As Americans, we are accustomed to being a magnet for the unhappy, the dissatisfied, and the persecuted from other countries. Whether we welcome immigrants, or hate them, we take for granted that every migrant who passes our border, documented or not, has essentially hit the jackpot, won the lottery. He has reached the land of eternal bliss.
We fail to appreciate the sacrifices the migrant has made to reach America. Not merely the discomfort and dangers of travel, and the risk of arrest and deportation, but also the loss of homeland. So what, we ask? Some poor soul from a backward, third world country? How can he complain of loss when he has reached the land of milk and honey?
Santosh was a domestic worker living in Bombay. He worked as a cook for a middle class businessman. He slept on the sidewalks, except during the monsoon when he slept in a small closet under his employer's stairs. His job earned him a pittance, but his needs were few.
He lived in squalor, we would say. He wouldn't agree.
I was so happy in Bombay. I had a certain position. I worked for an important man. The highest in the land came to our bachelor chambers and enjoyed my food and showered compliments on me. I also had my friends. We met in the evenings on the pavement below the gallery of our chambers. Some of us, like the tailor's bearer and myself, were domestics who lived in the street. ...
In the evenings it was cool. … The pavement was swept and sprinkled, bedding brought out from daytime hiding places, little oil-lamps lit. … [W]e read newspapers, played cards, told stories and smoked.
[In the morning,] I was free simply to stroll. I liked walking beside the Arabian Sea, waiting for the sun to come up. Then the city and the ocean gleamed like gold. Alas for those morning walks, that sudden ocean dazzle, the moist salt breeze on my face, the flap of my shirt, that first cup of hot sweet tea from a stall, the taste of the first leaf-cigarette.
Alas, indeed. Santosh's employer was sent by his company to Washington, D.C. Santosh faced the choice -- go with his employer, or return to his hill village where his wife and children lived. He had become too much an urbanite. He chose to travel to America.
V. S. Naipaul's novella "One Out of Many" was published in 1971, as part of a collection entitled In a Free State. Bombay (now Mumbai) was not the modern city it is today, and Washington was experiencing devastating race riots and arson; entire sections of Washington, including the area in which Santosh and his employer lived, were being blackened with flames. But I suspect that in much of Mumbai life, beyond the tourist areas, life goes on much as Santosh describes it. And I suspect that at least some of the racial tensions that prompted the riots in our nation's capital still simmer below the surface.
But Santosh's problems are far more fundamental than coping with tensions between the whites (which he did not consider himself) and the people he knew as hubshi, blacks who aroused at least as much prejudice in India as they did in America. The physical city itself he found disorienting, and the behavior of the people of all classes and races was impenetrable. He spoke virtually no English on arrival. He had no friends. He had no status. He enjoyed cooking for his employer -- and for the restaurant for which he later worked -- but when work hours were over he was at a total loss, despite gradually picking up some English.
His only ventures outside his quarters eventually were limited to visits to the supermarket, excursions that made him uncomfortable. He watched television, which gave him his only (distorted) insight into the life of white Americans.
Eventually, he married a hubshi woman who had shown some interest in him. They knew nothing about each other when he asked and she accepted. He tells us nothing about his marriage, but his account of how he spends his days does not include mention of his wife.
Like many immigrants -- some of whom, unlike Santosh, never learn any English at all -- he has no real life or enjoyments. As he says in my quotation from the story's conclusion, he merely goes through the motions as he waits for his eventual death.
Santosh's story reminds me of André Aciman's frequent accounts of his childhood life in Alexandria. Aciman and his family came from an infinitely more sophisticated and cosmopolitan background than did the humble cook from Bombay. But André, too, continually laments that no matter where he lives or visits, he never feels he is "home." Home is Alexandria, or more accurately a now-dead Alexandria, to which he can never return.
Permanently leaving the society you grow up in is a radical act. It is an act requiring much bravery, and is usually motivated by intolerable difficulty in living life in one's true "home." Groups of men, women, and children do not lightly leave their homes and walk 1,600 miles to a country they know little about. We can't assure them happiness in our very different society, although -- as the Latinos of our Southwest show -- we can offer them hope for their children's future happiness.
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