Saakhi: Amreeka, America, the US |
Listen to this article:
America entered our home sometime in the late 50s, when father came back after a long trip to Canada and the USA. From New York, his last port of call, he had picked up two little bronze souvenirs. One was a lady in a flowing gown and a crown upon her head, holding aloft a flaming torch. We were told she was called The Statue of Liberty. The other item was a tiny replica of The Empire State building, New York’s pride and one of the world’s tallest buildings.
For long, our house was filled with our small town relatives and nosey neighbours, eager to know more about the far off country they had known only through films and journals. All that made us feel we were all celebrities. “You know,’ Dhiru Bhaiya, our neighbour’s son and the oldest among our playmates, said to us, “Amreeka is a land paved with gold. And Amreekans are so rich that even the beggars there go around in cars to beg”.
Even though we had no house of our own in India, born in transferable government servants’ families, we always landed in a comfortable house waiting for us no matter where the latest posting catapulted us. But years later, when our little family – my husband, two-year-old daughter and myself – arrived in Washington DC on fourth of July, we heard the fireworks and cheering crowds nearby but felt lost and homeless in a hotel waiting to be located in an apartment that the HR department found for us.
Everything felt different – the people, faces, clothes. Even familiar food like milk and bread tasted different. For days, my daughter looked under beds and in chests of drawers to find familiar faces that might be playing hide-and-seek with her. The eyes I met in the hallway were cautious and incurious, and were soon averted. It was 1970 and young Indians in motels or the youth hostels were acceptable but in posh hotels they were not a familiar sight. People often asked me kindly if I had wandered in by mistake and needed to be guided to my destination. When I said I was staying at the hotel, I got long looks and no more was said.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The thing I now remember........