I was born and raised in a Hindu household in Lucknow—a city of four million people in northern India. My hometown is famous for poetry and politeness, and its historical buildings—built by both British and Mughal rulers. I grew up right in the middle of the city and lived in small apartments in compact neighborhoods. Most of my friends lived within a few hundred meters of my home. There were few home phones and no cell phones. If I wanted to see any of my friends, I had to go to their house. They did the same when they wanted to meet me. There was always something going on. A beggar knocking on the door. A vendor hawking a cartful of potatoes. A neighbor asking for sugar. Loud devotional music playing from giant loudspeakers in Shiva’s temple across the street. Privacy was something I got only when I was in bed with a sheet over my face. Every once in a while, looking for some peace, I walked or rode my bicycle to the old city and sat for hours on the steps of one of the centuries-old mausoleums.
My father came from a poor family, but he had worked hard to get a college education. His mother had never gone to school and his father was a small-time farmer.
My mother’s family was rich. Her father, my Nana, was born in 1926. He was a wealthy landowner who administered several villages under the British rule in India. He spent his growing-up years in a British boarding school in a hill resort town in North India, and came home to his family only during summer vacations. Living in an English environment, he acquired a lot of English mannerisms and tastes, and an English accent. He liked to hunt with his entourage of servants and often drove to the country for hunting expeditions.
My mother often told me this story:
It was a balmy June afternoon in 1955. Your Nana was out with his entourage to hunt for geese. Two men walked behind him carrying birds that he had already shot with his .22, and a couple of people walked ahead of him. They walked for miles in the jungle and kept hunting until it got dark. He took position one more time to get his last kill of the day. He hid behind the bushes and aimed at the geese. The gun went off, but he didn’t get the bird. The flutter of the wings and the sound of a loud bang scared a wild bull, which was hiding in the pond. He charged out in a state of panic, keeping his head low, pointing his long horns straight ahead. Your Nana, who wasn’t expecting it, and was still kneeling on the ground behind the bush, couldn’t get up fast enough to escape, and came in the direct line of the bull’s rampage. The bull trampled over his body, injuring his throat badly, and left him in a pool of blood.
His men, who had scampered away in an effort to avoid the bull, returned to see him lying on the ground, unconscious. They carried him to his car and drove him to a hospital, about thirty miles away. Doctors got to work. After an eight-hour surgery, your Nana came out of the emergency room. Doctors said that he was lucky to be alive since most of his throat was cut open, and he had lost a lot of blood. They told his men to take special care of him and only give him liquid foods for the first week.
After four weeks or so, he went to the doctor for his checkup, and got the stitches removed. He looked at himself in the mirror, and felt the scar that ran down his jaw, all the way to the base of his throat. He was ready to hunt again. His people set off with him to find the animal. This time he carried bigger rifles, the ones that he used to kill alligators with. They arrived at the pond and saw the bull submerged, with his hump sticking out. Your Nana gave half a smile and extended his arm towards the man who held the guns, asking for the rifle, one with a double barrel. He loaded it, aimed at the animal, which had no clue what was about to happen, and waited to see its reaction. It raised its head lazily to look at the people staring at him, but didn’t move.
Your Nana shot a couple of feet away from the bull, in the middle of the pond. The sound and the sudden ripple in the water caused the animal to run for shelter. As soon as it got out, he fired again. This time he didn’t shoot to scare the animal, but to kill it. The bullet hit it in the neck, pretty much in the same spot where it had struck him. The large bull was pushed backward by the force of the bullet. It staggered and tumbled back into the pond. The water turned red. A smile full of content swam across your Nana’s face as he handed the gun back to the man standing next to him. The revenge was over.
My mother, who grew up in Faizabad, a smaller city eighty miles from Lucknow, often showed me black-and-white photos from her childhood, including her father’s cars. I tried to imagine her life when she was a seven-year-old kid wearing a knee-length dress, playing hopscotch, skipping rope, running around her yard. When she was around twenty-four years old, my Nana put out an advert for his daughter’s marriage in the Times of India. He was looking for a suitable boy for her—someone educated and employed. My father had taken out an ad for himself in the same newspaper. He was looking for an educated and beautiful girl.
He had a stable job, and my mother was the prettiest woman he had seen. The marriage was quickly arranged. Except for the fact that both my parents were high-caste Hindus, there was not much in common between them. My mother was a devout woman, and my father didn’t believe in idol worshipping. My mother followed cricket with a passion, and my father didn’t understand the game. My father saw his first Bollywood film at age eighteen. My mother knew the actors like the back of her hand. She grew up in a large bungalow in a city, and my father in a mud house in a dirt-poor village. She went to school in a Vauxhall car. My father walked miles, often barefoot, to an open-air school. She played with her pet Alsatian dogs; my father milked and herded goats. Her father had imported, in 1950s, an Electrolux refrigerator from Sweden so the family could drink cold water during hot months. My father had used a metal bucket to pull water out of a well.
The biggest conflict between my parents was that my father wanted my mother to live in his village to take care of his aging parents. Most of their quarrels went like this:
“I want to send our kids to English-medium, private schools.”
“I know you want to turn them into snobs like your own father.”
“I just want them to do well and have a good future.”
“I didn’t even have chairs in my school.” My father thought anything better than an open-air school where you didn’t have to sit on the floor was a good thing. My parents ended up staying in the city.
Because my mother had gone through so much resistance and criticism from my father and her in-laws for educating us in the city schools, she was extra harsh with her kids. She had a point to prove and she didn’t accept any excuse from us for not doing well.
One time, when I was in grade seven or maybe eight, my mother came to the parent-teacher meeting to discuss my performance with many of my teachers. She wasn’t impressed with what my teachers had to say about my grades. She listened to all of them, but didn’t say anything to me there. When we walked out of the school, she said to me, with fury in her eyes, “If you don’t end up fixing punctured tires by the side of the road, I’ll change my name.”
I looked down.
“You’ll be like Ramu, the puncturewallah, who didn’t graduate from high school. If you get lucky you might become a newspaper delivery man like Sunil.” Although she yelled at all three of her kids, she seemed to be most invested in my future.
As years went by, my father also became interested in my education. At some point he realized that I could provide him support—financial, emotional, and physical. I turned twenty-two around the same time that I finished my bachelor’s degree. It was an important age. My parents, aunts, and uncles often asked whether I was going to get a job. If I wanted to get a job, then what job? If I wanted to continue studying, another degree must come with the promise of a job, a career. For the first time in my life, I felt I was under pressure. Everyone looked at me as if they were expecting something from me. Even my neighbors asked me, as I walked by, what my plans were.
I, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. If anything, I wanted to travel. I wanted to get on a train and explore India. India is huge and diverse, and I knew that there was a lot to see. So far, I could count the number of places I had traveled on my two hands. I wanted to travel to the southern parts of India, which are quite different from where I grew up. I wanted to learn another Indian language, immerse myself in a different culture, and eat different kinds of foods. I had once casually presented this idea to my folks and they had looked at me as if I were out of my mind. They had in their minds something very different for me. Two things were required for me to be able to do what I wanted to do: money and my parents’ consent. Not obeying your parents was a surefire way of earning a bad reputation among friends and family. I had very little money and no approval from them.
During the first year of getting my bachelor’s degree, I had lied to my parents that I was going to spend a week with my friend in a neighboring town. I actually went to Nainital—a popular hill station—about three hundred miles from Lucknow. I was only nineteen then. My friend, a son of a wealthy bureaucrat, had arranged free food and lodging for us in a government guesthouse. I only had to come up with a few hundred rupees for train tickets and food along the way. We took the train to Haldwani, a small town and the closest railway station to our destination. There we boarded a government bus, which soon began its ascent on the narrow roads that snaked up and around the mountainous terrain. The higher we climbed the cooler it got. Clouds floated below us. It was October. Bobby and I arrived in Nainital around six in the evening. A couple of hours earlier and several thousand feet below, it had been hot and muggy. When we got off the bus, a cold draft hit my face. It was dusk and there was still a hint of blue in the sky. Below it were tall mountains with shimmering lights. Right in the middle was the lake, reflecting the lights from the mountains. I immediately fell in love with the place.
While I was gone, my father and mother found out that I had lied and gone to Nainital. There was no way for them to track me down; there were no cell phones, and very few people had home phones. They had asked around and gotten in touch with a few friends of mine who knew about my whereabouts. They couldn’t do anything except to wait. When I returned, my family looked at me with mixed emotions. My father lowered his head. He didn’t say anything, but he seemed both happy and disappointed—happy that I was back, sad that I had left without telling him. My mother looked angry. She told me how much my father had harassed her for what I had done. “This is what you get when you give your kids English education,” he had repeatedly told her.
I had gotten away with it when I was nineteen, but now I was twenty-two. They wanted me to hurry up and figure what I wanted to do next. I wasn’t alone. All my classmates and friends were busy planning or had already decided what they wanted to do. Since my bachelor’s degree was in commerce, the obvious thing to go for was an MBA. In 1995, a postgraduate degree came with a lot of prestige and promise. There weren’t many institutions that offered an MBA program. The ones that did were very hard to get into. Quite a few of my father’s friends suggested I should prepare for the entrance exam. I didn’t think I was cut out to be a corporate honcho, but I didn’t know enough to really know.
Growing up, when I was seven or maybe eight, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “a singer.” When I was ten, I said I wanted to be a musician. I kept a harmonica under my pillow every night. Around the same time, I also aspired to be a painter. Sitting by the window, painting dark clouds and green trees was my favorite pastime during hot months. My parents encouraged me, or at least didn’t laugh at my ideas when I was that age, probably thinking I’d grow out of my fantasies. If I’d seen a way to become a singer and earn a livelihood, I might have pursued that passion. But my singing talent never made it out of the bathroom. I continued playing harmonica as an amateur, though.
So, I did what seemed like the best idea at the time. I applied for business school. The results for the exam were declared soon, but I didn’t have the courage to look at the list myself. I sent my younger brother to see whether my name was on the list. He came back with a blank expression. Looking at his face, I knew I hadn’t been chosen. He walked into the house without saying anything. No one said anything. Then he jumped on me and yelled, “You made it!”
It was a big deal for my family, not only because I had been selected from a large pool of thousands of candidates, but also because my parents had to come up with a great sum of money to pay the fees. Back in the early nineties in India, an MBA was a surefire way to get a highly paid job and a lot of prestige. My mother was ready to sell all her jewelry to make sure I could go to school. My father was not 100 percent sure that was a good idea. He had to marry off my sister. He had some savings, which he had planned to use for her wedding.
My family thought about it for several days. We had about a week to decide. My father decided to borrow some money and to dig into his lifelong savings. I felt bad, almost guilty, that he had to do that. I felt that my family was going through this only because my name was among the list of selected candidates. It was a big strain for my folks, but as time went on, they seemed happy about their decision. During the two years that I was in business school, they never stopped talking about me to people.
When I started the program, I met students from all parts of India. This was a first for me. Everyone I had gone to school with until now, I had known since childhood. We had all gone to the same secondary school, same coaching classes, same university. In business school, I met people who had very different educational backgrounds. Folks with degrees in engineering, law, education, sociology, and history. Some of them were quite a bit older than me and had several years of work experience. There were engineers who wanted a business degree to advance in their career. There were schoolteachers who wanted to change careers. And there were people who wanted to get an MBA so they could manage their family business or start their own venture. I had never studied with such a diverse group of people. I wasn’t sure if I belonged there. I wasn’t sure if I could handle the pressure to perform.
The competition, from the day one, was fierce. Almost every other day, we had to present a paper before the class of sixty students. I found it nerve-wracking to stand up and speak and answer everyone’s questions, knowing that 20 percent of our grades depended on how well we presented our paper. This was in 1995. Internet hadn’t reached India yet. Wikipedia was years away from being created. We worked hard to conduct our research on various topics. One of our classmates had a personal computer and a printer at her house and everyone hated her for that. She was the one who typed and printed her papers and assignments. Most of us wrote with our own hands. It cost a lot of money to go to a shop to get our work typed and printed.
I couldn’t keep up with the assignments. No matter how hard I worked, I was always behind on something. One day I came home, overwhelmed with work and pressure, and lay on the bed. My mother asked me, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“Can I quit?”
“Quit what?” she said with a curious face.
“MBA.”
She looked at me for a few seconds and said, “Can I slap your face?” The conversation ended.
She knew I was working hard and struggling. She couldn’t help me with work at school, but wanted to make sure I was healthy. She made me drink a glass of milk every night. It was her way of supporting me, providing me strength, mental and physical.
I carried on with the program, but my heart wasn’t there. I couldn’t bring myself to fall in love with any of the courses. Oftentimes while attending a lecture in organizational behavior or industrial marketing, or statistics, I thought, “Why?” Sitting next to some of my friends in class, I watched them frenetically jotting down every word that came out of the professor’s mouth. What was I missing, I wondered?
In the two years I was in business school, I was gone from nine in the morning to six at night, and when I got home I was drowned in homework. I didn’t have much time to hang out with my friends in the building. I had stopped playing cricket. This caused a lot of my friends to think I was avoiding them, or I didn’t want to associate with them. People started to behave differently with me. My friends envied me. Kids and teenagers looked up to me. They came to me to get advice about their careers. They wanted me to help them write essays in English. Mothers talked about me, smiled and gave me a flutter of their hands, leaning on the railings of their balconies. “He’s the one who got selected in an MBA program,” I heard them saying. This made my parents happy. For them, this was worth all the money they were spending on me.
I finished my degree. Everyone in my class wanted a corporate job, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t envision myself wearing a necktie to work every day. I spent several months figuring out what I wanted to do. And, one day, I met a media consultant from England who thought I would make a good radio journalist. He offered me a job in the BBC World Service in my hometown. I had grown up listening stories about how my grandfather and my mother listened to BBC on their crackly radios in the 1950s. I had never imagined working for the company.
After I’d worked for a month, the accountant gave out monthly paychecks to all the employees. My turn came and he called me to his desk, and made me sign on a sheet of paper. Then he handed me the check. The amount on it said fifteen thousand rupees, three hundred dollars, just as big as my father’s monthly wage. I thanked the accountant and moved away from his desk. I came out of the office and checked to see whether the check was really for me. For someone who had spent almost a quarter of a century living on an allowance of five hundred rupees, ten dollars a month, a paycheck that was as big as my dad’s—who supported a family of five—was hard to come to terms with.
I was excited and didn’t know what to do with it. Several outrageous ideas of how to spend it flashed through my mind. I went to the restroom several times that day to take the check out, feel with my fingers how my name was printed on it. I tried to contain my emotions, calm down, and not go crazy.
The day at work came to an end. I reached home, ran up the three flights of stairs without stopping, pushed the doorbell and held it down until someone answered. My dad opened the door and saw me standing there, panting. He asked whether I was okay. Since I was out of breath, I didn’t say anything, but showed him my paycheck. He looked at it, and gestured to me to come in to the living room. My mother and sister were sitting on the couch against the wall, watching the TV in the corner. Right next to the TV were two chairs, beside a settee. I sat down on one of the chairs, next to my father. Slanted sunrays entered through the large windows behind the settee and brought my face into focus.
I smiled and exclaimed, “I can buy the new Honda motorbike now.”
My dad took the check out of my hands and said, “Are you stupid? You want to buy a motorcycle? Who’s going to pay off the loan I took out for your MBA? Who’s going to pay the mortgage for the land we bought? Who’s going to pay for your sister’s wedding?”
After he fired several questions at me, he calmed down and looked at me. I looked at my mother, my sister, my brother, and then back at my father, as if they were the audience in a court watching me, the accused, and my father, the judge. When I didn’t respond to any of his questions, he answered all of them with just one word: “You.”
I was back to getting a monthly allowance—my dad felt generous and raised it to one thousand rupees, twenty dollars, since I was earning now. He took most of my money every month and asked me to inform him dutifully of any raises or bonuses that I might get.
The fact that my dad owned my paycheck every month didn’t make a huge difference in my lifestyle or responsibilities. I was still my parents’ little kid—I just had a job now and instead of taking money from them, I was giving money to them.
They never thought of it as a great favor. They saw it as a role reversal—they had taken care of me for twenty-some years, and now it was my turn. The only problem I had with the arrangement was that I was not learning how to run a house or a family. I was contributing my salary, but I didn’t have to take on full responsibility; other people still paid bills, bought groceries, cooked food, repaired the car. My parents did some of these things. Sometime we hired help. My responsibilities were simply to go to work and come home.
Soon after I got the job, my father’s colleagues and friends started showing up at our door with marriage proposals for me. My father told them that he was in no rush to marry me off, but his friends didn’t stop coming.
One evening when I returned from work, I found a potbellied, bespectacled middle-aged man sitting in our living room. I knew exactly why he was there. I avoided him, but my father got me to come and sit with them. Reluctantly, I joined them. The man asked me questions about how much money I was making, and if I was going to get a raise soon. Then he pulled out a picture from his shirt pocket and said, “This is Smita. My daughter.”
I looked at the picture with a fine balance of interest and disinterest and then rested it on the coffee table. Then he gave me a piece of paper. “This is her bio data,” he said. I was absolutely sure in my mind that I wouldn’t marry his daughter. I looked at the bio data, a resume, and smiled, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything either. After a few minutes of awkward silence, I left the room.
This became a routine. Every other day, I would find some man sitting in our home waiting for me. When it got to be too much, I called home from work to see if anyone was there to meet me. If someone was there, I would stay out longer.
While my parents were busy looking for a nice upper-caste Hindu girl, I was trying to enjoy unmarried life as much I could. One of my favorite pastimes was to walk up and down the entire length of Hazratganj—a half-mile stretch of a street with swanky restaurants, movie theaters, libraries, and shops that sold clothes, perfume, handicrafts, books, and music. Every day after sundown beautiful ladies walked in the corridors of Hazratganj, leaving a trail of scent that caused men to forget what they had come to shop for.
In Hazratganj, above an historic theater, the Mayfair, there was a British library that I had been a member of for as long as I could remember. It cost less than eight dollars for an entire year’s membership, and had books on a variety of subjects, videotapes about life in the UK, and audiotapes of several British radio dramas. My favorite was a radio comedy program, The Goon Show. I would put on the headphones, close my eyes, and pretend that I was not in Lucknow, but in 1960s London, surrounded by a bunch of crazy Englishmen speaking Cockney.
One day, on one of my visits to the library, I saw a brown-haired, green-eyed girl. Intrigued, I walked up to her and introduced myself and asked where she was from.
“America,” she said. Her name was Holly. It was rare to see Westerners in Lucknow. I was surprised to learn that Holly was planning to stay in Lucknow for a year. I invited her for a cup of tea, to which she agreed.
Holly told me she was from western Pennsylvania. I had never heard of Pennsylvania before. I tried to imagine the place as something from the scenes in the American movies—Home Alone, Miami Blues, Face Off, Blue Lagoon, and a few other Hollywood flicks—that I had watched at the Mayfair. My knowledge of America was limited.
Holly had just finished her undergrad from a liberal arts college in Ohio. She was spending a year in Lucknow on a Fulbright scholarship doing research on history. She wanted to learn about the city, its culture, and the language. I took her to my favorite chai shop, which was quite basic, but had delicious chai and was unpretentious. We sat on wooden benches under squeaky ceiling fans and drank chai that was served in tiny glass mugs. I liked her laidback attitude. She seemed like a girl I could spend a lot of time with.
A few days later I took her home to meet my parents, sister, and brother.
My mother, a gregarious woman, hit it off with Holly from day one. Holly started showing up at my home quite often. She became friends with my family. She was staying in a girls-only hostel in Lucknow and had to be back in her room before eight. She didn’t like that, since we liked to hang out in the evenings. Our meetings became more frequent and she decided to move to a different place in Lucknow, a place that didn’t have any time limitation. I found her a place, a room in a bungalow that was central and safe. A friend—a septuagenarian woman—owned it, and that meant I could come and go as I pleased. In the new place we had more freedom and we slowly became more than friends.
Her year in India came to an end and it was time for her to return. She didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want her to go. We were not sure what to do. Holly decided to go back to the United States with a heavy heart. She told me she wanted to see whether she still had the same feelings for me from ten thousand miles away.
It was quite hard for both of us to be apart, but I think it was harder for me, at least in the beginning, since I was still in the same place, the same city, and there were so many things that reminded me of her absence, the void. The chai shop, the bungalow she lived in, and several other places where we spent time.
When she returned to the States, we started chatting on Hotmail messenger. The Internet was a new thing in India in the late nineties. Cybercafes were a new business and there were often long lines to use a computer. I became a regular customer at the Internet cafe close to my home. To make sure I had a computer to myself, I often got there a several minutes before I was supposed to start chatting. When Holly came online, we chatted for hours. Once in a while, we called each other, but we mostly relied on the Internet since it was much cheaper. During this time, Holly had been accepted into a doctoral program in anthropology at the University of Virginia. As time passed, and because both of us didn’t know when exactly we were going to meet again, we often wondered about where our relationship was going.
Then about a year later, when we were chatting, she surprised me.
“Can you handle this?’ the words appeared on the little square box on my computer screen.
“What?” I asked.
“I am coming to Lucknow again! This time on a different scholarship,” she typed.
I quickly logged off and called her number in America. I am not sure exactly how much my bill was that night, but it burned a big hole in my pocket. It was worth it, though. I couldn’t wait to see her again.
When she arrived this time, we decided to get engaged. When I proposed the idea to my parents, they were taken aback at first. This is not what they had planned for me. They had never thought that I would bring a foreign bride home, but it didn’t completely shock them since they had witnessed my relationship with Holly unfold. Apart from the fact that she wasn’t my parents’ idea of a typical bahu, an Indian daughter-in-law, they had grown to like her.
Holly and I married in a traditional Hindu wedding. I tried to keep the wedding small by Indian standards. Only 150 people were invited, instead of 1,000.
We went to a beach for our honeymoon in eastern India, on the Bay of Bengal. It was there that I saw the ocean for the first time. We stayed in a hotel right on the beach. We walked for hours on the seashore, drew a heart on the sand with our names in it, and drank lots of coconut water. But, soon it was time to be separated again. She had to return to America, and I didn’t want to leave my job. I was torn between the choices: keeping my job or joining my wife in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A lot of my friends and colleagues told me I would have no problem finding a similar job in the United States. I spoke English well and had BBC World Service on my CV. Some others said, “Be prepared. America can also be a rude shock.”
I quit my job in India and bought a one-way ticket to Washington, DC.