There is also a light aspect to the first immigrants’ original plights to restore our views to balance and to hope. The following letter, a model in fiction of many such letters in reality, will bring a knowing smile to any settled immigrant’s lips:
“Beloved Younger Brother,
Greetings to Worshipful Parents. I am hoping all is well with health and wealth. I am fine at my end. Hoping your end is fine too. With God’s grace and Parents’ Blessings I am arriving safely in America and finding good apartment near University. Kindly assure Mother that I am strictly consuming vegetarian food only in restaurants though I am not knowing if cooks are Brahmins. I am also constantly remembering Dr Verma’s advice and strictly avoiding American women and other unhealthy habits. I hope Parents’ Prayers are residing with me.”
(Anurag Mathur, The Inscrutable Americans, p. 9)
Another specimen among the abundant literature on the subject:
“When she got her daughter’s first letter from America, the mother had a good cry. Everything was fine, the daughter said. The plane journey was fine, her professor who met her at the airport was nice, her university was very nice, the house she shared with two American girls (nice girls) was fine, her classes were OK and the teaching was surprisingly fine. She ended the letter saying she was fine and hoping her mother and father were fine too.
The mother let out a moan she could barely control and wept in an agony of longing and pain and frustration. Who would have dreamt that her daughter was doing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, she thought, wiping her eyes with the end of her sari, when all the words at her command were ‘fine’, ‘nice’, and ‘OK’? Who would have imagined that she was a gold medallist from Delhi University? Who would know from the blandness of her letter, its vapidity, the monotony of its tone and the indifference of its adjectives that it came from a girl so intense and articulate?
The mother wrote back: ‘Write a longer letter to me next time, my Rani. Try and write as though you were talking to me. Describe the trees, the buildings, the people. Try not to be your usual perfunctory self. Let your mother experience America through your eyes. Two years or even more for you to come back. How we worry, how we worry. You can’t live on bread and cheese forever, but knowing you, you will. But you will lose your complexion, your health, your hair. Bathe every day. And don’t get into the dirty habit of using toilet paper, all right?’”
(Anjana Appachana, Her Mother, p. 1)
Once a bright student in my mathematics class at College showed me a geometrical construction of the transcendental number pi (3.14159...) he had found out for himself. It is well-known that pi, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, cannot be expressed as the root of an equation with rational or even irrational coefficients. That’s why mathematicians in all ages have excogitated geometrical constructions that cleverly approximate the value of pi. The student’s construction was a very ingenuous one, surely beyond the capacity of an ordinary student, but he swore it was original. I showed it to the editor of our mathematics magazine in Gujarati Suganitam, to which I was a regular contributor, Dr. P.C. Vaidya, and as he also liked it we decided to publish it in our next number under the student’s name.
A few days later, while I was reading the last issue of The Mathematical Gazette (a mathematics monthly from England), I found there the construction in question. Even the figure and the letters on it were the same. It was obvious that our student had read the magazine before me (praiseworthy initiative, to be sure) and had copied everything from there. I confronted him with the evidence, but he denied it. He insisted that his construction was original and declared that he had never read the magazine. Still, the evidence was such that in our next issue of Suganitam we just mentioned the information obtained.
Years passed by, and this good young man emigrated to America to continue his studies there. A few days after his arrival in New York he wrote to me a letter just to confess that he had in fact copied his construction of pi from that issue of The Mathematical Gazette years before and had lied to us and he was now sorry for it and apologised to us and to the readers.
What goes on in the heart of the emigrant on arrival at a distant land? What emotional shake-up takes hold of them, what heart-searching burns their soul, what moral crisis leads them to clean up memories and smooth out wrinkles forgotten in the depths of their moral conscience? The need to face a new life with a secure background leads to writing a letter and owning up a forgotten wrong. One needs all help of God and all backing of a clear conscience to enter the unknown, unfriendly, threatening world so different and so far. And the letter is sent.
Yes, my dear boy, be sure that we understand and forgive and forget and bless you and want you to succeed from the start and find your way and steady your step and bring to fruition in that new land all the talent we know you have and all the capacity to make reality the best dreams you dreamed when you left us in hope. And never mind about geometrical constructions for pi.
