FEBRUARY 2, WEDNESDAY

THE PATELS

Hasmukh Patel is a Gandhian leader in Gujurat who has dedicated his life to the adivasis, the tribal people of India. He has organized many programs for these people including organizing schools, building of dams, running all kinds of extension programs. He lives simply and has made it possible for me and group after group of Warren Wilson students to experience rural life in India. He is a good, humble (actually great) man whom I am honored to know, and a friend that I have visited every second year for over thirty years.

His son Mihir and his wife, Hetvi, are friends of ours. They have lived in Johnson City, Tennessee for about fifteen years. Both studied medicine in India and then attended East Tennessee State Medical School. Both now work full time as doctors and have a beautiful big house in Johnson City.

They have one daughter, Prisha, who goes to an American school now. Outwardly they fit comfortably in a well to do section of Johnson City, but inside the house they are very Indian, still eating Indian food at home with their home decorated in Indian way. I’ve heard that 40% of America’s doctors are Indians. You have only to look at the medical experts who have been instructing us about Covid for the past two years, half of them Indian, to realize this. Hetvi and Mihir’s whole extended family in India on both sides are doctors or dentists, traveling widely and living very well in Ahmedabad and in Johnson City and New York and San Francisco. They are the people who worship in temples like the Somesvara Temple that we visited in Buncombe County a week ago. There is a large Indian community in Greenville who worship at the same temples and who celebrate Indian festivals together like Holi, where colored water is sprayed on everyone, and Diwali, the Festival of Lights. They speak their native language, Gujarati, shop at Indian grocery stores like Radha’s Grocery in Asheville and watch Indian TV streamed from India.

To other Americans all of this Indian activity is invisible. But Indians are only doing what expatriate Americans do all over the world, worshiping in a local English speaking Christian church, cooking up American food and gathering with other Americans to celebrate the 4th of July and Christmas together. Except Americans usually refuse to fit into the countries they are temporarily living in, sending their children to American schools and when possible eating imported American food and always returning home to America to live. Most Indians living in America are here to stay. They are Indian, they are American.

In India as a boy, on the Fourth of July, we fired off rockets into the Himalayan valley and blew up firecrackers without Indians having any idea what all of the racket was about and we decorated a little spindly tree that looked as much like a fern as a tree at Christmas time and said to the Indian servants, who weren’t celebrating, Burra Din Mubarak Ho, which I assume is good Hindi for honoring the big day.

Indians don’t keep all their worship and celebration secret or even private. They would welcome other Americans to join in. The reason that we other Americans don’t know what is going on is because we aren’t curious, because we expect everyone else to be just like us, because we don’t go our of our way to understand. Indian immigrants are just like the Chinese living in Chinatown or the Italians living in Little Italy or any of the other groups that all of us, except the Native Americans, had ancestors who were part of some supportive immigrant community at first.

The first time my family realized how clueless we were as Americans was before Prisha’s birth when we were invited by Hetvi and Mihir to Johnson City for a baby shower. I vaguely was aware that the guests at baby showers are women who bring practical gifts for the baby and congratulate the mother to be. I assumed that most of the guests would be fellow medical students with whom Mihir and Hetvi had lived in campus housing, small apartments on campus. I assumed that since we had driven from an hour away we would be the guests that had traveled the farthest. We didn’t dress up because we assumed it would be a small, informal party. I knew what a baby shower was, usually something wives attended with cake and lighted candles.

We arrived completely clueless. Mihir and Hetvi had moved from campus housing and were now living in a huge elegant house on a hill. The presents that everyone received were brought directly from Ahmedabad by an aunt and a niece dressed in bright Indian saries as were all the women. Several aunts and their families were there from New York City, a cousin who had earned a medical degree before turning to high level investing which took him to India once a month, had flown in from San Francisco. The ceremony itself was an elaborate Hindu ceremony.

Our family had come the shortest distance, were the most inappropriately dressed, had no idea what an Indian baby shower was, and had a wonderful time. It was our first real initiation into India in America.

So our visits to the Somesvara Temple last week and to Radha’s Indian Grocery this week were just excursions into a small part of this Indian community in America. There is a saying Patel, Motel, Hotel with Patel being a common name of Gujarati businessmen who have spread around the world. In the United States Patels often run motels and hotels. They often run convenience stores and gas stations and in Asheville seem to own half the hotels and motels and most of the convenience stores. When an Indian hotel owner took over the Asheville Civic Center for the marriage of his daughter with hundreds of invited guests from all over the United States it was a sign of how well this community is fitting in, almost invisibly, and how well they are prospering in the United States.

To give you a feel of Indians in Americans, often American citizens but still very Indian I’ll include some photographs of the baby shower (later apparently since I can’t find them).