"American at heart"
#12 Padma enjoyed playing historian as she took me through her experience with migration in the 1980s.
Padma has lived in America for 44 years now.
“I left and arrived here on the same day, which is what happens when you come from India to here.” A silent nod to the way time is warped when we chase the sun across the globe.
“14th of August 1982.”
This never ceases to amaze me. Everyone remembers the exact date they moved, as do I, because that day cleaves their lives into ‘before’ and ‘after’.
On that day over four decades ago, Padma had a sense of “nobody even knows, nobody cares what 15th of August is — that was my early introduction to ‘okay, I’m in a different world here.’”
August 15 is the day of India’s independence.
Why did you move here?
“In retrospect, it’s very shallow and very foolish. The goal was ‘I want to go abroad to study!’”
Over half her batch at IISC Bangalore (Indian Institute of Science), where she studied engineering, wanted to come to the US.
“That was the goal,” Padma said, generously laying out the events of her life for me with theatrical flair.
“My father said ‘absolutely not, you can’t go all by yourself, but if you’re married, I can consider it.’ So I said ‘Okay, I’ll get married, let’s find a guy who’s there.’ That was the reason I came here.”
Thus came Padma to America, a new bride, full of ambition, which she went on to fulfill with a master’s in engineering and a rewarding career. Today, the Padma seated on my couch, sipping tea and reminiscing, is a widow, a mother and a grandmother. And she’s still a working professional.
So much has happened since she came, but her memories of the day she landed are still strong. She flew Air India from Bombay to New York’s JFK airport. Her husband, who was already working here, came there to receive her. Their final destination was Cleveland, Ohio.
They stayed overnight in New York before catching the connecting flight the next morning. “I remember the freeway drive to the hotel, cars whizzing past, no pedestrians, no two-wheelers, no traffic lights, just cars. The road was so homogenous. I remember the structure and the order — that was one of the first memories when I stepped outside.”
Another memory from her first few days here is about experiencing being in a high-rise for the first time. In Cleveland, they lived on the 16th floor of a 24-storey building of an apartment complex. “I had never gone higher than the 2nd floor,” she said, giving me a peek into a sepia-toned India, very different from the technicolor one I’ve seen.
Moving from India to the US was “not traumatic at all,” she said, attributing this to her experience with moving homes across India as a child.
Padma, originally from Andhra Pradesh, has lived in different parts of India. At 13, she moved from Delhi to Bangalore. “That was a huge culture shock.” Overcoming the challenge of intercity migration in her formative years immunized her against potential large scale stress when she moved countries as an adult.
“I’ve never had an identity crisis.”
Being called a “Madarasi” in Delhi and a “Delhi-wali” in Bangalore taught her that “identity is fluid.” She always disliked “sticking out like a sore thumb” — growing up, she stood out because she was “skinny” and tall and wore glasses — and tried to fit in as best she could. Sometimes that meant making sure the food in her tiffin box matched the local cuisine, at other times it meant her clothes were aligned with what others around her wore. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Padma became American on paper in 1998.
“By that time I was an American at heart.”
Of all the American values she was “liberated” by, the strongest one was “live and let live.”
Do you call yourself Indian, American or Indian-American?
“I think I play games by being politically correct! My answer depends on where I am. I don’t want to antagonize the company around me… If I’m asked at work, I’ll say I’m an American.”
Oh?
“Absolutely! That’s why I never mix my work and my personal life. At work I’m completely American but at home I am completely Indian. I don’t want to mix these two worlds and explain ‘this’ world to ‘them’ and ‘that’ world to ‘them’.”
Would it go against you if you were more Indian at work?
“Yes. Absolutely! Oh my God! In my generation at that time? Oh, absolutely. I was a brown woman in a man’s world.”
I try to picture what being a woman of color, working in tech, in the midwest, in the 1980s must have been like.
I can’t, so I ask her: So you couldn’t just be yourself?
“I was myself… I spoke my mind, I was sharp, I was not afraid of saying I’m intelligent, I competed with the guys for projects and awards and stuff… but I was not Indian. I’ve never gone to work with a bindi on my forehead.”
She cooked and ate Indian food at home but never carried an Indian meal to work. She has no qualms saying she made very deliberate attempts to fit in. That meant having two alter egos — an Indian one named Padma and an American one named ‘Pam’ — who never mingled.
“That’s the cloak of a first generation immigrant. What’s the big deal? I don’t understand all this heartache about it. Of course you’re going to be two different people, you’re going to have a split personality. You’re going to play whatever card needs to be played in whatever area you’re in. That’s survival! It’s common sense. We worked very, very hard to belong. We lived quietly. There wasn’t all this noise — strident voices screaming from table tops.”
By this time we’d segued to spirituality and her tea had gone cold. She quoted a Sanskrit shloka1 from the Bhagvad Gita which says, at the time of death the soul sheds the body like a cloak and picks up a new one. That helps me better understand her comment about ‘the immigrant cloak’.
“So the personality you choose to put on is like that,” she said. “Your name, the clothes you wear, are all superficial.”
To her, it’s the soul, “the atman,” that matters.
“For me, India is not about wearing ghagras and eating samosas,” she said, insisting, for her, it’s something deeper; “it’s more about cultural heritage, spirituality and faith in God.”
A practicing Hindu, she prays, chants and conducts bal vihar classes, where she teaches children Indian culture in her spare time. But discussions about whether Diwali should be declared a holiday in America do not interest her in the least.
Where is home?
“If I divide my life so far into three parts, then for the first part, India was home. For the second part, I had one leg there, one leg here. Now, both my legs are here. Today, this is home.”
vāsāṁsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navāni gṛhṇāti naro’parāṇi
tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇā nyanyāni saṁyāti navāni dehī
Such a different and interesting perspective. Thank you for interviewing people across backgrounds and age groups!