From Deep South (Paul Theroux) p162-3
Most of the Indians I was to meet in the South had, like Suresh Patel in Allendale, like Hardeep Patel whom I’d met in Virginia, like most of the Patels and Desais I met on my trip, arrived straight from India, were fearful of the new country, and were comforted by their ancient pieties. Virtually all the Patels I met were caste-conscious, mutually supportive, ardently superstitious, highly sensitized to ethnic differences, ignorant of local history, jittery in the presence of blacks, and suspicious of anything or anyone who might represent a threat to their religion or their notions of racial purity. They too might have objected to their daughter’s marrying Denzel.
Some of these nonlinear ethnic niches, in the form of back-roads motels, were clean and well run, but many were dire to the point of disgusting. One of these motels, where I spent a night on Highway 68, near Collinsville, Alabama, was among the filthiest places I have stayed in a life of resorting, out of desperation, to flophouses. Masses of dime-sized brown beetles on the walls of my Travelers Inn room were creeping to the ceiling, where they clustered and dropped in gobs, pinkle-pankling onto my face, disgusting sheets stiff with dirt and stains of unknown origin, the mattress all hogged down and wallered out in the middle (as they said in these parts), a bathroom that had the features and the reek of a vomitorium, an entire floor of dust bunnies —the room was filthier by far than almost any I’ve found in Africa or China, or for that matter India. The desk clerk. Mr. Patel, smiled at my complaints (“I woke up itching”) and boasted that every (filthy) room was occupied.
He had also been a student. More than any other immigrant group I’d ever encountered, Indians had a keen instinct for queue-jumping on the fast track. The complete story of the Indians of the South has not been written; it is secret and subtle, just whispers, emerging now and then when a politically ambitious Indian American becomes a public figure, like Piyush (“Bobby”) Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, or Nimrata Randhawa (Nikki Haley), the governor of South Carolina, both children of Punjabi immigrants, both converts to Christianity, both right-wing Republicans, supporters of the death penalty, and dismissive of welfare programs. And both have distanced themselves from their parents, who are tradition-minded and perhaps a bit too exotic to appeal to Southern voters, even though Sikhs, and many Punjabis, consider themselves IndoAryan people.
The Indian shopkeepers and motel owners, many of them now American citizens, were unquestionably hardworking, but many preserved the Hindu caste rules, including the highly developed abhorrence of racial taint. As I had noticed on my first visit, there was something weirdly colonial about the presence of Indians in the rural South, which reminded me of Africa: the Indian shop in the dusty upcountry town, the overpriced and grubby merchandise, the locals squatting under the trees, giving parts of the South an even more dramatic, sleepier, unfixable Third World appearance.
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