Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Possible, impossible, plausible, implausible: perhaps any child telling her parents' story must be a secret narcissist, entranced by the chance drama of her parents' meeting, the improbable string of twinkling lights that lead somehow to the explosion that is her own body. Though my parents' arranged marriage had more in common with a business deal than a love story, for me the tale carries all the intrigue of a passionate romance, and one with a most desirable outcome. When my grandmothers parted that afternoon, did either of them perceive with certainty the pattern of the future? When they gestured and negotiated toward a match, did they envision the grandchildren who would ensue from such a union? Did they predict, or even love, a decade in advance, me; the possibility of me?

  Bhupendra, unaware of his mother's strategizing, finished his semester with all A's. He had beaten the competition: as long as he maintained a B average, his tuition would be paid for the next four years.

  And his graph-paper chart, revised, looked healthy. He still had most of his Chicago money. He wrote home:—If the girl is not yet married, I can afford to marry now. I can come for the summer.

  My mother knew of proposals in the wind, but she was intent on enjoying her new career. She was earning the stunning sum of thirty pounds a month, and with that, along with savings from her student stipend, she planned to buy a used Volkswagen Bug from her favorite physiotherapy teacher. Miss How, who would be returning home to the United Kingdom soon, agreed to supply driving lessons as well.

  Bhanu also was preparing her trousseau. She bought one or two new saris a month, hemmed them, and had the matching blouses tailored. Then she folded them neatly in a trunk for the day, sometime in the uncertain future, when she would be married.

  Ratanji, receiving Bhupendra's letter in Fiji, was furious. His obstinate son, who had wasted money coming and going as if it were nothing, now wanted to visit again? Bhupendra should have married and left the wife behind for a few months, as he'd been told. For that matter, he should have moved back to Fiji after his master's degree; what was this nonsense about more study, when by now he was surely more than qualified to open a pharmacy in the back of the department store? Why should Ratanji pay for another round-trip airfare? How could he be sure the investment would pay off this time?

  It fell to Bhupendra's brothers to speak reason to their father. Ranchhod and Chiman, both married and with children of their own, waited for a calm moment before approaching him.

  —Father, one or the other said,—you know how stubborn our brother is. Now that he's decided to get married, he will get married—and what if he marries one of those American girls?

  Ratanji wrote back:—Fine. Come in the summer.

  Bhupendra placed his belongings in storage for the summer and decided he would move himself and his bride into married student housing in the fall. The university-owned apartments, at forty-eight dollars a month, were subsidized; rent would be forty-two dollars less than he paid for his current off-campus housing.

  When the housing clerk asked his wife's name, Bhupendra explained that he did not know yet—but that he would certainly be married by next term, and to please write down Mrs. Hajratwala.

  And Kaashi paid another visit to Benkor, who replied,—Possible. Yes.

  To my mother, everything after this point is a blur, weeks and months from which she emerged with her entire life altered. There were days of nerves and decisions and instructions, things to do and undo. She gave notice at the hospital, finished the driving lessons with Miss How, explained why she could no longer buy the car.

  Bhanu knew a few things about her new family and husband, but it was difficult to separate fact from rumor. Her older sister Pushpa—the one who had whispered so presciently in Bhanu's ear on the dock four years earlier—said that the Narseys lived in such luxury that the women changed outfits twice or thrice a day. Meanwhile Bhupendra's father, perhaps confused by his son's explanations of his studies, was bragging that Bhupendra had invented penicillin—a claim that Bhanu, having taken several science classes, knew to be patently false, though she was mature enough to hold her tongue.

  The way Bhanu saw things, it was enough that Bhupendra was more educated than any boy on the island, more educated than any other among the slew of proposals she had received. Her mother and Pushpa approved of the match. And there were positive signs about her new family: Ratanji had shown generosity by hiring her uncle to work at Narseys when the family's fortunes waned, and the Narsey sons were known as gregarious, respectable young men. Beyond all of that, two of Bhanu's wishes were about to be fulfilled: she would live far away from her mother-in-law, and she would at last have a chance to travel overseas. She wondered if she could bring her collection of Life magazines with her.

  Bhupendra flew into Fiji's main airport, on the western side of the big island, late on the night of Monday, June 12, 1967. His brother Ranchhod picked him up, and they drove four hours to Suva in the east. Bhupendra had just enough time to shower and dress before his 8 A.M. Tuesday appointment at the registrar's office. No one was taking any chances that he might change his mind again.

  In the waiting area, future husband and wife sat next to each other, not speaking. Bhupendra noticed again how pretty she was. In his worldly travels he had learned a little about how to converse with a stranger. Begin with a compliment, Dale Carnegie had advised, and perhaps those words of wisdom rose somewhere out of his subconscious as he looked down at the inches of bench between them, upon which was the trailing end of her pink chiffon sari. He complimented its dainty floral pattern; and when she said she had embroidered it herself, he lifted the cloth to praise the work.—Pretty, very nice, he might have said. Later his family would be scandalized: Not yet married, and already fondling her sari! He could not touch her yet, but he could touch the vein of her threads, what her hand had touched and made.

  The wedding itself was meant to follow some days afterward. But Bhupendra's uncle Magan was deathly ill, suffering from cancer of the fundus of the stomach. It was Bhupendra who had interpreted the doctors' report, drawn a diagram of the organ, and explained it to his family.

  Every few days Ratanji would call Bhanu's uncle and say,—Make the preparations, Magan is feeling better, we'll have the wedding tomorrow afternoon.

  Then, hours later, he would call back and say,—Forget it, he's not well now. Let's postpone.

  At home, Bhanu was making her own financial calculations. By now her family was in precarious circumstances. She and her uncle were the breadwinners, but Kalyaan's income was minimal. They were not only maintaining their household but also paying Champak's tuition in America. And the wedding expenses had to be borne by the girl's family.

  Bhanu had saved four hundred pounds from her physiotherapy stipend and salary. Now that she would not be buying Miss How's car, she could use that money for the wedding. If they kept it simple, she thought, it would be enough.

  As they waited for their wedding date to be set, my parents did not court, date, or even talk much. Spending time as a couple alone was considered both unnecessary and unseemly. One exception was the day Bhupendra took Bhanu to the U.S. consulate, where they showed their passports, their marriage certificate, and Bhupendra's student visa. The consul official stamped her passport with an F-2 visa, the category for student wives: no waiting period, no delay. They went home, their union recognized now by two governments. On paper, and by day, Bhanu was a daughter-in-law; she visited her in-laws' home daily to sit with Uncle Magan in his sickroom. At night, she went home to her mother's house.

  One morning, Ratanji called with a different message. Magan had passed away in his sleep.

  As the home of her in-laws filled with mourners, Bhanu's own home bustled with wedding preparations. A priest was consulted to calculate an appropriate date, taking into account the thirteen-day mourning period for Magan, auspicious and inauspicious astrological hours, and Bhanu's menstrual cycle. Finally the wedding was set: 2 P.M. on July 10, a Monday.

  The celebration would be
understated, out of respect for the newly dead. In financial terms, this reduced scale was a fortunate stroke for Bhanu.

  Only immediate family members were invited, and the crowd was less than fifty. Her sisters, cousins, and cousins' wives came to help, cook, and fuss. Bhanu's only personal guest was Miss How, her favorite teacher; even her dearest childhood friends and neighbors had to stay away. Instead of a dinner banquet, Bhanu's family would serve afternoon tea and homemade snacks: the white milky fudge called burfee and the trail mix–like gaathiyaa.

  After weeks of waiting, the ceremony itself was perhaps anticlimactic. In a haze of anxiety and fatigue, early mornings of ritual and duty, neither of my parents remembers their thoughts during the central moment of their wedding: the four circles they made around the sacred fire, with the priest murmuring Sanskrit verses and their families looking on. Their necks were garlanded with flowers, their foreheads cluttered with red powder and raw rice, their wrists tied together symbolically by a red silk scarf. There was no ritual kiss, no clinking of champagne glasses. They sat again before the priest, their places reversed now as a sign of their changed status. And their hands, in the wedding photos, are clasped together.

  The wedding photographer was Bhupendra's younger brother, Manhar, who gave the two rolls of color film to Bhupendra, who waited to have them processed back in Iowa. From Woolworth's, Bhupendra bought a small journal and decorative contact paper, and improvised a three-by-five photo album. He mailed it to Fiji so that the families could see it; it traveled with relatives to London and South Africa, then to Toronto, and from there his sister mailed it back to him in Iowa. It was the only copy.

  The young couple were themselves making a series of similarly complex transitions.

  Three days after the wedding, after the wrap-up rituals, my mother moved into the Narsey home. She had closed her savings account and given the balance to her mother—one hundred pounds, left over after the wedding expenses. To her in-laws' home she took only a small tin suitcase, which had been her sister's when they came as children from India. The saris that Bhanu had been buying herself each month easily fit inside. In the wedding altar, the place reserved for two new trunks stuffed with clothes and household goods as the bride's trousseau had been empty; Ratanji, sensitive to the family's financial circumstances, had told her relatives not to prepare them, saying diplomatically,—We are providing enough for her.

  It is hard for me to imagine my parents' state of mind upon marrying a stranger. They have tried to explain: That was just the way it was, everyone we knew did the same, it was no big deal. But I think it must still have been a big deal, as any marriage is, any first sexual encounter. In a society where everyone has the same experience, certain experiences may go unarticulated for many lifetimes. Among the events that pass in silence, at least in the public record, are whatever wishes or fears or regrets a woman takes to her wedding night.

  For a woman of my mother's generation, this moment—an almost ritual deflowering, with no prior preparation, not so much as a first kiss or date—was routine. For a woman of mine, it is nearly impossible to fathom. The question itself—How did it feel?—comes from a different world, is unanswerable; across the gap between my parents' young selves and me, perhaps there are no words to convey the actual experience, the feeling. In my family I have some hint of it through whispers and rumors, the network of news that is called, because it is women who convey it, gossip.

  One of my cousins had to explain to her new sister-in-law the facts of life, several days after the honeymoon. The girl had not known anything, and her husband had not been tender. They were driving, and pulled into a gas station as my cousin explained to her what was happening, what part of the man entered what part of the woman, how it could feel, and what would happen next. The girl opened the car door and threw up.

  Another cousin's wife, my own age, married when I entered college. Her mother-in-law asked my mother to explain the facts of life to her. By the time I graduated, she had three children. Yet it took her several more years to understand that the loud sounds her husband made at night, the way he stopped breathing from time to time, were not simply the normal way a man sleeps; he had a sleep disorder that required treatment.

  I like to think that my parents' education protected them from the worst of such silences. I like to think that my father was a thoughtful man, and that my mother, having studied anatomy and sneaked peeks at Cosmo centerfolds, had some idea of what was about to happen. I like to think that there was, in the weeks and months and years after their wedding, a kind of courtship that had elements of the sweetness, romance, and love that I myself have known. And that one of those nights, if not the first one, they found a mutual pleasure that would, eventually, make me.

  But not yet: they had already discussed a practical matter. I can imagine my father broaching the subject of birth control gently but directly, feeling awkward perhaps but knowing that it was his role to take the lead in such discussions. I can imagine my mother, perhaps shy at first, giving voice to her own bold, opinionated nature. They agreed; she would go on the new birth control pill. They would wait until Bhupendra finished school to have a child.

  On the night of July 13, 1967, approximately four years after that first chance non-meeting on the dock, my parents slept at last in the same bed, in the Narsey home. Weeks of waiting and days of exhausting ritual had taken their toll. The newlyweds' slumber was so deep that neither stirred when a thief reached in through the open ground-floor window, surveyed the goods on the nightstand, and stole all of their 24-karat wedding gold. Gone was Bhupendra's slim new ring from his in-laws, inscribed with his initial B; gone were Bhanu's new black-beaded necklace and red bangles signifying her married status.

  Gain and loss, give and take: these are the fundamental tropes of migration, the ebbs and flows that are as certain as travel itself. What Bhanu gained was a good husband, a chance to travel, a lifetime of intellectual companionship, and the opportunity to develop her mind rather than stagnate. What Bhupendra gained was a helpmeet, a lifetime of domestic companionship, someone who could understand both where he had come from and where he wanted to go; an ongoing connection to and taste of home. What they lost was what Bhupendra had already begun to leave behind, and what Bhanu had not known she was so much a product of: a culture and family that had formed an inextricable web—from which they were already extricating themselves—and the intimacy of living among the intangible textures of their childhoods. When I think of my young father in the nook of the porch in India, immersed in his textbooks and in the flow of village and community and family around him, with no contradiction among them; when I think of my young mother climbing tamarind trees and tossing down the sweet-sour pods of fruit whose taste I know only from dried plastic packages or tubes of paste, I feel that only I know what has been lost. They at least had the pleasure of living through their childhoods, of knowing precisely who and from whom they were, once. Perhaps only we of the next generation—raised among strangers, eating the fruits of our parents' risks—can taste the true proportions of bitter to sweet.

  They reported the theft, replaced the necessary jewelry, and did without the rest. A modern couple, they were the first in their families to go on a "honeymoon"—two, in fact.

  The first was a bus trip around Fiji's main island. Its formal purpose was to introduce Bhanu to the extended Narsey clan. In truth, she, raised in Fiji, knew them better than Bhupendra did. Thus they began a lifelong pattern of Bhupendra greeting people as if they were familiar to him, coached by Bhanu as to their identities and precise relationships.

  The second "honeymoon" was suggested by a distant uncle who lived in Tonga, where, he told Ratanji, there was a lovely hotel in town, perfect for sending the boys over with their brides. But to Bhupendra's parents, a young couple traveling alone did not seem proper. After some consideration, the family agreed to a compromise: the newlyweds would stay at the uncle's home, and Bhupendra's mother would go along too, as chaperone. It was
the first public honeymoon in the family.

  For the next four weeks, Bhanu and Bhupendra lived with the Narsey clan. Bhanu helped with household chores and took a crash course in homemaking from her mother-in-law, majoring in Bhupendra's favorite foods. She wrote down Kaashi's recipes for garam masala and the other spice blends that were each family's signature, which Kaashi had in turn inherited from her own mother-in-law, Maaji; she learned that her husband's family liked sugar in their daal. Her new sisters-in-law, they of the troublesome Narsey temperament, had been sternly admonished by Ratanji not to cause her any trouble:—This is an educated girl, she doesn't know anything about housework, it's your job to teach her. And so Bhanu found them civil enough; moreover, they did not, as it turned out, change outfits several times a day.

  When it came to gender roles, Ratanji Narsey was as conservative as they came. His own daughters were struggling in Toronto and London, encumbered by being raised without English, education, or independence. Even a decade later he was enforcing the rule against the women of his family working outside the home; one of my cousins recalls with frustration that she was not allowed to do anything with her high school and secretarial degrees while in Fiji.

  But for my mother he made an exception. Perhaps he sensed that in America a different type of woman would be needed. He had never liked America, not for a boy alone, subject to temptations of every kind. But since his son seemed bound to live there at least a few more years, he had chosen a suitable bride.