Visions of America

Razak works in a light bulb store, but he dreams of bigger things. I first met him on one of my regular trips to get our gas cylinder refilled. The store that does the refilling is just north of Tirur’s main bus stand—a seething square of market stalls and one-room restaurants—on a side street that abuts a pungently aromatic drainage ditch.

Razak’s light bulb store is on the other side of the walking path from the store where the gas is refilled. Every two weeks or so I have to take one of our two gas cylinders to this store in order for them to refill it and give it back to us. The process takes a night, so I usually drop it off one day and come back the next to pick it up full and ready for us on our gas-burning stove.

The first time I dropped off our gas cylinder, I also needed light bulbs. Several in our apartment were blinking, warning us their time was near. As I walked in, Razak sat idly at a long Formica counter that took up one wall of the store. Shelves of light bulbs in their delicate, cubical boxes stood from floor to ceiling—40 watts, 60 watts, 100 watts, standard, green efficient, energy saver, spotlights, porch lights, oven lights. You name the light bulb and Razak has it here.

That first meeting was uneventful. We passed the usual pleasantries. He asked me where I was from and what I did in Tirur. I asked him his name, then asked him to repeat his name, then asked him finally to write his name down on a piece of paper. “I say it better when I see it,” I said lamely. Razak simply smiled and wrote his name on a piece of scratch paper and then handed me bag of light bulbs.

“Have a good day. See you around,” he said.

And every time I would come back to the store to pick up a full gas cylinder or drop off one that needed refilled, I would stop off and wave at Razak or simply yell, “Hello! How are you?” as I walked down the path.

One time, I greeted him: “What’s the news?”

He looked puzzled. “The news? What is the meaning of this?” he said.

“You know, what is going on? How are things?”

“Ohhhh, they are good. Good. Things are fine! What is the news…” he said, clearly filing this American phrase in a part of his memory reserved for odd English idioms.

He looked up, apparently taking my question of greeting to heart: “I have been thinking…” and he let the statement hang there for a few seconds.

“Thinking of what?” I asked. I had a full gas cylinder hanging heavily from my hand, so I placed it on the concrete pavement.

“Thinking of future. Thinking of life.” Razak apparently had big news.

“That sounds important,” I said, chuckling.

Razak smiled but remained serious. “You know, I want to go to London. I want to get my MBA there.”

“Really? That sounds great,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. I had noticed advertisements in The Hindu—south India’s biggest English daily newspaper—trumpeting MBA courses in all different locales: London, Paris, Singapore, Thailand, Tokyo, New York. And MBA courses were not all. The ads also promised IT training, cooking classes, secretarial courses, and dozens of other training regimens geared towards the service industry. The prices for these courses were never displayed as prominently as the advertisers’ catchy slogans, but a few had offered packages for as low as Rs. 2.5 lakh (which is equivalent to about $5,600). Quite a chunk of change for the average Indian.

And that was Razak’s main impediment.

“It is so expensive,” he was saying shaking his head of kinky black hair, which stood up firmly form his head in tufted perm. He had the look of a Commodores-era Lionel Ritchie. “So expensive. Out of my range.”

“Do you think you will ever get enough money?”

“I will keep working here,” he jerked his head back towards the light bulb shop. “But I don’t know.” His tone remained calm and even bright despite the resignation of his words. His lips constantly rose with the beginnings of a grin, his white teeth revealing themselves every so often.

“I had a friend who went to London,” he said. “A cousin actually. That is another thing: security at the airport. If you have the money to pay for training, you still may get stopped at the airport and then turned back. My cousin made it though. But he said they questioned him for a long time.”

I tried to be empathetic and I nodded my head, though as a white male I had never once been randomly stopped at a security checkpoint in my life.

“I hear the same things about America,” Razak said playfully. “It is hard to get in there. Visas are hard Security is hard.”

“Yeah, ever since 9/11, we have been very careful who we let in,” I said. Most Indians liked talking politics. A man who just met you on a train might ask you your feelings about America’s new health care law (that happened to me). Or the person sitting next to you on the bus might ask you your name and then follow that nondescript question up with whether you voted for Barack Obama or not (that also happened to me once).

Razak was no different. His whole gripe about the exigencies of studying for an MBA abroad had been an entrée to getting me to talk about America’s border security.

“I am thinking America does not like Indians,” he said.

“Are you kidding? We love Indians. There are so many Indians in America,” I responded, compelled to defend my homeland.

“I know. I know. We are always wanting to go there. Indians always want to go to America,” Razak said with a typical head waggle. “But it is hard. Expensive and hard to get a visa. That is why places like London are so popular, too.”

Razak’s points reminded me of another man I had met in Calicut a few weeks ago—a man named Joy who had dual American and Indian citizenship He had been living in America for nearly two decades but was originally from Kerala and had returned for his father’s funeral. He had said to me in the midst of drinking a few scotches at the hotel we both happened to be staying at: “It is easy for us Indians to leave here,” he said, pointing at the hotel bar’s patio floor. By ‘here’, I assumed, he meant India. “But to go to America and then try to leave and come back to India. Not so easy.”

It was Thornton Wilder’s old trope, “You can never go home,” put on its ear. Indians like Joy and Razak wanted to leave and never come back. They wanted to find contentment and fulfillment beyond India’s borders, beyond the boundaries of a light bulb shop.

If anything, encounters with these types of people have made me realize even in the midst of a historic economic slump and rhetoric that says America is as globally unpopular as its ever been, the USA is still the premier destination for any would-be immigrants who have dreams of boot-strapping their way to the top. Joy proved it. He now lives comfortably in Staten Island. And Razak wants to be next in line, as soon as he saves enough money.