Life not so green in America

by Maswood Alam Khan
January 12, 2011

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/1223/life-not-so-green-in-america

It is easy to paint a rosy picture of life in America, especially for one who has never been in America but seen those American lifestyles in movies or read about in novels. But, once you are in America, the dreamland, you realize to your bone how confusedly enigmatic it is to enjoy life far away from your sweet home. Here, when you are frantically running, like chasing a mirage, to make your living it will seem you are neither happy nor unhappy. But, in the end you are unhappy. But that moment at the end of the day is too late for you to make up for the time lost.

Though it may sound like something close to the bone, I must say, after what I have seen about the conditions of some expatriates and heard about their so many painful stories and tragedies, eking out a living in America for a Bangladeshi is a sheer punishment if he or she is or was a little comfortable with a shelter and a source of reasonable income back home in Bangladesh.

Here in America you always chase a 'golden deer' till you drop dead. You earn your weekly check of handsome pay for one week of your labor and then you have no other way out but to spend all your earnings before the end of the next week. Savings is not heard of in this society where everything is on credit. Having savings in your bank in America is like crying for the moon. The whole American system is so tailored that you won't be allowed to save. Your bank account has always to be in the red. One who has come to settle in America with a dream to make a fortune realizes the truest meaning of the idiom: "The grass is greener on the other side".

Death for a Bangladeshi in America is heart wrenching when he or she is far away from his or her kith and kin. My heart was aching as I was reading in Thikana, the Bangla daily from New York, that the frequency of immature and unnatural deaths of Bangladeshi expatriates in America is rising alarmingly. There has been a sharp increase in the number of deaths of Bangladeshis from suicides, heart attacks and accidents. Most of them died of heart attacks. Some of the deaths were the talk of the town: deaths from a number of suicides, road accidents, murders and poignantly a death of a child from falling into a swimming pool. Some deaths were also the tragic result of an increase in 'hate crimes' with economic recession gripping America.

Two deaths that have been much talked about are: of Suraiya Parveen, a housewife in Michigan, who was murdered in her home and of her husband Mohammad Abul Fazal Chowdhury, who mysteriously died inside a penitentiary called the Macomb County Jail. Police said Mohammed Abdul Fazal Chowdhury died from a suicide as he had sliced his own throat with a razor. But Muslim activists in America are still unsure about the cause of Fazal's death as two individuals, who performed the Islamic ritual of washing and shrouding of Chowdhury's dead body, reportedly witnessed 'a laceration across his neck, mutilation of his genitalia and a bruise on the back of his right shoulder'. News4 in Detroit reported that Chowdhury's genitals were not found, raising rumors and concerns for Bangladeshis living in America. The 22-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant Mohammed Abdul Fazal Chowdhury was being held on charges that he had murdered his wife on September 28 in 2010.

Still life in America is not bad if you have a steady income to pay your mortgage, utility bills and insurance premiums. But, many Bangladeshis still gripe about their bleak future in America.

Some Bangladeshi parents, who are a bit religious, are especially concerned about their children when they find wards of their relations, friends and neighbors trying to be Americanized by imitating the American style of hobnobbing with friends of opposite sex. Their children face a painful identity crisis; they are neither American by color nor Bangladeshi by culture. They are torn between two identities; they feel guilty to bear the color, creed and culture of their parents.

Some families are so concerned that they are determined they would leave America for Bangladesh before their children reach 18, a precarious crossroads for American children when parents cannot control their wards by law, an age when many Bangladeshi boys and girls reportedly did leave their paternal homes to live with their friends, mostly to live together with their soul mates in the same house without being married. Stories and rumors abound here and there about Bangladeshi boys and girls even playacting in those hush-hush films in their birthday suits. One should not be surprised if he hears about a Bangladeshi American who did conceive a child out of wedlock without a sense of guilt. Many parents of such children are fatally broken-hearted; they now realize that "The grass in Bangladesh was much greener than in America"

But the paradox is: the same Bangladeshi who has been in America for a couple of years in spite of all the tragedies, pains and hardships will find Bangladesh as a land totally bereft of any grass, let alone green grass, if he or she now resettles back in his sweet home. It has been observed in many instances that many Bangladeshis who went back home found their life there much more miserable than in America. In retrospect, they from their homes in Bangladesh re-found America full of grasses, perhaps the greenest in the world and most of them had to come back to America.

This is what precisely human psychology is: we think that what we want is better than what we have. We value what we want more than what we posses. We don't like to believe that the grass is not always greener on the other side. Perhaps the only way out is to want more of what we have, not to get bored of what we are blessed with and not to gripe about what we cannot change.

Once you make up your mind to settle at a new home away from an old home, better burn the boat you have journeyed in. No point looking back, no point imagining "The grass was perhaps greener on the other side".

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