AmreekanDesi

Ravi Masoor was an ordinary man. After a lifetime of public service as a postmaster, he switched to a career in politics. He did well, and by a quirk of destiny and the complexities of coalition politics he ended up becoming India’s external affairs minister.

Unlike his cabinet colleagues, Masoor declined all official amenities and decided to continue living as a common man. Living an ordinary life would allow him to better empathize with his fellow aam aadmis.

Besides, an austere life would set an example for others in public service. He could not let himself enjoy a life of comfort while his countrymen plodded their way through hardship.

He lived in a tiny MIG flat in Dwarka and drove a Maruti Wagon R to work. The car happened because going to work on his Hero Honda Splendor became too big of a security concern. He had no domestic help (demeaning to fellow Indians), paid his phone/bijli bills himself, and lived a contented life with his wife and three little kids.

The US Secretary of state was on a state visit, and Masoor was scheduled for a meeting with her today. Pakistan had been firing on the border, and there had been increased incidents of intrusion in Kashmir. China on the other front, wasn’t any less busy with its aggressive stance on the border disputes and would routinely shake a diplomatic rifle at India.

India had been pleading with the US for some diplomatic show of support, but things were in a state of statemate stalemate.

Today’s meeting was going to be crucial.

This was peak load shedding season and there had been no power for the last 20 hours. The inverter was long gone. Somehow he spent the night preparing for the big meeting in candlelight. The kids proposed keeping a bucket nearby for the sweat. Evaporation would help cool down the room, they had just learned in school.

Somehow the night passed, and he was ready for work.

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Asha and Ravi were a happy couple. After an agonizing year and a half of misery living as an H4 wife, Asha had finally got her H1 visa. She had found a job with a high school in New York city who filed for her H1 visa. She was lucky and the visa got approved.

She had already been working for a few months now.

Life was all settled and going on nicely. Their combined income afforded them a very comfortable lifestyle. Life was great. They would save for a while, buy a big house in the suburbs with their own garden. Ravi had his Lexus. Asha would get her second love, a Honda CRV. They would have two kids and a dog. If all went well, Asha and Ravi would achieve their American dream in a few years.

All did not go well. Their dream was to come crashing soon.

Ravi’s trading division at Goldman Sachs had been struggling under the weight of the ongoing financial woes. Goldman decided to cut off the aching arm.

Ravi no longer had a job. Ah…the vagaries of life!

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As the air hostess handed over the immigration forms, Rajat felt a daze from the blood rushing to his head. His dream was coming true, at last.

Ever since he had gotten into engineering and heard all those stories of Indians going to America to live out their american dream, he had had only one goal in life.

Rajat wanted to live in America. He wanted to bathe in american water. He wanted to eat american eggs and drink american milk. He wanted to work in America.

He got that golden chance two years into his job with one of the leading consulting firms. Once he lost out on that onsite opportunity, there was only one way out.

Rajat found a consultant who would file for his H1 visa. Once that came through, he would go to the US, and be assigned to work on a project for some fortune 500 client.

This was too good to be true. He paid $2000 towards the visa filing fee, and another $2000 as a deposit to the consultant, just as security that he wouldn’t chuck the consultant as soon as he landed on the hallowed shores.

Luck was on Rajat’s side. He got the visa.

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Asha got off the Continental Boeing 747 with a constipated stomach and a flutter in her heart. She had just crossed the proverbial seven seas over a fifteen hour non stop flight from New Delhi.

She was in America.

The past two weeks had been a whirlwind. She had met Ravi on 20th Nov, and ten days later they were husband and wife.

Ravi was a strapping 30 year old vice president at Goldman Sachs. He had been lapped up from NYU’s Stern school where he had been among the top performers in his MBA class. He had managed to hold off his mother’s insistence for the past few years, but now that he had gotten the promotion he so desperately wanted, there was no stopping her.

All he had to do was take a picture with his Lexus in clean clothes and send to his tech savvy mom. She set up his profile on Shaadi.com and set about finding a suitable match for her son. A shortlist of 25 was prepared and Ravi was summoned to headquarters in Mumbai.

Of all the doctors, engineers, and finance types that his mom had shortlisted Ravi liked Asha most. They got married a week later. There was no time for a honeymoon in a two week leave.

The newly weds were in New york.

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You stupid FOB. Who the hell asked you to come to this country? You dumbasses from India take away from all the hard work we put into getting accepted in this country. You stink. Your India stinks.

Akhil kept listening as AJ lashed out at his Indianness.

AJ was Indian. Kind of. His real name was Ajay and he was born to parents who had left India over 30 years back. He was an American citizen. He despised the link to India. It kept him down. It was stopping his progress. He was smarter than most kids his age, but he was exotic. Never really there. As much as he hated the expression, he was an American Born Confused Desi. An ABCD. Akhil, on the other hand, was a FOB.

Akhil and AJ were roommates. They were attending the masters program in Computer Science at the University of South California, and destiny university housing had put them in the same room. Akhil considered himself as an ambassador of India. AJ hated everything Indian. Clearly there wasn’t much love between the two.

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Akhil was two months old in America. He was a FOB (Fresh Off the Boat). Even though he flew in from NewDelhi. No Boat involved.

All Indians around him, even the ones who had been in the US for years were FOBs. They would remain so till, well, forever. Along the way, they would get married, and have kids. Their kids would be ABDs (American Born Confused Desi). But they would be FOBs forever. Anyway, this is about our favorite DBD (ABD – American + Desi = DBD). Akhil.

Akhil was a 24 year old software engineer. He chucked his well paying tech job to come over to the US to get his masters degree. All paid for by the university. He was after all, a bright kid.

His flight to cross the proverbial seven seas stopped over in Paris. A starving Akhil went to get a coffee and was horrified to find a cup of coffee priced at 4 dollars. 200 rupees!!! There was no way he was going to drink that. Then he found his new friend from the flight – a fellow to-be-FOB who agreed to share the coffee. And Akhil had the costliest half cup of coffee of his life. Yet.

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Akhil was confused. He had just been told to take it easy by his fellow Teaching assistant Mike ‘Belly’ Smith, and was not too sure what it was supposed to mean.

He had finished his weekly session teaching eighteen year old American kids how to save documents in word, as part of his Computer Literacy assignment. His throat always got parched from all the speaking, and he had gone out of the room to grab water.

He had also managed to get locked out of his classroom. His wallet, ID, home keys, everything was left in the room. Poor Akhil was worried about what to do and he remembered that Mike had his office nearby. He ran to Mike’s office and asked him if he had access to the same room.

Mike did not.

But he suggested that Akhil call up the campus police and that they could help unlock the room for him. And as Akhil left, Mike said “take it easy”.

Akhil thought that maybe he looked worried thats why Mike suggested him to take it easy. He was a little surprised though. He wasnt quite that worried. Anyway, he thought, that was nice of Mike.

The cops took 10 minutes to get there, and were very cooperative. As they left, they told Akhil to, well, take it easy.

Akhil had just arrived in America to start his masters, and really didn’t know much about the American way of doing things. That night he discussed with his more experienced roommates, and they laughed at him shamelessly for a full minute before they could even reply.

Abe gadhe…you are a complete idiot. Just take it easy.

Going to America. The song was set on an infinite loop in Rajiv’s mind, and had played out about ten thousand times in the last two days.

He was after all, going to America.

That though couldn’t happen till he finished packing. Which would be once his mom was done stuffing fifteen packs of dals, and spices, and snacks, and soaps, and toothpaste, and shoe polish, and god knows what else, into his two suit cases which as per US regulations couldn’t weigh more than 64 pounds.
Not the pound that is the British dollar, but the pound that is the American kilo. (What sort of silly people weigh in Pounds. A woman weighing a nice 40 kilos would probably have a heart failure if someone admiringly told her that she looked about 90, and forgot to add the unit.)

Anyway, who cared. Rajiv had already converted to the pound system. He even went to the Agarwal sweet store and asked for 2 pounds of kaju barfi. He called them ignorant and they shooed him off. Their loss. He was going to America, kaju barfi or not.

Rajiv had grown from strength to strength the past 6 months. He was a wreck during the initial application stage. Only he knew how he managed to get his 95 percentile GRE score. In March he got notification of his acceptance to the University of Southern California (no funding, but his dad was rich enough to pay the thirty thousand dollars. Thank god for rich parents). He was the envy of his classmates, and the latest find for the babes girls. He was a lion. Soon it was time to get the visa. He had heard of so many stories where the visa officer rejected the visas of even deserving people. He was mediocre, on his best day. He was going crazy. He couldn’t afford turning back from here.

There was going to be no need for turning back. The visa officer liked his face, and wished him luck.

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The alarm went off at exactly 7:30, just like everyday. But it was a Saturday and there was no office today. Akhil slapped his heavy fist on the snooze button of his Chinese alarm clock he had bought from the dollar store last week. Damned alarm.

Ten minutes later he woke up with a start. “Oh crap!” Today was Holi.

Akhil felt a pang in his stomach. He was going to miss home today more than ever. His first holi in a new town with hardly any Indian friends around. Nobody to smudge with color, no kids running around throwing water balloons at random people, no celebration of any sort for him. And then it occurred to him that holi in India would already be over – it was early evening there at this time. He smiled at the irony of that realization, but that sinking feeling came creeping back a second later.

He called up home and talked to everybody in the family. They were all there – his parents, uncles, aunts, all the kids. The only one missing was him.
At least he could call them up, if not be with them. Some consolation.

This lasted 30 minutes. It was now 9am and the day had just about begun for him. He had moved to New York last month after finishing grad school in Atlanta, and didn’t really have any friends he could visit or invite over.

“Let’s make some kheer to celebrate” he thought. He was a good cook, and the last time he made kheer was on India’s Independence Day when he had made a potful and taken to his office. Everybody had liked the rice pudding, as they called it.
An hour later the kheer was ready, but Akhil was even more stressed out. All this kheer on a festival and nobody to share it with. The loneliness was killing him.

Even Shakira didn’t help, and Shakira always worked for him.

Last year holi was so much better. He had a big bunch of Indian friends back in grad school and they had so much fun at the Indian Association sponsored celebrations. But now he was in a different corner of the country. Things were a little different this year around.
He called up his dearest buddy Rajiv, who had just about woken up. He was in a different time zone, but in the same situation as Akhil. They talked for a long time, discussing their lives and the multitude of options they had for spending their time. Rajiv had a suggestion – “maybe they do some celebration at the local temple?”
A quick Google search revealed that a temple a short drive from home indeed had some sort of holi celebration in the morning. It was almost noon now, but if he rushed he might make it.

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The phone rang…”Your cab’s here sir”

“You’re 15 minutes early. Give me 5 minutes and I’ll be there.”

Akhil was bristling with excitement. Three weeks. That was how long he was going to be gone. Home. After all of two years. Akhil was a young Indian living the American dream thousands of miles away from family. He thought of his argument with his boss when he asked him to let him take all of his annual vacations in one go – “Three weeks! That’s too long” was his initial reaction.” Akhil smiled.

He hauled his bags down the four flights of stairs and out the door. The limo driver was waiting patiently for him. As Akhil saw him he smiled. “Aap Hindi bolte hain?” The driver looked Indian.

As the driver helped transfer the luggage in the car, he told his name – Nayeem. They were on their way to the airport.

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