Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (31 page)

—But what if someone asks for proof?

—Son, let me tell you, in America people believe everything you say until you give them a reason to think otherwise. They will believe you.

To my father's people, America was uncharted territory—a country where few of their kind had ventured, where one might easily become, in the Gujarati idiom, lost.
Poiro khowai jahe,
the boy will become lost, busybodies warned his mother. "Lost" meant to become rootless, tailless; to forget the ways of the clan. It was equivalent to another phrase my grandmother had to endure:
Poiro bagri jahe,
the boy will become ruined, spoiled—the same adjective used to describe rotten fruit.

Privately, Ratanji and Kaashi shared the same fears. Kaashi wanted her son married before he went anywhere. They would have preferred England or New Zealand or Australia, where they had more relations and where the culture was not, perhaps, so wild and free. A handful of traditional Khatri families had settled in California, a handful elsewhere, yet most of America might as well have been the Wild West for all that the Fiji Indians knew of it. And it was true that at least a few of the community's young men were known to have found their American dream in the arms of a white girlfriend, mistress, or wife.

Ratanji trusted his son's opinion about the best educational course to pursue, but America made him queasy. It was a place that could ruin, or at least confuse, a boy.

In the spring of 1963, a few months after his visit to the consulate, Bhupendra received one and only one graduate admissions letter. It was from the University of Colorado at Boulder, which he vaguely remembered as being somewhere in the middle of the map. He had not yet benefited from one aspect of American policy—
scholarship and fellowship programs for particularly gifted foreign students were enacted
—but he was not worried: his father was paying his tuition. He would study two years, add another degree to his list of accomplishments, and come home to rejoin his family.

To Kaashi, the risk of losing her son still loomed large. Though the family was migratory, till now everyone had followed the path set by Motiram back in 1909: from India to Fiji, with occasional voyages back, surrounded always by a close network of kin and clan. Bhupendra was the only son about to be set adrift, far from his people, in a vague kind of danger. So she tried to extract a guarantee.

—Promise me, she said to him one day shortly before his departure,—promise me before you go that you will come back and marry a Khatri girl.

—No, Bhupendra said,—I cannot make that promise.

To his mind, trained as it was by the Hindu scriptures, such a promise could not be made lightly; once spoken, it was a sacred vow that could not be breached.

—I have no idea what I'm going to do in the future, he told his mother.

—Then at least promise you will marry an Indian girl, she begged.

—No, he said,—I make no promise at all.

And thus when he boarded the ship to America, he did so unfettered: free to make his way as he chose, to see all that America had to offer. Trying to be gracious to the dozens of relatives who pressed gifts into his hands, and trying to distract his mother or perhaps himself from the grief of parting by pointing out various features of the ship, he did not notice the fair, slim girl with dark eyes at the dock.

Bhanu wanted to keep studying, but she did not know what her father would allow her to do. So she pursued several avenues at once.

She took the Cambridge Overseas exam, which would have qualified her to seek admission to British or Commonwealth universities. While awaiting the results, she applied to stenography school in Suva. And she worked on her father, asking him to send her abroad. Champak was studying in America, she argued; why couldn't she go to New Zealand, just a short hop away?

When the exam results came, she was thrilled: Grade I, the highest category possible, in biology, mathematics, English, religion, history, geography, and English literature. She could easily gain admission to a university in New Zealand.

But Narotam hedged.—Just wait, he said each time she asked;—just wait. And he nixed the stenography course:—No daughter of mine is going to be a secretary.

One day at last he came home with a clipping from the
Fiji Times:
a few lines of a classified ad. Applications were being accepted, it said, for physiotherapy students at the Fiji School of Medicine. A man who worked at Narotam's shop had pointed it out, had said it was a good line of work for a girl. Narotam, still a Gandhian by temperament, had always hoped that one of his children would enter a profession in which they might help others. And unlike the university's M.D. program, this one did not require students to live in the dorms; they could commute from home.

Bhanu dared not ask her father what exactly physiotherapy was. It was her ticket to school, and she could not endanger it with any hesitation. She agreed immediately.

When she tried to research the field at the public library, she found nothing helpful. She went to meet with her high school principal, and asked her. Something to do with massage, the woman said; something to do with polio. Armed with this paltry information, Bhanu went to the interview, riding shotgun in her father's flatbed truck from the store.

Physical therapy or physiotherapy had a relatively short history in the Fiji Islands. The program at the medical school had started only the year before, with three students; this was to be the second class. In the 1950s Fiji had had a polio outbreak, and physiotherapists had been imported to massage the limbs of the afflicted. That was what everyone knew.

The interviewer asked Bhanu if she knew what physiotherapy was. Bhanu gave a vague answer that included, somewhere in it, the words "massage" and "polio." The woman smiled; another student who had no idea. Well, she would find out soon enough.

—Classes start in May, Bhanu was told.—You will receive a stipend of nine pounds per month, tuition is free, and we will send you your class schedule in the mail.

The luxury cruise liner carrying Bhupendra and Champak floated smoothly across the surface of the Pacific: one week to Hawaii, another week to Vancouver, two more days to San Francisco. The
Oriana,
part of the P&O line, was organized in the English manner, with "upperclass" and "lowerclass" facilities; Bhupendra and Champak were not allowed on the upper decks.

While Bhanu's brother learned to play Ping-Pong and, with his Jesuit-school English, mingled easily with the other passengers, Bhupendra passed the time reading and hanging out with the few other young men from India. At night there was dancing, and Bhupendra enjoyed being around the pretty English girls, though conversational English remained a challenge.

Food was another. One evening the meal was spaghetti. The Indians watched in confusion as the other diners swirled their forks gracefully round and round, then into their mouths. When Bhupendra tried it, the noodles slipped and slithered every which way. By the time his fork reached his lips, the rebellious spaghetti had splashed—if he was lucky—back onto the plate.

An American priest who often sat at their table offered salvation.—You can eat it like the Americans, he suggested, showing the Indian students how to chop the strands of spaghetti into bite-size segments that could more easily be shoveled into the mouth. It was another lesson in eating, and one of many hints that my father would pick up about what makes an American an American.

At the port of San Francisco, Bhupendra's father had arranged for the two young men to be met by a distant uncle, Ratilal, who was one of the first in the community to migrate from India to America. Uncle Ratilal told them the story of his success. He had arrived in San Francisco with nothing, and met up with some other Gujaratis from the Patel community. Like him, they had no education, no English, no capital, and few skills that seemed marketable in America. They worked as housecleaners. Ratilal had begun cleaning offices; a commercial janitor's pay was somewhat higher, and he could work without supervision—almost like being his own boss. Cleaning two or three offices each night in downtown Oakland, he came to know the night-shift workers, including the owner of a low-end hotel. As they swapped stories about their lives, Ratilal told the man how he was saving almost all of his earnings: he lived in a hostel with a shared kitchen and bath, ate rice and daal for no more than a dollar a day, and kept the rest squirreled away. The owner took a liking to him, and one day said,—Look, you're saving all this money, why don't you buy this hotel from me?

Ratilal looked up at the tall building, several stories high.—I never imagined I could own such a big hotel; my parents don't even own a house in India, he said.

But they worked it out, and Ratilal bought the building: the Will Rogers, an SRO—single room occupancy—hotel in downtown Oakland.

By the time Bhupendra and Champak arrived in 1963, Uncle Ratilal had three such hotels and a house of his own. America, Ratilal told his two young visitors, was a place where such miracles could happen. He invited Bhupendra and Champak home for meals, showed them the sights, and put them up at the Will Rogers among the old men who paid rent weekly and drank in the shadows of the city's neon signs. When it was time, Uncle Ratilal also arranged Greyhound bus tickets for them: for Champak, to Iowa; for Bhupendra, to Colorado.

Riding the bus two nights and three days, Bhupendra gazed out the window at the ever-changing landscape, the scenery so unlike either India or Fiji: dramatic peaks of the Sierras, snow-tipped even in late summer, followed by the broad flatlands of Nevada and Utah, punctuated every several hours by city lights, the diesel and grease smell of busy stations. The bus wound up and through the Rockies, crested a peak, and coasted down to Boulder, a city set like a jewel in a valley of forested mountains.—Wow, thought Bhupendra,—what a place I have chosen!

He had written in advance notifying the university that he would arrive several days before classes started. The bus rolled into the university stop, the door opened, and there stood, he thought, his welcoming committee: an Indian man his own age, whose name turned out to be Bhupendra, too. The other Bhupendra was also Gujarati, also studying pharmacy, and had the same faculty adviser. But he was not on official assignment; he had just been walking by the bus stop, he said, and paused to see who would get out.

It felt like a good omen. Bhupendra took Bhupendra to the foreign students' office, which assigned him a host family until classes started, and a dormitory thereafter. The adviser shared by the Bhupendras was a German, whose strong military personality was intimidating; even his children addressed him as Sir. A handful of other Indian students were in the program, and Bhupendra fell in easily with them. They warned him that the German would make him take two years' worth of calculus.

—I haven't come here to study mathematics, Bhupendra said. In their first meeting, to decide upon a course schedule, he told the adviser,—I know enough calculus.

—No Indian kid knows enough calculus, came the reply. Still, the man allowed as how, if Bhupendra could get the head of the math department to sign off, he could skip the prerequisites.

Bhupendra had no calculus textbooks with him, so he bought a paperback study guide at the university bookstore for $3.95 and spent three days working through it. When he felt ready, he set up an appointment with the math chairman, hoping the man had a more favorable view of Indian students.

In 1963, if there was anywhere in America that people were used to seeing Asians outside of urban Chinatowns, it was in the math, science, and engineering departments of universities. Bhupendra and his classmates, new arrivals from India, China, and elsewhere in Asia, were at the vanguard of a new wave of immigration to the United States that was about to reshape many aspects of the nation, perhaps none more than its academic and scientific landscape. Studying for their degrees in the great plains and valleys of the new land, trudging through snow to classes and laboratories, they were making history.

Less than a year before Bhupendra arrived, in October 1962, a minor adjustment had been made to U.S. immigration law, designed to "facilitate the entry of alien skilled specialists." Since 1946, one hundred Indians annually had been granted permanent resident status—but far more applied each year, which had created a backlog of hundreds. The 1962 law cleared a good portion of this backlog, allowing some of those who had already applied for a change of status—specifically, those who could prove their credentials in science and engineering—to become immigrants. The number of Asian scientists and engineers obtaining the small, government-issue green cards that indicated permanent resident status immediately tripled, causing the
Boston Herald
to publish a few lines of pithy commentary:

Send me your trained, your skilled,
Your eager students straining for degrees,
The cultured cream of all your learned scores.
Send these, the brainy masters, Ph.D's
We're courting class along these golden shores.

By the time Bhupendra graduated, the trend of Asian "brains" defecting to America would become a steep upward curve. He and his peers would face the prospect of going home after graduation not as a predetermined fate, but as a heart-wrenching exercise in free will.

The math chairman wrote an equation, then showed it to Bhupendra:—What is this?

—Triple integration.

—And how do you solve it?