An Indian gentleman named Karthick Santhanamoorthy landed in John F Kennedy airport on an uneventfully snowing February afternoon. When many men from India fly to the land of opportunities to pursue their highbrowish motives like
earn money,
earn an education ,
earn freedom – all types : social , economical and sexual( America being hotchpotch of all nations offers a wider variety of women(should I say slash men to sound unprejudiced ? ) for men to ladle from),
earn a lady-love,
earn a house in India- yes yes ,a house in India requires a lifetime of sweating in American soil ; God’s curse to men in general on geneis 3:17 is little harsh on Indian men.May be they have a tendency to listen to their wives more than others,
earn enlightenment – some indians find America to be their Bodhi,
Karthick Santhanamoorthy’s motive is altogether different.Even I can say unprecedented in the history of Indian diaspora to US. He has come to seek his brother. Biological , to be precise.That might strike as odd as a Bolly/Kolly/Tolly wood actor seeking a career in Military services instead of Politics, to serve the nation.With all their six packs and iron pumped muscles ,I think they will make good Soldiers. Dont you think so ? Well, I digressed. I am very much prone to this disease. So readers feel free to hoot whenever I go wayward.
The Immigration officer , a women in 40’s , eyeballed his papers in an earnest abandon. He reciprocated the same abandon in eye-balling her. It seemed to him that her eyebrows were dancing to every gesticulation of her face forming mathematical shapes – Can you believe it , this whimp is looking at her eyebrow – collinear , hemispherical , parabolic , skewed lines and at last it came an inch closer to forming a continuous sine wave touching each other. But she cleared and looked up.
“You are from India ? Right ! Are you actually an Indian”
I know this might sound foppish , readers. But this is not said without any significance. Every damn thing in the world is significant and happens for a purpose. Courtesy : Chaos Theory. A geographically sensitive eye would have catched the oddity.He is 6.2 ft tall tanned white skin with golden hair and azure eyes. His aquiline nose and the thin skinny lips will be at right angles whenever he grin .Yes he has an American appearance and an Indian name.To end it all, he was born and brought up in a small town of Tamilnadu and never have ventured out. This is his first trip abroad.
Now the clever lot among you will be seriously guessing what the story behind this Indian boy trapped in an American body.I tell you guys you got it. It is no different from any sentimental-sick stories churned out by Bolly/Kolly/Tolly wood at a rate of 100 per year.An american girl in a student transfer program or in red cross mission or as a tourist …….falls for a local guy….. they couldn’t get married due to inter-national differences….girl becomes pregnant .gives birth to twins …..leaves one child in an ashram…takes the other to America…..children grow up….the ashram head spill the beans in his dying bed about his mother and brother..mother is already dead…embarks on a journey to meet his brother ….blah blah blah.If you find this unconvincing , chart your own story.
Many could have noticed that I have no knack of handling a nostalgic subject. Yes , nostalgia nauseates me. I don’t like looking back.See I again digressed.Let us get back to our hero. Damn, I missed him. Where is this tall american guy with Indianness written all over him? There he is.! He has been captured by an awaiting taxi driver near the exit.I could never understand how these taxi drivers always get the right guys and the fresh-landing-Indians always get the wrong ones. I am sure our hero would lose a good amount of dollars.
The driver walked him to a blue mini-van. They stowed the luggage in the rear seat . Karthick Santhanamoorthy handed over a nicely folded printout. May be, address. The van farted , reversed and fled.Inside the van he was fumbling with the seat belt. Noticing his fiasco , the driver buckled the belt in one hand for him.His other hand carefully steered the wheel. Without taking his eyes off the road,he asked “Where are you from ?”
This might be the 10th time Karthick Santhanamoorthy is facing this question.Still untired ,he recounted his sobbing story again to the 10th listener more avidly.After a 30 minute of feet drenching story-telling ,the perceptibly swollen driver – may be sorrow made him turgid- avowed to take him to his brother as soon as possible. But the falling snow and the bumper to bumper traffic in US Route 1 South played the villain to this unusual reunion.Instead of flying they crawled.The driver noticing his hand bands (actually sacred threads) asked him what they are. You know Indian men are heavily threaded than any body else in the world.They have threads in their wrist , arm , neck , waist and across the torso , but still the feminists in India ask these men to wear the ‘Mangal Sutra’ to be in par with women. God save them.Wait a minute , I see a blue mini-van pulling into my driveway. Excue me guys ! Let me check who the hell is that.