Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  When I interview relatives now about my father, it is as if this later self has eclipsed the impetuous young man he says he once was.—He was always bhagvaan ni gaadi, one brother says; the image is of a vehicle moving smoothly, frictionless, undisturbed by bumps and ruts on the ground; God's own train.—Your father sits in meditation, doesn't he? one cousin remembers: dhyaan maa pare, to fall into concentration, as if it were a deep well down which one might calmly, coolly, endlessly float.

  Decades after his epiphany, my father would write in the front page of the copy he gave me as I finished college: "As I look back, I can see that I was self-righteous, arrogant and argumentative. Oh, yes, I 'won' all the arguments with my family & friends. I could catch them at every little point they misspoke. I was sharp. I knew it all. I could tell what they were doing wrong & how flawed their thinking was..."

  And he added a wish: "May this book bring you life time of happiness as it has brought me."

  My father spent the winter of 1965 and the spring, summer, fall, and early winter of 1966 practicing his new outlook on life in Chicago. Through the changing seasons he drove to work each morning, arriving at 8 A.M. at his new company, which turned out to be an underarm deodorant factory owned by the Pittsburgh Railways Company. A train carrying pressurized gas pulled up behind the plant. Someone brought Bhupendra a sample from the tank. He tested it, using his new gas chromatography skills. Then he signed the piece of paper that allowed the assembly line to start. Gas pumped into hundreds of small aerosol cans that would become deodorants with different brand names, with slight variations in scent or formula. At 5 P.M. he signed off to close the line, and drove home.

  In his bachelor quarters he would open a can and heat something up on a hot plate, eat, read a bit, and go to bed. Occasionally he experimented with cooking, though he lacked most of the essential ingredients of Indian cuisine. Devon Avenue, tucked into the northwestern corner of Chicago just a few miles from Bhupendra's apartment, was not yet the Little India of shops and restaurants that it would become in the next decades, as tens of thousands of Indian immigrants streamed into the city. The latest census, in 1960, had found only sixty-eight natives of India in Chicago, and Devon was just another anonymous boulevard. Bhupendra made do with short-grain rice instead of basmati, and vegetable curries improvised with powdered garlic, ginger, and chili; the fresh ingredients were too exotic to be found in American grocery stores. Lacking also the essential spices of cumin, coriander, mustard seed, and turmeric, his concoctions did not taste much like home food; but they were the closest thing he had. He knew no one other than his coworkers and co-tenants, spent weekends driving around Chicago neighborhoods and trolling the stacks of the university libraries, and sometimes visited the city to tour the great museum.

  One day he set out for the Art Institute with a more precise mission in mind. He pressed and put on his suit, packed his art portfolio, and traveled downtown to the venerable and dignified building on the lakefront whose broad steps, flanked by two marble lions, majestic columns, and arches, announced its importance. He had made an appointment to show his work to a professor there.

  In the office, the professor marveled at his portfolio, particularly the "invisible" images etched by hand:—This is amazing; I've never seen anything like it. Bhupendra had secured a small exhibition at the student union back in Boulder, and now he hoped the professor could help him find his way in the Chicago art scene. But when Bhupendra asked how to go about showing his work, or studying further, the white professor's face hardened into an expression now familiar from landlords, employers, strangers:—All that is very difficult, he said.

  Bhupendra stood, thanked him for his time, and went back to his room in Evanston.

  In Chicago for a conference, I stand a few hundred yards from the Art Institute, on the shores of Lake Michigan, and think of my father's time here. Nearly forty years later, he tells his Chicago stories in more or less good humor, only hinting at the difficulties by saying, "I learned a lot about America the hard way." I can barely believe the doggedness of his quest for that first job, and the miracle of success. The lake is so vast it might be an ocean, the curve of its watery horizon stretching toward strange, unseen lands: Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan. Its waves, which appear blue from a distance, up close are green and murky, lapping fiercely against a concrete shore. Opposite, past the grand museums, is a downtown filled with old, imposing brick buildings; gleaming new skyscrapers that seem to be held up by glass alone; and the fierce chill wind that blows between them.

  While in Boulder, Bhupendra had written long, chatty letters to his eldest sister in London. Perhaps he had rambled on a bit too long about a pretty girl named Penny, her sweet blue eyes. He realized this news must have traveled when his father wrote with a new offer:—There is a girl, if you are interested. She has studied...

  American girls were good for movie-and-dinner dates, Bhupendra thought, but the cultural gap was so large that he had never seriously considered settling down with any of them. He knew he was not in danger of becoming "lost." But neither was he ready to marry.

  He wrote back, equally neutral and practical in tone:—That's good, but I have no money to come to Fiji. I am saving for my PhD.

  What holds a diaspora together across oceans, national boundaries, generations? Watching my cousins enter arranged marriages, I have wondered why a young person born and raised in Fiji or Hong Kong should feel any affinity to one raised in New Jersey or Toronto, even if they are from the same caste. But for my grandparents, the suitability of such a match was a given—and more than that, an urgent requirement.

  My father had grown up in India, my mother in Fiji; the currents of their lives and families had, up to this point, carried them many thousands of miles apart. In a sense their marriage was arranged by education, within a world of possible prospects that was delineated by caste. Aside from their degrees, indeed, all that they shared was caste: a supposed purity of blood enforced by culture and economics, supported by a continuity of belief and a politics that these days we might call "identity."

  Among Khatris the elements of this identity included religion, history, geography, food, and certain habits of drink, dress, and speech. In the 1980s in Michigan, my parents met a Khatri family in a grocery store when the wife overheard my parents discussing the selection of fish; she recognized the pronunciation of the word (maachhli) as distinct to our caste. Astonished and delighted to find each other, they developed a friendship that remains strong to this day.

  In India, arranged marriage plays certain societal roles: solidifying alliances between families, ensuring continuity for the sake of the ancestors, maintaining entrenched power within the most powerful castes. In diaspora, arranged marriage is crucial for different reasons. Where geographical return is impossible or uncertain, marriage is itself a type of return. To join one's blood to the blood of one's caste is always a homecoming; one is no longer at risk of being "lost."

  This simulated homecoming functions not only in the lives of individuals but also in the life of the community as a whole. As the Khatris became a diasporic people, arranged marriage was what ensured the survival and transmission of old ways of life. With each young person's wedding, everything worthwhile—identity, honor, community coherence—was either preserved or lost.

  With so much at stake, no marriage could be left to the vagaries of youth, or to a thing as unruly as love.

  In October 1965, Bhupendra's sister Lila, recently married in the time-honored manner, moved to Toronto with her new husband. On the telephone with her, perhaps Bhupendra heard loneliness; and he himself had not had any face-to-face contact with family for more than two years. He wanted to go and visit her.

  But under the terms of his student visa, if he left the United States he would have to reapply from abroad. Bhupendra wrote an appeal explaining his dilemma, and addressed it to President Lyndon B. Johnson, White House, Washington, D.C.

  One day at work he received a phone call. The voice on
the other end identified himself as an immigration officer from the Chicago office.—Did you write a letter to LBJ?

  —Yes, Bhupendra said.

  —Well, you could have just come in to our office. Come in and pick up your visa.

  "The Immigration Service official is often the only representative of the Government encountered by the foreign student during his stay in this country," noted a commentary in the Immigration and Naturalization Service newsletter during this period. The INS saw itself as the first line in recruiting and welcoming skilled talent, a national priority. The commentary went on to stress the importance of providing "the student and his family with a lasting, favorable impression of our Government."

  As for President Johnson, he can perhaps be forgiven for not answering Bhupendra's query personally. On October 3, 1965, the president was at a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty, signing the Immigration Act of 1965. Technically an amendment to the 1952 act, it was underplayed by nearly everyone, including its supporters. "This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill," Johnson announced. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or, really, add importantly to either our wealth or our power."

  In fact, the act would reshape not only the daily lives of millions but also American immigration policy itself. It was a complete reversal of decades of exclusion. It abolished the racial "national origins" basis of immigration policy, substituting current nation of citizenship. And for the first time since 1882, it admitted Asians on the same terms as all other peoples of the world.

  For the long-excluded Asians, the act was revolutionary. The barred zone was finally and unequivocally retired. Citizens of all nations could now compete on an equal basis in each category, although no nation could exceed twenty thousand per year. For those with skills and education, the act was a godsend. Of the seven new categories of "preference" that would guide decisions on who was allowed in, two were designed for them: "Needed workers" could apply with employer sponsorship, as skilled white workers had been able to do since 1952. And those with certain "urgently needed skills" could apply on their own behalf, without a job offer in hand; proof of training was enough.

  At the same time, certain provisions of the law were crafted to preserve America's white majority. Even as the act opened up immigration from Asia, for example, it tightened Latino immigration, which had been fairly free of restrictions. And with four of seven preference categories reserved for immediate relatives of American citizens, policymakers had reason to believe that the ethnic makeup of the incoming population would still skew white.

  The first provisions went into effect on December 1, 1965, and INS employees worked overtime through the holidays to handle the "initial flood of applications" from those eager to take advantage of the new openness. Within a year, the number of skilled immigrants admitted would double. By July 1968, the INS newsletter would note "several unintended and unexpected side effects." Chief among these was the fact that the two occupational categories—"needed workers" and those with "urgently needed skills"—were dominated by immigrants of color, particularly Asians. The act had "spurred demand in these categories to new highs," causing a years-long waiting list for some nationalities.

  The eleven-and-a-half-page act of 1965 would alter the demographic makeup of America, redouble the worldwide ripples of anxiety about brain drain, and transform the fate of millions of people around the world, including my parents—whether or not they had yet realized that they wanted to become Americans.

  In Toronto for two weeks that December, Bhupendra had a taste of family life for the first time in two years, playing with his sister's young children, buying them clothes and a red plastic car they could sit in and "drive." Lila and her husband, recently arrived, had little money. She would need a coat for winter, Bhupendra told her, and offered to buy her one. She demurred; she would make do with her sweater, she said.—Come on, you'll die, he said. She would wear her first winter coat, bought for an extravagant $150 and with fur on the collar, for more than ten years.

  As for the matter at hand, the question of my father's future, it would have been my aunt's first natural line of inquiry:—So, brother, when are you getting married? And Bhupendra asked whether she knew the girl mentioned by his father.

  I have heard two versions of what happened next.

  According to my aunt, she praised Bhanu as the perfect girl for Bhupendra, and his response was,—In that case, sister, I'll marry her.

  But my father, telling me the story, describes it differently: "She told me your mother was a snob, stuck-up, walked around with her nose in the air." He took his sister's opinion with a grain of salt, he says, and flew back to Chicago.

  When Bhupendra received his letter of admission to the doctoral program at the University of Iowa, he wrote home with the good news. He would defer enrollment for one semester, in order to make the most of the eighteen months of work allowed on his student visa, then start his PhD program in January 1967. He planned to have saved $2,500 by that time: a full third of his income from the factory, and just enough to cover tuition, room, and board for one year.

  Ratanji's next letter said,—We will pay the airfare; just come and see the girl.

  Bhupendra wrote back that he would come for a visit but was making no promises about marriage. Each month, on green graph paper, he plotted his earnings, expenses, and savings: one millimeter equaled five dollars. By his calculations, he could not yet afford a wife, however lovely and talented the girl might be.

  My mother did not know she was the subject of this transpacific correspondence.

  In the three and a half years since her brother had left for America, Bhanu had grown up a great deal. She was twenty now, about to graduate from the physiotherapy program in which her father had enrolled her. But Narotam was not there to see it.

  Bhanu had witnessed his final heart attack, tried to resuscitate him with her fledgling medical skills, mourned even as she tried to comfort and support her mother. They waited to tell Champak the news until his exams were over, several weeks later, but perhaps from his Iowa dormitory he sensed a disturbance: he failed the term. Bhanu's life was changed.

  No more was she the daughter of a well-to-do businessman, able to buy whichever dress fabric suited her fancy. Her uncle Kalyaan tried to run the store alone for a while, but eventually it became insolvent. Kalyaan was taken in by Narseys, where Ratanji, an old friend of the family, set him behind the ladies' wear counter. Everyone knew that Kalyaan gave away more than he sold, trading handkerchiefs and pantyhose for "favors" from female customers, whom he took into a curtained fitting room for "payment." He kept a bottle of whiskey behind the counter and went to the club after work; arriving home late, drunk, and often violent, he vented his frustrations on his wife. From their side of the thin wall, Bhanu and her mother listened to the arguments, crashes, and weeping. They waited for the dull calm that came when at last he passed out.

  By day, in the neat classrooms and smooth corridors of the hospital, Bhanu studied anatomy, physiology, all the things that could go wrong with the body, and the modalities a physiotherapist used to heal them: heat, exercise, massage. To work with patients who needed aquatherapy in the medical school's heated pool, she learned—alone among the Khatri girls she knew, and years after her parents had barred her from after-school swimming lessons—how to swim.

  In her second year of physiotherapy school, Bhanu had to let go of her overseas dream. She had been chosen for a World Health Organization scholarship to continue studying physiotherapy in New Zealand, where medical facilities were more advanced. But her mother drew the line, knowing that her late husband would not have allowed it. The scholarship went to another girl in the program.

  At home, finances grew tight; Bhanu had to go to a neighbor to borrow money for Champak's tuition. Relatives pressured the widow to get this last daughter—pretty, sociable, modest, and eminently eligible—married off. Bhanu was the right age, already
overqualified for most of the island boys, and the brief wave of gossip over Champak's affair had blown over. Plenty of marriage offers were coming in; it was foolish not to take advantage of them.

  And there was another issue, one that usually went unspoken, but that loomed large nonetheless. For girls there was no question of becoming "lost"; they were rarely allowed to wander far. But a girl could still be ruined, in fact or in reputation; she could be ensnared in lafraa.

  Lafraa is translated, in my Gujarati–English dictionary, as "botheration," and further amplified as "improper worldly trouble or connection." For a respectable girl, even a hint of lafraa means trouble, a tangle of a particular romantic sort.

  One afternoon a Narsey cousin stopped Bhanu as she walked home from the medical school, and asked whether she had Champak's address in America. She had it at home, she replied, and he said he would walk there with her. They were seen by several people sitting on porches as they passed, and by the time they reached home, Bhanu's aunt had been notified and was frantic with rage and shame. She barely waited for the boy to get the address and leave before shouting at Bhanu. And the next day the neighbor girls asked,—What were you doing with him?

  —Doing? Bhanu said.—I wasn't doing anything.

  In such a climate, a girl had to be careful. She understood her mother's worry, yet she did not want to marry a mere dukaan-wala, a shop boy; she was holding out for an educated man. And she wanted to finish school herself. She was enjoying her classes and practical training, and she knew marriage would end her professional aspirations.

  To console her mother, Bhanu vowed that there would be no problems. When the time came, she promised, she would marry a boy chosen by her family. And in the meantime, she would finish school and steer clear of any lafraa. So when a boy slipped her a love note on the bus, or when she noticed one or two young men who just happened to be standing around every day as she walked from the bus to home, their eyes following her, she was not tempted. She remembered the drastic reaction to Champak's transgression; for her, any sign of "botheration" would mean immediate marriage and an end to her education and profession. No boy was worth that.