Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  —A tablet rotary press.

  —Do you know how to operate it?

  Bhupendra paused. He had seen such machines, capable of pumping out hundreds of tablets per minute, only in textbooks; in India they had worked on a simpler press that made one pill at a time. He considered bluffing but feared he would be asked to demonstrate.

  —Not right now, but I'm sure I can, he replied instead.

  That honest but confident reply won him a place in the course, while his compatriots were stuck doing two years of prerequisites.

  ***

  Bhupendra's English was still rudimentary, his manner that of a boy from the upper stratum of a village. One day he forgot to bring his pen to class, and wanted to borrow one for a moment to write down an important point. He turned to the student next to him. In Gujarati one would say, Bhai, mane taari pen aap ni: Brother, give me your pen. "Give" and "lend" are the same verb; the polite and temporary nature of the request would be understood. The language has no equivalent for "please."

  —Give me your pen, Bhupendra demanded urgently of his neighbor.

  —No, said the other student, pulling away and giving him an odd look. Bhupendra was furious, filled with an impotent rage.

  People problems seemed to plague him. One roommate was too loud, another too messy. One roommate insulted him; the next insulted him even more. After his eighth housing rearrangement in less than two years, Bhupendra realized that the problem might lie with himself.

  But this realization came toward the very end of his time in Colorado. By then, his volatility—his portion, perhaps, of the notorious Narsey temper—had had a grave consequence.

  His studies had gone well, with A's and B's in his classes and only a slight delay in writing his thesis as he waited for the results of his laboratory experiments to bear fruit. He had traveled to California, Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon; he had taken a summer job selling encyclopedias. Now, with one semester left in Colorado, he was focused on planning for his future. In one of his weekly letters home, he asked his father whether Narseys was ready to open a pharmacy or a pill-manufacturing factory.

  —No, came the reply; his father's brother Magan, the managing director of the firm, was very ill, and no new projects could be considered.—Come home anyway, Ratanji wrote.

  The truth, though, was that Bhupendra was changing. His image of himself in a white coat, dispensing painkillers and balms to the old ladies of Fiji at the back of the Narseys department store, had shifted and blurred and slowly faded. In his laboratory in Colorado, he had learned to operate not only the tablet rotary press but also the other modern machinery, to mix and document the results of his experiments with test tubes and beakers, Bunsen burners, solutions, distillations. He was studying how quickly the colors in pill coatings faded, according to various conditions; it was an important topic, since people tended to discard pills that had lost their color, even if the medicine inside them was still stable. Fascinated now by pharmacy's theoretical and mathematical aspects, Bhupendra wanted to continue in research. A patriot, he was interested in returning to India someday, to share his knowledge with his motherland; but Fiji, lacking a community of intellectual peers or scientific research facilities, was far less appealing.

  He wrote home and told his father he would like to pursue a PhD.

  —What is a PhD? came the reply.—And how much will it cost?

  — It is the highest degree possible to attain, Bhupendra wrote.—It will take three more years.

  Ratanji said he could not afford such expense.—Come home now, he wrote.

  Instead, Bhupendra set about developing Plan B.

  His F-1 student visa allowed him to work up to eighteen months after graduation; the U.S. government considered this practical training to be, in theory, an extension of a student's education. Bhupendra calculated that if he found work for eighteen months, he could save enough money to start a doctoral degree. In his typical methodical way, he applied to a hundred pharmaceutical companies for a position. He also applied to several doctoral programs.

  Every one turned him down.

  He went to meet with his adviser.—What might the problem be?

  The advice he received was invaluable, if a bit late:—Don't use anyone's name as a reference without asking them first.

  — Oh! Well then, will you be a reference for me?

  The adviser paused.—You should ask someone else, I think. Ask a professor whose course you got an A in.

  Bhupendra nodded and left, confused by the odd American etiquette. One day in the mail he received an anonymous envelope: a copy of a letter of "recommendation" about himself, written by the adviser. Apparently someone had taken pity on him and forwarded the letter so that he could see what it said. Bhupendra read it, reeling. The letter spoke candidly of Bhupendra's umpteen changes of address, his short temper, and apparent difficulty getting along with people. With such an evaluation from his primary adviser, it was no wonder his mailbox was filled with nothing but rejections.

  This unpleasant lesson in American candor was a profound shock to Bhupendra, raised in an Indian value system of loyalty, family-feeling, and helping one another along. He no longer knew if he could trust any of his three references, and he had no idea what to do.

  But the cruel moment also contained a gift: a glimpse of truth, and the potential for transformation. Away from his family and the milieu in which arrogance had served him well, Bhupendra realized that the Narsey temper was a problem he would have to learn to control.

  For now, though, the damage was done. Bhupendra set about completing the last hurdles in Colorado. On the way to his oral examinations and thesis defense, he was turned back by the department's sole Indian professor, a Dr. Himmat Mehta, who chastised him for his rumpled appearance. Bhupendra went back to the apartment, ironed the cuffs and front panels of his shirt—the only bits that would show under his suit jacket—and aced the interviews. At commencement, his black gown and cap sported a dignified gold tassel, indicating his master's degree in science. It was August 1965, and his graduating class of ninety included one Iraqi, one Afghani, and four Indians, including Bhupendra. He sent a photograph home, himself in graduation robes against an American flag; Ratanji made dozens of copies for all the family members.

  Meanwhile Bhupendra set about trying to repair his career prospects. Once again he came up with a plan.

  The great industrial heartland of America lay east of the Rockies, so Bhupendra decided to go east. He had bought a huge old Ford, cheap, from a fellow student, who had also taught him how to drive it. Now he would take Interstate 80 toward New York, pausing in each major city to seek work. His father had stopped sending money, so Bhupendra's only assets were the car, $100 remaining from the $1,500 his father had given him two years before, and his expensive textbooks. If he reached New York without finding a job, he figured, he could sell everything and buy a plane ticket to Fiji.

  In Lincoln, Nebraska, he stayed a night at the YMCA; the university's doctoral program had already rejected him, so he kept on moving. In Iowa City he stayed at another Y, for three dollars. The next morning he stopped by the University of Iowa. At the pharmacy building he filled out an application, skipping the most difficult section by writing simply, "References provided upon request." Then he drove on.

  In Chicago, he counted his money: he had fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not going to make it to New York. In his rented room at the downtown Y, he sat down to calculate.

  A night at the Y with private room and shared bath: six dollars. A day's worth of food: three dollars. Gas and miscellaneous: one dollar. At ten dollars a day, he could last for five days. It was a Monday.

  If by Friday he had no job, he guessed he would go back to Fiji.

  In Washington, D.C., the nation's highest politicians were working to get him to stay—not Bhupendra as an individual, of course, but skilled young scientists from the Third World. As early immigration policies were shaped around the need for labor, so was the legi
slation being drafted and debated in the summer of 1965. Instead of bodies, what America needed now was brains.

  By the 1960s the Cold War had become a national obsession. American superiority over the Soviet Union was measured by every conceivable scorecard: votes in the United Nations, comparisons of gross national product, medals won in the Olympics, shifting maps of small Third World countries. Now President Lyndon B. Johnson was aiming to import the talent America needed to emerge victorious in at least two arenas: the space race and the nuclear arms buildup. Aerospace engineers and nuclear physicists were worth their weight in plutonium, but all scientists, whether or not they worked for the military, were counted as valuable recruits for Team America.

  The legislation that had eased restrictions on foreign students back in 1952 had also paved the way for further change. That act had been a comprehensive rewrite of U.S. immigration law, technically abolishing the ban on Asia and setting up a new formula that looked like equality, although it was actually a clever piece of strategy. The quota of immigrants from each country was set at one-sixth of one percent of the population of that country's natives already in the United States—as measured by the census of 1920. By basing future growth on the 1920 population, the act guaranteed that historically tiny groups, like the Indo-Americans, would remain tiny, while larger ones, like most European Americans, could grow. Just to be sure, a special provision capped migration from the old "Asia Pacific Triangle" at 2,000 total. And to be extra-sure, immigrants with fifty percent or more Asian ancestry were charged to Asia, whatever their current citizenship, so that third-generation Japanese from Brazil or Pakistanis from England could not sneak in under non-Asian countries' quotas.

  Precisely because the 1952 act preserved America's racial profile, it had passed political muster. For Indo-Americans, whose quota of 100 immigrants per year remained the same, it had no numerical impact at the time. What it did change was the type of people who could come, and this would turn out to have a more lasting effect.

  Previous legislation had given first preference to relatives of Americans, with small occupation-based quotas. But the 1952 law had turned that practice on its head. First preference was now going to those with skills "urgently needed in the United States." Fifty percent of each nation's quota was set aside for these professionals.

  Doctors, scientists, engineers, and health workers found that their brainpower could launch them to the front of the immigration queues. They lined up quickly. While the quotas for such nations as Great Britain and France went unfilled, those from Asian nations with substantial educated populations and tiny quotas, including India, were soon booked up for years in advance.

  At the same time, American companies and universities were clamoring for talent. From 1952 to 1965, U.S. research and development funds nearly tripled, paying for a 242 percent increase in scientists working in R&D. America's universities were producing too few U.S.-born students to keep up with this voracious pace, yet U.S. law was keeping out the brains who could satisfy the demand. Tinkering with immigration law and creating new access for students and exchange scholars was no longer enough. As a series of U.S. presidents fighting the Cold War recognized, large-scale recruitment of foreign scientific talent could not occur without changing the basis of immigration policy: the national-origin quotas themselves. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had all placed large-scale immigration reform on their agendas, without success in Congress. Now the issue had landed in Johnson's lap—and this time it seemed to have a chance.

  The civil rights movement had created a climate in which, for a brief moment, politicians scrambled to exhibit racial tolerance. Corporations favored changes that would bring cheap labor, trained up to U.S. standards (often overqualified, even) but willing to work for less, for jobs that were going empty. Public xenophobia against Asians, which had blocked immigration reform since the turn of the century, was at an all-time low, with Americans' enemy radar refocused against the Soviet communist threat.

  The time seemed right for far-reaching change, and many minds and mouths and pens were hard at work on Capitol Hill, hammering out the precise compromises and phrases that could make it happen. Politically and perhaps astrologically, the stars were lining up.

  At the Y, Bhupendra lingered in the lobby each morning until someone left a newspaper behind. After combing the Tribune classifieds (free), he budgeted another dollar a day for nickel phone calls; the calls saved on gas, which was 31 cents a gallon. He drove around filling out applications, and soon learned to skip the offices and restaurants with signs reading NO DOGS NO JEWS NO BLACKS.

  In the university towns where he had lived until now, people were used to seeing foreign students; the Americans he had encountered were comfortable with, and even intrigued by, his ethnicity. Chicago in 1965 was another story entirely. Within a year, it would explode in race riots that would rock the nation. For Bhupendra, it was the site of his first encounters with the color line that W. E. B. Du Bois had called the problem of the twentieth century, the racially polarized America divided starkly into white and black—with no category but "black" for anyone who was, like Bhupendra, darker than a paper bag. In Chicago people either went out of their way to avoid him, mistaking him for a black man, or approached him speaking in Spanish, thinking he was Puerto Rican.

  The week went by, and Bhupendra's billfold grew slimmer. On Friday morning, a two-line ad in the Tribune said simply, "Analytical Chemist. Gas Chromatography. Apply in person." Bhupendra had taken a special elective in the new technique and had written a paper on how it could be used to test for steroids in athletes' urine. The emerging technology, which measures the rate at which a molecule breaks down, would later be developed into such applications as the Breathalyzer test for drunk drivers.

  Bhupendra drove out to Morton Grove, a northwestern suburb near the airport. His interviewer was the head of quality control and R&D at a firm called G. Barr Company. Bhupendra filled out an application and wrote down his grades—including an A in the gas chromatography course. The man interviewed him on the spot, without asking him for references.

  —Do you know what a propellant is?

  Bhupendra paused. It was Friday; without this job, it was quite possibly his last Friday in the country. But he decided it was risky to fib on a technical point.

  —No, I don't, he replied,—but I have learned this much and I have come this far and I'm sure I can learn it.

  —When can you start? was the next question.

  —Now, he said.

  He was hired to start on Monday, at a salary of seven hundred dollars a month, far beyond his expectations. But there was still one problem: how to meet his expenses on Friday and Saturday. He told his story to his new boss, who was so impressed—or pitied Bhupendra so much—that he took twenty dollars from his own pocket.—We'll take it out of your first paycheck, he said.

  With that, Bhupendra set out to find an apartment.

  He spent a few evenings after work looking for a place to stay, but Morton Grove was a white suburb. Apartment complexes bore the same offensive signs; many building managers refused to even open the door when he knocked. At last he found a motel with a low weekly rate. Within a few weeks, though, the manager told him he had to leave.

  —But I'm paying you on time, aren't I?

  The manager shook his head. Someone had complained about a dark man living permanently at the motel. He would have to go.

  Drawing upon his limited experience in America for a solution, Bhupendra drove out to Evanston, the home of Northwestern University. There, on campus, he hoped to find a friendly refuge among people who were used to foreign students and visitors. At the student housing union, he found a listing for a shared apartment, four rooms. Three were occupied by white students, but the landlady was willing to rent the fourth to him. He sighed with relief, and settled in for a twenty-minute commute each way.

  ***

  Over just such issues, America was exploding around him. In the summer of 196
6, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made Chicago a focal point of his civil rights campaign, and the city was awash in protest marches, fiery rhetoric, and violent backlash. Bhupendra paid enough attention to heed his coworkers when they warned him which white neighborhoods to avoid driving through, even innocently, and especially at night. Otherwise, he felt little personal involvement. Despite his experiences with racism in Chicago, it was not a problem that had much to do with him. He was a visitor in this country, not a part of its internal squabbles, and he intended to do his best to avoid getting caught up in them.

  Bhupendra had jotted a quick note home to let the family know where he was working, but moving, and moving again, had led him to neglect his weekly letter home. Nearly a month went by, until one day a supervisor called him in and asked,—Have you written home lately?

  It turned out that his uncle Magan, a Rotarian, had written from Fiji to the Rotary Club in Chicago saying,—I have lost my nephew. They looked up the company's name and called. Immediately Bhupendra rushed to send a cable home, letting them know that all was well.

  Settling in, he found among his possessions a book given to him by a cousin long before, which he had never read: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by someone named Dale Carnegie. He opened it, skimmed the pages, and was captivated.

  Carnegie's mass-market paperback, a popular bestseller that had sold millions of copies since its publication in 1936, was like a light bulb popping over Bhupendra's head, as he would say later. Bhupendra saw his own behavior illuminated—under the anecdotes of how not to behave. Still carrying the shock of America's perspective on his behavior, via his professor's "recommendation" letter, he was receptive to Carnegie's lessons about tact, negotiation, and seeing the other person's point of view. And he was young enough to change, to leap out of his old skin and into a new, perhaps more American, self.