by Anjana Basu

Copyright © Anjana Basu

She came looking for the lights of New York city, but is now juggling her time between caring for her husband's home, pets and children.

It's a weekday morning again in the US. In millions of homes all over the country, the inhabitants are getting ready for another work-a-day. Babies scream on their way to their sitters, children head out to their school-bus stop, lugging their lunch boxes, while male and female executifwves hoist their Coach bags and drive down the freeways for their 45-minute commute to their offices. White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, South Asian- no matter - they all follow the same morning schedule at their different levels, deserting their homes for more exacting seven-to-seven routines or more.

However, there are some people who do stay behind -whether to switch off the dishwashers or hush the baby or cook or clean or do something. The wives - specifically some South Asian wives, whose existence moves at a pace very different from that of their spouses.

Transplanted out of their normal milieu and dumped unceremoniously into an atmosphere supposed to move faster than their lives "back home," most of them set out to create an existence guaranteed to cushion them against homesickness. These are the wives with relatively new marriages who are trying to juggle life in America. Most of them have come from Bombay, Delhi, Karachi, Lahore, Calcutta, Colombo, Madras or Bangalore.

South Asian men go east looking for a bride.

These are the women married to men who went East from the US looking for wives. Enamored by the prospects of settling down in the US, these women got married to these men through matrimonial ads or through the intervention of relatives.

The men went East looking for a traditional bride with "South Asian" values - notwithstanding the girlfriend(s) they left behind in the US. The women ventured West looking for the lights and glamour of New York or Los Angeles. Instead, they have touched down in quiet suburbs with tree-lined streets, a couple of supermarkets a handful of restaurants and the nearest shopping mall way past Twelve Mile Road somewhere south of the border and north of the freeway.

A startling discovery almost all of them make is that there aren't any useful automatons called domestics to shampoo the carpets or clean the tub, or dust the shelves, or slice the vegetables, or clean the meat. "You've got to do everything yourself here," declared Raji Mohan, hammer in hand. "Tell me, have I got those two paintings exactly diagonal to each other? Okay. So if I put this tack here and hammer it like that?" She hangs the picture up, the tack refuses to take its weight and the picture slides gracefully to the carpet. I asked her, why not wait for her husband to come back since she was obviously making heavy weather of it. She said, "Well, I've got to do it myself. If I waited for my husband to do it for me, he'd be furious. He'd say, I've got enough to do bringing in the bread."

Moving around is not easy either. To visit the neighbor you have to drive. Or even to get to the nearest store. Public transportation, they find, hardly exists outside the major cities. For some driving can be quite an ordeal. "My husband put me in the car, told me what to do and dumped me on the nearest freeway," said a woman who had just arrived in Iowa a few months earlier. It's so scary, you know and he was so sarcastic about it. After that, I've decided I'm not going to drive." Not driving also means not being able to go anywhere - literally anywhere.

Some of them, however, are proud of their new American cars even though the mysteries of power steering and cruise control can be a little confusing. And with very rare exceptions, they all prefer to avoid the freeways and settle for driving from mall to mall off the beaten track. Long drives are saved for weekends when, hopefully, with their husband, they can hit the nearest big town for a day out. But during the week, after the husbands are gone and the chores are done, there is very little left to do except head for the malls, where one can shop and browse and eat. It helps if you have friends nearby.

"We've got a perfect system," a member of a group of Indian wives outside Detroit said. "We sort of get together and decide what household items we need to buy and then we just buy them together in bulk."

Unlike the little towns, the big malls are crowded and you can meet fellow South Asians there. Friendships start very easily. People meet, stop, exchange addresses and phone numbers and, on an impulse, invite each other to lunch or perhaps to catch the latest Bollywood film on DVD's.

They have successfully managed to carve out a microcosm of existence very different from their environs. Very few of them have non-South Asian acquaintances. And at a time when the emphasis is on a two-career household, many prefer not to work. "I think my husband likes me just the way I am, keeping house and having fun with the girls," said Raji. Kum Kum Chatterjee, stranded in the middle of academia confesses sadly that few American colleges are really interested in Indian degrees and that Presidency doesn't carry much clout in Pennsylvania.

"Though actually," she says, " I think it's all a matter of contacts like it is at home. I don't know the right people and it's surprising how little people here know about India." "I think that people are basically warm, friendly and open minded here (more so in a small town) and genuinely curious about other cultures and traditions but there isn't the constant dialogue between people as we have in India. "I agree," says Ruby Mitra looking back to the day she came to America as a bride.

There are some wives who find themselves temporary classes to go to, as a substitute for the Ikebana and the ice-cream making that they would have learned in India. Aerobics, as in India, is the most popular. Enterprising ones, like Swati Lal, can cash in on the craze and teach a brand of homegrown yoga or even Indian classical music. But these are only the more ingenious.

Junk mail is guaranteed to make any lost Indian wife feel at home. A small organization in New Jersey sends leaflets advertising a grand sari sale which features computer chip saris and blouses along with the normal rubia variety. Rekha is dancing at the Ford auditorium and all the other wives in the area are bound to be there sporting their weaves and their synthetics and chattering in Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali and believing for a while that all this is happening in Netaji Stadium.

For those wives lucky or unlucky enough to be stranded in places with few Indians, once the pleasures of solitary shopping pale, the only things left are the soap operas on TV, or the films on video. Perhaps this is why they are so crime-conscious. New wives can recount the crime figures with deadly accuracy. One out of four American homes is broken into every year and no matter how small the town, one has to be careful. Going out alone at night is a definite no no, unless you live in a campus town. Security conscious wives with Caller ID screen phone calls before picking up the receiver.

Despite this nagging fear, for the most part they lead mundane, uneventful lives with hardly any excitement.

"We lived in a small town called Burlington in Iowa where it was cold and dreary. Hardly saw anyone on the almost-spotless streets. There were beautiful houses on our street with manicured lawns, but not a soul on them. I used to wonder why I didn't see any children (they were busy in the backyard)," said Deepa Vaidyanath. "Nothing spectacular happened except for the fact that I lost myself completely one day while trying to come back home after a trip to the grocer. I found my way home with the help of a friendly university student who was going back my way."

But finding their way home seems to be the least of their problems in relation to their metaphorical quest of finding their way in life. Because, despite the custom-designed homes, the cell phones and the Mercedes, they find that it's very hard to turn their existence in small town America - or metropolitan America, for that matter - into even a lesser version of what it was in South Asia.

Photo Credit:
Illustrations by Reuben Sinha.