LETTER FROM INDIA

India's stepchildren, making their own way home

By Anand Giridharadas

Published: November 20, 2008

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VERLA, India: "What are Papa and I doing here?"

These words, instant-messaged by my mother in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep-ocean cables and came to me in the village where I'm now living, in the country that she left.

It was five years ago that I left America to come live and work in India. Now, in our family and among our Indian-American friends, other children of immigrants are exploring motherland opportunities. The idea is spreading virally through émigré households across the West.

Which raises a heart-stirring question: If our parents left India and trudged westward for us, if they manufactured from scratch a new life there for us, if they slogged, saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, then what does it mean when we choose to migrate to the place they forsook?

If we are here, what are they doing there?

They came of age in the 1970s, when the "there" seemed paved with possibility and the "here" seemed paved with potholes. As a young trainee, my father felt frustrated in companies that awarded roles based on age, not achievement. He looked at his bosses, 20 years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he didn't want to spend his life becoming them.

My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of the best schools in Washington.

It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.

My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.

Perhaps it was the survivalism born of scarcity: the fierce pushing to get off the plane, the miserliness even of the rich, the obsession with doctors and engineers and the neglect of all others. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Perhaps it was the culture shock of servitude: a child's horror at reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India.

My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities.

But history bends, and sometimes swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.

India, having fruitlessly pursued command economics, tried something new: it liberalized, privatized, globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.

America, meanwhile, floundered. In a short blink of history came 9/11, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, emerging economies, rogue nuclear nations, climate change, dwindling oil, a financial crisis.

Pessimism crept into the sunniest nation. A vast majority saw America going astray. Books heralded a "Post-American World."

"In the U.S., there's a crisis of confidence," said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, the Indian software giant, and author of a forthcoming book, "Imagining India."

"In India," he added, "for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of optimism about the future, a sense that our children's futures can be better than ours if we try hard enough."

My love for my birth country never flickered. But these new times piqued my interest in my ancestral land. Many of us, the stepchildren of India, felt its change of spirit, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.

At first we felt confused by India's formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. We wondered what the newspapers meant when they said "INSAT-4CR in orbit, DTH to get a boost."

Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to "S&M conferences," only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing.

Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for a man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting.

We learned new expressions: "He is on tour" (means: He is traveling. Doesn't mean: He has joined U2); "What is your native place?" (means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn't mean: What hospital delivered you?); "Two minutes" (means: An hour. Doesn't mean: Two minutes).

We tried to reinvent ourselves, as our parents had, but now in reverse. Some studied Hindi, others yoga. Some visited the Ganges to find themselves; others tried days-long Vipassana meditations.