Indian American... Then Indian Again

By Lakshmi Palecanda

Indian American ... then Indian again vividly portrays the incidents in the life of an average Indian-American. Waking up in the US for the first time, the first moments of pride and fear at home ownership, the inevitable trips back to the home country, the pain endured while grieving alone ... these are unforgettable experiences faced by every immigrant to America, whether Indian or not.

After going through the trouble of making a career and a life abroad, deciding to return to the home country is a huge decision to make. However, quite a few people do take this decision, for various reasons. Once they do, they are faced with the logistics of uprooting the family and moving their whole life. When they try to resettle in once-familiar surroundings, they realize that they actually have to start a new.

If this has been part of your life, read Lakshmi Palecanda’s collection of essays and you are able to relive your experiences over again. The overall tone is one of self-deprecating humor, and you are able to laugh over her descriptions and wry comments that evoke memories that are deeply etched in your own life. Also included are a couple of poignant essays that may recall the times when it was hard coping with life in a new country or a country which appears new.

If you are an armchair traveler in search of new experiences also, this book takes you through a whole host of them. And if you are contemplating going abroad to live, this book helps you see how your life can change, so that you won’t be blindsided when the inevitable happens. Finally, if you are an Indian contemplating a move in either direction, this book can give you actual information that may help you.

Whether you want a good read with plenty of humor in it, or a primer of what life abroad is like, or how hard it can be to go home again, this is the book you want.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lakshmi Palecanda
• Release date: Jul 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301836512

Lakshmi Palecanda

The author contributes articles to the Indian-American magazines, India Currents and Khabar. She is a regular contributor to an Indian newspaper, The Deccan Herald. She has also published an Indian romance, called Playing at Love, published by Pageturn Publisher. Currently, she is working on a series of books on Life Skills to be published by Knowledge Publishers and Distributors.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Imagine going from India, a warm, noisy, spice-loving country, straight to the snow-covered silent landscape of small-town Montana, where ‘curry’ was something you did to groom a horse. That is what I did when I went to the United States of America for graduate studies, years ago. Adjusting was hard, and I learnt many lessons in the process. Here’s how it all began.

An Indian in Cowboy Country

"You live… where?"

I was on vacation in my parents’ house in India. A friend of my father’s had dropped by, and on being introduced to me, asked where I lived in the US of A. My answer flummoxed him, and he squinted at me, coffee tumbler and dabara (saucer) in hand.

Bozeman… it is in Montana. An explanation was clearly due. In my case, it always is. Montana is the 41st state; it is the 4th largest. It is located north of Utah and Wyoming, east of Idaho and west of the Dakotas. It is just south of Canada’s province of Alberta.

Ahh… yes, I know Canada. My sister’s grandson’s friend’s brother lives there. It must be quite chilly up there.

Yes, it does get quite cold up there. Sitting in my parents’ living room in Chennai where the day was already a balmy 90 degrees at 10 a.m. and climbing, I saw little point in elaborating on exactly how chilly it could get. After a point, cold is cold, be it 12 above or below freezing.

Do you like it there?

Oh, yes, I do. Even as I answered emphatically, I couldn’t help remembering a time when I wasn’t so sure.

It was March ‘91 to be exact. Armed with a Rotary scholarship for studies toward a Master’s degree in Biology, I landed in Bozeman’s Gallatin Airport. It had two gates and a grand total about 50 people in it, including the disembarking passengers. On my way into town, I saw snow on the ground. What a wonderful adventure, I thought, being in a whole new country, a whole new climate zone, with a whole new set of friends! The feeling lasted maybe 48 hours.

You see, I was most ill prepared for my adventure. Coming from a very conservative middle-class close-knit South Indian family, I couldn’t deal with the loneliness, the difference in culture, and very absence of everything familiar. I had no family in the States, and only had two friends, both back East. And, as for the weather, I used to be the first one in my family to feel the cold in Coimbatore, my hometown in South India. My titanic adventure had struck an iceberg, literally.

I knew that something was different the very first morning. I woke up… and heard nothing. After ascertaining that I hadn’t lost my hearing, I looked out the window and saw no one. My apartment was on a side street; I must have stayed at that window for half an hour before I finally saw a car go down the street. Ah-ha, so I wasn’t the only one alive in town. This Stephen King moment repeated itself several times in my life since; in fact every time I came back to the States from a trip to India, I got this feeling that I alone was alive in a ghost town. Gradually, I grew wiser and figured out what was happening: I was missing the background noise and chaos that is India.

In Indian cities, the noise starts at around 4 a.m. Honking vehicles, screeching brakes, reversing cars, the street noises are ubiquitous. Into this, blends the music from the local temple loudspeakers, the radio in the teashop and the call of the hawkers.

"Kaye… Kai, kai, kaaye." Vegetables for sale.

"Keerai… avuthikkeerai, thandukkeerai, chukkutikeerai… keerai." Greens.

"Aattangal kuthalayo, Ammikkal kuthalayo." This service involved chiseling holes into the granite grinding stones used to grind batter for idlis and dosas, by a grizzled ‘Michelangelo’ of Marudamalai. And let’s not discount the door bell or the calling bell as it is called in India. From 5.30 a.m. when the newspaper boy and the milkman visit, calling bells peel through the day and even into the night.

Contrast that to a US university town with a population of 30,000, during spring break, when most of the school kids are in Florida. I might as well have landed on the moon.

This was followed by other out-of-my-world experiences. My first snowfall was a fairytale event, with silvery flakes that settled like tiny kisses of sensation on my face. However, the days that followed it were one long nightmare, when the fallen snow froze in the night and sent me skidding before depositing me solidly and ignominiously on my behind. And the cold… it was a slap of reality. It was the end of March, for goodness sake, how much longer could winter last? Three more months, I was told. I needed at least two layers of clothing, socks, boots, a thick woolen hat, scarf, and thick waterproof gloves, not to mention a jacket that resembled a polar bear’s winter coat. In the beginning, it didn’t help that I constantly forgot my winter accoutrements, often ending up on the street minus one or more of the Thinsulate necessities that didn’t seem so important indoors. So I was lonely and cold and fit perfectly into the profile of a waif… yes, I was hungry too!

An army is not the only one that marches on its stomach. Pampered as far as cooking was concerned, the only thing I was familiar with in my mother’s kitchen was where she hid the cookies. So I couldn’t cook, and as for eating out, Indian food was simply nonexistent here. In a place where the term ‘Indian’ was a politically incorrect way to say ‘Native American’, there absolutely nothing resembled Asian cuisine. Even in the token Chinese restaurant, there were beefy Caucasian Americans that just added soy sauce to noodles and called it chow mein. For the first few days, I mooched off some fellow Indian students who cooked Indian food, but after that I had to fend for myself. That was when I tried to take the easy road: I went to the cafeteria.

The first thing I saw there was a tray of doughnuts, and yes, I thought they were vadas. Now, keep in mind that I had had very little western exposure. These days, even middle-class kids in India know all about different kind of pastries, specialty coffees and Mexican food, but I’m talking about the beginning of the 90s, when western influence was restricted to Hollywood movies, and Doordarshan was the only channel on the tube. I was beside myself with excitement; things were going to be fine after all. I hurriedly paid for one and bit into it, my eyes closing in anticipation of when my teeth would penetrate the crispy fried exterior with a satisfying crackle and break into the salty-spicy dough that held tasty secrets, maybe a sliver of chilli or coconut or even, dare I hope, a whole black pepper. Instead, I bit through a wimpy crust into an insipidly sweet cakey mass with as much character as a used-car salesman. My eyes flew open as I beheld in horror my first cake donut (I later grew addicted to the stuff, but that’s beside the point). I teared up as I finally acknowledged the truth: I was far, far away from home.

That was the beginning of my life as an Indian in America. In Montana, I was definitely para-desi (slang for immigrant Indian). At the time, long-distance calls cost up to 75c per minute, so my phone bills were horrendous. It was before the Internet was accessible to all, so I had no idea of what was happening in India at the time. There were about 50 Indians in the town, most of them being students. We had an Indian Students Association, meeting occasionally for potlucks and festivals, but for most of the time, we were foreigners studying in America. The highlights of our days were when somebody came back from a visit to a big city, where there were Indian immigrants that held jobs, owned houses and had families, where there were actual Hindu temples, and Indian movies in theatres, and above all, where there were Indian restaurants… the Promised Land.

I visited Chicago three months after my entry into the States, my first excursion into the America that I had heard and read about in India. I marveled at the huge crowds, I gawked at the tall skyscrapers, and I went into ecstasies in their big department stores. But I cried when I saw my first live masala dosai on my plate. I would have had it bronzed if I hadn’t inhaled it.

What that visit taught me was that there were really two Americas. One was metropolitan America or Desiland (land of the immigrant Indian), where the immigrant Indian could be a part of both his native and his new communities; the other was small town America or Real America, where he could live a life that is one hundred percent American, down to steak and potatoes, Levis, and Chevy/Ford trucks. I lived in the latter. The experience was like getting on a roller coaster for the first time: the ride was harrowing, scary, and excruciating, but after it was over, well worth it.

For, I got to see how friendly and helpful Americans really are, how broad-minded and accepting they can be. They showed a lively curiosity about me, without being judgmental, and accepted me as friend with all my quirks. I felt like an ambassador at times, explaining the way we do things in India. And I learned that it was a good thing that I wasn’t into telling tall tales since, just because they chose to live in a small town, it didn’t mean that they didn’t have any exposure to the outside world. Most of the people I met, both in school and out of it, were very well-travelled, some had even been to India. As a student, I was stuck in Bozeman; it felt good to know that there were people who had been elsewhere, that actually chose to live here.

Then spring came to the valley… and I realized what a beautiful place this was. Bozeman was nestled in the Gallatin Valley and bordered by mountains on all sides, the Bridgers, the Gallatin Range and the Spanish Peaks, all part of the North American Rocky Mountain range. The Gallatin, Madison, Jefferson and Yellowstone rivers flowed around here. It was 32 miles southeast of the headwaters of the Missouri River (the object of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1805-1806), 100 miles northwest of the world’s first national park at Yellowstone, and near some of the best ski country in the States. In fact, a fifteen-minute drive in any direction would take you to a picnic area, fishing access or scenic area that was beautiful and, best of all, had no other humans around. I enjoyed every bit of that wonderful summer. Of course, there was another big reason for that: there was one Ph.D. student, (tall, dark, handsome single male) in the Veterinary Molecular Biology department from Coorg in India, who was real nice…

As I grew more used to the American life, I began to accept the way things were. The winters were still bitter, but had their moments, like when the brook that ran alongside the road from student housing to the school iced up on the surface, but still ran liquid underneath, or when sparkling bits of snow fell from trees when the breeze blew. There was still no good vegetarian food to be had, but I found substitutes like tater tots and bean burritos with Tabasco sauce. These may appear lame in comparison to all-you-can-eat Indian lunch buffets but still work when you are hungry as a bear. One of my favorite memories is the time when I went into Hardee’s and asked for a cheeseburger without the meat. I wonder if the pimply kid who took that order with his jaw hanging open still remembers it. Yep, I been in beef country and come out, still a vegetarian! A popular bumper sticker hereabouts says, Save a cow; eat a vegetarian, but I successfully evaded all attempts to be made the entrée du jour.

But most important, I realized that I could survive and do well, even under difficult circumstances. It was independence, learned the hard way, and it felt good. In a way, I was a pioneer too.

The funny thing was that I fell in love with that small town, so much so that I returned to it six years later. During my time in Bozeman, that Ph.D. student and I fell in love with each other, we got married, both of us earned our degrees, and we moved out, thinking that we’d never return. We lived in San Francisco, Toronto and Boston, all prime examples of Desiland, but ironically, we felt more alien and homesick there than we had in Montana. Incidentally, we have heard