Lonely in America

By S. Vasuki

The statelessness of my being hits me hardest on Thanksgiving Eve when I roam the empty streets of a world that has gone indoors like a lonely turkey that could not find a table to grace.

 

America.

The shore just beyond the horizon for many a sailing ship, where the lighthouse of freedom shone bright in the pitch darkness of oppression. A new civilization that flourished on the foundation of new ideas and ideals. A garden in which saplings transplanted from various pockets of wilderness bloomed in resplendence on fertile soil. A new page, which was not muddled with, antiquated words of tradition and culture that had lost their meaning in the quagmires of history. On this new page, the lexicon, the only lexicon, was "opportunity’ and individualism." Where Man stood before Men. Where an individual shaped the community rather than the other way around.

Political prisoners had slid through the iron curtain right under the eyes of Big Brother to roam freely here, waving the American flag wildly with their unfettered hands. Numismatic refugees had scaled the mud walls of indigence in search of the beatific smile of George Washington on the dollar bill. Persecuted zealots had scaled the walls of religion to seek the God residing in their own selves. Starry-eyed younglings had scaled the walls of reality to enter the Magic Kingdom and dance hand in hand with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse on the comic book stage.

All creatures who came here would shed their old skins to don the silken new. The Sambupillais, the Semechenkos and the Sung Jung Hus of the world would be clipped off their long honorifics of lineage and become "Sam" to the office set – the Indian Sam, the Russo Sam, the Chinese Sam. The grapes came from vineyards all over, but the wine was All American.

I was one such earthling to set sail to this Elysian Island far away. I must confess that I had no walls to scale, except maybe those built with diligence by the construction workers of Indian bureaucracy. No fetters clasped my hands in a bind. I had not been persecuted by any abuser of authority. America was not to be a doorway to freedom. I did not behold a rainbow at the edge of a nebulous sky. I did not envisage pavements lined with gold that I could scrape with my calcium-fortified nails.

America to me was just a notion, a nice feeling. It was a manifestation of things that could go right in this world. It radiated a smell of freshness in putrefying ether. It held the keys to the door of knowledge. It was a celebration of the human mind in all its cogitative glory. It was a pen pal from whom I had received many an entertaining letter through my childhood and youth.

My pal had sent me comic strips filled with Disney magic. She had sent me books of fiction weaving exciting tales around ordinary lives. She had sent me magazines that debated the issues or right and wrong ranging from the weighty topics of feminism and civil rights to the frivolity of puppy care. The eyes of curiosity had now opened far and wide, yearning to meet my pen pal in person. Moreover, there was no point in being an alien in one’s own land in the corridors of Bangalore University, where all one heard were endless conversations on preapps, GRE scores and visa applications.

I embarked on a flight to the United States donning the guise of a student. I was an Indian who voyaged the seas in search of Columbus, for as they say "If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed." I envied the refugees from behind the iron curtain who sat next to me in the flight with their noses flattened against the windowpanes, their pietistic eyes peeled open to sight the Goddess of Liberty. When they landed at the New York airport, these pilgrims fell at the feet of their goddess in reverence. I scraped the payment with my bitten nails to make sure that the golden myth was not real.

In the days to follow, I would spend moonlit nights under the table lamp romancing the shapely partial differentials. I would indulge in ponderous and often fruitless discussions with the college faculty over the methods of modeling the turbulent flow of supersonic jets through an engine nozzle.

I would roam the university corridors in an endless quest of knowledge that reflected off the computer screen. I would experience culture shock handling currents at a different voltage. I would take showers in the dorms at 3 a.m., ashamed of flaunting my slender frame before basketball giants and football hunks. I would write long letters to my kith and kin on toilet paper to save postage costs, taking pages out of the letters that I had received from my pen pal when I was still back home. I would pick up pens that were strewn over campus and go on futile shopping sprees for refills.

But America to me was not just a haven of technical literature and toilet paper. I came here in search of education and comfort and found Myself instead. Because this was the first time in my life that I did live "For Myself, With Myself and Off Myself" (which is the way Abraham Lincoln would have put it to any self-centered patriot). America paved the roads to facilitate my self-seeking sojourn.

I found myself in the kitchen graduating from a neophyte who made holes in the roof with pressure cooker weights to a conjuror of Moghlai delicacies. I found my feet dancing to the lilting ragas of Carnatic classical music. They say that Gandhi went around India on his return from South Africa in an endeavor to discover his motherland. I discovered India on the American college campus.

Quiescent cerebral cells that had been camatosed by the anesthetics of tradition and order woke up from deep slumber to wander in the wild pastures of liberated thought. Ten thousand miles away from home, it struck me strange that all Muslim actors had to bear Hindu names on the Indian movie screen. It struck me strange that my mother from whose loving hands I had partaken many a sumptuous meal had been immured in the kitchen confines all along.

A progeny of Brahminical lineage, I repented and begged forgiveness for the casteistic oppressions of my ancestors as I stood silent witness to the subjugation of African American citizenry on the panorama of American mainstream life. From one Indian to another, I empathized with the tribulations of the Navajo tribes in the Arizona wilderness. I have felt strange and embarrassed for being a recipient of kinder hospitality as a just-arrived alien that the primal owners of this great land.

I have trekked the jungles of loneliness within the four walls of my one bedroom apartment befriending the stranger behind the mirror. I have witnessed the dichotomy of a great nation that is a heralder of freedom and a protector of individual rights, while in the same breath wreaking havoc on the Iraqi landscape with an inane intent of keeping down the cost of petroleum. I have scraped the beautiful blanket of white snow that draped the landscape to behold the hard soil, tilled by the ploughs of hard work, underneath.

All in all, this self-seeking sojourn has been gratifying. But there is a darker side. Even though my mind has been awakened from its somnolent state, the body has been subjected to an antipodal experience.

The limbs that clung on for dear life to the doorframe of a jostling, rickety bus and trekked miles and miles through the mountains and valleys of day to day existence have now sunk into the abysmal sick seat of comfort. Puppy show commercials have substituted the works of Joseph Hellers and Kurt Vonneguts. Like any other product of this generation, I can only read off a vertical screen. I have been reduced to a remote control on the sofa, switching channels to escape scenes of wailing Ethiopian children defiling the pristine visual paradise. Conversations with Indian friends at social gatherings are restricted to such terminal topics as each other’s immigration status and that of our clan’s.

I sometimes feel that comfort and prosperity have taken the life out of existence, as if I am in hibernation not just in the five months of winter, but all year around. Sitting in the mall as my wife meanders through Macy aisles in search of a half-priced handbag, my eyes do not even delight in the resplendence that surrounds them. They stretch their elastic rubber bands of memory across the seven seas into the hovel in the center of a Bombay slum. They flutter in consternation as they behold a deep-set couch and a large screen Sony inside the hut. I can fell the disparity across the spectrum of existence even though I cannot see it. As Indians in this country celebrate India’s independence day (from the British) on the weekend nearest Aug. 15, following the tradition of their hosts, I read about my home country going up in the flames of religious bigotry and economic suffering. Only Indians living outside their country seem to afford the celebration of the homeland’s independence.

At this juncture in my life, I feel like I am at the crossroads without heading anywhere. Having escaped from the dungeons of tradition and culture, I seem to have fallen into a trap once again. A trap where opportunity has taken the place of tradition and individualism the place of culture. I feel like an alien in two lands. When someone asks me about my hometown, I am inclined to blurt out Tennessee, where I went to study. For a nomad, the last place he visited is home.

The statelessness of my being hits me hardest on Thanksgiving eve when I roam the empty streets of a world that has gone indoors like a lonely turkey which could not find a table to grace. And still harder when I come home to a call from my mother inquiring whether I lit the candles on the doorsteps on Diwali night. I am tempted to tell her that they are considered a fire hazard in this country, but instead I mumble something to the effect that I did not realize that the Diwali nakshatras had moved into the month of November this year.

As immigrants from all parts of the world fervently embrace the cause of their homelands back "home," the two halves of my cerebrum (the emotional and practical) tussle with each other over the concept of Home. I envy the political refugees from behind the Iron Curtain as they shed tears of American pride on July 4.

My mind goes back to the day my grandfather who was living with me here passed away of a heart attack in Princeton Hospital. When I went to the funeral parlor after a few days to pick up the death certificate to be shipped along with his ashes to India, I saw the words: "K. Narasimhaiah. Born Aug 11, 1908, Krishnapur, India. Died Nov 28, 1986, Princeton, N.J."

What a long journey from a small village in Karnataka to Albert Einstein’s hometown! What a way to go for this aging pigtailed Brahmin whose most glorious dream was to spend his last days in his place of birth! One handful of his ashes was dropped into the Cauvery River and another handful into the Delaware. And I reckon that they both merged into one single mass again in the middle of the great mass of water that surrounds us all.