The American Dream: A Cliché: – Part 7
It’s not only about Money and Fame!
Ajay Kulkarni is a fighter. He doesn’t give up. He fought for and achieved a lot of fame and money. But there was something else. This one was hard. But he was adamant. And strategic, devious and obstinate. So he managed that too after struggling for about twenty years. For this one, there was a lot of collateral damage. I guess he is happy now. But I am not.
Ajay is an aristocratic Marathi Brahmin from a small village, a star student – did his Ph.D. in theoretical Physics from a top school in USA. Physics is a field which is totally saturated by some seriously talented people. These people are brilliant (how else could they understand such obscure concepts like parallel universe and particle accelerator?), and they are devoted to this stuff. After a Ph.D. in economics, you usually get a job as an Assistant Professor right after your Ph.D. Not so for Physics. Most fresh Ph.D’s work as post-docs where salaries are just enough to bring you barely to the lower end of American middle-class. Many physicists stay like that for four to ten years. Finally, having done a considerable amount of post-dissertation research, some get a job as an Assistant professor around the time they are about forty years old! Tenure, that comes with job security, comes six years after that and is often denied if your research is not impressive enough. Without tenure, you go back to being a post-doc or work as a temporary lecturer or teach remedial math and science to morons in two year colleges for the rest of your working life.
Dr. Kulkarni was a post –doc for two years before he decided he was having none of this crap. He was going to go back to college and get a second Ph.D. in Finance. His Physicist colleagues shrieked, his family in his Marathi village worried about his sanity, but that didn’t stop him! Ten years after getting his Ph. D. in physics, he got his second Ph.D. in finance and started his first job at my university as an Assistant Professor in the Business school with a very comfortable salary.
That was only the beginning! With some outstanding research, outstanding collaboration with connected co-authors, and some outstanding Business School politics, he became a Distinguished Chair Professor after sometime -you know one of those that get paid a lot more than us mere professors and get a lot more respect to go with it. His accomplishments were well-deserved.
His beloved daughter , Asha, was born during his physicist days, Anand was born a few years later. He doted on Asha, who grew up in their very conservative Brahmin household in USA. Anand was a rogue, always trying to sneak out of the strict norms of his family.
Wealth accumulation took some time. As it is, he lived frugally relative to other faculty members of his stature. A lifelong vegetarian, they never splurged on steaks and lobsters! They had a modest house as opposed to 3000/4000 square feet behemoths with two acre of lawns that other distinguished professors liked to buy. Kulkarni did stocks and bonds for a while then he started buying cheap real estates and rented them out. This strategy had its own pitfalls, but ultimately he prevailed and became an owner of about ten apartments and his own house, and a nice nest egg that he could not possibly spend during his own life. He continued working until a couple of years ago when he was approaching eighty. I will skip the details here as they are not relevant to the main narrative.
The next thing to manage was the kids – the purity of their aristocratic Brahmin family was to be maintained. As soon as the kids reached their early teens, they were controlled like crazy. No dating, no overnight trips from school, no un-chaperoned day trips, repeated monitoring of computer usage (this was before cell phones, thank God!), and of course no alcohol and no tobacco.
Asha was a piece of cake. Anand was highly manipulative. He was like, “ you want me to grow up like this weird Indian boy? Ok, its’ going to cost you a lot, Mom and Dad”. The best clothes, the best electronics, the best computers, the best video games – he got it all from his parents as rewards for being a good Indian boy. The cars were a grand coup. In high school, when most of his classmates were given old jalopies by their parents, he had a brand new car that he demanded as a payment for “no dating”! In college, he had a brand new Lexus with a massive sound system, the only 22 year old virgin in his class, again as a quid pro quo for not having a girlfriend! Guess what profession he got into later? A lawyer, specializing in human resources hahaha!
Asha, on the other hand, followed all the rules. She actually loved being a Hindu Brahmin girl in America. When she was fifteen, and her female friends were trying on mini-skirts and heavy make up, she will have her waist length hair washed by her mom with henna and then worship the deity in her house for an hour! She could speak decent Marathi, whereas Anand could only muster some basic conversation. Right on track, Asha finished her MBA and started working on a prosperous career path as an executive in a fortune 500 company in Kansas City. Professor and Mrs. Kulkarni went to work to find a suitable boy for Asha. In absence of the internet , they relied on classifieds, matchmakers, and direct search in their hometown in Maharashtra. Ideally they would have liked a young man , who is educated like Asha,born in USA and financially established in USA and his parents hailing from the same Marathi region, and religious, and vegetarian…. bla bla bla. Mrs. went back to her village every year, twice , for the next five years.
Well, they came up with nothing. Zilch. It turned out that the high-caste Marathi Brahmans in India that were willing to relocate to USA don’t have much of an education or job prospect, they were basically opportunists trying to get a free ride with the Kulkarni clan. On the other hand, most of the young men named Hegde or Garg etc. born in USA were too westernized to agree to an arranged marriage. The Kulkarnis probably would have better luck today with the internet and social media and a lot larger Indian immigrant population. But the search failed totally in early nineties.
Around the same time Asha started working, we had a saga of heartbreak unfolding on campus. His name was Arun Deshmukh, also a high caste Brahmin from Pune. This man got his Master’s in Physics from Benaras Hindu University and joined our Ph.D. Program in Physics. Umm.. there was a second generation Indian grad student in mathematics, who was nice to him. Arun, the virgin Brahmin, fell for her hook, line, and sinker. The femme fatale played him big time. When all was said and done, she transferred to another university far away, leaving Deshmukh hopelessly broken hearted. Then the bozo failed all his exams and was kicked out of the Ph.D. program in physics. After sulking for a while, he enrolled as a Master’s student in Computer Science, but lo and behold, dropped out of that too after one year. His downward spiral had begun. He moved to the girl’s city to win her over and came back after a few months when she took a restraining order against him. Ultimately, his visa ran out and he became an illegal alien. He would work as an illegal employee for the next twenty years, dodging immigration. Fortunately for him, after a while, he started working as a carpenter’s assistant and learned how to make decent furniture on his own. Ultimately, he started making a moderate living as a custom furniture maker and doing other odd jobs – still an illegal alien.
There are a people in America that are affluent, and some of them have a discerning taste for custom furnishings for their home or office. Furniture stores only provide bland, conventional stuff. What if you, a lawyer, want a 100% mahogany conference table for twelve in your lawyer’s office? If you are a young financial analyst (or a dealer of cocaine) rolling in money, you may want to build a large heart-shaped bed with mirrors all around to romp with ladies in your spare time. In America, people that can build stuff like this are hard to find, so Deshmukh would generally get some custom jobs like this every year.
As we said before, Kulkarni toned down his national and international search for a suitable groom for Asha after a few years. Needless to say, he looked locally, in Kansas, for a suitable boy, but the pickings were slim. There was Shailesh Upadhaya, a high class Brahmin indeed, but from Jamalpur, not a very nice place for Brahmin purity. Nevertheless, he was the right age, had finished his education three years ago and worked in IT in Kansas City. Although he was about fifteen years younger than me , I hung out with him since his student days. This boy was stingier than my brother-in law! When all his American classmates who got similar jobs were buying houses with their partners, getting new cars and furniture for their houses, this fellow was sharing a two bedroom apartment in a questionable neighborhood with a roommate. Furniture? He slept on the floor on a mattress and had a card table for his computer. He drove a noisy, battered car from his student days. I was embarrassed to ride with him, for real! And although he was not a vegetarian, he would feed me curried chhole and rice every time I would visit him or sometimes splurge into a one dollar taco from a Mexican place.
Kulkarni liked this boy,- a miser, a nerd and a Brahmin with Khandan! The word Khandan is actually an Urdu word, which has multiple meanings, including pedigree or purity or prestige of the clan. In Muslim countries like Pakistan, fathers have been known to torture or even kill their daughters who had brought shame to their Khandan. Kulkarni was not like that at all !!
He invited Upadhaya to his house where he had chaperoned conversations with Asha. Hell, Asha, who also worked in Kansas City, met up with him with two other friends and had a group date at the famous Country Club Plaza! But Upadhaya had some revolutionary ideas. After about six months of hanging out occasionally with Asha, he announced that he would quit his high-paying job. It’s time, he said, to try to be super-rich. He would use all of his considerable savings and get a MBA in management from MIT with his own money, no scholarships. This program is very expensive, currently about 150K dollars per year for two years ( a total of about 2.3 crores of rupees)! In the mid-nineties, it was less expensive in monetary terms, but about the same in real cost. I tried to dissuade him.” Start a business if you have this much cash saved up. It is too risky to use up every penny of your hard-earned savings for a single purpose”, I said. But this kid was banking on being rich and famous, and he was not giving up on his dreams. He left for MIT soon afterwards , out of Kulkarni’s pool for a suitable boy. Did he succeed? Yes, he actually overachieved, but this story is not about him!!
Hmm, regarding the remaining pool, he took a cursory glance at me, a fallen Brahmin, divorced, with a penchant for beef and young females, and twenty plus years older than Asha – no good! Then, of course, he also looked at Deshmukh who had become illegal at this time and working odd jobs to support himself – a penniless, illegal, albeit pure Brahmin from Pune who was about eighteen years older than Asha –also rejected.
I guess a groom was not forthcoming anytime soon. Asha depended on her parents all her life to find a match for her, she refused all temptations to deviate so far, now she was turning into a thirty year old lonely virgin in America. A note to my conservative Indian friends: yes Indian women are human, they get frustrated with loneliness (and lack of intimacy) just like anyone else! To her parents’ surprise, Asha actually quit her job as a an executive at a Fortune 500 company and stayed at home and moped for a while. She eventually came up with a long-term plan. In her early thirties, she planned to go to college again to get an undergraduate degree in pre-med and then go to medical school for four additional years!! Recall that she already had a Bachelor’s degree and an MBA in Business! The whole thing will take her about seven years of very hard work , but it will totally take all her attention and she will be able to forget about finding a partner, possibly for life. A solid, brutal plan for regeneration – self-laceration for her parents’ failure! Damn!
Well, it worked: seven years later she was a first year resident, and two years after that she joined a hospital in far away in Connecticut . But there was a price to pay. Asha had a very nice figure in her twenties, now she started gaining weight. First she was chubby, but by the time she received her medical license, she was obese – 100 kgs on a small frame. This weight gain was partly self-inflicted, and I will not speculate any further about whether it was revenge against her parents or frustration out of loneliness.
In America, doctors that come in contact with patients regularly are supposed to be slender or at least not fat, so Asha chose her specialty as a Hematologist where she will spend most of her time in the labs or consulting other doctors.
Once she stabilized herself in her medical practice and bought her own house in Connecticut, Dad Kulkarni came back to her life again. Gosh, this guy does not let go!
I guess it started with a seemingly innocent query from her mother about setting up a life partner for Asha. Asha wondered how and why her parents are still matchmaking for her. When she was young and attractive, they could not find a Marathi Brahmin of the same stature for her. Now she is more than forty-five years old, and more than full-figured, so how are they finding a match for her ?
Dad Kulkarni slowly revealed his candidate. No, it was not a fifty-year old business executive who somehow never married and hails from a top Brahmin clan in Mumbai. Remember Deshmukh, the college dropout that I talked about earlier? He was about sixty-five years old, but now a stable, albeit illegal manufacturer of custom furniture . Obviously, he had problems getting married because of his status, and his low income.
Evidently, Dad Kilkarni at this point only cared about his Khandan , even a bald, semi-employed illegal alien will do if he was a Brahmin from Pune. I don’t know how he managed to convince Asha, but eventually she got married to Deshmukh, he moved to her house in Connecticut and they adopted a small boy! Now they are a family with a 50 year old-physician and a 70 year old illegal immigrant who has never been back in India during the last forty years. Dad Kulkarni, you are the man! Khandan rules!
The weakness of the main characters in this story saddens me. Asha remained a tortured soul for most of her life, and possibly is so even now! Over about thirty years, she never had the guts to defy her parents and get a partner on her own and settle down! Deshmukh was even weaker. One girl jilted him and he never finished college!. Damn, all he had to do was to grit his teeth and finish that master’s in computer science – this was the early nineties- most people that had this degree went on to become millionaires or better!! Or, at least when he became an illegal alien, he could have gone back to Pune and started a new life as a physics teacher!
In the eighties and nineties, there were a lot of second generation kids with strict Indian parents who did not tolerate any “deviant” behavior . How did these young men and women manage? Did most of them rebel at some point or did most of them remain subservient during their teenage years?
I will hereby make a rather sordid confession which will probably provide part of an answer. In the mid-nineties I hooked up for a short period of time with a Gujju hotel girl, about 22 years old. She grew up in her dad’s hotel, where the entire family lived in one room of the hotel they owned. The family was super-conservative. Our relationship was very strange. This cute but chubby chick would call me (I was not allowed to call her), and show up around 9:30 am usually on a Saturday morning. Right away, she would take her clothes off,- so her clothes will not smell of tobacco and alcohol ! I will give her one of my t-shirts to wear. She would put up her feet on my coffee table (hairy legs – mom prohibited shaving!), light up a Marlboro that I had ready for her, and imbibe some scotch whiskey on the rocks! A few minutes later, she would ask me to put on a porn VCR. After she had smoked and drank for a while, she will take her t-shirt off and we will start kissing. After our encounter, she will pass out on the couch. Late in the afternoon, she will wake up, shower, chew a lot of elaichi and gum, put on her oversize Sweatshirt and baggy jeans that her family allowed her to wear. And go home like Daddy’s little girl! She told me she had done this since she turned eighteen with several men. How is this for a mini-rebellion?
With her, there was going to be no social interaction. When I met her socially (which happened occasionally), I was only allowed to make the briefest amount small talk. We could not take a trip or do anything else that resembled dating. I was not going for it after a few months – when I decided to break up, she was surprisingly nonchalant about it, thank God!
BTW, I have wondered many times if Asha also had encounters of this kind. Nah!!
The only winner in this story is Dad Kulkarni, who achieved all his dreams at the end. Congratulations, Bud!
Kulkarni has old fogey friends who are all close to his age (70-85) with outlandish views about Asha’s life. Conversations with them will go like this:
Me: “Hey, why did Asha leave a perfectly good career in her mid -thirties and decided to start from scratch to become a doctor?”
OF (Old Fogey, Kulkarni’s friend): She always wanted to help people, do something good for the world!
Me: “Then why didn’t she go to pre-med as an undergraduate , when she was 19 years old?”
OF: “ Children!! Sometimes they grow up slowly, it takes them time to find a direction in life!
Me: “ Do you think her decision to go to med school in her thirties has anything to do with being lonely, without a partner?”
OF: “SHHH. Don’t even say that. Indian women are too pure – sweet and innocent. They would never do anything drastic just because they are lonely”!!
Me: “ You know, Asha married Deshmukh when she was about forty-five years old. Why not twenty years ago when her parents started looking for a groom for her?”
OF: “ Yaar, this is a sweet love story, They were secretly in love with each other. Asha was waiting for her father’s blessing only. “
No comments from me except WTH!!