Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Aunt Kamu was seventy-five and had lived in London more than four decades. Born and raised in India, except for a brief stint in Fiji, she had been betrothed in infancy. India's new laws barring child marriage meant that the actual wedding waited until she was eighteen. Soon afterward her father arranged for her husband, Vallabh, to migrate to Suva and work at Narseys. Vallabh traveled to Fiji twice on the four-year stints allowed by migration laws of the time, eventually obtaining a British Commonwealth passport. With that, he decided to try his luck in London.

  Kamu joined him in 1961 with their two sons. At first she found England terribly cold and gloomy; with little education and no English, everything was difficult to navigate. A third son and then a daughter were born. London was expensive, and no one was eager to rent a decent house to an immigrant family of six. They made do in a drafty apartment. And then the eldest boy, Harish, came down with leukemia.

  Through the nightmare of shuttling him through public hospitals, trying to understand the doctors' questions and instructions, Kamu held her family together. She and her husband donated blood, were evicted from one apartment and moved into another, somehow kept the other children fed and clothed; and when despite everything Harish died, she vowed to learn English. That part of the ordeal, at least, would never happen again.

  Minal's father, Chandraprakash, or Chando, was the second son. Now, so many years later, everyone thinks of him as the oldest brother, but he says he will always think of himself as the middle son. He and the youngest brother, Mukesh, eventually married and started their own families. They stayed with their parents for many years, until at last the house where they grew up started feeling far too small. Then Chando moved his family out, a few blocks away, and Mukesh and his family stayed. They still get together at least once a week for meals, and the children come and go easily from one home to the other. For years they ran a tailoring factory with industrial-grade sewing and cutting machines in their basement. Now Mukesh works as an accountant, and Chando runs a card shop; these enterprises, combined with savvy real-estate investments made by their father, enable them to live comfortably.

  At Minal's birthday party I gave her a wire sculpture of our name that I had bought a couple of days earlier from a street vendor outside the Tate Gallery. I tried to give her some money, too, in a card; after all, I had stayed with the family a whole month while I researched diaspora history at the British Library. But Aunt Kamu made me take it back; then, after some haggling, we settled for a lesser amount.

  Later, as we sprawled out on their parents' big bed, I interviewed Minal and her sister about their lives growing up in London. Sumita, or Sumi, was two years older, about to enter university; Minal was in her second year of high school.

  Because Minal and I have the same name, I couldn't help comparing. Although I am more than twice her age, we have some similarities: both raised in English-speaking countries, we speak Gujarati with an accent and wear jeans and T-shirts a good deal of the time. These traits alone separate us from many of our relatives.

  But in other ways, our experiences are completely different. Where I grew up as an invisible minority far away from any extended family, Minal and her sister have lived all their lives in an extensive network of community surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Owing to a completely different racial and colonial history, South Asians are one of Britain's most visible minorities. That, combined with the forces of globalization in recent years, means that South Asia is represented in the politics and popular culture around Minal to a degree I never experienced. A new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical with a Bollywood spin was about to premiere; the department store Selfridges was holding a month-long Bollywood-themed sale; and there was no shortage of groceries, restaurants, community resources, or role models. In teenage-girl-world, this meant, for example, that Minal and Sumi had crushes on Bollywood heroes whose posters adorned their bedroom walls. The sisters' tastes differed—Minal favored Hrithik Roshan, the gray-eyed star, while Sumi preferred long-haired bad boy Bobby Deol—but all of their icons of both male and female beauty came from Hindi films that streamed into their home at any hour of the day, thanks to satellite television. A generation earlier, the only access to such narratives had been by scratchy VHS, copied over and over, then rented from Indian stores or passed from household to household; theaters in the big Indian areas had shown Indian films, but not up in Finchley, a middle-class suburb of London. Now CDs and DVDs, Zee TV, MTV Asia, and MP3s bring the latest Indian popular culture to every diasporan who desires and can afford it. From Hong Kong (where the broadcasts originate) to Fiji (where they are recorded and then cut free of advertising for local rebroadcast), from London to South Africa to North America, my relatives follow the same soap operas and game shows and breathlessly await the latest re-leases of their favorite stars, all the while claiming that television is not so important to them. Minal's grandmother, my aunt, has learned in her seventies to program the VCR so that she never misses an episode of her favorite shows, though the shows do not matter to her at all, she says.

  On a personal level, the cultural and demographic shifts also meant that Minal and Sumi grew up enjoying a clique of school friends who, like them, are second- or third-generation British Asians. They had instant-message access to their cousins both locally and globally, and could spend hours chatting online and trading jokes with one another. An estimated 1,200 Khatris were living in the London area in 2001, and their annual functions had outgrown the town hall of the heavily Indian district of Wembley.

  While Minal's parents' social life was Indian, then, so was her own. Technology and a community of peers gave her access not to an ancestral India—fossilized, irrelevant, and tradition-bound—but to a living and wildly modern sense of Indianness, a youth culture with roots in both the diaspora and a subcontinent that was itself rapidly westernizing. For a Khatri community talent show, Minal and Sumi choreographed a dance routine for their younger cousins and friends to a popular Hindi film song. Sumi also performed in a garbaa, while Minal won first prize in snooker. The selves they formed in this climate seemed enviably integrated, and their reality was so different that I had to suspend my act of imagining myself in the other Minal's adolescence. The whole sensation was simply too foreign to me.

  In a measure of just how different, I asked a serious question, applying in a way my own litmus test of alienation: Had they ever thought about not having arranged marriages?

  The sisters looked at each other. Sure, they said, it would be nice to marry for love; but they couldn't imagine breaking their parents' hearts like that.

  And yet they were wholly comfortable being, and identifying as, British. "When the British ran India, no one starved," their grandmother was fond of saying. Spending my days in the India Office of the British Library, reading of Great Britain's conquest and sometimes brutal treatment of India and Indians—I was reviewing famine logs, records of the salt march, Gandhi's campaigns in South Africa, and so on—I felt a kind of disturbance at being in the belly of the imperial beast. Some days it was as if I could see clearly how the fine monuments and buildings of central London, the world-class collections of art and knowledge, the entire sleek infrastructure from the high-speed subway to the smoothly gliding elevators in every building, all of the continuing fruits of empire, had been undergirded by the sweat and blood of millions in the colonies. "Without the British, none of us would be here," Minal's father told me—and included me in the statement, too, since, as he pointed out, without the British there would have been no Indians in Fiji, and without Fiji our grandparents could have never afforded to send my father to the United States to study.

  Minal's grandfather Vallabh had decided many years ago that, since they were in a new country, they should change a little. Every Sunday, he decreed, instead of flat, round rotli with dinner, they would have English bread. He has long since passed away, but the family still follows the tradition. Six nights a week, rotli; on the seventh, bread.

 
On one of my last afternoons in London, my cousin Mukesh, Minal and Sumi's uncle, took me on a guided tour of London. He is a few years older than I, born and raised in London, married with two children, and we had talked easily during my month-long visit about family, politics, and the politics of the family. Our afternoon tour took us past Trafalgar Square, where demonstrators were staging a peace protest against the new war in Afghanistan. I confessed that I had marched in such protests back home, and we both sympathized with the cause of peace. His progressive outlook, though not unusual for a British Asian of his generation—raised under Margaret Thatcher's xenophobic policies, targeted by a racist white movement—was such a novelty in our family that I felt more comfortable at his home than I had anywhere else in my travels. Perhaps, too, I had learned after many months of traveling among relatives to settle in, to relax in the presence of my relations, to be less on edge and less afraid of judgments and vulnerability. Though I did not come out to Mukesh, I wondered if he had guessed or heard; in any case, he let slip that he had a lesbian school friend.

  In that simple conversation, I realized what a relief it was to be able to integrate the various sides of my persona; not to feel like a freak within my clan because of my progressive views. And on my next airplane ride I had a sensation I had not felt during the entire eight months or so of my overseas travels. It was that particular brand of loneliness called homesickness—not for America, to which I was returning, but for the home I had just left behind.

  IOWA

  It is hard to think of any place more quintessentially American than Ames, Iowa. A town of thirty thousand surrounded by cornfields, Ames is home to the Iowa State University Cyclones and to a tiny, three-leaf branch of my family tree: my aunt Tara and her two sons, Dhiren and Nilesh.

  I traveled to Ames for Dhiren's wedding to Alana Ho, a Vietnamese American woman whom he met when she cut his hair at the local JCPenney. Obviously it was a "love marriage," not arranged.

  On the wedding Saturday, my cousin was nervous, but these were no typical premarital jitters. He and Alana had dated for six years, braving their parents' disapproval and tears, to reach this moment. His anxiety now was about the schedule.

  This was actually Day Three of a four-day celebration involving four languages and four hundred guests. The procession would kick off a fifteen-hour marathon of events: Hindu wedding ceremony (in Sanskrit and Gujarati), Indian lunch, Vietnamese ancestor rites, Catholic mass (in Vietnamese and English), photo session, Chinese banquet reception. To pull it off, everything had to happen precisely as scheduled—not, as Dhiren had emphasized to his mother over and over again, on "Indian Standard Time."

  For his mother, Tara, the weekend was also a balancing act: between the wishes of her own conservative relatives and those of her American-born son and his in-laws. If each and every rite was not performed correctly for her eldest son, her family would be disappointed, and the gods might not properly bless the marriage. But if she didn't comply with the tight schedule, Dhiren would be furious.

  So Tara compromised, keeping all the ceremonies but asking the priest to perform a short version wherever possible. The ritual chants were in the dead language of Sanskrit, anyway; to this Gujarati-speaking family, they might as well be in Greek. Or Vietnamese.

  Days One and Two had been filled with preliminary ceremonies. Everything had gone smoothly enough, unless you counted the cheese platters that didn't show up, the missed plane connection that delayed the opening ceremonies for four and a half hours, the chill rain that pushed outdoor rituals into the family room, and the fact that Tara had forgotten to book a priest for Day One. It wasn't bad, considering the inevitable chaos of a Hindu wedding—in which events are determined not by written etiquette or the word of a religious authority, but by heated discussions among a family's elders.

  Here, the experts were numerous. They included Tara's father, who in 1929 had migrated from India to Fiji, becoming a successful businessman and patriarch of a large family. These days, he spent most of his waking hours maintaining a continuous flow of Scotch and whiskey through his eighty-four-year-old veins.

  Pouring the drinks was Tara's older brother, Mahen, who with his wife, Manjula, had flown in from Hong Kong. They had lived there thirty-five years, as long as Tara had lived in Ames, but Manjula still wore a sari every day, neatly pressed and draped. Rounding out the maternal relatives were Tara's three sisters, the younger from California, the older two from Canada. Between them, Tara's siblings had married ten of their own children to an assortment of Indian and non-Indian spouses—making them experts on the minutiae of marriage rites.

  Uncles, aunts, and cousins from Fiji, South Carolina, and other exotic locations were also in attendance, along with a number of former national table tennis champions—close friends of the groom, who was the No. 1 table tennis (not Ping-Pong) player in the country when he was nine years old, and spent his high school years at the U.S. Olympic training camp in Boulder, Colorado, preparing for the Olympics with the U.S. national team. Dhiren's first coach had been his father, Champak, who had learned to play table tennis on the ship voyage from Fiji to America in 1963. My own parents, from California, also were on hand and saw themselves as chief counselors, since they had planned and survived my brother's Hindu-Catholic wedding.

  Finally, there was our aunt Pushpa, who could not attend but who, as the groom's senior relative on his father's side, sent fax after fax from her home in Fiji. How many coconuts would be needed for the rituals? Could ordinary lawn clippings be substituted for the sacred kusha grass traditionally used as an offering? Which times of day were astrologically most auspicious for each rite? These and other pressing questions were raised, then answered, by Pushpa's faxes.

  If Dhiren's father, Champak, had been present, Dhiren would have relied on him to turn some of the chaos into order. But Champ, as almost everyone in Ames called him, had died less than a year earlier, victim of a massive Father's Day heart attack. Most of the people assembled for the wedding had come to Champ's funeral, crowding into the same downstairs family room where now his photograph sat on the mantel, garlanded with silk flowers. Below it, a festive red banner and symbols drawn with felt-tip markers honored the family goddess, seeking her blessings for the new couple.

  Religious taboo prevented Dhiren's mother, Tara, a new widow, from participating in many of the ceremonies; my parents stood in for Dhiren's, sitting with him at the ritual altar. From time to time, each of them looked up at Champ's photograph, and Dhiren often seemed to be gritting his teeth to keep from crying. At the end of the second day's prayers, when Dhiren bowed to each of his deceased ancestors in turn, Tara broke down and wept, and so did her sons; then, quietly, so did the rest of us. The wedding festivities, like the fresh paint and new white carpeting in the family room, could not cover over a grief that was still raw.

  On the morning of Day Three, the procession departed at 8:30 A.M. —right on time, according to the handwritten schedule that Nilesh had photocopied for all family members (with the note, "BTW, God told me this is how it's going to be ..."). The jaan was an institution stretching back centuries. Every one of Dhiren's forefathers had taken the ritual step with his right foot out of the house and then, at the end of the journey, stepped with his right foot into the wedding canopy with its sacred fire. When bride and groom circled the flames four times, they were married in the eyes of Agni, the Hindu god of fire and ritual. Our grandparents had walked around the wedding fire as children, back in India early in the century; our parents had done so in Fiji in the 1960s; and our generation was reenacting these rites all over the world, with a constant remixing of authenticity and innovation.

  Traditionally the jaan had been a singing, dancing parade along dusty village streets. But in Iowa, it was a motorcade of a dozen cars driving past newly planted cornfields, the sprouts just an inch or two high. In the parking lot of the Comfort Suites motel, owned by a Gujarati family friend, Dhiren broke a clay pot with his foot, and Alana's mother accepted
him into the banquet hall. He took a seat next to the priest under a four-pillar canopy, jerry-built from plumbers' pipes that had been spray-painted gold and decorated with pink flowers. Instead of a fire, a candle sat at the center, a compromise between the demands of the fire god and the hotel's fire code.

  By 11:30 A.M., when "The Wedding MUST end (Indian, that is)" according to Nilesh's schedule, the wedding did end (Indian, that is). The flame was circled and extinguished, the audience applauded, and lunch was served as the groomsmen dashed into a hotel suite to change into tuxedos for the Christian wedding.

  Dhiren did not smile at the Hindu wedding, nor during the Vietnamese ceremony in which his mother reluctantly accepted a whole roasted pig with yellow lilies in its ears from Alana's parents, and certainly not at the mass when his relatives had to be shushed by the priest. He did force a smile for the seemingly endless photo sessions, and when at the reception the guests clinked their glasses, American-style, he also smiled as he leaned over to kiss his bride—on the cheek, respecting the modesty of both of their cultures.

  Here again was the tightrope that Dhiren and Alana had been walking for months: how to balance their own modern sensibilities with two different sets of old-country values. Even the menu for the wedding banquet had been a scuffle, ending in a compromise between Indian and Vietnamese palates: Chinese food, with oversize martini glasses full of red chili paste for those needing a little extra kick. Giant crab legs, noodles, spicy green beans, beef, and chicken joined a selection of vegetarian Indian leftovers from lunch, for the purists.