Texas Instruments and Eastman-Kodak also brought in a regular crop of engineers of Indian origin. These “techie” types, when I saw them at a party, always struck me as unused to the bright glare of the outside world, staring out at it ferretlike. After four years of cracking books in the library of some state university (those at Amherst and Buffalo were especially popular) and skewing the grade curve in a manner to make things impossible for their American student peers (who still held dear the three Fs of college life—fraternities, football, and frolicking with the opposite sex), they appeared quite lost.
Meanwhile, more foreign doctors were setting up practice in the smallest towns of rural Tennessee, southwest Virginia, and Kentucky, after completing their training in an urban residency. They made expeditions to our provincial metropolises of Johnson City, Kingsport and Bristol—the Tri-Cities—to do their shopping, to look up families that were friends of friends of friends, and to gradually become regulars at any of the major functions, such as Dipavali or Indian Independence Day, that justified an excursion of such length.
New York City and Chicago had long gotten used to the sight of Indians manning newspaper kiosks, driving cabs, running gas stations, working as staff nurses or doctors in the metropolitan hospitals, and even trying their hand at the pretzel and hot dog concessions. And now, the glittery variety shops that were once the province of the Lebanese, the Yemenis, and the Jews had competition from Indians. Indians had learned the art of cramming the window displays with autofocus cameras, palm-sized cameras, video cameras, 8-mm cine cameras, hand-held televisions, car televisions, stereos, VCRs, CDs, radios, two-in-one boom boxes, three-in-ones, four-in-ones, five-in-ones, computers, calculators, pens, time managers, wristwatches, pen-size dictaphones, strobe lights, binoculars, telephoto lenses, tripods, telescopes, and lava lamps. This phantasmagoria was peppered with SALE! SALE! banners and little fold-up cards sat below each item with the “price” prominently displayed in fluorescent green, yellow and red, below the crossed-out “retail” price. It was as difficult for a grown man to walk past such a store as it was to whisk a child through Toys “R” Us without stopping. And once you were caught by this display, transfixed by the stare of the one hundred lenses, captured by the four video cameras that now projected your image onto every TV screen in that window—shopper transformed into variety store star—you became like a deer trapped in a hunter’s flashlight.
The dark-skinned man at the door, with hair curling out of his shirt collar and peeping out at his wrists, watched you, smiled easily, nodded to his assistant who mysteriously appeared with the one item that had tugged at you. As he ushered you into the interior of the shop, where incense burned at the foot of idols of Lakshmi and Ganesh, he reminded you how indispensable a pair of binoculars with power-zoom was to a citizen of the world.
These visible Indians in the big city were but a fraction of the total number of Indians who lived there, worked quietly as accountants, engineers, Port Authority workers, students, computer programmers, immigration officials . . .
In a town our size, without the very visible trades of taxi drivers or newspaper wallahs to use as a yardstick, it was tricky to establish exactly how many Indians there were. My friend Brij, a traveling Hong-Kong-suit salesman (the kind who will set up his tie and shirt displays on the ground floor of an Embassy Suites for a day, run advertisements in the local paper, then take orders for custom-tailored suits which are stitched in Hong-Kong, by Indians, and mailed back in a week), describes his foolproof method of gauging the local Indian population and finding an Indian restaurant in a strange city:
“You look in white pages under B for ‘Bombay Palace’ or T for ‘Taj Mahal’ or I for ‘India House.’ These are equivalent of Asia Palace, Bamboo House, China Garden, or House of Hunan in the Chinese restaurant business. If there are no listings under those names, take my word there are probably no Indian restaurants in town. Failing this, you simply look up number of Patels in white pages and multiply by 60; that will tell you size of Indian community not counting wives, children and in-laws. Take my word: less than ten Patels means no Indian restaurant. If more than ten, you call, say you are from India, ask them where to go to eat.”
“But, Brij,” I asked. “Why don’t you just look under ‘Restaurants’ in the Yellow Pages?”
“Aare, that’s no fun, yar !”
Even if it was not readily measured, Indianization, the entrepreneurial spirit of the variety store, was trickling out to the hinterland. The sari shops, the video stores, and the spice shops in New York, Atlanta, and Chicago were now into mail order. Indian culture was following on the heels of the Coca-Cola truck, going wherever it went, probing deep into rural America. A Gujarati couple from Charlotte sent flyers out in the mail to announce the days they would be in Johnson City. The flyer listed their complete itinerary which, much like the itinerary of a country singer, began in Charlotte and took them up to Boone, North Carolina; Johnson City, Tennessee; Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee; Wise, Virginia, and then back home.
In Johnson City, they parked their van at the former Mid-Town Inn, with the blessing of the new Indian owners. Along the insides of their Ford van they had rigged up crude shelves. The floor of the van was loaded with giant sacks of basmathi rice, raw rice, rice flour, lentils and a balancing pan to weigh out the rice. In the recesses of the van were bottles of Ambedkar mango and lime pickles and papads. They carried the complete product line of the Surati Sweet Mart, a company with offices in Toronto, Ontario, and River Rouge, Michigan. Surati Sweet Mart produced a line of packaged and canned goods that included badam puree, barfi, badampak, bundi ladu, farsi puree, gulab jambu, ghari, jalebi, khaman, khajli, kachori, mesub, mohan thal, penda, surti bhusu, chevdo, sev and gathiya.
The wife, a formidable lady with a giant diamond in her nose, thick gold bangles on her wrists and a no-nonsense air about her, sat on the lip of the cargo space, further jeopardizing the van’s suspension. Her hand rested possessively on the weighing machine. If you requested an item other than rice or flour or lentils, she yelled the order to her husband, a thin individual who never emerged from the recess of the van, but stayed crouched in the back. You only saw his gangly arms handing out items to his wife. Her size precluded her fulfilling this task.
The parking lot was full of doctors and engineers. I spoke no Hindi and the Gujarati couple spoke no Tamil or Malayalam, so when it came my turn, we carried out our transactions there in the former Mid-Town Inn parking lot in English:
“Three packets of papads—”
“Plain or chili?”
“Chili. And two kilos of basmathi rice—”
“I give you discount on five kilos.”
A NEW FAD HAD swept the Johnson City Indian community. Instead of inviting people to each other’s houses for dinner, families were renting out the gym of the Ashley Academy, a private school, to host dinner for sixty to a hundred people. In one fell swoop, a family could reciprocate for every dinner they had been invited to over the previous year. In doing so they also racked up the certainty of invitations for the rest of the year, a year that could be spent at leisure until they were in the debit column again.
As more families followed this trend, the dinners took on a surreal quality: the same gym, the same crowd, almost the same food—only the host changed.
Rajani and I stepped inside the gym. The women had, as usual, gravitated to one side, the men to the other, and children were playing noisily in the middle. There was a constant din in the room from all the voices.
I moved around the room greeting people I had seen just two weeks ago in the same gym.
This party, like every other such party, was “dry”—no alcohol was served. This was in itself curious, as I had never known any of these hosts to decline my scotch or gin or rum at our house. Of course, a “dry” dinner could be thought of as being more traditional, like in the old country. But here in this prep school gym, children running around with ninja figures and robot trans
formers in their hands, the most fluent east Tennessee patois rolling off the tongues of toddlers and teens alike, it was difficult to invoke the old country, difficult to ascribe the “dry” dinners to anything but an unbecoming miserliness.
I looked around the room and saw Rajani with a group of fifteen women, all of them, including Rajani, wearing colorful saris, or salwarkamiz, all of them sitting on the gym benches and chatting. The different states of India that were revealed in subtle aspects of dress and jewelry included Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Orissa; there were an equal number of unique dialects. English was the only language common to all. Rajani was laughing and enjoying herself in a way that I hadn’t seen for a long time. Another group of women with a few men were helping the hostess bring the food (prepared at home over the past few days) in the giant cooking pots to the row of tables strung end to end to make a buffet table.
The teenage girls buzzed and whispered together, staying in their one geographic spot all night. The teenage boys stood sullen together, on the men’s side of the room. They looked displeased at being made to come to these functions.
Among the men, the pecking order at these functions was clear: doctors ruled over engineers, who lorded it over everyone else. The motel owner’s status depended on how successful he was as an entrepreneur. But then financial success was really at the root of the hierarchy among the doctors: surgeons—particularly thoracic surgeons—were treated as the maharajahs, everyone rising when this persona entered the room. Plastic surgery and urology were a notch below thoracic surgery. (And even if the urologist made more money, there was something just a little unclean about the idea of urology—it had tinges of untouchability, what with working with urine and all that.) Then followed the cardiologists and the gastroenterologists and the other procedural medical specialists. Needless to say, on this ranking, being an infectious diseases specialist was equivalent to being a bathroom sweeper.
To have made the choice of the specialty of infectious diseases was, in this circle, considered akin to buying at full price a motel that any Patel could have told you was going belly-up and that you could have bought for a bhajan at foreclosure.
Tonight, as always, I was the recipient of much advice. Most of it was on how to make money, since I clearly wasn’t making any. In the competition to build a larger and fancier house, I was not even in the race: I was renting from the VA—a heinous crime from the perspective of an Indian community that saw land acquisition as a primal necessity. (“But what about my oak trees?” I wanted to say. “What about the bed of red salvia I have in front? What about the yellow and red roses? What about my tomatoes?” I knew the answer: it would be “What about equity?”)
I acted as if money meant less to me than it did to them, a childish reflex. This was, of course, not true: I valued money and would not have minded a ton of it. But I didn’t feel I had to do something different in medicine just for that reason. I was every bit as well trained, just as talented I like to think, as the doctors who made twenty times what I made. The monetary disparity was not due to their skill or their intrinsic worth (even though at times I think they succumbed to this delusion); it was due to a payment system that placed greater value on procedural specialties than on those without them.
“Ah, but in Sweden,” I would say when I grew tired of being needled about my specialty, “thoracic surgeons and infectious diseases specialists get the same salary. And you know what, if the Democrats win the next election . . .”
This was guaranteed to produce a loud outcry that I delighted in. There were no stauncher Republicans than the Indian doctors of east Tennessee.
I tired of this after a while, tired of the talk of stock options and mutual funds and the benefits of incorporating. I drifted over to the teenage boys. To them I was a hero of sorts. Not only did I not drive a Honda Accord, not only had I never owned a new car, I even owned a motorcycle and rode it when the weather permitted. I took them for rides, not necessarily with their parents’ knowledge. And on top of that, I took care of AIDS patients! Whatever it was their daddies did, there was no personal danger. In truth, there was no personal danger in what I did, but that evening I did not fight the St. George-the-dragon-slayer metaphor.
With a little encouragement, I found myself waxing eloquent about AIDS care, telling them how it enriched my life, changed its direction. Some of the teenage girls shuffled over. I marshaled a passionate argument against Reagan, deliberately planting a seed of dissension in their family. I told them a risqué joke: how the urologist who removed Reagan’s prostate was asked later by Reagan if all was well, would the plumbing now work well? “Everything is perfect. Your bladder is fine. Your penis is one-hundred percent. You can go out and fuck the country for another four years!” The loud laughter drew looks from the parents.
As I talked to the teenagers, I was conscious that my words created a reality far superior to the actual reality of what I did. But the teens were chiming in now: They had such pure ideas of justice, of right and wrong, of what they would do if they were in control. I loved it! If their parents were the ultimate pragmatists, these kids were beautiful idealists.
When the summons for dinner came, and the line started to form to walk past the table and pick up the pooris, the channa, the rice, the vegetable curry, the pickle, the yogurt and the sweet, our little group broke up. Children went first. I picked up my paper plate and stood with the ranks of the men. By long-standing Ashley Academy Indian dinner tradition—a token concession to years of oppression—the men would serve themselves after the women.
An hour or two later, I was ready to leave. I thanked our host. Looking for Rajani, I approached the side of the room where the women were sitting. A father stopped me, his expression half-serious, half-joking. He said he was mortified to hear his daughter say to him a few minutes ago that when she finished medical school (and these kids were all going into medical school, even the ten-year-olds) she thought she would become an AIDS specialist.
I shook his hand and offered him my warmest congratulations and turned away. Ahead of me I could see Rajani, still laughing, at the center of a circle of women. She seemed perfectly at home. I didn’t want to take her away.
12
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I went to see Vickie McCray and Clyde at their home in Tester Hollow, a mile or two out of town.
I had just seen a patient at Northside Hospital. Northside was built by one of the medical groups in town. It was much smaller than the Miracle Center, laid out ranch-style, with three wings fanning out from a lobby. I tried not to encourage consultations at Northside because it meant yet another place to dart to during my lunch break or after my hours at the VA. But since I was now on the north edge of town and had time to spare, I gave Vickie a call.
To get to Vickie’s house, you head north on North Roan, past the Holiday Inn, the Sheraton, the International House of Pancakes, and Putt-Putt Golf until you come to where North Roan forks into two. The left fork is the Kingsport Highway leading to the airport and then on to Kingsport. The right fork is 11E to Bristol.
At this Y junction, on the Bristol side, there used to be a bar called Cowboys. It had been a country-western place whose parking lot was filled with pickups; the gals and guys coming and going wore cowboy hats, a look quite out of place for east Tennessee, more suited to Nashville or Austin. The building itself was a large ranch house with light cedar paneling. Cowboys had closed, and in its place was a bar called New Beginnings. New Beginnings was Johnson City’s new gay bar; the Connection had moved to this bigger, more visible locale, and had in the process taken on a new name. I had been meaning to work up the courage to visit someday, perhaps asking Olivia Sells, my Red Cross friend, to come along for company.
North Roan is segmented by traffic lights that can make a midday drive a frustrating stop-and-go exercise. But a mile on the Bristol Highway, and you are free of lights. The strip malls, car dealers, and gas stations, which till then have been neck and n
eck, now give way to businesses with a little yard around them, space between them for a shed or a prefab storage barn.
The highway here is raised. The turn-offs from the shoulder of the road lead steeply down into country. Driving by, you see only the rooftops of the small enterprises on either side of the road, the billboards strapped to the chimneys that identify the businesses as “Country Florists,” or “Lawn Ornaments,” or “Tennessee Headstones.”
Vickie had given me good directions. Nevertheless, I drove right past my landmark, an antique store which looked to me like an ordinary house with junk piled on the front porch. The shop had no rooftop billboard, only a dark-cedar slab nailed to the railing on which the word ANTIQUES was painted in black letters.
The turn-off from the highway ran behind the antique store, crossed over a creek and then went plunging down, down, deep into a valley. I was on Tester Hollow Road. On either side was a steep embankment coated with a blanket of pine needles and maple and poplar leaves. The newly fallen leaves were saffron and ocher in color, their outlines preserved, as if someone had set them down carefully by their intact stems to form a mosaic around the bases of the trees. And the trees that soared up from this earth-coat were on fire: wild maples, pine and sycamore, tall and still full of leaf with colors from crimson to gold with every shade in between. They formed a canopy over the road, diffracting the light, making me feel as if I were driving into a Cezanne painting.
I traveled a mile down Tester Hollow Road, followed it as it twisted and curved with no shoulder on either side. In places the foliage was so thick and so little light came in that I could see fern and moss growing on the fallen trunks of trees. I came to a crossroad: McCray Road.
My Own Country Page 24