India Calling (eBook)

Dreams As my flight swooped down toward Bombay, an elderly Indian man leaned over and asked for help with his landing card. We started talking, and he asked why I was visiting India. Actually, I'm moving to India, I told him. His eyes bulged. They darted to my American passport on the tray table and then back up at me. 'We're all trying to go that way,' he said after a moment, gesturing toward the plane's tail and, beyond it, the paradisiacal West. 'You,' he added, as if seeking to alert me to a ticketing error, 'you're going this way?' And so it began. I was twenty-one and fresh out of college. My parents had left India in the 1970s, when the West seemed paved with possibility and India seemed paved with potholes. And now, a quarter century after my father first arrived as a student in America, I was flying east to make a new beginning in the land they had left. The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it. They had begun their American lives in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, called Shaker Heights. It was a sprawling neighborhood of brick and Tudor houses, set on vast yards, with the duck-strewn ponds, meandering lanes, and ample sidewalks that had lured millions of Americans into suburbia. In Shaker Heights the rituals of my parents' youth quickly confronted new ones. Suburban Cleveland was not a place where one could easily cling to the Old Country or take refuge in multiculturalism. So they dug in, assimilated, gave my sister and me childhoods with all the American fixin's. Making snowmen with carrot noses. Washing our Toyota Cressida on Sundays, me in diapers working with a watering can. Playing catch with a vinyl baseball mitt. Trying in vain to build a tree house. Catching possums in baited cages. Meandering through summer block parties, where the rules of normal life seemed suspended: the roads were emptied of cars, fire engines rode up and down and could be boarded at will, there were more bubbles and balloons than your cheeks could blow. Shaker Heights was a warm and generous place. Family was the only community that had mattered in India, in America, my parents discovered the community itself: the people who shared recipes, gave them rides, taught them the idioms they didn't know, brought them food when they were sick. It was perhaps the grace of this welcome that inoculated them against the defensiveness and nostalgia that so often infect immigrants. They still loved India, but they never looked back. They spoke often of 'Indian values,' but these were abstractions meant to suffuse our being rather than commandments to live in this way or that. They accepted and came to savor the American way of life. And yet we were unmistakably Indian, too. Indianness in those days was like a secret garden to which the society around us lacked access. You needn't have gone there if you didn't want to, but it was there, a hidden world of mysteries. We had a past that others didn't, we had our little secrets of what we ate and wore when we attended a family wedding, we had dinner table stories about places and people from an almost mythical past. We had history, history being the only thing that America's abundant shores could not offer. We were raised with a different idea of family: family as the fount of everything, family as more important than friends or schools or teachers could ever be. We were raised with an Indian docility: we didn't hit or fight, we didn't play contact sports such as football or hockey but stuck to swimming and tennis. We didn't--not then and still not today--call our parents by their first names or curse in their presence. We got paid for losing teeth but...