The Taste of Ginger(36)

“It’s not like I was that much younger than you. I saw all of that stuff too.” I tried not to sound defensive, but he often acted like being five years older gave him a lifetime of experience over me.

He shook his head. “You know some of it, but they worked really hard to keep the bad stuff from you when you were a kid. So did I. We wanted you to think moving to America was the great adventure we hoped it would be.”

I searched my memories, trying to understand what Neel meant. It had been hard for him and me as we struggled to fit in at the public school, where most of the kids were white or black, but I thought it had been good for our parents when we’d first arrived. One of Dad’s friends had helped him get an engineering job at a steel factory. Mom had her social circle with Monali Auntie and her other friends who had also come over from Ahmedabad. It was like they had their perfect Indian enclave in America: modern amenities with old-world culture. They weren’t teased and picked on the way we were because they didn’t have to go to school and mix with so many non-Indians. No one had ever called them “curry lovers” during lunchtime—a phrase that I did not understand because there were no Indian dishes I knew of called curry. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized curry was what white people decided to call Indian food rather than use the names Indians used for our food. My parents never learned to identify themselves as “other” the way Neel and I had to navigate America’s color-based caste system. As a child, I’d longed to be something other than “other.” After September 11, I got my wish. After that, we all became “brown,” and that was far worse than “other.” India had no “brown” people, so I’d never referred to myself as such when living there. The first time I had to utter it as an identifier of who I was, it felt so odd. But my parents escaped that. Keeping to their own meant they got to avoid the pressures of blending in and adopting odd labels to make them palatable to the white community around us. For years, when things were so hard for Neel and me, I’d been resentful that they’d made this move thinking only of themselves and not about how it would affect us.

“What were they fighting about?” I asked.

“Dad hated being a factory worker and wanted to come back. I think having an advanced degree but doing lower-caste work really hurt his pride. He thought his education and stature in India would translate here, but those things didn’t matter anymore. They ended up making less money than they would have in India and working harder to get it.”

“Factory worker? Dad was an engineer.” I couldn’t picture my father doing manual labor as a profession.

“That’s what he told people, but the company wouldn’t recognize his Indian degree. He was working on the floor of a steel mill hauling stuff to the loading docks. That’s why he has all of those back problems now. It took him years to get an American degree at the local community college that companies would recognize.”

My mind was reeling. How could I not have known that?

Neel continued, “Dad thought they’d be better off back in Ahmedabad. They’d have more respect and could afford a better life. Life would have been easier.”

“Why didn’t they move back?”

“Mom didn’t want to.”

That wasn’t the answer I was expecting. My mother, who was so steadfast in her devotion to Indian culture and who could not get on the plane fast enough whenever we went to Ahmedabad for a visit, hadn’t wanted to move back home? This was the same woman who’d forced me to wear panjabis to a public school in Chicago after she’d realized there were no school uniforms like we’d had at our private school in Ahmedabad. I had begged her to buy me a pair of jeans so I could dress like the other kids, but she’d said my tailored Indian clothes were better quality than the cheap, off-the-rack American clothes I wanted to wear. It had taken me over a year to convince her otherwise.

“Why?”

“Not sure.”

Neel’s version of our family’s life was so different from what I remembered. I began scanning my memories, looking for signs I had missed or been too young to notice. When my parents forced us to take leftover Indian food to school for our lunches and made us susceptible to curry-related jokes, was that really because they thought it was more nutritious, or was it because it was all they could afford? Was Mom insistent that I wear panjabis because we already had them, and she couldn’t pay for new Western clothes? Did she tell me I couldn’t have friends over for dinner because it was just another mouth to feed and every penny counted?

I had so many unanswered questions, but before I could probe Neel for more information, Bharat walked into his bedroom and asked if he could use the computer.

“Sure,” Neel said, standing and returning the chair to the desk. “Sorry we took over your room.”

I wasn’t sure when Neel and I would get another moment of privacy to resume our talk. But we had already come so far in just this single conversation, and I knew he was never going to be able to tell me why our mother had acted a certain way toward me, whether it was because she believed so strongly in our culture or whether she’d rather have me believe that instead of knowing how difficult things were after moving. Only she could give me those answers.



That night, I replayed my conversation with Neel and my childhood memories for things I might have missed or that might have been more nuanced than my young mind could have processed at the time. I felt a little betrayed that Neel hadn’t let me in on all those secrets earlier. While I’d thought we hadn’t kept any secrets from each other, it seemed that loyalty had only flowed one way. And even if the goal had been to protect me as a child, we’d both been adults for a long time now. Loneliness washed over me, and my heart yearned for Alex.