He kept pressing on as have tens millions of others who came to this country, a nation of immigrants. Mittra’s story is the story of people who came here from the subcontinent and many other places. It could be the story of people who came here from the Far East. It could be story of my immigrant parents, refugees of Hapsburg and British Empires. (Mittra’s family and mine share a prejudice -- neither liked the British Empire. My maternal grandfather, rumored to be a member of the IRA, supposedly had a price on his head and was being sought by the notorious irregular British police force, the Black and Tans. But I digress).
Mittra’s story is one of growing up poor in Banaras, a holy city in Northern India in the last decades of the British Raj. His father, an Indian banker, prematurely dies. It throws the family into a struggle to stay out of poverty. This is likely a foreign concept to many people who have only known Western affluence (See the s idebar below, Growing Up in India in the 1930s). So Mittra had to fight his way up the greasy pole. He had to struggle to get an education and find a place in banking. It was a long struggle. He often heard and sometimes actually believed that he was “a dunce.”
He was a teenager when World War II broke out -- the British Empire was crumbling and the Japanese, after overrunning Myanmar (nee Burma), threatened India. His brother, a doctor, achieved great things, but Mittra struggled through school. He eventually landed a job as a lowly clerk in banking. He struggled to find help in obtaining a graduate degree.
Mittra was getting ahead at the bank. They were letting him write research reports. Maybe he was on the fast track in his homeland. Yet he still wanted to obtain a graduate degree. After blowing a chance for a Fulbright scholarship because he misread a date, he applied to myriad American universities for a scholarship.
After endless rejections, he finally succeeded. But there were caveats -- one obvious and one not so obvious. His bank pleaded with him to stay in India. Mittra took a big chance and turned his back on a secure job in a friendly environment. He headed for the United States to try to obtain an advanced degree, which he might or might not obtain and which might or might not mean a good job in a new land.
The university was in Florida in the Deep South, at a time when Jim Crow was still strong. Mittra, a dark skinned Indian, was heading into a region racked by racial turmoil.
Making things worse, he accompanies a friend on an extended car trip from Gainesville, Fla., to Washington, D.C. There he needs to do some research in his pursuit of a graduate degree. His friend is a white woman. He is going through the heart of the South at a time when many states prohibited the mixing of races.
“Why you riding with this nigah?” a police officer, who looks like a character out of The Dukes of Hazzard, demands of his female friend (page 122). The cop puts him in jail for a night, which, at that point, is probably the best place for him. The cop, under Georgia law, had been required to stop interracial couples.
In this case, apparently, ignorance was bliss. If he had known what he was heading into, almost any person with even an iota of poltroonery (yours truly) would have been on the first plane back to the subcontinent.
Still, if one wants to believe in a divine plan, Mittra had some kismet and luck on his side. The Jim Crow cop, in a strange sort of way, was doing him a favor by separating him from his white friend at the beginning of a trip. If they had taken the trip together, there is a fair chance that Mittra wouldn’t have survived or would have been badly injured somewhere. Instead, after his night in the pokey, he is put on a bus and sent on his way.