The day the bridge collapsed in Minnesota I went for a party. By 6pm that evening, I knew I would never cross over a bridge again without fearing for my life. Bridges simply don’t collapse. Atleast not ones just twenty minutes from your home and certainly not in the state of middle-class, Midwest Minnesota, where people work hard and pay high taxes to protect themselves from the vagaries of life.
The thought of canceling the party, which had been planned for awhile, never entered our Indian minds. Infact the accident itself never seemed to seep through anyone’s consciousness for there was beer to guzzle, samosas to tuck into, blaring Bollywood music to sway to, in-laws to complain about, biryani recipes to exchange, cricket scores and the latest Indian political guffaws to discuss. Elsewhere in Minnesota, just twenty minutes from where we were, helicopters were hovering over a collapsed bridge that plunged cars into the icy-waters of the Mississippi. People were rushing to help with victims, donate blood at hospitals, transport people to safety, join search parties to help find the missing and offer solace to those that had lost a member of their family. Such is the utter indifference of the Indian community to assimilation. Albeit my experiences were more with the Indian guest workers in the US, but some of them had been in the US for upto ten years. Yet, they led lives parallel and in complete apathy to their host country. Shopping in their own grocery stores, watching Bollywood and Tamil movies over the weekend, buying enough clothes in India to last their stay in America and constantly disparaging the American system of education which explores creativity rather than learning by rote. There is no curiosity at all about another culture, no interaction beyond the most superficial and no involvement in their community affairs. Instead they chose to live in a cocoon of India transplanted. (In good conscience, I must add here that in this respect Goans fare much more favorably, because there is a genuine willingness to assimilate when we migrate and it is this more than anything else that defines our community in diaspora.) When we drove home, past midnight, there was an eerie quiet on the streets of Minnesota. A hush to mourn the dead and come to terms with the discomforting thought that even in quiet, peaceful, Blue-state Minnesota the ground could literally give way from under. selma
