After arriving in Charlottesville, I found out that my visa alone didn’t allow me to work. I had to apply for a work permit, which was going to take 365 dollars and three months to get. The first step in getting the work permit was to get my fingerprints taken, which meant we had to go to Charleston, West Virginia—a four-hour drive. Since we didn’t want to go there the night before and spend the money on a hotel, we were left with no option but to leave Charlottesville at four in the morning. I had just landed in the country a week before, and picking me up from the airport had been a long drive for Holly. She wasn’t excited about the idea of another long drive, but she also wanted me to be able to work and make money, so we drove there and came back the same day. It was a long and sometimes tense journey.
After the fingerprinting was done, waiting began. I would walk to the mailbox of our house every day to check whether my work permit had arrived. Everyone else in the house got mail and I would quickly sift through all of it but never see an envelope for me. I’d put the mail back in the box and start waiting for the next day.
In Lucknow, the local government and town planners had cut down most of the trees to make way for new buildings or roads. To be among trees, I had to go to the botanical gardens, an important landmark in my hometown, which were open to public for morning walks. I liked to go there every morning and enjoyed being surrounded by the greenery.
In Charlottesville, the entire city was like a botanical garden. I had arrived as autumn was beginning. The changing colors of leaves left me astounded. I often walked around the university with a camera in my hand. Every corner I turned, there was a tree asking to be photographed. I couldn’t stop staring at trees that looked bright orange, or completely yellow, or just red.
Soon, I learned why the season was called fall in America. I had never seen trees shed leaves like this before. And then I learned a new verb: raking. The front yard of our house was filled with copious amounts of leaves. One day, while leaving the house for her class, Holly casually told me to “rake the leaves if you get bored.” I didn’t understand at first, but later found out that raking meant combing the yard with an instrument to get rid of the leaves.
With no money, no one that I could call, no one that I could share my feelings with, and no work permit, I had been feeling pretty worthless in America. I was angry with myself and in a desperate need to prove my worth, I decided to take my aggression out on the yard. I let out a few expletives in Hindi and grabbed the six-foot iron rod with a giant claw at one end, called a rake. I stood in the middle of the yard and began scraping the earth. I worked myself into frenzy. After several minutes of thrashing the leaves around, I hadn’t made any progress. I had just moved the pile from one side to the other. The yard still looked like a big mess. My effort to clean it didn’t make any difference. The mounds of leaves seemed like the big maze that was America. I was working with so much fervor that I didn’t notice that I had bloodied my fingers in the process. I had turned my life upside down for a new beginning. I looked at my bleeding hand and wondered how much more I’d have to suffer.
December came. Now, there was not a single leaf on the trees and the grass looked lifeless. The days were so short that it got dark at five in the evening. I had been in the United States for almost three months. I was out of money and was still waiting for my work permit. Since it had gotten much colder, I had stopped walking up to the driveway to wait for the mailman. I mostly stayed inside my room, and looked for him through the window. Sometimes, I felt like the old and sad Indian mother in Indian movies who always waits for her lost son at the railway platform, hoping one day he will arrive. I felt sorry for myself.
On a cold afternoon in December, I found an envelope in the mailbox that said U.S. Immigration Services. It had my name peeking through the rectangular window. My heart was going a hundred miles an hour. My hands shook. I had been waiting for it so long that it seemed unreal that I was actually holding the letter. The letter seemed like a lottery ticket, a lottery that I wasn’t sure that I’d won yet. I didn’t think I had the nerve to open the letter.
I ran inside the house to show the letter to Holly. She looked at me, smiled, and took a deep breath as if to say, “Your wait seems to be over.” She sliced the envelope open with a knife and pulled out a card the size of a credit card. It had my picture on the right side and “Employment Authorization Document” written on the top. I was elated. I didn’t wait for it to get late enough in the morning for my parents to wake up in India. The work permit card felt like a key to a treasure, the solution to all my miseries.
I began applying for jobs. I wanted to work in radio, but there weren’t enough paid jobs in the small town of Charlottesville. Some people suggested I move to Washington, DC to work for a public radio station, which I wasn’t sure about since Holly had two years of coursework left. It didn’t make a lot of sense to live away from Holly, when I had moved from halfway around the world to be with her. I started looking for jobs in Charlottesville. I tried my luck everywhere, but nothing worked. Every day that passed after I received my work permit seemed like a huge waste. I was missing out on making dollars, I thought.
Walking around town with Holly, I’d notice restaurants, bookstores, mattress stores, and jewelry stores displaying signs that said, “Now Hiring.” I decided to apply for jobs at those shops. I had watched the employees and it didn’t seem to me that the jobs required any special skill. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some job, any job, while I continued to look for something better.
Thinking of applying for a sales job brought to mind a similar job that I had done a few years before in India. The work involved going door-to-door, knocking on people’s homes and asking them to fill out a questionnaire, the objective being to persuade them to switch from their existing newspaper to the one I was working for. The job was humiliating. The pay was not great and it was demeaning to have people shut their doors in my face. I didn’t tell any of my friends where I worked, and prayed that the door I knocked on didn’t belong to someone I knew.
My parents and my close relatives had expected me to land a job with a fat salary, an air-conditioned office in the swank building of a multinational company. They were not going to be proud to hear that I was going around door-to-door selling a newspaper. I begged my boss to assign me an area of the city furthest away from where I lived, so I could avoid being seen by relatives and acquaintances. But soon my boss stopped paying attention to my requests and gave me locations I didn’t want. Now, I had two options—either quit the job or find a way around knocking on people’s doors. I chose the latter. I went to the area assigned to me, but didn’t knock on doors. I just looked at the nameplates on the boundary walls and discreetly noted down each name and house number. When I got home, I filled out the questionnaire in the name of Mr. Gupta, Mr. Sharma, and Mr. Yadav. Since there was no pressure to convert people to our newspaper, I said the people were already our customers. It worked. My boss didn’t pay much attention to the fact that the handwriting looked the same on every questionnaire. A month passed and I got my salary as I had every other month. The only difference was that this time I been paid for doing nothing.
I would soon find out that I was not the only person in the company who was doing this. My boss had been working there for a while and he’d had this happen to him before. It didn’t occur to me that he could be double-checking, visiting or calling people’s homes to find out whether I’d showed up at their place. I quit the job. I didn’t want to have to answer to my boss.
Looking at the job advertisements in Charlottesville, I consoled myself that I was in America. Although it was a gigantic step down from what I had been doing in my last job, I was away from my family, who would have look down on me for working as a salesman. I filled out job applications in almost every store I came across. Most of them had a standard two-page form that had sections like “Work Experience,” “Education,” and “References.” I didn’t know why they couldn’t just accept applicants’ resumes instead of asking them to cram their entire life histories into two lines.
I spent several weeks applying and waiting to be called for an interview. “Sorry, we found someone who had more relevant experience,” would be the answer when I called the employer to check whether they were interested in my application. People didn’t want to interview me because I didn’t have any experience in retail, and they didn’t care that I had a master’s degree in business. My last job in India had spoilt me, and had turned me to into an overconfident, arrogant man. I couldn’t imagine any of these jobs I was applying for in the United States being too difficult. After all, they only required a high school diploma, I thought. I got the feeling that my resume didn’t look familiar to most hiring managers, so they buried it at the bottom of the pile. They were probably looking for a familiar name—Robert, Dan, Keith—and my name didn’t quite click. My work experience, references, and educational institutions looked too alien. There were no columns on the job applications to describe my confidence, enthusiasm, sense of humor, or eagerness to work.
I believed that if I could sit in front of a person and get a chance to talk one-on-one, I could convince someone to give me the job. I looked for the number of ElectronicsHut, an electronics chain store where I had applied for a job. Someone called Mike answered the phone and said, “How can I help you?”
“I have applied for the position of sales associate in your store and was wondering whether I could get an interview,” I said nervously.
“Hang on a second. What’s your name?”
“Deepak.”
“The book?”
“No, no, no, it’s D-e-e-p-a-k. Deepak Singh.” I pronounced each consonant and vowel as clearly as I could.
“Oh, okay, let me check.”
I heard papers rustling in the background.
“Alright, I found your application. Could you come for an interview on Monday at 10 A.M.?”