One Roof, Two Worlds

New immigrants, they say, carry a lot of old baggage. Well, not in the literal sense but metaphorically.

Immigrants to the "New World" from our part of the world—much older than even “old Europe”—carry precious little in terms of physical baggage. No, they need not trudge their old, mostly decrepit, trinkets and faded family heirlooms to the lands of plenty, glitz and glamour. It’s largely the glare and glitter of these modern ‘baubles’ that spins a trance over their imagination and lures them to these shores.

But what they do carry with them is the metaphysical baggage of their upbringing, cultural moorings, taboos and what nots. That’s a baggage that drags them down a lot and retards their progress as they embark on the long journey to put down their roots in a new land almost totally different from their native one and, in most cases, apparently hostile to the values they’ve been holding on to all their lives as the core of existence.

Of course it’s but natural for a new immigrant to hold on to his core social and religious values. Immigration doesn’t mean discarding one’s past—in every sense—for good. Not any more. That may’ve held good in the past when the crossing of an ocean was like leaving behind one’s old land forever—lock, stock and barrel. What percentage of immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries ever revisited the lands they’d said goodbye to?

Technology and science have changed the whole concept of migration to a new land upside down. Immigration is no longer the burning of bridges it used to be in the olden eras. Why is it so? Because a new immigrant can now stay firmly rooted to his native land with the blessings of modern innovations in communication. A Pakistani immigrant to North America, for instance, can watch his favourite Pakistani or Indian tv channels with as much facility as he did back home. I know of people in U.S. and Canada who hardly ever watch the local tv channels but are fully tuned on to what goes on the tube in India or Pakistan.

The satellite age has done away with the compulsion to change, or the incentive to innovate, in a new clime. Well, the climate changes only on the outside: raging snow storms in place of the blowing fury of sand. But inside there’s a climate control. Mr. X can flick on his Geo TV channel, or ARY, Sony or Zee by reaching his remote control. And, voila, he’s back to where he came from, live and in dazzling colours. Gone are the days when an immigrant would wait for weeks and months for a letter from ‘home’. Now, ‘back home’ is just a punch away on one’s touch- tone cell phone.

If one’s a literati or a literature buff there’s a lot of mushaira culture on hand. There’s a lot of it on offer, in particular, if Mr. X happens to be in Toronto, Chicago, New York, Houston, L.A. or, for that matter, any major urban centre in N. America. The climate of the ‘new world’must agree a lot with our ‘literature-buff’immigrants to spur poetry writing in such profusion, if one is to go by the generous sprouting of poets in all these and other cities. And prominent poets from home can always be invited to add flavour to an evening; money is no consideration. In fact, bulging wallets are a passport to buy pride of place as a connoisseur of fine arts.

The other deeply engrossing, real hot, pursuit is the mushroom growth of Islamic centres which no immigrant community worth its salt can afford to be without in this part of the world. An slamic centre serves both social and religious needs and thus figures high on the priority list of immigrants. They’ve made it in the circle of their peers if they’ve a centre of their own.

With so much going on the ‘native front’one keeps more than a leg in the land one may’ve forsaken for entirely economic reasons. Money in the pocket makes it so much easier and convenient to keep one’s socio-religious compass homed in all the time on the home turf. To borrow a terminology coined by the Russians to define their special interest in their former Central Asian possessions they were forced to give up reluctantly, the distant home is still “near-abroad” that one is attached to, intellectually; physical separation matters little, or none at all.

But that’s not the case with the progeny of the immigrant.

There isn’t a ‘back home’ or ‘near-abroad’for the child born and raised in U.S. or Canada. For the offspring coming to life here, it’s home; the only home he or she knows. The progeny feels attached to it and is hard put to swallow, unquestioningly, the old man’s logic that their roots are elsewhere. ‘ But my roots are here; it’s here that I belong to’ is a common refrain and counter-argument between two generations of immigrants living under the same roof but belonging to two different worlds, in their basic perception of who they’re and where do they belong to.

To be honest, the one born to immigrant parents is not an immigrant. A second generation of people planted in the North American soil is either American or Canadian, depending on the incidence of birth. So for the first generation to insist that ‘no, you’re still a Pakistani first and anything else later’ defies common sense—at least for the younger generation. It triggers a debate that often ends up exposing the chasm dividing one generation from the other. It no doubt brings up the proverbial and much-cliched ‘generation gap’ in all its damning dimensions.

Curiously, neither is wrong in its perception of ‘who’ and ‘where’.

The immigrant is right about his or her roots. Economic necessity, or craving for a greener pasture, may induce migration but implanting a tree into a different soil doesn’t take away its innate properties. Driving an American car, living in a Chicago suburb and drawing a fat American salary doesn’t make one an American in the generic sense. The tree still refuses to put down firm roots in the top soil despite imbibing all the nourishment from the soil and the fertilizers mixed into it. Immigrant X still carries a little Pakistan in his heart and unwinds only in the company of peers sharing his philosophy down to its fine print.

But the offspring isn’t wrong either. He or she doesn’t have roots in the older generation’s turf. To them most of it is hearsay and alien: poetry, literature, history and its mostly dismaying experience, music, sports et al. Their music is not Saigol-oriented or Lata-centred. Their sports are different too. They don’t follow Cricket with the religious fervour and passion their parents do all the time. As for the bemused parents, American Football or Canadian (Ice) Hockey may belong to another planet.

Mushairas are definitely boring and a drag on time for the American- born offsprings; they simply can’t understand why their parents would while away so much time on such an ‘uncool’ pastime and return from their nocturnal wasteland bleary-eyed. They fault their parents of ‘double standard’for not letting them enjoy a ‘sleep-over’ at their friends’.

They may not be allergic to what their ‘Mom’ cooks for dinner but never miss an opportunity to give it a slip and settle, instead, for a pizza, disdained by their elders as too mushy and saturated with unhealthy fats.

Perhaps the only common denominator between the two generations is their loyalty to Bollywood and its lilting potpourri spoofs. Why do they agree on something so superficial and ersatz as Bollywood? Well, because in some strange and mind-boggling way, Bollywood’s masala technique concocts a cocktail of traditional and super-modern that both generations can identify with, if only partially, as their own. The difference of idiom and lingo dividing the two generations so regularly, otherwise, gets papered over too in the Bollywood conflation. It’s such a boon to keeping the two worlds under one roof from colliding with each other.

Who says migration has lost its magic? It doesn’t cease to wonder; not yet.