Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (37 page)

I like to think that my parents' education protected them from the worst of such silences. I like to think that my father was a thoughtful man, and that my mother, having studied anatomy and sneaked peeks at
Cosmo
centerfolds, had some idea of what was about to happen. I like to think that there was, in the weeks and months and years after their wedding, a kind of courtship that had elements of the sweetness, romance, and love that I myself have known. And that one of those nights, if not the first one, they found a mutual pleasure that would, eventually, make me.

But not yet: they had already discussed a practical matter. I can imagine my father broaching the subject of birth control gently but directly, feeling awkward perhaps but knowing that it was his role to take the lead in such discussions. I can imagine my mother, perhaps shy at first, giving voice to her own bold, opinionated nature. They agreed; she would go on the new birth control pill. They would wait until Bhupendra finished school to have a child.

On the night of July 13, 1967, approximately four years after that first chance non-meeting on the dock, my parents slept at last in the same bed, in the Narsey home. Weeks of waiting and days of exhausting ritual had taken their toll. The newlyweds' slumber was so deep that neither stirred when a thief reached in through the open ground-floor window, surveyed the goods on the nightstand, and stole all of their 24-karat wedding gold. Gone was Bhupendra's slim new ring from his in-laws, inscribed with his initial
B;
gone were Bhanu's new black-beaded necklace and red bangles signifying her married status.

Gain and loss, give and take: these are the fundamental tropes of migration, the ebbs and flows that are as certain as travel itself. What Bhanu gained was a good husband, a chance to travel, a lifetime of intellectual companionship, and the opportunity to develop her mind rather than stagnate. What Bhupendra gained was a helpmeet, a lifetime of domestic companionship, someone who could understand both where he had come from and where he wanted to go; an ongoing connection to and taste of home. What they lost was what Bhupendra had already begun to leave behind, and what Bhanu had not known she was so much a product of: a culture and family that had formed an inextricable web—from which they were already extricating themselves—and the intimacy of living among the intangible textures of their childhoods. When I think of my young father in the nook of the porch in India, immersed in his textbooks and in the flow of village and community and family around him, with no contradiction among them; when I think of my young mother climbing tamarind trees and tossing down the sweet-sour pods of fruit whose taste I know only from dried plastic packages or tubes of paste, I feel that only I know what has been lost. They at least had the pleasure of living through their childhoods, of knowing precisely who and from whom they were, once. Perhaps only we of the next generation—raised among strangers, eating the fruits of our parents' risks—can taste the true proportions of bitter to sweet.

They reported the theft, replaced the necessary jewelry, and did without the rest. A modern couple, they were the first in their families to go on a "honeymoon"—two, in fact.

The first was a bus trip around Fiji's main island. Its formal purpose was to introduce Bhanu to the extended Narsey clan. In truth, she, raised in Fiji, knew them better than Bhupendra did. Thus they began a lifelong pattern of Bhupendra greeting people as if they were familiar to him, coached by Bhanu as to their identities and precise relationships.

The second "honeymoon" was suggested by a distant uncle who lived in Tonga, where, he told Ratanji, there was a lovely hotel in town, perfect for sending the boys over with their brides. But to Bhupendra's parents, a young couple traveling alone did not seem proper. After some consideration, the family agreed to a compromise: the newlyweds would stay at the uncle's home, and Bhupendra's mother would go along too, as chaperone. It was the first public honeymoon in the family.

For the next four weeks, Bhanu and Bhupendra lived with the Narsey clan. Bhanu helped with household chores and took a crash course in homemaking from her mother-in-law, majoring in Bhupendra's favorite foods. She wrote down Kaashi's recipes for
garam masala
and the other spice blends that were each family's signature, which Kaashi had in turn inherited from her own mother-in-law, Maaji; she learned that her husband's family liked sugar in their daal. Her new sisters-in-law, they of the troublesome Narsey temperament, had been sternly admonished by Ratanji not to cause her any trouble:—This is an educated girl, she doesn't know anything about housework, it's your job to teach her. And so Bhanu found them civil enough; moreover, they did not, as it turned out, change outfits several times a day.

When it came to gender roles, Ratanji Narsey was as conservative as they came. His own daughters were struggling in Toronto and London, encumbered by being raised without English, education, or independence. Even a decade later he was enforcing the rule against the women of his family working outside the home; one of my cousins recalls with frustration that she was not allowed to do anything with her high school and secretarial degrees while in Fiji.

But for my mother he made an exception. Perhaps he sensed that in America a different type of woman would be needed. He had never liked America, not for a boy alone, subject to temptations of every kind. But since his son seemed bound to live there at least a few more years, he had chosen a suitable bride.

On September 6, 1967, they celebrated Bhanu's twenty-first birthday. Four days later, she and Bhupendra flew to America in time for the start of the new school year.

That semester, nearly five thousand wives and children of foreign students were admitted to the United States. Like the others, Bhanu had tried to steel her nerves for a new life. Her stomach, though, was another matter.

It was two nights and three days by train to the interior. Besides saving money over airfare, my father thought that riding the rails would be a romantic way to introduce his bride to America's scenery. Amtrak in 1967 had limited culinary options. Bhanu was not vegetarian; she had grown up eating chicken and lamb. But every Amtrak meal featured beef, which she had never tasted. Even the soup was beef broth; it looked to her like blood and smelled worse.

For a whole day Bhanu ate nothing but the
chevdo
snack mix they had brought from Fiji. During a brief stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, they ran to buy potato chips and rushed back to the train; the thin air at more than a mile high caused Bhanu to feel out of breath, which made her panic. Fiji was at sea level, and she had never experienced the effects of high altitude before. She felt nauseated till they got off the train in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

A forty-dollar taxi ride brought them to Iowa City. It was a Saturday, and the campus was quiet. After picking up the apartment key from the university office, they sat in the Quadrangle for afternoon tea and apple pie, one of Bhupendra's American favorites.

To Bhanu, everything in America would stink for weeks. The restaurants had an odor altogether different from anyplace she had had to eat before. Fiji had continental-cuisine restaurants, but no one she knew had ever eaten at one. The closest thing was the home economics class at the missionary school. She had learned to make scones and trifles, but the instructors had been careful not to offend their students' mostly vegetarian sensibilities.

Their apartment, Unit 1013, Finkbine Park, was an aluminum barrack that smelled of gas. Located in a cluster of military-style trailers that had been erected as "temporary" housing for veterans coming back to study on the G.I. Bill, it was showing the wear of twenty years. Not only that, but it apparently had lain empty all summer: cobwebs hung from the corners, and a layer of dust coated every surface. Bhanu insisted that they clean before doing anything else.

Bhupendra found a friend with a car to take them to Kresge's for detergent, a bucket, a sponge mop, a broom, and a few other essentials. They scrubbed until six or seven that first evening, then outfitted the apartment with their few belongings, along with two pillows, two knives, and two forks that a previous roommate had bequeathed to Bhupendra. Then they slept, in what would be their home for two more years.

Neither Bhanu's degree nor her visa status allowed her to work in the United States; the diploma from the Fiji School of Medicine was not generally recognized outside that region. So Bhupendra had suggested that Bhanu take classes, too. She thought she might study home economics, which she loved, or continue in physical therapy. On Monday morning she and Bhupendra went to the physical therapy department to find out how to gain admission to the program.

Bhupendra introduced himself and his wife to the head of the physical therapy clinic, who ushered them into his office. The man addressed Bhanu:—Are you a PT already?

Bhanu could barely understand his thick American accent.—Yes, I am, she told him.

—OK, on Wednesday there is a board exam in Des Moines. Can you go?

It turned out that the clinic was desperately understaffed; he wanted her to work, not study. Bhanu said yes, and the man made a call. He arranged to register her for the exam, though every deadline had passed. The application also required a photo; luckily, Bhanu had an extra passport photo in her purse.

Des Moines was two hours away, and Bhupendra asked if there was a bus, as they had no car. Bhanu said she had no books to study with; they were all coming by ship from Fiji, which would take three months.

—Dear, he said,—here's my office; whatever books you want, you take. Then he called in a student named Nancy.—Give this lady a ride tomorrow night to Des Moines, and help her study, too.

So Bhanu spent Monday evening and all day Tuesday with Nancy; whatever Nancy studied, Bhanu also reviewed. In the evening they went to Des Moines, where they stayed in the nurses' quarters of a hospital. Bhanu, finding herself away from family overnight for the first time in her life, copied everything Nancy did. She was shocked at the showers without doors, but went ahead; she had no idea how to navigate the self-serve breakfast line in the cafeteria, but took one of everything that Nancy took, including an egg-salad sandwich whose taste she would remember, decades later, as simply
gross.
Then they went to take the exam.

Iowa's state capitol was the most impressive building Bhanu had ever seen. She walked up its grand stone steps, through statuesque marble pillars, under a tremendous and ornate golden dome. In a huge, high-ceilinged hall, wooden desks were spaced four feet apart. The papers were distributed, and Bhanu gazed with confusion at the rows of circles. No one had explained to her the notion of a multiple-choice exam or the system of mechanical scoring that had recently come into vogue.

Part one was basic sciences, and much of the material was new to her; but she circled answers in the exam booklet. After a while the exam monitor, walking through the rows, told her not to write in the booklet.

—Then how will I answer? she asked, and the monitor tried to explain to her how to fill in the circles, but she did not understand. She looked around and saw that Nancy was busy doing something with the paper that had only circles on it. When the monitor was safely away on the other side of the room, she hissed for Nancy's attention and gestured her confusion. Nancy held up her paper and showed her first answer, and Bhanu finally understood.

By this time, an hour and a half of the three-hour exam had passed.

Parts two and three were more practical and more directly related to physical therapy, so Bhanu found them easier. When the results came back a month later, she had passed those two, but had failed the first part by two points. Without the license that the exam conferred, she could not work. She arranged to audit fall classes in anatomy, physiology, and physics, and registered to take the exam again.

The snow began to fall.

Iowa in winter was a frozen sea. Bhupendra taught Bhanu to cross the glacier step by step, from their graduate student barracks to town or to the Quad, pressing her new rubber boots, fortified with two or three pairs of socks, against the slippery ice. They both fell, again and again. They had no money for a whole winter wardrobe of Western clothes; she pulled a thin sari around her, and a jacket over that. Her lab partners in anatomy class laughed at her over the cadaver they were slowly dissecting that semester:—How can you wear such a beautiful dress with such ugly shoes?

At night, since the barrack's tin wall had no insulation, Bhanu and Bhupendra slept with scarves wrapped around their necks and over their heads. They placed their slippers near the bed so they could step right into them without touching the cold slab. The sole source of warmth was an ugly metal furnace protruding into the living room, fueled by heating oil and vented through a pipe out the roof.

One day when Bhanu was home alone, she turned to see the whole furnace glowing red, from the barrel all the way up the chimney. She shut it off, then went outside. Flames were shooting from the roof. Bhupendra, on his way home from work, passed a neighbor walking the other way.—Your house is on fire, the other student calmly informed him, and Bhupendra started running for home. By the time he arrived, firefighters were already on the scene, putting it out. It was natural for such heaters to build up soot and catch fire, they explained.

Between classes and crises, Bhanu set about making the metal trailer into a home. She and Bhupendra covered the rotting wooden countertop with contact paper, and purchased a straw mat to shield the furnace from sight. A graduating student sold them a sewing machine for twenty-five dollars, which Bhanu used to convert some of her trousseau into curtains. A pink sari became the front curtains; a blue one covered the bedroom window. They bought a large and tremendously ugly rocking chair; Bhupendra drew a pattern for a slipcover, and Bhanu sewed it. They did the same with a used sofa. She scrubbed the aluminum pots they had bought for ninety-nine cents apiece till they gleamed, and covered a metal Crisco can (before the days of cardboard "cans") with contact paper to use as a utensil holder. The habit of making a home wherever she was became a skill that Bhanu would use again and again.