Best of Both Worlds
When Shivaan Gusain was born Jan. 25 at Butler Memorial Hospital, his grandmother gave him the most exquisite and priceless gift imaginable: herself.
Shobha Bisht left her native India and flew halfway around the world to be with her elder daughter, Shruti Gusain, and to help establish the routine of running a household around a newborn's needs. Grandma Bisht returned home to Bhopal recently, ending her four-month stay.
Thanks in large part to her help, Shruti Gusain and her husband, Sunil Gusain, an engineer at AK Steel in Butler, are celebrating their first Mother's Day as parents with confidence that their son will get the best of American and Indian cultures.
“It's a tradition in India that the mom is there when her daughter has a baby,” said Shruti Gusain, 30, during a recent interview. “My grandmother was there when I was born, and her mother was there when my mom was born, too.”
Traditionally, grandparents lived nearby or even in the same residence, making the transfer of parenting skills automatic. When they live farther apart, in some instances the daughter and newborn go to live temporarily with her parents; in others, grandma — or “nani” in their native Hindi language — goes to live with the younger couple.
“Mom did everything for us,” Shruti Gusain said. “She looked after me. She looked after the baby. She cooked, she cleaned. She did the laundry. She even packed lunches for Sunil.”
And when infant Shivaan awakened in the middle of the night, Nani took more than her share of turns sitting or walking with him, trying to get him back to sleep.
“Everything she did for us, it gave me the opportunity to concentrate on loving my son, bonding with him,” Shruti Gusain said.
Her extended visit provided an unexpected benefit for new father Sunil as well: An opportunity to get to know and appreciate each other as son-in-law and mother-in-law.
“We were kind of formal and superficial those first few weeks,” Sunil Gusain said. “But by the second month we had dropped the pretenses.”
He likes to tease his mother-in-law, but as the mother of daughters only, she was a newcomer to such boyish humor. He found himself occasionally saying, “Mom, I'm kidding,” he said.
Later this month, Sunil Gusain's mother will come for an extended visit. In India, paternal grandmothers aren't called nani. They have a name all their own: “dadi,” pronounced “doddy.”
Dadi Gusain raised three boys and two girls, so she's no stranger to adolescent male humor. This time around, the joke might be on Shruti Gusain.
The Gusains have one foot firmly planted in American culture and another in their Indian tradition. Their union was an arranged marriage — but with a few modern twists.“Our families have known each other for a long time. They introduced us,” Shruti Gusain said.An arranged marriage in India starts like a blind date. During the courtship, either individual at any time can say thanks but no thanks. But for the Gusains, the attraction was mutual.They remained a committed long-distance couple when Sunil moved to Texas to pursue his master's degree in engineering, followed by four years in the U.S. Army.“We communicated every way imaginable,” Shruti Gusain said. “Skype, phone, e-mail.”They married in May 2011 in a colorful multiday ceremony in India while Sunil Gusain was on leave from the Army. He had to return to his home base in Savannah, Ga., almost immediately.Shruti joined her new husband in Savannah seven months later in December 2011. With her bachelor's degree in information technology and an MBA in marketing, she got a job as assistant manager of a Kroger supermarket.“We have supermarkets in India now, but nothing as big as the store I was working in,” she said. “And it took awhile to get used to the way Southern Americans talked.”
Culture shock wasn't really a problem, she said.“I had frequently communicated with Americans through my job in India, and I knew a lot from television and the Internet, social media,” she said.They moved to Butler thanks to an online job listing posted by AK Steel.“My Army term was ending, and I had a job lined up in Savannah, but the job in Butler was more in line with my education and training,” he said.“Besides, we like to travel. We explore a lot,” Shruti Gusain added. “After three years, we'd driven all over the South. We decided Butler was a good place from which to explore another big part of the country.”And they are happy with their new country. They are happily assimilating as Americans, while at the same time retaining their ancestral roots like so many Americans before them. And they're proud that their son is a born citizen.“He's an American Indian,” Shruti Gusain joked.They call him Raj Kumar — that's Hindi for prince — and like all infants he's learning to smile, coo, suck his fingers and grab his feet. Soon he'll be able to roll from his back to his belly, a precious Mother's Day gift.“My biggest blessings are the new things my baby does every day,” Shruti Gusain said. “Every day I say prayers of thanks for him.”She said she will raise her son to respect all people, especially women. And to have self-respect as well.He'll learn baseball instead of cricket. He'll eat peanut butter as well as hot curry spices.He'll learn about his Indian heritage from family, and from the 800-member Hindu temple in Monroeville. He'll learn about his American heritage at school.And for the record, his Huggies disposable diapers come from Amazon.com.
