When my father dies, he's in a nursing home, seated upright in a chair. He hasn't been out on the ocean, in a boat, in years, maybe decades, and I know he's not a beach person. He hates the sand and wet and cold. But days before his death, he can remember this clearly enough to reminisce in his hoarse voice: wearing a jacket and a scarf despite it being early spring in America, taking a ferry to the Statue of Liberty, then Ellis Island. Walking past all those names. None like his own. And yet he never doubted that he and his younger brother and my mother, who all lived together in a tiny apartment after I was born, had arrived in America, and would be welcomed in one way or another.
His journey to the water started in the late 1960s, early 1970s. He had come here after the assassination of Martin Luther King, many years before my birth, the birth he had imagined, hoped, would be of a son. Was New York safe then for Asians? I try and imagine. There were 45,000 South Asians in the United States by then, a small fraction of the nearly one million strong tristate area desi community today. He wouldn't have felt entirely alone, though most in that first wave of immigration — the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act giving preference to those with professional training — were doctors, engineers, or successful businessmen with relatives already here to sponsor them. My dad was none of these. He was ambitious about emigrating to America but lackadaisical about academics during his student years in India, more interested in acting in plays and going to parties than career planning. Yet he married a doctor, my mother, who gave him passage here.
