The desi mother steps off the conveyor belt

A young Indian girl is married to an Indian man who is settled in the US. After moving to the US and leaving her family and the life she has known, she faces her first big challenge. It's not how to speak in English but how to live with a man who has no intention or desire to fall into "arranged love".

We saw one such story in the tale of the Ganguli's in Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli live their American dream in the suburb's of Boston, growing to love each other and raising their two children in a constant balancing act between their Bengali roots and American culture. Although the story revolves around Gogol their son, we see him in the backdrop of his parents growing into their US lives as they hang on to their Indian roots. The pattern of their life mirrors the life of many Indian emigrants to the US during the 70's and the 80's. Celebrating holidays and religious ceremonies with the other Indian immigrants, month long family trips to India, potlucks, picnics with other desis, and the first car, then the first house and so on. It's a conveyor belt life that carries the young immigrants as they grow into adults and raise children that grow up to go to the top schools and good careers amid a constant struggle to find their own balance between the two worlds. It's the feel good story about young educated desis living their American dream.

However, not much is heard about the lives that did not fit this pattern, about the Indian girl that finds herself living a very different life than those of her fellow desis on the Ganguli style conveyor belt. In her tale, the couple stays on this conveyor belt for a while, keeping up the public persona and walking in lock step with the other local desis. However their private life unlike the Ganguli's follows a different pattern. A lack of respect and affection from the husband ensures that love stays away. The cultural stigma associated with a troubled marriage contributes to the couple keeping up the falsehood of a perfect desi couple. The couple continues to keep up their dutiful participation at potlucks, picnics, Diwali and karwa chauth festivals and the pretence continues. At some point the girl reaches a point of no return, she can no longer carry the weight of the falsehoods, bear the contempt from the man she married and who fathered her children, so she leaves the marriage. And she steps off the conveyor belt, which trudges on carrying her desi friends into a future of potlucks, picnics, and a series of firsts - houses cars etc.

Her liberation from the marriage leads her to a life of hardships but at the same time liberates her from the conveyor belt and sets her adrift in the anonymity of US life. She feels strange at first as she is used to having someone control the direction of her life. Making the simple every day decisions makes her uneasy, what to wear, what kind of food to purchase but are soon forgotten in the rigors of being a single mom where other types of decisions have to be made constantly. What to pack in her children's lunch boxes;  which route to take so she can shave off ten minutes off her commute; how many exemptions she needs to claim on her w2;  wait what's a w2?;  permissions for field trips and sleep overs. All these among echos from her past life of desi children who get corrupted by the Americans when they are permitted to go for sleep-overs and faint unease on missing the monthly puja at the temple as she was too tired to pull out her sari.

Soon she finds herself slipping into the every day life of a mainstream American single mom. The unease at missed religious functions and permitting her children to act as other American children fades away. The other desi mothers make feeble attempt to pull the newly minted desi single mom back into their lives but there is a growing chasm between them. There seems to be less and less in common between them and the differences in the two worlds becomes a barrier so there is a slow parting of ways. The desi mom flourishes in her new found freedom, she finds herself performing better in her career. It's as if standing up for herself and walking out on her marriage has given her the freedom to do the same at work or at the corner shop where the desi check out person tries to short change her. Much to the delight of her children her cooking repertoire now includes spaghetti, pita bread pizza's with the added bonus of the house gradually loosing the smell of desi spices and fried food.

There are many desi families whose live an American dream but follow a path unlike that of the Ganguli's. In this case, a single desi mom broke the pattern, discovered her own life path which allowed her to break away from the American-desi norm and find her own desi-single-mom American dream.