I had just been accepted to a program that would send me for an academic year to India, where I would study Hindi language, Bhojpuri language, folk singing, and astrology—all things that make a descendant of indenture giddy. The family would tease me, saying things like, “Oh, you wan’ tun pandit?” or as Pua said, pointing to her temple, “People who go to India come back real simple.” For her, going to India was a reversion to an uncouth past. To return from a trip to India, would mean that I would come back less intelligent, having regressed. How was it that these people who I came from hated themselves so much that they would rather kiss a white person’s ass than call themselves Indians?
There was one place where Aji could talk to the shopkeeper: PD Market, though she called it Piri’s after the proprietor. He would greet her with “Ram Ram, Nani” when she walked in.
“Tohar jiew achcha hai?” she would respond. As a child I loved this dance between them. It was the only time when I felt Aji was joyful, when she was reminded of home.
They conversed entirely in Hindi: the shop owner speaking Modern Standard Hindi and Aji speaking Guyanese Bhojpuri. After greeting the dukan-wallah we walked to the back of the store where Piri’s parrot perched. She would say “Ram Ram,” and the bird would call out “Ram Ram” in reply. It was a blue and gold macaw, the same kind that she had had when she was a little girl living in New Amsterdam.
Rabaht, Aji’s mother’s macaw, was completely wild and would visit their house for leftover rice and daal in the morning. Her mother would call, “Rabaht, Rabaht, Aao, bhojan karo,” and Rabaht’s blue and gold feathers would appear. Aji held the rice and peanuts in her hand while Rabaht perched on the fence in front of the house and ate from her open hands.
They kept feeding him. He followed Aji to the market where she bought more peanuts. He even knew a couple words like Sita-Ram and Betiya. They were friends, about the same age. Rabaht had just shown up one day and Aji’s mother had fed him. When he came back the next day, Aji’s mother fed him again. On the third day that Rabaht ate from her hands, the family adopted him. There was no need to cage Rabaht or to clip his wings. He lived outside, wild, and came and went as he pleased.
One day Aji’s mother went outside with her plate as usual and called for Rabaht. She called for hours, but Rabaht never came. She left the plate outside until the rice dried up, uneaten by the parrot but scavenged by ants. Rabaht never returned. She suspected that the bird had been caught and sold to the United States as an exotic pet or killed for its feathers.
Piri’s was the only parrot in Aji’s Toronto, amid the familiar smells of the Indian market, but askew, not quite her own: Indian but not Guyanese. “Indiaman different kine people,” she used to say. Their language, their Hinduism, their songs.
I sat on the crushed velvet couch and wiped the sweat off of my palms on my jeans. The afternoon sun was now looking into the window, as my aunts and uncles encircled me. There was silence. What song should I play? Everyone wanted to hear something that they knew. Maybe I should play “Mere Sapno Ki Rani” or “Suhani Raat,” I thought. These were crowd-pleasers. All of my aunts leaned forward in their chairs. I thought of Aji and how she was listening sitting on the floor of the next room. What song would she want to hear? I started to pick the chords, A minor, G, A minor, G, I was hardly a guitar player. I caught the rhythm and began:
akhiya hamar badal rukhi
kahi naahi sukhi sukhi
tinhu lok me hamesa
tohar birha se hi bhigal
Aji unfolded her legs and rose. She walked in her empire-waisted floralprint frock and shuffled into the room where we were awash in her music. She sat on the couch next to me and joined in:
sare duniya me ghumat hai
pavan aur nadi ka pani se
ekgo hi nisan paye ke
baras me kehar aram karab
hamar saiya baahar bhejaile
Tears glinted like Sita’s golden deer in my aunts’ eyes. They sat with mouths agape. Auntie Sonia asked, “How does Ma know this song?” She shook her head in disbelief. Ma only knows broken Hindi, I’d heard her and her siblings repeat countless times before. She shook her head in disbelief.
“This is Aji’s song, not mine.” I answered, gesturing with my head at Aji next to me.
“Me mummah been sing dis song come time fe plant rice,” Aji said. It was a work song. A song that women sang in the rice fields, that Aji and I sang now in a middle-class living room in Brampton, Ontario. I thought of all the women who once sang this song—how it was important for both doing the work and expressing the sadness of leaving their father’s homes, of leaving their India to come away to Guyana—and now, Aji sang this song of bitter separation having left her home for the snow.
Auntie Sonia said, “Wow, you’re a real Indian Cat Stevens.” Her own children didn’t know Aji the way that I did. It didn’t matter what Auntie Sonia meant by her remark. I would soon be leaving for Varanasi, firmly in the Bhojpuri belt, where I would learn about the rainbows of rivers and epics that Aji regaled me with, finally seeing them firsthand. I wanted to plant our language back in my mouth—the language that had been stripped from us through indenture. I wanted to live in a world of Aji’s music. I wanted to be colorful, too. Aji was perched on the couch next to me, growing back her tropical plume.
South Asian Language Summer
I SAT IN the ice cream parlor on State Street on my first afternoon exploring downtown Madison. I was there to participate in a six-week Hindi language intensive hosted by the South Asian Summer Language Institute at the University of Wisconsin. My cayenne-flavored chocolate cone stung my lips with its own summer heat. Across from me was a guy about my age. He wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt and had dreadlocks.
“You here for SASLI?” he asked me.
“Yeah, for Hindi—you?”
“Tibetan. Dude. Madison is awesome. I’m from Eugene and here it’s crazy. I heard that Madison was built on a bed of rose quartz and that the Dalai Lama said that this city glistens with psychic energy.” His blue eyes were high beams.
I looked at his feet. Hemp anklets and hairy toes. I realized that no one knew me here and I could be something new entirely—I could reforge wholeness from the brokenness I believed defined me.
“It’s trippy,” he continued. “Because we’re here now and did you know that Tibetan doesn’t have tense markers on its verbs.” I had stopped listening. Outside, a man in shorts with large thighs and a tight T-shirt strode by. I could feel my ears redden. This was going to be a great summer.
I lived in the International Co-op with about thirteen other students from the University of Wisconsin. Pot-smoking, acid-dropping hippies became my quick friends, delighted by the prospect of being pals with a “real” Indian.
One woman who lived there put a copy of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now in my hands. I opened it to a page with a sketch of Hanuman, the monkey god, and looked up at her.
“Before you came, I had a dream of Lord Hanuman. He promised me that I would meet the love of my life.” She looked in my eyes. I looked to the other side of the room.
“Is that a fire door?” I asked. I started singing the song by Ani DiFranco.
“Come see this silk I have,” she said, her brown curls falling down past her well-glossed lips.
I obliged and asked her, “What’s the deal with Ken?” Ken was an international student from Indonesia who was staying in the co-op as well. He lived on the first floor and I had seen him a couple times. When I would smile at him, he would smile and look down, blushing. He was short but sturdy-framed with a muscled back and handsome. I wanted to see more of him.
“He’s new here, he came like a week before you did,” she replied.
“He’s super-hot. Do you know if he’s queer?” I asked. She got the message and with a huff threw the bolt of silk on her bed.
I walked downtown from the co-op, past all the shops and cafés bursting with collegiate imagery: croissants, espressos, dread-headed white boys studying th
e Tibetan language, skaters, smokers. I felt free and wore my hair down and wild with its curliness. I rushed in to meet Virendra Singh, who had been teaching Hindi in this program for about twenty years.
He sat nursing a cup of chai while looking over some disheveled papers on his desk. His white hair was neatly trimmed and even though it was summer, he wore a green sweater-vest that contoured the curve of his paunch.
“Namaste, sir-ji,” I greeted him.
“Namaste ji, baithiye—” he motioned for me to sit down on the leather armchair facing his desk. He continued, “I’ve asked you here because I know that you already speak some Hindi and I want to gauge just where I should put you in our class and for when we are in India.”
Virendra-ji, as I was to call him, began with the test, asking me questions in Hindi. Where are you from? What do you like to do for fun? Where were you born? I was used to stumbling through my answers to these questions in Modern Standard Hindi.
“What language does your parents speak?” he asked.
“They speak English and Creolese. We’ve been outside India for so long. They’ve never really known or spoken Hindi.”
“Oh, so you’re not a real Indian.”
Silence.
“My Aji speaks Bhojpuri though,” I added.
“Arrey, your Aji speaks Bhojpuri?!” his surprise lifted the wrinkles off of his face. He switched to Bhojpuri, “Achcha tu Bhojpuri gaana gaa sakela?”
“Yes,” I replied in English, stunned. “I can sing some Bhojpuri songs. In fact, that’s why I’m here—to learn enough Hindi so that I can understand the language that my family has lost.”
Virendra-ji rubbed his chin and nodded his head. He turned to his desk and gave me a paper. “Okay, please write in Devanagari, aapse milkar bahut khushi hui.”
I wrote down what I thought it should look like. The vowels in short and long form mixed up. Aspirated consonants for retroflexed letters. After a moment’s pause, Virendra-ji said, “I think it’s good for you to be in beginner Hindi. You already speak some, but your writing would benefit from starting over. It will get rid of your bad habits in speaking Hindi.” His smiling face was like sunshine. “I’ve seen this a lot with NRI kids—they know a lot but need to iron out all the issues.”
I called home that day and my mother picked up after several rings.
“Hi Mom. How are you?” I asked.
“Hi! Finally, a call. Are you okay?” She replied. She stopped whatever she was doing to give our conversation her full attention.
“Yes, everything here is okay. I’m having fun. The co-op is interesting with a lot of people here from all over.” I looked up and down the hallway. No one was there.
“That’s good. How are classes going?”
“Classes are okay. The teacher thinks that I speak Hindi okay already! And get this—he also speaks Bhojpuri!” I tripped over my words with excitement.
Silence.
“Mom, did you hear me?”
“He speaks Bhojpuri?” she said, drawing out her vowels.
“Yeah. You know, Aji’s language, and also the kind of Hindustani that Nana must have spoken. Your father spoke Hindi, right?”
“Yes, he spoke it. That’s amazing. Are you going to try to learn Bhojpuri too?”
“As much as I can while I’m there I guess.” This was a major reason why I wanted to go to Benares in particular.
“I can’t believe it. It’s like God is watching over you,” Mom said. God. She was talking about Christ Jesus, whom my family had tightly embraced upon arriving in the United States.
“I guess so, if your God spoke Hindustani,” I said. “And it’s so cool that I can learn Aji and Aja’s language there, too—like all of Pap’s older relatives will be able to talk to me.”
Silence.
“It would be so great to learn their songs from Crabwood Creek—” I continued.
After another pause my mother spoke. “You only care about your father’s family. My family is nothing to you,” she cut into me.
“Well, I don’t really know anything about your family except that they’re Hindus and hate Pap. They come to Florida but don’t even visit us,” I cut back.
“Well, you have two parents who had parents who spoke Hindi—or Bhojpuri as you called it,” she reminded me.
“Wait, Nani spoke Bhojpuri, too?” I asked.
“She learned some because my father made her.”
“And what about all my mausis and mamus? Do they speak?”
“No—my father would try to teach them, but when they couldn’t get past the alphabet he would beat them for their mistakes. It was Mummy who asked your Nana, ‘Would you rather have dead sons who speak Hindi or living sons who don’t?’” She laughed.
“Why did he start with having them read it? Why not just speak it to them?”
“I don’t know. Are the other people who are going on the trip with you nice?” she asked, changing the subject.
“There’s a guy here who I like in the co-op,” I said, avoiding her question. I had told her that I was gay almost two years prior, as I folded laundry and talked about the white bisexual man I had been on two dates with. The date didn’t go anywhere, but we did do ecstasy together and learned a lot about each other’s childhoods. She cried and asked me to stitch my lips with silence. She didn’t want anyone in the extended family to know.
“Oh, that’s nice—what about your teacher, you like him?”
“The guy’s name is Ken and he’s very nice.” I had not yet had many interactions with Ken, just the occasional “hello” and “how are you.” I wanted my mother to acknowledge the fact of him.
Silence.
“Well, the weather here is nice, too,” I said, trying to pick the conversation back up. “How’s Pap?”
“That’s good. You know you can never tell your father. It would kill him to know.”
This time I was quiet.
“Are you sure, Raimie? You just haven’t met the right girl as yet,” she said.
“Mom, we’ve been through this. You know I’ve slept with women. It just doesn’t work for me in the same way.” I looked over my shoulder. I was glad there was no one in the co-op that day.
“I just don’t understand what two men can do together. It’s just not anything that I would ever want for you.” She was crying on the other end.
“I am not explaining it to you right now, but I will sometime if you want me to. I just can’t keep having this conversation again and again.”
Ever since I told her, our conversations have ended with her crying. She cried on the phone every time we spoke for two years. She wanted to bear this secret alone, not trusting that my father would ever fully support or see me as someone who was not straight: their worst fear in the world made manifest.
Lake Mendota was everywhere, surrounding the UW isthmus and beckoning students in the hot summer months to be free of our garments and dip our bare skins in its cool waters. After class and before the nightly hang with the other students, I hopped in as often as I could. Being from Florida, I was used to relaxing at beaches, in pools, in rivers, and, when I was willing to risk being attacked by alligators, in lakes.
I spent this particular day with a well-shaped white boy from Boston University. His brown hair and green eyes made me blush as I stripped off my underwear and followed him into the water, hurling myself from the dock. I had also invited Ken.
Just as I was about to get out of the water and warm myself in the sun, Ken appeared and took his clothes off while keeping his eyes on mine. His body shone like gold in the sun. He jumped in and splashed near to me. By this time, we were alone.
“Do you swim a lot?” he asked.
“I do love to be in the water.” I felt his leg brush mine as he lunged away from me.
“Catch me then!” he said. I swam after him, but he was quicker than I was. He jumped onto the dock and bent over to pick up his towel. “See you later,” he said as he dried off.
At Der Rat
hskeller, the bar on campus that opened out to Lake Mendota, I met Mae for the first time. Der Rathskeller’s deck had twenty round tables, and we sat with several other classmates from around the country. Also among us was Jegga from Richmond Hill: the Indo-Caribbean neighborhood in Queens, New York, that was in my extended family’s orbit. Jegga had been conscripted to teach ESL in Varanasi through a fellowship from Oberlin College.
Mae was advanced in Hindi and had come to study Urdu more fully before going to India. A student from North Carolina, she originally came from Colorado. She had curly hair, too; it was light brown and fell to her hips. Mae had spent a summer in Nepal and was bewitched by the songs that she heard there, and we were drawn to each other right away.
“Let’s walk down to the water,” Mae said. We moved away from the crowds and the lights. The stars were gleaming on the lake surface. I looked over the wooden boards of the dock. Elodea waterweeds swayed in the subtle surf below our feet.
“Nangi Village had some really neat people. I met one woman who really was something special,” Mae said. “I want to return to South Asia because I’m so in love with how the culture speaks to me.” She was a Hindi/Urdu major who was passionate about South Asian Muslim issues as they related to labor. Mae continued, “You love your Aji’s songs. Do you know any?”
“I do,” I replied. “But I want to hear the song you learned in Nangi Village. Would you sing it?”
“Oh, sure.” We sat down and put our feet in the water. Even though it was summer, the cold waves bit our toes. Mae looked at the moon and then looked at me and smiled. As she began, the words curled out of her mouth like smoke. I was captive to the lilting and bending of the words, which in Nepali sounded similar to words in Bhojpuri and Hindi but were completely beyond my understanding.
Antiman Page 3