Contrary to what some people think, life in America is not a bed of roses
WHO better to narrate their own ballad than Nadia and Nadir themselves? With a lump in their larynx, they swore allegiance to the American flag, repeating after the immigration officer, words of affection, sincerity and devotion to their newly-acquired homeland — the United States of America.
As they stepped out of the federal building, a burst of spring showered them with nature’s most bounteous colours and the clouds parted to let the sun smile upon them. At last they had arrived.
“It’s a heavenly moment that has washed away all those awful memories of pain, struggle and tears that we had to endure ever since we set foot in this country — oops — our country now.”
Settling down at a roadside cafe, we order vanilla chai with doughnuts. In these idyllic settings, the ‘trials and tribulations’ lived by this couple seem incongruous, so out of context. How can anyone talk of misery on a made-to-order day like this?
“Trust me ... we’re delighted to become Americans and are proud to have stuck it through real nasty periods, but the baggage we carry of the past will take time to offload, if ever. Our emotions are raw, our souls sullen, there’s no closure,” Nadir murmurs, as he flicks a tiny cherry pink petal that has landed on his jacket’s lapel from the canopy of blossoms above.
“To me, the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Nadia interjects, citing Wordsworth’s ode: Intimations of Mortality. She pats her husband’s hand, as if to say don’t worry, all’s well now.
Beyond a decade, the couple came over on a work visa, commonly called H-1B. Computer wiz-kids were in raging demand and suddenly the whole of America wanted to cart them off from Pakistan. Those were the dotty days when twenty some-things were waking up as millionaires having gone to bed as ordinary Joes. Silicon Valley and NYC were fevered with the dot-com epidemic. Remember?
The company that Nadia kept, caressed her to the point of spoiling her silly. The computer engineer was in demand and could name a princely price.
Nadir stayed home to tend to their elite Upper East Side apartment in New York, enjoying his visits to museums, luxury boutiques, and strolls through The Central Park, where some of the city’s richest residents hang out. For toddler Tania, a live-in maid from Pakistan was airlifted.
“Nobody asked where we were from. Nobody stared at us in a strange way. Nobody noticed our foreignness; nobody commented on our accents.”
Nadia would deck out in an ethnic shalwar qameez on a weekend and coast down Fifth Avenue. “I was the queen!”
Dare the uppity saleswomen at Saks or Gucci treat her with disdain? No, never. They sensed Nadia’s fetish for top-of-the-line designer stuff. “How could these stuffed up salespeople tell?” wonders Nadia with a grimace — currently underemployed, unkempt, unremarkable ... but still displaying the stylish Dior handbag that she paid a ‘fortune’ for in sunnier times.
“When the dot-com crashed, our world crashed too,” Nadir butts in, restless ... I suspect he’s a tad bit bored of girlie talk and wants to move on with it ... raring to start a new chapter as a newly-minted naturalized American.
After Nadia got the sack from her employers who went belly up as Americans call bankruptcy, she applied to ‘zillions’ of tech firms all over America. None bothered with a note. “With savings at an ebb, we moved to a dingy little apartment in New York, sent Fatima, our maid, packing to Pakistan, put Tania in a cheap daycare while Nadia and I combed the streets and scanned the newspapers for jobs.”
The immigration clock furiously ticked away and if Nadia didn’t soon find another employer willing to continue with her work visa, they’d have to pack up and quit their ‘American dream’ or risk becoming illegal. “And you and I don’t want to go there — all those arrests, solitary confinements and heart-wrenching deportations of Pakistanis.”
Down to their last dollar, Nadir pumped gas; delivered pizza; hauled heavy stuff into trucks; hawked newspapers at the crack of dawn ... “my hands were sore lifting heavy boxes and my body wracked with fever and cold, but I doggedly laboured those long hostile wintry days. I had to work to put food on the table.”
Tears swell up Nadia’s eyes; she reflexively hugs Tania, now a pre-teen (how quickly little girls grow up, mumbles the proud mom) and continues with her narrative: that she finally landed a job as a clerk with a Pakistani company in Queens, a borough of New York, who promised to sponsor her for a Green Card if she ‘worked hard, behaved herself and did not demand too much of a salary’.
“I call it modern-day slavery ... they paid me a pittance, made me slog six-days-a-week and cut money from my salary if I took a day off whenever Tania fell sick.”
What in heavens was Nadia thinking when she agreed to be slave driven year after year, until her Green Card came?
“I had become numb to pain and hurt. I obsessed and stayed the course, knowing that the Green Card would eventually win us our freedom and that Nadir and I would at last be at liberty to walk away from a job we didn’t like were we were treated unfairly ... like serfs.”
Four years down the road, their Green Card arrived one fine day and the couple went to a Pakistani restaurant to celebrate. “With no family, no friends, no acquaintances ... we two only had each other to toast,” Nadir recalls the blandness that was their constant companion.
While the couple got better jobs after their status was changed into legal permanent residents, September 11 happened.
No longer did neighbours smile at the Pakistani family; no longer did their respective employers find them indispensable; no longer did New Yorkers nod as they passed them by. The world had changed. Indeed.
Discrimination at workplace smacked them on their face. Racism raised its ugly head once again. Tania too suffered taunts at the mouths of her schoolmates ... they gradually distanced themselves from the ‘Muslim-Pakistani girl’.
The kids on the block turned cold overnight. They stayed away from her and when she tried joining in, she was politely but firmly told to keep out. “I was unwanted,” chips in Tania, fully Americanized.
Now that they are US citizens, will the racial demons go away?
“Not really,” say the two in unison. They know they will continue to be pigeonholed as Pakistanis; they know they will never be given jobs that command respect, honour and come loaded with perks even if they are far superior than white people; they know they will never be accepted as Americans no matter how hard they work at their accents and roll their R’s.
“Foreignness wears us down,” admits Nadir, betraying cracks that he had kept under check when fighting for survival.
But they also know they will live reasonably comfy lives, buy a mortgage for a nice home in the suburbs with a yard where Tania and her friends (if any) can play; lease two shiny SUVs, those Sports Utility Vehicles that their neighbours truck around and vacation in Pakistan as and when their heart desires.
As the afternoon is winding down, the balmy air suddenly turns shivery. It’s time to say goodbye and wish Nadia and Nadir bon voyage on their oceanic travels of life that hold uncharted promises; unseen challenges, embedded in a network of mines laid out by fate.
With a future unscripted, a sorry past, says who that life in America is a bed of roses (pardon the cliche)?
Contrary to what some people think, life in America is not a bed of roses
