Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  Well me faddah na been give me education. Me faddah seh gyal pickni na should git none. Da why me married young. Langtime, India people seh when you get twelve-t’irteen year you gah fe marry. Me time, me stan fifteen year. Me muddah been get five year. Five year! An’ me papa been get ten when de married. An’ me mama an’ papa live til dead togedah. De live out dem life.

  Me mama sistah—you na go know ’am—Sarupiya Mausi been get four year. ’E been small da you gah fe carry am ’roung de marro. Me nani go ’roung wid de pickni. ’E been cyan’t walk, ’e been too little. Da been a India rule. You pickni tuhn ole you cyan’t married am. You got to marry you pickni when ’e young. When dem do kanyadan dem put de pickni in you lap, an’ when ’e tuhn big you cyan put a pickni in you lap.

  Me papa put me pan ’e lap when ’e gi’ kanyadan. Me been got fifteen year but ’e put me pan ’e jangh an’ siddung me he’ an’ gi’ de kanyadan.

  Evolution of a Song

  VARANASI, THE OLDEST continuously inhabited city in the world, stirred with prayer. The cobblestone streets were littered with wet buffalo shit and little shrines to Shiva streaked in bright vermillion. Flower garlands piled up. Burnt-out clay lamps and leaves along the alleyways lent their color to the city’s dazzle. To die in this city, they said, would bring liberation from incarnation. The devoted chanted Victory to Ram, Victory to Ram.

  I sat on the cement floor in my rented room on Assi Ghat. It overlooked the Ganga River, flowing with glacial melt and silt made of minerals and waste from the devout. Moisture tie-dyed the blue-washed walls in mildew, and I sat cross-legged, all my weight on my ankles, looking for faces in the black crusty patterns. It was the night before Holi—the festival of colors—and tonight, supposedly, all social laws of caste and gender would be turned on their head. I had been living in India for eight months. Through the monsoon. Through winter. And now, the beginning of summer.

  In Madison, Virendra-ji, upper-casted and unaware of my complicated relationship to caste, had told me that Holi is not complete until you embrace a Dalit. I wondered what it would be like to roam the streets at night with all the naked men. But here I was at home instead. Shira, a student from Smith College, and I had invited all the women from our study-abroad program over for chai and namkeen. From the window the city glowed as a flickering flame.

  I smelled the charring effigies of Holika, Prahlad’s mythological sister, who sat her younger brother in her lap while they were both ignited in the fire. Their father, Raja Hiranyakashyap, commanded his son to worship him as a deva—mightier than Vishnu. When Prahlad refused, the raja tried to burn him but was unsuccessful. Prahlad chanted Narayana, Narayana, Narayana, and Vishnu, incarnated as Narasimha-dev—half man, half lion—saved him from the flames and disemboweled the evil raja. The beast-god wore the raja’s intestines as a pink flower garland.

  I was learning so many stories in Varanasi. The mustard fields and burning trash coupled with cow feces and potent spices were a smell that made sense. It smelled like life, like the life that I could have had, had my ancestors remained here and not, as Aji had said, “left to live in Foreign. Dem arkotiya been tell abi leh abi go dat side abi go tuhn rich rich. But when de jahaji reach now, dey punish. All India people what been come dis side been a poor. Ham India chhordke bides rahe lagi hai. Uu arkotiya suar rahi. We left India to live in Foreign. The recruiters were swine.”

  Sitting on the floor, she had one leg before her the other folded in a half crisscross. Her hair wild like a gray cloud. Underneath, a storm of music and epics brewed, preparing for deluge. I knew that Aji’s tongue was different—a form of Bhojpuri that was forged in the Guyanese plantations—and inscrutable to the majority of South Asian immigrants’ children who I knew and went to college with. I wished desis would recognize me as South Asian, that I would fit in to the community that was a swirl of rainbowed silk—a garish gallery of multicolored gods and food that yellowed my fingers. I no longer wanted to feel like a forgery—a fake South Asian.

  Varanasi, also known as Kashi—City of Light—and as Benares, is the holy city of the River Ganga, known to Americans as the Ganges. Aji’s call name, Gangadai, meant “that which the Ganga gave.” Part of me was from this holiest of places. My father’s family was originally from the Gangetic Plain, and the Ganga River featured heavily in pujas and stories. But that was so long ago that Aji’s accent was Caribbean.

  Abroad, as I sat in the holy city of Shiva, the Lord of Ghosts, I drank enough bhang to tell the truth. It was night, the time for nakedness. Ghosts and spirits swirled around me. Four of us sat listening to music and laughing at the gossip from the program house. The directors told us not to befriend any Indians in order to protect ourselves. We all knew this was bullshit.

  Mae sat behind me to oil my scalp, her long brown hair curling like the clouds over her beloved mountains in Colorado. I sat cross-legged in front of her, facing the room’s only window. Outside, fireworks and laughter streaked the night like fire. She started to massage my head. High from the bhang, I began to remember stories from Orlando. I remembered an Indian girl I went to high school with who began to teach me Hindi and who pointed out just how broken my family was. She came over to my home and opened my fridge.

  “Teri fridge thordi hi desi lagti hai,” she accused. I gave her a blank look. “Your fridge is not very Indian,” she laughed, translating. Her Hindi seared like a half lion, half man’s claws. By opening my fridge, she opened my guts and saw just how pretend I was. I wanted so much for her to see herself in me, to validate my Indianness.

  “Would you ever think about going to your Nana’s village, Rajiw?” Mae asked, using her own nickname for me.

  “I want to,” I said. “I brought my Nana’s autobiography that he self-published in London. I want to go and see the earth that made my ancestors’ bodies, though I’m not sure that the people there, if there are any, would recognize me.”

  “What do you mean, Raju?” Jegga asked. Jegga, the tall Italian-descended woman I’d met in Madison, waited her turn for her own scalp massage. She lived in Richmond Hill, close to Pua and Pupha. The summer before, she’d been my tour guide to all things West Indian in Queens and New York City. Her eyes were the blue of Lord Shiva’s throat.

  “I just mean that my family has been outside of India for so long, we’re not exactly India-Brahmins, and I would have to pretend to be something that I’m not to even enter the home of anyone I find. If I do find anyone,” I said. Temple bells rang out, shaking the still air. “Going there would mean confronting who I am not.”

  Jegga knew that I wasn’t an NRI, Non-Resident Indian. She knew what I meant when I said I was Indian: I was an aluminum karahi, frying aloo pie and phulauri, I was floral print and plastic on the couch, I was gold teeth and Creole. I looked at Jegga and then back up at Mae. My cheeks were wet and my nose was running.

  “What’s the matter, yaar?” Mae asked, raising her eyebrows. Her touch was gentle, and I didn’t think I deserved gentle. I lit a cigarette.

  “Nothing.” I pulled myself away from her and blew smoke out of the window. It curled through the screen and mixed with the burning Holikas outside.

  “I hate being Guyanese. I wish I were a real Indian.” There, I said it. Something that had haunted me since landing in New Delhi. I could see only my difference. My darker complexion meant that I was not “desirable” in any way.

  “Raimie, are you okay?” asked Jegga.

  Even my call name wasn’t Indian. I hated my name, Raimie, the one my parents called me, because it was so European and damningly feminine.

  Being Guyanese was too complicated. Every time someone asked where I was from, I had to tell some kind of shortcut or lie. If I were to tell the truth, it would usually go something like:

  Where are you from?

  I am from Chuluota, outside of Orlando.

  No, really.

  Well, I was born in England.

  Where were you from before that?

  Before I was born?
My parents are from South America.

  But you look Indian or Middle Eastern.

  My parents are from a community of Indians that migrated to the Caribbean to work British sugar plantations in the late 1800s. We are from there.

  The British did all they could to erase the Coolie in the Coolie and made it impossible for Indians in remote parts of Guyana to attend school unless they converted to Christianity. In doing so, the British had carved their nation into the very bones of my parents. McCauley’s infamous essay “Minute on Education,” written in 1835, proved that the British wanted to make us brown on the outside and white on the inside—always lesser than white but “better” than brown.

  My parents had given me an Indian name, too. Rajiv. I started to use it when I lived in India because it was more easily recognized—Raimie sounded weak, an astrologer told me as he looked at my palm and asked me about my caste and clan. Another lie. I come from a place where caste is mixed and not remembered in the same way as in India. Aji would insist that she was “Brahmin and Kshatri—all two” and that Aja, her husband, “been one Ahiri.” A cowherd and a warrior. My mother’s castes were Brahmin and unknown—most likely Dalit and Musalman. Would the pandit drop my palm in horror of my being unclean and fettered with the caste-mixing of diaspora? I longed for a simple story.

  In my mind, if I were Indian without South America, the Caribbean, or the system of indenture, then I would speak Hindi fluently. I would have a single-caste identity. My name would not be Raimie. I would be marriageable to Punjabis or proud Tamilians. Savarna, upper-caste people, would not look down on me as though I were a Bhojpuri/Tamil mixture of castes and histories—a South Asian mongrel. White people couldn’t understand my frustration.

  “Why would you ever say that?” Mae asked. She was shocked by my candor. My embarrassment wafted like secondhand smoke. I snuffed my cigarette’s cherry in a stainless-steel tumbler.

  “We are not a real people,” I said, turning to face her. “My family doesn’t even speak Hindi and people don’t acknowledge us as Indians. We speak ‘broken Hindi’ and ‘broken English.’”

  “What do you mean you’re not Indian?” But Jegga spoke up. “Raimie, I know Richmond Hill. It’s Little Guyana in Queens. You guys have soca chutney music and know how to wine. And besides, your food is awesome. You telling me that you’d give up daal puri and buss up shut for what—chapati?” She was a light. I could recognize her olive branch but was convinced that I knew better. I had inherited too much suffering.

  “When people go to Indian restaurants, they don’t order phulowri, barah, daal puri. In fact, they don’t even exist unless it’s a Coolie store. They order samosas, chicken tikka masala, and naan. We don’t have those things. Our foods are different, and we are not treated like we are real anythings,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Mae said. “What about your Aji, too? If you were from Delhi she would be your Dadi.”

  Dadi. That word was all wrong for my Aji. Dadi was Shah Rukh Khan’s mother and the young Anjali’s grandmother in the film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Aji was personal—someone who sat in my family home in Florida, who narrated long stories of rajas, ranis, and rajkumars. She knew about exile. She knew its songs. Aji spoke Hindustani.

  In Varanasi, I had been studying folk singing with Pintu Rai, but he did not speak English, nor could he assist in translations, so the program coordinator appointed Kumar to lead me into places of music. Kumar was in his late thirties, wore a cleanly pressed dress shirt about his meek frame and tucked it into his khakis. His shoes were spit-shined, and I looked at my face’s reflection in them.

  In order to fulfill the requirements of the program, each student had to write a thesis on some aspect of Indian life. Mae wrote about the Muslim weaving community and focused her efforts on Urdu and her friend Saleem—the old uncle who was missing many teeth but knew of the best fabrics around Sonarpura. My housemate Shira wrote about Coca Cola’s exploitation of Mehandi Ganj village’s water and how the people there resisted the imperialist efforts of the multinational corporation. Remembering Aji and how broken I felt, I decided to write about the Bhojpuri folk singing culture as it related to the Ramayana to make sense of our connection, or lack thereof, to this place.

  Kumar met me at my house on Assi Ghat at seven in the morning. “Today we will go to this Ram Mandir,” Kumar said, looking over our list of names and places. The old women lined their platforms with neem branches to sell as makeshift toothbrushes, children carried baskets filled with chrysanthemum blooms and small clay lamps in leaf bowls to sell to pilgrims to float downstream. The sun began its climb, red as a vermillion forehead smear, as people young and aged came to bathe in their dhotis and saris. Brass temple bells, Shri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram, and incense wafted above the city at dawn.

  We walked to his motorbike and I climbed on behind him, clutching his waist for support. We zoomed down the gullies, past the vegetable vendors crouched down next to their sheets lined with eggplant, okra, tomatoes, and onions sweating into their Alua, Baingan, Bhindi, Tamatar. We zipped past the chai stands with old and young alike chatting about politics as macaque monkeys marched in troops in the bel and ficus trees. A pig in the ditch on the side of the road fed on a dog carcass. Cows, pigs, stores, and rickshaws were a blur of lows, oinks, ka ho gurus from our perch on Kumar’s bike.

  We stopped for chai at Kumar’s favorite place. The blue wash on the wall was powdery with trails of gecko footprints. The fluorescent light hummed above us as though it were getting ready to sing.

  “Doh chai,” Kumar asked, “Chai piyenge? Will you have tea?” The milky, sweet chai was poured in a cup made of local clay fired in dried cow shit.

  Outside four men carried a stretcher with a body wrapped in a cotton cloth. They proclaimed Ram Naam Satya Hai. “The name of Ram is truth.” They were taking the body to Manikarnika Ghat to burn on a pyre. Above the chai shop the smoke billowed. I didn’t know if I was breathing in exhaust or the smoke from the body of the latest liberated soul. In this city, life was death was life. The living and the dead lived together in one house. The lord of this house was Shiva, the god of ghosts and ghouls—easy to anger, easy to please. I sipped the sweet, milky chai and wondered if in this place I would encounter any ghosts of my kin, of the people we once were before we left for Guyana. I burned my tongue.

  “It’s very close, only, this ashram that we are going to.” Kumar turned to me. I could feel my body relaxing and tightening from the caffeine. Kumar’s role as interpreter had been invaluable. We went to see a famous birha singer, Hiralal Yadav, who was convinced that I was from the government and there to steal his songs. Kumar explained that I was just a student who was interested in his art. Which would be easier to think? I wondered into my chai.

  We smashed our cups on the road and mounted the bike. We wound into a gully. I could sense the moisture in the air, hanging about like a song. Shopkeepers threw water in front of their stores in the morning in a ritual to keep the dust from flying up and into their faces. We entered a square compound. In the center was another square space surrounded by grass. As we walked farther in to the ashram the outside chaos fell away. Along the perimeter were rooms with wooden doors painted teal. In the middle stood what looked to be the shrine, yet there was no deity enshrined—rather an old man in a kurta and dhoti sitting, waiting for his guests. His hair was pure white. His beard hid the inward sloping of his cheeks. His bones were as old as the city he lived in.

  “Come, child,” he smiled at me and patted the space next to him. His Hindi was broad and rustic—a peepal tree in the village square. Something about his voice and demeanor reminded me of Aji. It wasn’t just the white hair, his smile felt like home—warm and bright. He was a sannyasi, someone who renounced his earthly connections as a youth and was living a life of religious supplication.

  “Tell me, would you like some chai?” the baba asked.

  “No, ji, thank you, we just had tea before we came,” I admitted.

  “Wha
t is your name?” he asked me.

  “Rajiv.”

  “Rajiv what?”

  “Rajiv Mohabir.”

  “That’s a strong name, beta. Rajivalochan, he with eyes like a blue lotus—steady in stormy weather. And Mohabir—maha and vira meaning ‘great warrior.’ What is your caste?” The baba tilted his head and narrowed his eyes.

  The question stung. “Gwalbans Ahir.” It was a familiar lie.

  “What does your father do?” He relaxed his eyebrows.

  “He is disabled but he was an accountant. My mother works as an assistant principal of an elementary school.” His questions were not rude or overly inquisitive but polite things to ask. “Baba-ji. What is your name?”

  “There is only one name, beta, and that is the name of god. People call me baba.”

  His hands were soft, the lines dark and numerous. A century of life hung from his bones, the collagen giving way to time. His fair skin and the Bhojpuri lilt in his Hindi conjured a field in rural Bihar. He relaxed when I said my family were cowherd people. Was he a farmer before he renounced his life to pursue religious and spiritual moksha? What could my caste matter to him, a sannyasi? There is no name but god, which was Truth—Ram Naam Satya Hai. He was close to death. I was close to his death. I could see from the deep creases on his face that I had come in time to ask him to sing for me.

  “We have come to ask you about songs you know about the Ramayan.” Kumar’s interjection was down to business. I didn’t mind—after all, this was a job for him, not an experience to relish. For him such babas were common and students like me, work. For me, it was the realization of a dream: India was a place of people and songs like this baba and his repertoire.

  The air was thick, not with exhaust fumes, but with my hope. It descended like the fruit bats that returned daily to their dawn perches having eaten their nightly fill in the trees in Madanpura. The baba reached back into his childhood in Bihar. He closed his eyes.