Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (19 page)

I did learn some things about America. I knew about Pat Boone and John Wayne. I loved Elvis Presley from his movies
Jailhouse Rock
and
Kid Galahad.
We were taught a little about slavery, and that segregation still existed. Abraham Lincoln was compared to Gandhi. We learned about a woman named Rosa Parks who refused to sit in the back of the bus. When we talked about this in school some of my classmates asked why Americans were racists, and we had to remind them that we were, too: We had a caste system. And we certainly knew about President Kennedy. The educated people of India were enchanted by JFK. One of the first American movies I ever saw was
PT 109,
the story of JFK saving his crew during World War II. I remember being on a bus on a Saturday going to school for a cricket
match when someone listening to a transistor radio told us that five Indian generals had died in a helicopter crash on the border with Pakistan and there was speculation that it was sabotage. We were worried that this crash might lead to fighting with Pakistan, and everybody was quiet and depressed. A few minutes later that same person heard on his transistor radio that President Kennedy had been assassinated. People immediately started crying, including me. The match was called off and we went home. India came to a halt, and just like the rest of the world we listened to the news coming from America.

While in medical school Amita and I accepted the fact that we would go to the United States for as long as five years to finish our training in our respective specialties. I planned to spend three years doing internal medicine, two years in my specialty, gastroenterology, and then return to India and perhaps join my father and Deepak in a practice. Amita intended to study pediatrics, the favorite choice of women physicians in India.

Amita knew even less about America than I did. In her family, whenever there was any talk about going abroad it was always about Europe and England. Our institutions were British, our schools were British. We were Indian first, but Great Britain was clearly in our heritage. Her very first impression of America came from a girl who had come to India from there when Amita was in the seventh grade. Amita had never heard such a strange accent and asked the girl where she was from.

“She said the USA,” Amita remembered. “I had never heard of that. I asked her how USA could be the name of a country, it was just capital letters. Then she told me it stood for the United States of America. Although I had seen maps of North and South America when we were studying geography, I didn’t quite understand that America was a country until several years later.”

Like most Indians, her strongest impressions about America came from music and movies, especially movies like
Cleopatra
and
Come September.
She loved Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, and Sophia Loren. (Sophia Loren may have been Italian, but the movies Amita saw were
made in Hollywood.) While the music from
Come September
may not have been so popular in the USA, for years it seemed like every band in Delhi played it at every wedding reception until everyone was tired of hearing it.

While Deepak traveled to Ceylon to take the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) examination, Amita and I went to Hong Kong. Although we considered ourselves relatively sophisticated, our eyes began to open to the world during that trip. There were two experiences that struck me: First, we went to a movie that started at midnight! We’d never done that in India. And then, when we came out of the theater we were both hungry and at two thirty in the morning there were merchants and vendors on the street. One of them was selling fish and chips, which he put in a newspaper cone and handed to me. It was all part of an adventure, delicious fish and chips in a newspaper at two thirty in the morning.

The next evening, we were walking down a main street and Chinese, Malaysian, Japanese, and English prostitutes were all lined up. They were calling to me in four languages. If I had ever seen call girls in India I was too young to understand what they were selling. I was twenty years old and walking with my new wife, but they still asked if I wanted to go with them.

“I’m married,” I told them. “This is my wife.”

“That’s okay,” one said. “She can come, too!”

We weren’t in Delhi anymore.

After we’d passed the ECFMG exam Deepak advised us that the Ventnor Foundation that had sent him abroad would ensure that we would be matched to the same hospital where he had done his internship. We applied and were sent to Muhlenberg hospital in New Jersey. Once again I was following my brother. We were each given eight dollars for the trip, and Deepak sent us another hundred suggesting we would need it as our itinerary called for us to stop in Rome, Paris, and London.

Our trip did not begin well. As we walked down a street in Rome, Amita slipped and broke the strap on the brand-new sandals she had bought in India. We didn’t think this was much of a problem until
we walked into a shoe shop. The least-expensive sandals in that shop were about seven thousand lira, the equivalent of a hundred U.S. dollars.

Amita started to cry. I asked her why.

“If shoes are this expensive abroad, I don’t think we’re going to be able to survive on the salaries we’re earning. Maybe we should stop and go back to India.”

I reassured her that we would be fine, although secretly I, too, was apprehensive. That was a lot of money for a pair of sandals.

In London we stayed in a lovely cottage with an associate of Amita’s sister who was working there as a senior officer for the Indian Administrative Service. It certainly seemed like an impressive position to us. One night he told us that he had bought tickets for us to attend one of the most popular plays in London. We were thrilled. We had both read about the British theater and we wanted to see a show.

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“
Oh! Calcutta!
” he said.

From the name, we assumed this was something we would enjoy. We assumed it was simply a British play about our country. He left us at the theater and said he would meet us afterward. We had wonderful seats in the second row. When the play started and naked actors walked onstage, Amita and I were absolutely astounded. I mean, our jaws dropped open. Modesty was central in Indian culture, and we had all been taught how important it was to maintain our privacy. Even two young people touching each other in public was considered by many to be inappropriate. Here, actors and actresses were performing completely naked. In India it would have been scandalous; in London it was entertainment.

I remember the experience vividly. Toward the end, one naked actor turned to another and asked why the play was called
Oh! Calcutta!

“By jolly, it couldn’t have been called
Oh! Bangkok!
”

Amita and I would have lots to learn about living in the West.

After landing in Boston and spending a few days with Deepak and Rita, we went to New Jersey. Our real introduction to America began
at Muhlenberg hospital. They gave us a good orientation, instructing us in how to shop in a grocery store and how to open and use a bank account. My mother had been concerned about how we would handle the money we earned. She told us that tradition called for us to give our first month’s salary to Deepak, just as we had given whatever we earned to our parents when we were in India. That made perfect sense to us, but when we tried to give our checks to Deepak he wouldn’t take them. He insisted that it was time for us to learn how to handle our own finances.

The hospital issued us each a black doctor’s bag with a stethoscope, a hammer, and an ophthalmoscope. But it was the uniforms that created our first problem. I was given white trousers and a smock-type shirt, which suited me fine. But the female doctors at the hospital were issued skirts and smocks. In India, Amita typically wore a two-piece
Salwar Kameez,
a sort of tunic over pants, quite comfortable. When she wanted to look older—so she could get into the movie theater, for example—she would wear a sari. When she was being measured for her uniform she asked if she could wear pants. No, she was told—female doctors wear skirts. She didn’t like it, but there was nothing she could do about it. She asked them to make it as long as possible. The larger problem was that she had to wear panty hose.

Women in India didn’t wear panty hose. I’m not even sure panty hose were widely available in India; there would have been little need there, since proper women didn’t display their legs. Amita had trouble getting used to the way they gripped her waist, and every day she would get two or three runs in them and have to throw them out. She got so frustrated and angry; she would wear a new pair every day and every day she would snag them or rip them. She complained that she was spending most of her salary buying panty hose. One of the most useful things she learned at Muhlenberg hospital was that, as soon as she saw a run, she should put a small amount of colorless nail polish at the end to stop it.

My first day in the hospital I was introduced to the other interns and members of the staff. Around me there were physicians from
England, Hungary, Italy, Australia, the Philippines, Pakistan, and India. Some of them had risen to become the chief of a division or a department. There was no unspoken barrier holding them down. I’d heard America was a land of opportunity, but here was the proof standing all around me.

During that orientation we were also told how the hospital worked. They told us it was very important to call the operator to tell her we were leaving when we finished our shift so we wouldn’t be paged.

One night as I came to work, a fellow intern, also from India, was finishing his shift and asked if he could borrow a dime. I gave him one and watched as he went to the pay phone and deposited it, then dialed once. After a moment I heard him speak.

“Hello, operator? This is Dr. Rao. I’m now leaving the hospital.” Then he hung up.

Now I was the expert.

“You’re supposed to call the hospital operator, not the New Jersey operator!”

Truthfully Amita and I weren’t that sophisticated, either. After we had finished working our second or third night, I suggested that she call Deepak and Rita in Boston to tell them we were fine.

“Good idea,” she agreed, and then picked up the pay phone and told the hospital operator, “I’d like to make a PP call to my brother-in-law Dr. Deepak Chopra in Boston.” Amita couldn’t understand why the operator started laughing. In India, a PP call meant person-to-person but, as we discovered, it has a very different meaning here.

Everything about America surprised us. Of course we were enchanted by television. I was mesmerized by the beautiful young women and handsome young men singing on
The Lawrence Welk Show.
My favorite show was
Sanford and Son,
starring comedian Redd Foxx. On one episode I remember well there was a holdup and a white cop and a black cop came to investigate. They asked Sanford to describe the robbers, which he did. Then the white officer asked him, “Was he colored?”

Sanford looked right at him. “Yeah. He was white.”

We rolled around laughing and went on to repeat the line over and over to the other foreign doctors at the hospital. Everyone thought it was amazing that you could make a joke like that here.

One of our most memorable experiences took place only two days after we had settled in Plainfield. When we were staying in Boston with Deepak, we had seen Rita go into the grocery store Stop & Shop while we waited in the car. At Muhlenberg we were each given a two-hundred-dollar advance, so we decided to use some of it for food shopping. We knew we could buy food at a Stop & Shop. We walked about half a mile to downtown Plainfield looking for one. As we walked we saw a young woman coming out of a parking lot with a baby in one arm and a toddler holding her other hand.

“Can you tell me where the Stop and Shop is?” I asked politely.

“Is that a grocery store?” she asked.

“Yes, it is. We were just in Boston and we went to it.”

She nodded. “There’s no Stop and Shop here, but there is a Pathmark. That’s where I’m going now. Why don’t you come with me?”

So we jumped in her Oldsmobile station wagon and she drove us there. It was several miles from our apartment, but we didn’t even consider how we would get back to our apartment with our groceries. This was the first large American supermarket we had been inside. We had never seen anything like it. It had an amazing variety of canned foods and cheeses, pet food, flowers, milk and cottage cheese, sardines, dozens of varieties of Baskin-Robbins ice cream. There was shelf after shelf of items, and with our advances we could buy much more than we wanted. We were mesmerized. We could have walked up and down those aisles for hours.

When we were finished, we took our bags and went outside, expecting to walk home. We were young, we thought. We could do it. But the lady who had driven us there was waiting in her Oldsmobile.

“I saw you buying a lot of groceries and I was concerned how you’d get back. So I thought I’d drop you off.”

We spoke on the way home and explained that we were interns at
the hospital and had just arrived. As she dropped us off she asked, “Are you free on the Fourth of July?”

“What’s so special about the Fourth of July?”

“It’s Independence Day, a national holiday.” We were free, as it turned out, and she picked us up and brought us to her home for a family barbecue, where we met her family. We ate hot dogs and cheeseburgers and chicken off the grill. We played horseshoes. That was the first time in my life I’d eaten food like this. I enjoyed the hot dog, but didn’t care that much for the cheeseburger. We spent the day with these wonderful, gracious people who truly appreciated the gifts that America offered. The woman’s name was Mary and her husband, Andy, was a Hungarian who had escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. On his first attempt he had been shot in the leg, but as soon as he recovered he tried again and was successful. He had joined the American military and become a Green Beret. Being welcomed to America by people like this, people who had risked their lives to get here while we had taken an exam, really made us look at this country differently. What was it about America that was so different from our home?