Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (31 page)

And because we could afford it, as often as possible we returned to India with our children. It was there, really, that our children learned about their Indian heritage. They spent time with their family, ate traditional foods, dressed as Indians, played Indian games, heard the languages spoken, and listened to the music. In addition they could see the snake charmers and the cows in the streets, ride elephants, and learn how to deal with poverty unlike anything they had ever seen in America.

It was my parents, their grandparents, who showed them total and unconditional love—and best exemplified the heart of India.

My son, Bharat, remembers sitting in a small room, just off the kitchen on the entrance floor of my parents’ home. “This was where my grandmother would play the harmonium and my grandfather had his library,” he recalls. “It was a great place to sit and read the comic books, the
Amar Chitra Kathas,
which told the story of the entire Indian mythology: the saints and the holy men, the gods and the goddesses, the noble warriors.

“One day I was sitting there with my grandfather, who described heaven and hell to me. It was just the two of us, and I’ve never forgotten it. In the Hindu philosophy, he said, there is no physical heaven and hell. They are states of mind. Then he told me a fable: A robber was running through the forest and met a monk. He asked the monk to tell him the story of heaven and hell. The monk looked him up and down and said, ‘I’m a noble monk. Why should I waste a moment of my life teaching a filthy scoundrel like you what heaven and hell are?’ The robber was filled with rage and anger. He took out his sword and raised it above his head. And just as he was about to bring it down to cut off the monk’s head, the monk said, ‘That is hell.’ The robber was stunned. He dropped his sword to the ground and was overcome
with gratitude, love, and compassion for this monk, who had risked his life to teach him the meaning of heaven and hell. He smiled benevolently at him. As he did that the monk looked up at him and said softly, ‘And that is heaven.’”

It was important for our children, we believed, to maintain as many Indian traditions as possible. We wanted them to be culturally literate. At times it was a struggle for them to figure out exactly where they belonged. Whenever it became a problem for them we would remind them how lucky they were to have been brought up in two cultures, although sometimes that was hard for them to accept. For a time they attended a school in which they were the only Indian children. That was hard for them; kids don’t want to be different. When we had the opportunity we tried to teach the popular aspects of Indian culture to American kids. When Kanika was in third grade, for example, Amita went to her school and spent the day teaching children how to wrap themselves in a sari, which they dearly loved. Our daughter Priya attended dance school to learn the classical dances called
Bharat Natyam.
Every Saturday for years we would drive her to those lessons. She celebrated her sixteenth birthday with an
Arangetram,
to which we invited scores of our friends. An arangetram is a coming-of-age celebration like a bar mitzvah or a sweet sixteen, the difference being that the young woman is required to demonstrate her mastery of classical Indian dance for several hours. Our American friends were fascinated and impressed.

“When she applies to college send a tape of her performance,” one of them said. “This will be her ticket to any Ivy League school.”

All of our children played American sports. Our son, Bharat, played baseball, basketball, and tennis, our daughters played tennis and softball—and a little field hockey.

Once, when we took our children to India, Priya wanted to play cricket with her cousins, and when she smacked the ball she immediately dropped the bat, as is done in softball, and started running. And all her cousins laughed at her.

I think our attempt to assimilate our children succeeded so well that Bharat, an absolutely fanatical Boston Red Sox fan, once told me,
“Instead of thinking of the Pakistani cricket team as the enemy, to me my biggest enemy is the Yankees.”

And when he attended NYU he lived on a floor with about nine other Indian students. His first day there an Indian girl knocked on his door and asked him where he was from.

“I’m from Boston,” he told her.

“No, no,” she explained, “I mean really, where are you from?” Then he thought he understood.

“I’m from Weston, it’s just outside Boston.”

What she actually wanted to know, she said, was where in India his family came from.

“My parents are from New Delhi,” he finally said. At NYU, Bharat realized, other young Indians defined being Indian as being able to speak the language and knowing the popular Bollywood movies and Hindi music. He didn’t know any of that. For him, being Indian meant understanding the mythology and having strong connections to his family there.

For Priya assimilation meant becoming a vegetarian. Although many millions of Indians do not eat meat, that has always been a personal choice. Indian restaurants, for example, will usually offer nonvegetarian options. Our children ate meat as they grew up. But when Priya was a teenager she started eating only chicken and fish and after a visit to India in 1997 she became a vegetarian. She used to wonder about the animals’ karma and for her the decision to not eat meat is a form of individual prayer. In some ways that’s a peculiarly Indian way of thinking.

In our house it was natural to speak English, as that was the language Amita and I had grown up speaking in India. We didn’t insist that our kids learn Hindi. But whenever there was something we didn’t want the kids to know we would speak to each other in Hindi. That was our secret language, although the habit had its drawbacks.

During a visit to India, Amita and I were in a shop debating how much we would spend on a wall rug depicting a beautiful hunting scene. The dealer named the price. Amita turned to me.

“
Yeh hamara bewakuf bana raha hai,
” she said in Hindi, which means “This guy is treating us like fools.”

I smiled at her. “This is India,” I said. “This guy speaks Hindi better than we do.”

The shopkeeper was standing there grinning at us. I told him that we would come back in a few minutes after making up our minds.

“No,” he said, “please stay, and I’ll be back in a minute.” A few moments later he returned with tea and pastries. The rug now adorns our living room.

I think every immigrant parent worries about how well his or her children will adjust to America, especially if they look like they come from another culture, as ours did. So both Amita and I were pleased that in only one generation our kids were mostly American.

The fact that our children didn’t speak Hindi made it difficult for them to communicate with their cousins when we visited India, but they made do—as kids will—with a composite called Hinglish. It was basically Hindi with an English word stuck somewhere in every sentence. When we did go to India our kids were smothered with affection from our extended family. They had a difficult time getting used to the fact that everyone wanted to hug them and kiss them. Their cousins referred to them as ABCDs, which stands for American-born confused desi; desi being another word for an Indian.

Watching our children adjust to the culture in which we had been raised—and wanted them to appreciate, if not embrace—was fascinating. Everything there was new and different for them, especially the food. We encouraged them to at least try everything, even street food, and almost inevitably the result would be someone suffering from traveler’s diarrhea, a common affliction when people from a developed country visit a developing one. In Delhi it’s called Delhi belly, and in other parts of the world it’s called Montezuma’s Revenge, Aztec two-step, Hong Kong dog, Poona Poos, Casablanca Crud, and, if you get it in Leningrad, the Trotsky’s. I guess I knew I had truly become an American when I, too, suffered this ailment.

While they loved all the exotic stuff they saw in India, the most
difficult thing for them to deal with was the poverty. In the United States poverty can easily be hidden; Americans are lucky in that most of the time we don’t have to deal directly with in-your-face desperate poverty. That’s not true in India, and it was confusing to our kids. They came from an affluent society and suddenly had to deal with children their own age living on the streets, dressed in filthy clothing, begging for morsels of food. When we stopped our car at a traffic light, young children covered in dust and holding a baby in their arms would approach our car, stick their noses to the window, and beg for a few rupees, the equivalent of a few pennies. How do you explain that to children who have grown up in America in a way that makes sense to them?

And it was difficult to explain it to them because we weren’t sure that there is a right answer. When you grow up in India the poverty becomes part of the scenery, part of your life, and after a while you don’t even notice it. But when you return after living in America it has a tremendous impact. It’s impossible to be adequately prepared for it. A colleague and friend of mine, Gina Vild, and her husband, Nigel, were on holiday in India and were visiting Agra to see the Taj Mahal. A very young boy tried to sell her wooden camels with sequins. He was following Gina and tugging at her sleeve. Finally she told him to stop.

“He did stop and just looked at me,” she recalls. “This young boy, about ten years old with huge brown eyes, said, ‘To you it’s a very small amount of money. It would mean so little. But for me it would make a world of a difference.’”

She bought two camels.

We had a lot of discussions with them about the accident of birth. There are things that are not under our control, we would explain. If that beggar had been born into a different family, his life would have been completely different. We encouraged them as much as possible to have a sense of responsibility toward those people.

“It’s terrifying,” Kanika said once when we were talking about it. “When I saw children my own age I kept thinking, how is this possible?
When I was looking at a beggar it was really hard not to think that it could have just as easily been me. Rolling down the window and giving them a few coins doesn’t seem like very much.”

My daughter Priya said once, “It’s such a helpless feeling. You want to help all of these people, but you don’t know how.” That really is the difficulty, we told the kids, the problem is so huge that it’s beyond the ability of one person to make a difference. You simply do what you can to help as many people as you can. When Priya was nineteen, for example, she spent a summer in India teaching English at a school for children with artificial limbs.

On these trips to India the children were also exposed to a different kind of spirituality than they experienced in America. While many Americans tend to be skeptical about those things that they can’t experience with their physical senses, the Indian culture widely accepts mysticism as part of life. Maybe because our children had learned to meditate while they were young they were always very open and curious about these things. Priya once went on a pilgrimage to a hill station high in the mountains with her cousins and her aunt. To get there they had to walk on a somewhat narrow path on the side of a mountain. Walking ahead of them was a blind man feeling his way with a cane. He was by himself and he was walking close to the edge. If he had taken just one wrong step he would have fallen three hundred feet into a ravine and died. But as Priya remembers, he walked with complete confidence.

“He was praying to God, and every step he took was a prayer,” she told me. “We watched him for a long, long time. We probably were a little afraid for him, but his devotion to God was so beautiful that we cried.”

I think that there is some part of all of us that wants to believe there is far more to this world than we know. That there are some things for which there is no scientific explanation. The path that Deepak followed heads in that direction. And growing up in India we did see and hear of real examples of that, for example, the monk who was buried for several days. But we also knew that many of these spiritual
people were complete frauds. Maybe living in America made me forget that, or made me want to believe in the existence of the magical powers of the human mind. Once, on a trip to India, Amita and I took my parents, our children, and Deepak and Rita’s children, Gautam and Mallika, on holiday to Kashmir. While they were all busy shopping I was standing by myself outside a store. Mallika had gone inside a shop to get a soft drink. As I stood there by myself a holy man dressed in a saffron robe approached me. Opening a copy of the Gita, he looked directly into my eyes with an intense stare and said in Hindi, “You live abroad, don’t you?”

Here we go, I thought. I was wearing Western clothes, including Adidas sneakers, so it wasn’t very difficult to figure out I lived in the West. But before I could shoo him away, he continued, “And you’re a doctor.” That was an interesting observation. There was nothing about my appearance that would have suggested that. I began to get intrigued. “And you have three children, and your son’s name resonates with India’s name.” My son’s name is Bharat; another name for India is Bharat. I didn’t know how he was doing this, but it was impressive. He continued, “You live in Boston in Massachusetts and you work at the Harvard Medical School.” Now this was getting seriously interesting. How could he know this?

My father, always the voice of reason, came up and saw what was going on.

“Don’t get caught up,” he warned me, speaking English. “If he asks for money, don’t give him money.”

It was too late for that. I was hooked. If this was a trick, it was an impressive one.

“Give me a hundred rupees,” he said, asking for the equivalent of about two dollars. I gave it to him and he continued. “You’re passionate about tennis.” I nodded. “And you’ve been to Manchester, England.”

“Yes and no,” I said. This was the first wrong statement. I had won many tennis tournaments, but I had never been to Manchester.

He smiled with confidence and corrected himself, “You will soon go to Manchester.” And then he told me to give him a thousand rupees
—about twenty-five dollars. When I refused he repeated his demand, staring at me—practically through me—with that unblinking, hypnotic gaze.