Montage-Part 2

We moved back to India in 1998 (I think) because Appa decided he needed to make some changes. I’ve overheard some of the more gossipy reasons for this as a child, so I can’t confirm their veracity.

The non-gossipy side is that he wanted to no longer be a textile engineer, at the age of 42 or 43; his hope was to move to the United States to live the American dream; the cars, the houses, the movies, the works. But this would require his re-skilling into software things so we moved from Lagos to Bangalore, which was taking center stage in the Indian tech scene but was also where he grew up; it was where two of his three brothers lived.

Moving there felt like a pretty severe upending in quality of life. For me, at least—I cannot speak for my brother or parents. For one, before my teenage years, I’d gotten very accustomed to living in air-conditioned homes and being chauffeured around in fancy cars—or maybe having someone driving you around makes even a modest Peugeot feel fancyAnother lamer and tamer version of The Selfless Driving Car.. If there were power cutsPower outage, but we’ll stick to the local lingo., we had backup generators, too. If there was a water shortage, large drums of water would be rolled into our house; I’d wondered what the local Nigerians from Appa’s factory felt bringing in several gallons for us when they would have also lacked water at their homes.

India, at that time, came with some of the same problems, but none of these solutions as we were no longer living that upper class lifestyle—I had become, basically, a brat over my time in Nigeria.

But we did move back with the computer from Lagos, too—Appa would need it for his training. It might have been the one object that separated us from the other middle-class families in the block of apartments we lived in.

Of course, my access to it remained limited because there was a pecking order—I seldom got to use the computer. If Appa wasn’t working on his stuff, my brother would be on it; in Nigeria, he would play Doom or Duke Nukem 3D or Commander Keen, while I mostly watched. Quake became the centre of his life in India. Of course, it was not like I played nothing at all—we had a Sega Game Gear and Gameboy. I did get to play on them, but on the one side, it was clear that the computer games were more immersive; but I suspect part of me also just wanted access to what I couldn’t have. So, I’d just spend a lot more time watching him play whatever he did on it.

In Appa’s usage, I kept hearing words like Oracle, SAP, and ABAP in conversation. On the computer screen, it was more numbers and text than immersive, cartoony animations of platform games or gore-filled panoply of first-person shooters. This seemed less fun so I never really watched him work on the computer. He’d also have a lot of big, spiral bound books lying around and reams of sheets to print on, all of which also seemed quite unappealing. Sometimes, I think that children have a wisdom that adults lose; a wisdom of prioritising fun over logic¹.

Eventually, things would work out for Appa’s side of the plan. After roughly three years shuttling between Hyderabad, for work, and Bangalore, to see us, he would move to the US in 2001. The plan was for us to follow him in a few days or weeks.

But that wouldn’t happen. We didn’t know at the time that we would have such a hard time following him there, but plans for our move were well under way before he left for the US.

It was thrust upon Amma to handle the logistics of selling the last bits of our stuff at home. Like the TV, fridge, our beds, and even the computer! After moving back from Nigeria, she’d been slowly trained into handling the personal finances of our home because, after his Bangalore-based training, Appa spent a good chunk of his time in Hyderabad for work. He’d come back to see us every few weeks but only for the weekend. He sent home money for Amma, to keep the show running in Bangalore.

That she had been married at eighteen and become a housewife probably made all this quite daunting for her; but she ran a real tight ship.

She was thriftier and more frugal than Appa, which I attribute to how her father raised her; he was an honest man but also very miserlyI’m sure there’s some correlation between the two.. I remember, even now, how she’d fill out a little dated journal with the finer details that accounted for all our expenses. She’d make sure my brother and I put in whatever we spent on grocery store runs or travel in there, as well. I remain uncertain of the value of this effort on me but I could see that every month, she’d be satisfied by seeing how much we’d spent in the past month.

If only she’d learned to use the computer for this. Back then, I didn’t question why she had never learned to use the computer but it would become clearer a decade later when I’d teach her how to use one. It required a lot of patience, which Appa lacked. At the time, my brother and I only really knew how to get a game running. But I’m sure we might have also been tactically reluctant to share the computer with one more person. Back then, I suspect neither of us really knew one could do serious math on it; I definitely thought things like that were either done mentally or on paper and was the whole reason school existed: to torture children with these ideas. Had I paid more attention to what Appa was doing on the computer, that might not have been the case. To this day, I am unsure if it was my lack of curiosity or just the pecking order that prevented me from learning how to use the computer. Or maybe it was some grand design by Appa to keep that knowledge from us so we’d be really good at math for the purpose of exams.