Sitars and stripes
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`Following the standards of the best narrative non-fiction, Kalita is an unobtrusive reporter, economical with her prose and astute in her observations.'
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STUDY the signboards on the funeral parlours and the grocery stores. That's what amateur sociologists are advised when they set out to chart the ethnic changes in specific American neighbourhoods. Invariably, the funeral homes are owned by a member of a long-settled immigrant group that's well on its way to becoming just another lump in the melting pot. These businesses indicate that an entire generation has lived out their lives in the new country, even as their children have turned into Americans and left the old neighbourhood for the affluence of the suburbs. But the proprietors of the grocery stores, most often, are members of a recent group of settlers who're still struggling to get a toehold on the ladder to success. They haven't been in America long enough to forget the tastes and smells of home — and the more entrepreneurial among them are only too glad to cash in on the nostalgia of their countrymen.
In the early 1990s, as Irish and Italian names hung over the funeral homes of Central New Jersey, the grocery stores increasingly were coming to be owned by people called Patel and Singh. Prompted by legal changes that allowed immigrant families to bring over parents and siblings, and by the demand for computer engineers, New Jersey's Indian population more than doubled in the decades from 1990, from 79,440 to 169,180. That bare statistic is hung with flesh and blood in Suburban Sahibs, in which S. Mitra Kalita takes a novelist's eye to the efforts of three Indian families to realise their American Dreams. It's sitars and stripes forever.
Following the standards of the best narrative non-fiction, Kalita is an unobtrusive reporter, economical with her prose and astute in her observations. She follows the rollercoaster rides of the Kotharis, the Patels and the Sarmas with an empathy that comes from being a second-generation Indian immigrant herself. Their stories are representative of the struggles of tens of thousands of Indians to weave new lives in Edison, the town in which Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb in 1876, and remind us of people we all know: the uncle who went off to an American college in the 1960s, whose daughter has a pierced eye-brow and is living with a black man; the restless friend who's working in a petrol pump but thinks that returning to India is to admit defeat; the computer-engineer cousin whose $70,000 salary has propelled him into the ranks of the American middle classes without any of the strains traditionally associated with the immigrant experience.
Kalita also chronicles the reactions of long-settled citizens to their new neighbours: while a few stones are hurled at the windows of Indian-owned stores, some local politicians are quick to realise the importance of incorporating the new immigrants into the political machine. Her final sketch, of travel agent Pradip Kothari's campaign for public office, should nudge readers to consider the paradoxes of the Indian middle-class attitude to immigration: we nod approvingly as our government fulminates about the stray bias attacks that followed 9/11, even as we believe that the Gujarat genocide was a "justified reaction"; we fret that Western governments make it difficult for us to emigrate, even as we insist that "Bangladeshis" (many of whom are actually Muslims from West Bengal) will ruin our cities; we cheer when people of Indian origin are elected to state assemblies in the U.S. and the British houses of Parliament, even as we're adamant that an Italian-born naturalised Indian can never become prime minister. It's a marvel that we accuse American-Born Desis of being Confused.
Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and Their Passage from India to America, Penguin, Rs. 250.
NARESH FERNANDES
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