Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (50 page)

By the time my father found a permanent position in Michigan, we all had migration fatigue. With each move, I had had to start over: friends, neighborhoods, teachers, schoolyard lingo.

Looking through old class photos, I can't play the
Which one am I?
game with current friends or lovers. Every picture has only one brown girl. Here she is with babyish pigtails, here with a sixth grader's version of a sophisticated braid; here with eyeglasses, now braces; embarrassing shadow of mustache; eyeliner and lipstick; straight teeth, feathered hair, contact lenses. Which one am I? The answer is clear, yet I hardly recognize myself. I was a foreigner to everyone around me, and therefore to myself as well.

And was this queer feeling a part of my destiny, a quirk of history, or some mixture of both? Was it the rich soil in which a certain sense of being different would later take root? Was it a predictor of how I would choose to live my life? Whatever its nodes and branches, in Michigan my sense of being an alien would come into sharp focus.

Our new home was next to an elementary school in the Township of Canton. It was a three-bedroom, white brick house, and when you walked in the front door, to your left was a wallpaper mural of the tropics. Installed by the previous owners, bequeathed to us along with the red shag carpeting and the Ping-Pong table in the basement, the mural covered the entire wall with a beach panorama: palm tree, waves, sand, sky. The opposite wall was tiled in mirror, so that entering the house you could have the illusion of stepping directly from suburban Michigan into, say, Hawaii, the Philippines (where the previous owners were from), or Fiji. This surreal environment was our formal living room, a new concept to me: a whole room that hardly anyone used.

Instead we spent our time in the decidedly more prosaic family room, whose only artifice was fake wood paneling. It opened onto a dining nook, kitchen, and stairs leading down to the basement. I had my own room, with cream-and-gold princess furniture, shelves for my books, and a growing collection of dolls. Property values here, thirty-five miles from Detroit proper, were stable, the real-estate agent had told my parents; most importantly, the schools were "good."

"Good," in the most segregated metropolitan area of the nation, turned out to have a very specific meaning.

In campus towns in New Zealand and Iowa, our brown skin had been exotic, too rare to be a threat. But if our previous neighbors had had no sense of a Race Problem, suburban Detroiters were all too aware of it. Eight years old, I touched down in an electrified pond, all ions already polarized.

At first, or on the surface, it was all right. No one threw bottle rockets at our house. We were the good darkies: brown, not black; immigrant professionals, not blue-collar workers competing for scarce union jobs. But the sense of unbelonging was palpable, and tinged with tensions I could not have begun to name.

"Where are you from?" asked one of our Canton neighbors. New Zealand, we said. "Oh—did you drive?" came the next question, revealing the distance we had traveled. Another's son said, peering into our garage, "But it's illegal to have only one car!"

In elementary school I tried the new games, though the coordination of my arms and legs with the seemingly endless variety of round objects and their desired destinations eluded me: dodge ball, kickball, T-ball. Boys played Smear the Queer and King of the Hill; girls played foursquare or stood in knots talking about boys. My hearing became unreliable.

"Does
anyone
like mangoes?" someone asked.

I did not catch the tone, so delighted was I to hear mention of my favorite fruit. "I do!"

She turned on me: "
David
Mengel? You
like
him?"

"Oh," I said, "no, sorry," and stepped back, confused and embarrassed.

I began to be quiet. My childhood receded as I tried not to mess up in the new world. This was the year my mother took off work to help us settle in, so every day my brother and I came home for lunch: SpaghettiOs or Campbell's soup, Ortega tacos, grilled cheese sandwiches. At night I slept on
Peanuts
sheets where Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and Snoopy frolicked around a motto that nicely summed up the playground ethic: "Happiness is being one of the gang." But more and more often, at recess I flew solo on the swings, or played alone in the naked winter woods behind the school, carving words and pictures with my mittens in the snow.

My new world, the school and subdivision I was learning to navigate on my purple Schwinn bicycle, had once been cornfields. Canton had become a rural farm community just after the two great transportation breakthroughs of 1825. A canal had opened a route through the Great Lakes so that New Englanders could spread themselves onto the new homesteads of Michigan, and the Detroit-Chicago road was laid down, blossoming with tiny, convenient stops for stagecoaches. In 1834 this particular stop was named, in a fit of nineteenth-century orientalism, for a city in China. Neighboring Nankin and Pekin eventually changed their names (Westland, Dearborn), but Canton stuck. As the "Sweet Corn Capital" of Michigan, Canton produced six thousand bags of corn a day as late as the 1967 harvest.

That year, by a conjunction of racial progress and racial antagonism, Canton started to change. By the time I arrived, the corn town had been reshaped by two decades of white flight from Detroit. But it would take years—a decade more of growing up, and a decade of living away from Michigan—for me to learn this silent history, and years more to understand how it shaped me.

My elementary school teachers encouraged me to write poems and wild stories, and filled my journals with praise: "Minal, you are such a talented writer. I love reading your work." And I wrote back: "Dear Mrs. Kurnick, I love you." My New Zealand education had put me ahead of my American peers, and I was sometimes so bored that I asked for more math problems. On report cards my teachers gave me high marks but worried, "Sometimes, Minal seems to be a loner and I'd like to see more interaction between her and other classmates." Instead, I took refuge in my schoolwork and in books; my parents took me to the public library nearly every weekend, even as they tried to encourage me to develop other, more social interests. From the library I checked out armloads of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and other mysteries starring fearless young people who always ended up with a complete understanding of all of the clues clustering around them. I read the "Little House on the Prairie" series and felt a nostalgia for a history that wasn't mine, for a time when girls licked maple-sugar candy made of syrup poured on snow, and the prairies were tamed by homesteaders clearing their flat acreages of forests, of Indians.

February is Michigan's cruelest month, when the wind chills the air to minus twenty degrees, the snow turns dingy, and spring is still months away. In the February of my third-grade year, just a few months after our move, unemployment in southeastern Michigan stood at twelve percent, not counting those who had given up looking. The region had lost 87,500 jobs in a year, more than half from the auto industry.

The economic cruelty trickled down: boys made fun of other boys wearing cheap flannel shirts from the sale bin at Kmart.

"I used to have a shirt like that," someone would say.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, then my dad got a job!"

In the fall I started fourth grade and our elementary school held a mock election; Ronald Reagan won by a landslide, foreshadowing the national consensus a few weeks later. I was one of three who voted for the Independent candidate, having overheard my father say, "He's very good; too bad he won't win." My parents could not yet vote, but they were rooting for Reagan's sunny "Morning in America" platform; later they gave money to the English-only movement that was gaining speed in California. When the school sent a questionnaire asking "Languages spoken at home, other than English," my father wrote "
NONE
," to avoid the possibility of my being placed in a bilingual class.

But America's political waters were tricky, filled with contradictory positions we each had to negotiate for ourselves. My parents decided to teach me to read and write Gujarati, having first obtained permission from my classroom teacher, who thought I might benefit from the intellectual stimulation. Mum had started working at the hospital; Pappa's schedule as a tenured associate professor was more flexible, so for an hour a day he and I sat at the kitchen table with the curling Gujarati alphabet as I sounded out stories about squirrels
(siskoli)
and lions
(sher).

At school I started to get headaches. At home my parents began inviting over other Indian families they met at the PTA, at the grocery store, at the mall. The night before Halloween, our house was hit with eggs and tomatoes, marking an annual bacchanal known as Devil's Night; the crab apple tree in our front yard was dressed in loops of toilet paper. Our Muslim friends who lived in Canton were used to such treatment; the woman wore the headscarf, and their home was a target all year round. My teachers said I was beyond my class level, and suggested I skip fifth grade. My doctor said I was nearsighted and needed eyeglasses to stop the headaches.

So at age eleven, perched uneasily on a forest-green Naugahyde seat, peering out the windows through my new Wonder Woman spectacles, I started riding the bus to Pioneer Middle School. I did not feel like Wonder Woman. Overnight, it seemed, the children around me had changed, become harder. I learned new rules. You were not supposed to look anyone in the eyes; as between dogs, eye contact was a challenge met with immediate, fierce barking. "Ya got a staring problem," a girl would snarl, gums bared, or "Take a picture, it'll last longer." I began to grow breasts, which they could see; I began to bleed, which they could perhaps smell. I began to understand the world as composed of me and Them.

To board the yellow bus each morning was to run a gantlet. The back was the territory of the bad kids, who brandished illicit cigarettes and curse words. But sitting too far forward meant that They could throw bits of sandwich or paper at you. If you got on last with your violin case, you had to depend on the mercy of a stranger to let you sit, and mercy was in short supply.

"Tits!" hooted Billy, the biggest because he'd flunked eighth grade twice. "Why do they call you Tits?" The bus driver turned up the radio; it was always the same Top 40 station playing the week's Top 40 songs in reverse order, counting down to number one. Someone started a chant, and everyone joined in: "Meener Wiener Meener Wiener Meener Wiener..."

I started to hate Them; to hate my body, which was growing foreign even to me; and to hate my parents for choosing a stupid name that made me a target. Those bus rides could not have been more than twenty minutes, but in my memory they stretch an eternity, occupy most of three years. They were far more terrifying than the voyages back and forth across the Pacific, when I had not known what lay ahead.

Some classes were a refuge, like orchestra, where we were all nerds together, huddled behind our full-grown instruments. My father was pleased that I was receiving the music lessons he had been denied, to develop an appreciation for the arts. In social studies, we were assigned to imagine our school as a self-contained system. My final project resembled nothing so much as a prison blueprint, complete with forced labor and armed guards.

But math was worst of all: poor Mr. Barnes, a thin, balding man who loved numbers, not children, his desk littered with spit wads whose origins he could never discern—how could he have protected me? The class was self-directed; Mr. Barnes sat at his desk and did his work as we did ours, and my hair filled with spit wads. It must have been satisfying to create, in a black mass, constellations of white.

I can sympathize, now, in Buddhist fashion, with the boys in the back of the class or the teacher up front, see how they were all suffering. But if I try to get inside my own head at that age, I can barely catch a glimmer. I remember completing math units furiously, comforted by the neatness of equations and rules, with a momentum that put me nearly a grade ahead by the end of the year. Speeding through the numbers brought a kind of numbness that made it possible for me to bear the weight of relentless, minute decisions: how to act, what to wear, whether to move.

Should I run my hand over my hair to get the spit wads out?

Should I ignore it, not to give Them the satisfaction of a response?

Would it be better if I gave Them the finger?

Would it be worse?

Would it be better if I had designer jeans?

I pretended invisibility as much as I could, and They pushed and pushed for a reaction. It was like a game but it was a war. I had to have a wall.

One day a fat, pasty boy named Rob started screaming, pounding the desk, shouting, "Stop it! Stop it!" as if he were having a seizure. I don't know what they'd been doing to him just before, but it was he who cracked, and everyone shrugged and muttered, "Crazy." Someone took him away. He was back the next day, and it was worse than ever for him. I had no doubt it was traumatic stress: emotional misfit syndrome. I saw that his wall was not strong enough.

I erected mine tall and circular, a region of the imagination that was inviolate, where no one could touch me. Its bricks were fear, shame, silence.

Even my parents had to be outside. My mother had been a Popular Girl, the ringleader who led her classmates on the basketball court and illicit field trips through the tamarind groves of Fiji. My father had been the smartest boy in his class in a place where being so brought not ostracism but admiration. They were social success stories; I was a failure. I did not think they could possibly understand me.