Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (51 page)

Besides, I was ashamed of anything that made me different—and my parents were most certainly the core of my difference. I was ashamed of what they wore, what we ate at home, what I called them: Mummy and Pappa. Normal kids had Mom and Dad, I learned when a classmate read one of my school journal entries and laughed; from then on, I referred to my parents as Mom and Dad. Such parents would have given me a name, skin, clothes that would be totems of protection, would have let me do the things that made a girl normal: date and stay out late to chat about boys. True, my mother never sent me to school with chicken curry instead of a sandwich, but that level of culinary assimilation was not enough. I wanted an
American
family, dinners of roast beef or meatloaf—fantasy meals I read about in the pages of my young-adult novels. In these exotic flavors, I imagined, I would taste what it was to be American. Somewhere in there, between tuna casserole and a first date, between MTV and
Sixteen Candles,
somewhere in the interstices of rock concerts and miniskirts, was the secret to happiness, the way to be one of the gang.

So when my mother visited school one day and a note fell out of my locker saying, "You have B.O.," I mumbled, "Must have been meant for someone else." One more brick for the wall. When I came home with my face smeared with violent pink, I looked at my mother's shocked face and lied, "We had a lipstick fight on the bus," as if it were mutual. One more brick.

Because I told my parents nothing, they read my diary. I stopped writing.

At school, people who had seemed friendly laughed with the bullies; I stopped trying to make friends. In the cafeteria a tough girl put toenail clippings in another girl's sandwich; I stopped eating, and threw away the lunches my mother packed each morning. On the balance beam a group of boys surrounded me with taunts; I stopped going outside. I found a study hall where I could sit through my lunch hour, facing the wall.

If my retreat was thorough, it was hardly calm. A few years later in high school we read
Lord of the Flies,
William Golding's parable of children enacting adult wars. We had to answer the question, Which character could I fit? I wrote about Roger, the sadist, who was the first to kill: "In middle school there were many many times when I wanted to kill somebody: To maim them, to hurt them physically as much as they had hurt me emotionally." I switched to the present tense. "I imagine them cowering before me begging for mercy while I subject them to ultimate degradations." More than a decade before the Columbine school shootings, neither bullying nor revenge fantasies were taken seriously. My teacher wrote "Wow," and gave me an A+.

Home was a different world, a swirl of schedules and expectations that seemed increasingly foreign. My mother cooked Indian food most nights; my parents' friends were all Indian. When we went to dinner at someone's house, my father sat with the men in the living room, my brother went off to play with the boys, and my mother and I went to the kitchen. Girls my age already knew how to roll out perfectly round rotli, and our mothers warned, only half jokingly, that it was a skill we'd have to master if we ever wanted to get married. Mum despaired, since mine came out "like the map of India"; I was, perversely, determined to keep it that way.

Still, my rotli rebellion did not excuse me from all responsibility. I was coached to ask "How can I help?" and "Does anyone need anything?" and to clear the adults' plates, wash dishes, serve tea. Mostly I fulfilled the role of dutiful daughter as well as I could, bringing home A's, practicing the violin and Indian classical dance before my weekly lessons. Within my wall I contemplated suicide, and felt even more self-loathing that I could not go through with it. It was just a fantasy. I read Anne Frank and thought
she
had the courage to die; the Holocaust did not seem too great a metaphor for my pain. I read Camus. I read
Animal Farm
and knew Orwell was right about the people who ran the farm: they were pigs. I read Stephen King's
Carrie
with glee and decided my revenge would be to become famous, and show them all.

Underneath, I still longed to be named Ann, as I had written in an elementary school journal; to have friends, or at least a place to sit at lunchtime. I feathered my long hair with a curling iron each morning, wore blue eye shadow, cajoled my parents into getting me one precious pair of Jordache jeans. I kept my mouth closed to hide my braces, and took my glasses off whenever I didn't need to see the chalkboard. On Saturday mornings, while my brother watched cartoons, I lay in bed, listening to Casey Kasem's
American Top 40
on my clock radio and writing down song lyrics so that I could mouth the words on the bus and pretend not to be different, pretend to be a part of things. To be normal, American, normal.

It did not occur to me that my difference was immutable.

In 1980, the year I started fourth grade, the Census Bureau counted 387,233 "Asian Indians" in the United States. The main feature of our presence, one study noted, was that we were "inconspicuous" and "rapidly assimilated." Economically, academically, on paper we fit smoothly into the middle class.

But another piece of our demographic condition in that moment, uncounted and unaccounted for, was loneliness. Among immigrant groups, Indo-Americans were the most geographically dispersed. Rarely did the researchers find Indians concentrated in specific, urban neighborhoods, and these too were relatively small. For the most part, while Cubans congregated in Miami, and Vietnamese created Little Saigons across California and the South, the post-1965 Indians with their professional edu-cations ended up all over the country, often in the white suburbs. Isolation was built into our patterns of immigration and assimilation, as surely as hair follicles in our brown skin.

I knew the handful of other Indians in my school because the community was small. Their fathers were engineers or doctors; one family ran a motel; the mothers stayed home or took modest part-time jobs. We were a microcosm of the most educated, most professional, and thus wealthiest immigrant group in the nation. And at fewer than four hundred thousand spread across a nation of 227 million, we made up a scant one-fifth of one percent of the U.S. population. If you rounded out the math, we would make up zero percent.

These days, when Hollywood debutantes sport Bollywood fashions and "chai tea" is available at every Starbucks, it is hard to remember the America where I grew up: an America where people did not recognize our ethnicity, where we were constantly mistaken for black or Hispanic or anything but ourselves, where when we said "Indian," they asked us, "What tribe?" Living in San Francisco, where a new yoga studio seems to open up every month, I am tempted to forget that other America which regarded anything foreign with suspicion, where half an hour of yoga and meditation in our public-school classroom had our town's delegation of the Christian right raging. My parents' survival tactics worked in the world of adult professionals, where their own fully formed selves and their colleagues' veneer of civility protected them. But children have no such social screens; my environment was unfiltered, toxic as tar. And as in my junior high school, Indians as an American group had no critical mass, no power, and no political identity.

Elsewhere in the diaspora—Fiji, London, even Toronto—my cousins were raised in Indian-only communities, which held tight to their cultural values by virtue of neighborhood, close networks of kin, and sheer numbers. Our parents also wanted to "preserve our culture," as if culture were a mango to be pickled in chili and brine, not a thing that evolves with its environment. But in the American suburbs of the 1970s and '80s, even gathering places were scarce. In and around Detroit, our nexuses of culture were limited to two grocery stores, two "sari palaces" for clothing, one or two Indian restaurants, and a Hindu temple in a distant part of the suburbs, an hour's drive away. In place of outings with cousins and constant oversight by neighborhood aunties, we were driven to the occasional Indian dance classes, talent shows, and dinner parties that our parents dedicated a good share of their free time to organizing.

One generation's grounding may be the next's limitation. The daughters reject the mothers' comfort food, their ways of feeling beautiful, the yards of silk and slashes of kohl. The sons do not want women who will serve them tastes of home, but women who will lead them into new worlds. Not every daughter, not every son; but sooner or later, a generation diverges, and makes its own way further into the new world than the parents' first dream envisioned. Perhaps each migrant should be warned at the border: Your children will become foreigners to you; are you prepared? It would cut the rate of chosen migration by half.

Somehow we were meant to absorb "culture" on the weekends, stay true to our parents' values, yet accomplish full-fledged assimilation at school. To our parents this meant we must have, above all, good grades. To each other, my peers and I were friendly in our homes or at "community functions." But if we passed in the halls at school, we looked away. Some Indian girls managed to slide into the popular cliques, wearing foundation a shade lighter, boycotting their mothers' cooking for fear the curry smell would seep out their pores, mastering the fine arts of the giggle and the tight pink sweater and the precise sassy angle at which books should rest on hips. The rest of us would have settled for inconspicuous. I stayed away from the popular Indian girls, not wanting to compromise their status; they did not come near me at school, however close our families might be. As for my fellow misfits, I despised them almost as much as myself. We, too, made sure never to be seen with one another.

It was not until I went to college and compared notes with other Asian Americans, raised in the white suburbs, that I realized my alienation had a racial component. I had thought I was an outcast because I had the wrong clothes, or the wrong karma (I spent many of those study-hall hours in junior high school trying to remember if I'd ever been mean to other children at a younger age). Because almost everyone I saw was white, I never thought of myself as not-white. I felt different, but I did not know why; I tried to be "normal" and could not understand why I failed to be so. I was a brown body, and did not know what that meant: that blending in completely would be impossible, that I could never disappear into the "melting pot" described in our history lessons on the ideal American immigrant. Racism was, perhaps like sexuality, one of the unspoken mysteries of the adult world. It was a word we did not have then, though I felt its outline daily, a white loop in my chest, a constriction around the live wet thing.

Michigan's racial structure was densely layered, built not only around our hearts but into our landscape. I have come to understand that the uniformity I witnessed around me was not imagined but constructed: a landscape shaped by successive waves of racism.

Its bones were laid down two centuries ago, during the westward expansion of America, accomplished by genocide and racial exclusion. In India and Africa, the "white man's burden" was the rationale for conquest; its corollary in the New World was "manifest destiny." Before 1808, Native Americans from a dozen tribes inhabited most of Michigan's 57,000 square miles. Less than sixty years later, tribal lands amounted to only 32 square miles.

The change was made possible by a land ordinance carving up the vast area, opening it to white homesteaders, the German and British and Scandinavian immigrants whose descendants would become my classmates. The law was carefully crafted to deter settlement by free black Americans. It divided the Territory of Michigan "into several numbered townships, each six miles square in area. The townships themselves were divided into 36 sections, each one square mile in size. Each section, as necessary, was further subdivided into quarter sections."

Here was the grid on which the next wave of conquest would take shape. "Subdivisions," once units of land available for purchase by settler families, would become the units of suburban community.

Long before we arrived, the subdivisions had divided further; one could no longer buy an 80-acre farm for $100. Our house, on a lot 65 feet by 135 feet, was in section 10, the most densely populated fraction of the six-square-mile Township of Canton, in a subdivision named Carriage Hills II. Neither carriages nor hills were in evidence, but no one seemed troubled by the fiction.

Our subdivision's development was linked to a massive demographic shift that had begun before World War II. As African Americans migrated up from the South for jobs in northern cities, whites abandoned those cities. They paved over more and more of the plains, inventing suburban sprawl to satisfy a need—not simply for land, but for white land.

In Detroit, four days of rioting in July 1967 accelerated the centrifugal motion. That was the year that Canton began to grow houses faster than corn. A few years later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued for educational integration in Detroit—a move that would forever influence the suburban definition of a "good" school. The public schools I attended were among the best.

The fight dated back to the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, in which the Supreme Court had said that separate white and black schools could never be equal. But the ruling alone did not integrate America's schools. With the law on their side, civil rights activists had to wage a city-by-city legal battle against fierce, sometimes violent, opposition. In Pontiac, Michigan, for example, the Ku Klux Klan blew up ten school buses the week before a busing order was to be implemented. Against this backdrop, NAACP lawyers pressed their case in a Detroit courtroom.

Two decades of urban disintegration had already left Detroit itself mostly poor and mostly black. The city was ringed by suburbs that became increasingly white in direct proportion to their distance from the city, like a photo-negative image of a spiral galaxy. As everyone involved in the court case soon realized, meaningful integration would have to involve the outer, whiter areas. A map published in the
Detroit News
showed the proposed remedy: busing 780,000 students between the city and fifty-two suburban school districts. A thick line made the affected suburbs look as if they were all an extension of Detroit.