Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  On September 6, 1967, they celebrated Bhanu's twenty-first birthday. Four days later, she and Bhupendra flew to America in time for the start of the new school year.

  That semester, nearly five thousand wives and children of foreign students were admitted to the United States. Like the others, Bhanu had tried to steel her nerves for a new life. Her stomach, though, was another matter.

  It was two nights and three days by train to the interior. Besides saving money over airfare, my father thought that riding the rails would be a romantic way to introduce his bride to America's scenery. Amtrak in 1967 had limited culinary options. Bhanu was not vegetarian; she had grown up eating chicken and lamb. But every Amtrak meal featured beef, which she had never tasted. Even the soup was beef broth; it looked to her like blood and smelled worse.

  For a whole day Bhanu ate nothing but the chevdo snack mix they had brought from Fiji. During a brief stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, they ran to buy potato chips and rushed back to the train; the thin air at more than a mile high caused Bhanu to feel out of breath, which made her panic. Fiji was at sea level, and she had never experienced the effects of high altitude before. She felt nauseated till they got off the train in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

  A forty-dollar taxi ride brought them to Iowa City. It was a Saturday, and the campus was quiet. After picking up the apartment key from the university office, they sat in the Quadrangle for afternoon tea and apple pie, one of Bhupendra's American favorites.

  To Bhanu, everything in America would stink for weeks. The restaurants had an odor altogether different from anyplace she had had to eat before. Fiji had continental-cuisine restaurants, but no one she knew had ever eaten at one. The closest thing was the home economics class at the missionary school. She had learned to make scones and trifles, but the instructors had been careful not to offend their students' mostly vegetarian sensibilities.

  Their apartment, Unit 1013, Finkbine Park, was an aluminum barrack that smelled of gas. Located in a cluster of military-style trailers that had been erected as "temporary" housing for veterans coming back to study on the G.I. Bill, it was showing the wear of twenty years. Not only that, but it apparently had lain empty all summer: cobwebs hung from the corners, and a layer of dust coated every surface. Bhanu insisted that they clean before doing anything else.

  Bhupendra found a friend with a car to take them to Kresge's for detergent, a bucket, a sponge mop, a broom, and a few other essentials. They scrubbed until six or seven that first evening, then outfitted the apartment with their few belongings, along with two pillows, two knives, and two forks that a previous roommate had bequeathed to Bhupendra. Then they slept, in what would be their home for two more years.

  Neither Bhanu's degree nor her visa status allowed her to work in the United States; the diploma from the Fiji School of Medicine was not generally recognized outside that region. So Bhupendra had suggested that Bhanu take classes, too. She thought she might study home economics, which she loved, or continue in physical therapy. On Monday morning she and Bhupendra went to the physical therapy department to find out how to gain admission to the program.

  Bhupendra introduced himself and his wife to the head of the physical therapy clinic, who ushered them into his office. The man addressed Bhanu:—Are you a PT already?

  Bhanu could barely understand his thick American accent.—Yes, I am, she told him.

  —OK, on Wednesday there is a board exam in Des Moines. Can you go?

  It turned out that the clinic was desperately understaffed; he wanted her to work, not study. Bhanu said yes, and the man made a call. He arranged to register her for the exam, though every deadline had passed. The application also required a photo; luckily, Bhanu had an extra passport photo in her purse.

  Des Moines was two hours away, and Bhupendra asked if there was a bus, as they had no car. Bhanu said she had no books to study with; they were all coming by ship from Fiji, which would take three months.

  —Dear, he said,—here's my office; whatever books you want, you take. Then he called in a student named Nancy.—Give this lady a ride tomorrow night to Des Moines, and help her study, too.

  So Bhanu spent Monday evening and all day Tuesday with Nancy; whatever Nancy studied, Bhanu also reviewed. In the evening they went to Des Moines, where they stayed in the nurses' quarters of a hospital. Bhanu, finding herself away from family overnight for the first time in her life, copied everything Nancy did. She was shocked at the showers without doors, but went ahead; she had no idea how to navigate the self-serve breakfast line in the cafeteria, but took one of everything that Nancy took, including an egg-salad sandwich whose taste she would remember, decades later, as simply gross. Then they went to take the exam.

  Iowa's state capitol was the most impressive building Bhanu had ever seen. She walked up its grand stone steps, through statuesque marble pillars, under a tremendous and ornate golden dome. In a huge, high-ceilinged hall, wooden desks were spaced four feet apart. The papers were distributed, and Bhanu gazed with confusion at the rows of circles. No one had explained to her the notion of a multiple-choice exam or the system of mechanical scoring that had recently come into vogue.

  Part one was basic sciences, and much of the material was new to her; but she circled answers in the exam booklet. After a while the exam monitor, walking through the rows, told her not to write in the booklet.

  —Then how will I answer? she asked, and the monitor tried to explain to her how to fill in the circles, but she did not understand. She looked around and saw that Nancy was busy doing something with the paper that had only circles on it. When the monitor was safely away on the other side of the room, she hissed for Nancy's attention and gestured her confusion. Nancy held up her paper and showed her first answer, and Bhanu finally understood.

  By this time, an hour and a half of the three-hour exam had passed.

  Parts two and three were more practical and more directly related to physical therapy, so Bhanu found them easier. When the results came back a month later, she had passed those two, but had failed the first part by two points. Without the license that the exam conferred, she could not work. She arranged to audit fall classes in anatomy, physiology, and physics, and registered to take the exam again.

  The snow began to fall.

  Iowa in winter was a frozen sea. Bhupendra taught Bhanu to cross the glacier step by step, from their graduate student barracks to town or to the Quad, pressing her new rubber boots, fortified with two or three pairs of socks, against the slippery ice. They both fell, again and again. They had no money for a whole winter wardrobe of Western clothes; she pulled a thin sari around her, and a jacket over that. Her lab partners in anatomy class laughed at her over the cadaver they were slowly dissecting that semester:—How can you wear such a beautiful dress with such ugly shoes?

  At night, since the barrack's tin wall had no insulation, Bhanu and Bhupendra slept with scarves wrapped around their necks and over their heads. They placed their slippers near the bed so they could step right into them without touching the cold slab. The sole source of warmth was an ugly metal furnace protruding into the living room, fueled by heating oil and vented through a pipe out the roof.

  One day when Bhanu was home alone, she turned to see the whole furnace glowing red, from the barrel all the way up the chimney. She shut it off, then went outside. Flames were shooting from the roof. Bhupendra, on his way home from work, passed a neighbor walking the other way.—Your house is on fire, the other student calmly informed him, and Bhupendra started running for home. By the time he arrived, firefighters were already on the scene, putting it out. It was natural for such heaters to build up soot and catch fire, they explained.

  Between classes and crises, Bhanu set about making the metal trailer into a home. She and Bhupendra covered the rotting wooden countertop with contact paper, and purchased a straw mat to shield the furnace from sight. A graduating student sold them a sewing machine for twenty-five dollars, which Bhanu used to convert some of her trousseau into cu
rtains. A pink sari became the front curtains; a blue one covered the bedroom window. They bought a large and tremendously ugly rocking chair; Bhupendra drew a pattern for a slipcover, and Bhanu sewed it. They did the same with a used sofa. She scrubbed the aluminum pots they had bought for ninety-nine cents apiece till they gleamed, and covered a metal Crisco can (before the days of cardboard "cans") with contact paper to use as a utensil holder. The habit of making a home wherever she was became a skill that Bhanu would use again and again.

  Another was the skill of building community. When a fellow Gujarati student was to be married, Bhanu agreed to help with the wedding; they made eight cabbages' worth of curry. For the university's annual International Festival—an event commended by the local INS officer as an example of how universities might foster international "friendship and cooperation"—Bhanu helped cook traditional dishes and choreograph folk dances. At Divali time, Bhanu joined in preparing a feast with the members of the Indian Student Association, which had just enough critical mass to hold holiday dinners, while Bhupendra helped with the organizing. The festivities included a talent show, where one of the speakers was a serious young graduate student who would later fashion—in part from the isolation of being a foreigner in the white land of academia—an influential set of postcolonial theories. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is considered a seminal text of the field to this day, is known, among other things, for wearing boots with her saris.

  My parents were fashioning their own theories of America. To them it seemed above all a land of opportunity, friendliness, and welcome. Certainly there were moments of difficulty, of nausea and homesickness—but where else in the world could you walk into a stranger's office in your first week in the country and be met with such generosity: job, books, scholarship, smile?

  It was on the night of their first shared Divali in America, among a community of foreigners reenacting a ritual of home, that Bhupendra took one of his favorite photographs of Bhanu. She was dressed in a sky-blue sari, one of a pair that Ratanji had bought in India for his two youngest daughters-in-law. Her hair was swept back into a scarf-bound ponytail, and her eyes were dark and limpid in a fine, pale face. For decades Bhupendra would carry the photo in his wallet, a reminder of a sweet time.

  One weekend the barrack apartment was filled with a special kind of warmth: family. Bhanu's brother, Champak, had driven the 140 miles from Ames, halfway across Iowa, to visit. Bhanu cooked what she could to summon the scents of home: rice, chicken curry, rotli. The rice was not basmati, the chicken lacked certain spices, the rotli were made from all-purpose flour rather than the special finely ground whole wheat they were used to, but it would do.

  Champak could see how his baby sister had grown. Married now, and cooking a whole meal! How odd that they were all assembled here, in Iowa, perhaps the whitest place in the country or even the world, having somehow traversed oceans and skies, passed through cornfields and prairies to eat this meal together. Bhanu spoke in Gujarati, and Champak answered in English, his mother tongue stiff and awkward from disuse. Four years in America, he had had adventures he could not share with her, at least not yet.

  As he took the first bites of spicy chicken, his mouth filled with tastes he had not known for years. And his eyes filled with tears. Not nostalgia, not homesickness—his palate had become American, the food simply too spicy for his taste buds. He ate it all and asked for more, nose running. And they laughed as only family can laugh.

  In January, Bhanu retook the portion of the exam she had failed. Waiting for the results that spring, she learned about the thaw. One morning they stepped out of bed—into water. The barrack was set into the earth, below ground level, so snowmelt had seeped under the crack of the doorway. They spent the day cleaning and sponging, then hung the thin carpet they had recently bought for fifty dollars—to keep their feet a little warmer on the icy slab—on a clothesline, where it took two weeks to dry.

  Bhupendra was working from 7 A.M. to midnight in the lab, and sometimes Bhanu went with him after dinner, helping to wash his test tubes. Meals in those months were simple vegetable curries, or sometimes Campbell's tomato soup, nine cents a can, with crackers. For a dollar or two they might treat themselves to a meal out, venturing out on weekends to split a slice of apple pie with ice cream in the Quadrangle, share a burger at McDonald's—she was getting used to beef—or splurge on a midnight movie, ninety-nine cents, with popcorn they popped on the stovetop at home and sneaked into the theater.

  In April, Bhanu learned she had passed the exam. That very day, the clinic director telephoned the Omaha office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Over the phone, Bhanu was issued a visa number and given a verbal OK to work.

  My parents were aware of their personal good fortune, but not of the supremely good luck of their timing. That spring, 1968, the last provisions of the new Immigration Act were being phased in, still being publicized and understood; the quotas were not yet full. Within the year, so many would-be immigrants would discover and apply for the new categories that INS officials warned of a backlog of at least two or three years. By the end of the decade, the process of getting a work visa and permanent resident status—an immigrant's first official step toward the dream of American citizenship—would require formal paperwork and years of waiting.

  But for Bhanu, arriving almost accidentally at the height of the brain drain, the coveted green card appeared in a few weeks and without fanfare, in the mail. Printed in blue ink on white paper, the green card took its name from the wavy green lines printed over half of the laminated surface, over the photograph. Bhanu was smiling, dark hair smoothed back from her face with a fragrant oil, her sari's flowered border visible over her left shoulder. As her spouse, Bhupendra could have applied for permanent residency as well, but then he would have been required to register for the draft; with the conflict in Vietnam raging, he decided to stick with his student visa. Bhanu's card, dated June 5, 1968, advised her in tiny print of the necessity of keeping the government informed of her address, and noted, "If 18 years or older, you are required by law to have this card with you at all times." She was one of seventeen thousand aliens with "urgently needed skills" admissible under the third preference category in 1968.

  "We are in the international market of brains," U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was quoted that year as saying. India had just, for the first time, made the list of top ten countries providing immigrants to the United States. My parents were impressed with American efficiency, grateful for the kindness of authorities eager to help them, and warmed by the welcome that was, in part, a quirk of history.

  Nine hundred dollars a month.

  Bhanu's new salary was a virtual fortune, especially considering that Bhupendra was already covering their monthly rent and expenses from his graduate student fellowship. They remained frugal, but soon Bhanu's earnings bought their first car. It was a new Fiat 850, the smallest car available, light blue, stick shift, for $1,800. They went to visit Champak, and he often made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to visit them.

  Champak had worked hard in his first years in America, taking odd jobs as babysitter, dishwasher, and construction worker to pay for textbooks and rent. He had loved Ames, Iowa, from the first day he arrived there; he told his sons many years later, "I just felt safe here." Thousands of miles from home, endowed with a new freedom, he also played hard. His American friends called him Champ. Handsome, athletic, and outgoing, he had had a series of white girlfriends. Slowly, he broke his news to Bhanu: he was seriously dating a farmer's daughter named Nina. He did not tell her that the girl's father had promised him a house, a car, and a stake in the family farm if they married.

  At Champak's graduation, Bhanu and Bhupendra spent the whole day with Nina. Bhanu came home and cried. Indeed, it seemed her brother was lost. What would the family back home say? How could Champak be happy with someone from a strange culture, who did not even know how to cook his favorite foods? And what would become o
f their widowed mother, without a proper daughter-in-law whose home she could go to in her old age?

  Although Bhanu was younger, and bound to respect her older brother, she resolved to try to speak reason to him.

  By the time she did, perhaps something had soured in the relationship; or perhaps the taste of home that Champak had experienced in the Iowa City barrack every once in a while was enough to remind him of who he was. Bhanu never asked what happened to the farmer's daughter. All she knew was that when she did speak to Champak about marriage, he seemed ready to settle down.

  —Name a girl, he said.

  Bhanu, surprised, thought she would have only one shot. She named their lifelong friend Tara, whose family lived across the street. She showed him Tara's letters to her, written in fine English. It was Tara who, the day before Champak had been sent off to America, had teased him about his then girlfriend—through a locked screen door, so that he couldn't retaliate—with the words Sita Sita, velaa velaa ("Sita, shame!").

  Champak nodded. They wrote a letter home, Bhanu telling her uncle that it was either Tara or the Iowa farm girl, and that he had better arrange the match. Champak wrote on the back, "What Bhanu has written is right."

  Within weeks, he had borrowed money from his little sister to buy a plane ticket back to Fiji for the wedding.

  Bhanu felt that a tragedy had been averted.

  Though his father had been an Indian patriot, Champak seemed never to have considered resettling in India. Fiji and now the United States were comfortable places to live; India was distant, dirty, poor, even foreign.