As I exit most mornings off Interstate 84 into Hartford, Connecticut, I pass a corner where about 30 Southasians gather to catch the bus. Most of them wear backpacks, and many have headphones on, listening, I imagine, to the sounds of Lata Mangeshkar or Krish. These are in-sourced employees – on short-term contracts through firms such as Tata Consultancy Services or Wipro – working for large insurance companies such as Aetna or Travelers Insurance.
Along Farmington Avenue, where the software engineers cluster, is a nondescript store called Cosmos International. Run by a family from the Baltic region, Cosmos sells Southasian, Arab and Eastern European packaged food and spices, as well as fresh food and snacks from the Subcontinent. It is an oasis for the software workers and for the larger Southasian community in Hartford, a place one can buy rice together with a DVD of the latest film, or find halal goat alongside a tongue scraper.
On the floor of the store sit a series of free newspapers and magazines produced for the Southasian community, and funded entirely by advertisements. If you were to bother to look through the articles, you would have read of a meeting held in Washington, DC, at the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The head of the agency, Rajiv Shah, had convened the meeting to talk about 'enhancing partnerships between USAID and the Indian diaspora in development efforts in India'. Another story was on the powerful commercial lobbies that work in the halls of the US Congress to ensure greater business opportunities for US firms – in India mainly, but also for some of the other countries in the Subcontinent.
The worlds of lives and labour, of pleasure and power – these are the elements of the diaspora that strike me on a regular basis. Not far from Cosmos sits another store, this one run by a woman from Trinidad whose family came to the island from eastern India a century and a half ago. She makes goat curry and roti, and is able to break into sentences of Trinidadian-Bhojpuri, laughing all the time. Her son is interested in India, but not enough to go there. He has other dreams.