“This is so cool,” said Holly, looking at the shiny pressure cooker I had brought for her from India. Her exclamation of the word cool took me by surprise. There was something about Holly’s reaction, the way she said it, juxtaposed against the Indian-ness of the pressure cooker, that caught me off guard. I had never heard her speak like that.
In India, Indians often commented how Indian her English was. Now I began to notice her accent. It sounded harsher than I remembered. Her Ts were more like s and her Rs sounded grating to my ear. I wasn’t a big fan of the way she said “man” at the end or the beginning of nearly every sentence. And often she said “man” with nothing before and nothing after it. There was something belittling about it, but I wasn’t completely sure why I didn’t like it. The innocence and the sweetness of Holly’s voice, her demure manner that I had fallen in love with, were missing.
I was getting strange vibes from her. She wasn’t acting the same as she had in India. This caused me to be more uptight around her than I had ever been. I was expecting her to behave like the Holly I had known in my country. I was aware that that might not be the case, but I also expected her to be a little more supportive than I thought she was. I knew she was the only person I could ask questions, and I had thousands of them. I had stepped into a different world, literally different, and I felt like I needed help at every step, and for the most mundane of things. I asked her about which shampoo to use in the shower—there were four different kinds and all of them belonged to different people. I asked her about the TV channels since there were a hundred more than on my cable network in India. I asked her about where to get a haircut and about everything else I didn’t know. She gave me curt answers, and her tone was often dismissive.
This was the first time I was going to live in a city where I didn’t know anyone except Holly. This was the first time I was going to live in a house that didn’t belong to my parents or me. There was nothing in the house that was familiar to me—the smells, the sounds, the layout. I couldn’t move without letting everyone in the house know that I was moving. The floor squeaked every time I yawned. The walls smelled like coffee—no trace of cloves and cardamom. It felt as if no one had ever boiled a pot of chai in the house. Before this, I had never been inside a kitchen that didn’t have yellow turmeric stains from cooking daal.
I wondered about a lot of items in the house. The array of wine and liquor bottles—which were all sharaab, alcohol, to me. I didn’t know who consumed so much alcohol. My father had been an alcoholic at some point, but even then he drank only one bottle a day. Why were there twenty bottles in a house of three people? I would find out soon.
Within days of arriving in that house, I began to feel unwelcome. Not so much by Holly, but by the other housemates. They were not thrilled to have another person living in the house. There were three bedrooms in the house, and according to them, there was only enough room for three members, not four. Holly had told me this so I tried to confine myself to our room. I thought it would help if I didn’t have to show my face to them. I became so conscious of myself that I stopped making chai or cooking parathas in the kitchen. I didn’t want the smell of Indian food to remind them of my presence. I even removed my black hairs from the wet walls after my shower.
Holly often left me in the room and went to talk to folks downstairs. She told me she didn’t want others to think that she had abandoned her friends. It angered me that she thought it was okay for her to abandon me. I had no friends and back in the early 2000s it was expensive to call India. I couldn’t just pick up the phone and talk to friends or family. One day when I was alone at home, I used the house phone to call my cousin in Toronto. I was unhappy and it was nice to talk to him. He had been in Canada for a while and he could relate to what I was going through. About a week later, the telephone bill came. It was much higher than usual.
“Who called Canada?” everyone asked. When I said that it was me, they made Holly pay the difference in the bill. She wasn’t happy about it. She understood why I called my cousin, but told me not to do this again.
Little things like that started to get to me. As the days passed, I got desperate. I wanted to get my work permit and start working. My money had run out. I would walk into a store, and out of impulse pick up a can of soda or a cookie, and then put it back, realizing that I couldn’t pay for it. I had never been this destitute in my life.
I was beginning to get depressed. At home, there were parties twice a week. Holly’s friends and housemates gathering over food and wine. The parties would start around seven in the evening and go until two in the morning. The people started out talking about anthropology, travel, music, food, and American sitcoms. Before everyone got drunk, they asked me how I was doing, adjusting, but after they had downed a couple of glasses of wine, they didn’t even notice I was there. They would talk about some video game they had played in their childhood, some American TV show they had grown up watching. I was often a piece of furniture at the house parties.
A lot of wine flowed at these parties, which was new to me. Watching Holly sit with her friends, both men and women, bothered me. I would sit and look at her and not say anything. I felt insecure seeing her sit next to muscular white men, not protesting, but giggling, as the glasses around the table filled and emptied more than once. The whole scene made me feel like throwing wine in someone’s face.
As the parties would progress and the wine bottles empty, people got loud and nonsensical. They talked about sex with gusto. To be polite and social, I sat with them, but soon I grew bored and impatient. In my high school years, my male friends had joked about penises or vaginas, but never when girls were around. I found it hard to get the tofu they served down my throat when I heard ladies talk about their sexual fantasies with men whom they’d just met. The house smelled like wine, and I developed a dislike for it. I often excused myself and went into our room and lay on the bed. Holly continued to sit with her friends. I clenched my teeth in frustration when I heard men guffawing and women shrieking at crude jokes.
I doubted my decision to marry an American woman. Quitting my job in India and moving to America seemed like a mistake. I had emptied my bank account to pay for the plane ticket, visa fees, and everything else needed to come to the United States. Lying on a futon bed, my hands on my chest, I stared at the ceiling and thought that I had nothing to go back to. I couldn’t even tell my parents what I was going through. Describing the scene in the house to them would be reaffirming their suspicions about my decision. I had no friends or relatives in America. I felt so alone.
Looking back now, I feel bad for Holly—a twenty-five-year-old grad student who had a tiny stipend to support herself and, now, me. She had lectures to go to, talks to attend, and fat books to read for her classes. And then she had to babysit me. She had never lived with a man, let alone an Indian man who had come to America for the first time. Having me around in the house had also changed how her friends acted towards her. They thought that I had stolen her from them.
My wife had grown up in a very small town in rural Pennsylvania, and had done a lot of odd jobs when she was younger. Very few people in her family had gone to college. She was the smartest kid in her village, that’s what folks in her family told me, but Holly told me she didn’t have the confidence, the sense of entitlement, that other students at her college had. She had secured admission with a scholarship at Kenyon College, a top-rated private liberal arts school in rural Ohio.
Her family spent the night in their car when they first arrived to drop her off for freshman orientation. They couldn’t afford to get a hotel for the night. As a newcomer in America, I had failed to understand that people could be so poor in the wealthiest country on earth. In college she had a roommate who said things like, “My parents are just barely managing to send my brother and I to college and to take us on vacation to France after final exams. Can’t wait for this semester to end.”
To that she gave a short, supportive answer along the lines of, “Yeah, cool, it’ll be done soon,” but she seethed inside, thinking, Not only do I have to do well this semester, but I have to pack up, go home, and get to work at Sheetz all summer making coffee and hoagies and ringing up gas customers. At the end of the first year, Holly and her mom packed up the fancy instant coffee her roommate had left behind and carried it back to their home in rural Pennsylvania, a good treat. All the way through college, her parents worried not about the money they spent for her room and board (because they didn’t), but about the money that went to phone calls home and gas for the eight-hour roundtrip drive to shuttle her between college and home on breaks.
I thought about why it was so hard for Holly to pull away from her friends and attend to me. It was a big deal for her to be accepted by her graduate school friends mostly because she had long felt like an outsider. For her being able to finish her doctorate was a great measure of success, culturally and academically.
I now understand how she might have been frustrated that my presence was taking her away from her friends.