It didn't take me long to find out I needn't have worried. Later that day I attended a party in my honor thrown by another Kenyan Asian, the media entrepreneur Sudhir Vidyarthi, to whom I had been introduced by my good friend and former UN colleague Salim Lone, a Kashmiri Kenyan. Vidyarthi's father had run an anti-British newspaper, the Colonial Times, in which the legendary Jomo Kenyatta had first published his nationalist screeds. The elder Vidyarthi had gone to jail for his pains, and his son had continued in the family tradition as a courageous antiestablishment publisher.
Sudhir Vidyarthi's garden, with its outdoor deck and outsized bar, was even grander and more impressive than Mr. Shankardass's, but as fifty guests milled about on the patio, what struck me most was their ethnic mix. An Indian DJ bantered with the African CEO of a rival radio station; a Ugandan Asian journalist questioned the newly appointed government spokesman; a senior government official, a striking woman with a vivid tribal scar down her cheek, held forth to an older lady in a graceful sari. Asians and Africans melded seamlessly into one. “We're all Kenyans here,” my host said simply.
A group of Kenyan South Asians was publishing a magazine called Awaaz, subtitled The Authoritative Journal of Kenyan South Asian History. I was given a copy of the latest issue. On the cover was a photo of the recently deceased Pranlal Sheth, a hero of Kenyan independence who was then deported from his country by the Kenyatta government and died in exile in England. If that seemed discouraging, the same issue carried a review of a new play by a Kenyan-Indian playwright Kuldip Sondhi, dealing with shop demolitions in Mombasa. And a portfolio of photographs by the legendary Mohammed Amin, who first broke the news of the Ethiopian famine with his searing pictures, lost a leg in the Somali civil war but went on immortalizing East Africa through his lens till he was killed in a plane crash in 1996.
There was much talk at the party about a new exhibition that had just been mounted by the National Museum of Kenya. It was called “The Asian African Heritage: Identity and History”; through photographs, documents, and artifacts, the exhibition depicted two centuries of Asian assimilation in Kenya. Indian labor had built forts in Kenya as early as the sixteenth century; Indian masons and carpenters had practiced their craft in even larger numbers from 1820; and over 31,000 contract laborers from Punjab and Gujarat had built the famous Mombasa railroad, 2,500 of them perishing in the process. The city of Nairobi (like forty-three other railway towns along the line) was erected by Indian hands.
“This is our home,” said Pheroze Nowrojee, who had written the text of the exhibition. “Our social identity rests on our bi-continental tradition. We are both Asian and African. We are Asian African.”
Sudhir Vidyarthi soon emerged, proudly holding a little black toddler in his arms. “Meet my new daughter,” he beamed. “She's been with us since she was four months old; the official adoption comes through next week.” His excitement was as palpable as his affection for the girl, who nibbled at Indian hors d'oeuvres from his palm. “Give Daddy a kiss,” he told her in Swahili, and the tiny tot, bits of samosa and kebab still on her lips, duly obliged.
I looked at them — Asian father, African daughter, sharing Indian food and chatting in an East African tongue — and I raised a silent toast to their Kenyan garden. I only wished I knew the Swahili word for heaven.
*
As an Indian who, without actually emigrating, has found himself working abroad all his adult life, I have always had some sympathy for my fellow NRIs. The argument that Indians who work abroad are doing a disservice to their country seems to me misplaced, especially in recent years as Indians abroad gave back to their homeland so much more than they could ever have contributed while staying there. The old fears of a “brain drain” seemed to me to have been supplanted by hopes of a “brain gain,” as desi software designers and high-tech gurus from Silicon Valley have opened thriving firms in India, employing their countrymen and women, increasing the country's export revenues and pumping up the national GDP. Indians going abroad after their studies have done a great deal to benefit the Indians who stayed at home.
But one category of Indian professional who emigrates still troubles me. I know it's unfair, but though I am unfazed by the expatriation of our engineers and economists, our scientists and scholars, it still bothers me when I see an Indian doctor settle abroad.
Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends in the United States are Indian doctors, and I feel no personal desire to uproot them from their lives here and send them back. But whereas our country is so abundantly supplied with talent that few of us living abroad can truly claim that our absence from our native shores makes any negative difference to India, doctors strike me as a different case, mainly for two reasons: they possess knowledge and training that is still in short supply in our country, and the government of India, through its generous subsidies for higher education, has spent a large sum of money helping them to acquire the skills they are taking abroad.
The problem came back to me when I read that Indian doctors in the United States are discovering a new means of staying on legally in America. They are serving the poor.
Under U.S. immigration rules, a foreign doctor — even if he completes his medical schooling in the United States, or does an internship or residency at an American hospital — is obliged to return to his homeland for a period of at least two years before he can seek employment in the United States. There is, however, an exception built into the law. The U.S. government has designated 2,100 areas, mostly impoverished districts at the nadir of the economic recession, as “medically underserved.” If a foreign doctor agrees to work in one of these areas, the standard requirement of two years outside the States before working here is lifted. The much sought-after green card, entitling the doctor to permanent residence in the United States, is just a few prescriptions away.
As a result, the brain drain of doctors from developing countries continues while ensuring Americans get medical care even in areas where American doctors wouldn't want to work. There are some 600,000 licensed medical practitioners in the United States, of whom about 120,000 are foreigners. The largest single group of foreign doctors is, of course, from India — no fewer than 25,000. The irony of Indian doctors, who have no lack of poor patients needing their medical skills in their own country, coming to help the American underclass, is considerable.
Few American doctors want to build a practice or make a home in some of the places where Indians are prepared to serve. I remember one New York Times piece years ago about one such “medically underserved” area, the town of Welch, West Virginia. The journalist described Welch, a remote outpost in the Appalachian Mountains, as “an economic sinkhole whose coal-mining jobs have been vanishing.” Towns like Welch, populated largely by the very poor and the often sick, have little appeal for American doctors, whose principal objective is to earn back the quarter of a million dollars they have spent on their medical education. Even graduates of West Virginian medical schools refuse to work at the local hospital. So Welch has made use of its federal designation to import its doctors. Fifteen of the nineteen doctors in the town hospital were from abroad, including India.
As with lesser professions, from janitors to cab drivers, immigrants are always willing to do the jobs the locals consider beneath them. The easier route to a green card may not, however, be the only incentive for the foreign doctors. The New York Times wrote that many found greater professional opportunity in these blighted rural communities, less professional discrimination — and greater material comforts. Typical earnings, the newspaper reported, ranged from $80,000 to $200,000 a year. Only in America can you make that much by serving the poor.