Return to India: an immigrant memoir

Return to India

An immigrant memoir

by

Shoba Narayan

Return to India: An Immigrant Memoir

Published by Jasmine Books at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Shoba Narayan

All right reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Shoba Narayan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

Parts of this book first appeared in India Knowledge@Wharton in 2007

A section of this book was first published in Newsweek, March 13, 2000 issue under the title, Was it me or was it my sari?

Cover Designer: Ajanta Guhathakurta.

Book Designer: Maureen Cutajar.

Dedicated to

Padma and V. Ramachandran

You are the reason we came home

Other books by the same author

Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes.

Praise for Return to India

Shoba Narayan’s Return to India is a wonderful read. She captures the essence of the immigrant’s dilemma in her own expressive style. A memoir that is as once inspiring to those settled abroad—who are thinking of coming back—and reassuring to those who have come back.

N.R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder, Infosys.

Praise for Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes

This is fresh wonderful writing—a mouth watering story from a gifted storyteller.

Saveur

Monsoon Diary is ultimately a story about being Indian and carrying the traditions into a new world.

Travel + Leisure.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Prologue

Return to India is a topic that consumed me for about ten years. I was living in New York at that time, part of a community of Indians, all of whom were in the midst of this conflict. This book is written for them: for the Indian Diaspora in America, the UK, Singapore and elsewhere, who wrestle with the ‘R2I’ question. This book is also written for another set of Indians — students in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, and countless other Indian cities; men and women who are young and ambitious, and cannot wait to leave their homeland for foreign shores. I used to be one of them. I want to tell them what it’s like on the other side. I began writing this in New York ten years ago and finished it in India.

This is a book about an immigrant’s dilemma, written by an immigrant for an immigrant. It is about my dream of returning to the homeland. Other Indians share this dream too—most recently Bollywood diva, Madhuri Dixit, and her family — and perhaps all immigrants fantasize about riding back home on gilded horses with gold coins, to the sound of applause from adoring families. They may do nothing about this dream; they may not speak of it. Some eventually disdain or discard it. But for others, it festers at the back of their minds, rearing its head at random moments, till— as it did for me— it becomes an obsession. Go back home, go back home — and like in the film, ET, we say — home…home…

Home: a word filled with loss and longing. Snatches of music bring to mind a mother’s song. Smells in restaurants conjure up a kitchen back home. A face in a crowd looks like a relative. Birthdays, anniversaries and other milestones bring guilty reminders of aging parents and the relentless march of time. A tug of war between two cultures— New York or New Delhi, San Francisco or Santo Domingo, Toledo or Taipei. A competition between countries with no clear winner; a championship game for the title of ‘Home’.

When I was an immigrant in America, ‘home’ for me was a mélange of memories that had softened with time into a happy haze, like an Impressionist painting. There were people in this painting: iconic figures like my grandmother, dead and gone long enough to be elevated to the status of a benevolent ancestor. There were others who remained like my parents, in-laws, aunts and uncles, slowed by age but resolute nonetheless, with laugh lines and worry warts, marking a life lived with character and charm; wit and wisdom. There were physical places and wide-open spaces. Most delightful of all were the scents and tastes of childhood — the fragrance of blooming night jasmine, dew wobbling on a lotus leaf, tinkling cowbells, shrieking parrots, the taste of cilantro, cumin and ginger — all of which imbued me with a powerful longing for the land that is called India, but which I call home.

My own relationship with the two countries I have called ‘home’ is complicated. My love for India is one that a child feels for her mother, albeit a chaotic, unwieldy, harassed mother who doles out exuberant affection and unpleasant surprises in equal measure. My admiration for America is what one feels for a perfect, if emotionally detached, father— part hero-worship, part reproach. I respect many things about America, and therefore hold it to very high standards. I expect it to be more moral and more just than other nations. When it perpetrates or even tolerates injustice, I am crushed. Because I put America on a pedestal, it sometimes falls short. Because I take India for granted, it sometimes surprises me pleasantly. India’s unchanging ways frustrate me. America’s impenetrable core flummoxes me. I can’t escape India, but America sometimes escapes me.

The problem for immigrants like me is that we are equally at ease in two disparate cultures and, therefore, fit into neither. We belong to both countries, yet choose neither. Most of us end up in a no-man’s-land, neither here nor there, in an angst-filled limbo. We remain immigrants forever, unlike our forefathers who swore allegiance to one nation due to political or economic repression.

In generations past, life in the old country was a struggle. Immigrants to America were fleeing revolutions that stripped them of title and property and threatened their life and liberty. They were the pregnant women who threw themselves on boats, willing to submit to raging seas and the risk of drowning, just so that they were afforded the opportunity to be rescued by the US coastguard — and their babies, the right of US citizenship. They were the desperate refugees who begged, borrowed and paid their entire life savings to visa agents, only to be told that they should flush all their papers down the airline toilet and land in America uttering two words, ‘Political asylum’.

My path to America did not involve anything as drastic as jumping fences, crossing borders in the middle of the night, or overstaying a tourist visa and slipping into the shadow world of illegal immigrants for years on end. Mine is not a tale populated by bloodthirsty dictators, rampant epidemics, boat people, barking dogs and blood-smeared fences. I am neither a political exile nor an economic refugee. I went to America merely as a student seeking opportunities. Yet, I believe that my journey is emblematic of countless others. My dilemmas reflect those of many an immigrant today.

What is home anyway? Is it a place, a person, or merely a fleeting memory? Can one ever go back home or is such a trip fraught with disappointment? I didn’t know the answers when I began asking these questions and perhaps, there is no one answer to questions so individual. Along the way, I found no universal truth, no personal path to salvation. But in the meantime, I discovered many things — about life and loss, about risking it all and making do, and about my place in the world.

This is what I found out. This is my journey.

Chapter 1

For as long as I remember, I have wanted to come to America. Mine wasn’t a desire born out of fear— of political persecution or economic privation. I was just a student in search of adventure. I wanted to escape the suffocating clutches of my family and the morass of middle-class Indian life. America seemed like a bright prospect. It was the land of the free, home of the brave. Stuck in a small South Indian city, I felt like I could use a bit of both. I wanted anonymity and space. I wanted to be able to cut my hair without taking a poll about whether I could, and getting a thousand reactions once I did. I wanted to be able to go to school without being watched by a thousand eyes. I wanted to live life by my rules. Not that of my parents or my grandparents, but mine.

In retrospect, I often wonder about why I picked America as my destination. Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia were geographically and psychologically closer, and had good universities. England shared a Colonial history with India. Europe was just as interesting. But America…?

America was so fabled, so far away; hard to reach, yet so pervasive. Many of the movies, music, and cartoons I was exposed to as a young girl were American. I grew up with Archie comics and Mad magazine. I listened to the BeeGees and Bob Dylan as a teenager. I imitated John Travolta in white bell-bottoms, shaking his legs in Saturday Night Fever. I watched Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson and Meryl Streep at the movies. If that were not enough, there were friends and relatives who visited America and regaled me with tales of that distant land. After years of listening to these, I felt intimately familiar with America. I felt American. Well, almost.

Not that I ever said or did anything about this dream because I knew, the way a child knows, that my family was dead against it. I knew it because one morning when I was seven years old, my father cancelled our subscription to Archie Comics and Mad magazines and brought home a stack of Amar Chitra Kathas — in which Hindu Gods always said, ‘So be it’, instead of ‘Okay’. I knew it because the first time I mentioned America to my mother, she drenched me with cold water as if she were exorcising evil spirits from my body.

This was in the seventies. Things were different then.

At its heart, a memoir is a recollection. This one is no different. There are some events from my childhood that I remember vividly. Other incidents are, but a feeling. I recall feeling elated, frustrated or peaceful. From that feeling, I have tried to recapture the context. I have changed most names of friends and relatives and have compressed time for the sake of storytelling. I have exaggerated certain characters or dramatized events. What is unchanged, however, is the immigrant dilemma that is at the heart of this book. I hope this truth will resonate with the reader, even if individual incidents sound forced or fake.

‘Ma, I want to go to America,’ I said.

‘Hush, the mosquitoes will hear you,’ my mother said, stroking my hair. She believed that all sentient beings had emotions, except her daughter whose feelings she discounted severely.

It was late at night, the time when shadows take shape and dreams get voiced. My bed was hard. I nestled into my mother’s rounded softness. Her cotton sari smelled faintly of sweat and sambar powder.

‘Ma,’ I persisted. ‘I want to go to America.’

My mother sat up abruptly. She dragged me into the bathroom and poured a bucket of cold water over my head, clothes and all, which is what people in our ancestral village did when they wanted to exorcise evil spirits from a person’s body.

‘Don’t you ever say such a thing again,’ my mother hissed as she toweled my wet hair furiously. ‘Do you want to die young? America will addle your brain and reduce your life span.’

‘But Ravi mama lives over there and he is okay.’ My voice was small.

Ravi mama was my uncle, my mother’s brother. He had moved to Washington, D.C., a decade ago and never returned. My mother hadn’t forgiven the country that had stolen her brother. Whenever I mentioned America, she responded with a series of non-sequiturs that attempted to alienate me from the land I dreamed about. America would give me allergies, she said. People there didn’t take baths in the winter, and used— horror of horrors— tissue paper, instead of water, to clean themselves. They died young because of the harsh winters.

‘Ravi mama does yoga. That’s why he is okay,’ my mother explained. ‘Other people will just keel over because of the cold. It thins the air and reduces oxygen intake.’

‘Really?’ I was shocked.

‘That’s right,’ she said in a sibilant whisper. ‘Why do you think people over there guzzle so much Coca-Cola? Because they have addled brains and don’t know any better. Now go to sleep.’

I was eight. I believed everything my mother said.

We lived in Madras (now called Chennai), a city that some call a melting-pit but one that I loved and still love— irrationally and viscerally. In Madras, you can touch the air, especially when it congeals into sweat beads. You can taste the earth—or could when I was growing up— because it was mixed with our ration rice. You could see the rain in the petrol fumes that created a rainbow coloured spider-web atop puddles inside potholes.

My brother, Shyam, a year younger than I, didn’t give me the respect that an elder sister deserved because he considered us more or less equal. He took great delight in taunting my lack of prowess in cricket with his band of vandal friends. My father taught English at the local university and filled our home with weighty tomes, which found multiple uses. Shyam and I carried bound volumes of Chaucer and Keats to add inches to movie theater seats. My dad pressed his ties amidst giant editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Shakespeare’s plays were stacked on each other to become extra seats for surprise guests. My grandmother put up her feet on them when she napped in the afternoon. As soon as she woke up, she bent and touched the books to her eyes as an apology to Goddess Saraswati.

My mother ran a beauty parlor above our home. She dispensed face creams and practical advice to the legions of housewives who sought her door every day. My mother was convinced about the curative powers of castor oil and made her customers drink a spoonful of it every Sunday. She made foul-tasting decoctions with brewer’s yeast, wheat germ oil, molasses and soy protein, and ingested them with stunning stoicism. When I got pimples, she asked me to swallow her concoction. It only gave me gas. A staunch patriot, my mother made my brother and I do yoga headstands every morning and sing the Indian national anthem at family gatherings, of which we had many.

My father was one of ten children and my mother, one of five. We had thirty-six first cousins, many of whom lived nearby and visited us almost every day. Our eldest first cousin had grandchildren and it tickled me no end to be called an aunt. My grandparents visited often and stayed for weeks, sometimes months. The concept of privacy in our household was nonexistent.

‘Ma, I want to go to America.’

I clutched my mother’s hand as we walked out of the dark theatre. Credits for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory were still rolling. American accents rang in my head. I salivated at the thought of all that delicious chocolate.

‘After all that happened to poor Hari mama, you still say that?’ my mother chided.

Hari mama was another of my uncles, my mother’s eldest brother— a legendary army officer who had jumped across enemy lines in Kashmir and escaped grenades from Pakistan. The Captain with Nine Lives, they called him. He had gone to America for a holiday and was returning home on the Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2). There was a photo of him taken moments before departure, a grainy color photograph given to all boarding passengers, courtesy of the QE2 for $12.95.

Hari mama looked strapping in his sun hat and goggles. He had smiled at the camera, stepped on the gangway and dropped dead. Crumbled right there, amidst ruddy Florida retirees in floral Hawaiian shirts. Death was instantaneous, painless; the somber cruise official had assured my family. There was nothing they could do; his heart had been attacked. My grandparents were inconsolable, as was my mother. America had taken two of her brothers away from her. A robust man had come home in a coffin. His widow got a photograph for free.

‘The medical facilities in that country are horrible,’ my mother said, buying me a chocolate ice cream with a fly on top. ‘Look at how they couldn’t save my brother.’

We walked past giant billboards displaying a pink cherubic Wonka Bar. And I craved for the Golden Ticket to America.

One day, my parents took me to a psychic. My America dreams were getting out of hand and they didn’t know what to do. Like many of our neighbours, they turned to astrologers, psychics and God men to assuage their anxieties. A pinch of sacred ash; a visit to a temple; or a mantra to chant twenty-one times every day, morning and evening before meals and just like that, as if it were a visit to a doctor, we all felt better.

The psychic’s name was Chinmayi, but everyone called her Mataji—the one who could throw cowrie shells and predict the future; the one who could read minds. She was an elderly plump lady, clad usually in a blood-red sari and a bright matching bindi about the size of a coin. Her face had a sheen of yellow turmeric and her thick black hair was liberally specked with gray. My parents had heard of Mataji from my father’s uncle who had reported that the psychic had cured his daughter of her obsession with movies. In fact, the girl had run away from home to go to Bombay to become a Bollywood vamp, but Mataji had brought her back to her senses. ‘The girl wanted to be Helen, but there is no future in item numbers,’ this uncle had remarked somewhat presciently.

My parents wanted Mataji to exorcise America from my mind. They had no choice, they told me, since I wouldn’t listen to ‘reason’. I pursed my lips. At fifteen, silence was my mutiny.

Chattering monkeys welcomed us as we opened the creaky gate of the resident’s quarters of the Theosophical Society. They were everywhere, swinging from banyan vines, dodging squirrels and tossing ripe mangoes that exploded in a burst of yellow on the earth. It had rained the night before. Mist hung low on the ground as my parents and I picked our way through the stone footpath that squelched into the slushy earth with our every step. It was winter in Madras, with cool, dewy mornings and whispering breezes that filtered through the lingering monsoon. The hazy November sun shone through the umbrella fronds of the coconut trees. We rounded a bend and the stone cottage rose like a mirage behind a profusion of flowers and shrubbery. Blooming naga-linga flowers hung low to the ground, perfuming the air with their lingering scent. Parrots screeched, cuckoos cooed, sparrows chirped and crows cawed in complete disregard of the rusty sign that said, ‘Please maintain silence in these premises’.

We rang the doorbell and waited. A stern manservant opened the door and wordlessly ushered us in. Neatly lined sandals in the foyer prompted us to take off our own. Sonorous chanting drew us into the large living room, shrouded by incense and crowded with people who sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor. In the middle sat a dark petite woman with long black tresses, a commanding presence in a flaming red sari and bright vermilion bindi. Her diamond nose ring glinted as she swayed from side to side, in time to the chanting. This was Mata Chinmayi, who had gained a large following and enough money to establish an ashram and school outside Madras by predicting the rise and fall of governments, celebrities and businesses. She had even started going to America to visit her followers, whispered one of her devotees to my mother.

In one corner of the room huddled a prominent actress, recently divorced after her husband’s scandalous affair. In another sat a clutch of briefcase-toting businessmen with worried, spectacled eyes. There was a flurry as the deputy mayor arrived with his entourage, bearing a large garland, which he laid at her feet. She whispered something into his ear and sent him on his way. ‘He comes everyday to see her,’ said a man to our left.

We sat in the back of a room and listened to families discuss divorce, death and illness right in front of a room full of strangers, all of who made clicking sympathetic sounds every time someone aired a grievance. It was like an eastern version of group therapy.

When it was our turn, we stumbled forward and sat down before her. After the usual protocol and prostration, my father handed her my horoscope, precise green boxes on yellowing paper. Mataji examined it, pointing at the various planets and muttering calculations. When she didn’t look up, my mother gently broke into her reverie by saying, ‘The child unfortunately wants to go to America. We don’t want her to go.’

Mataji smiled. ‘Ah, but what we want and what we get are two different things,’ she said enigmatically. ‘Isn’t that the way of the universe?’

Everyone around us nodded sagely.

‘Can you…er…change the way of the universe?’ asked my father.

My mother was more direct. ‘Please exorcise America from her head,’ she said.

Mataji threw some cowrie shells on the floor and studied their arrangement.

‘The jala-rasi (water influence) in this horoscope is particularly strong, so your daughter is going to be pulled across the seas anyhow,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘Not that this is bad. America is a good country. I’ve been there myself. The only problem is the timing. The next few years are very crucial for this horoscope. A fork in the road, as it were. If she stays in India, she will have the opportunity to make a very fortunate marriage. I see buildings, cement, bricks…perhaps the man will be an architect or a real estate magnate. The Goddess of Wealth will smile upon their union. On the other hand, if you send her to America, she will be blessed by the Goddess of Learning. So in a sense, you have to choose between Lakshmi and Saraswati.’ A ghost of a smile played on her lips.

My parents glanced at each other. I knew exactly where they had cast their vote.

During the summer holidays, my family and I went to Coimbatore, where my maternal grandparents lived; or to Kottayam, where my father’s family lived. My Periappa, my dad’s elder brother, and his four sons lived in Kottayam, and their house was a common meeting point, for an assortment of male and female cousins from Madras, Bombay and sometimes, from abroad. My cousins and I spent many happy hours climbing mango trees, playing cards in the afternoon, cricket or table tennis in the evenings and devising different activities after dinner — gathering outside to tell stories or sneaking out to watch a late night Malayalam movie.

My cousins and I got out an Ouija board late one night. The five of us gathered around the makeshift