Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  My father's graph of expenses in 1967, the year my parents married. The spike in June represents his wedding trip to Fiji, and the one in September shows their trip back to the United States.

  Champak and Tara in 1969, just after their wedding.

  The young professor and his children, New Zealand.

  LEFT: Our first stop in the United States: Disneyland, 1978.

  BELOW: In our new home in Canton, Michigan, ca. 1979. Note the tropical wallpaper mural.

  Growing up in Michigan in the 1980s.

  My brother, Nayan, at his wedding in 1998, with our uncle Champak.

  Mala with her family on their first trip to the United States, when I first met her at my brother's wedding and learned part of her story.

  My mother (left), Mala, and Mala's mother-in-law with Mala's daughter, Kirthi, 1978.

  Jaydeep (far left) and his family in Kalyaan, outside Mumbai, India, 2001.

  Minal Khatri (third from right) with her siblings and cousins at her sixteenth birthday party in London, 2002.

  Raju (Roger), the entrepreneur, at his wedding in Toronto, showing a gift, ca. 1987.

  Dhiren, the table tennis player, with his trophies, early '80s.

  Praveena with her students in the new, postapartheid South Africa, 2002.

  Hemesh, the Hong Kong import-export businessman, in 2001.

  The next generation: my nieces with their cousins, 2007. Left to right: Ava Naasko Hajratwala, cousin Ella, Zoë Naasko Hajratwala, cousin Sonia, Téa Naasko Hajratwala, cousin Trina. They all live in suburban Michigan.

  8. Body

  To assimilate means to give up not only your history but your body, to try to adopt an alien appearance because your own is not good enough, to fear naming yourself lest name be twisted into label...

  —Adrienne Rich

  DEEP IN THE MARROW of every story is a silence. Having struggled, all these pages, to be transparent, not to overwhelm the stories of others with my own, now it is my turn to emerge, solid. And I hardly know where to begin. I have practiced the art of submergence—invisibility, assimilation—all my life. To metamorphose, now, from neutral narrator to embodied character, self, seems a great act of exposure. Vulnerability, guilt, freedom, sympathy: Which thread shall I pull first? How shall I unravel or construct, from all of my memories and aches, one true pattern, one set of possibilities—one spine?

  I might have been named Gita, Saroj, or Sudha. I might have had trouble in school, been raised under the shadow of Mars, and brought good luck to my house. The telegram my father sent from San Francisco to Fiji at my birth was un-mystical:

  BABY GIRL BORN 742 PM MONDAY JULY 12TH STOP BHANU AND MINAL IN GOOD HEALTH LETTER FOLLOWS BHUPENDRA

  It was 1971. My grandmother in Fiji forwarded the vital information—date, time, time zone—to her astrologer in India. He wrote my horoscope, which predicted all of the above. Based on an ancient calculus, the stars said my name should start with G or S. My grandmother sent a gift for "Gita."

  But I had already been named, as my parents reminded her: meen meaning "fish," al meaning "like." Minal, she who is like a fish. They were college-educated, beyond superstition; they had named me for a friend of my mother's, just because they liked the sound of the name. They declined to read the trajectory of my life ahead of time: lucky and unlucky years, characteristics of a compatible mate, probable paths of education, marriage, and health. Nor did they perform the sixth-night ceremony, when a pencil and paper are placed under the baby's crib, for the goddess of destiny to write.

  And so I was raised free of predestination.

  But not entirely.

  My parents believed in destiny, even as they doubted the importance of ritual in shaping it; and the telegram my father received that day—the job offer from the south of the planet—was a kind of proof. With or without a written horoscope, I entered the world with a lucky footprint.

  Within six months I was an emigrant, collecting the first international stamp on my passport. I slept all the way from San Francisco to New Zealand in an airline bassinet, aided by a lick of whiskey.

  In the normal manner, I progressed from howling to cooing to, eventually, words. In New Zealand I believed we had our own special language, a delightful singsong made up by my parents. It was a code we could use in the public park, where we fed our stale bread-ends from the week to the ducks, or in the grocery store to discuss the funny-looking woman nearby, say, or complain about prices that were too high. No one could decipher our secrets. We used it just for fun, too: My mother said it was time to inter-pinter the laundry, to move it from washer to dryer. A bumpy road was so gaaber-goober, she complained. She could double any word or name to humorous effect, or for emphasis: Minal Binal, TV BV, bowling phowling.

  It was only when we visited India, when I was four years old, that I understood there was a world of other people who spoke the same funny way. Gujarati was a lilting, rhyming language, and with a child's knack I absorbed it completely in the six weeks of our visit. By the time we left India, I had forgotten all of my English.

  ***

  I never thought of myself as an immigrant until I began writing this book. Because I was born in San Francisco and now live in San Francisco, my mind skipped over the years of disruption in between; I believed I was only the child of immigrants, the so-called second generation. But the truth is, I have lived through multiple migrations, shifts from one world to another; and these geographic shifts were mirrored and amplified into emotional, mental, and even sexual ones. Each time I cross a border, I feel the push and pull in my body, a cacophony of competing desires. And always there are choices to make: what to assimilate, what to reject. Is it true that we are always, as migrants, and the children of migrants, attempting to choose what my parents call "the best of both worlds"? Or is it possible to transcend—no, not transcend, but enter into—the dualism, the splitting, the uncertain interstices between the worlds? Is it possible to integrate, even heal, the trauma of crossing; of many crossings?

  Back home in New Zealand, my Kiwi babysitter was forced to learn a few basic words in Gujarati for a few weeks, until my tongue acclimated again. Water, hungry, yes, no. Eventually I would become adept, like all children raised with more than one language, at code-switching, knowing instinctively when to use Gujarati and when to use English. Meanwhile Mrs. Maclean acquired pani, bhukh, haa, naa. She fed me Jell-O and a soft-boiled egg for lunch every weekday while my parents were at work. She was our next-door neighbor, and my mother also traded recipes with her—rotli for trifles, curries for brandy snaps. Her daughters, Philippa and Vicki, became my best friends. We were partners in spitting watermelon seeds, hunting for golf balls on the nearby course, and taking swim lessons at the Y. We watched television, and I developed a secret crush on Adam West as Batman. I called their grandmother Gram, and had no memory of my own.

  Five years old, I walked unchaperoned—the streets were that safe—every day to and from Maori Hill Elementary School, which, despite being named for the indigenous people of New Zealand, was populated by a couple of hundred white children, one Maori boy, and me. My teachers had innocent, storybook names: Mrs. Lion, Mrs. Stringer, Miss Babe. Once I lost a 24-karat gold earring on the way to school; a neighbor's son found and returned it. And when one of my kindergarten classmates asked his mother, Why don't Minal's hands ever get clean? and she reported this to my mother, they simply laughed: Kids say the darnedest things.

  I remember our years in New Zealand as happy ones. Traveling back, I have felt a nostalgia for its green hills and cool southern fog, an unaccountable joy, even a sense of home—the original landscape that my body remembers. But when I was six years old, I began peeling the skin from my lips, obsessively, till they bled. My parents tried everything: scolding, spanking, a trip to the pediatrician. I remember the bitter taste of iodine on my fingers, the night mittens; but none of it worked.

  I believe that as children we know things, in an almost prescient way, as animals understand earth
quakes; that we absorb mysterious signals, the unspoken anxieties of adults, and the plans that are being hatched around us. Did I sense that my parents were planning to shift continents again, and that they were (although they did not say so, perhaps not even to themselves) afraid? Did I take this fear, worry, and uncertainty into my own small body? When I was seven years old, the world changed.

  My parents had decided to move back to the United States. When they broke the news, they tried to sweeten the deal: in America they would buy me one new doll every month, for a whole year. Like legions before me, I was seduced by the New World's promise of wealth beyond imagination.

  After touching down in Los Angeles, we toured Disneyland and I picked up a Mickey Mouse cap with ears and my name embroidered in yellow script. This rite of passage was followed by a series of moves whose reasons I understood, vaguely, as being connected to my father's work. Of Gainesville, Florida, I remember the terror of roaches, which I had never seen before. In Iowa City, where we lived for a year, our lives seemed brushed by a glamour that only America could offer. One of my classmates was the son of a minor television star. My best friends were redheaded twins whose father had spent time in India and given them Indian names; when I went to their house for a sleepover, I saw with amazement that they each read a book at the dinner table. The twins borrowed my Indian outfits, and my mother choreographed a Gujarati folk dance at our school's winter show. Christmas was, for the first time, storybook white, and important. My parents bought a plastic tree and gifts, to help us fit in. I sang Christmas carols in my second-grade classroom, where we stood for the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and had The Hobbit read aloud to us every afternoon. I learned to ice-skate, to sled, to transform deep drifts of snow into roly-poly men and hollow angels.

  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 histor
y 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.