Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

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.

  It was Vinay who convinced his anxious parents to stay calm amid the chaos of LAX.—Just wait, he repeated;—just wait. And they did. Finally, as in the happy ending of a Bollywood movie, the man walked up to them, they all exclaimed and embraced in relief, and they picked up their bags and went home with him. That was their first day in America.

  Within a week, they heard through the Gujarati grapevine that someone knew someone who was looking for a responsible couple to manage a motel on Alvarado Street. Good, Mala thought, we can start to work. Though their hosts were generous, she felt uncomfortable being someone's guest indefinitely; the whole point was to start their new, American lives. So they took their luggage—the lost bag had arrived—and moved into the motel. The manager's quarters were cramped for a family of five, but if it all worked out, Mala thought, this job would be a convenient way station. They would learn how to manage things, save some money, and then perhaps buy their own motel, as so many had done before them.

  By the turn of the millennium, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, which despite its inclusive name has always consisted mostly of Gujaratis, could boast that its members owned a full forty percent of the hotel and motel rooms in the United States. They had twenty thousand hotels with more than a million rooms, ranging from skid-row to high-end boutique, and were a fifty-billion-dollar economic force. If you have spent a night in the past decade in what the industry calls "economy lodging" (a Days Inn, Motel 6, or Holiday Inn Express, for example), it is more likely than not that you were staying in an Indian-owned room.

  How that happened, over a period of twenty-five years or so, is a story that in its outlines is rather simple; anyone who has played the Monopoly board game can grasp it. First you cobble together enough dollars (property, cash, loans, whatnot) to buy a hotel on a well-traveled route. Soon the customers come through. You use the revenues you earn to buy more property. The key is to imagine that you are playing not strictly as an individual but as a real human being with family members whom you care about, or at least who you wish would move out of your living room. You don't want them to go bankrupt from paying rent to you, as in the board game; you'd rather have them running their own motels, or one of yours, and have casual passersby pay the rent.

  The first Gujaratis to penetrate the motel game started out in San Francisco in the 1950s. As a port city, it had a constant flow of travelers as well as a steady supply of long-term hotel residents, men with drinking or other problems who never quite got it together to manage a place of their own. In the long tradition of immigrants finding an economic niche, a handful of Indians realized the benefits of managing, leasing, and eventually owning such motels. First and foremost, you did not have to pay rent yourself, cutting out one of the biggest line items in any household budget; second, the work did not require special credentials or education, or even fluent English. By 1963, a social scientist studying the phenomenon found twenty-two families owning dozens of the city's skid-row motels in the area between Third and Sixth streets just south of Market. All of them were from a particular Gujarati caste, the Patels, who would eventually come to dominate the industry to such an extent that today you can buy T-shirts celebrating the Patel-motel connection.

  For the first Patels, the motels were not only a way of making a living; they were also community hubs, a place for new immigrants to stay while they got their footing. A few Gujaratis of other castes also entered the business, and some individuals struck out beyond San Francisco. What really made the trend take off nationwide was an unlikely combination of government investment in interstate highways, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and Walt Disney World.

  I first heard this history from a Patel named Ramesh Gokal, one of the pioneers of the Indian motel business, who happened to be friends with some of my relatives in New Jersey. They had all emigrated at some point from South Africa, which gave them a solid basis for camaraderie. Gokal, a friendly and frankly intelligent man of whom it might be said that every subject is his favorite subject, was glad to outline for me the early history, which I later confirmed through other sources, that had shaped the economic landscape in which Mala and Madhukant found themselves in the late 1990s.

  Mid-century, America was at the height of its love affair with the automobile. When Disneyland opened in Southern California in 1955, one of its star rides was Autopia, where Americans who had presumably driven miles to get there could enjoy driving bumper cars around a track. The following year President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, spreading $25 billion among the states to create what would become known as the interstate highway system. A decade later, a series of new connectors had been built, including the country's longest north-south routes: Interstates 75, 85, and 95, which connected the high-population regions of the Midwest and the Northeast all the way south to the tip of the Sunshine State. Flying over Florida in a helicopter in search of a location for his next great theme park, Walt Disney found the spot where the highways connected, a swamp near a sleepy town called Orlando. He began dredging it, and on October 1, 1971, Walt Disney World opened.

  It was the beginning of a boom. Dozens of motor hotels, or motels, sprang up along the interstates leading into Florida. Families in cars, recreation vehicles, and caravans traveled up and down the highways, stopping overnight to refresh themselves and perhaps dip in the tiny cement pools. The motels' new owner-investors were mostly white, empty-nesters, former corporate executives looking for a relaxed retirement business. Having a motor inn along the interstate was, says Gokal, reaching back to his roots for an African analogy, like diamond mining.

  Then, in the mid-1970s, the fuel crisis hit. Gas shortages and skyrocketing prices put an abrupt end to the era of autopia. It was time for the diamond miners to get out; their grown children did not want to inherit empty motels, and these were the years when, as Gokal put it, "you could lie on the interstate for an hour and a car wouldn't hit you."

  Meanwhile, the number of Indians in the United States was creeping upward, thanks to the 1965 Immigration Act. Some of these professionals had hit the glass ceiling, or found themselves itching to be their own bosses; some, because of state-by-state licensing rules, were unable to practice in the field they had been educated in; some found themselves with extra capital they wanted to invest. A few were new immigrants arriving on business visas, which they obtained by agreeing to invest a certain amount of money in the American economy. Like Gokal, most had heard from their San Francisco relatives or connections about the easy money to be made in motels. California was already too pricey for most of them, but in the Midwest and South, they could find plenty of properties for sale, cheap. Gokal himself bought a twenty-six-room motel in North Carolina in 1976. By 1978, when he sold it, he owned five more. Eventually he became partners with the broker who was selling him the properties, and together they sold dozens of motels to other Indians. The Monopoly game was in full swing.

  From Gokal's perspective, and the community's, the Indian buyers were bailing out the American sellers, offering them cash during a period when no one else would buy. Others, though, saw it as opportunism; you can imagine the conflict if some people are pla
ying the game as lone rangers, while others are applying the ethics of teamwork and dealmaking. Half a dozen motel property brokers told the Washington Post in 1979 that they hated doing business with Indians, who were "a headache" and tended to do "things not customary in this country." Gokal's ancestors in South Africa would have found the arguments familiar: Indians lived so cheaply that they could undercut the white competition; they were dirty, the rooms smelled of curry, and so on. White owners put up "American-owned" signs, although it was a bit too late—like appealing to the public to stay at your Park Place when your opponent has built hotels all across the board. More significant forms of discrimination came from banks and insurers, who denied loans and policies to anyone named Patel, and from large hospitality chains that shut Indians out of buying their franchises. When the community tried to make up for these lapses, by self-insuring and loaning funds to one another, the Justice Department launched an investigation of a mafia family-type "scheme"—based on suspected immigration fraud, allegations of travelers' checks crossing state lines, and suspicious similarities in names.

  Eventually, the Indian motel owners realized they needed to organize. With the help of a few key white allies in the industry and in state politics, they began using their collective economic clout to negotiate with bankers, insurers, and franchise chains. The president of Days Inn conducted an internal study rating his firm's Indian-owned properties versus others by a series of measures including quality of service, timeliness of franchise payments, and so on. Surprising themselves, his staff found that the franchise's Indian-owned inns were, on average, more profitable and of equal or higher quality. By 1985, the Associated Press was reporting that "nearly every exit of Interstate 75 in Georgia has an Indian motel owner." By 1994, a single company had six hundred Indian franchisees.