On the 250th birthday of the country I call home, I feel thankful to be alive. I arrived here on January 14, 1985, as a young woman of 23. I still remember the color of the skirt and blouse I wore for my trans-Pacific flight when I taxied down on a wintry morning at San Francisco International Airport. The skies over the Bay Area were a misleading bright blue, as always, but the weather on that day four decades ago, according to ChatGPT, was a chilly “55°F, while the overnight low dropped to 45°F accompanied by drizzle and patchy fog.” (Yes, I was dressed for a South Indian summer.)
When I look back upon the drive from San Francisco airport to our plain apartment on San Jose’s Tradewinds Drive, I remember the noiselessness of it all. From vibrant cacophony I’d been transported into monotone, clinical silence. From my home country’s random olfactory assaults—imagine rancid coconut, burning incense, sandalwood, squeezed lime—I’d arrived in Purell Nation. The law and order here seemed to dictate even noise and smell.
I remember, most of all, the alien element to it all—I had, after all, arrived in the country as a “Resident Alien”—for I did feel I was on Mars. For every Indian who arrived in America, surely this experience had to be the first wake-up call about what it meant to be alive in the world? I had landed here as a young woman married to a man I did not know very well. Although we had written to each other for a whole year after we met and tied the knot, we were each discovering exactly who the other was. (Yes, everything happened in reverse in those days.) But did I really know the man I called my husband? And would America, my now adoptive nation, sustain me in my successes and my failures?
At the time, I was too young to ask these crucial questions: What makes a life worth living? Why do we feel we must cross shores? Why did I feel the need to leave the security and warmth of family for a place where nothing was guaranteed to be whole, most of all, my sense of identity? When I embarked upon the journey on a flight bound for America, I had no idea that one day I would chuck it all for writing and that I would become a seminal part of its 20th-century immigrant history. Those of us who arrived from India in the seventies and eighties became part of the history of Silicon Valley as it began paring the land of its apricot orchards and selling out for its next wave of wealth-building.
Before my husband and I knew it, however, our children had graduated from kindergarten, high school, and college. In a span of 25 years, we had hovered (literally, according to our children) over the lives of a daughter and a son, fretted over the number of emergency visits (for a shoulder dislocation, for packing thermocol up a nostril simply because, for a nasty head injury during rough play, for a severe case of asthma, and so on and so forth, (in a list that seemed endless), chewed our nails out at recitals, waited for one of them until 2 am when out in a car with a friend, butted heads, had many a petty fight, and attempted to console one another on a day when nothing went as planned and hoped.
Our family traveled abroad, and regular trips to India dominated our lives; as long as the grandparents were alive and well, this was a priority. We had to make sure our children knew their roots. This was the only way to keep what they both knew of the culture and the language. That was a decision I do not regret. When it came to America, however, there was a tendency for me and my husband to say that we could always see this land. It’s there. It’s where we live, after all. When we look back at our lives, I do wish we had made more road trips in America as a family.
In the last decade, however, the two of us, my husband and I, have made up for not seeing our adoptive nation by planning several road trips through the country. There was a trip to New Hampshire and Maine three years ago in August with the help of a friend who was a local. Our Yellowstone trip we planned with our Canadian friends, covering several states including national parks. Then there was our magnificent trip through Utah with personal milestones for me as I hiked some difficult (for me) trails. The richest of all road trips happened on a whim. My husband convinced me that we should go on a road trip between Florida and New York (and back), each drive taking us to new historic stops, each stop a treasure in the social, literary, and political history of the United States: Washington DC, Fredericksburg, Charlottesville, Charleston, Savannah, Fort Sumter, Montgomery, and Selma, among others.
Visiting Monticello made me lose some of my reverence for Thomas Jefferson, but by the end of that visit I was also in deep admiration of the man. There, we saw Jefferson, the uncannily brilliant engineer, architect, and scientist. We were shown Jefferson, the meticulous accountant and bookkeeper. We saw him as a 33-year-old thinker drafting the document that would become the Declaration of Independence. We saw the man who devoured books and, of course, we saw the statesman in all his hypocritical stances, the gentleman who spouted his philosophy about the equality of all human beings while possessing 607 slaves. Under the shade of mulberry trees, we walked through the slave quarters and plantation, and discovered what it was to be worked to the bone in the fields at Mulberry Row and at the weaving looms or at the tool sheds.
Every trip through America has made me realize how little I know about the country I now call home. The two of us try hard to see a new part of both our nations every year. We don’t know how long we can keep doing this, but the more we see of both our countries, the more we learn about how much more there is to know.
I will be Medicare eligible soon. My husband stepped into his eighth decade of life last year. I’m conscious now of more aches and pains in my limbs than ever before. While we still have good, healthy years ahead of us, we need to be fit enough to care for my husband’s parents in India. Then we need to be strong enough to run behind our one-year-old grandson when he visits us.
On the country’s 250th birthday, I close with a deep sense of gratitude for all that I’ve received here in America. This country’s appreciation for its own recent history taught me about the importance of understanding and appreciating centuries of Indian history and my own vast heritage. The many debates here on freedom of expression, decency, and justice have made me keenly aware of how to think about my writing. It’s a humbling thought when I consider that I may not be alive for the tricentennial that will take place in 2076.
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