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My earliest childhood memory is of an immigrant navigating suburbia-literally. She was my mother, Nirmala Kalita. In 1978, my parents bought their first home in Massapequa, a working-class town on Long Island; the down payment was made with savings from her night shift at Burger King. My mother was left with no choice but to learn to drive. As she nervously steered our newly purchased yet secondhand orange Vega, I sat in the back, my two-year-old frame strapped into a car seat.
So my confession begins: I am a product of the very subject I write about on the pages that follow. My father emigrated from India to New York City in 1971, sent for my mother and elder brother the following year, and began to climb a corporate ladder from the bottom: a temp job at Citibank. Their move into a $40,000 split-level home on Long Island thrust my brother and me into a school system where we were the only nonwhites, as far as we could tell. We endured little blatant racism but plenty of questions about just "what kind" of Indian we were. "What tribe?" one teacher asked. Quickly, as the children of immigrants tend to do, I became two Mitras. The one at home spoke Assamese, ate with her little hands, and slept tucked between two parents in a king-size bed. The one at school spoke in a thick Long Island accent, dreamed of a family past as storied as Laura Ingalls Wilder's, and vacillated between the black Cabbage Patch Kid and the white one, settling on the latter. I grew distressed if my two worlds collided, as they inevitably did. Before friends came over, I sprayed several rounds of air freshener to rid our house of its pungent cooking odor; I never smelled the scent my brothers and I dubbed "IFS," for Indian Food Smell, but knew it existed because my classmates told me so. When my mother wore a sari to school graduations and ballet recitals, I secretly wished she wore a business suit or floral dress like the other moms.
In 1985, my father was promoted to a vice presidency at Citibank and transferred to Puerto Rico. Although we protested it, the move was a blessing to our fledgling cultural identities. My brothers (by this time, I had two) and I encountered newfound otherness virtually every day as we wore the metaphorical hats of the Indians we were at home, the white suburbanites we once had attempted to be, newcomers to an island colony that "belonged" to the United States yet somehow didn't, and members of an elite class created by an employer who paid our country club membership and private school tuition. Once again, we quickly adapted ourselves to the new world we were living in, eventually learning to translate and navigate its components on our own terms.
Transferred back to the mainland in 1988, my family began looking for a house in the tri-state area. Now that they had money to spend, my parents based their decisions exclusively on good school districts and proximity to a direct train line to New York City. New Jersey was the clear choice.
Apparently, a lot of other families like ours had had the same idea. As we rode in rental car after rental car to look at one fourbedroom Colonial after another, settling finally on a home in West Windsor, my brothers and I would count the Indians along the New Jersey Turnpike. Not until undertaking this book more than a decade later would I embark on a journey to discover just why they came.
This book traces the evolution of the suburb. New arrivals once viewed it as the destination of their journey. For many, home ownership in a place with good schools and soccer leagues, strip malls and picket fences, signified the completion of the American Dream. To get there, they had to toil for years in cities, ride subways, scrimp and save. But as city economies declined, manufacturing jobs moved, and chain migration increased, the immigrant experience in America was redefined. Today, the suburbs have become a launching pad for the newcomer's journey in America. I tell this story through exploring the migration to central New Jersey of three waves of Indian immigrant groups, represented by three families: the Kotharis, Patels, and Sarmas. I spent two years interviewing them and following their lives, using no formal surveys or questionnaires, just a pen, a notebook, and observation.
I met Pradip Kothari in the spring of 2000 when the idea of documenting the explosion of South Asian immigrants in central Jersey was still a nebulous one. I was a student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism taking a course taught by Samuel G. Freedman, the award-winning author of several books including Small Victories and Jew versus Jew. Sam wanted me to unlearn my own experience as the daughter of immigrants in New Jersey and try to see the place anew. So I called up Pradip Kothari, president of the Indo-American Cultural Society, and asked him to help me do that.
Pradip's was the first interview I did. We met on a Sunday morning at his travel agency; the office was closed, but people came in in a steady stream. They were not customers but fellow Indians seeking help, advice, or support. Pradip-I could never get used to calling him "Peter" as everyone else did-rarely missed a beat, stopping our conversation to tend to them and then turning back to me to finish the sentence he had just interrupted. During our meeting, I caught glimpses of his daughters, Payal and Toral, who came in to ask for money as they headed to the mall. We only smiled and exchanged hellos, but their presence helped me see Pradip as not only a community leader but also a father and husband.
There is a danger in interviewing people who have been interviewed often. From prior research on the area, I knew reporters often turned to Pradip as their first, perhaps only, source on the Indian community; over the years, it seemed, his answers grew more and more prepared. I wondered if he would allow me to go deeper with him, if he would speak in more than just quotes. In Pradip's family, I saw much of my own. They were the so-called success stories that fill immigrant suburbia. Arrival in the suburbs and the accompanying multistory homes and cars were the clear signs of "making it." But what made Pradip and his wife Nandini's story compelling from our first meetings was that they seemed to want much more. Despite the couple's prominence at various Indian functions and festivals, they appeared somewhat sidelined by many facets of American life. I could feel that Pradip was on the verge of doing something about it. When I first met him, however, it was not clear what that might be.
Many of those who came behind the immigrants of the Kotharis' generation also appeared sidelined-but in a much different way. Easier to spot, these immigrants pumped gas, walked miles along busy roads without sidewalks to the train station, crammed eight into a car at 5:00 A.M. to get to work, and ignored the exasperated sighs of annoyance at their accents or perhaps lack of English altogether. I saw cashiers at Burger King who had spent years behind the counter serving Whoppers and fries, un- like my mother, whose two years of earnings helped buy her family a home to ensure she would never have to take such orders again.
"McMansions," as planners dub virtual starter castles marketed to soccer moms and dads, are not an option for those who flip or serve burgers for a living. As more working-class immigrants from South Asia call the suburbs of central Jersey home, those immigrants have been hard pressed to find affordable housing. Families of four or more not uncommonly live in a onebedroom apartment, in cramped conditions more reminiscent of cities. To witness this phenomenon, I needed to look no further than Hilltop Estates, a sprawling apartment complex housing mainly South Asian immigrants situated just off Oak Tree Road-turn at the Dairy Queen and go past a bowling alley. Location is what motivated dwellers to move into Hilltop's five hundred units. The main thoroughfare of Indian stores on Oak Tree Road is not exactly a stone's throw away, but to a new transplant's legs, the half-mile distance is certainly walkable. So is the mile to the Metro Park train station, where many Hilltop residents trek daily to at dawn and fro at dusk.
Unlike other housing complexes, which boast billboard signs-"If you lived here, you'd be home by now!"-and large bold squares in newspaper classifieds, Hilltop needs no publicity. "It's a landmark. Indians bound for the U.S., who haven't even heard of JFK Airport, know all about Hilltop Apartments in Edison where they will be staying," Sunil Mehta, manager of the complex, told Little India magazine.
So one weekend afternoon, a few days after I had first met with Pradip, I found myself roaming Hilltop. Rather than knock on random doors, I headed for the complex's laundry room, thinking that residents there would have nothing better to do than talk to me. Outside, I met Kajal Patel, a reticent teenager who seemed to bear more burdens than girls her age should, and there began my relationship with her family.