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Suburban Sahibs
This non-fictional narration looks at the lives of these three immigrant families in central New Jersey, an American suburb "often considered a launching pad for the newcomer’s journey." Touching upon the reasons that made the three families leave their motherland to seek new and profitable pastures, the author primarily focuses on one year of the lives of the characters, from October 2000 onwards. It was a year rocked by many an unsavoury happening — the Gujarat earthquake, the dot-com bubble burst that had "America’s longest-ever period of economic prosperity" coming to a close and H1Bs talking of little else but job loss and, lastly, the September-11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The struggles, doubts and hopes of the people who feel they belong "neither here nor there" could have made the story as "shapely as fiction" (as mentioned in the blurb) had the narrative not been inundated with dates, facts and figures of immigration arrivals, layoffs, etc. Makes it hard to forget that you are reading anything other than a non-fictional, research-based account. An example of one such data-driven information: "In late March, the number of H1B drops by 30 per cent compared to the year before. In fiscal year 2000, the companies exhausted the nationwide quota of 115,000 visas in the first six months of the year; but between October 2000 and the beginning of March, they approve petitions of on behalf of just 72,000." Another heavy dose comes like this: "In 1999, Congress`85upped the quota to 115,000 but also, concerned about taking jobs away from Americans, legislated that the cap would drop to 107,500 in 2001 and back to 65,000 in 2000." More such talk and you are not any less confused than the American born confused desi. Recounting the lives of the three families, the author has been able to convey subtly and suitably how different people meet different fates in America. While Harish Patel returns to Baroda three times in as many years because he finds America "lonely" and a "back-breaking place to live and work in", Lipi Sarma encounters job dismissal but in no time gets more work, and Pradip ‘Peter’ Kothari’s is in a comfortable social position to demand the representation of desis in the political arena. In deciphering the different levels of adjustment of different characters in an alien land, the author, however, has been unable to lend an expression to the emotions of the protagonists. Even when Kothari’s daughter Toral and Payal take to the dance floor during Navratri, their steps speak of mechanical, almost perfunctory, movements. The characters, out to gain foothold in a foreign land, are constantly proving themselves and finding ways to ensure their material security. The buck simply stops at their obsession with dollars and the need to establish their worth. There is little mention of their interpersonal relationships and contact, equation, association and adjustment with Americans. Kalita’s statistical-laden account of immigrants is undoubtedly informative in parts, but doesn’t give a wholesome insight into the lives of the three families. In their race to realise the more-or-less elusive American dream, the characters come across as study cases or automatons, caught in the fast-forward gear to become suburban sahibs.
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SUBURBAN
Sahibs is an American desi’s
account of American desis. The author S. Mitra Kalita, a reporter with Washington
Post whose parents immigrated from Assam in the 1970s, talks about
three Indian families clutching on to and hoping to realise a dream
called America on American soil. They are all desperate, in their own
different ways. If for the Patels the question of survival has been hard
to dislodge ever since they descended on the land of options, the
tech-savvy Sarma couple has been kept on tenterhooks by the alarming
layoffs and the head of the Kothari household, disgusted with the subtle
and not-so-subtle discrimination against South Asians, hopes to lend a
voice to the community by standing for elections.