The Gift of Our Wounds

by Arno Michaelis

  Mom said she had mixed feelings about the marriage because it meant leaving everything she had ever known. The actual term for the transition into an arranged marriage is Dulli, and Mom described it as a time of great anxiety. The only way she got through it was her faith in God and trust in the judgment of the bachola. Before she married my father, she had never been separated from her family or gone away from home. Yet three hours after the wedding ceremony, she was on a train, with a new family, headed to a faraway place she didn’t know, with a husband who was a complete stranger. Indeed, the first conversation my parents ever had was on that train ride. Dad asked Mom if she was okay. She responded that she had a headache. It was a somber time in her life, but we both laughed at the memory. Dad got her an aspirin and a cup of tea. He seemed nice enough. But love? She had never loved. She was too young and too inexperienced to even know what love should feel like. People didn’t “fall” in love, she always said. They grew to love each other.

  The uneasy start got tougher when Mom was introduced to her new home.

  Mom knew Dad was a farmer, but she didn’t know anything about the farm or the village where she would be living. Her family had become quite successful over the years, and she was coming from a large farming homestead in the scenic foothills of the Himalayas.

  The two-hour bus ride from the train station in Patiala to rural Dogal offered some clues about the life she was about to begin, and it didn’t look anything like home. Unlike her hometown, with its wide vistas of snowcapped mountains and roaring rivers, the topography of this new place was flat and dusty. The farther away from the city they got, the more barren the land became. Looking out the bus window was like watching a monotonous slideshow of dull brown fields. The trip seemed never-ending.

  Finally, the bus turned toward Dogal. The only access to the village was a narrow dirt road traversed mostly by bicycles, the main mode of transportation. The “town square” consisted of small houses, some brick, but most built of mud, as well as a few dilapidated shops, a school, a walk-in clinic, and a Gurudwara.

  Dad’s farm was a mile walk from the center of the village. The “farmhouse” that my mother would share with her new husband and in-laws turned out to be a tiny, rectangular brick structure consisting of three rooms. The apprehension she’d felt about leaving home turned into an acute case of homesickness.

  Over time, my mother found her place within the family structure, but it was slow going. She had gone overnight from being a daughter to a married woman with no practice or instruction and no relatives nearby. Her role was that of a housewife. She spent her days with her in-laws, helping to cook and clean, and got to know Dad by listening to their stories.

  Dad was rarely around. He worked in the fields from dusk to dawn, came back home to shower and eat, and left again to milk the cows. Evenings were spent in prayer, with each family member retreating into meditation by reading silently from the Gutka, a small book of sacred verses from the Sikh scriptures. Dad was already well versed in Sikh history and theology by then. The people in the village called him “Gaini,” which means scholar or theologian.

  My parents had been married for a year when Mom became pregnant with me. I was born on August 3, 1976. Dad’s older brother, Jagjit, who immigrated to America and ran a successful veterinary practice, urged my father to follow him to Wisconsin. Dogal had nothing to offer a young family. The living conditions were poor, the medical care was subpar, and education was inferior. America, the Land of Opportunity, had everything we needed and more: high-paying jobs, exceptional schools, and doctors on every corner! Dad demurred. His place was on the farm.

  After I was born, Mom joined Dad to work in the fields. She’d often take me when she picked cotton or delivered food to the workers. By the summer of 1978, when my brother Amardeep was born, she had become tired of the toll that farming had taken on her body. Tired of the 100-plus-degree days in the sun, the bloody cuts on her hands from harvesting cotton, the constant ache in her back from picking vegetables. She liked what she’d heard about America and made up her mind that she would convince my father to take us there.

  Faced with an unhappy wife, Dad moved all of us to an apartment in Patiala. He bought an old motorcycle to commute between the farm and the city. Mom was happier with the easier lifestyle, but Dad missed having his family at home, and the constant back-and-forth between work and us was hard on him.

  Still, I think we might have stayed in India had it not been for mounting communal tension between non-Sikhs and Sikhs that threatened our safety. Punjab was in turmoil in the early 1980s. The majority Sikh community was fighting for both political and religious independence from the Hindu nationalist government, and a movement by Sikh nationalists for a sovereign state within the region called Khalistan erupted in widespread violence. In Sikhism, violence is condoned only for the purposes of resisting tyranny and protecting human rights—and only after all peaceful means have been exhausted. This was dharam yudh, “war in the name of righteousness.” The government intervened, and tens of thousands of Sikhs were arrested. No place in the region was safe, certainly not the city of Patiala, where curfews, gunfire, and exploding Molotov cocktails were a constant source of anxiety. The mounting danger, as well as continued pressure from my uncle, convinced Dad that a move to America was the right decision.

  Two years after we left, the conflict boiled over with the infamous Operation Blue Star, a deadly military attack ordered by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on the Harmandir Sahib of Amritsar (the Golden Temple), the holiest of Sikh shrines, where armed Sikh militants had taken refuge from the Indian Army. For many Sikhs, it is still seen as the darkest period in our faith. Hundreds of innocent men, women, and children were sacrificed in the bloodbath. Six months later, Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards in retaliation, which led to anti-Sikh riots and thousands of Sikhs massacred. By then, we were safely ensconced in Milwaukee.

  We’d arrived in America in the spring of 1982 as “resident aliens.” I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for my parents to leave everything they’d worked for—everything they knew—to immigrate to a foreign land where their future was uncertain and they didn’t know the language. They were poor farmers and their view of the world was Punjab. They had never even been on an airplane before they brought us here. As a parent myself now, I can’t imagine uprooting my family and fleeing to a new country with a hundred dollars in my pocket and the clothes on our backs.

  With no income and no place to live, we stayed with my father’s brother in the Milwaukee suburb of Germantown (coincidentally, five minutes from Arno’s house in Mequon) for the first few months. It was a tough adjustment. Everything in America was so big. The stores. The office buildings. The houses. Even the cars. My parents were overwhelmed. Coming from such humble backgrounds, they wondered how they would ever fit in.

  Dad went to work pumping gas at a small station in Milwaukee’s inner city, and, after three months, we moved into our first apartment. It didn’t take long for him to realize that his earnings—even though he worked fifteen-hour shifts, seven days a week—didn’t go far for a family of four. If they were to make it here, Mom would have to work as well.

  My parents’ solution was to send my brother and me back to India to live with an aunt until they could get on their feet. Mom was miserable without us, and, after six months, we returned to Milwaukee and a new home—a shabby low-income apartment with a tiny black-and-white TV and mattresses on the floor. We had some toys, but only a few, and Dad would fix them when they broke. We had homemade food, but never enough to overindulge. It was a far cry from the abundance of my uncle’s house, but we were happy to be back together as a family.

  I saw firsthand how hard my parents struggled to make a life for us. Dad had taken on extra hours at the gas station and Mom took English-language classes, then went to work for Dad afterward. When she got to the gas station, he ran home to check on my brother and me. Then he went back until closing, and Mom too
k the bus home, arriving in time to make us dinner. I was so young, but I understood the sacrifices of my parents and I was happy to do my part. It was my job to ensure Amardeep and I safely walked the mile to and from school.

  America was a scary place for a young boy, especially a young boy who looked different than everyone else. The kids at school made fun of Amardeep and me and our long hair. In the Sikh religion, uncut hair, or Kesh, is a symbol of devotion to God. The Kesh is often concealed under a turban, which is considered a crown of spirituality. My dad was meticulous in wrapping his “just so.” Younger males, like my brother and me, wore ours twisted into a tight bun at the back of our heads wrapped in a handkerchief. It’s called a patka.

  The man bun is trendy today, but for us it was a source of constant teasing and bullying. The boys at school called me a “girl” and laughed when I passed them in the hallway. It was worse for my little brother. After a few months of being relentlessly ridiculed, he broke down and told Dad what was happening. He didn’t want to go back to school. The kids were pulling on his bun and it hurt. Dad went to the school administrators for help. But the school did nothing and the bullying escalated to the point where Amardeep was wetting the bed and refusing to eat. Our father was a tough man, but it was clear that my brother’s tears hurt him. As difficult as it was for him to sacrifice a religious custom in which he deeply believed, he took us to a local barbershop for our first haircuts. Dad grimaced at each snip of the scissors. Afterward, we went to the gas station where Mom was working the cash register. I overheard him tell her, “A din bhi dekhna pana se” (This is a day that we knew we’d have to face).

  Mom tried to comfort him with rationalizations. They were in a different country now. The culture was different. It was important for us, their children, to be accepted. As she spoke, I saw the anger on Dad’s face fade into sadness and tears drop from his eyes.

  I never really understood how much that chapter in our lives affected him until shortly after his death, when we discovered a box of his writings tucked away on a shelf in his closet. One of his missives was the story of those first haircuts and how painful it had been for him to see our shiny black locks shorn. As sad as it had made him to break with our culture, it was more important that we, his sons, not have to suffer the humiliation of having long hair in a society that didn’t understand.

  I read Dad’s words with both sadness and gratitude. As his son, I felt a sense of sorrow for his pain on behalf of Amardeep and me. As a father now myself, I understood that this selfless act was driven by the deep love he felt for us—a love he found difficult to express in words.

  I don’t think I’d ever felt more connected to him.

  THREE

  TRANSITIONS

  Before becoming a Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, or Christian, let’s become human first.

  Guru Nanak Dev Ji

  Pardeep

  I was just getting accustomed to Milwaukee and Midwest culture when my father came home and announced we were moving to the South. An acquaintance told him about job opportunities there and Dad had gone to scout it out. He’d landed a job at a furniture factory in High Point, North Carolina, making double his gas station earnings. When he came back to get us, we crammed everything we owned into our beat-up Mazda hatchback and headed to our new home. The car was so jam-packed that my brother and I had to lie on top of suitcases for the entire fifteen-hour trip.

  Dad found us an old two-bedroom house near his job, and we settled in. The South was so different from Wisconsin in so many ways, from the food to the weather to the religious and political ideologies, and back then it was even more of a culture shock than it would be today. We’d only been there a couple of weeks when, without any warning, Dad came home with his hair cut short. We were all gobsmacked. Mom thought it was a stranger at the door. When we asked why he’d cut it, his response was that the turban got in the way of his factory work. We knew better. Dad was a farmer! He’d spent most of his life laboring in the heat while wearing his turban, and he’d never complained about it getting in the way. We also knew not to question him further. Mom accepted his answer and we all carried on as if things were normal.

  The biggest drawback of the move wasn’t necessarily the lifestyle, though. It was feeling so isolated. We’d left everyone we knew in America back in Wisconsin. We missed our family, and even Dad felt the sting of separation from his brothers and our small, tight-knit Sikh community. Tensions in our house were mounting. So back we went after two months—this time for good—but with no jobs and no place to call home.

  Without any income, we depended on relatives again to help us settle in. As was a tradition in our culture, family supported family until they could help themselves. We stayed with Dad’s younger brother Gurwant, his wife Perminder, and their newborn son in a sparsely furnished ranch home they’d recently purchased in the suburbs. My brother and I were registered in our third school in less than a year, and Mom and Dad went to work for Gurwant at his gas station in a seedy section of the city.

  As hard as everyone tried to acclimate to the arrangement, it was doomed to fail. Too many people in too small a space only exacerbated existing familial tensions. The last time Dad and Gurwant worked together was on the farm in Punjab, and their roles were reversed. Dad had been Gurwant’s teacher and Gurwant his disciple. Now Dad was working for minimum wage and his kid brother was his boss. At home, Mom went out of her way to share the household chores, but nothing she did was good enough in Perminder’s eyes. The strained relations made for stressful living and, in just short of a year, with tears in our eyes, we moved out of their house and out of their lives.

  One of the most important tenets of our Sikh faith is a practice we call Chardi Kala. Translated from Punjabi, it means living with “relentless optimism.” We are taught that obstacles and hardships are not to be feared but embraced as stepping-stones toward the preordained plans God has for us. Chardi Kala is what Sikhs strive for, a blissful mental state, even under difficult circumstances—especially under difficult circumstances—as testimony to our unwavering belief in the will of God. It’s a noble concept, but sometimes it’s harder to put into practice than others, and this was one of those times.

  It must have seemed to my parents that the American dream would never be ours. I secretly wished we could return to India and the farm, but that would have meant conceding failure, and my father was not about to do that. My parents took whatever work they could find to keep us fed, and we moved from one dingy apartment to the next in the worst neighborhoods in the city. A pall hung over the family. I saw Dad lose this temper, sometimes to the point of almost losing control. He was Sikh, but also human, and he sometimes took out his frustrations on my mother with harsh treatment, which made me angry. I hated hearing her cry behind closed doors. For many people, the situation might have seemed hopeless. But time and time again, my parents had risen from adversity through meditation and prayer, and this time would be no different.

  Our divine spiritual messenger, Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, wrote, “A God-directed person never faces defeat.” My parents were nothing if not God-directed. So it was that when we were at our lowest, Dad saw an opportunity to lease a gas station with a partner, and Mom was offered full-time work sewing at a knitting factory. It looked as if our fortune was finally turning.

  One constant principle stood the test of time: work hard and you can make it. My parents worked their hands to the bone. Mom put in long hours sewing infant and toddler clothing, while Dad ran the station. To save money, he became a jack-of-all-trades. He could take apart car motors, dive under a sink to repair a leak, or rebuild a refrigerator. Mom rode the bus across town to work, often leaving and returning home in the dark. Dad drove a beat-up pickup truck with an eight-foot flatbed for carrying the drywall, wood, sheet metal, and scrap he needed for odd jobs.

  They scrimped and they saved, and, by the time I got to middle school, we were able to buy our first home. My parents’ sacrifices suddenly seemed wort
h it. All of the time away from home and us, the blood, sweat, and tears—we finally had something to show for it. We moved from our tiny apartment with mattresses on the floor to a row house in a nice, blue-collar neighborhood across the street from a park. I still remember waking up on our first morning there and smelling the dew on the grass. It was the perfect metaphor for that time in our lives. That house symbolized the dawning of a new life. I was still the only Indian kid in my class at school, but the neighborhood was a melting pot of working-class white, black, and Latino families, and we were welcomed.

  The park became my second home. Kids who were looking for someone to throw a ball with didn’t discriminate, and I was a pretty good athlete, so I made friends quickly. Baseball was my sport, but I loved basketball and football, too. A group of eight of us kids bonded and called ourselves the Adams Park Posse, APP for short. We gave each other nicknames. My little brother was “Geeker”; I have no idea why. I was “Mama” because I was responsible and tended to watch out for everyone, the way I always had with my little brother. All of us came from different backgrounds, but at the park we were just a bunch of boys who loved playing ball.

  Street gangs were endemic in the city, then and now, and our neighborhood was not exempt. The Latin Kings had a big presence in the park, and we interacted with them regularly on the basketball court. A group of them would roll up in one of their fancy cars (paid for with drug money, we suspected) and challenge us to a game. We were younger and, by far, the better players, but our choice was to either get our asses kicked or let them win. We chose the latter.

  One of the regular Kings was a stocky brute of a kid named Bull. He was older, probably seventeen, and fierce. He liked to foul us on purpose and we always just took the hit and kept playing. Until, one day, our friend Jason decided not to take his guff. Jason came to the park that day in a foul mood. His father was abusive and I figured he’d probably just been beaten again that morning. We started a game and Bull fouled Jason, but rather than take it, Jason snapped. He went after Bull like a rabid dog. Both teams stood on the sidelines and watched the two of them slug it out. It was hard to know if we should jump in and help our teammate, except that we were no match for violent gangsters who, we knew, most likely had guns. I don’t know why the Kings decided to stay put, but I’m grateful they did. Bull and Jason fought their fight and both came out pretty beat up. Afterward, we all went our separate ways. No hard feelings. Bull and his gang were back the following afternoon, as was Jason, ready to play ball. I think, in some weird way, the gang gained respect for us. Nevertheless, that was the closest I ever came to “gang involvement,” and it was a little too close for comfort.