Girish Gangadharan

Wonderful neighbor

// July 25th, 2010 // Neighbor, Personal, Racism

Swapna and I were getting out of our apartment this afternoon heading to our friend’s house. And our neighbor was walking up the stairs just as we were ready to lock our door. Here’s the transcript of the interesting conversation I had with him.

Me: (to Swapna, in Malayalam) Get the keys? Lock the balcony door?

Swapna: Yupp.

Neighbor: English!

Me: (to the neighbor) I’m sorry, were you talking to us?

Neighbor: Not just to you. (Pointing to my other Indian neighbor’s door) To them and to the ones living downstairs, to all of you. Speak in fucking English.

Me: Excuse me?

Neighbor: You heard me. You come to my fucking country and you don’t speak my fucking language?

Me: You don’t get to decide what language I use to speak to my wife. I’m a tax paying legal immigrant. I think I have the right to speak to my wife in whatever language I want.

Neighbor: Oh yeah? Why don’t you get the fuck out of my country then? Who asked you to come here?

Me: Are you kidding me, man?

Neighbor: Why don’t you get the fuck outta here? Yeah, get the fuck outta here.

Me: No, you get the fuck outta here. (Yupp, that’s the best I could do at that point. I was so nervous. I wasn’t quick enough to come up with a befitting reply.)

Let’s rewind back a little bit. July 27th 2002. That’s when I arrived in the US for the first time as a student on an F1 visa.

I graduated with my Masters degree here in Computer Science from UTA in August 2004. Got a job after that.

I’ve always paid my taxes, social security, medicare etc on time, every time. Never committed any crime. Never been arrested. Never broke the law. Never done anything wrong.

I don’t even download movies illegally.

Yet, none of that matters. Doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived here or how well you’ve blended into the society or how great you’ve been a member of the civilized population or how many friends you’ve made. If you are a foreigner, you better be prepared to be on the receiving end of some racism, my friend. It’s happened to me before but you just don’t get used to something like that no matter how hard you try.

Swapna wasn’t happy at all. She’s never seen me in a confrontation before. She was upset. It’s been only 3 months since we moved to this new place that is swarming with Indians. Not bachelors. Full fledged families with 2 kids on an average. 90% of them work in the IT industry (Pepsi, JC Penney, Frito Lays, Dr. Pepper, Cadburys, Infosys – all these companies are less than 5 miles from this place. Most of these guys are contractors there).

At first, we were surprised there were so many desis around. We didn’t know about it before we signed the lease. As time passed by, we got invited to potlucks and our neighbors speak Tamil like us. It was a huge change and Swapna loved it. At my previous apartment, that was her biggest complaint – “People keep to themselves here. Nobody talks to anybody. Nobody comes out of their apartment. If they do, they get in their car and go away. I’m bored out of my mind” (this was before she joined Epsilon)

As you can imagine, she was excited about the interaction she was getting here. People stopped by and said Hi and asked about our dog when we were walking Mia. Apparently, we’re the only Indians in this complex that owns a dog. Nice ice breaker.

So anyways, our awesome neighbor gentleman complained about us from day one. No, literally. He called the office and complained about the movers making noise when they were carrying the furniture in to our apartment on our moving day. A week later, he also complained when we got our washer dryer installed in the garage downstairs which was funny because he actually lives on the second floor and he said he couldn’t stand the noise.

Today’s incident was our first face-to-face chat with him and obviously, it didn’t go too well.

I think I’m gonna have to talk to the apartment manager tomorrow. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be but I’d hate to have to move again.

May be I should bake him a cake. One with a picture of one of our Gods with multiple arms with a dot in the forehead working at a call center fixing somebody’s computer.

UPDATE: (07/26/2010) When I walked into the manager’s office this morning, he was already there. She made him apologize to us. She also mentioned that they are discussing terminating his lease. I don’t know if they are actually going to do it. But she seemed pretty sincere and was apologetic for his behavior.

Interestingly, she told me that this was not his first incident there. And that they have zero tolerance for racists especially because it’s considered harassment under law and is a crime.

His side of the story was that some Indian kid threw a ball at his friend’s dog and the dog’s leash came loose and it ran away. He had to chase it and when he came back and asked the people around who was responsible for the kid’s actions, nobody said a word. So apparently he was pissed off at them and he just took it out on me. Because you know, the kid was an Indian, I’m an Indian, all Indians are jerks..etc..etc.

UPDATE: (10/16/2010): He moved out last week.

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