Hardik Savalia
Foreword
Motel, Botel - A short story collection.
Whenever I went to pick my grandparents from JFK Airport, the drive was laced with panicked questions.
Did the flight attendant give them the correct vegetarian meal? Or did my Ba and Dada end up eating butter for dinner? Did the wheelchair attendant actually show up on time to pick up my Ba? Or did Dada have to tow her on a luggage cart?
Now that they have passed, I realize I should have been asking different questions.
Will this be their last visit to the US? What’s remaining on their life wishlist? Has God answered all their prayers in this lifetime? Well, I can partially answer that: I know for a fact that Ba looked like a supermodel worthy of starring in a Pond’s Cold Cream commercial. So that was at least one prayer answered.
Another prayer answered must be that her eldest son, my father, made it to the United States and went on to own some modest businesses: a Quiznos Sub franchise, a diner, and a UPS store franchise. Some of her prayers weren’t even a secret—she would wish them directly upon our faces while talking to the Gods.
When we got home from the airport, Ba would find photos of her younger self around the house. Her reaction was always the same: her gaze would turn a few shades softer, and she’d flick her palm from her forehead down into the air in front of her. Without using any words, she would tell me, “Welp, there went those good times.”
So I would try to pry that open. I would park myself on the sofa next to her and say, “Tell me about those good times!” She would say, “One day, I’ll tell you. But who has the time to hear all that drama-bama, anyway?”
Eventually, she would find a comfortable starting point, something like, “The peristhithi of our people back then...phew...it was really a miracle that we made it out of that.”
Ba always said the word peristhithi, the condition of our people, with a deep sigh. She treated that word like a dense gem she had to take care of. She would explain that the peristhithi, economic condition of our family and the Saurasthra Patel people, was hopeless for the last century. That was always puzzling, because I thought she was gonna tell me about the good times. You know, what it was like to be a supermodel without the pay and have all the Kathiavadi boys wrapped around her finger?
The peristhithi probably sounded similar to the gripes of many rural Gujarat farm families at the time: Her father-in-law, my great-grandfather, decided he would no longer earn money. Instead, he spent his last 40 years in prayer day and night, believing that the Gods were speaking to him and leaving the family with zero income and a lot of hungry mouths.
When my Ba would ask our great-grandfather for some money, he would suggest money isn’t everything. He would shirk his responsibility for putting food on the table and get back to praying. Womp.
This meant my Ba and Dada had to do all the earning in their early twenties, supporting another thirty people that had decided to live under Ba’s roof!
Ba and Dada were too poor to own any fertile plots of land. They had just enough spare change to purchase a dustbowl plot that resembled a rocky plateau on Mars. It took ten months of manual labor to clear the rocks off that plot. Everyone in the family got involved. Apparently my father was a rock digging champion. It took another five years to start yielding green, edible things and not just a new baby rock.
Ba, Diwali Ben Savalia, in the early 90s
By the early 1970s, the land produced enough seed to sell to other farmers
Our family visiting the land in the 90s
I listened to Ba’s stories about the economic conditions of her generation, hoping that I would eventually hear about their social conditions. For instance, what gossip was taking up space back then? What was our family’s reputation in society?
I struggled with asking Ba about that. I mean, how was I supposed to ask politely whether people in the family got into any out-of-wedlock funny business? Or whether Ba was as fascinated as I was by the first neon sign she’d ever seen? Or which Saif Ali Khan movie took up space in her heart? I had a small window of opportunity to ask this last question recently. But then a KFC ad interrupted the movie. Ba, repulsed at the sight of dead chickens as if she was watching live child birth. She walked away and went to bed.
It wasn’t easy pulling out stories from Ba about the big social challenges. But if I sat on the sofa next to her long enough, she would eventually dish small tidbits.
One day, I sat next to Ba and pulled gently on her ears. I asked her why she chose not to wear those big ear gauges that all the other grandmas seemed to wear? Ba explained that those things were trouble. She told me about a woman whose ear gauges were so big that when she leaned over into her water well to fetch a bucket, the weight of her gauges dragged her whole body into the well. She saw no point in being a copycat. She would rather be an original cautionary tale.
A different day, I tugged on her sari. She seemed to wear one color religiously - a navy blue, like the one featured in Top Gun. So I had to ask, why this color? Why not orange or green like the colors on the Indian flag?
She explained that once she got married, she was locked into a social hierarchy designated by color. Younger wives were supposed to wear faded, sky blue saris while the older women wore bold, navy blue saris. Apparently, the navy blue color separated the wise matriarchs from the younger women less experienced with the social dramas that might define their lives sooner or later.
I asked Ba who sent out the memo that cleared up such fashion rules. She said women back then had a secret language made up of varying eye twitch patterns. Those eye twitches communicated all the fashion and social order rules the wives needed to know.
I also couldn’t ignore the tiny dot tattoos on Ba’s forearms. I asked where she got those from. She said she was fourteen at the time. She and her girlfriends had found a tattoo artist during a makeshift festival that had traveled into her village. It was late into the night and all the other girls were getting a tattoo, so she caved. See? We have proof now - peer pressure runs as a weakness in the whole family!
So then I had to ask, were you trying to impress a boy with these dot tattoos? Ba quickly changed the subject and asked what life has been like here in Pennsylvania.
Ba on the left; Great Grandmother is 2nd from the right wearing a navy blue sari, a designation of the matriarch.
The matriarch of this adjacent family is shown 3rd from the left.
How could I summarize how life was in the United States? I couldn’t help but to answer Ba with bullshit responses. Mostly about how fast everyone’s growing up. And how good our jobs are compared to the average Indian immigrant. You know, stuff that makes American life sound like a robotically peachy dream.
If I told Ba it was any harder than that, she would have thought we were all idiots. If I told her that I occasionally cuss out Grubhub when food delivery is too slow for my munchies, she wouldn’t look at me the same way anymore. Instead, she would remind me about how she had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to milk buffaloes and make food for thirty people. “SO DEAL WITH IT,” is what she would have said to me.
I would drive Ba to the oversized homes of her acquaintances from India, who had also moved to our corner of the Pennsylvania suburbs. Afterwards, I’d get the urge to debrief with Ba: that man might own a big house and a chain of hotels, but he’s barely making ends meet and is a part-time philanderer. Or, that’s not youth, it’s just a nose job. But I would resist.
How could I explain in Gujarati that some of our people have used their businesses as a platform to doubledown as bullies, murderers, or racists, while others have at least tried to become great parents, humanitarians, and artists despite their flaws?
Like many Gujarati immigrants, our family left India for a fairly simple reason: make more money and chill out. How? The answer for some was to become a doctor, dentist, or whatnot. And for the rest, the answer is get into some industry where you can purchase your own business on the cheap like gas stations, motel-botel, liquor-bicker, et cetera, et cetera.
So the stereotypes woven into The Simpsons about our people are kinda true. Gujarati immigrants do own a lot of convenience stores (even though Apu was technically Bengali). We are also known for owning other darkened corners of the retail world—think 7-Eleven, Dunkin’, and Subway. These storefronts are where the American public often meets a Gujarati person for the first time.
But we also left to get away from the tired social constructs of our motherland: the pressure to maintain a certain social image, the inescapable class and race hierarchy, the corrupted institutions that leave us little choice but to participate in the corruption ourselves.
We weren’t running away from war or gang violence or unstable governments. We just wanted to start over again in a new place, become better versions of ourselves. And yet, we were disappointed that we couldn’t shake off our bad personal habits or those Indian social constructs on the flight to this continent. They stayed handcuffed to our arms and glowed red, white, and blue in the American environment.
This all happened while America herself was groaning. She was trying to reinvent herself too.
Even after several visits to the United States, Ba was never able to fully absorb the social and economic conditions of our people, largely because we couldn’t explain adequately what was happening around her. Or we didn’t think she would be able to understand.
Now more than ever, I’m certain that not only would she have been able to understand, but would have added invaluable perspective. After all, we aren’t the first generation to migrate. In the 1970s, her generation was busy migrating from the Kathiavadi villages to the Indian cities, transitioning from being farmers to industrialists. That migration had just as monumental of an impact on our peristhithi as any migration to foreign countries in the 1990s.
I hope these stories capture some of the social, emotional, and economic conditions that I wish I could tell Ba about. I hope she might see the parallels to her past from her sofa in heaven.
While the conditions for us in the US have gotten physically cushier, they’ve also gotten more mentally and emotionally complex, more so than our upbringing prepared us for.
Sure, some Gujaratis made a small penny there somewhere. We used these businesses as a leg of stability to lift the next generation into “good schools” and eventually “good jobs.”
But, what now? How will the next generations use that stable footing? How will they use it to do what prior generations couldn’t? What will hold them back? What has held us back?
What did these “good schools” teach us? Did we learn how to have healthy discourse with our families? Did the “good job” help us have any influence in society beyond our own wallet?
Have our people figured out yet how to build a life that leaves a worthwhile legacy? If not, how do we get there quickly?
The response to these questions is complicated for any ethnic group, not just for the Indian diaspora.
I hope the fictional characters in this short story collection shine a light on these questions. I hope they show how far we have come. And how far we could go.
This is the peristhithi that I most wanted to tell Ba about, but wasn’t able to.
