No woman in my family has ever had a job.
No other female in my entire extended clan, as far back as I know, has ever leafed through ‘wanted’ ads and shuffled nervously in a seat while a stranger asked her about ‘job history’. What would she say? That her primary profession was to serve her father and brothers in early life, and her husband and sons later?
So I was completely taken aback when my mother-in-law prodded my stomach with a wooden spoon, complained that I was yet to make her a grandmother, and then insisted that I may as well be of some use and join the workforce.
‘America is expensive,’ she said, poking the utensil with such vigour that it was a rather good thing there wasn’t a baby in there. ‘This is not India. In this country everybody works.’
It didn’t matter that I was a newlywed, in the first flush of marriage, still unpacking the silk saris and silver goblets that had been part of my small but respectable trousseau. It didn’t matter that I was still getting acclimatized – not just to living in a strange country, with a man I didn’t really know, but also with his parents and his younger sister. And nor did it matter that, as far as I saw it, my most important role in this family was as housekeeper, cook and general errand-runner, duties that came along with my new position as wife and daughter-in-law.
All this, I had expected.
But I had never thought that somebody – least of all a ferocious guardian of tradition like my mother-in-law – would be telling me to go out and look for a job.
In generations of women in my family, I was going to be the first.
It should have made me feel like a trailblazer, a pioneer, a valiant example of a woman’s right to be independent.
Instead, the idea terrified me.
Whether by design or circumstance, my parents had never shown my sisters and me much of the world. To them, there was enough to see and do in India without us having to explore what lay beyond the borders of my homeland. It is the same limited vision, I suppose, that I soon realized many Americans have of their own country.
So getting off that plane two months ago at the Tom Bradley Terminal of Los Angeles International Airport, on a muggy day, was a shock in itself. I had stifled the instinct to wail all the way on the flight over, longing to be with my family again although I had just said goodbye to them. I had drifted in and out of restless sleep as watery images of my wedding, just days earlier, seeped through my subconscious. I was trapped in a middle seat on a packed aeroplane, my husband using my armrest on one side, and a large, be-turbaned Sikh doing the same on the other. I hadn’t even landed, yet already felt overwhelmed, squashed and small.
When we finally made it out to the airport, I was astonished by not just the huge numbers of people, but their different types. Television in India doesn’t show you the variety of humanity, their complexions and clothes and cultures so removed from my own: the black woman with her tight trousers and inch-long purple nails, checking my immigration papers; the waiflike Chinese man with the small, serious spectacles, waiting for his grey-haired mother to make her way through customs; the fat white fellow bellowing at his children to get out of the way so he could heave his luggage onto a wayward trolley.
The airport already was a world I had never seen, a microcosm of a universe that I knew I would always be apart from, never a part of.
A week after our Delhi wedding, Sanjay and I had arrived in Los Angeles, his home for the past two decades. For the following two weeks, it was going to be just him and me. My in-laws and Sanjay’s sister, Malini, had remained in India, travelling and visiting relatives, and presumably looking for a husband for my sister-in-law, who had just turned twenty.
‘Welcome.’ Sanjay shut the front door behind us. ‘This is your new home,’ he announced, like the fait accompli it was.
The house was located in a quiet street in Northridge, in an area popularly called ‘the Valley’, which sounds quaint and rural, but in fact is vast and sprawling, and stretches well across the state. Sanjay dropped the bags on the carpet, and moved towards the couch as I stood and looked around.
At least it was a nice home, and for this I could be grateful. One of my friends from Delhi had had an arranged marriage with a man in Chicago, and had arrived there with all the blushing and naïve enthusiasm of a new bride to discover that he was living in a garage.
But here there was plenty of space: a large sitting room, which looked as if it was never used, filled with bulky furniture, marble-topped tables, and a shiny crystal chandelier hanging overhead. A separate dining room boasted a long table, high-backed wooden chairs and a glass-covered cabinet holding glimmering little figurines. In India, this house would be considered a palace, and I very fortunate to live in it.
‘Come, I’ll show you my bedroom – oh, er, sorry, our bedroom,’ Sanjay offered, leading me in by the hand.
It was the room of a young man who had yet to completely shed the remnants of his boyhood: a mess of clothes and newspapers lay strewn across the floor, a big-screen television sat in one corner and remote controls for various other pieces of entertainment equipment were scattered on the bedside table.
‘Great, isn’t it?’ Sanjay grinned.
‘It’s quite messy,’ I said to him, looking around.
‘Hah, why would I clean up after myself when my wife, my new biwi, will be here to do it for me?’ he said, smiling.
‘I am not your maid!’ I shouted, realizing as I was doing so that I had never raised my voice at him before. I knew I should revert to the meek and mild Hindu wife that I had been for the past week, but I was exhausted. ‘Don’t think that I am some kind of a village bride because I am from India and you are living in America,’ I said testily.
Sanjay jumped back, startled, fear in his face.
‘I was just joking,’ he said. ‘Why so mad?’
I walked into the den and pushed a stack of newspapers off the couch so they tumbled to the floor. Sitting down, I began to weep. My ears were still sealed from our descent, my lips chapped from the cold aeroplane air. I was wondering what my family was doing that very second back home: if my father had yet had his morning chai, if my mother was scolding the dhobi for ruining yet another of her outfits, if Radha was combing her long hair, and Roma tending to the household, and Ria reclining against her bed, her face in a book. I knew that, barring any unforeseen calamity or cause for celebration, I could anticipate only an annual return to India. Other people live forty minutes or three hours away from their parents. Mine were a whole year away.
Sanjay approached me cautiously, and sat on the couch.
‘Why are you crying, Priya? I was just joking.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘These tears aren’t for that. I miss my family. I’m supposed to see your parents as mine, but I don’t. This doesn’t feel like my home. What if this is a mistake, and we can’t get out of it? Then what?’ I turned my back to him, and continued to cry.
I felt a murmur of a hand on my back, a gentle stroking of my hair. I could hear him breathing, steadily, tentatively, as if he were not sure if or where to touch me next.
‘Roh-na,’ he said gently, asking me again not to cry. ‘We are both new to this. We will make it.’
Looking back, I believe that that was the precise second that my married life began.
Until the start of my new life in America, I had never experienced jet lag. It was, to me, a concept as foreign as seasickness and being hung over, all of which only sophisticated people ever talked about. My first collision with jet lag made me believe that there is something to be said for being confined to the same time zone for all one’s life. I couldn’t wait for evening to come so I could finally sleep, but what seemed like an eternal night ended abruptly, hours before dawn. It was when I felt most vulnerable,