfway up the hill between the town and the hospital, with a view of the hot blue sea.

By the time I first saw this house, where my mother had grown up, it was a dilapidated version of its former self. It was covered in a coat of bright turquoise paint that was peeling into the humid air. On a long veranda—the one where my grandfather had collapsed of heart failure—two women were rolling out papadums and setting them to dry in the sun.

Now the house has been torn down, the large plot a scrabble of dirt and weeds. An antique tamarind tree is the only familiar sight—the one my mother climbed as a girl, nearly a lifetime ago.