Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (56 page)

Here,
I say,
San Francisco.
I was born here, have lived here many years.

Oh?
In her voice I hear a faint rise: disbelief, wonder, a set of questions she does not ask. Steam rises from our bodies in the cool city night, towels wrapped around us like layers of stories we aren't willing to release. The conversation moves on, but I am thinking of all the times I have faced this question—dozens? hundreds?—and how, even now, I feel I must defend or explain my answer. Often
San Francisco
is enough; but equally often, my questioner wants more.
No, I mean, where are you
really
from?

I might list all the other places I have lived, from New Zealand to suburban Michigan to Silicon Valley—but none of these would give a clue as to either ethnicity or character. I find myself resisting the expected answer:
India.
For just as my questioner suspects by the looks of me that San Francisco is an oversimplification, that there must be more to the story, I know that India is too easy an answer. I could describe my parents' series of migrations, including Fiji, but I would have to go back another generation to match up a landscape with my phenotype: skin tone, hair, features. My extended family lives in nine countries at this writing; am I not in some way
from
all of these places? Within India, too, we have a deeper history than a simple region or village name. We are, if legend is to be believed, from royalty, from mud, and from fire.

But yes, India: a foreign country to me, the place where all four of my great-grandmothers bathed in lakes and streams, six yards of cotton wrapped around them for modesty. A hundred years ago they would not have conceived of a daughter stepping naked and free of shame into heated pools and saunas, with women of all the world's races for bathing companions. Puzzling over a question whose answer they knew in their bones.

And yet, as far as I travel from my family, I am never lost.

There are moments now when the wall, the one that grew up so strongly around me in childhood, seems to have dissolved entirely. Or I have absorbed it into myself; it is no longer made of brick, but of skin, and is perhaps no more than the boundary each of us has, our simple sense of self. It is a hard-won unity, not to live in compartmentalized fragments; easier sometimes to avoid explaining the rites and vocabularies of one tribe to the other. Yet the moments when I have felt truly integrated shine brighter than suns in my memory; I would not trade them for a princess's ransom.

It was only when I began traveling among my relatives for this book that I came to understand how each life is a tangle of push and pull; how each migration opens up future directions; and how my own journey, which I had come to believe and been made to feel was so unusual as to be selfish and freakish, was in fact continuous with a long heritage of moving from the known to the unknown, from tradition into modernity, from village India into a cosmopolitan world. In my interviews I found not only success stories but also secret shames, sometimes one buried within the other: illegal border crossings, whisperings of second wives and concubines, stories of abuse and survival, turn-off-the-tape-recorder moments that I knew I could not retell but that I absorbed nonetheless. As I unveil a piece of the vast silence about sexuality in order to tell my own story, I know these other secrets are the context.

Shame is bone-deep,
says my reiki-shiatsu healer, as her brown hands massage my muscles, tense from typing. I close my eyes, and an image arises: a grid of fishbones under my skin. Interconnected, sharp-edged, like the history of all of the women in my family, the bones are flexible and nearly translucent. I try to describe this new spine, its compelling, almost mathematical beauty.

My name means fish,
I tell her. Where am I from? This is my body, this is where I live.

2001

Estimated size of the Indian diaspora: 11,510,644
Countries with more than 10,000 people of Indian origin: 47

1. USA

2. Saudi Arabia

3. England and Wales

4. South Africa

5. Canada

6. Mauritius

7. Trinidad and Tobago

8. Guyana

9. Fiji

10. Oman

11. Singapore

12. Kuwait

13. Réunion

14. Netherlands

15. Australia

16. Surinam

17. Qatar

18. Bahrain

19. Kenya

20. Yemen Arab Republic

21. United Arab Emirates

22. Tanganyika

23. Thailand

24. Italy

25. Portugal

26. France

27. Jamaica

28. Indonesia

29. New Zealand

30. Hong Kong

31. Israel

32. Guadeloupe

33. Philippines

34. Germany

35. Madagascar

36. Spain

37. Nigeria

38. Mozambique

39. Zimbabwe

40. Russia

41. Switzerland

42. Zambia

43. Libya

44. Uganda

45. Austria

46. Lebanon

47. Sweden

Vaasudeva kutumbukam.
The whole world is one family.
—Ancient Sanskrit mantra

I
T IS OCTOBER
and the women are dancing. All around the world we put on our long skirts and tight bodices, wrap ourselves in gauzy shawls, fasten jewels at our throats and bells around our ankles. We dance barefoot in temples, where we have temples; or community centers, high school gymnasiums, even bare fields. The dance is what remains the same: a sacred circle.

Garbaa,
the word for the Gujarati folk dance, comes from a Sanskrit root,
grb,
for womb. Round and round we twirl to celebrate Navratri, the lunar festival of nine nights of dancing in honor of the goddess. I have danced the garbaa with my cousins at a newly erected temple in New Zealand, where Indians are running more and more corner stores ("dairies") and clustering together in new neighborhoods. In Fiji, I have danced it with my aunts at a temple whose walls slide away to let in the tropical night. I have swirled and sweated it with relatives and friends in London, New York, Toronto. And as a child in Michigan, I twirled round a fluorescent-lit multipurpose room in the Plymouth Cultural Center, whose hallways we shared with white-robed tae kwon do students and bulging ice hockey players.

Always it is the cusp of seasons: harvest, or planting. The soundtrack booms from live singers and musicians, or only a precious cassette tape (now CD or iPod) recorded (downloaded, bootlegged) from the old country. Always the oldest women cluster around the edges, on bleachers or folding chairs or the floor, gossiping or watching silently as they clutch knees and hips long past dancing. Every generation has its place, and gives way to the others. Middle-aged women form the outer ring, moving slowly to the 3/3 beat, clapping their hands three times: once at the earth, once at the waist, once at the sky. The circle advances, counterclockwise. In an inner ring, younger women and girls who are just becoming women show off fancier moves; wrists and hips swivel with a grace and vanity befitting their age, as if they know that this is their time on earth. At the very center, the littlest girls run around and groove to their own beats, wild foals dressed up for a few nights as princesses.

At midnight we chant the praise-song of prayer. We pass around a tray with the small flame whose grace we accept one by one; we make offerings of coins and bills; we share the sanctified food. Then we emerge sweating and sated, bundling up in winter coats to cross the tarred parking lot, or walking down hot dusty lanes to an ancestral home.

If diaspora is defined by the phenomenon of dispersal, then bringing together the stories of a diaspora may be a task as wisely undertaken as that of piecing Humpty Dumpty back together again. And trying to look into our diaspora's future, as I want to do in this last chapter, can feel like examining a cracked mirror. It can never be fused into smooth glass again; better, perhaps, to construct a mosaic.

But what is it that glues us together, across time and space? Each generation grapples with a new set of circumstances, inheriting some traditions and discarding others. The choices of what to change and what to continue are made not once and for all, but daily, yearly, life by life. What, then, is the fabric of the shared identity that seems to persist, though in places it frays? Is it still, after so many generations, India—or the memory of India?

I
NDIA

The first time I met Jaydeep, he was running, as if for his life.

This is the impression I will always have of him: desperate, determined, out of breath. In the dust and heat he was chasing our car, to guide us—the lost American relatives—to his house. Once indoors, he had barely caught his breath when he jumped up again and went to a corner of the single room that served as living room and bedroom for him, his parents, and his younger brother. From the cupboard he took out a folder, which he presented to my father. "I want to come to America," he said.

Jaydeep's mother is my cousin Bharati. Among my thirty-six first cousins, she and her brother are the only ones who remain in India. Their mother, Sarasvati, my mother's eldest sister, is the only one of my parents' eleven siblings who never migrated out of India. While Bharati's brother still lives near the ancestral villages, Bharati and her family have moved to Kalyaan, north of Mumbai (formerly Bombay).

To reach Kalyaan we had followed the massive above-ground water and sewage pipes that wound through the last choked suburbs of the city, past the failed utopia of New Bombay, past factories of handmade bricks drying in uneven red piles, past miles of diesel-colored weeds and children squatting by the roadside, past gated communities where overseas Indians spend their new U.S. dollars on private parking and swimming pools and views of the swamps where no slum-shacks can stand—and at last into a town. Our driver, who came with the rented car, stopped for a fifth time to ask directions. As he rolled down his window, a face pushed into the conditioned air.

"Why, it's Jaydeep!" said my mother, and the face grinned, a door opened, and he squeezed in next to me. My first impressions were: thin boy in thin shirt, head too big for body, age twelve to fourteen. Panting, he told us cheerfully, "I've been chasing you for ten minutes." He guided the driver back toward the one-room apartment we had missed, on the sandy lane whose name no one knew, in the unnumbered building with its back to the dry, wide stream. My father asked, "How are you? How old are you now?"

"Twenty-two," he answered. "Yesterday was my birthday. Here we are; park here."

We emerged from the car's tinted interior into the bright Indian sun, blinking. His mother stood at the entry to the sandy lane. It was almost noon.

Inside, Jaydeep perched on the edge of the bed where we were all sitting, and his legs trembled with nervous energy.

"Let them rest a little first, Jaydeep," his mother admonished, telling us, "He hardly slept."

So we sat awhile in the narrow room with its two windows, small and high, shuttered against the midday heat. A small television suspended from the ceiling transmitted a staticky color picture, though the sound was turned off. The walls were painted bright blue, and a fake cockroach climbed up one of them—the work of Jaydeep's brother, Pradeep, who was sixteen going on ten. A twin bed was pushed against each wall, and we sat on these, with a narrow coffee table between us.

The sons and their father, a thin, white-haired tailor, sat and talked with us as Bharati busied herself in the kitchen. It was the size of an American closet, with a few open shelves bearing pots and dishes, and a wood-eating contraption that sat on the floor and served as both oven and stove. Next to the kitchen were the bathrooms: one room housing a tiled pit toilet, the other a walled-off area with a tap, a bucket, and a drain, for bathing and for washing dishes or clothes. From this triangular area Bharati emerged shortly with a full meal of vegetables, rotli, rice, daal, and sweets.

Pradeep, who had an interest in cooking, had made the mattar paneer. My father complimented the dish and joked, "You'll be in America faster than your brother," and Jaydeep piped up, "I can cook too!"

"Only kidding," said my father, but Jaydeep was still talking: "I'll do anything, any kind of job—" As he spoke and we ate, every muscle in his wiry body seemed to be straining. I had the odd idea that he was making a great effort, in fact, not to fall to his knees and beg us for help.

I had never met Jaydeep's family, though I knew something of their story. Bharati's mother, my aunt Sarasvati, was named for the goddess of learning, but she did not finish even elementary school. Unlike my mother and the other children, Sarasvati grew up in India with neither parents nor siblings. As her father, Narotam, was struggling to gain a foothold in Fiji, Sarasvati was raised by her grandparents, was married at a young age, and became a mother of four. Eventually she and her family moved to the outskirts of Bombay, in the great rural-to-urban migration that was transforming, and was a result of the transformation of, India's postwar economy. But they remained poor; millions of other rural émigrés were packing the cities as well, driving down wages and clustering together in slumlike conditions. Sarasvati's husband wanted her to ask for money from her rich relatives overseas, and under duress she wrote letters to her father in Fiji. My mother remembers one letter from Sarasvati's son arriving in the 1950s:
Ma has been burnt, please send money for treatment.
The boy had drawn a rough sketch of her face showing how the burn covered a third of it. Narotam did not know whether the story was true or just another ploy for cash, but his heart was soft and he sent money. For decades my mother remembered the sketch, one of the only likenesses she ever saw of her eldest sister in their years apart. Sarasvati died in 1982 of cancer. Twenty years later my mother had a chance to ask her nephew about the burn, and learned for the first time that the sketch was real: a kitchen accident.