My Story of Immigration and Change
- Ayushi Roy
- California
- UNITED STATES
- 17
My father’s mother was born in India in 1938, when the British Raj still ruled over the subcontinent. After India won its independence from England in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi had to finally agree to the partitioning of India into two independent nations - Pakistan and India. Pakistan would be a haven for all Muslims and India would be for the Hindus.
The eastern half of Bengal, the Indian state my grandmother was born in, turned into East Pakistan, filling her childhood with danger and chaos. As a young Hindu girl it was not even safe for her to travel to the neighborhood school. The violent riots and destruction of property drove her family from her grandfather’s mansion, where she and generations of her family had grown up, as hapless refugees to West Bengal, now a part of new India. Her family had to leave everything behind; they took only what they could carry.
In Calcutta (Kolkata), my grandmother married Hrishikesh Roy, a man who had been orphaned by the age of twelve, also victimized by the partition of India, and who sustained all his education by merit-based scholarships. A year later they had their first child, my father, Indrajit Roy. My grandmother and grandfather supported him through the best private school to grant him the learning opportunities they themselves were deprived of.
My father graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), the most prestigious engineering university in India and covered by “60 Minutes” for its selectivity that is far more stringent than its American equivalent, MIT. However, his dream to come to the United States for higher education remained challenged – the financial strain on his family to pay for tuition and boarding in a U.S. university was too great. Recognizing this, my father worked hard to be one of just thirty students from his university to earn a full fellowship to study in America. He was the first from his entire extended family to emigrate from India to the United States.
This driven man, my father, came to America with one suitcase, $50 dollars in his pocket, no acquaintances in this continent, and not even a heavy coat to shield him from the New England winter. When he landed on JFK International Airport in 1983, my father was running a very high fever. He was detected with malaria. After spending his first two nights in America in a hospital, he ventured out into the beautiful town of Newark, Delaware surrounding the University of Delaware, and faced his first serious challenge – ordering a sandwich. He had never been given so many choices! White or wheat, American or Swiss, mayonnaise or oil, tomatoes (not “tomaahtoes” as his English teacher had taught him), lettuce, mustard, onions?
My father earned his Master’s degree in Computational Fluid Dynamics and traveled from coast to coast with my mother to the picturesque seaside town of Santa Barbara, California, for his second graduate degree in Computer Science. In 1992, in Santa Barbara, I, Ayushi Roy, was born. My father went on earn an MBA from the elite Haas School of Business of UC, Berkeley, and today is an executive at a very large high-tech company in the epicenter of this flourishing technology industry – Silicon Valley.
My mother’s family hailed from Kashmir, the gorgeous basin in the foothills of the majestic Himalayas. However, religious persecution forced her ancestors to leave the valley and disperse to various corners of India. My mother grew up speaking Urdu (Indo-Persian-Arabic origin) at home while learning Hindi and English at school.
Though both my parents are born and raised in India, their heritage, culture and family struggles permeate through the American lifestyles of my little brother and me. We still make it a point to practice both Hindi/Urdu and Bengali at home, though we learn Spanish and speak English at school and among friends. Our parents have instilled in us the value of education because across three generations of migration it is the only thing that kept their forefathers moving forward. We enjoy weekly family outings to Bollywood movie theaters and eat authentic home-made Indian foods for dinner every night. But even today we are not allowed to waste any food on our plates.
Though my mother enrolled me in ballet classes as a toddler, I chose to switch to Indian classical dance and learn two unique gharanas – Kathak (originating in North India) and Odissi (with its roots in the South-eastern Indian state of Orissa) – for seven years and counting. Along with a Christmas tree full of ornaments, a Thanksgiving turkey, and an Easter egg hunt, our Hindu family also celebrates Diwali with hand-made oil lamps all around our home, Holi with splashes of color, and Rakhi -- all with equal fervor. We have learnt tolerance and inclusion from our refugee heredity. Our exposure to other cultures, languages and traditions has increased my awareness of and interest in other customs.
But I am an American, or more specifically a Californian – Indian by heritage, from a family of immigrants, whose favorite foods are Thai Tom Yum Goong soup, Greek kabobs and freshest Japanese sashimi, who speaks four languages, who watches Korean dramas in her free time, who carries Persian music including “Boro Boro” in her favorite iTunes playlist, whose best friend is Chinese but knows all the lyrics and dance steps to the Indian song “Desi girl” from the Bollywood movie Dostana, and whose fellow ASB Junior Class officers in high school were anxious to sing to “Jai Ho” in front of a student body of 1,600 for a high school production. I am proud to be a Californian.