The Green Card Dowry Plan: A triumphant memoir of an Indian immigrant's plan to bypass dowries for his five sisters.

PREFACE

WHY DID I write this memoir? I wanted my memoir to document myself and my experiences. I wanted to keep my immigrant family’s unique story immune from the ravages of time. I wanted to create memories and establish my family’s traditions for generations to come. What follows is an account of the arc of my life, why I bent it to suit my life’s goals.

I always shielded and protected the privacy of my family. However, in writing this memoir, I had to close my eyes to peel back the curtain of my family’s life, hoping it is the right thing to do. I only changed some names and identifying details.

PROLOGUE

AT A TIME when the immigration laws in the United States and their abuse is being hotly debated, I am telling the story of how I used the immigration laws for my family’s benefit. Born into a middle-class family in India, I worked hard and earned an excellent education. With meticulous planning, I was lawfully admitted into this country as a student. I then used the U.S. immigration laws to help my father of ten children, who included five girls, from becoming destitute.

This book is about the dowry system which still prevails in India despite laws against it. The dowry is mandatory payment of wealth that is expected from the father in order to get his daughter married. The dowry is no small amount. Depending on the status, education and earning potential of the bridegroom the dowry could be astronomical. How does a father of five girls who is principled and proud to provide a good living for his family cope with the overly burdensome dowry?

I arrived under a university assistantship award to become a physicist. My original goal was to obtain my doctorate, earn money as a physicist in the U.S. and then return to India to settle down. My original expectation was that my earning potential combined with those of my four brothers who remained in India would help my father meet the dowry demands. However, this expectation soon collapsed. After earning my Ph.D., I was caught up in a U.S. recession and unable to find employment commensurate with my earning potential. This unexpected event reset my goal.

After working as a teacher and still unable to find employment as a physicist, I made a dramatic change in my career to become a lawyer. My study of law combined with my strong foundation in technology opened up a new vista to address my goal to solve the dowry problem that my father faced.

This book tells how I devised a clever solution to help my father by lawfully and judiciously using the generous immigration laws of the United States.

I qualified for my U.S. Green Card based on my scholastic accomplishments which paved the way to become an American citizen. I was able to sponsor my unmarried alien sisters to earn their Green Cards. I orchestrated their Green Cards as a currency for finding suitable husbands in India without paying dowry. The husbands then joined their new brides in the U.S. to live permanently and enrich the lives of these married couples.

In addition to looking at the hardships on India’s dowry system, this book ponders on the question of whether family unification in the immigrant community still serves a vital purpose in the United States.

Do immigrants and the sponsor-host immigrant and other family already in the U.S. stay reunited? On balance, does the family unification bring in the right blend of immigrants to our country and enrich it with cultural, intellectual and economic vibrancy?

I invite you to read my story and decide for yourself.

1

SETTING MY SECRET GOALS

GOAL SETTING AND successfully meeting goals has always been a part of my life story. This started in my middle school years while I was playing soccer with my classmates during the lunch break and driving the ball across the goal post was that day’s goal that I set for myself. Goal setting has seldom been for competitive reasons but to feel a sense of accomplishment when a goal was met. Perennial and systematic goal setting is a trait that remained with me in everything I did. My determination to achieve goals can be linked to where I am now positioned in my accomplished life.

I was born into a large and loving Hindu family. Although my father did not finish college, he had adequate education past secondary schooling to pass the administrative examinations to qualify as an Income Tax Inspector in the Federal government of India. He was excellent with numbers which was how I suppose he got into the tax business. He was also articulate in English. When his clients showed up at our home for consultation on tax matters, he always conducted business in English.

My father’s job was solid, and it paid for the basic comforts of his large family. But he wasn’t made of money. He was a hard-working man, as well as a disciplinarian and a stickler for principles. He admonished his children when they misbehaved or displayed unacceptable manners in the presence of others. He was by no means controlling but emphasized discipline in everything the children did. He never showed external love and affection. He seldom openly uttered, I love you, son. However, such overt display was not common or expected in the Hindu culture. My father and I were close, and I admired him enormously.

My father believed in a higher being. Although he seldom went to Hindu temples to worship, he regularly prayed in front of Hindu gods and deities at home. Every day right after his bath, it was a ritual for him to go to the prayer area where pictures and idols of the different Hindu Gods and Goddesses were displayed over a shelf. He would pray for five minutes with his eyes focused on them.

I am not a devout Hindu. I have been a practicing Hindu when it was convenient to do so. I emulated my father in ritualistic prayer. I prayed for forgiveness and for grace and for the strength to be a good son and brother. I lived a life of faith and, eventually, scholarship.

My mother completed her secondary school and graduated with a Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC). Telugu was her first language and English, her second. She was a caregiver and the one who held everything together. Every meal was freshly prepared. She named me after her father who passed away just before I was born. I did not like my name as it was old-fashioned. I thought of changing my name when I realized it was unpopular. However, such a change did not occur as I viewed it as a rejection of my mother’s wish and the heritage that she wanted me to carry on. Later in life, I realized that popularity of one’s name wasn’t that consequential. What I wanted was to do something that mattered, to make a difference. I kept my given name and later just went by the initials TR.

To us children, my mother regularly read aloud stories from books and magazines written in Telugu. We loved hearing her read as she showed emotion in her voice in complete consonance with the happenings in the stories which rendered each one that much more vivid and real. My mother was my first coach. Her reading of stories coached me to read which endured my entire life.

Even though love was never overtly spoken, it was there always with both my parents. My siblings and I grew up knowing that our father and mother, different as they were from each other, and from us, cared. That’s their legacy.

How large was our family? By the time I reached fifteen, my parents had a dozen children. I am the second with an older brother Avi of sixteen months preceding me. Two of my younger sisters (Sashi and Urmila) passed away due to health complications when they were less than five years old. Beyond those two sisters, the composition of the family was five sons and five daughters.

My parents’ generation tended to have large families even though they were not agrarian. Further back, on my maternal side, my grandparents had two sons and eight daughters. My maternal grandfather was a school headmaster. My paternal grandparents had eight children, evenly split between the sexes. My paternal grandfather worked for the state government of Andhra Pradesh in an administrative capacity. It was common in those days that the women never worked, and the men were the breadwinners.

Male children were prized because of the age-old and still prevalent dowry practice in parts of India. Under this system, men commanded a huge payment of money and other assets from the bride’s parents at marriage.

My parents and grandparents hailed from Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh where Telugu is spoken. Most of my parents’ siblings lived around Kakinada, which was a large town on the southeastern coast of India by the Bay of Bengal. Being employed with the Federal government, my father was transferred regularly from place to place to meet the demands of tax collection from businesses. The towns and cities where each of my siblings was born provide a good roadmap of the places where my family lived. Four siblings were born in Kakinada, two were born in the rural town of Eluru, two were born in the city of Hyderabad and two in the city of Bangalore in the adjacent state of Mysore (now renamed as Karnataka). We did not live in Eluru, but two siblings were born there because my mother had older sisters who lived in that town; she chose to deliver the babies in their household utilizing their midwifery help.

I was proud to call Kakinada my place of birth. Coca (my last name) from Kakinada had a nice ring to it. I had a rare strain of the pioneer in me beginning in my childhood. I was precocious. I spent my first six years in Kakinada where I started elementary school. Soon after I entered school, my family moved to Hyderabad, which was then the capital of Andhra Pradesh. I continued two to three years of elementary-primary schooling in Hyderabad before settling down in the picture-perfect Bangalore.

It was the late summer before I just had turned ten when my father received orders that his job in Hyderabad was transferred to Bangalore. He came home very excited about the orders and showed off the transfer papers to my mother as the children attentively watched him. He raved about Bangalore and the cool climate it offered, being located at an elevation of 3,000 feet in the south-central peninsula of India. My mother asked, Will you receive a higher salary? He simply replied that he was promoted, without telling how much of a raise he was going to receive and added that Bangalore was a more expensive place to live.

My parents quickly identified that one of my mother’s nieces (and my cousin), who was married to a Ph.D. chemist working for the Indian Dairy Institute, lived in Bangalore. My mother contacted them and asked them to line up a rental property for us in the neighborhood where they lived, which they did.

Within a month we were ready to move to Bangalore. I was excited about the move and the train journey from Hyderabad to Bangalore with my parents and seven siblings. It was my first trip anywhere. My father reserved essentially one of the train’s compartments for our family, leaving four seats for other passengers. The open seats were situated across the berth from where he and my older brother and I were seated. The day’s journey took nearly ten hours, from morning to dusk. Passengers got on and off at the various towns where the train stopped.

At midday at one of the train stops an English gentleman in his early thirties boarded the train and came into our compartment. He occupied a vacant seat in front of my father. The train soon roared into the cool wind and blew tiny bits of burnt charcoal from its engine into our compartment.

My father suddenly pointed to the outside and said, Look, the woods on both sides of the train are moving backward, referring to the relative motion of the train and the surrounding woods.

The English gentleman smiled, and my father engaged with him in a conversation in English. They discussed Indian politics it seemed, but I could not fathom what they were actually saying.

The English gentleman was holding a tiffin box and he opened it. It contained peeled hard-boiled eggs and pieces of fresh mango fruit. He offered the opened box to my father to share his lunch, and my father politely obliged by picking up an egg. The man then graciously offered tiny salt and pepper shakers, which had been tucked in the box. My father used them to sprinkle the contents on his egg.

As they enjoyed the shared lunch, I could not help admiring the Western habit of sharing food with a total stranger. This kind and generous gesture of sharing by the English gentleman was etched in my mind as a sign of human magnanimity and goodwill.

The rented house in Bangalore was small with only two bedrooms and a large indoor open space where we children played. However, it soon became apparent that its location was too far from where my father worked. He had to take three buses to get to work. He left home early and came home late, and we rarely had any time to spend with him. He started to look for a house closer to his place of work. With this uncertainty, his children’s education became a casualty. None of the school-aged children were enrolled in schools and we just wasted our time exploring the neighborhood for several months until my father found a house in the High Grounds section of Bangalore.

The rented house in the High Grounds was less than half a mile from where my father worked, which made it convenient for him to walk to work. The address of 8 Miller Road became a landmark for our residence in this new city. The house was set back from the road and it had a large acreage of about 150 feet x 300 feet in the front. It was walled off from the neighbors who had equally spacious grounds. The front yard also was walled off with a set of large 10-foot-high dual gates.

The home had three bedrooms, a large veranda, a kitchen and a private bathroom. Adjacent to the house in a corridor there were two small dens and a private room for the toilet. We had complete plumbing–running water and an underground drainage system. The bathroom was fitted with an electric boiler which delivered hot water at any time of day or night at the flip of a switch. The bedrooms, kitchen and the veranda had electric power and good ventilation. Also abutting the house on the opposite side of the corridor was a spacious garage fitted with a set of large metal doors. As we did not have a car, the garage served as a bedroom for me and my older brother Avi. As the house was unfurnished, my father went to the local auction house and purchased beds, huge armoires, a large dining table that seated eight, wicker chairs, and desks. We were very comfortable in our new dwelling.

After all these moves, where my education was disrupted, I was glad that we settled down in Bangalore. The silver lining behind the disruptive moves was that I was able to skip two grades based on entrance tests that I took. I was placed in the same middle school class as Avi, who skipped one grade. I could declare that my formal education started in earnest in Bangalore.

Our next-door neighbor, who owned a large coffee plantation on the outskirts of Bangalore, invited our family to see their display of traditional dolls arranged in an aesthetic manner on nine steps during the Dasara festival. Being natives of the state, they filled us with useful information about Bangalore. I learned that the city had earned the reputation of the Garden City of India because of several public parks, freshwater lakes and such public buildings as the Vidhana Souda, the seat of the state’s legislature, with its lofty landscaped gardens. Due to its high elevation Bangalore offed a moderate tropical savanna climate throughout the year with distinct wet and dry seasons. The rich diversity of flora and fauna that thrived in the city added to its reputation.

My father pursued his hobby of gardening and enlisted his older children to help with the digging of the fertile red soil that was characteristic of Bangalore and with planting seedlings or seeds for plants. He planted a variety of flowers, herbs, vegetables, fruits like tomatoes, and even crops like sugar cane, corn, peanuts and lentils. He engaged a tractor to till the acreage for planting crops. My father truly had a green thumb. Everything he planted yielded a bounty.

Books and magazines were aplenty in our house. Everyone who could read devoured them so much so that they all quickly grew dog ears. Despite the spacious quarters, living with ten siblings was a strain. I could feel the noise and chaos of a full household. A certain amount of rationing for food, use of hot water, and electricity when ironing clothes was a standard operating procedure. Sharing and working together among the family members became necessary. My siblings and I got along well. We developed a culture of comradery and accommodation. We taunted each other while doing everything whether eating papayas, Banganapalli mangoes, peeling and chewing on fresh sugar cane, or eating fresh peanuts boiled in saltwater. Some siblings had a sense of humor, a quality I attribute to my mother. She always preached with a smile for unity and cooperation among us children. The large dining table in the veranda where we often ate together became the center for our conversations.

My mom always sang while she was in the kitchen. She had a melodious voice. At family gatherings during festivals and weddings, her sisters and other relatives always encouraged her to sing. After sufficient persuasion, she used to oblige and sing to the complete satisfaction of the audience. She sang like an angel, which amazed me.

My upbringing was rule-bound: unwritten rules like you must take care of yourself whether it was getting to school on your own, pressing your shirts and pants, and dealing with your injuries.

The sense of goal setting increased in me after an incident that took place soon after I graduated from high school in the spring of 1958. My older brother and I graduated from high school with our SSLC in the same year. My grade point average was excellent, and I was a few months shy of the age of fifteen then. The logical next step would have been to apply for admission to a one-year pre-university course at a college, completing it to pursue a bachelor’s degree. However, my father had a different idea. He intended Avi and me to join the Indian Army.

Without any explanation, my father directed Avi and me to dress up. He ushered a bicycle rickshaw for us to ride. On his bike he led the way for the rickshaw driver. The air was crisp, the sky was blue, and we did not know where we were going. As we rode the rickshaw, I speculated that he was taking us to see a local college. We rode for well over 5 miles to the outer periphery of Mahatma Gandhi Road where we never had ventured.

Finally the rickshaw driver stopped at the entrance gate of the Army Recruiting Center on Mahatma Gandhi Road, which was guarded by two soldiers carrying army rifles. Large erected signs on both sides of the gate had pictures of such things as the tricolor Indian flag and of soldiers carrying rifles along with the words Join the Indian Army and Protect India in large letters.

My brother and I both got off the rickshaw. My father spoke to the gate guards and the three of us were let into the Army’s facilities—many sprawling yellow-plastered buildings with Spartan furniture. We were led to the first building which had open doors and was airy. Large framed pictures of the Indian Prime Minister and the Indian President hung on the walls along with proclamations like Protecting our country is our utmost duty and Contribute to India by joining the Indian Army. An array of the Indian Army Ranks and identifying badges in black and gold were affixed to a large wall. My father signed us in. Soon after, my brother and I were separated and escorted to different buildings.

I was orally quizzed on math, science and on my English-language reading and speaking abilities. The quizzing seemed to last for a long stretch and was grueling. Then I was led to another building with a large red-cross sign emblazoned on its outer wall. A physician clad in Army fatigues took over. He measured my height, weight and chest size. He checked my eyes for vision and ears for hearing. He checked me out thoroughly after asking me to undress. He poked my body at various places as part of the Army’s physical examination and asked whether I felt any pain as he repeatedly poked me. I stammered and said, No. He tested for my hand-to-eye coordination and reaction time. He asked me to stretch my hand out with the palm facing up. He then slammed my open palm with a cane to see whether I could avoid being hit. He looked bemused when I missed his slams all three times.

Then it was time for testing my physical skills and stamina. A different Army recruiter led me to an open sand and gravel field with planted markers separated by a distance of 100 feet and he commanded me to run four times between them. A posted sign in the field which stated, No Pain, No Gain only tormented my running.

The series of physical, stress and mental tests were grueling and lasted for three hours. At the end of it all, my father collected his sons and took us home. If we passed these tests, what remained would be a written test. If we also passed that, my brother and I would be ready to join the Army.

I felt disappointed that at the tender age of fifteen, my father was ready to send me off to the Army without knowing my true potential. I knew that I was capable of accomplishing far greater things in life than serving in the Army. However, my father’s attempt to enroll me in the Army awakened my senses with a jolt. Later in life, I realized that between fathers and sons, it’s always been the same, since the dawn of time. Fathers discouraged what their sons wanted to accomplish and directed them to meet their own wishes.

Two weeks later, we came to know by a letter received from the Army Recruitment Center that neither Avi nor I qualified for the Army. When I heard the news, I breathed a sigh of relief.

From my early childhood I kept a journal where I jotted down, before going to bed, the important happenings of that day. As I was getting ready to write down the revelation of rejection by the Army in my journal, it dawned on me that my father wanted his first two sons to be employed early, much before they reached adulthood. I kept thinking about this incident. It was his plan to receive financial support from his employed sons. He needed this support not for daily needs, which he could fully meet, but for the eventual time when he would have to pay dowries to marry off his daughters. The number of daughters had grown to five and equaled the number of sons.

Later I came to know that my father was following in the footsteps of his younger brother who persuaded his eldest son Govind to join the Army, perhaps for similar reason. Govind subsequently committed suspected suicide.

The majority of Hindus in India practiced a dowry system under which the bridegroom’s family expected a large amount of wealth in the form of cash, gold and diamond jewelry, or even real estate, to accompany the bride. This sinister practice, even though outlawed on the books, was brazenly practiced by most, especially families with sons as it was a source of found wealth. The amount of the dowry was commensurate with the educational qualifications and economic well-being of the groom. Doctors, scientists, bankers and engineers commanded a much larger dowry than other grooms.

Many stories of atrocities regularly made the news when the dowry requirements were not met or reneged after the wedding. Even romantic and good marriage relationships were ensnared when the dowry was not satisfied. Sometimes the consequence of not honoring the promised dowry was fatal. Stories abounded including relegating the married bride to the menial work of a servant, physically and psychologically harassing her and even burning her alive.

I concluded that dowry payments for my sisters were inevitable and a plan for such payment must be addressed now.

What began as a chronicle of my rejection by the Army became something exorbitant. The rejection changed everything and launched my plan. It created a tension with my father but reinforced my determination to find a better and different avenue to financially help him.

Cerebrally I toyed with the thought that since there was five sons and five daughters in our family, my father could break even in the dowry gamble. He needed to offset the dowries he would receive from the families of brides for his sons with dowry payments to the families of grooms for his daughters. However, I set this thought aside as it seemed unpredictable and undependable to realize. I could not count on whether my brothers would voluntarily transfer the dowry that they would receive from their bride’s family to my father so he could use that wealth to pay for my sisters’ dowries. I wished, however, that my brothers would be so magnanimous.

Each of my four brothers was like a slice from different pies, each with a different perspective. Each brother was independent, and they seldom shared their thoughts with me.

I felt I needed to be pragmatic. I wanted a workable plan to address the dowry issue that my father would face. I made up my mind that I would not personally aid the sinister dowry machine. I would renounce the dowry from the parents of my would-be bride. I could not predict whether my independent-minded brothers would do the same. If they did, then my father could proclaim that, as a matter of principle, he would take no dowry for his sons nor pay dowry for his daughters to get them married. Under this principle, no money was needed for my father to marry off his children. Otherwise, my father would need a huge source of independent wealth to pay for the dowries of my five sisters. If he were to pay for the dowries of his daughters, he was bound to go bankrupt and become destitute.

It was then that I conceived a master plan, which was simple, I thought. I should go overseas to a wealthy country, establish myself as a professional, earn money and financially help my father to pay for the dowries for my sisters. The plan sounded ennobling for sure, but it depended on my accomplishing step-by-step the many challenging intermediate goals.

The challenges were many, burdensome and drawn out. The plan needed systematic attention, perseverance and eternal patience to work. Being goal-oriented from early on, I did have the beginning of a goal for my life—despite having fears about my future and doubts about myself. I wanted to earn an impeccable education. This was the cornerstone of my overall goal. Only impeccable academic accomplishments would open the doors to achieve my goal.

I was a precocious young man. My larger and long-term goal to financially help my father generated a number of short-term goals: I must get an impeccable higher education in India; I must decide which foreign country would be best for my further studies; I needed to apply to the foreign university, compete with applicants from around the world for admission, earn a scholarship and excel in my studies; I had to prepare myself to live in such a foreign country; and after graduating must professionally establish myself in that country, earn money and help my father.

I had to quickly decide what career path I should pursue. Since my major subjects in high school were physics and mathematics with a minor in chemistry, I was pretty much destined to pursue a career as a physicist or engineer. I regretted that I did not major in biology in high school. Otherwise, pursuing medicine would have probably been a logical and fitting career for my personality.

I applied for my undergraduate education in the most prestigious college in Bangalore—the St. Joseph’s College which was an all-boys private school and run by Roman Catholic Jesuit priests. It was generally hard to get admission to this college, but my grades were good enough to apply. I was very lucky and received acceptance from St. Joseph’s.

Fide et Labore (faith and labor) was the Latin motto of St Joseph’s College, which perfectly matched my life governed by faith in hard work.

I had the benefit of competing with the crème de la crème of students from the city and got educated by some of the best professors, including many catholic priests. The Vice Principal of the college who was also the Head of the English Department, Father Lawrence, a slender man in white robes, took particular interest in me. He became my unofficial counsellor and a phenomenal mentor who listened to my thoughts and anxieties about attaining my goals. Father Lawrence guided me on how to think and what to think. Making informed, thoughtful choices in every area of student life was a learning experience that he stressed.

St Joseph’s did not have a decent cafeteria, except for a small kitchen and an adjacent room under the same roof where simple Indian meals were served. It was always crowded, particularly at lunch time. This forced me every school day to dash home on my bicycle during the lunch break for a hot Indian meal. That ride refreshed me and split the day into two manageable segments.

My years at St Joseph’s were also steeped in lessons about the value of conscience and compassion for others. Social service to benefit the poor and displaced was emphasized by Father Lawrence. He led small groups of us students on the weekends to nearby villages where people were suffering from poverty or affected by natural disasters like floods. We collected food and clothing donated by the Red Cross and distributed them to the villagers and assisted them in rebuilding their homes.

St. Joseph’s promoted my critical thinking—not just having me embrace ideas but also encouraging me to challenge them. Because of this training, I was able to look at situations from a critical standpoint to be able to make the right decisions when presented with choices.

The diverse student body came together from many faiths including Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Jews and many different Indian languages were heard in the classroom, laboratory, and while participating in various academic competitions and social functions. Occasional entertainment where the students performed magic tricks or sang popular rock and roll songs with an organized band was something I looked forward to enjoying. I won essay competitions and was awarded prizes, including the books of Homer’s Iliad