Maps

(Today's prompt from StoryADay.org was to create a character sketch. I had planned to develop the character defined as a twenty-nine-year-old woman in the story below. However, before writing the story, I read an excerpt from S. Shankar's novel A Map Where I Live, which depicts a character searching for Lilliput who ultimately skydives into nothing-ness. Reading Shankar triggered a memory of maps and addresses, and their importance in immigrant lives. So the character is more of a prototype -- the immigrant -- than an individual. Much of the story is new; some is drawn from work-in-progress.)



A story of how one travels from the place of one's birth to a current residence lurks in every individual. One of my goals in the first decade of the twenty-first century was to try and convince everyone I met to probe the depths of that story, and use it as an opportunity to define home.
I would start with an exercise: Close your eyes and go back to your childhood. Focus on the first memory that comes to your mind. I would invite everyone to keep their eyes shut for two or three minutes, and then ask them to write down whatever images came to mind.
Usually, the scenes were pleasant. Often, they were telling, presaging the journeys across the Atlantic Ocean out of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that the children would later make as adults. One woman remembered herself sitting on a swinging gate, letting the sun burn her nose, wondering where life would take her. A man remembered going to school for the first time. Another individual remembered a conversation he had with his father. Often, smells would surface: of jasmine, of cumin sizzling in ghee, of the damp earth following the monsoon, of the stench of trash accumulating outdoors in the streets.
Write down every address you have lived at, starting with the place of your birth. Use as much detail as possible. Including street names, numbers, cities, states, countries. List the years you lived at the address if you can remember. If there was no street address, list whatever was used to detail the geographic locale.
My students in Seattle had remarkably few addresses, as did my in-laws. My mother- and father-in-law had lived at the same house for forty years. My parents, by contrast, had nine addresses in just their married life together. My father used to jot down the addresses where he and my mother lived on the back of a photograph of them as newlyweds. When the photo crumpled, my mother carefully taped it together and stored it in a plastic wrap.
By then, they were living in Muncie.
But they did not yet consider it home.

“Where is home?” I asked a dozen people gathered in my parents’ living room. “What does home mean for you?”
Most of those gathered were émigrés who had come to Muncie three decades after our family had arrived. Like the bulk of the immigrants from South Asia who entered the U.S. in the 1990s, they were trained as software engineers, computer scientists, and informational technologists before leaving their home countries. Even as the U.S. was becoming a much more difficult country to enter, their prestigious education and highly sought after skills had paved a prosperous path for them to enter America.
They were young, like the immigrants who came in the 1960s. But their departure from their home countries was not considered permanent. They could imagine a world of round-trip plane tickets, dual citizenships, and homes in multiple locales. Prosperous and well-versed with the niceties of a shrinking globe, they landed in Muncie with little conception of what Muncie was. I was curious to find out how they had come to articulate a sense of  citizenship and national identity, and on how they articulated their place in Muncie as South Asians after they had lived in Muncie for awhile.
My questions, however, provoked dialogues less on Muncie and America and more about the inaccessibility of home.

“Well, I cannot say what home means,” responded one participant, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had grown up in New Delhi and had married a young Indian émigré who had taken a research-and-development position with a corporation based in Muncie. She was quite lonely in Muncie until my father happened to see her at the local Staples store and, perhaps remembering how he, too, had felt alienated and alone in Muncie, had greeted her.
“I have never been to my home, unless you mean my home to be the place from where I came. My home is now in Pakistan. Obviously, I cannot go there.”
“Why not?” I asked.
I knew the answer, in a sense. Many Hindu and Sikh Indians whose families had lived in what is present-day Pakistan before the British colonial administration had carved the country off of what was ruled by them as India to create a Muslim majority state did see Pakistan implicitly as off limits. The 1947 Partition that occurred at the end of the British Empire in India and resulted in the establishment of two separate nations – India and Pakistan – on the Indian subcontinent caused a dislocation of some 14 million individuals and an estimated 1.5 million deaths. Memories of the horrific violence continue to inform the attitudes of many India-born individuals toward Pakistan, as this individual’s comments illustrate.
But if the world was shrinking and this was a generation of South Asian immigrants who could have anything they wanted, it would seem that they would have no problem visiting their home.
As the young woman hesitated, the buzz of conversation in the room began to rise.
“What are you saying?” I asked one of the other participants, a twenty-seven-year-old who had grown up in Mumbai.
He hesitated. Then, he said, “Well, why would anyone want to go to a home in a Pakistan anyway? Why should anyone who is Indian do Pakistan a favor by making a visit?”
  A few others giggled, a little nervously.
I pressed. “Why shouldn’t she go, if she wants to go? She can get a visa. Pakistan isn’t bad. In fact, it is very nice. I’ve been there. I went there in 1996. The people are friendly, the food is incredible, and if you have a personal tie, it can be even more special just to see where your family once lived, the … uh, history, that transpired.”
Others in the room began murmuring. Our conversation shifted away from home and more into the “difficulties” that a Hindu might face in a Muslim-dominant country.
To bring the conversation back to the topic, I asked once again. “What is home? What does home mean for you?”
“I think you set us up with a trick question,” interjected another participant, an information systems specialist from Madras. “There is no way that we, as immigrants, can ever define home.”

It is 1971. The telephone in our ranch-style house on Woodward Drive rings. My mother reaches for the hand-set on the wall, and begins speaking. Quickly, she shifts to Hindi, clueing me to the fact that the caller is most likely from India.
The caller was a newcomer to Muncie, who planned to study at Ball State. He had arrived in Muncie knowing nobody, and had instinctively picked up the local telephone directory to see if any Indians lived in the town. He scanned the directory for common last names: Aggarwal, Bhatia, Desai, Garg. When he looked for Gupta, he found us. The only Gupta in town.
Soon, the caller was at our house having dinner. My father picked him up at the campus, and showed him a few important locations. The two of them visited a department store so he could pick up some essentials, and then came over for dinner.
Malati recalls driving into Muncie in 1994 with her husband Ravi and seeing a billboard for my parent's hobby and craft shop.
"Gupta Hobby Center," she remembers exclaiming. "A Gupta-ji is here."
At the hotel where she and her husband stayed, she too picked up a telephone directly. Soon, she and her husband too were at our house having dinner.
Long friendships begin with these encounters among immigrants who might differ in a hundred ways but share one thing in common: an incapability to define home.