From Nairobi to New York: My Grandparents’ I-House Experience
Toronto-based writer and freelance journalist Vikram Nijhawan ’24 lived at International House while at Columbia School of Journalism. When he moved into I-House in 2023, Vikram contacted the alumni office for any information about his grandparents, who lived at the House as a young married couple. His grandfather’s original application was found, and he offered to write the following article, during I-House’s centennial year, about his grandparents’ experience.
My grandparents arrived at the International House as newly-weds in 1962, from Nairobi, Kenya. My grandfather, Inderjeet Singh Bhoi, came here to study international diplomacy at Columbia, on a Carnegie Endowment Fellowship. This was part of his preparation to take on a pivotal leadership role in Kenya’s emerging foreign service, during the country’s transition to independence after British rule. He and my grandmother, Jaswindar, had a controversial love marriage just a month before arriving in New York.
Jaswindar Bhoi (nee Virdi) was just 22 years old, and initially, felt completely out of her depth. It was her first time living anywhere other than Kisumu, the sleepy Kenyan town where both she and her future husband were born. After a kismet reunion in Nairobi years later, she swept Inderjeet (Inder) off his feet, and soon after, he swept her halfway around the world. Jaswindar went from inhabiting her spacious family homestead along Lake Victoria to a one-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive.
Back in Kenya, her personality filled up entire rooms. The interests that she listed on her I-House application – home economics, sports, and music – were all areas in which she excelled back home, as the local starlet among her friends and wider community. But arriving in New York, and surrounded by the unfamiliar, Jaswindar’s first reaction was merely to shrink. She was perplexed to find chicken food on grocery store shelves (not realizing that “chickpeas” were merely what they called chole back home.) Passersby would politely request to take photos beside her, clad in her fine red saris, while walking down the street. She felt completely foreign, as her new country did for her. But within this new community, she soon found pockets of the familiar.
Their neighbours at I-House were Uganda’s heir-apparent royal couple. While Inder and Prince Karamagi attended their classes at Columbia, Jaswindar and his wife, Margaret, grew close. Together, they went to late-night movie screenings in Harlem and cooked meals for each other. Jaswindar would host many dinner parties for her and Inder’s new friends, as her culinary reputation spread. They had Christmas dinner with the Schulmans, a Columbia couple from New Jersey, whose family owned a bakery, and who eventually became like family to my grandparents as well. Jaswindar prepared authentic Punjabi food for guests at her home, but also enjoyed trying new delicacies in her new city – hot dogs and chestnuts from Times Square street vendors, and flaming ice cream from greasy spoon restaurants. Her feet treaded city buses and sawdust floors of Greenwich Village jazz bars. She went to the top of the Empire State Building, feeling like she had summited the world.
When Jaswindar found out she was pregnant with their first child, she returned to Kenya, with Inder to join her after completing his studies. The Schulmans baked her a “Bon Voyage” cake and drove her to the airport along with Inder. She was returning to her old home, but at I-House in New York, she had found a new one.
