I am the only Indian woman that I know who, in the 1980s, raised 3 children as a single mother in the United States. In 1973, I immigrated to the United States with my 2 daughters, ages 3 and 11 months. My husband was a village doctor in India and came to the United States as part of the brain drain movement. He found work in a mental hospital. My husband found work in a mental hospital in California.
In India, I came from a small town of 300 to 400 people and I had an arranged marriage after my first year of college. Upon arriving in California, I was fascinated and overjoyed with having simple amenities like electricity and hot water directly from the tap. We lived in an apartment building and while I barely spoke any English, I soon met an “American” woman at the bus stop of our apartment building. I guess she saw that I was gentle with my children, and so she asked if I could babysit her two children after school. It was a nice arrangement because it allowed me to start making some money soon after coming to the States, my children played with her children, and it was only for a couple of hours after school. However, after a while, one of the other tenants in the building did not like something about me or the fact that I was watching someone else’s children and making money, so she reported me to the state as
running a daycare facility without a license. I told the woman whose children I was babysitting that I could no longer look after her children. The woman (who I later learned was an attorney) told me not to worry and resolved the issue!
Within the first two years, we had saved enough money to buy real estate, and we decided to buy our motel –it had 7 rooms. It was an ideal setup – the motel had a manager’s apartment where we could live, and my husband could go to work while I ran the motel. Life was going well, and within a few years, we sponsored family members to the United States helped them settle down, and bought a couple more motels.
Unfortunately, in less than a decade after coming to the United States, my husband died of coronary heart disease, leaving me a widow at the age of 34, with children the ages of 13, 10, and 5, in a foreign country, with no education or skills. I did not even know how to drive a car. It was an incredibly difficult period for me. I faced societal pressures to remarry as many members of my patriarchal society unabashedly opined that I would need a husband to take care of me and my children. I decided that I would not remarry and raise my children on my own, a decision that defied traditional norms. My choice not to remarry may have been rebellious, but I was not rebellious by nature and quite the opposite. Despite having no real societal support or male figure to rely upon, members of my society told me that to properly mourn the loss of her husband, she needed to start wearing saris, as it was customary for widows in India to wear a sari for the rest of their lives. However, by this time we had moved to Texas where I owned and ran a small motel with 24 rooms. I faced a great dilemma because while my decision to wear a sari may have appeased members of my Indian society, it had the opposite effect on American society. Many motel customers in Texas may have had biases or prejudices, but they were the source of my livelihood. Therefore, my primary goal was to appease them, which meant to look as “American” as possible, and which was impossible in a sari. In fact, I, like many Indian motel owners would try and hide when potential customers drove by, as customers often chose not to stay if they saw Indians present. However, there was no hiding as eventually our competitors, other nearby motel owners, started putting up signs stating “American Owned” to steer customers to them. By then, I was a naturalized United States citizen, and an “American” in every sense, so I, too, put up a sign that said “American Owned. As for society’s pressure to wear a sari: I compromised and wore a sari for the first year, and then went back to wearing pants.
More than a decade later, I moved to Oklahoma in search of employment and had my parents immigrate and live with me. I had to move to a small town in Oklahoma, and I got a job running a small, run-down remote motel on the outskirts of town that did not attract a respectable population. It was horrible. I worked there because I had no other skills and because it had an apartment behind the front desk, and it was free housing for me and my family. One afternoon, my mother, who was a frail, silver-haired woman, decided to go outside for a walk. The locals, lacking cultural understanding, mistook her sari for a "bed sheet" and assumed that she was mentally ill. They called the local police, and the situation got worse because my mother did not speak any English and was unable to communicate with them. Luckily, one of my children saw the police car outside our building, and when they saw that their grandmother was
being questioned by the police, she quickly intervened and resolved the situation.
If there is one thing I have learned from my experiences in this country it is that you can never give up. I forced my family to stay in this country knowing that if I returned to India, my patriarchal family and society would not have allowed a widow such as myself, and my children to have any opportunities. Life here was certainly difficult as I worked 7 days a week for years and years doing unglamorous work, such as cleaning motel bathrooms and folding laundry; I pinny-pinched and saved every dollar that I could, so we rarely ate out, never had a vacation, and wore cheap clothes. Additionally, all of my children obtained jobs at fast-food restaurants as soon as they turned 16 to help pay bills. However, I believe our hard work paid off as I was able to send all three of my children to college and graduate school, and they are all now successful individuals. Lastly, I never imagined that I would be someone who would not succumb to societal norms, but as an immigrant, I was forced to deviate from the expected path.
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