Remade in America

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.” — Pat Conroy

The Indian American dream is paved with crooked paths, curve balls, detours, and not infrequent derailment. This month Little India explores the fascinating stories of Indians from all walks of life who traveled the seven seas, overcame uncertainty, discrimination and hopelessness, and embracing change and chance along their path, struck that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Picture Perfect

If some one had told Gursharan Pannu, the son of a farmer who had gone on to become an academician and a successful businessman in India, that in 1991, he would be standing on a corner street in California selling cheap picture prints, he would have scoffed at the idea. Look who is laughing now.

Pannu left his business and a secure government job in India after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when the backlash faced by the Sikh community changed his life in an instant.

“Things became very tense in Taran Taran district and there were attacks against the Sikh community, and we decided to leave, ” Pannu recalls. The family first went to Hong Kong to stay with his father and siblings, but then not seeing much future for his children there, decided to try his luck in California where his brother had a business selling pictures.

“I found myself standing on street corners selling prints and wondered if this was the right thing for me. I always believed in the dignity of labor and had already gone against family tradition to first get into academics instead of agriculture and then the manufacturing business, but this was really different and I wasn’t sure it was the right fit for my personality. People of course were curious when they saw me standing on a street corner selling pictures. They were courteous, but they did have questions about my turban! However my first day’s sales were over $400, which was not bad. I learnt everything from my customers, and I actually made a profit at the end of the day. I knew English, so there was no language barrier, but the accent took some time to be understood.”

A month later Pannu moved to Seattle and not having a work permit, worked for others selling everything, from picture prints with cheap plastic frames, which went for $5 to more expensive reproductions on demand. His employers often took advantage of his lack of legal status in the country, but he continued to work tirelessly, until finally his immigration status was regularized and his children also joined him in 1992.

“We had already decided that if our children did not like USA we would go back, but they told us that we were a family and would work hard and make it here,” says Pannu.

Pannu bought a truck, deciding to go into the wholesale business, and would drive from city to city selling prints, until a chance meeting with a fellow Sikh at a gas station propelled him to try his luck in Atlanta.

“The Olympics were round the corner and we were told that things were booming there.” Pannu and his wife arrived in Atlanta, leaving their children with his sister in Seattle. Suddenly his sister called and asked that they return, as she had to leave town.

Pannu says that day stands out clearly in his mind. Having driven 20 hours non stop, traversing highways he did not know, he reached the airport on a rainy night at 3.30 a.m. He put his terrified wife, who couldn’t speak much English and was a village belle, on a flight to Seattle to collect the kids, while he stayed on in Atlanta, scouting flea markets and locations the next morning.

A kindly Mexican restaurant owner let him sell his prints there. “In four days I had sold a third of my inventory.”

Pannu would stay nights at a local gurudwara and worked incredibly long hours selling his prints and in two weeks business picked up. He then began looking for a warehouse, but without any credit history no one was prepared to rent him any space. Finally he found a warehouse where the owner trusted him instinctively and without asking for any guarantees or credit history, rented him the space.

His kids and wife worked long and hard to fix pictures in frames, and by 1996 Pannu was a millionaire. Today he has built a palatial and opulent multimillion dollar home, has a thriving print business, which he is handing over to his 20 year old son, and is planning to pursue his new passion of building and designing homes.

“When I look back I see God’s grace, but more than that it was the hard work and the family support that has brought me where I am. There are a lot of people who started out with me, but none of them reached the level I have and a lot of them are far more talented and far more intelligent. I feel that I took advantage of the opportunities that came my way; a lot of people don’t and therein lies the difference.”

Clothing to Construction

Ramesh Butani too would have scoffed at the idea that he would be working with tailors in Hong Kong after graduating with a degree in civil engineering in India.

“A rich uncle gave me a ride to Hong Kong, in 1966, and I thought I had it made,” recalls Butani. He discovered instead that since it was mandatory to speak Chinese, he couldn’t get a decent job. Instead he ended up being a liaison between the Chinese tailors and their buyers in the clothing business, since he knew English. Two years elapsed before his English speaking capabilities landed him an offer to come to the United States to sell clothing.

Butani moved on from there to selling industrial chemicals and then to a construction company. Four years later a Filipino customer gave him the incentive to become a contractor by promising him orders.

“In 24 hours I had the license and went to work. I had no idea what it entailed, how to get a contract.” The first year, 25 years ago, Butani’s company HRGM grossed $250,000, specializing in roofing and waterproofing. Butani has moved on to become one of the biggest contractors in the District of Columbia. Today his companies renovate and build schools, clinics, police stations, raking in nearly $50 million worth of business annually.

Butani says the business of construction has evolved into a very competitive industry over the years. “The advent of computers has made it difficult for people who are not computer savvy to survive. Every one has to have a novel business model to nab business and you have to have concrete numbers to back you up. You can’t throw numbers in the air and get away with it now.” HRGM roster of clients include District of Columbia, the University of Maryland, the Washington D.C Department of Public Works, the U.S Department of Agriculture, and Chevron. Butani was nominated as a finalist in the Ernest & Young 2000 and 2001 Greater Washington Entrepreneur of the Year award.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Rules…

These three women demonstrated tremendous courage and grit, carving their space in the American dream, while rocking the cradle.

Leela Sharma lost her father at a very young age and went to nursing school in Kerala at a time when nursing was looked down upon, because her family could not afford to send her to medical school. She married to a physician and came to the USA to live the American dream.

“In those days it was easy to come to USA, and I got my visa in 1973 within 3 months of applying.”

Sharma came by herself leaving her husband behind and felt like a fish out of water.

“It was tough to understand folks and people in turn thought I was dumb. When I went to the hospital and they asked, “Can you hand me the PDR, I had no clue it meant the Physicians Desk Reference book!”

While she was preparing for her board exams, Sharma went to work as a waitress. “I could not understand the language and had never been around any kind of liquor, so when I was asked to serve martini on the rocks, I said I don’t see any rocks here! I was earning $1.19 per hour.! I quit the job as soon as I passed the nursing exam and started working.”

While Leela had learnt a little driving she only knew how to go forward and had no clue how to reverse and had no money to hire an instructor. “So I would drive to work, then take a road where I did not have to reverse. I would get stuck in a mud pile or get lost, because I didn’t know the difference between south, northeast and west. I can laugh now but it was very scary then.”

Sharma also recalls the time when she moved south and had to live in a trailer with some colleagues. For the first few days she was petrified that while they were sleeping some one would come and drive off with them at night. She did not know how to turn the heat on and was too shy to ask, and would cover herself with all the saris she had to protect herself from the cold. She walked 5 miles to work, sometimes in freezing weather.

In the meantime her husband came checked out the place and decided not to stay since he had a very lucrative job in India. It was another four years before he returned to America, and in that time Sharma worked 16-20 hours each day, seven days a week until she finally saved the money needed to bring her family and her siblings over.

Today Leela Sharma settled all her siblings, raised two children, invested well in real estate and lives in a million dollar mansion. She says she believes that not only does this country teach you dignity of labor, it also makes you realize that if you are willing to work hard, nothing is beyond your reach.

Shashi Kumar was born in an affluent family and came to the United States in 1969 with her husband who was an army officer. They stayed with her in laws in Chicago. “We had barely any money, may be $16 dollars expenses.”

A few weeks later her father in law threw them out of the house asking them to fend for themselves and her husband went back to India as he was still in the armed forces. In desperation Shashi applied for a job as a teacher in Chicago. There was a shortage and she was hired, but the owner of the preschool who sponsored her knew her problems and underpaid and ill-treated her. “I was so desperate and ignorant that I had no idea I could have fought against that racism and discrimination.”

Somehow with her meager income Kumar found an apartment, but had no money to buy furniture. She found a discarded bed, a table and chairs, and a sofa. Her son would sleep on the sofa and she would sleep on the bed with her daughter. Kumar worked two jobs and went to school as well and often left her kids home alone by themselves.

“I could not afford to put them in day care. Often my son would catch the bus with my 4-year-old daughter by himself. If the social services had found out, they would have taken my children away from me.”

She remembers the hopelessness of a night when her daughter had 105-degree fever. Kumar had no medical insurance and no one to help her, as her husband still in India. “My son and I put my daughter in cold water and finally her temperature came down.” On another occasion a tornado hit the city. “We were on the third floor. We had no option but to get under the table and hope for the best.”

Kumar says it was the well-being of her children that made her continue struggling and working long hours. Soon she went on to become the only woman manager of a multimillion-dollar retail department store in the 1970s in the Chicago area, when there were no women in the top brass, much less an immigrant. A head hunter called soon after and she received an attractive offer from Target stores, who moved her to Denver and gave her a big raise. Kumar has not looked back on her professional life since.

Both her children are now successful professionals. Kumar divorced and subsequently remarried, is now afflicted with lupus, which leaves her fatigued, but her courage ensures: “I guess the stress of all those years has taken its toll on me. I never thought I would ever have to face adversity of this kind, but adversity does bring out the best in us.”

Deepa Dharamrup is the quintessential bag lady. She first came to New York in the early 1970s to join her husband, who was in the travel agency business. In 1993, Dharamrup, newly divorced, began interviewing for jobs with travel agencies, but discovered she was a hard sell, because she was over qualified. At one agency, she recalls, “the manager said very openly, I can’t hire you because in 2 months you will take over my job.”

Dharamrup and a close friend Manju Vaswani decided to launch a business together, starting with selling a large consignment of leather handbags that were thrust upon them. They succeeded in selling 1,500 in a couple of months.

“We became known as the bag ladies,” laughs Dharamrup.

The timing was right, says Dharamrup and soon they got into the business of home furnishings. The work however was very different. “In this business you have to create the need for the product, whereas in the previous business people came to us to fulfill their need.”

By 1997 they had built it into a lucrative wholesale and retail business. Dharamrup had to raise two daughters along the way as well. “It was not easy raising them, as a single parent, while working full time, but they have turned out to be strong, independent women, and know that if they have a mother who can do it, they too can stand on their own two feet.”

Dharamrup says as she looks back at her life, there are times she cannot believe that she has pulled though. “When I went through my divorce there had only been one divorce before me and both my daughters and I lost a big section of friends. I don’t think the Indian community here was ready to deal with a divorced woman They have come a long way since then, but you do the best you can under the circumstances you are in at that time. There are always going to be obstacles and there will be people trying to cut you off, but if you know that you have made the right decision within you, you do not need to seek anyone’s advice or approval. I have never wavered in what I needed to do and I firmly believe that when one door shuts another one opens. It did for me. I never felt I was better than everyone, but then there was never a point where I felt anybody was better than me.”

The Tamilian in US

Giriraj Rao may not have lived to live the American dream, had he not been in the bus that took him to Bombay harbor to board the ship that was to take him to the University of California at Berkeley on a government scholarship.

“It was 1947, our bus had just made it to the Bombay harbor while subsequent buses were set on fire as communal riots erupted in downtown. We escaped death by 30 minutes,” recalls Rao, who along with 250 fellow Indians had boarded a 7,000- ton displacement ship, which had previously been deployed to ferry supplies across New York and South Hampton in World War II. It took them 30 days to reach San Francisco, only to be stranded by a maritime strike while waiting for clearance to disembark.

“We had no food or water. The vendors threw us sandwiches from below for 25 cents. We caught every one of those sandwiches, only to discover they were bologna sandwiches and I was a vegetarian. That was the moment of truth for me. Was I going to be a scrupulous Hindu or eat meat to survive. Let’s say I survived!”

Giriraj Rao remembers his vegetarian diet being limited to egg sandwiches and ice cream and bowls of fried rice at the only Chinese restaurant near the campus. The university exposed Giriraj Rao to people of many cultures.

“My first roommate was a Pathan Farookh Shah Razani, who was a big follower of Khan Abdul Ghafar Khan and was against the division of India, and then the other one was a Muslim from Bengal, but wanted Pakistan to be created. It was quite a sight, two Muslims fighting each other and a Hindu in the middle trying to hold the peace!”

Rao was very pleasantly surprised by the camaraderie between professors and their students. “There was a cordiality I had never experienced in India, where our professors treated us as peons. Here we had professors fixing dinners for their students.”

Then Giriraj Rao, the Tamilian Brahmin, did the unthinkable. He fell in love, eloped with and married an American Catholic and then returned to India armed with the knowledge he had gained, the sense of liberation he felt.

“I no longer had the peon mentality. I was ready for India,” he says, only to discover an irate mother who was convinced he was not married and staged what Rao refers to as “suicide strikes against me.”

Rao also discovered that the India he had left behind, was now full of corrupt officers. He was disillusioned and returned to USA, but ran up against discrimination as he looked for jobs in California where his wife was already a teacher on contract.

“An Indian was not a known commodity in the late 1940 and ‘50s. We had a problem even finding a house. In fact when we finally did buy one, our neighbor complained, ‘Since when have you started allowing these Mexicans in here?’” laughs Rao.

That story was repeated in Atlanta in the early 1970s, when Giriraj Rao came as an employee of the Coca Cola company, the first of two Indians employed by Coke anywhere in the world. “My wife did not want to come to Atlanta. In 1973, a white woman married to a non American, especially a dark one with the only white thing being his teeth, was definitely frowned upon!” Initially, recalls Rao, when he joined Coke, there was a concern in the plant whether he had adequate knowledge about food and Citrus technology and his management skills, but after a day or two he won their respect. Giriraj Rao went on to create the drink Mellow Yellow, earned high respect in research and development at home and overseas and traveled to Italy to represent Coke.

“I brought in a lot of technological information for the company from Europe, and I was an integral part of the process, which led to the creation of major coke products like diet sprite, and in implementing formula changes and improving the ingredient control for the Coco Cola company. Introduction of fruit juices was one of my major achievements. I am a full-fledged food technologist, chemist and biochemist and came into Coke with a tremendous experience and knowledge that was not taught in universities. Today one of the greatest advantages the industry enjoys is the technological advantages that run parallel, like liquid and solid face chromatography. These analytical tools help synthesize flavors, but in my time you had to have a tremendous first hand knowledge of flavors, including spices, since root beer and many other Coke products have spices in them and I had that knowledge.”

Rao retired from Coke in 1986 as principal investigator, but remains a consultant to Coca Cola to this day and is a highly respected community leader well recognized both in the South Asian as well as mainstream community. “Things are very different now, but I still feel that in spite of everything, returning to USA was the best decision I could have ever made.”

From Birlas to Baking

Nainshad Manekshaw was 15 when his father died. Growing up in Bombay after his father’s death was a struggle, but Nick was an ace cricketer who went on to play in the Ranji Trophy and worked for the Indian Railways as an 18-year-old while putting himself through college at the same time. Soon he joined the Birlas and rapidly climbed the corporate ladders, only to chuck it all up and migrate to United States with his wife and two young sons in 1981 to join his other siblings and mother, all of whom had migrated earlier.

Manekshaw reached New Jersey on a return ticket fully prepared to go back if things didn’t work out. “The Indian population was scarce. If we spotted an Indian in the mall we would talk for hours.”

Having done well in India, Manekshaw was unprepared for the challenges of starting all over again from scratch. “I very quickly found out that the Indian education and corporate experience was not going to cut it here.”

After struggling for some time Manekshaw found his first job-baking bread in a bread factory. “As I walked in on my first day, I hated myself and hated America,” recalls Manekshaw, “but I decided to hang in there because I definitely saw some distinct advantage for the children, and the one thing that really impressed me was the fact that there was no corruption.”

Luckily since Manekshaw was working the 4:00 AM shift, he would be done by 2 p.m. and that left him enough time to interview with corporations. After a series of interviews and rejections, a Fortune 100 company in New Jersey finally hired him as salesman. Residing in a one bedroom run down apartment and supporting a family of four on a meager salary was extremely difficult, but through sheer dedication and hard work Manekshaw concluded his first year in sales amongst the top five producers nationwide and a rookie of the year award to boot. He never looked back.

Although his corporate career was going well, like most immigrants from India, Manekshaw had a burning desire to be in business for himself and opened his first Mexican cuisine restaurant Marita’s Cantina in Pennsylvania in 1985 along with three partners followed by a second one also in Pennsylvania in 1987.

In those days, Indian cuisine was just becoming known, but though the food offered by most restaurants was decent, the ambiance and cleanliness left a lot to be desired. Manekshaw saw the potential and in 1987 opened Palace of Asia along with his good friend and Master Chef Sukhdev Kabow in Ft. Washington, Penn. “The restaurant took off instantaneously and revolutionized the concept of Indian cuisine in the restaurant industry, receiving several awards and accolades from each and every food critic,” says Manekshaw.

In 1990, Nick and his partner opened another Palace of Asia in New Jersey, which was also a smashing success.† Since the Indian community was growing rapidly, Manekshaw in partnership with Sukhdev Kabow, opened a huge Banquet and Catering facility in Mercerville, New Jersey, in 1995, which hosts weddings as well.

Manekshaw says he has come to the realization: “Whenever any one says America is a land of opportunity he is absolutely correct. Unlike in any other country, if you are willing to work hard here, the rewards are yours to keep.”