Your Heart, My Hands by Arun K Singh
Author:Arun K Singh [Arun K. Singh MD / John Hanc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2019-04-16T00:00:00+00:00
Chapter Fifteen
New Family, New Friends, New World
By this point I was fully immersed in my life in New York and in my relationship with Barbara. But I still had a family in India, and one member of that family—my youngest brother, Ashesh—now wrote and told me that he wanted to come to the United States and study medicine. He had the academic credentials, but no means of supporting himself (my other brother had not yet struck it rich in the Indian lottery). Could I give him the plane fare? he asked.
Clearly he didn’t understand my situation. I was making only $19,000 a year, and much of that was going home to our mother. But then I thought back to what I’d gone through for my plane fare two years earlier, how I’d had to grovel before Nana, and how my mother and I had sold old clothes to get a little extra cash. Did I really want Ashesh to have to endure the same humiliation and hardships? I wrote him back and said that I would pay for his flight.
A few months later, using the money I’d sent to him, he flew to Chicago to study cytology, a branch of pathology that involves studying diseases on the cellular level. But Ashesh suffered greatly in the cold Midwest winter and also felt homesick. He called me and said he wanted to move to New York. He had an opportunity for a scholarship in a cytology program affiliated with New York University.
How could I deny my younger brother?
“Sure,” I told him. “Come to New York and stay with me.”
Meanwhile, I was spending every free hour I had with Barbara. I had met her family in Queens. Her father, Oscar, worked in real estate, and because it was not always the lucrative profession in New York that it would later become, he supplemented his earnings by driving a cab. Oscar had come to this country at a young age from Romania. He spoke fluent German, and during World War II had served in the US Army as an interpreter. But the Holocaust had claimed most of his extended family. That loss and the horror of war haunted him for the rest of his life.
Barbara’s mother, Frieda, had been born in the US of Polish descent. When I met her, I saw where Barbara had gotten her caregiving instincts. Frieda was a warm, compassionate, and lovely person. She made me feel comfortable and welcome from the first time I visited Pomonok.
Barbara’s parents never questioned their daughter’s relationship with a non-Jewish, nonwhite man. When I asked her parents for their daughter’s hand (as young men still did then), I had worried that they might turn me down. Instead they were thrilled. As were my parents, who had probably never met a Jewish person in their lives. I think my mother was just happy that I’d emerged from my studies and work long enough to meet someone!
After dating for ten months, Barbara and I were married on the evening of November 20, 1970.
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