North To The Future

Posted on | April 6, 2005 | 34 Comments

This was an entry for contest #8 at The Zero Boss: Blogging for Books. The subject was “RISK – about a time when you took a risk in your life on someone or something – a new romance, a new career, a new home, etc. Were you successful beyond your wildest dreams – or did you crash and burn?”

My entry was chosen as one of the seven finalists, but didn’t make it to the winning three. The Zero Boss site in its original avatar has since disappeared.

Beware: This is a long entry, over 1500 words.
Be Aware: This was originally written as a blog post in 2004 for a blogging competition. I have added some CET96 references, updated some text, changed ‘my husband’ to NG and added an epilogue paragraph that was not part of the original post, in 2026.

Now read on, make sure you have some patience and some minutes to murder.

 

 

 

 

 

North To The Future

 

 

 

 

 

“Alaska! You are joking, right?!”

It was 2001 and this was the reaction we got every time we broke this news at any Bay Area desi party – an event you don’t voluntarily attend, you get subpoenaed to.

“Wait. Alaska? Like, actual Alaska?”

Dark clouds of bewilderment followed by suspicious looks doubting our sanity descended on our friends’ faces when we disclosed our plans – about moving to Alaska. You’d have thought we had announced we were joining a cult. That too, a cold, dark cult with a membership perk of 16 hours of darkness for 8 months of the year, with an occasional side of frostbite.

The silence following our tiny slip of an announcement would last a few seconds, then everyone would erupt at once. “Only Eskimos live in Alaska, what are you gonna eat, whale blubber?” “Planning on driving to work on dog-sleds?” The brash young crowd laughed us off. ‘Moving to Alaska’ was an unnatural act as far as our San Franciscan friends were concerned.

True to the overly networked, clannish, looking-out-for-each other nature of the relatively new immigrant communities in the New World, every one was eager to offer their piece of advice. Some even took on the role of our absent parents, admonishing, “Why don’t you try somewhere else, some place a bit warmer perhaps, like San Diego, my niece’s father-in-law’s cousin’s son once stayed in Minneapolis, mind you it was nowhere near Alaska, but he almost froze to his death living there, these cold places are not for us,” an older, experienced friend tried to warn us, before moving on to stop other reckless young people like us from committing other foolish acts.

And honestly, the desi-uncle wasn’t wrong to worry. Both of us, my husband, NG (CET96, Electronics & Tele.) and I (CET96, Architecture), the prospective Alaskan immigrants of CET96 vintage, had been raised in a place that practically hugged the equator. In Thiruvananthapuram, at 8°N on the tip of peninsular India, my mother kept her single wool shawl wrapped in camphor as a hedge against hypothetical winter, an event so rare that in my twenty-two years under her roof it had happened exactly twice, and both times it had felt like breaking news. My first encounter with actual snow came at 21, on a college trip to the Himalayan foothills, and I fell for it instantly, the way anyone starved of snow their whole life inevitably does. So yes, I get why the uncle looked at us like we’d announced a trip to Ganymede.

It wasn’t just the Indian diaspora losing their minds over our announcement. The too-cool-for-school crowd of Silicon Valley software geeks, a club NG held honorary membership in, dismissed our plan as the dumbest move a self-respecting dot-commer could possibly make. They were pretty sure Alaska’s literacy rate hovered somewhere around “can sign own name” level and they told us that the odds of finding someone fluent in Java or C++ were pretty slim. But you do you, they dismissively warned us.

We didn’t wake up one morning and decide over coffee, “you know what sounds great?” “ALASKA!” There was no fortune cookie with suspiciously specific instructions or a dream where a moose appeared and told us to go west, or rather, further north-west.  It came in the form of a man named Dave (not his real name).

 

 

************

 

 

 

2001 had just rolled in but the New Year cheer didn’t last long, for things were hardly bouncy in Silicon Valley. Winter had not officially exited California and the ominous chill of the impending dot-com apocalypse was creeping up the Valley. Six figure salaries were routinely making a habit of disappearing to naught overnight. Aging flower children and young nerds in condo communities conspired together and devised algorithms to move to Utah or Idaho.

NG clocked the first sign of the dot-com apocalypse the morning his CEO showed up with his hair dyed a boring, corporate brown, a sharp departure from the electric blue he’d been rocking since founding the company the previous spring. Next, the pinball machine, the pool table, and the keg fridge vanished from the office lounge. A week later the lounge itself disappeared, making way for a real estate office. Nothing says “we’re doomed” quite like watching your ping-pong table get evicted for a dreary realtor-office desk-farm.

We might have stuck it out, still sipping orange juice somewhere between Orange County and the Bay Area, if NG’s old buddy Dave hadn’t blown through town during a work-trip layover. Dave lived in Seattle now, before that, he’d worked alongside NG in San Francisco for two years. Both were independent contractors at this point, which meant they had plenty of shared war stories and roughly zero job security.

Dave was the one who broke the news: Alaska was booming, nothing like the doomy – gloomy Bay Area. The economy up there was roaring, and there were jobs for everyone, even for non-citizens like us. He had family in Alaska, had gone to school there, and was already planning his own move back once his current contract wrapped up. He knew people who might be able to line up contract work for NG. Nothing was set in stone yet, just a maybe with potential. But for a second, you could practically feel the buzz in the air, as if it was the Klondike Gold Rush all over again.

That night NG turned to me with a casual question. “Alaska seems like a great opportunity. What do you think?” I was twenty-six, on a dependent visa that did not allow me to work, fresh out of a year stint at a US tech giant in New Delhi, itching to hit a home run, but confined to the bench on the sidelines. I was increasingly convinced that if we did not do something spectacularly inadvisable while we still had no children, no mortgage, and no defensible reason to stay where we were, we would spend the rest of our lives being reasonable. That was totally unreasonable.

The writing on the wall wasn’t subtle. We were young enough to fail and walk it off. And somewhere past the clean, predictable edges of our California life, there was something worth finding out. So my answer took about four seconds. Yes. North to the Future. (That’s the actual Alaska state motto, printed on license plates. Alaska doesn’t do subtlety either.) To Alaska we go.

And that’s how we made the biggest bet of our young lives, trading the number one city-state in the world for a walk-in freezer with really good lighting for four months of the year. A month later we were on Alaska Airlines, the Polar Express, as we started calling it, with just four pieces of luggage. Our car, with its trunk packed like a game of Tetris played under emotional duress, was shipped separately, by ferry. Everything else went to the Salvation Army.

 

 

***********

 

 

 

And what a life it has been ever since. For all I know, Alaska could very well be another planet. Sometimes I park my truck outside the Walmart in downtown Anchorage and meditate on the store sign just to make sure I am in the US of A. NG landed a job a week after we reached Alaska, with one of the contacts Dave had hooked him up with. Contrary to the popular notion in the lower 48, we have come across a lot of Alaskans who can code and program and some of them are even good at it.

The lack of an Indian community has opened doors to meeting people from various cultures – Americans ranging from re-invented hippies to devout Mormons (Dave and family, for one), grandchildren of the original Russian fur traders, Australian bush pilots summering in Alaska, Icelanders who holiday here for a change, Pakistanis with whom we can ruminate about our common roots and finally Indians of the red/native kind.

For the first time since my teens, I learned a new skill/sport. I learned to ski and have been steadily conquering steeper slopes ever since. Carrying his adventurous spirit further, NG carves down double black diamond slopes like he’s a Nordic dude with a brown skin affliction.

For me, nothing compares to the beauty of the Alaskan landscape. It is like watching a movie at an IMAX movie theater after having watched 35mm movies all your life. Presented in the grandest of grand scales, from the majestic mountains rising right off the coast to the white vastness of the winter tundra, the landscape of Alaska makes living here a unique experience. And some nights, the Aurora Borealis just shows up over your own balcony, uninvited and free of charge. Try putting a price tag on that. The desi-uncle at the party was, in the end, half-right – Alaska was nothing like what we’d known. He just had the conclusion backwards.

 

 

 

************

 

 

 

*Epilogue, 2026:*

We stayed on in Alaska for almost fifteen years. All our three children were born into Alaskan summers that lit the sky until midnight like someone had forgotten to turn off the sun-switch and grew up through the winters that lasted eight months. We both built our entire life, family and careers inside that snow globe. No regrets. We have since moved to Washington, not because Alaska let us down, but because a job pulled us to a quaint little artisanal wine town. Half a decade later, we packed up again for a town born out of the Manhattan Project, where we are currently cooling our heels. We’ve come to terms with the reality that stability is a myth and impermanence is our only true address, which is just an elegant way of admitting we are either enlightened nomads or untethered weirdos, depending on who’s asking. Either way, we’re still out here, quietly conducting the business of life as Indians in the American West, hiding in plain sight among the vineyards and modular reactors.

Comments

type a search string

Search for:

Categories

• Alaska
• Family
• Photos
• Travel
• Uncategorized
• Writing

Tags

Alaska alaska living alyeska anchorage biking fall flora growing up halibut hawaii homer kannur kerala kualoa life life's lessons mother oahu photo poetry trails

Meta

• Log in
• Entries RSS
• Comments RSS
• WordPress.org

Recent Posts

• To all parents out there in general, to my Mom in particular
• Two Trees at Kualoa
• Notes from my rear-view mirror
• Deep Sea Fishing in Alaska
• Bar on a Mountain

Recent Comments

• shema on To all parents out there in general, to my Mom in particular
• appughar on To all parents out there in general, to my Mom in particular
• DeepTea on To all parents out there in general, to my Mom in particular
• DeepTea on To all parents out there in general, to my Mom in particular
• DeepTea on To all parents out there in general, to my Mom in particular

September 2026

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« May
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Archives

• May 2010
• February 2010
• October 2009
• July 2008
• June 2008
• April 2008
• November 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• April 2007
• September 2006
• May 2005
• April 2005
• January 2005
• August 2004
• July 2004
• May 2004
• December 2003