Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  In this volatile environment, Praveena was a teacher in the integrating public-school system. The position made her, de facto, one of the people trying to bridge the racial divides that had been enforced in South Africa for generations. She took me on a visit to her school, where the staff remained almost all Indian but where the student body now included Indian, black, and "coloured"—but no white—children.

  Y. Chengalroyen, the school's principal, sat down with me for one class period and gave me an overview of what was happening in the school system. One problem, he said, was that people who were active in the anti-apartheid struggle had been given important posts overseeing public education, pushing out skilled career educators. These activists seemed to be modeling their administration on the U.S. public-school system, with erratic results.

  Another, more immediate issue was that Indians were moving their children out to schools in white areas or to private schools, where they paid up to 8,000 rand ($800) per year in tuition. His high school was functioning on less than 600 rand ($60) per pupil per year. "Indians are not prepared to uplift the schools in their own areas," he complained. Into the vacuum came black and "coloured" students, from areas whose schools were even worse off. He was allocated one staff member per thirty-five students, which included the principal and deputy principal.

  Chengalroyen bore no nostalgia for apartheid; he had been an activist himself, involved in the early days of the national teachers' union, and a leader in the movement to protest a history curriculum that included little but the mythologizing tales of white settlers. But he was frustrated by the scope of the challenge. "Parents have become desperate to send their children to good schools," he acknowledged. "Our teachers are not very relaxed."

  At 8 A.M. the morning assembly opened, and the students chanted in unison: "Let God be in my head, and in my understanding; let God be in my eyes, and in my looking..." While the other teachers huddled together and talked under an awning, Praveena walked up and down the neat rows of her students, saying good morning. Her students were mostly "matriculates," meaning that they were in their last year; she taught biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. At 8:10, she unlocked her classroom door, and the chattering students filed in. By American standards, they seemed polite and well behaved, most saying "Good morning, ma'am" as they entered. Praveena launched into a lesson on vectors and polygons, scrawling problems and diagrams on the board: "A spider in search of food crawls 2 meters on a bearing of 225 degrees, then 3 meters on a bearing of 270 degrees, 2 meters on a bearing of 315 degrees," and so on for several more steps; "Determine the resultant displacement of the spider." Sitting in the teacher's chair near the front, I tried to solve the problem, then gave up. Instead I watched the class: "coloured" girls with light skin and fine features, darker African girls with hairstyles that would not have been out of place in the latest rap videos, Muslim girls wearing black headscarves, and Hindu girls with henna highlights and eyeglasses. The boys were less varied in their hairdos, and everyone wore the school's uniform, gray with accents of red and white. The students seemed to have grouped themselves by race in their seating choices, but in my quick survey, I could detect no hostile currents among them; they seemed attentive and focused on learning. By 8:30 A.M., Praveena had chalk on the scarf of her salwar kameez.

  In third period, she taught physics. "In your opinion you're doing work," she started off, "but scientifically, you're doing nothing." This was a prelude to explaining that "Work is done when a Force is applied to a Mass, and the object moves in the direction of the Force." Heads bent over papers; pencils were raised. She described Newton's second law, then concluded, "You're only doing Work if a Force causes a Mass to be displaced." There were forty-eight students in the class, and when she asked them to break into small groups to solve a problem together, chaos ensued. She had to shout to regain their attention. By 11 A.M., Praveena was exhausted—and she had three more classes to teach.

  On Saturdays and Sundays she also taught, all day, giving private lessons in her family's garage to students who could pay for extra tutoring. At first only Indians came; then, as the schools integrated, other students asked if they could also come. She told me, "At first I was guilty, but then my heart told me, you mustn't be so ugly. They are children too, and I am a teacher. And I'm so glad I took them, they are lovely children, they want to learn so much."

  By the end of each day, chalk dust forms a sort of Milky Way across Praveena's blouse. The moral force of the anti-apartheid resistance has caused a great displacement; now, for the Indians as for other South Africans, there is work to be done.

  NEW JERSEY

  Praveena and her family were planning to stay in South Africa—while I was there, they were looking to buy a bigger house—but many of their relations and peers had chosen emigration. At a Starbucks on Astor Place in lower Manhattan, I met my father's cousin's son Nainesh, who was in his first year as a biology major at New York University. We rode the train back to the New Jersey suburbs where his family had lived since 1995. Before that they had spent ten years in Toronto, and before that, in an infancy he cannot remember, they were in South Africa. His grandfather was the eldest brother of my paternal grandmother, Kaashi. The great-grandfather we shared, Ramjee Govind, had first traveled to South Africa in 1899.

  Nainesh was now nineteen, and when I told him the subject of my book, he said, "That's so boring—I can't think of anything interesting about our family, not one thing." At home, his brother Vimal, a year younger, was more interested, or more tactful: "I'd like to read that book, I can't wait." Their youngest brother, Amit, only thirteen, said nothing at all. They invited me to join them on an excursion to see American Desi, an independent feature film that had just come out about the second-generation Indo-American experience, along with other members of the Kshatriya (Khatri) Youth Association of New Jersey. Both brothers had served a term as president of the caste-based group, despite being only half-Khatri. Their parents had had one of the first "love marriages" in our family, after meeting in a Hindu youth group in South Africa.

  "I joined every club I could," Nainesh said by way of explanation of his involvement in KYA. When they moved from Toronto to New Jersey, Nainesh was thirteen. At school white youths taunted the brothers with racist comments. New Jersey's Indian population was growing steadily, and the backlash was fierce; the state had seen a rash of unsolved hate crimes in the late 1980s, committed by an anonymous group who called themselves the Dotbusters and took as their target the bindi, or "dot," that Hindu women wear on their foreheads.

  KYA gave both boys a forum in which they quickly became leaders, though a few parents murmured about the bad influence; the boys were mixed-caste and were rumored to be wild and even (gasp) to date. Lean and tall, in black leather bomber jackets, they towered over the rest of the youth group. With their slightly rakish good looks, they stood out like young James Deans or Matt Dillons in a cluster of sheltered suburbanites.

  At the theater, a red neon sign on the parking structure identified our destination only as CINE_AS. Once a Regal Cinemas franchisee, the multiplex now featured all Indian movies all the time, mostly Bollywood megastar musicals. It was Saturday night, and the theater was full.

  Onscreen, the main character, Kris (Krishnagopal) Reddy, drove away from his suburban New Jersey home toward college vowing, "This year's going to be very different!"

  "Mein bhi," said Nainesh loudly—Hindi for "Me too"—eliciting a round of laughs from his friends. When another character in the movie, Salim, kissed a huge poster of the voluptuous Bollywood star Rekha, the audience laughed and Nainesh said aloud, "What's wrong with doing that? I do that." When Salim opined that Indian girls in the United States can't cook, Nainesh blurted out, "He's got a good point." And at the first shot of the long-haired, light-skinned heroine, Nainesh moaned in appreciation: "Aah."

  Afterward, as everyone clustered in the lobby to say their goodbyes or make plans for the rest of the night, Nainesh waxed enthusiastic: "That m
ovie was totally about my life, I could identify with everything!" At a diner with those KYA members old enough or free enough to stay out late, Nainesh said he identified strongly with the term "ABCD," which stands for "American-Born Confused Desi," desi meaning Indian—a self-mocking label that hints at the difficulties of forging a new identity in the United States.

  Middlesex County, New Jersey, where we went to see the movie, is home to one of the highest concentrations of people of Indian origin in the United States. And since the United States is now the country outside South Asia with the most Indians in the world, Nainesh and his peers might be said to be living at the epicenter of the diaspora.

  One might look to them, then, for a hint at its future: a people almost wholly identified with their new country, but still drawn to form connections to those of the same background. For this next generation of the diaspora, the lands settled by their ancestors are but distant homelands. India herself is not within their, or perhaps even their parents', living memory.

  INDIA

  My first clear memories are of India, vivid and colorful, like a handful of snapshots. Because I was four, my sense of chronology still loose, these images float like snippets of film: close-up on my own hand, lifting toward my mouth, hot fried nuts from a cone bought on the street. Across the way, a small girl, perhaps my age or a bit older, is starving. Her bones are thin, her eyes sunken and lined with kohl. She, her mother, and a baby sit on the sidewalk, begging—they are desperately poor, and I become desperate to help. I walk to her and give her my food.

  My mother tells me that every day we stayed at that hotel, the Taj on the waterfront in Bombay, I gave that girl whatever food or money I was allowed to give away.

  And somehow, in memory, this is connected with the story of Jaydeep: a need too big to fill, the desire and futility of the effort to help.

  After we left Kalyaan that first afternoon, I kept thinking about the options we had laid out for him. Becoming a student was possible but unaffordable; he was willing, eager even, to work, but a student visa would not let him support himself. Marriage would be easiest in terms of paperwork, but it would be next to impossible to find an American citizen from our community willing to marry a tiny man from a poor family; girls with green cards had so many other options. A work visa seemed out of reach, particularly given the sudden bursting of the Internet economy's bubble; the trend now was toward outsourcing and "reverse migration," with H-1B holders going home and Indo-American entrepreneurs heading back to the subcontinent to make their money. The United States was no longer rolling out the welcome mat for educated immigrants as it had for my parents' generation, so many of whom ended up Americans almost by accident. Coming to America now seemed like a Gordian knot of laws and policies, and as I lay in bed trying to untangle it, I knew Jaydeep would also be lying awake.

  ***

  When my research took me back to Mumbai alone, I decided to visit Jaydeep and his family again. In a bookstore I looked for a belated birthday gift, something that might help or encourage Jaydeep in his ambitions; perhaps something American. My eye fell on a small paperback: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I had it wrapped.

  At the house in Kalyaan I ate another meal with them, and asked to interview Jaydeep for the record.

  "Why do you want to go to America?" I asked.

  "That is big question!"

  "Yeah."

  "I make lots and lots of money," he said.

  "Mmm. Anything else?"

  "And my ambition is one of the billionaire person in the world."

  "And you think that's easier in America than anywhere else?"

  "That's easier only in America!"

  "Only America, not India or Australia or somewhere else?"

  "American style is also one of the best preferences of my life. That is also important, American style."

  "Style meaning what?"

  "The way to talk, and ... longs buildings..."

  He had seen America's tall buildings on the BBC news. Whenever he bought a local newspaper, he would look at the currency exchange rate for American dollars. He memorized the names of states and cities. And in cybercafés he would pay twenty rupees an hour for time to browse websites for stories and pictures of America, degree programs, and advice on how to migrate.

  Studies of voluntary migration have shown that it is rarely either the wealthiest or the poorest of any society who migrate. The rich are doing fine and have little incentive to uproot themselves, while the most desperate generally lack both resources and stamina for the journey. Somewhere in between are those who have access to information about the other world and can see the gap between their own lives and the dream. In terms of the old push-pull model of migration, India's problems—population, pollution, corruption, poverty—are overwhelming; the push factors for emigration are as strong as ever. And as global television (Friends, The Bold and the Beautiful) and free trade (Domino's Pizza, Tommy Hilfiger) sell the tastes and pleasures of American lifestyles, the pull is growing as well. Added to that are the dot-com successes returning home from the gold rush, for holiday, telling tales of overnight fortunes "over there." From the viewpoint of Jaydeep and others like him, the other side must have seemed a magical world, as indeed its marketers meant it to seem. And so it was America—not Australia or New Zealand or even Canada—that fired Jaydeep's imagination.

  On our first visit, Jaydeep had bought an "American" cake to celebrate his birthday with us. Perhaps he intended the shared ritual, re-created from American television, as an auspicious way to inaugurate his American connection. But there were no candles, and we neither sang—it not seeming to be the tradition—nor ate, being afraid that the cream filling, unrefrigerated for hours, would distress our sensitive American stomachs.

  After my second visit to Jaydeep's home, I had a vague dream. I was in a crowd of people, searching, waiting, pushing. We were all struggling and straining, though for a time I could not have said why. Then I saw—I was searching for a space on a ship. The ship that would leave Mumbai.

  A few days later I boarded that airship, of course. For me and for anyone with an American passport, borders sometimes seem entirely arbitrary: imaginary lines etched on a globe, painted stripes to be stepped over as lightly as crossing the street. It is easy to forget that for others they are all but impregnable.

  I think of myself as a small child leaving India, after only a brief visit, with India on my tongue: salty bor fruit pickled in vinegar, thick dark honey on rotli, words. And leaving my parents as a teenager, not pausing to look behind; but returning, with however much difficulty, each time. Perhaps we in the diaspora are always leaving India, or that part of India, real or imagined, which lives in our souls, memories, skins. And this constant journeying separates us, irrevocably, from those who do not or cannot leave.

  After returning home, I stayed in touch with Jaydeep for a while. His e-mails were affectionate; he asked each time for my blessings, and spoke of me as a second mother—a notion that made me so uncomfortable I did not respond for a few days to each e-mail, and then did not remark on that reference. I supposed his gushing language was simply an effort to translate the affection already contained in our mother tongue, and my discomfort an American aversion to too much intimacy. After all, the Gujarati word for mother's sister or female cousin, maasi, contains the word maa, mother. We wrote back and forth, but there were gaps; sometimes I could not understand his English, nor he mine.

  Eventually, perhaps when I proved impotent as a gateway to America, his messages took an aggressive turn. "You come and eat my food, I hope my interview helpful," he wrote bitterly. Then they became abusive, and I stopped writing back. His last e-mail to me was so furious that it was barely coherent.

  Looking back at the notes of our first meeting, reading through the advice we gave him, I can see how useless and evasive we must have seemed. I feel sympathy for his dilemma, and along with it, sorrow: for the basic inequality between us, for his clear
sense of betrayal. The implicit promise of my American presence in his life, my friendliness and empathy, was that I could help him, too, to become an American. That I cannot is a matter for legitimate frustration, even rage.

  And his story reminds me that as migrants, the crime of abandonment never quite leaves us. Migration song is not only the melody line of the ones who leave; it is also the deep blue undertones of those who, unwilling, remain. The story of the not-diaspora, the ones we leave behind and who watch our accumulations with a mixture of envy and rage, is ever present, whether we choose to see it or not. And so the homeland is, perhaps, where we come to weep; to see what we were and might have been; to have our hearts broken, again and again.

  LONDON

  Five weeks after leaving Jaydeep, I was at another birthday party.

  Traveling from India to England, it had occurred to me that I was reversing the journey of the first Englishmen to land in Surat. In the four centuries since, the differences between the two countries have eroded somewhat; bureaucracies in South Asia are dominated by the English language, while London's best food is cooked by South Asian immigrants. I landed in Finchley, a tidy suburb north of London; there, as it happened, my cousin's daughter Minal was turning sweet sixteen.

  Where Jaydeep's mock-Western birthday party had struck me as ad hoc and slightly sad, Minal's was warm and filled with the simple luxuries that we in the West are used to taking for granted. The cake, picked up at a bakery, was of the right size and shape for a birthday, and unquestionably safe to eat; the electricity did not flicker out as we gathered around it; there were candles to be blown out and wished over. Gathered around the dinner table were a suitable party: the birthday girl and her sister; their parents; uncle, aunt, and cousins who lived down the road; a school friend; me, the visitor; and her grandmother, my father's eldest sister, Kamla, known as Kamu.