One summer morning when I was 17, I begged my mother to get me out of India – where I was born – and out of my helpless situation. We were on a family holiday in Jaipur and my father had gone into another one of his viciously violent rages the day before. We had all had a sleepless night. It wasn’t the first time: we had gone through this so many times before. I don’t know why it was this time that made me snap. Something about the pink city of royals triggered a desperation in me that I didn’t know existed.
I found a quiet moment with my mother. Sobbing, I implored her to find me a way out of that life. I don’t think she knew about the times I cut myself. My own physical pain was the only thing that helped drown the screaming, crying and sounds of violence. I never told her. I don’t know why, but she heard me that day. She spent the next few months researching undergraduate schools in the US that offered scholarships to international students. I got here through the sheer determination of a mother trying to find her daughter a better future.
I went to undergraduate and graduate school in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. On a chilly day in October, I saw snow for the first time. I was in my first year seminar class. A friend from Pakistan and I begged our professor to have the rest of the class outside when the first fluffy flakes began to fall. It was exactly as I had seen in the movies. The world felt like a snow globe. Each snowflake was so luscious and soft; all I wanted to do was eat it.
The others all laughed; they knew the darkness of winter would soon overcome our naive excitement. Sure enough, a few weeks later, I made the mistake of walking to the library without drying my hair after a shower. As my wet hair, teary eyelashes and dripping nose froze, the only thought in my cold brain was Titanic’s Rose and Jack freezing in the Atlantic Ocean.
Like most international students, I had my fair share of “when did you learn English” type of questions. My favorite was: is it comfortable for me to wear shoes in the US? It took me a while to figure out that they thought Indians didn’t wear shoes. I was also asked whether my parents would pick me up at the airport on a camel or an elephant. I wish! That would be so much grander than a dinky car. At the peak of the Iraq invasion, a man in his 40s drinking alone at a bar told me to go back to Iraq. Angrily, I retorted that it wasn’t “eye-rack” and that he should first learn to pronounce the name of a country before passing judgments.
Years later, in a garage in San Francisco’s Japantown, a lady yelled at me to go back to my country. Why did she think I had another country to go back to? I wanted to tell her that if immigrants went back to “their” countries, she wouldn’t have fruits and vegetables in her grocery store, doctors in her healthcare facility, a computer to track her social media on. Hell, even she wouldn’t be here. Instead, I screeched an expletive in my highest-pitched raging voice. I think I felt threatened that someone had assumed, just by looking at me, that I didn’t belong, that this was not my home.
What does home mean, anyway? I’m classified as a legal alien in this country. I think Hollywood needs to learn a thing or two about what real-life aliens look like and what languages they speak. I live in an in-between space where the place that most resonates as home can be taken away from me by people who don’t even know me. My future is caught in politics, immigration quotas and visa lotteries.
Along with millions of others, I’ve seen my immigrant dreams rise and fall with the government’s inaction and hateful vitriol. Why do I stay? Because I can’t imagine making my home anywhere else but here - a nation of immigrants, a country that has taught me to love, to forgive, to open myself to adventure.
