Not Quite Not White Read online

  I tried, with partial success, to mask the bitter taste of genteel poverty with the sweet taste of arrogance. Arrogant—there is no other word for how I felt when I sat on those rented chairs in our drawing room and studied my report card at the end of each term. A row of beautiful numbers—95, 96, 97, 98—written neatly in blue fountain pen ink. Those numbers made me feel strong when, in reality, I was weak and vulnerable. A girl in a poor Indian home during the 1970s had limited options, even if she possessed an English-medium education and her grandfather’s name elicited looks of admiration and her great-grandfather once sailed from England wearing beautifully tailored suits. If I were to maintain the crucial space between myself and the boy who swabbed the floor, and Darwanji who washed cars at four a.m., and Jamuna whose father collected her monthly wages, and the maimed children who begged on the streets, I needed more than faded photographs of my ancestors leaning against elegant teak furniture.

  In an irrational act of generosity, the Architect arranged a job for Baba as a salesman in a men’s clothing store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He helped us apply for green cards—a process that took nearly three years, over a quarter of my life at that point. The Architect had immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and studied design at Harvard. He had lost touch with Baba for many years until one day he decided to look us up in Calcutta. Spontaneously, he decided to help his unemployed friend and his family. Immigration routes are patterned on kinship networks. Brothers follow brothers. Children follow parents. Grandparents follow grandchildren. Through marriage these networks become ever more expansive and intricate. A new bride follows a husband. A few years later her mother might follow. Then her brother and his wife. Entire districts from certain parts of the world might find themselves in a small American town as families follow one another across well-established migratory paths. A new immigrant feels secure knowing there is a brother with whom one could stay for a few months until a job is arranged. A cousin might provide just the right tip to secure employment in a new country.

  Occasionally, friendship trumps kinship. A sibling might distance himself from his less successful brother, and kinfolk might slowly inch away from a family member emitting the faint whiff of poverty. In a poor society, impecunity is treated as a communicable disease. If you stand too close to poverty, you might catch it. Others see the poor as lacking merit and virtue. We were becoming infectious, virtueless, without merit. And suddenly, just as I had begun to adjust to a slightly lower social class by giving up the little luxuries—new school uniforms, meat at the table, the use of a scooter—a long-lost friend led us to a new life. Without accruing any financial benefits for himself, without any social or moral obligations, what was the Architect’s motivation? Perhaps he remembered rainy afternoons spent chatting over hot tea in a canteen. Maybe he recalled the red laterite soil of his hometown. He could have missed speaking Bengali with someone who knew him as a boy. Or maybe he wanted to be near someone who knew how to pronounce his name correctly. Perhaps he wanted to fashion three new immigrants into his ideal of the American nuclear family. I can only guess. The Architect might have been reaching for his past in his own irrational way. He might have wanted a second chance at rectifying mistakes he made as a foreign student in the America of the 1960s. I became the unintended beneficiary of his whimsy.

  We waited for almost three years in India for our visas because Baba was too nervous to emigrate without a green card. We were making a historic leap from one continent to another, yet we were an extremely risk-averse family. Many immigrants carry these twin traits within themselves and some even pass them on to the next generation. As risk takers we leap far from the safety of home. Having left the comforts of home we know all too well that there is no safety net of kinship or citizenship to catch us should we topple. This makes us cautious. We check the lock on the door three times before going out. We save more than we spend. We collect sugar and ketchup packets from McDonald’s and cannot throw anything away. At work, we beat every deadline in the office and never pass up a second gig to make extra money. We tell our children to keep their heads down, study hard, and always look for a bargain. As risk-averse immigrants, we do not rock the boat. If you were a trapeze artist without a net below you, wouldn’t you act the same way? Anything else would be irrational.

  Scholars who study immigrants such as Baba and Ma would describe them as the classic example of Homo economicus. Economic man makes rational decisions that will increase his wealth and his ability to buy nice things. In those early days in America, whenever people asked why my parents immigrated I felt a sense of irritation and embarrassment. I could not say that we were fleeing war or political turmoil. We were not exiles seeking political or religious freedom. We were seeking economic gains. We were seeking more money. That is a humiliating thing for a twelve-year-old girl to have to repeat in a schoolyard. My parents sounded greedy. Or, worse, they sounded like people who had failed to be successful in the country of their birth and sought a second chance in a richer country. Because I arrived with them, I feared I too was tainted by these labels—greedy, unsuccessful, Homo economicus. At twelve I had made no rational choice, but the accident of my birth made me Homo economicus all the same.

  I wished we could pretend to be expats. Expats are glamorous and cosmopolitan. Cool expats like Ernest Hemingway sip Bellinis in Harry’s Bar in Venice. Modern expats are the well-heeled white Europeans or Americans one encounters in cities such as Dubai, Singapore, and Shanghai. They are foreigners who have moved to distant shores for all the same reasons as a humble immigrant—higher wages, more job opportunities, greater purchasing power, and faster upward mobility. White expats often hold themselves apart from natives in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, seeing themselves as superior. They send their children to the local American, British, French, or German school. They go to restaurants and shops frequented by others who share their tastes. They have their own clubs. In the West, we do not begrudge white expats their seclusion. New immigrants in America, by contrast, are perceived as undesirables who bring down the real estate value of a neighborhood. The women wear strange garb, their ill-mannered children run amok, and their grocery stores emit unpleasant odors. Meanwhile, white expats add value to their surroundings. Shanghai’s French Concession is chic because of the presence of white folk. European expats add glamour to the high-end restaurants of Abu Dhabi.

  We weren’t chic expats or political dissidents with lofty ideologies. We were three people moving from a country with fewer resources to one with greater resources. I doubt we added glamour or value to our surroundings.

  “Why did your parents come to America?”

  “For better jobs.”

  To this day this small exchange—repeated endlessly throughout my years in the United States—instantly determines the social hierarchy between my interlocutor and me. I wish I could say my parents possessed some extraordinary professional skill for which an American institution wooed them. We did not hold noble political or religious convictions that were at odds with the government of India. There was no war raging in my city and we were not being resettled. Homo economicus has a duller, more prosaic story to tell.

  “Why did your parents come to America?”

  “For better jobs.”

  The native-borns nod and feel pleased that they are citizens of a country that offers better everything—jobs, homes, clothes, food, schools, music. I would feel the same if I was in their shoes. It must feel good to be born in a country that has more wealth than other places, to have the hardest currency in your wallet. It must feel good to be generous and invite others—after intense vetting and preselection—to share in this plenty. Even though I had no say at all in my family’s decision to emigrate, I felt my shoulders weighed down with the plenitude of the host country. This plenitude of which I was to be the grateful recipient was evidence that white people were superior to people like me. How else could one nation be so wealthy and another be s
o poor; one country have so much to give and another stand in a queue to receive? The inequality of nations was surely a sign that some races were morally, physically, and intellectually superior to others. The inequality of nations surely had nothing to do with man, but was shaped by Providence.

  “Why did your parents come to America?”

  “For better jobs.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Poor people anywhere in the world are very conscious of their clothes and personal appearance. When you venture out for an important occasion you wear your cleanest clothes, your least shabby footwear, with your body washed and your hair neat. If you have only one set of good clothes, you make sure it is washed and ironed even though you have to be naked when washing and ironing those precious articles of clothing. Shabby chic and bohemian disarray are for the rich. We were determined to arrive in the United States looking as sartorially polished as possible. Distinguishing ourselves from those slum dwellers, the ones who lived in the basti, was crucial. I had practiced eating with a fork in my left hand and a knife in my right hand for a week. I was determined not to be bested by the European food served during the flight. I practiced my conversational English. We planned our outfits days in advance.

  Baba in his best suit, Ma in a red-and-cream silk sari printed with a floral motif, and me in a dark gray, pleated wool skirt, yellow blouse, black Mary Janes, and white Japanese ankle socks—we had dressed for a special event. We left India with five suitcases, a mossy green carry-on bag made of fake leather, and sixty U.S. dollars. In retrospect, I realize we had less than sixty dollars. My parents were in debt to the Architect, who had loaned us the money for the airfare from Calcutta to Boston. Two Calcutta taxis, modeled after the old British Morris Minor, took us and our relatives to the airport. My maternal uncles and grandmother had come to Calcutta from Allahabad—an overnight train journey—to bid us farewell. Back then, there was a gallery at Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport from where one could wave to passengers as they boarded the plane on the tarmac. One of my uncles had brought a small flashlight with him and had told Ma that he would wave it. Even if we were too far away in our plane to make out the faces of our relatives, we would know from that flashing point of light that they were there. They would not leave until our plane departed Indian soil. It was dark when our flight took off. I saw the flashlight bobbing up and down in the distance.

  Our plane stopped in Doha, Qatar, for refueling, but the passengers were not allowed to disembark. Then came a long layover at Heathrow. With the small amount of money that we had, my parents had to be careful with their purchases. They bought a little tube of moisturizer (for none of us knew how dehydrating planes could be) and a medium-sized bar of white chocolate. I was familiar with Cadbury chocolates in India. But white chocolate was a revelation. We carefully broke it into three equal pieces and savored the taste. And then we boarded another plane that would bring us across the Atlantic to Boston.

  The Architect and his wife came to pick us up in a Fiat. He commented on how silent I was during the car ride from the airport to his home. Was I not excited to be in America? Did I not feel amazed to ride through a tunnel that was built under sea level? What did I think of escalators? The luggage conveyor belt? The crisp New England weather? Did I like the taste of Schweppes ginger ale? I was silent because I was tired. I was always eager to provide the correct answer to questions posed by adults. In America, however, children are not always quizzed by adults looking to extract the correct answer; sometimes they are asked about their feelings. So I worried about what my correct feeling should be in each circumstance.

  The Architect already had a small rental apartment lined up for us. It was located within a modest three-story wooden house on a little street that sat on the border between rich Cambridge and its poorer neighbor, Somerville. The house was owned by Harvard; and the university, acting as landlord, rented it to a variety of people, even those without university connections. On the first floor lived a Spaniard who was studying for a PhD at MIT. He owned a Porsche. I was told it was a very expensive car. On the second floor lived a single white American woman who worked as a bartender. On weekends she cooked a roast that made the entire house, from attic to basement, stink. On the third floor lived a graduate student of religion. He had just finished his doctorate at Harvard and was about to leave for a new job at a prestigious small college nearby. It was his two-bedroom apartment that we were going to rent from the university real estate office. Baba said the apartment was “romantic.” That was the first time I heard him use that word. To me, it was an unusual space full of wildly sloping roofs, odd closets within closets (the previous tenant had, for purposes known only to him, built closets within walk-in closets and covered the floors of those interior closets with wall-to-wall shag carpeting). The bathroom was tiny and the roof sloped so steeply that it was impossible to stand in the bathtub. The ceiling was so low on one side of my parents’ bedroom that you had to roll out of the bed carefully to avoid bumping your head.

  The kitchen had a white lace curtain, left behind no doubt by the student of religion. It seemed like something only people who live in rich countries do—leave behind such beautiful things like a lace curtain. He also left behind a set of blue melamine dinner plates with a cluster of flowers in the center of each plate. The plates had a set of matching blue melamine bowls. In the freezer, he left a tub of Brigham’s strawberry ice cream. It was still half-full. We ate that ice cream during our first few nights in the apartment, awed by the wealth of a country where one could leave behind half a tub of delicious and perfectly edible ice cream with such careless largesse.

  Before we moved to our own attic apartment, we stayed with the Architect and his wife for a week. During this period, we acquired all necessary paperwork for beginning life in the United States. We all received our Social Security cards. My parents learned how to use the T, Boston’s public transportation system. The Architect’s wife taught Ma how to use washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and how to cook using American-style ovens. We were taken to supermarkets by our hosts and shown where to buy food and household products. We were used to Indian bazaars with butchers, fishmongers, vegetable sellers all hawking their goods in a cacophonous, open-air, slippery, wet environment that smelled of fish scales and offal and chicken feathers and vegetables still covered in dirt from the farm. Each vendor, for eggs, fish, goat meat, fruit, loose tea leaves, and so forth, had his own specialty and developed a relationship with his long-term customers. Everyone bargained vociferously. The milkman, who owned his own cow, brought milk in an aluminum pail every morning. Our neighborhood butcher had seen me since I was a toddler and always saved for us the parts of a goat—ears, kidneys, marrow bones—that he knew I relished. In Calcutta, almost everyone shopped daily for food, in modest quantities. A hushed, brightly lit supermarket where families loaded their carts with a month’s worth of groceries was a new experience for us.

  The Architect had notified his vast network of our arrival, so we found many cardboard boxes filled with bed linens, towels, dishes, pots and pans, old clothes, and outdated, bulky winter coats (because everyone knew that a new family from Calcutta was unlikely to be prepared for New England snow). I was taken to the Cambridge Public School Department’s main office and after a few hours of looking through my old school report cards, the school officials decided that I would be placed in the seventh grade at the Peabody School, located in one of Cambridge’s more affluent neighborhoods. Our apartment was not in this neighborhood. So, the same officials also decided that I would take the school bus daily.

  * * *

  • • •

  August 11, 1982. That was my Arrival Day. My detailed recollection of that day and the ensuing weeks has an unexpected historical parallel. Indians had arrived in the New World long before the U.S. immigration laws were reconfigured in 1965. Thousands of Indians arrived in the New World in the early nineteenth century. They traveled on s
lave ships and disembarked in places with names such as Port-of-Spain or Georgetown.

  The majority of these Indians embarked on ships from Hooghly Harbor, in the city of Calcutta. I had already encountered their descendants when I was a girl. When I saw those blurry images of black West Indian cricketers in the Statesman I also saw photos of Indian players standing next to them. Alvin Kallicharran. Rohan Kanhai. These men with subcontinental names played for the West Indies. Through cricket matches we caught a glimpse of our vast diaspora.

  When slavery was abolished in the British Empire during the 1830s, plantation owners in the Caribbean feared that a labor vacuum would affect the production of sugar. Vast profits were to be made from Caribbean sugar in the nineteenth century and many wealthy British families were involved in the business. As newly freed Afro-Creole slaves moved from the plantations to the cities, the British started looking for alternate sources of labor. After some experimentation with other populations—Scots, Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Chinese—they arrived at the conclusion that villagers recruited from the Indo-Gangetic Plain were best suited to cultivating sugarcane. This was no mere happenstance. These Indian farmers were already cultivating sugarcane in their villages. India, as recorded history tells us, was producing refined sugar before Alexander the Great arrived in Punjab in the fourth century BCE. A few decades later, in his book Indika, the Greek ethnographer Megasthenes described the sugarcane plants of India as reeds that bear honey without the aid of bees.