Between loans and legal help, I was covered in case of emergency.
We all got together a few times a year and always at Thanksgiving, at the family house in the East Bay, where our mother still lived. It was a simple tract home we’d moved into several years after we immigrated. Before that we’d lived in a dingy apartment behind a Kmart and then in a brand-new condominium that was eventually too small for a family of five. In the bare backyard of the new house, my father had dug holes and planted roses, grape vines, and peach, plum, and pear trees. After long days of work, he was happiest tending to his flora. He’d been dead a decade, but still I often thought of him, lingered on his precise movements in the garden, especially when I was working in my own backyard.
Through the kitchen window, I watched the first of the morning light streaming through the thicket of pink bougainvillea growing in the back. I’d planted them as little shrubs soon after we’d moved into this house several years earlier, and here they were, immense and unruly, needing to be cut back. I’d chosen them, along with a cherimoya tree, because they reminded me so much of India. Here, in my wife’s hometown, through the alchemy of wet ocean air and dry mountain heat, the plants grew ferociously. In some ways, when we’d moved here, we’d both returned home.
I went out through the sliding door into the cool morning. The damp lawn wet my feet as I walked over to the chicken coop. Arun loved eggs to start the day, and I loved cracking them open on a sizzling pan, watching the orange yolk harden and change color. There were two waiting for me in the laying boxes, and they were warm in my hands.
In the distance, I could hear Mexican radio, and this early in the day, it sounded like a norteño morning call to prayer. We lived next door to a large organic blueberry farm, and the work of picking always started very early. We’d bought our ranch house, and the half acre of land it sat on, when the housing market had crashed, and now that the market was returning and the trees on the property were bearing consistent fruit, buying the house felt like the single best financial decision we’d ever made.
We couldn’t have made it without some help. As he neared retirement, my father had written a weekly column for a newsletter that went out to our entire extended family: “The Upanishad Guide to Investing.” He liked the Upanishads and he liked investing; he thought that the philosophical core of this particular Hindu religious tradition—to be neither happy in victory nor daunted in defeat—was as useful a principle for investing as any fancy algorithms Goldman Sachs could come up with. He took special pride in his returns and became a little obsessive about it. Not because of the money he was making, but because—at least this is what I think—it was his way of getting back at America for all of the promotions he hadn’t gotten in the years he’d been working in the country. In India, he’d been in charge of monetary policy at a large national bank, but here, he’d hit his ceiling quickly as the branch manager of a local bank, spending his days and years approving home improvement loans for garage additions and new kitchens.
He started each of his columns with the same statement: “I am not telling you how to invest. I’m simply telling you how I invest. What you do with the information is up to you.” He’d then write a paragraph—with supporting numbers and charts—justifying each new stock he picked. In addition to preaching dispassion once the stocks were bought, he’d explain his choices by applying two further principles. First, invest in companies that were at least five years old, because they were sustainable yet still hungry; don’t invest in companies that had been around for more than twenty-five years, because they were comfortable and had no desire to innovate. And second, he picked businesses that made things or provided services that he himself could reasonably use. For his sixty-fifth birthday, we put all the columns together in a book and printed a hundred copies to give out to the family. For a lark, one of my younger cousins put the book on Amazon. For a while nothing happened. Then a few copies sold, and then several more. An investing blog picked it up and wrote about it, dubbing my father “the Guru of High Returns.” After that, we had to print more. A small business publisher paid him a decent amount of money to repackage and properly sell the book. Some of the proceeds from the book, but mainly his judicious use of the advice in it over the years, had helped pay for our down payment.
He never saw our house, but I imagine he would have liked its rural feel. To the right of us was the farm, and to the left, about two hundred yards away, were a couple of houses occupied by older neighbors. A retired art professor and his wife lived in one; inside their house, the walls were covered with the abstracts he had painted over a lifetime. In the other house was an older man named Max, whom I only saw riding on his John Deere, mowing his large backyard. The one real substantive exchange I’d had with Max was when he noticed a Bay Alarm truck in our front yard soon after we moved in. “I have an alarm system too,” he’d said with a mischievous grin. “My shotgun.” In the name of new neighborliness, I’d smiled back, though in truth, guns, and the Second Amendment culture that often surrounded gun ownership, made me pretty uncomfortable. I feared that the right to bear arms would loosely translate, at some point, into a right to shoot me.
In some ways, we were boutique homesteading. The daily world my children woke up to couldn’t have been more different from the one-bedroom, sixth-floor apartment that I had lived in with my family in south Bombay until I was eight. The apartment had felt big to us then, with the salty air of the Arabian Sea blowing through. Every weekday morning, my sisters and I would descend into the hectic, crowded streets and walk to the Gandhian school we attended, where the principal had outlawed clapping during assemblies because he thought the motion was too violent. In my earliest memories of the city, I smell the fresh loaves of bread baking in the Iranian café near our apartment, and I walk past whole families who slept on the sidewalk, cows meandering nearby, red double-decker buses barreling past them on the street, mere feet away from their heads. I see schoolchildren like me, oil in their hair, talcum powder on their faces, trying to stay cool in the humidity that never seemed to break.
I’m not sure which set of early impressions I preferred for Neel and Arun. On the one hand, I would have liked for them to be urban children, aware that the very act of walking down the street was a complex negotiation between beauty and danger. And yet, I loved that they often woke up to the piercing sounds of a red-tailed hawk flying high above and that they flinched less and less at the sight of a gopher snake. But I did feel some parental responsibility to balance out this world they knew with the world I’d grown up in, so that when it was time for them to choose lives for themselves, they could make an informed decision.
When I got back inside with the eggs, the kettle was whistling. As I made my coffee, I wondered what advice my father would have given me about how to proceed following the previous evening’s debacle. Somewhere around my freshman year in college, he had decided it was time to start communicating with me as an adult. This didn’t translate to real conversation, or even the metaphoric intimacy a lot of fathers and sons find in, say, sports talk. No, my father spoke to me through photocopied clippings from the Wall Street Journal, which he mailed to me every month or so. Where were the originals? Perhaps in a folder called “Stuff Sent to My Son for Guidance.” Those envelopes left me with so many questions. Why wasn’t he writing me an actual note? Did this article mean he thought I wasn’t saving my money properly? Did this one mean I was ruled by my heart? Now I desperately wish I’d saved them all, but of course I hadn’t. I was young; it didn’t occur to me that they were clues. My father didn’t share much about himself with me; imagine what I could’ve pieced together from what he did.