For a father . . .
As an immigrant to the United States, I am often asked why I came to the United States. In the 44 years since I first landed at Kennedy Airport, the simple answer had always been, “I came for the opportunities” or a variant of that, “I came to go to grad school.” But now, after four decades, the reason I can firmly stand by is that my father filled my head with stories about what I disparagingly called in my teens the Promised Land.
I came to these shores because a young Bengali man, barely 22, in the fall of 1939, a month after the declaration of the Second World War, boarded the United States Lines passenger liner President Harding in Southampton, England, for New York harbor. Americans fleeing Europe had overloaded this vessel with almost 597 passengers, and non-Americans such as my father had to get special authorization from the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, a man named Joseph Kennedy, the father of the late president. But that’s in the future.
My father had a scholarship to start a certification program for teaching the visually handicapped in the fall of 1939 at Teachers College at Columbia University, and he was already delayed as his ship from India, SS Mooltan,
brought him up to Marseilles in August 1939. He crossed France and into London by train just days before the formal declaration of war on September 1, when he was issued a gas mask and started helping volunteers sandbag air-raid shelters. As a former Boy Scout — he had started the first Scout troop for the blind in Asia — he was relieved to be occupied and of service.
In the many tellings of that dramatic voyage, my father insisted (as is standard feature of dramatic scripts) that as he walked up the gangplank of the ship at Southampton, a man, perhaps insane, shouted at him, “You, Hindoo, don’t go! You will drown!” I have no way of verifying that such a statement foreshadowing the events did occur. The story was added flavor for a bug-eyed 8-year-old, though.
The overloaded President Harding sailed into the North Atlantic, weighted by its passengers fleeing from a continent about to erupt into flames. German U-boats swarmed the Atlantic waters, and my father had a front-row seat to the cat-and-mouse maneuvers of French tankers like the Emile Miguet and British freighters like the Heronspool, which were both torpedoed. The Harding ended up rescuing crews from these vessels.
Around 9:30 p.m. on the night of October 17, 1939, 300 miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and 1,000 miles from New York, the strongest Atlantic storm up to that time hit — and it hit the US Lines’ President Harding with category 4 hurricane winds of 130 to 140 mph, tilting the liner to angles that caused injuries and deaths. Furniture and pianos went crashing into human flesh, breaking bones. One such victim was my father, who broke his left leg in three places. Once again, having been a Scout, he managed to help with splints and bandages assisting the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Thomas Fister (how do I know that name? I researched the microfilm collection of the New York Times at the Brooklyn Library a few decades ago).
On October 18, the US Coast Guard cutter Hamilton, off Boston, got the call for medical supplies. It responded and escorted the damaged liner to New York, on October 21st to the West 18th Street pier, completing the 11-day odyssey. “With flag at half mast, afterdeck piled high with splintered furniture, and saloons and staterooms half wrecked, and with three uninjured members of the ship’s band rendering a poignant “East Side, West Side,” the United States liner President Harding docked here early yesterday …” reported the New York Times.
A young Bengali man, with a high school education and hard-knuckle life experiences reached these shores with a broken leg, very little money, and a ton of hope. This country accepted him for what he was — an intelligent, quick-witted, enormously inventive young man who wanted a chance. That’s the way he always saw it. Americans were can-do people without absurd limitations. They rolled up their sleeves at Thanksgiving dinner, he’d tell me, at a time when starched collars were di rigueur in the Indian heat.
One of his professors, the founder of the Teachers College program, the late Dr. M. E. Frampton, obtained a lawyer for my father, who participated in a class-action suit for damages against the United States Lines. This money was paid out.
The poor Bengali scholarship student, who was also a car enthusiast (he had 26 cars in his lifetime), bought his first car in the United States and started touring schools for the blind across the country. He discovered that once he crossed a certain geographic point on the Mid-Atlantic Coast, physical segregation of the races was the rule of Jim Crow. But that’s another story and he never spoke about it very clearly. What he did speak about was how a colonial British-Indian passport holder escaped the class and societal strictures of colonial India and the stifling stratification of England, to find a home in the land of opportunity for most. And that land became the beacon when I looked for a familiar shore.
