by Tony D'Souza
But it wasn’t as easy as that, my mother and uncle soon discovered. Because Winston wasn’t an immediate blood relation to my father, the government did not recognize my mother as someone who could be his sponsor. She and Sam tried everything, my mother taking the train downtown with me in the stroller while my father was at work to meet my uncle at the immigration office early in the mornings. They’d take a number like at the deli and wait in the chairs, and with them they brought all the documents they thought they’d need: bank statements, the tide to my parents’ house, the titles to their cars, my mother’s birth certificate, letters of recommendation from her Peace Corps friends who were now lawyers and teachers all over America. The petitioners at that time were mainly Mexicans and Latin Americans, but there were also Poles and Haitians, and swelling numbers of Cambodians and Vietnamese, spilled over from the wars in Southeast Asia. My mother and my uncle made their way to the immigration officers’ cubicles a half dozen times, and a half dozen times the immigration officers listened to all that they had to say and calmly handed them back the forms.
Since they were in the city anyway, my mother and uncle would eat lunch at a cheap Chinese takeaway, then walk through the windy downtown, my mother’s dress rippling around her calves as she pushed my stroller through the business crowds. My uncle leaned into the wind as he smoked. One time, they went up to the observation deck of the Sears Tower and tried to pick out their neighborhoods through the haze of the city’s smog, and another time they went to the Field Museum and looked at all the large animals of the world that Teddy Roosevelt had shot and had had stuffed and donated. When the weather warmed and it was May, they took rolls of bread and a package of Camembert that my mother had brought with her, and walked to the beach beside the planetarium. They unscrewed the cap from the bottle of red wine my uncle had stepped into a shop to buy, and sipped from it—the bottle wrapped in its brown paper bag. Some kids were playing hooky, the girls squealing in Spanish and splashing water at the boys from the lake’s edge, the boys peeling off their shirts and jeans from their lean bodies to dive into the cold lake and wrestle with the girls like seals. Gulls coasted by on outstretched wings. Far out on the lake were the white triangles of the season’s first sailboats.
My mother rolled her dress to her knees to feel the sun on her skin. She said, “Ever since I lived in Chikmagalur, I cannot help but think about the wider world. I think about myself as I lay on my bed, the world moving me on it as it turns, the planet turning about the sun, all the other planets and their moons. Sometimes I feel big in myself, but other times I feel very small. And then I wonder what any of this can possibly mean? Why I should have brought a child into this world when I don’t even know the answer? But then I think about how much I love Francisco, and then I’m sure that it really does matter. I don’t feel that all of the time, but most of the time I do. The spring here makes me happy. It’s nice to open the windows and hear the new leaves moving in the breeze. Do you ever think about life like that, Sam?”
“I wonder why I should be here sitting and looking at this lake when I grew up in Chikmagalur and only knew the things of that place. I think, ‘How could I have known all of this would become my life? How could I have arrived right here?’ And I look about me and everything seems strange. Then I become confused and quiet. You have more time for it, Denise, than I do. I am always too busy with work. When I drive in the car, stand at my window at night, I think about it. But then there is work and the people I must deal with. Sometimes when I am driving, I see some trees or flowers or water and I want to do nothing but stop and look. Over here there is work and no time. In India, there was family and no space.”
“Sometimes I worry about what will happen to us, Sam.”
“Everyone in the world must worry that.”
“I worry about what will happen to my son, and I worry about you and Lawrence and everyone. What will happen to all of us?”
“The moment must be now, Denise. We will all be fine.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“How can it be any other way?”
“How is that something you can know?”
My uncle shook his head, looked out at the clouds scudding over the lake. My mother, too, was quiet. The teenagers were lying in the sand in each other’s arms now, whispering to one another, their wet bodies drying in the sun. At the far end of the beach, a woman approached with a black dog that strained on its leash. It was a fine day. My mother said, “Lawrence wants to have another child.”
My uncle closed his eyes. He said, “Children are the riches of the family.”
“It doesn’t bother you, Sam?”
“It is normal that a man should want to have children with his wife.”
My uncle lit a cigarette and looked at the lake, and what else could my mother do but that same thing? She tilted her face to the sun and my uncle stroked her hair awhile, from her scalp to the nape of her neck. Then my mother cut the bread with the knife she’d brought, spread the cheese onto the bread, and they ate on the bench where they sat.
“Don’t eat that, Francisco!” my mother yelled at me about the cigarette butt I’d found in the sand where she’d set me, and my uncle ran to pick me up. He fished the butt out of my mouth with his finger, brushed the sand from my bottom with his hand, carried me back to my mother on the bench, sat me on it between them. The passing joggers certainly took me as their child.
Steeped in my cousin Winston’s pleas and all means of sponsoring him legally explored and dead, my mother and uncle became more creative in their thinking. One Saturday afternoon, lying together in my parents’ bed, my mother petted my uncle’s face to draw him back from sleep. She said, “Sam? I’ve had some new ideas about helping Winston.”
My uncle said, “I’ve been thinking on that, too.”
“I think you should talk to Javier. He must know all about getting people into this country. He’s your friend. Call him. Explain what’s going on and see what he has to say.”
“I thought of that already. If Winston was to come in through Mexico, Javier said he would know who to call. But that is a hard and long way, and often they are caught. That’s not the way for one young Indian boy on his own. Javier says to try Canada. The visa laws are not so strict. I am going to see the Sardar on Devon Avenue who Babu sold the gold to. All of these new Indians who have come in have not all come in on visas.”
My father of course knew nothing of what was going on, not about their trips to the immigration office, their walks on the beach, their feelings for each other, or any of it. The first week of July that year, he was sent to London for a seminar on marine shipping insurance, and while there, managed to work in a day at Wimbledon. Despite the infamous labor strike that year by the ATP players, my father was able to witness the beginnings of “Borgmania,” the mobbing of the young tennis star by screaming women every time he arrived for a match. He saw both Ilie Năstase and Billie Jean King dismantle their opponents with brilliant backhand volleys on Centre Court. But more than any of that, he was able to savor again the impeccable decorum of Britain, taking afternoon tea in the public clubhouse, having pleasant conversations with the ticket taker, with the girl in the uniform who waited on him, and the club official in his jacket who directed him to the “loo.” They had all addressed my father as “sir.” He left the All England Club at the end of the day on the Tube, under his arm a neatly tucked umbrella, which he’d brought in case of rain, as any proper British person would. My father, as my mother would later describe him to me with a smile, was like a pig in shit in England.
I don’t want to portray my father as a cuckolded fool because, of the three of them, he was having the happier time. He wore his Wimbledon T-shirt at home after work, he practiced his golf game, he traded in his Buick for a slightly used Audi, red, which he polished in the driveway with the tenderness and attention Pygmalion paid to his statue. This was a period in my father’s life of work and advancement and solidifying his position in America. If
there would ever be a hiccup in his ascent, now wasn’t it. Now and again he’d tell my mother to get dressed up, to hire a high school girl from our church to watch me for the night, and then he’d take my mother in his Audi to a company social at a fine restaurant downtown, often the Italian Village. My mother would regulate his drinking masterfully at these events by whispering to him, “Your cheeks are getting their glow, Lawrence,” behind her napkin, and he’d later say to her, as he drove them home with one eye closed, “Why do you always have some comment to say to me?” But when he’d wake in the morning and realize he hadn’t said a single embarrassing thing to anyone, he’d kiss my mother’s cheek as she scrambled eggs in the kitchen for breakfast in her nightgown to thank her and say, “Where have you been all of my life?” He’d said that to her in India when they’d been courting, having picked it up from a movie.
My uncle was sending money back to India now and again, not as much or as steadily as my father, but he sent what he could. But what he did do that my father didn’t was write to the Indians in a real way, letters to my grandparents full of details and news of this life in America. In this way, my uncle Sam became the tether to India, whereas my father often didn’t put anything in the envelope but the check. “How is Babu? How is the baby Francisco?” the Indians would write to my uncle Sam. My uncle would unfold a new aerogram at his kitchen table from the sheaf of them that he kept, light a cigarette to think about it, then set his pen to telling them all the things they needed to hear: “Babu works like a harijan. The boy grows like a tamarisk.”
My uncle’s life was harder then than he would have let on to anyone. He didn’t know enough people in the city to have more than the vaguest success at real estate, and the reason that he’d rented this house, which he barely could afford, was more about giving my father the illusion that he was getting on in the world than about any desire he himself had for the extra space. Trying to live up to his perception of my father’s expectations was as ingrained in him as a second-born Konkan son as conquering the world was in my firstborn father.
Week by week, letters arrived from Winston, the tone of them growing more hopeless as the months passed. “What am I to do here, Uncle? Pedal a rickshaw? Push a cart? Always to wear slippers on my feet? I am young and have energy. Why would the world see me waste my youth? Just because of a vagary of birth?”
Sam kept the letters in a bundle in the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed. They were only inches from his head as he slept. Of course they infused his dreams.
Sam was no longer the naive young man he’d been when he first arrived. Any honeymoon he may have had with America had long since evolved into sipping Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in the dark mornings in his car, listening to Cubs games on the radio in his nightshirt as he panfried chicken gizzards and onions on his stove for dinner. Though he’d had fun when he’d first come, at times now he felt the nation subsuming him into another of the multitude of people who did not matter to it except for the work they produced and the taxes they paid. The thing with Winston began to consume him, to take on an import that it probably really didn’t have. If the boy wanted to come here, then the boy must come. Maybe then he would understand that life in America was not simply happiness. Finally, one Sunday in July, my uncle went to Devon Avenue to see the Sikh who had bought my grandmother’s gold half a dozen years before, whom my father had taken him and Les to after they’d shaved off their mustaches because the Sikhs of Devon Avenue were specialists at finding new immigrants jobs.
What had once been a one-room storefront displaying a few jewelry cases, with discount basmati rice stacked in the back, had become half a block: the Singh Brothers Jewelers and Emporium. They even had their own lot off the side, where my uncle parked his car. Stepping into the store now, Sam saw two things instantly: They had white girls working the checkout lines, and Mohan Singh had gotten very fat. He sat on a stool in the corner in his sky-blue turban, cracking peanuts out of their shells from the sack he sat beside, his wrists jangling with silver bracelets and chains as he watched a line of young Hindus carrying twenty-five-kilo rice sacks on their backs out to patrons’ cars. Aside from the white girls, the emporium still had the smell and bustle of India, and seeing the fat Sikh in his turban reminded my uncle of what could be accomplished in this country if one had the kind of determination he himself did not.
The Sikh looked him up and down as he approached, glanced at his shoes as though taking in the brand, looked at his face as though judging his worth as a man. Then he cracked a peanut like warming dice in his hand, popped the beans in his mouth. “Mujhe tum bahut yaad aate ho,” he said to my uncle in Hindi, and winked. “You’re looking for work again, Konkan D’Sai, isn’t it?”
“I’m not looking for work, Sardarji,” my uncle said to the Sikh, and smiled.
“And you still can’t have that gold back,” the Sikh said, and wagged his finger.
“Sardar, we have long since begun to send our mother money for new gold.”
“That brother of yours, maybe he is sending money back. But you and that smaller brother. I am sure that the two of you are not buying gold. Your elder brother brought you two to me like lambs to market, told me any job for you would do, just find something. You should be glad that you were speaking English at that time or I would have had you carrying rice sacks on your back like these useless Marathas. What is the little one doing?”
“Married in the West to a white woman. He served in the navy.”
“Ah, that is good. It is good that you Konkans are paying your dues to Uncle Sam. And you?”
“Real estate.”
“Then you should be owning a Mercedes-Benz by now, Konkan D’Sai. Tell me, is your older brother owning a Mercedes-Benz?”
“My brother Lawrence drives an Audi.”
“That is good. And you?”
“Not an Audi.”
“Come and drive a taxi for me, Konkan. I’ll have you in a Mercedes-Benz in a decade. Now,” the Sikh said as he stood from the stool, “tell me what you want.”
“Immigration,” my uncle said.
“Over here? Or still over there?”
“Over there.”
“How many?”
“Just one.”
“Come to the office,” the Sikh said and took my uncle by the elbow. “Out here is for shopping, but in there is for business.”
In the simple office crowded with steel desks, the Sardar chased away the women working at them in their embroidered salwar kameezs, motioned to a plastic chair, and my uncle sat in it. It was a windowless room with a Chinese calendar on the wall with the girl of the month holding a parasol opened over her shoulder before a woodland scene with a red pagoda on a hillside. The desks were buried in papers and receipts, and the sound of the busy tandoori kitchen next door came through the wall. It was hot in there, despite the fans. The Sardar folded his hands on the desktop, his kara and other bracelets clinking on the metal of it, and he looked at my uncle a long moment as though sizing him up before dealing a hand of poker. Two young Sardars in saffron turbans and black beards came in and leaned against the wall like toughs. One was chewing paan, and he spit strings of the red juice into a styrofoam 7-Eleven cup.
“What do you want, and what do you have to give, Konkan?” Singh said to my uncle.
“There is a young cousin who would like to come. It is not the necessary blood, so we cannot sponsor him. We would like to know the possibilities. My brother is not involved in this. What I have to give is my real estate license.”
The three Sardars conversed some moments in Punjabi, which my uncle could not follow. The sound of it was neither positive nor negative, more bored than anything, and when they were finished, the one not chewing and spitting the paan went out. Singh cracked his knuckles in two rippling sets. The joints of his knuckles were alive with hair.
“Money?”
“None.”
“Contacts here?”
“None but me.”
“Immigra
tion is becoming difficult, Konkan D’Sai. Truly difficult. Too many are coming. Too many browns and less and less whites. Uncle Sam has noticed. Still, where else in the world do we Indians have left to go? Papers will cost more than you have, even if we could arrange them.”
“I understand this, Sardarji-baba.”
“We want to help you. We like you Konkans. You are a very small people in India, as are we Sikhs. But when you roar in the crowd, your roar is heard like ours is. We are the soldiers of India, you are its Jews. Both are good. Here is what you must do. Uncle Sam is granting visas all the time for engineers. America is sucking out India’s brains. No matter. The engineers don’t need to live like we did when we first came. They have jobs and money, they need homes. You know real estate, you will find them homes. You will give your commission to me. You will place ten in homes and forfeit your commission.”
“Seven,” my uncle said.
“Spoken like a Jew Konkan. Eight and we are settled. Now, you write to this cousin, tell him to apply for a tourist visa to Canada. The laws there are behind what they are here. If he can secure the visa, then there is a way. I like you Konkans. It is strange and good that you are also here. Every piece of India should be represented here so that we can all feel at home. Agree to this, Konkan?”
“I agree, Sardarji,” my uncle said.
The fat Sikh sat back and clapped his hands, and he spoke to the young Sikh spitting into the cup. Soon enough a plate of purple tandoori chicken was brought in with naan, and my uncle and Singh ate a quick meal of it to seal the deal, which was the way.