This is how the story’s narrator explains to his male lover his difference from Sandhya: I put my hand on the back of his hip, with a finger looped through a belt hoop, and told him again that I coded high and she coded low, that when I cranked out my bread-and-butter xBase database rubbish I was shielded from the machine by layers and layers of metaphor, while she went down, down toward the hardware in hundreds of lines of C++ that made my head hurt just to look at them, and then there were the nuggets of assembly language strewn through the app, for speed when it was really important, she said, and in these critical sections it was all gone from me, away from any language I could feel, into some cool place of razor-sharp instructions, RMOV BYTE PTR [BX], 16.S But she skated in easy, like she had been born speaking a tongue one step away from binary.

I read the above passage, out aloud, to R. Mutthuswami when we left his office on Wall Street for a bar nearby. Mutthuwswami is a systems analyst at a top financial firm and the glass wall of his office overlooks the towers of the World Trade Center and the water stretching beyond it. "There are zero women at that level," was his first response. He explained that while there are several women, including some Indians, in design as well as management, he hadn’t met any that worked with those computer languages which "shield the way the machine actually works." There is also a difference, I suggested, between the narrator’s expertise and that of Sandhya. How does that translate into the way the Indian programmers see themselves in the diaspora?

There is a "clear dichotomy," Mutthuswami said, between two types of Indians. On the one hand, there are the highly educated Indians "who have given up an academic career to start their own companies" and, on the other hand, there are the graduates mostly of regional colleges and less prestigious programs who perform "low-level coding jobs in the U.S., Europe, or Australia." Those who fall in the former category, according to Mutthuswami, today serve as the CEO’s of 25 percent of the companies in Silicon Valley. The members of the second set are those who form "a larger portion" of Indian cyberworkers in this country. They perform "manual work," Mutthuswami said with a shrug, and added, "It is a class system, like any other class system."

By now we were sitting in a bar where I mentally made the quasi ethnographic observation that male Wall Street execs, enjoying their after work drinks, seem to loosen the knots of their ties by half to one inch. I asked Mutthuswami if Oracle Rao would have any say in the matter of where he was assigned a place in this hierarchy. "No," he replied quickly. Speaking broadly of the class of Indian cybertechies on H-1B visa, Mutthuswami said, "They don’t get paid very well, they don’t have any power or clout. They have skills, but they are mostly for maintenance jobs. I see nothing intellectual coming out of their work here."

As the interview came to a close, Mutthuswami mentioned to me Edward Yourdon’s Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. In this book, which came out in 1992, Yourdon, a software-marketing guru, had predicted a take-over of the U.S. software industry by the likes of Oracle Rao. In the opening pages of his book, Yourdon complained that "hardly anybody seems to be paying attention to the fact that a programmer in India earns five times less than a programmer in Indianapolis." The writer also felt that India and other former British colonies posed a serious threat to the United States because these countries had "inherited an excellent English based educational infrastructure." Yourdon was also distraught that more than 50 percent of the U.S. computer science Ph.D. students were foreign nationals.

Matters were, of course, more complicated. As Yourdon himself admitted, "More important than the claim that India-based software is 30 percent cheaper than American software is the likelihood that it has 10 times fewer bugs and can be maintained 10 times more easily." Nevertheless, he approvingly quoted a 1987 San Jose newsletter called "Software Success" which used an Indian software program to launch a warning to U.S. companies: "If the software industry doesn’t wake up to the possibility of software development moving offshore, we may be just another U.S. industry which is asleep at the wheel."

Mutthuswami had invoked Yourdon only to tell me that Yourdon’s prediction had failed. "What has really happened in the nineties," Mutthuswami said, "is that while Indians have done reasonably well, any advances in software still come from American companies." Nevertheless, what is incontestable is that around 50,000 H-1B petitions are being accepted each year for Indian cybertechies. This remains the most dramatic and consequential detail in the world of software technology in India.

I drove to New Jersey and met Satyajit Roy outside his office. Roy is 39 year-old software engineer and works for a large telecom company. He came to the United States from India two and a half years ago, and has been working on his fourth H-1B. This is the first job he has held since his arrival here that he finds satisfactory.

Minutes before I met Roy in his office, India had lost to Australia in the World Cup cricket match being played in England. We spoke about the match when we met. Roy had seen parts of it on television in the rooms of one of his cohorts in the office. (Many of his co-workers were H-1B techies from India and had, it seemed, emerged from their offices en masse to smoke after the match had ended.) "The H-1B visa is a big boon to Indians, as I see it," Roy said to me as he smoked. "From the mid-80s," he said, "the efflux really started, and now we are a class by ourselves."

Roy is a little different from most Indian cybertechies who come a little earlier in their career. He had been a manager with several years’ experience with two Tata companies in India; what made the move more difficult for him was that he came with his wife, and a son who is now 9 years old. What motivated him to come here? He said, "I wanted my family to get more exposure to the world. I had been in England when I was younger. I wanted to give my family that same experience."

The family did not get what Roy had been hoping for. A small "body shop" had given him the chance to come here, but it couldn’t very quickly find a place for him. "In the very beginning," Roy said, "I didn’t have a fucking car, I didn’t have a fucking salary." Recently, in his new job, Roy’s boss has promised to create a permanent position for him. Roy is looking two or three years ahead when he hopes he will have a green card.

Girish Bhatt, an executive at CyberTech, told me during a phone interview that the reason Indian cyberworkers get H-1B visas is that "it is almost impossible to hire someone who is a U.S. citizen at the rate that these guys are willing to pay." Bhatt cited the example of Ameritech, the largest company in Illinois, that his own firm was servicing.

Roy didn’t disagree with this analysis, but he felt that there was a basic ceiling below which the salary did not fall. "No one comes here below 40K," he said. "Of course," he added, "what job you’ll get depends on your luck, it’s a lottery scene."

While Roy hopes for the lottery to work for him, his family waits with him. Talking of his wife, Debjani, who had been working as a teacher in India teaching English, Roy said that his wife, like all spouses, is only granted an H-4 visa. "She can stay here, but not work," he said. Right now, he said, his wife is "planning on doing a distance-learning course."

The case of Debjani Roy is likely to be a common experience among most spouses of the IT professionals who come here on H-1B visas. The H-1B worker belongs overwhelmingly to the male species and, especially when their duration of work is longer than a few months, their spouses and children accompany them. When a worker is "benched" or a contract is cancelled, the family fully shares the brunt of the shock.

The phenomenon of H-1B work is wired with politics, and gender is an important, even if ignored, component of this circuitry. The letter-writer made a link between the H-1B visa-holder and his marriage: "Why USA through H-1? The answer is clear: there is no investment even on air tickets and then there is the premium in the marriage market in India. In one Indian state a U.S. based boy [sic] commands a dowry of $120,000 apart from marriage expenses. In the marriage market in India a U.S. boy’s rate is higher than a doctor’s or a civil servant’s.

The moment an individual gets his visa he is flooded with proposals with a high premium. The urge to come to the United States is so strong that software programmers started producing fake degree certificates, fake service certificates and the quality of candidates in highly substandard." I bring this up because — despite the danger that the letter poses of possible exaggerations and even gross generalization — it brings forward an issue that we can be certain is of no particular concern to the offices of the I.N.S. or the Department of Labor. The issue that the letter highlights, even perhaps without intending to, is that of gender inequality. And how technology, even when it promotes access to a better way of life for many, insinuates into an iniquitous custom one more element of oppression.

In an essay entitled "Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism," Nick Witheford has written that "our travels along capital’s data highways have discovered at every point insurgencies and revolts, people fighting for freedom from work, creating a ‘communications commons’, experimenting with new forms of self-organization, and new relations to the natural world."