By 1999, when Mala and Madhukant entered the field, many Indians owned multiple motels or hotels. Property values were high, boosted by continuing demand from other Indo-American buyers. For newcomers with limited resources, the best place to get a foot in the door had become not the owner's desk but the manager's apartment.
Mala did not know the complex array of social and economic factors that led to the position she was taking, yet she and Madhukant were drawn to motel work for the same reasons as hundreds of other Gujaratis before them: housing included, little English needed, no experience necessary. The only job qualification seemed to be a willingness to be available twenty-four hours a day. Mala was used to hard work, and she understood the basics of how to handle customers and their moods. The hours and chores could be distributed among all family members; Vinay and even Mithun were old enough to take turns at the front desk.
Perhaps most importantly, they knew others had done it. At my brother's wedding Mala had met our second cousin from Orlando, whose husband's family owned four hotels around Disney World. In the Hollywood hills, just a few miles away from Mala's home, I interviewed an aunt who had come to America in the 1960s and raised her children behind the motel desk, pretending not to notice customers holding their noses at the curry smell; we talked at her dining room table, overlooking a sapphire lap pool that in turn overlooked a plunging valley, as a real-estate agent ushered a rap star through her custom-built home, which she was considering selling.
Such success stories were everywhere in the air. The motel business had been providing them to Indo-Americans for a quarter-century now, so Mala and Madhukant felt it was a good bet.
But for those starting out, the business was not glamorous. It meant cleaning rooms and dealing with people who ruined the sheets, stole towels and even lamps, called the manager's line with drunken giggles in the middle of the night. It meant shifts spread over twenty-four hours, which made family outings all but impossible. Still, Mala thought she was ready.
The problem, though, was that the owner had either left unclear instructions, or left instructions that were clearly at odds with what Mala and Madhukant had understood. The hired desk clerks refused to teach them anything about the office work, instead relegating them to maids' chores. Mala and Madhukant cleaned the rooms, did the laundry, swept the hallways; they were managers in name only, and as Mala would later say, "We didn't come to America to learn to be maids." That line of work she knew well enough.
After six weeks of clashing with the surly motel staff, they moved out. In an apartment on Vermont Avenue, with no furniture, they plotted their next move.
Across the street was a massive hospital, at least a dozen stories high. Mala looked at it every day and thought, There must be jobs there, sweeping or cleaning up at least. So she crossed the intersection and went in, and walked around the corridors—each one exactly the same.
After a couple of turns, she realized she was confused and lost. She didn't see any place to fill out an application, and she couldn't work up the courage to ask one of the passing nurses or doctors what to do. Finally she saw a green exit sign and hurried out, walking all the way around the building to get back home. She gave up the idea—how could she work there if she could not even find her way around?
Through the grapevine, they heard about another motel opportunity. They decided to try it again; perhaps Alvarado Street had just been an unlucky experience. This time it was a bigger hotel, with much more responsibility—an overwhelming amount. They started learning the job, managing the staff, and trying to understand the systems of reservations, check-ins and check-outs, and payments. They had been at the motel just a few weeks when a phone call came from Fiji: Madhukant's mother was dead.
Mala and her mother-in-law had never become friends. But when the older woman grew ill with old age, it was Mala who had washed her soiled clothes and bedding, helped her to use the toilet, and cleaned her body afterward—all part of the dharmic duty of a respectable daughter-in-law, wife, woman. In Lautoka for the funeral, Mala thought, Well, perhaps now she's found happiness. In any case it was good to be back in Fiji for a visit, and to see her family again.
They flew back to Los Angeles, but by now they had lost their motel position. Instead, they moved into an aging but affordable apartment complex in the area of Hollywood known as Little Armenia, near the apartment they had rented previously while in between motels. Again they looked for work.
Mala had soured on motels, but she didn't know what other kind of job to seek. A neighbor told her to go to the unemployment office, that the people there would help her find a job. Vinay, who by now had enrolled in computer classes and taken a job as night desk clerk at a Comfort Inn, looked in the telephone directory, called a number, and asked for the address of the nearest unemployment office. Then he mapped the bus route for Mala, explaining what to look for and where to change lines.
Mala took the two buses, asking the drivers each time to be sure. When she reached the office, the staff pointed her toward the computers, where she could research the current job listings.
But Mala had never used a computer. After a few moments she got up and left.
The apartment-lined block of La Mirada opens onto one of the main north-south arteries of Hollywood and of greater Los Angeles, Vermont Avenue. It is quintessential L.A., an endless stretch of strip malls and utilitarian office buildings, with residential areas tucked into the side streets. Some blocks to the north is the hipper enclave of Los Feliz "Village," where the retail turns to chic cafés, boutiques, and an independent bookstore. To the south lies nothing but more of Vermont Avenue, for miles, all the way through Compton.
Eventually Mala strung together two part-time restaurant jobs, and Madhukant found work as a valet, parking cars. After a year or two they moved to the manager's quarters of the apartment complex on La Mirada. That meant two bedrooms instead of one, a break on the rent, and, on weekends, a more or less steady stream of tenants knocking at the screen door to turn in rent payments, to complain about something needing to be fixed, or to ask to be let into their apartments after locking their keys inside. One afternoon during a visit, I sat on the courtyard steps with Mala's youngest son, Pranil, who was giving me the rundown on the residents: one vacancy, one other Indian family, two Filipino families, eleven Armenian families. In return I was trying to answer his questions: how does God make the clouds move, why is the sky sometimes purple?
From behind a screen door, two identical fat boys with dark curls stared at us. They were obviously twins, maybe three or four years old. I smiled and gave a small wave. They started shouting. Pranil cocked an ear.
"They said shut up," he reported dispassionately. "They said you can't sit here. They said you have to go now." I thought the three of them were communicating in the special child language, the mumble that only other children understand.
"Where are they from?" I asked him in Gujarati.
"Armenian," Pranil said.
"Oh—you understand Armenian?" I asked in English. Behind the screen door, the twins' father came and shouted at them, pulled them into the apartment.
Pranil nodded. "I could speak some too."
The twins appeared again, scratching at the door.
"Nyada," Pranil told them.
"What does that mean?"
He had to think, to translate. "It means, like, Don't touch."
At school, Pranil was in English as a Second Language classes. When the forms had come, Mala filled them out honestly, which is to say that under "other languages spoken at home," she wrote "Gujarati and Hindustani"; how smart her children were, to have three languages! The result was that both Mithun and Pranil were placed in ESL classes. Mithun soon placed out, but Pranil would stay in ESL for the next eight years. In the neighborhood he picked up not only Armenian but also Spanish, and noticed how the Armenian children he knew had somehow managed to be tracked into mainstream English classes, though he himself spoke better English and was not in fact fluent
in either Gujarati or Hindustani. In seventh grade, he would test at fourth-grade reading and math levels.
His parents were navigating their own bureaucracies with somewhat greater success. Inside the apartment, Mala directed my attention to two plaques newly hung on the living room wall. One said:
MGM Plaza
Employee of the Quarter
Madhu Kant
Parking Department
1st Quarter 2002
Madhukant's job, valet parking at the movie studio, was now full-time and included benefits and frequent overtime. The other plaque said:
McDonald's #5806 presents
Mala Kumari
Employee of the Month
November 2001
Mala was working the early shift at a McDonald's just around the corner, a job that took her away from her family at dawn but allowed her to be home for most of the boys' afterschool and evening time. One afternoon shortly after they had settled into the apartment, Pranil and Mithun were playing outside when Pranil pointed to a woman and said,—Here comes Mummy!
—No, it's not! said Mithun, the older.
—Yes, it is! insisted Pranil. He was right; Mithun simply hadn't recognized their mother out of a sari, in her polyester McDonald's uniform.
It wasn't long before Mala found it tiresome to wear saris at all. Pants felt too constricting, but outside of work she wore tops with long, loose skirts that allowed her to enjoy the freedom of fabric moving about her legs. Her silk, nylon, and cotton saris in an array of bright colors were folded away into suitcases under the bed, reserved for formal community functions.
Mala's second job, which she had taken to try to save money for a visit home to Fiji, was at a sweets shop twenty-three miles south of Hollywood, in the Little India area of Artesia, California. By the time of the census of 2000, 1.9 million people of South Asian origin—Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan—were living in the United States. Of these, one in five lived in California, and their profile was now more diverse than that of the 1960s brain-drain generation. Unlike their suburban professional predecessors, the working-class immigrants tended to cluster geographically. Artesia's newest neighborhood was one place where they gathered, conspicuous and unassimilated, filling two or three blocks with sari shops, restaurants, groceries selling spice mixes and family-size sacks of basmati rice, and vendors of Bollywood videos and compact discs.
For Mala, the commute to Artesia took an hour and a half via two trains and a bus. But the job paid in cash, and being in Little India meant she could pick up the Indian groceries they needed. Vinay had also taken a second job, as a ticketing clerk at Singapore Airlines. "Life is hard," Mala told me. "I can't say it isn't. My mind spins trying to think what to do, how to do it." Her clock was set ten minutes early, to give her a head start on her already long days. She was almost never late. From her coworkers at McDonald's, she was picking up more Spanish than English.
Several years later, they are still in the apartment on La Mirada, but life has become somewhat easier. With the help of their saved money and employee-rate tickets from Singapore Airlines, the family has been able to make a couple of trips back to Fiji—including once for Vinay's arranged marriage to an accountant raised partly in Fiji, partly in New Zealand.
Mala now keeps her clock set at regular time. When it buzzes at 5:20 A.M., or sometimes in the silence a minute or two before, she leaves her sleeping husband and climbs out of bed. She is nearly fifty years old, her limbs are heavy, and sometimes her lower back or legs ache; but her will is strong. If it is summer, the Los Angeles sky is already light and hazy; if winter, it is dark, and sometimes stars peek through the smog.
After her ablutions, she sets the chaa on the stove: milk, water, black tea, sugar, and her own family's blend of spices, an authentic ancestor of the "chai" sold in trendy cafés throughout the City of Angels. Keeping one eye on the tea, which is prone to boiling over the sides of its pot the second she steps away, she stirs together a quick breakfast, perhaps some eggs and/or toast and/or sheero, a hot semolina cereal with ghee and sugar. A big morning meal will be necessary to fortify her still-sleeping family: Madhukant, who will soon rise to drive to his job at MGM, where he now works in the parking office rather than parking the cars himself; Mithun, who will take two trains to his engineering classes at California State University's Los Angeles branch; and Pranil, who will ride with his father to eighth grade at one of the city's failing public schools, with a student-teacher ratio of 40:1 and where he has already had several rounds of gang-prevention education.
Across town, Vinay is also rising to take the first shift at the motel he manages with his new bride. After her visa papers came through, they stayed in the apartment on La Mirada for a few months, then decided to move out on their own. Unlike some in the community who want their families to stay together under one roof, Mala encouraged the move; she knew better than anyone the costs of too much day-to-day closeness between mother- and daughter-in-law. The Days Inn in Lawndale where Vinay and his wife live and work is, needless to say, Indian-owned. It stays relatively busy, being convenient to both the beach and the airport; a sign in the lobby advises guests that breakfast is available from 6 A.M. to 9 A.M. and includes a complimentary copy of USA Today. "Today's Weather" is reported in black marker on the whiteboard as being 80 degrees, a sign that rarely needs changing. On a typical morning Vinay is checking out guests, loading mixes into the Minute Maid juice machine at the free breakfast bar, fielding a backpacker's series of questions about bus lines and whether the motel's wireless Internet service is working (it isn't), and conveying instructions to the cleaning crew and the motel's airport shuttle driver. The driver, originally from Guatemala, has worked for so many Indian motelkeepers over his past nine years in the country that he has mastered several Gujarati phrases, including a rhyming prayer ("Sing god's praises as you eat your lentils and rice") and some less-than-pious words (Saalo gaando chhe! or, roughly, "He's a crazy bastard"). Vinay is debating whether to keep the airline job; his wife has a day job as an accountant. One thing they are clear on: they are managers, not maids. If a customer throws trash in the elevator, or a room needs to be straightened up, they call on the staff to take care of it. "Once you start cleaning up, you have to do it all the time," Vinay's wife explains to me. They have learned the American concept of boundaries.
Mala spares them a thought as she puts away last night's clean dishes and packs her husband's lunch. If nothing is left over from last night, she cooks a quick vegetable curry for him and gets a head start on tonight's dinner. The tea boils; she strains it into a pot, gulps down her own cup, and hurries into the shower, ignoring the stubborn black mildew spots on the ceiling above the stall. There was a time when she would have climbed a stepladder every other day to scrub away the spatter of stains, but now the mildew has won the battle, enduring her curses but little physical challenge. Scrubbed clean, she sprays herself with a floral deodorant from the dollar store and pulls on her daily uniform: a grayish polyester shirt, long black skirt, multicolored tie, and matching polyester vest. This last item she calls, in Fijian-Hindi-English patois, a "coatee," and she hates it for being scratchy, unflattering, and most of all hot. By the time she is dressed, the household is awake. She will leave the breakfast dishes to her sons, who, after long years of coaxing and haranguing, have been trained to do certain chores. At 6:20 A.M. Mala grabs her heavy black imitation-leather purse and strides out the door, down one long block, through double glass doors, to clock in at 6:27 or so.
She has graduated from the two restaurant jobs and works now in the hospital she was once afraid to enter, having mustered her courage to go in, find the human resources department, and ask for a job. At $9.30 an hour, with health benefits, it is a definite step up. She assembles and delivers food, mostly to patients in the obstetrics ward who are about to have babies. She tries to pause once a day to walk casually over to a patient's window and, chatting all the while, look out toward her own home; from certain r
ooms on certain floors, she can see the back corner of the La Mirada Apartments. In the middle of the day it feels good to get a glimpse of the shelter she has worked so hard to provide for her family, and for herself.
Each time I talk to or visit Mala, some minute variation in her schedule has taken place. Always, I am fascinated by the minute-by-minute way she maximizes her time, the quantity and weight of her responsibilities, and how lightly she bears them. She is amused by my interest, but indulgent as she recites yet another iteration of her schedule: she has taken or dropped another part-time position; she is working weekends or not, sometimes an earlier shift, rarely later.
Despite the hard work, though, her life is her own, in a way that years ago seemed impossible. So when she complains of fatigue, as she does sometimes, it is in the most good-natured of ways. At the end of the day she may be exhausted, but she can sit in front of her own television on her own sofa and watch satellite television from India for half an hour, with no one to tell her to do otherwise. Frequently, when she reflects on her life as a whole, she says something like, "This is freedom."
In December 2006, Mala won another employee award. This time it was for Best Customer Service of the Year, hospital-wide, for a "hostess," based on surveys filled out by her patients. She received a certificate suitable for framing, some gifts, and tickets to the nurses' holiday party. In the raffle drawing at the party, she won a rice cooker.
It wasn't quite like winning the U.S. lottery, but it was nice.
My parents shortly after their wedding in 1967. They carried these photos of each other in their wallets.
Leaving India Page 34