Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  In America my mother bloomed like a tropical flower, colorful with a thick, strong stem, petals as sturdy as bark. She became a career woman who, with my father's careful financial planning, built a physical therapy practice so successful that within a few years it was netting six-figure profits, and would eventually put both of her children through Ivy League–caliber universities. She never slacked off on what she saw as her main duties as wife and mother, waking at dawn to make breakfast and pack lunches for all of us, making sure we had a homemade dinner most nights of the week, even if we had to warm it up and eat before she herself came home from work. She served as a social hub for a community of Indian (mostly Gujarati) families whom my parents befriended in Michigan, who lavishly praised her cooking and entertaining skills. She kept up with family obligations, sent cards and gifts at the right occasions, remembered birthdays and important holidays, and took us as often as possible to visit our nearest relatives in Iowa and Toronto. She seemed tireless, though of course she was often tired, developing insomnia and suffering chronic shoulder pain from leaning into her clients' deep-tissue massages several hours a day. Later she would recall the Michigan years as a blur: I can't believe we did so much, it was crazy!

  Slowly we became—all four of us—American. For Bhupendra and Bhanu this would become clearer with each visit to India or Fiji. Although they tried to blend in, to do as the locals did, the mask was less and less perfect. The changes were physiological: they could not drink the water, had to be careful about what they ate, were bothered by pollution. Toughened instead to midwestern winters and life without housekeepers, they had become, in some barely perceptible way, softer. Toward the end of each trip they longed for the climate-controlled neatness of America's suburbs, the quiet order of their own lives.

  The changes were also, of course, psychological. They found they simply could not understand why certain things were as they were, how people could stand to live that way. As their mothers and sisters described folk cures and beliefs, as their uncles and cousins quaffed whiskey and claimed it was good for their health, my parents listened politely, and afterward sympathized with each other over their people's ignorance. Over the years they fine-tuned a sensibility for when to intervene with real medical advice and when to let things be. They became accustomed to queries from relatives near and far: what should be done about an ache in the hip, what were the side effects of a medication, did a knee or shoulder warrant surgery, what did this paper from the doctors or the hospital mean? Such translation was a part of what they came to understand as their unofficial "social work," a service to the community whence they came. It was a connection but also a separation, a kind of setting apart—and setting above—that they negotiated, over a lifetime, together.

  In time they found they were not the only ones. Their new Indian community in Michigan was composed of engineers and doctors, physical therapists and pharmacists—educated men and a few women like themselves, also far from home. The 1980 U.S. census, taken just as we moved to Michigan, found Indo-Americans to be the immigrant group with the highest proportion of university graduates and professionals. They also had the highest incomes of any major immigrant group, a fact that one pair of census analysts found remarkable, given that "almost 80 percent of these immigrants had been in the United States ten years or less." That U.S. immigration policy had been virtually designed to ensure this outcome was not mentioned, and rarely noted even by Indian immigrants themselves. What mattered was that they were no longer "Hindoos" who were "unfit for association with American people." Indo-Americans had become a "model minority."

  In 1984, after waiting the requisite five years of continuous United States residence, my parents filed applications for U.S. citizenship. Bhanu's form listed a traffic ticket of $40 (paid), along with memberships in two physical therapy associations, the Gujarati Samaj (which my parents described on the form as "Indian Culture Society"), and the Canton Business and Professional Women's Association. Bhupendra's application listed five pharmacy associations, the Gujarati Samaj, and the science honor society Sigma Xi. Both provided their most recent addresses and occupations, ten fingerprints, and a bit of Gujarati script in the box labeled, "If your native language is in other than roman letters, write your name in your native alphabet in this space." They answered no to three questions about Communist involvement, two questions about Nazi affiliation, and various queries about whether they had ever been members of the nobility, mental patients, prostitutes, habitual drunkards, polygamists, drug traffickers, or deportees. They answered yes, they believed in the Constitution of the United States, and yes, they were willing to pledge allegiance to the United States and bear arms for it if required by law. On November 19, 1984, they were sworn in at Detroit's Cobo Hall as citizens of the United States. They were given naturalization certificates that confirmed their new citizenship status, listing them for identification purposes as being of "medium" complexion, with black hair and eyes, and noting their height and weight.

  On each certificate, in a section for "distinctive marks," someone had typed, in capital letters, the word "NONE."

  Where does one generation's story end, and the next begin? I am not a parent, but I have a sense that a parent's story must find some of its resolution in the next life—in the story of the child. This, at least, is the traditional belief, of which I caught a glimmer of understanding at my brother's wedding in 1998.

  Our mother planned the wedding like a war. For months, a year ahead, she was making lists, dreaming of centerpieces and massive menus. Her own wedding had been such a simple affair, with only close family members, only tea and snacks. My brother's wedding, by contrast, featured five hundred guests, many of whom were treated to not one but several grand meals over the course of two August weekends. The previous winter, all four of us as well as my future sister-in-law had made an advance shopping mission to India, to buy the necessities: Dozens of outfits, so that all of the main players could change at least twice a day, with coordinating shoes and bangles and bindis. Stacks of saris to give away as gifts. Centerpieces for the tables; garlands and decorations for the doorways and altars. Multipage invitations, purchased after a day's selection in the stationery alley of Bombay, printed in Gujarati and English. Upon our return stateside, our mother set about requisitioning and organizing the food, dishes, holy items, and whatnot into large labeled boxes in the basement, arranged in chronological order for each day of the festivities.

  No one could say she would have done more for an Indian daughter-in-law.

  Behind the public festivities was a rough, raw story. My brother's bride was a Michigander of half-Finnish, quarter-Irish, quarter-Norwegian descent: a white girl. They had begun dating, secretly, in high school, my brother sneaking out the side door of the garage at night. When in college he revealed his love interest to our parents, they wept, raged, and tried to persuade him to change his ways. He broke up with Heidi, saying,—I can't do this to my parents. But within weeks they were seeing each other again.

  By the time Nayan and Heidi moved from dating to engagement to marriage, my parents had bravely shifted with them. They paid for most of the wedding and a lavish scuba-diving honeymoon—unchaperoned—to Fiji. Besides the multiday Hindu wedding, they gamely participated in a Catholic wedding and separate country-club reception. Indian daughter-in-law or not, my mother would not be robbed of the pleasures of a grand wedding.

  Because I was my mother's lieutenant, on call for anything that needed to be done, running hither and thither to retrieve items or make arrangements, the two weeks before and during the wedding are a blur. So I do not remember which day it was that I saw, between errands, one of my aunts sitting on the swing in my parents' family room, weeping.

  Another aunt asked her what was wrong. Aunt #1 said she was remembering my grandmother, Kaashi, on her deathbed nearly thirty years earlier. Though Kaashi had eight children and more than twenty grandchildren, her last words—so this aunt said—were of my father:—Where will his d
ay end?

  By the time his mother died, Bhupendra had traveled from India to Fiji to America to New Zealand, but he did not yet seem settled. My aunt was weeping three decades later because my father's wandering had ended, in her eyes, in tragedy, with my brother's marriage to an "American" woman: the first white flower to blossom on the brown limbs of the family tree.

  Failure, success; gain, loss. I do not think my parents see their lives or ours as tragedies, by any measure. Rather, they have adopted an admirable attitude of constant possibility. They travel frequently, and seem not to have lost the desire for novelty. Perhaps a lifetime of migrating creates such an openness, a continuation of the inertia toward motion.

  "When we left San Francisco," my mother tells me, "we thought we would never come back."

  We are crossing the Bay Bridge after an inordinately fancy dinner at an eighty-year-old castle built into the San Francisco cliffs. We are celebrating my birthday and my parents' anniversary, which fall on the same weekend. I live now in the city where I was born. They live in the suburbs one hour east, where they have moved for a sunny retirement after twenty harsh Michigan winters, and I am driving them home. Gazing at the bridge lights strung across the black waters, my mother says to my father in the back seat, "Who would have thought we would cross this bridge so many times?"

  Sometimes my mother's voice fills with the wonder of a child from a small, small place, who feeds her imagination with Life magazine, never thinking she might see with her own eyes the fantastic, almost unbelievable lands depicted there. She and my father have embarked on a project to put all of their photographs into albums, a project that is reminding her, she says, of a lifetime's worth of travels. The only place she has not been that she read about in Life in the 1960s is the moon.

  "Perhaps one day," she muses, "when they take passengers there." She is barely sixty. After all that my parents have seen, it seems possible.

  7. Shelter

  Joje, haahu maarhe!

  Watch it, or your mother-in-law will beat you!

  —Traditional saying used to warn young girls to behave

  "FOR TEN YEARS I cried."

  In the dark of my apartment, my cousin Mala's words come through the tape recorder, strong and clear over a white noise that reminds me of rivers, though I know it to be highway traffic; it murmurs, this second voice, like the sound of time passing. I interviewed her on the road, driving up Interstate 5 from her home in Los Angeles toward mine in San Francisco. Our mothers are sisters, but Mala and I grew up on separate landmasses: she in Fiji, I in the United States. With a twelve-year age gap between us, I hardly knew her, though I had heard whispers and rumors that made me curious. Other relatives spoke of her past with a mixture of pity and admiration, and I hoped to learn why as we talked. We had six uninterrupted hours as we traveled toward a ceremony that would celebrate the first pregnancy of my brother's wife.

  Every married woman bearing a child in our community undergoes this ritual, a day of prayers and special foods: the srimant, the rite by which the father's family seeks the blessings of the household goddess for the birth. During the ritual, our family would ask the goddess to accept the unborn child, and future children from this stranger's womb, into the clan.

  It seems a beautiful sentiment, to arrange divine reception of the child before its birth, linking the reincarnating soul to its worldly home. But if the child is a girl, this acceptance is only temporary. When she marries, the family and its goddess will release her; the ritual will be repeated, and this time her groom's family goddess will be propitiated. For a married woman no longer belongs to her own father's lineage; she is not written into the family tree or counted with the ancestors in that line, nor is she to return to her childhood home as a family member, but only as a guest. And in every generation, some women more than others bear the burden of this shift in status, this alienation from parents and siblings, this journey to become a stranger-daughter in another's home.

  As Mala's sons played with their Game Boys in the back seat and the golden fields of California's heartland rolled past, I turned on my tape recorder, and she began to tell, for the record, the story of her life.

  Mala was the oldest girl. Both of her parents were born and mostly raised in Fiji; both had spent a few childhood years in India. Her mother, Tara, was seventeen when her marriage was arranged to Dhiraj, a tailor who was almost seven years older than she and who turned out to have little luck in business. They lived in a small shack behind his tailoring stall, and they got by because Tara's parents sometimes sent rice or other staples to help them make ends meet. Poor but prolific, Tara and Dhiraj were married in 1957 and had a son in 1958, Mala in 1959, another girl the next year, and another boy the next. This second son had a hole in his heart, however, and did not survive long after the miracle of birth. Mala's first memory is thus of female suffering: her mother weeping at the funeral, a deep and terrifying sadness. And then, the necessity of life going on: within a year, another girl was born.

  Dhiraj decided to shift his growing brood from Suva, where numerous Indian tailors competed for customers and living expenses were high, to a backwater town on Fiji's northern coast. They would live in Tara's childhood home, where her father—Narotam, Mala's and my grandfather—had settled when he first arrived in Fiji three decades earlier. There, Dhiraj hoped, he could raise his family in peace and prosperity.

  The town of Tavua lies somewhat inland, near a hill under which surveyors discovered gold back in the 1920s. The most beautiful local feature is a river that flows wide and dark blue through banks dense with taro plants, whose broad leaves bear a fecundity of green that perhaps only a woman who has given birth many times can truly understand. Our grandmother, who washed clothes and pots in the Tavua River and carried water to and from its banks, was such a woman; so was her middle daughter, Mala's mother; and so would be Mala herself. The taro grows, its roots and leaves are dug up for food, and somehow it grows again and is never lessened.

  Despite the river's beauty, Tavua lacks ocean vistas, so its tourist trade has always been nonexistent. Business in Mala's childhood was most brisk on payday, when the gold miners came to town to cash and spend their paychecks. One spending place was a small shop on the dusty main road where Dhiraj and Tara stocked such goods as cotton dresses, imported blue jeans, thin polyester shirts, leather sandals made in India, canvas sneakers from Hong Kong, and rolls of printed fabrics in cotton and polyester. The mine workers sometimes paid in nuggets of pure gold, slipped from the island's depths into their pocket depths, and these Mala's father or mother would inspect and weigh on a jeweler's scale kept for that purpose behind a glass counter filled with necklace-and-earring sets and neatly folded packets of underwear. With such earnings, D. Haris & Co.—for that was the shop's name—eked out a living for a family of seven.

  But the clapboard house was showing its age. What with the constant maintenance it required, childbirthing, and householding, Mala's mother had enough work for two or three of herself. When Mala was ten years old, her mother suffered a nasty kitchen burn that left her temporarily disabled on one side, shortly after bearing another girl. It fell to Mala to care for the baby, Pratibha. Mala also became responsible for much of the daily maintenance of home and family: cleaning, cooking, bathing, feeding, fetching, changing diapers, and walking her siblings to the three hours of school they had each day.

  Tavua's one-room schoolhouse filled up in the mornings with farm children from the surrounding rural areas; afternoons were reserved for townies like Mala and her siblings. Many of the town children learned just enough to write out a receipt and calculate a bill, then dropped out of school. Mala loved her classes; she went as often as she could through her junior year of high school, when she failed the year-end exams. She would have liked to repeat the year and try again, but her father decided she was old enough to start helping out in the store.

  By now Narotam's half-century-old house had been condemned, and the land was sold. Dhiraj moved his fa
mily to a newer home; the store was doing well enough. Behind the sales counter, Mala learned how to run the register while keeping one eye out for shoplifters; how to restock the inventory; how to measure and cut cloth. She had a way with the customers, deftly unrolling the long bolts of fabric they wanted, or could be persuaded to want, for shirts, dresses, salwar kameez, and curtains. She was sixteen, then seventeen years old, and the community had an eye on her future. Marriage proposals arrived as regularly as new shipments of goods.

  But Dhiraj and Tara were in no hurry to marry off their loquacious eldest daughter. They were a close family, and she was both a good daughter and a good worker: solid and capable, the one to whom her siblings turned when they needed to borrow strength—or a laugh, for Mala's eyes often sparkled with secret humor, and when she chose to loose her tongue, her wit was sharp and quick. Her parents wanted to wait for a good home for her, preferably one that was nearby, prosperous, and suffused with kindness.

  In Los Angeles one evening during my interviews with Mala, her husband came home and surprised me with a sheaf of four pages that he had composed during empty hours at his parking-lot job, headlined, I MadhuKant born on 01-01-1956 and my History how I grew in Lautoka Town in Fiji Islands.

  Madhukant's story is written in blue and black ballpoint, in neat cursive, the pen having pressed down so hard that the words of each page are written over impressions of the words from the page before, in capitalization as idiosyncratic as Emily Dickinson's. It covers his education, the growth of his family's business ("Wholesale Bussiness by Buy Variety Goods such as Canned & Plastic Packet food items, Cotton and straw Hats & Caps, Ready Made Garments, Insenses and Kerosene Light Stoves, from Big Chinese Direct importers. We 40 to 50% percent profit and Travel in Station Wagon Car...")—and the most romantic story anyone in my family had told me.