Indian angst and the American dream

Perhaps more than 165,000 Indians were given permits every year to work in America only a few months ago. Further, a large majority of Indian students from more than 65,000""who travel to America for higher studies each year""chose not to return.

Yet, little is written about the challenges that these Indians face and the strategies they deploy to overcome them in their imaginary homeland, despite such a massive exodus that Dr Sisir Das, a scholar of comparative literature, used to mockingly describe "the second Quit India movement". Kalita's book makes an impressive effort to fill this deeply felt huge void.

This snapshot, however, calls for a caveat. This book, as readers would note, is not about how brown Indians are neither seen as white men's burden nor as their assets.

More specifically, this book is not about how Amartya Sen became Lamont professor at Harvard or even earned a Nobel prize. Nor is it about how M Night Shyamalan directed an Oscar-nominated movie, The Sixth Sense; nor is it about how Fareed Zakaria has become a leading public commentator on global political affairs, on American television; nor is it about how Sonny Mehta has become one of the most respected names in the American publishing industry.

This is about ordinary Indians, how they fiercely struggle to realise their rather twisted version of the American dream such as to buy a house, secure a job, and offer education to their children. Also, their tussles with American law, their ambition to retain their cultural and religious identity, and most importantly, how they stand by each other during hard times.

Kalita is a reporter with the Washington Post, and also former president of the New York-based South Asian journalists' association. She has applied a method in her riveting narrative that is only to be expected from a dedicated student of investigative journalism. She followed the lives of three Indian families closely: the Kotharis, Patels, and Sarmas. These three families shaped three distinct waves of migration to a suburb in central New Jersey.

This is the story of how these new immigrants toil for years in cities, ride subways, and scrimp and save in order to realise their American dreams at their new abode: the American suburb. After reading the stories of their lives, a reader might find the term "sahibs" a euphemism for goolams! Put differently, this book is not about suburban sahibs but goolams of the West, perhaps!

One of its characters is Pradip Kothari, the president of the Indo-American cultural society of the suburb. Kalita met him in the spring of 2000. Kothari was also known as "Peter." Their first meeting occurred at his travel agency.

Many fellow Indians, she noticed at Kothari's agency, showed up in large numbers not to book tickets but for seeking advice or support in non-travel matters; which is an un-American but very Indian way of doing things. In Kothari's family, she saw the history of her family.

The other story is about the Patels. She first met Kajol Patel, the only teenage daughter of the Patels, and then the rest of the Patels. These Patels have lived in Edison since 1990.

At the time of her meeting with them, Harish, Kajol's father, was working at Bradlees, while her mother worked at another retail distribution company packing boxes. They struggled to support the family on their barely above-minimum wages.

She later learnt about Zankhana, Kajol's elder sister, who eloped with a taxi driver to Rochester. Without parental consent, falling in love for Indians is still a nightmare even in America. This was an immigrant family for which the American dream looked not only distant but painfully elusive.

The other character is Mr Sarma, who had been in the United States for less than a year with his wife and their two-year-old son. For the Sarmas, things fell in place as anticipated. For others, life moved in different directions.

The book can undoubtedly demolish the myth that escaping India for America ensures happiness and ends the struggle that commonly accompanies Indian life. What is indeed a new finding here is that this migration only replaces one type of struggle with another, and often not with very different consequences.

Kalita has shown that the art of writing a book is not formidable, which is why the book may serve as a boundless source of inspiration for budding authors.

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SUBURBAN SAHIBS

S Mitra Kalita
Penguin
Pages:180