A MONSTROUSLY TALL GIRL from Stanford with bright yellow hair comes to the door and asks if I am willing to answer questions for her sociology class. She knows my name, “Dr. Vivek Waldekar?” and even folds her hands in a creditable namaste. She has researched me, she knows my job-title and that I am an American citizen. She’s wearing shorts and a midriff-baring T-shirt with a boastful logo. It reads, “All This and Brains, Too.” She reminds me of an American movie star whose name I don’t recall, or the California Girl from an old song, as I had imagined her. I invite her in. I’ve never felt so much the South Asian man: fine-boned, almost dainty, and timid. My wife, Krithika, stares silently for several long moments, then puts tea water on.
Her name is Anya. She was born in Russia, she says. She has Russian features, as I understand them, a slight tilt to her cheeks but with light blue eyes and corn-yellow hair. When I walk behind her, I notice the top of an elaborate tattoo reaching up from underneath. She is a walking billboard of availability. She says she wants my advice, or my answers, as a successful South Asian immigrant on problems of adjustment and assimilation. She says that questions of accommodation to the u.s., especially to California, speak to her. And specifically South Asians, her honors project, since we lack the demographic residential densities of other Asians, or of Hispanics. We are sociological anomalies.
It is important to establish control early. It is true, I say, we do not swarm like bees in a hive. “Why do you criticize us for living like Americans?” I ask, and she apologizes for the tone of her question. I press on. “What is it we lack? Why do you people think there is something wrong with the way we live?”
She says, “I never suggested anything was wrong — ” She drops her eyes and reads from her notes.
“ — That there’s something defective in our lives?”
“Please, I’m so sorry.”
I have no handkerchief to offer.
Perhaps we have memories of overcrowded India, when everyone knew your business. I know where her question is headed: middle-class Indian immigrants do not build little Chinatowns or barrios because we are too arrogant, too materialist, and our caste and regional and religious and linguistic rivalries pull us in too many directions. She hangs her head even before asking the next question.
No, I say, there are no other South Asian families on my street. My next door neighbours are European, by which I mean nonspecifically white. I correct myself. “European” is an old word from my father’s India, where even Americans could be European. Across the street are Chinese, behind us a Korean.
That’s why I’m involved in sociology, she says, it’s so exciting. Sociology alone can answer the big questions, like where are we headed and what is to become of us? I offer a counter-argument; perhaps computer science, or molecular biology, or astronomy, I say, might answer even larger questions. “In the here and now,” she insists, “there is only sociology.” She is too large to argue with. She apologizes for having taken my name from the internal directory of the software company I work for. She’d been an intern last summer in our San Francisco office.
I say I am flattered to be asked big questions, since most days I am steeped in micro-minutiae. Literally: nanotechnology. I can feel Krithika’s eyes burning through me.
The following are my answers to her early questions: We have been in San Jose nearly eight years. I am an American citizen, which is the reason I feel safe answering questions that could be interpreted by more recent immigrants as intrusive. We have been married twenty years, with two children. Our daughter Pramila was born in Stanford University Hospital. Our son Jay was born in JJ Hospital, Bombay, seventeen years ago. When he was born I was already in California, finishing my degree and then finding a job and a house. My parents have passed away; I have an older brother, and several cousins in India, as well as Canada and the U.S. My graduate work took four years, during which time I did not see Krithika or my son. Jay and Krithika are still Indian citizens, although my wife holds the Green Card and works as a special assistant in Stanford Medical School Library. She will keep her Indian citizenship in the event of inheritance issues in India.
Do I feel my life is satisfactory, are the goals I set long ago being met? Anya is very persistent, and I have never been questioned by such a blue-eyed person. It is a form of hypnosis, I fear. I am satisfied with my life, most definitely. I can say with pride and perhaps a touch of vanity that we have preserved the best of India in our family. I have seen what this country can do, and I have fought it with every fibre of my being. I have not always been successful. The years are brief, and the forces of dissolution are strong.
Jay in particular is thriving. He has won two Junior Tennis Champion ships and maintains decent grades in a very demanding high school filled with the sons and daughters of computer engineers and Stanford professors. As a boy in Dadar, part of Bombay — sorry, Mumbai — I was much like him, except that my father could not offer access to top-flight tennis coaching. I lost a match to Sanjay Prabhakar, who went on to the Davis Cup. “How will I be worthy?” I had asked my father before going in. “You will never be worthy of Sanjay Prabhakar,” he said. “It is your fate. You are good, but he is better and he will always be better. It is not a question of moral worth.” I sold my racquet that day and have never played another set of tennis, even though even now I know I could rise to the top of my club ranks. I might even be able to beat my son, but I worry what that might do to him. I was forced to concentrate on academic accomplishment. In addition, public courts and available equipment in India twenty-five years ago left much to be desired.
Do I have many American friends? Of course. My closest friend is Al Wong, a Stanford classmate, now working in Cupertino. We socialize with Al and Mitzie at least twice a month. She means white Americans. Like yourself ? I ask, and she answers “not quite.” She means two-three-generation white Americans. Such people exist on our street, of course, and in our office, and I am on friendly terms with all of them. I tell her I have never felt myself the victim of any racial incident, and she says, I didn’t mean that. I mean instances of friendship, enduring bonds, non-professional alliances ... you know, friendship. You mean hobbies? I ask. The Americans seem to have many hobbies I cannot fully appreciate. They follow the sports teams, they go fishing and sailing and skiing.
In perfect frankness, I do not always enjoy the company of white Americans. They mean well, but we do not communicate on the same level. I do not see their movies or listen to their music, and I have never voted. Jay skis, and surfs. Jay is very athletic, as I have mentioned; we go to Stanford tennis matches. I cannot say that I have been in many American houses, nor they in mine, although Jay’s friends seem almost exclusively white. Jay is totally of this world. When I mention Stanford or Harvard, he says Santa Cruz, pops. He’s not interested in a tennis scholarship. He says he won the state championship because the dude from Torrance kept doublefaulting. Pramila’s friends are very quiet and studious, mostly Chinese and Indian. She is twelve and concentrates only on her studies and ice-skating. I am not always comfortable in her presence. I do not always understand her, or feel that she respects us.
We will not encourage Pramila to date. In fact, we will not permit it until she is finished with college. Then we will select a suitable boy. It will be a drawn-out process, I fear, but we are progressive people in regard to caste and regional origins. A boy from a good family with a solid education is all we ask. If Pramila were not a genius, I would think her retarded. When she’s not on the ice, she lurches and stumbles. Jay does not have a particular girlfriend. He says don’t even think of arranging a marriage for me. Five thousand years of caste-submission will end here, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
“So, you and your son go to Stanford to watch Mike Mahulkar?”
“Mike?” I must have blinked. “It is Mukesh,” I say. “My son models his tennis game on Mukesh Mahulkar. Some day Mukesh will be a very great tennis player.” Neither my son nor I would ever be able to score a point off Mukesh Mahulkar.
My father has been dead nearly twenty years. I think he died from the strain of arranging my marriage. Krithika’s parents never reconciled to my father’s modest income. In my strongest memory of him, he was coming from his bath. It was the morning of my marriage. His hair was dark and wet. We will never be worthy, he said. A year later, I was sharing a house with Al Wong and two other Indian guys. Jay was born that same year, but I was not able to go back for the birth, or for my father’s funeral services. Fortunately, I have an older brother. My father was Head Clerk in Maharashtra State Public Works Department. In his position, he received and passed on, or rejected, plans for large-scale building and reclamation projects. Anywhere in Asia, certainly anywhere in India in the past twenty years, such a position would generate mountains of black money. Men just like my father pose behind the façade of humble civil servant, living within modest salaries, dressed in kurta and pajama of rough khadi, with Bata sandals on their dusty feet. They would spend half an hour for lunch, sipping tea under a scruffy peepal. But in the cool hours of morning or evening, there would be meetings with shady figures and the exchange of pillow-thick bundles of stapled hundred-rupee notes. They would be pondering immense investments in apartment blocks and outlying farmhouses and purchasing baskets of gold to adorn their wives and daughters.
But Baba was one of the little folk of the great city, an honest man mired in universal graft. He went to office in white kurta. At lunch, he sat on a wall and ate street-food from pushcart vendors and read his Marathi paper. He came home to a bath and prayer, dinner and bed. Projects he rejected got built anyway, with his superiors’ approval. He was seen as an obstruction to progress, a dried-up cow wandering a city fly-over. So we never got the car-anddriver, the club memberships and air-conditioning. He retired on even less than his gazetted salary, before the Arab money and Bombay boom.
I suddenly remember Qasim, the Muslim man whose lunch cart provided tea and cigarettes and fried foods to the mspwd officewallahs. My father and Qasim enjoyed a thirty-year friendship without ever learning the names of one another’s children, or visiting each other’s houses, or even neighborhoods. Dadar and Mahim are different worlds. We never learned Qasim’s last name. But whenever I dropped in on my father on lunch or tea breaks, I would hear him and Qasim engaged in furious discussions over politics, Pakistan, and fatherhood. Qasim had four wives and a dozen children, many of them the same age, all of them dressed in white, carrying trays of water and tea. Qasim and Baba were friends. To me, they are the very model of friendship. You might find it alien. You might not call it friendship at all. If, as rarely happened, Qasim did not appear on a given day, my father would ask a Muslim in the office to inquire after his health. Once or twice in a year, when my father took leave to attend a wedding, a strange boy would appear at our door, asking after Waldekar-sahib. I’m certain my father expressed more of a heartfelt nature to Qasim than he ever did to his wife, or to me. In that, I am my father’s son.
“My father, too,” says the blue-eyed girl in the T-shirt. All This and Brains, Too. Suddenly, I understand its meaning, and I must have uttered a muted “ahhh!” and blushed. Breasts, not height and blondness. I feel a deep shame for her. Krithika reads the same words, but shows no comprehension. I have a bumper sticker: My Son Is Palos High School Student of the Month. When I put it on, my wife said I was inviting the evil eye. For that reason, we have not permitted newspaper access to Pramila. We are simple people. Our children consume everything. To pay for tennis and ice-skating lessons takes up all our cash. I could have bought a Stradivarius violin with what I’ve spent. When Pramila was ten years old, after a summer spent in Stanford’s Intensive Mathematics Workshop with the cream of the nation’s high school seniors, she wrote a paper on the Topology of Imaginary Binaries. It is published in a mathematical journal, which we do not display. I do not mention it, ever.
“My father says that if he’d stayed in Russia and never left his government job, he would be sitting on a mountain of bribes. Over here, he started a Russian deli on Geary Boulevard.”
“You have made a very successful transition to this country,” I say. All this. “I personally have great respect for the entrepreneurial model.”
She takes the compliment with a shy smile. “Appearances can lie, Dr. Waldekar,” she says.
Krithika brings out water and a plate of savories.
I am of the Stanford generation that built the Internet out of their garages. I knew those boys. They invited me to join, but I was a young husband and father, although my family was still in India waiting to come over, and I had a good, beginning-level job with PacBell. I would be ashamed to beg start-up money from banks or strangers. My friends said, well, we raised five million today, we’re on our way! And I’d think you’re twenty-five years old and five million dollars in debt? You’re on your way to jail! I have not been in debt a single day of my life, including the house mortgage. It all goes back to my father in frayed khadi, and three-rupee lunches under the dusty peepals.
“I notice an interesting response to my question,” she says. “When I asked if you’ve fulfilled your goals, you mentioned only that your son is very successful. What about you, Dr. Waldekar?”
Krithika breaks in, finally, “We also have a daughter.”
“I was coming to that,” I say.
“She is enrolled in a graduate level mathematics course,” says Krithika.
“That’s amazing!”
“She is the youngest person ever enrolled for credit in the history of Stanford. She is also a champion figure skater. My husband forgot to mention her, so I thought you might perhaps note that, if you have space.”
“I believe I mentioned she is very studious,” I say. Suddenly my wife forgets the evil eye.
Anya breaks off a bit of halwa.
I rise to turn off the central AC. The girl is underdressed for air conditioning, and I am disturbed by what I see happening with her breasts, under the boastful logo. They are standing out in points. Krithika returns to the kitchen.
“I am content, of course.” What else is there on this earth, I want to ask, than safeguarding the success of one’s children? What of her father, the Russian deli owner? Is he happy? What is happiness for an immigrant but the accumulation of visible successes? He cannot be happy, seeing what has happened to his daughter. Does the Russian have friends? Does he barge into American houses? Do Americans swarm around his? Who are his heroes? Barry Bonds, Terrell Owens, Tiger Woods, Jerry Rice? We share time on the same planet; that is all. We will see how much the Americans love their sports heroes if any of them tries to buy a house on their street. Mukesh Mahulkar is big and strong and handsome and he is good in his studies and I’m sure his parents are proud of him and don’t fear the evil eye. He’ll play professional tennis and make a fortune and he won’t spend it all on cars and mansions. He will invest wisely and he will be welcomed on any street in this country.
“My father works too hard. He’s already had two heart attacks. My mother says he smokes like a fish. Drinks like a chimney. He dumps sour cream on everything. Everything in his mouth is salty, fatty meat, and more meat, and cream, and cheese and vodka. Forgive the outburst.”
“We are vegetarian. We do not drink strong spirits.”
“So’s Mike. Veggie, I mean. He’s teaching me.”
“You mean Mukesh, the tennis player?”
“His name is Mike. He’s my boyfriend, Dr. Waldekar.”
The ache I feel at the mention of a boyfriend is like the phantom pain from a lost limb. If I could even imagine a proper companion for this Russian girl, he would be as white and smooth as a Greek sculpture, built on the scale of Michelangelo’s David. The thought that it is a Mumbai boy who runs his hands over her body, under those flimsy clothes, makes my fingers run cold.
“I might as well come out with it, Dr. Waldekar,” she says. “We’ve broken up. His parents hate my guts.”
Good for them, I think. Maybe you should dress like a proper young lady. I knew a Mahulkar boy in Dadar. I knew others in it, but no Mahulkars of my generation in the Bay Area. So many have come. Given my early advantage, the opportunities I turned down, I am a comparative failure.
“This is my honors project, but ... it’s personal, too. I love India and Indians, I love the discipline of Indians. No group of immigrants has achieved so much, in so little time, with such ease and harmony. I love their pride and dignity. I even love it that they hate me. I can respect it.” She is smiling, but I don’t know if I should smile with her and nod in agreement, or raise an objection. She might be a good sociologist, but there is much she is missing in the realm of psychology. So she goes on, and I don’t interrupt.
“But what I don’t love is that Mike won’t stand up to them, for me. You know what his father said? He said American girls are good for practice, until we find you a proper bride. When Mike told me that, we laughed about it. I’m friendly with his sister and I said to her, your game’s a little rusty. Think you need some practice? and we laughed and laughed. Mike said he’d show me Mumbai, and I said I’d take him to Moscow. He’s twenty-two years old, but the minute his father said to stop seeing me, he stopped. One day we’re playing tennis, or at the beach or he’s cooking Indian vegetarian and I’m learning, and then, nothing. Nothing.” She lets herself go, drops her head into the basin of her hands, and sobs. It is a posture I, too, am familiar with. Krithika rushes in from the kitchen, stops, frowns, then goes back inside. I will be questioned later: what did I do, say, what didn’t I do, didn’t say? She will suspect some misbehaviour.
So, I think, Mahulkar has found a bride for his son. This is very good news. Who could it be? Why hadn’t I heard that the famous Mukesh Mahulkar was getting married? It means there is hope for every Indian father with a son like mine.
“Please, take water,” I say. I would be tempted to hold her, or pat her back, but my arms might not reach. It would be awkward, and perhaps misinterpreted. Now that she has pitched forward, I see deep into her bosom; she has a butterfly tattoo on one breast, well below the separation-line. A girl this big, and crying, in my living room, wearing such a T-shirt, has brought chaos from the street into our life.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “That was inexcusable. You must think I came under false pretenses. Mike’s getting married in Mumbai in three weeks. It’s very hard, to be told, without warning, without explanation, that you’re just ... unworthy.”
She has a beautiful smile. It’s as though she had not been crying at all, or knew no sadness, or had a Russian childhood and a father with a mouthful of meat and vodka. I will ask around and discover the bride’s name.
I stand. “I must ask you quietly to leave. I must pick up my daughter from practice. My son will be home soon.” I do not want her defiling my house, spreading her contagion into our sterile environment. She has no interest in successful immigrants, or in me. “I have no special Bombay advice to offer.” When I open the door, my fingers brush the white flesh of her back, just above the tattoo. I don’t think she even feels it. She says only, “you have been very kind and hospitable. Please forgive me.”
I could not go home for my father’s funeral. I did not see my son until he was four years old and had already bonded with my wife’s family. I think he still treats me like an intruder. So does my wife. It has pained me all these years that I permitted my studies and other activities to take precedence over family obligations. I have been trying to atone for my indiscretions all these years.
In three of the four years I shared a house with Al Wong and the Mehta boy who went back and a Parsi boy who married an American girl and stayed, I remained steadfast to my research. I got a job at PacBell, where they immediately placed me in charge of a small research cell with people like myself, debt-free, security-minded team players. Suddenly, I had money. I bought a car and a small bungalow in Palo Alto, suitable for wife and child. No one in the group knew I was already married, and a father. We were all just in our twenties, starting out in the best place, in the best of times.
In my small group there was an American girl, a Berkeley graduate. Her name was Paula, called Polly. Pretty Polly, the boys liked to joke, which embarrassed her. On Fridays, our group would join with others for some sort of party. I would allow myself a beer or two, since carbonation lessened the taint of alcohol. Those sorts of restaurants made vegetarianism very difficult; I was admired for my discipline. Polly was naturally less restrained than I, especially after sharing a few pitchers of beer, a true California girl from someplace down south. Watching closely, I could gauge the moment when a quiet, studious girl, very reliable and hard-working, would ask for a cigarette, then go to the bathroom, come back to the table, and sit next to someone new. She sat next to me. One night she said, “You’re a very handsome man, Dr. Waldekar.” No one had ever told me that, and to look fondly at one’s reflection in a mirror is to invite the evil eye. “Take me home,” she said. “I don’t know where you live,” I answered. She punched me on the arm. “Ha, ha,” she said, “funny, too.”
It’s that transformation, not the flattery, that got to me. All week in the office, she was a flattened presence. She totally ignored me, and I, her. I imagined she was one of the good girls, living with her parents.
The passion that arises from workplace familiarity is hotter than hell. It is hell, because one must hide certain feelings, erase recurrent images, must put clothes back on a girl you’ve been with through the night. Above all, it must be secret. On Friday nights, she must not sit next to me. “May I call you Vivek, Dr. Waldekar?” she would ask. After the first time, I told myself it was the beer, but I knew it wasn’t. The sexual acts that had resulted in the birth of my son back in India, a boy whose pictures I now had to hide, had seemed, in comparison to Polly, a continuation of tennis practice, slamming a ball against a wall and endlessly returning it. She took drugs, expensive drugs, and I was helpless to stop her, or complain.
“Go to her, if that will make you happy,” says Krithika. “I know your secrets.”
“What foolishness.”
“You were staring at her. You shamed me. You behaved disgustingly.”
“If you were interested in the facts you would know I threw her out.”
“Remember,” she mumbles, “I get half.”
I reach out for her, but she pulls away. This is the woman, the situation, I left Polly for. Eventually, I left PacBell because of her, which has worked out well for me. Polly left California because of me. Al Wong is the only person I confessed it to; I think he’s mentioned it to Mitzie because of the ways she sometimes scrutinizes me. What do you think of her, Vivek? she’ll ask me, as though I have a special interest in attractive women, instead of Al. Maybe she’s mentioned it to Krithika. The promiscuous exchange of intimacies, which passes for friendship in America, is a dangerous thing. It is the sad nature of the terms of a marriage contract that the strongest evidence of commitment is also the admission of flagrant unfaithfulness.
One night fourteen years ago, I went up to sfo to meet Krithika and Jay who were arriving in my life after a thirty-hour flight from Bombay. I got there early and pressed myself close to the gate, but Sikhs from the Central Valley, rough fellows with large families and huge signboards, pushed me aside and called me names. It was a time of deep tensions between Hindus and Sikhs. If I had stood my ground, they threatened to stamp me into the floor. The Indian passengers poured through, fanning out in every direction, pushing carts stacked high with crates and boxes. Waiting families ducked under the barriers to join them, and I waited and waited, but no wife, no child. The terminal is always crowded, but the number of Indians diminished, to be replaced by Mexicans and Koreans. Perhaps she was having visa problems, I thought, or the bags had been lost.
After two hours, just as I’d decided to go back to my empty house, I heard my name on the public announcement. Please pick up the courtesy phone, Vivek Waldeker. Your wife wants you to know that since you were not here to meet them, she and her child have gone to a safe address provided by a fellow passenger, and she will contact you in the morning.
Two days later, I got that call. Perhaps you forgot you have a wife and son, she said. Perhaps you no longer remember me. She has remained on friendlier terms with that generous family who took her home on her first night in America than she ever has with me.
At four a.m. when the streets are dark and only the dogs are awake, the rattling of food carts begins. Barefoot men and boys dressed in white khadi push their carts heavy with oil, propane, and dozens of spiced tufts of chickpea batter ready for frying, all prepared during the night by wives and daughters. Each cart is lit by a naphtha lamp; each man fans out to his corner of the city near big office buildings, under his own laburnam, ashoka or peepal tree. Qasim died one morning as he pushed his cart through the streets of Mahim. His son Waqus appeared the next day, with his father’s picture and a page of Urdu pasted to the cart’s plastic shield. Even Hindus knew what it meant. My father took his retirement a month later — his superiors were truly sorry to see him go, since he was the obstruction that enriched everyone around him. He arranged my marriage, I received my Stanford scholarship and went to America, leaving a pregnant wife behind. After three years of bad health, Baba died. And I didn’t attend the funeral services because I was trying to please an American girl who thought starting a fire in my father’s body was too gross a sacrilege to contemplate.