Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (38 page)

Another was the skill of building community. When a fellow Gujarati student was to be married, Bhanu agreed to help with the wedding; they made eight cabbages' worth of curry. For the university's annual International Festival—an event commended by the local INS officer as an example of how universities might foster international "friendship and cooperation"—Bhanu helped cook traditional dishes and choreograph folk dances. At Divali time, Bhanu joined in preparing a feast with the members of the Indian Student Association, which had just enough critical mass to hold holiday dinners, while Bhupendra helped with the organizing. The festivities included a talent show, where one of the speakers was a serious young graduate student who would later fashion—in part from the isolation of being a foreigner in the white land of academia—an influential set of postcolonial theories. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is considered a seminal text of the field to this day, is known, among other things, for wearing boots with her saris.

My parents were fashioning their own theories of America. To them it seemed above all a land of opportunity, friendliness, and welcome. Certainly there were moments of difficulty, of nausea and homesickness—but where else in the world could you walk into a stranger's office in your first week in the country and be met with such generosity: job, books, scholarship, smile?

It was on the night of their first shared Divali in America, among a community of foreigners reenacting a ritual of home, that Bhupendra took one of his favorite photographs of Bhanu. She was dressed in a sky-blue sari, one of a pair that Ratanji had bought in India for his two youngest daughters-in-law. Her hair was swept back into a scarf-bound ponytail, and her eyes were dark and limpid in a fine, pale face. For decades Bhupendra would carry the photo in his wallet, a reminder of a sweet time.

One weekend the barrack apartment was filled with a special kind of warmth: family. Bhanu's brother, Champak, had driven the 140 miles from Ames, halfway across Iowa, to visit. Bhanu cooked what she could to summon the scents of home: rice, chicken curry, rotli. The rice was not basmati, the chicken lacked certain spices, the rotli were made from all-purpose flour rather than the special finely ground whole wheat they were used to, but it would do.

Champak could see how his baby sister had grown. Married now, and cooking a whole meal! How odd that they were all assembled here, in Iowa, perhaps the whitest place in the country or even the world, having somehow traversed oceans and skies, passed through cornfields and prairies to eat this meal together. Bhanu spoke in Gujarati, and Champak answered in English, his mother tongue stiff and awkward from disuse. Four years in America, he had had adventures he could not share with her, at least not yet.

As he took the first bites of spicy chicken, his mouth filled with tastes he had not known for years. And his eyes filled with tears. Not nostalgia, not homesickness—his palate had become American, the food simply too spicy for his taste buds. He ate it all and asked for more, nose running. And they laughed as only family can laugh.

In January, Bhanu retook the portion of the exam she had failed. Waiting for the results that spring, she learned about the thaw. One morning they stepped out of bed—into water. The barrack was set into the earth, below ground level, so snowmelt had seeped under the crack of the doorway. They spent the day cleaning and sponging, then hung the thin carpet they had recently bought for fifty dollars—to keep their feet a little warmer on the icy slab—on a clothesline, where it took two weeks to dry.

Bhupendra was working from 7
A.M.
to midnight in the lab, and sometimes Bhanu went with him after dinner, helping to wash his test tubes. Meals in those months were simple vegetable curries, or sometimes Campbell's tomato soup, nine cents a can, with crackers. For a dollar or two they might treat themselves to a meal out, venturing out on weekends to split a slice of apple pie with ice cream in the Quadrangle, share a burger at McDonald's—she was getting used to beef—or splurge on a midnight movie, ninety-nine cents, with popcorn they popped on the stovetop at home and sneaked into the theater.

In April, Bhanu learned she had passed the exam. That very day, the clinic director telephoned the Omaha office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Over the phone, Bhanu was issued a visa number and given a verbal OK to work.

My parents were aware of their personal good fortune, but not of the supremely good luck of their timing. That spring, 1968, the last provisions of the new Immigration Act were being phased in, still being publicized and understood; the quotas were not yet full. Within the year, so many would-be immigrants would discover and apply for the new categories that INS officials warned of a backlog of at least two or three years. By the end of the decade, the process of getting a work visa and permanent resident status—an immigrant's first official step toward the dream of American citizenship—would require formal paperwork and years of waiting.

But for Bhanu, arriving almost accidentally at the height of the brain drain, the coveted green card appeared in a few weeks and without fanfare, in the mail. Printed in blue ink on white paper, the green card took its name from the wavy green lines printed over half of the laminated surface, over the photograph. Bhanu was smiling, dark hair smoothed back from her face with a fragrant oil, her sari's flowered border visible over her left shoulder. As her spouse, Bhupendra could have applied for permanent residency as well, but then he would have been required to register for the draft; with the conflict in Vietnam raging, he decided to stick with his student visa. Bhanu's card, dated June 5, 1968, advised her in tiny print of the necessity of keeping the government informed of her address, and noted, "If 18 years or older, you are required by law to have this card with you at all times." She was one of seventeen thousand aliens with "urgently needed skills" admissible under the third preference category in 1968.

"We are in the international market of brains," U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was quoted that year as saying. India had just, for the first time, made the list of top ten countries providing immigrants to the United States. My parents were impressed with American efficiency, grateful for the kindness of authorities eager to help them, and warmed by the welcome that was, in part, a quirk of history.

Nine hundred dollars a month.

Bhanu's new salary was a virtual fortune, especially considering that Bhupendra was already covering their monthly rent and expenses from his graduate student fellowship. They remained frugal, but soon Bhanu's earnings bought their first car. It was a new Fiat 850, the smallest car available, light blue, stick shift, for $1,800. They went to visit Champak, and he often made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to visit them.

Champak had worked hard in his first years in America, taking odd jobs as babysitter, dishwasher, and construction worker to pay for textbooks and rent. He had loved Ames, Iowa, from the first day he arrived there; he told his sons many years later, "I just felt safe here." Thousands of miles from home, endowed with a new freedom, he also played hard. His American friends called him Champ. Handsome, athletic, and outgoing, he had had a series of white girlfriends. Slowly, he broke his news to Bhanu: he was seriously dating a farmer's daughter named Nina. He did not tell her that the girl's father had promised him a house, a car, and a stake in the family farm if they married.

At Champak's graduation, Bhanu and Bhupendra spent the whole day with Nina. Bhanu came home and cried. Indeed, it seemed her brother was lost. What would the family back home say? How could Champak be happy with someone from a strange culture, who did not even know how to cook his favorite foods? And what would become of their widowed mother, without a proper daughter-in-law whose home she could go to in her old age?

Although Bhanu was younger, and bound to respect her older brother, she resolved to try to speak reason to him.

By the time she did, perhaps something had soured in the relationship; or perhaps the taste of home that Champak had experienced in the Iowa City barrack every once in a while was enough to remind him of who he was. Bhanu never asked what happened to the farmer's daughter. All she knew was that when she did speak to Champak about marriage, he seemed ready to settle down.

—Name a girl, he said.

Bhanu, surprised, thought she would have only one shot. She named their lifelong friend Tara, whose family lived across the street. She showed him Tara's letters to her, written in fine English. It was Tara who, the day before Champak had been sent off to America, had teased him about his then girlfriend—through a locked screen door, so that he couldn't retaliate—with the words
Sita Sita, velaa velaa
("Sita, shame!").

Champak nodded. They wrote a letter home, Bhanu telling her uncle that it was either Tara or the Iowa farm girl, and that he had better arrange the match. Champak wrote on the back, "What Bhanu has written is right."

Within weeks, he had borrowed money from his little sister to buy a plane ticket back to Fiji for the wedding.

Bhanu felt that a tragedy had been averted.

Though his father had been an Indian patriot, Champak seemed never to have considered resettling in India. Fiji and now the United States were comfortable places to live; India was distant, dirty, poor, even foreign.

But for Bhupendra, who had grown up in India, the dream of going home remained alive. Within their circle of friends, when the talk turned to India, Bhupendra could often be heard expressing clear ideas of what his homeland needed, of what he would do there just as soon as he reached home. "If I were prime minister...," he would begin, launching into his ideas about education, politics, development.

So as 1969 began, in anticipation of graduation, Bhupendra had to decide where to apply for jobs. Each foreign graduate faced the same difficult decision: go home, or try to stay in America?

In Calcutta I met a man of my parents' generation who had studied in the United States, then gone home to take his place among India's elite. "I didn't want to spend the rest of my life as a second-class citizen," he explained.

In San Francisco, a writer friend who had immigrated from India in the early 1960s explained her choice to become an American. In the years of Kennedy and civil rights and the expansion of freedom, "this was such a welcoming country," she said. "You could be free here."

For Bhupendra, the question was logistical. His father, struggling to handle the large Narseys enterprise after Uncle Magan's death, was not prepared to capitalize a new pharmaceuticals division. Bhupendra thought he would work, gain expertise and prestige, and then strike out on a business enterprise of his own, either in Fiji or back in India.

He also wanted to teach; after nine years in universities, academia was more his home than anywhere else, and the campus environment appealed to him. He sent his curriculum vitae to universities and companies all over America, as well as a few other places in the Western world.

But the U.S. academic job market was tight, plagued by a sudden glut of PhDs. Bhupendra's initial efforts bore little fruit. This time, though, he had a strong advocate in his adviser-angel.

Professor Blaug told Bhupendra that the way to get a job was to present his research at the annual pharmacy convention, where industry recruiters and academics gathered to talk shop. The 1970 convention was to be held in Washington, D.C. Professor Blaug tutored Bhupendra through writing an abstract proposal and then, when it was accepted, rehearsed the talk with him: correcting his English pronunciation, advising him to stand up straight, alerting him when his eye contact faltered. He also schooled Bhupendra in the fine art of networking:—Tell everyone you meet, whether they ask or not, that you are looking for a job. And carry a stack of résumés to give out.

So Bhupendra and Bhanu flew to the nation's capital. She toured the city alone during the day, and they met for the convention's social events every evening. His talk went well. Afterward, in the hallway, Bhupendra ran into Dr. Mehta, the professor from Boulder who had told him to iron his shirt. As instructed, Bhupendra told Dr. Mehta that he was looking for a job and offered him a résumé.

—I just met someone, Dr. Mehta said.—Wait right here, don't move!

For more than half an hour Bhupendra stood in the hallway, the conventioneers flowing around him. He dared not move. At last Dr. Mehta came back, and said he had arranged an interview for Bhupendra.

—Tell him you'll do anything, Dr. Mehta instructed.—I told him you'd sweep the floors, clean the bathrooms, whatever!

The position, as it turned out, was far from janitorial: it was for a director of research at a San Francisco pharmaceutical company. But when the recruiter, who was the company president, looked at Bhupendra's résumé, he grimaced.

—Your name is very long, he said.—Can we call you Bob?

Bhupendra thought about the fact that, with only weeks before graduation, he had not a single job offer in hand. Yet he found himself shaking his head.

—When I learned English, he said,—"refrigerator" was a very hard word. But I learned it. You have only one word to learn, not a whole language. I think you can learn to say "Bhupendra."

Astonished, the man laughed. And he invited Bhupendra to bring his wife to a company-sponsored cocktail party in his suite later that evening.

Bhupendra was still dreaming of being a professor. But he agreed to fly—first class—to an interview for the position in San Francisco as director of research. A few universities also expressed interest, so he planned a round of interview trips to Omaha, Houston, and Madison.