Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (45 page)

The house still belonged to Mala's father-in-law, but Madhukant and Mala were paying all of the household expenses, which encompassed the old man's whiskey needs and a $20,000 remodel, including a new ceiling and floor tiles. When their daughter, Kirthi, turned sixteen, they paid for a decent wedding and saw her settled with a suitable boy from a respectable shopkeeping family in the capital, Suva.

Fiji, nine decades after the first Gujaratis migrated there, was comfortably home. Mala and her family spoke not only Gujarati and English, but also Fiji's Hindustani creole and even a few words in the native Fijian tongue. Madhukant had become, by a process of attrition and acquisition, one of Lautoka's most prominent businessmen. At home in the islands' balmy climate and cultural mélange, they had no desire to emigrate.

But in 1996, suddenly, Fiji's lawlessness started to feel personal.

The first time that Madhusons was looted—windows smashed, goods stolen, premises ransacked—Madhukant was furious. He cleared the mess, paid for repairs with the insurance money, and reopened. Within two months, though, the store had suffered three more break-ins. In one instance, a witness told him that seven police officers, arriving on the scene in response to the blaring burglar alarm, let the robbers escape and instead took goods home for their own families.

Accurate or not, the tale is one of a genre of such stories, and indicates how native Fijian authorities were widely perceived to be indifferent to crimes against Indians—especially Gujarati shopkeepers. Adding to Madhukant's troubles, he could no longer afford to keep his shop insured; the shop had five large glass display windows, which were such a high risk that the insurer demanded higher premiums. Livid, he vowed to leave Fiji.

Like his peers before him, Madhukant researched his options. Australia, New Zealand, Canada: all three countries accepted migrants via a point system, but it was weighted toward those with close family relationships and professional qualifications. And then, in 1997, he saw an item in the newspaper about the U.S. immigration lottery.

On a whim, he decided to apply. Maybe Destiny would favor him this time.

Most Americans are shocked to learn that each year our government's computers randomly select 55,000 lucky winners from all over the world to immigrate to the United States. These newcomers have no close family ties, no urgently needed professional skills, no large sums of money to invest—indeed, no grounds to become Americans except desire. We are accustomed to thinking of our immigration policy as somewhat rational, despite plentiful evidence to the contrary. The lottery is perhaps the most obvious Exhibit A.

The lottery's first incarnation, passed in 1986, was a gesture at balance for those who had begun to feel that America was letting in far more brown and black immigrants than was entirely desirable. In its early years the lottery favored those "adversely affected" by the Immigration Act of 1965. That act, prioritizing professional skills and family connections, had been carefully designed to maintain European American population dominance—but not quite carefully enough. Chain migration meant that people who had originally "drained" as professionals from Third World countries had been able to sponsor large numbers of their family members, who might or might not be educated; these in turn sponsored others, leading to a skew in the family categories of immigration—the very ones that, it had been thought, would ensure that America stayed populated with European stock. The fact was that most white Americans had no close relatives in Europe anymore; Europe was one of the areas "adversely affected." The lottery, with only 10,000 winners in its early years, could hardly stem the tide, but perhaps it could add some balance.

Partly it did so by reserving a quota of forty percent for Irish nationals, many of whom were already illegally living here. Its second function, then, was as a sort of unofficial amnesty program, which, not coincidentally, guaranteed its congressional sponsors the strong backing of the Irish American vote. Each individual could mail in up to 1,000 applications per year. It was truly win-win legislation.

Over the years the program was tinkered with and regularly threatened with elimination, but preserved in its essence until the great immigration battles of the mid-1990s. Faced with the accusation that the program encouraged illegal immigration, its sponsors chose to preserve it by eliminating the Irish privilege and making winners subject to penalties if they were already here illegally. Rather than amnesty, then, the lottery became what it is now, a long shot at the world's grand prize: becoming an American.

To qualify to enter, all you need is a high school education or a specified equivalent; citizenship in a country that sends fewer than 50,000 immigrants a year to the United States by other means; and the ability to write down certain pieces of information correctly on a sheet of paper. Among the approximately 6 million people who entered in the same lottery season as Mala and Madhukant, 1.3 million were disqualified for not meeting one or more of these requirements.

Madhukant filled out the paperwork, which was surprising in its simplicity: plain white paper with name, address, telephone number "if possible," country of citizenship, date and place of birth, and the same for each of their three sons. (Their daughter, married, was too old to qualify as a dependent.) He made out one form in his own name, one in Mala's, and taped—not stapled—a recent photograph (1½″ by 1½″) to the page. Then they signed their names.

Madhukant mailed the two envelopes together to his friend in Los Angeles, who had agreed to go to the post office and mail them so that they would arrive "between noon on February 3, 1997, and noon on March 5, 1997" at the specified address: DV-98 Program, National Visa Center, Portsmouth, N.H. Wherever that was.

By 1997, the lottery was so massive that the post office in Portsmouth sorted each continent's applicants according to its own designated zip code. For Oceania—consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and "the countries and islands in the South Pacific"—the zip code was 00214, and the odds were long. Mala and Madhukant were competing for one of 844 visas to be distributed in their sixth of the world. By the strange logic of the law's formula, Europe had more than 23,000 visas up for grabs and Africa more than 21,000, while Asia had just over 7,000 and Latin America fewer than 2,500.

In West Africa that spring, hundreds of people rioted and hurled stones at the central post office of Sierra Leone, where thousands of lottery entry forms were found to have been dumped into the sea. In Washington, D.C., the lottery survived yet another congressional attempt to eliminate it as an irrational policy; Ireland's ambassador was reportedly "instrumental" in keeping it alive. In New Jersey, immigrants from India officially became the state's largest group of new arrivals, according to new figures released by the Immigration and Naturalization Service; it was also the first year that Indians made it into the top three immigrant groups nationwide (after Mexico and the Philippines). They were therefore ineligible for the lottery, although Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans could apply.

In Fiji, Madhukant opened an envelope, and shouted aloud.

And Mala began packing for her first plane trip.

Los Angeles from the air is a patchwork of grays: concrete, slate, pitch, smog. For someone who has grown up on an island verdant with palm trees and cane fields, where the longest road is a 315-mile loop around the entire landmass, the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area is an awesome sight. On the approach, the endless gray dissolves into S-shaped blocks of townhouses and tract homes; just before touchdown comes the green shock of racetrack, then runway lights shimmering against the dark glass skin of hotels.

Mala took in the scenery and the excitement of her three sons, but her own thoughts were focused, as they had been for most of the eighteen-hour flight, on survival. What would they do in America, how would they live? Would they, who had done only one kind of work their whole lives, be able to learn a new trade at their age? Would she be able to keep track of new details, and would she need to learn to use a computer? How much was rent, food, schoolbooks for the boys?

These and other questions were the purpose of this, their first scouting expedition. Mala was hesitant about leaving the only homeland she had known, but her parents, siblings, and even sister-in-law were encouraging the move. They had to leave for the children's future, everyone said; Fiji's economy was shrinking, crime was rising, and the islands were no longer a paradise, at least for Gujaratis. And relatives already in the United States had invited them to visit and see how they liked it.

Besides, it was August 1998, almost a year after Madhukant's name had been drawn in the lottery. If they wanted to keep their options open, they had to activate their green cards by getting them stamped within United States borders.

I met Mala and her family during this trip at my brother's wedding in Michigan. My first impression of the family was of a series of Russian dolls, identical in form but scaled in size, the kind you could put one inside another: Madhukant was the tallest and roundest, followed by Mala and, in turn, their three sons, aged nineteen, eleven, and five. All of the boys were friendly, boisterous but not seething with resentment like most American adolescents; Vinay, the eldest, had a permanent twist of one ear that reminded me, rather sweetly, of a baby elephant. During the endless days and nights of wedding-related cooking, Mala taught me to make a special kind of sweet bread cooked only at weddings, and we stood side by side for what seemed like hours, as they had to be pan-fried individually. As we talked, she struck me as friendly, enjoyable, and even a bit independent—spirited, not just another subservient daughter-in-law. I don't remember exactly what was said between us, but it occurred to me that she was a woman willing to speak her mind. At the time, I knew nothing of the path she had taken to become so.

Of the cities they visited on that trip, Mala and Madhukant found Los Angeles the most appealing. Its vastness—it is ten thousand times the size of Lautoka—was daunting; but a large city would offer more opportunities for work, community, and Indian groceries. The climate suited them. And apparently it had an abundance of motels, which was a good line of work to pursue, according to friends and relations all over America. Among Gujaratis, especially those with an entrepreneurial bent and no higher education, the motel business was said to be a no-brainer.

They decided to go back to Fiji, close up shop, and take the plunge. They would claim their lottery prize.

In the late 1990s, the national media were abuzz with stories of South Asian immigrants to California: the H-1B visa holders, the brilliant computer scientists and engineers from the subcontinent who were flocking to Silicon Valley to be part of the Internet revolution. Their story merged with, and seemed a natural sequel to, the saga of the brain-drain generation, those polite professionals who had assimilated so smoothly into America's suburbs, universities, hospital staffs, and engineering firms.

Pushing up underneath this visible, model-minority diaspora was, however, another South Asian community, composed of relatives and refugees and illegals who threatened not only America's borders but the South Asian American community's vision of itself. They were working-class, either minimally educated or unable to apply their overseas educations to white-collar work in the United States. They were most visible as taxi drivers and newsstand operators, at 7-Elevens dispensing change and cigarettes, or behind bulletproof glass at gas stations and late-night liquor stores.

It was this quieter diaspora, one that was ultimately deeper-rooted and longer-lasting than the Silicon Valley megatrend but that never appeared on the cover of
Forbes
or
Time,
that Mala and Madhukant were about to join. With their rudimentary Fiji public-school education decades behind them, neither would be able to read English well enough to browse the help-wanted ads in the
Los Angeles Times
classifieds; their oldest son, Vinay, by then twenty, would have to become their first translator in America. He would explain to his parents, as best he could, the terms of the lease on the one-bedroom Hollywood apartment where all five of them would live. He would go with Mala to a parent-teacher conference when little Pranil, in a seven-year-old's tantrum, decided to fib to a teacher that his parents were beating him. Vinay would also take computer classes, decide which computer they should buy, and attempt with little success but good humor to teach his father to use e-mail. And when he started working the graveyard shift at a motel, where he would do his homework in the quiet of the night, and a man walked in and held a gun to his head and demanded the cash from the register, Vinay would speak to the police afterward in his most polite English before coming home in the middle of his shift and crawling into the bed that was his, in the living room next to the television, next to his younger brothers already deep in dreams.

But all of that was far ahead of them, in the unforeseeable future. Landing at LAX on August 5, 1999, they waited to be picked up by a Fiji friend's relative. One of their suitcases had somehow been lost in transit, so after waiting for it to no avail, they finally emerged from baggage claim and customs only to realize they had no idea how to recognize their contact person. They were behind schedule, the terminal was crowded, and they worried they had missed him. Mala suggested calling, but when they tried to use the pay phones, they could not understand how the American dialing system worked, nor did they have the proper coins or phone cards.

Hours went by. Madhukant said,—We have no business in this country; let's go back. Over the next years, each time life in America threw up another hurdle, this would become a mantra of sorts for him. He kept thinking of the inventory he had put in storage in Fiji, the property he had not sold but leased out, holding on to it as a kind of insurance policy in case they needed to return. And then he would remember, or be reminded of, the break-ins. Even as they were finalizing their immigration paperwork by fax, the shop had been broken into once more; the fax machine, along with everything else of value, had been stolen.