Coupled with his restlessness was the increasing amount of alcohol he now drank on our Saturday outings. Gauri noticed it and told him, “Mister, you should get married—it will make you more responsible.” Kumar responded with a dispirited face. She turned to me: “You should talk to your friend before the whisky sends him to hospital with delirium.” Before I could say anything, Kumar had a rejoinder: “This place is a prison; whisky is freedom.”
Two weeks later, Tamby took us to Rose Hill, in the center of the island, to the house of a mulatto woman who was so stunning that we couldn’t believe she was in the trade. “Tamby, she can get any man she wants,” Kumar said in Bhojpuri, an Indian language she wouldn’t understand. Tamby smiled, shook his head, and left to visit his cousin nearby. We had barely started the drive to Pointe aux Sables, where a bungalow was waiting for us, when I saw Kumar’s countenance change as he looked in the rearview mirror. He was pale and he bit his lip.
“Foutou! I have to make a detour,” he said.
“Why are you swearing?” the woman asked.
Kumar didn’t reply. He took the first left that presented itself, then another left, and raced for half a mile. The woman and I turned behind to see if anyone was following us.
“My asshole of an uncle was behind us. I can’t risk going that way again,” he said. “I’ll drop you back at your house.”
“Don’t you want to have a good time, guys?” she said. “Why don’t you drive in the other direction, to the south. Le Chaland Hotel is a lovely place.”
I told Kumar in Bhojpuri, “It sure looks delightful, but it’s too close to Mahébourg and Mon Désert. My folks may see us.”
We were at her door. “Can’t risk it, mademoiselle,” he said as he handed her an envelope.
She opened it. “You’re generous,” she said, and blew us a kiss.
We drove away.
“Why did you let such a beauty go? We could have driven east to Belle Mare,” I said.
“Vishnu, that asshole is going to ask me who that mulattress was. He’s going to tell my parents and blame them for the way they brought me up.” Kumar was shaking. “He is a bigot, as much a bigot as the higher-caste Hindus who look down on him. I’ll have to tell him that the woman is your friend. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? I should be thankful for all that you’ve done for me,” I said.
I wasn’t worried about word getting back to my parents, relatives, or neighbors: Kumar’s uncle would think twice before leaking information to the outside world about a family member cavorting with me and a mulattress, the more so because of his clan’s high standing in Mauritian society.
Since the rent for the bungalow was already paid, we ended up in Pointe aux Sables to chill out. We sat on the veranda. The late-afternoon sun was mild, the wind balmy yet strong enough that multicolored kites were flying in the clear blue sky. We started with a bottle of Scotch to accompany the prawns with oyster sauce we picked up at Lotus Bleu, in Rose Hill, then, to do justice to the copious Chinese restaurant portions, we moved downscale to a bottle of rum. Kumar repeatedly congratulated me for the French scholarship. “You’ll realize how lucky you are when you land there. No one telling you what to do. You’ll get a girlfriend and have sex without paying for it,” he said. “You’ll fall in love.” I repeatedly thanked him for Gauri and the others and insisted that he take my money; he repeatedly refused my contribution, even for the drinks or food or petrol for the car. After more rounds of drinks, of mutual congratulations and thanks, our eyes dim and our voices a slur, Kumar offered a toast: “To Vishnu, to freedom—freedom to be yourself, freedom to make your own fucking mistakes.” His hand trembled, he slumped on his chair, and his glass smashed on the cement floor.
My eyes opened to a golden sunset. Kumar was standing with the car keys in his hand. “We overdid it today,” he said. “We better get going.” How he drove to Mahébourg and back to his house in Quatre Bornes—fifty-five miles in all—in that half-drunken state remains a mystery to me.
We didn’t go anywhere the next two weekends. Kumar looked like a chastened man. In the staff room, he kept to himself and read the newspapers. I wondered if his uncle had caused trouble for him or if the alcohol binge had unsettled him, making him apprehend a deeper problem. The colleague with the monk’s disease speculated that Kumar was being pushed into an arranged marriage by his parents and uncles. I didn’t press for any explanation. My departure overseas was approaching and soon I’d be busy with formalities such as getting a French visa.
“Let’s go out once before you travel,” he told me. We were getting close to the August school holidays.
Tamby took us near the Civil Hospital. The house, surrounded by a five-foot whitewashed stone wall, had a narrow gate with an intricately wrought metal grille, carrying a design that looked like tendrils of vine. A huge lychee tree rose above the wall. Clearly not a poor family’s home.
We were greeted by a woman in her early twenties, with a cat’s gray eyes, who held a copy of Paris Match in her hand. She wore a blue polka-dot skirt and a cream-white turtleneck sweater that accentuated her breasts. I peered beyond the veranda into the rooms behind, and saw shelves of books.
“She can’t go anywhere with you,” Tamby said. “You’ll have to stay here.”
Kumar and I looked at each other. To me, there was nothing threatening about the house, no foreboding of danger. The presence of books, the woman’s coiffed hair, and the subtlety of her perfume made me comfortable with staying. But Kumar’s face registered first a whisper, then a suspicion of something amiss, something improper. I held my tongue.
“Let me show you to the bedroom,” the woman said.
Tamby would have left by then, but he stayed with us. We went behind, past the veranda. There was a dark reddish-brown poster bed with transparent curtains. The height of luxury and style, I thought. I suspected the wood was mahogany or keruing from Indonesia. The only similar bed I’d seen before was in the Mahébourg National History Museum, the bed that belonged to a French governor of the island.
In a corner, behind a partially open drape that trailed the floor, I spotted a porcelain sink, but not at waist level; it was on the floor.
“Don’t gape like that, Vishnu,” Kumar said. “It’s a bidet. To wash after.”
He turned to Tamby: “Classy stuff.”
“I better leave you now,” Tamby said.
As Tamby turned towards the veranda, we heard a groan. “Shireen, where are you?” It was an old man’s voice, not mournful but dolorous, a voice that sought appeasement.
Shireen rushed towards the voice and carefully opened a door. We fixed our eyes on the room. A man in his fifties was sitting in bed, his shoulders and back against the headboard. His legs ended in amputation stumps. A wheelchair lay by the bedside. He motioned us to come in. We approached but stayed by the door. “You don’t have to worry about anything,” he said. “I called because I needed my tablets.”
After giving him some tablets and refilling his glass of water, Shireen came out and closed the door.
Kumar took Tamby and me aside. “Tamby, how can I get it up with her after seeing the poor man? This is sad.”
“This is the first time the old man interrupts. Shireen is my most sought-after woman, the most expensive, the most intellectual.”
“Vishnu, can you get it up?” Kumar said.
I was tongue-tied. I shook my head.
Shireen walked towards us, poised and dignified. “What’s the problem?”
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Tamby said.
His words didn’t register.
She faced Kumar and me. “Pull yourself together, messieurs, my time is as precious as yours. I have a father to support.”
She picked a book from a shelf.
“We all deserve a comfortable life, don’t we?” she said, and
headed to the garden.
In the car, Kumar took Tamby to task. “You can’t put your clients in such situations. What’s the story with Shireen and her father?”
“Mr. Kumar, if God meant me to ask such questions, he would have made me a priest or a social worker. I know my place in this world. I’m here to find women for you, not to dig into family problems.”
We dropped Tamby at the Rex, and that was our final Saturday outing.
* * *
—
Two months later, I left Mauritius for university studies. In my third year in the United States, during our courtship, my future wife Maria and I went to the Smithsonian for an exhibition of Utamaro’s paintings. The world of Gauri and Shireen was far removed from the glamorized palaces of pleasure depicted by the Japanese painter of the Edo period, with their geishas walking about in the richest silks and brocades against a backdrop of cherry blossoms or participating in elaborate tea ceremonies. Nonetheless, the sight of these women called to mind the difference Kumar made in my life.
At dinner that evening, I asked Maria, who was writing a thesis on Japanese art, “Were Japanese adolescents in Utamaro’s time expected to repress their sexual desires?”
“I’m not researching that subject,” she replied. “Why do you ask?”
I told her about Kumar and my initiation, sparing her the graphic details.
She squeezed my hands. “You had no options,” she said.
I was relieved. I expected a lecture on morality; instead I got love and understanding.
When I returned home to Mauritius with Maria after six years abroad, we went to see Kumar. I had heard that he got married, ran successfully for political office and was a junior member of the cabinet. That didn’t surprise me, given his charisma and the fact that over the years he had provided free tuition to hundreds of poor kids. A housemaid answered my knock on the door; I caught a whiff of burning sandalwood and ghee emanating from inside. I told her who we were, and she came back after transmitting my message.
“Sir, he can’t see you now. He’s in the middle of a religious ceremony.”
“When can we meet him?”
“He didn’t say, sir.”
As we left, Maria said, “That’s a strange friend.”
Unlike her, I wasn’t upset. “Some friendships last, some don’t,” I said.
Seven years earlier, Kumar had performed his role as a mentor to me, and after I left he moved on with what Mauritius had to offer him. He was now a married elected politician, dutifully performing the rituals of a Hindu life. He now had other obligations, other duties.
XVII
Sookwaar Hands
1971
“You don’t want to spend the night in New York. It’s too dangerous,” the Canadian told me.
Sitting next to me on the London–New York flight, crammed with noisy students returning from summer holiday, he was unable to sleep. He had the craggy face of movie villain Jack Palance, and the frame, height, and enforcer eyes of Clint Eastwood. He spoke to me about his hitchhiking across California, his work as a lumberjack in Alberta, but mostly about New York. He described how, on a trip to the city, he manhandled two thugs who thought they could intimidate him with their Colt revolvers. He told me about the prostitutes and pimps pestering him in Times Square, and the story of Kitty Genovese’s murder in Queens and how more than thirty neighbors heard her screams and never called the police.
When I boarded the plane in London, I was excited by the prospect of roaming around New York for a few days. But now, as the pilot announced our arrival at JFK in thirty minutes, the veins at my temple were pulsing and my heart was pounding—not with excitement but with anxiety, even fear.
“Proceed straight to Connecticut. It’s much more civilized,” the Canadian said.
I hadn’t intended to be in the United States that early in August 1971. The Tuckers, my host family in Connecticut, expected me the following week, under a program run by an international students’ organization. But the immigration officer at Heathrow denied me a two-week visa, allowing me to stay in England for only a week. I was reluctant to show up at the Tuckers’ early. From recent Royal College alumni returning from university studies abroad, I had heard that in Europe and America you don’t just drop in at someone’s house, even if you are a close relative; it has to be arranged in advance. And you certainly don’t hang around for a week longer than arranged.
What shall I do? New York sounds like hell, and I don’t know anybody in America.
When I walked out of the international terminal, the doors opened automatically. I went back inside, and this time I stepped out slowly, deliberately. America, land of wonders!
Three hours later at the Windsor Locks airport, in Connecticut (“the Gateway to New England,” proclaimed the brochure), I was checking billboards. They showed pictures of hotels, but no rates. I picked the one that looked the cheapest—one floor, nondescript facade, no lobby, no lawn. A “motel,” which I assumed was an American abbreviation for mini-hotel. I reckoned that calling the Tuckers after two or three days here would be reasonable; they would regard me as a well-bred young man who hadn’t imposed on them right upon arrival in the United States.
This would be the first time in my life that I set foot in a hotel. In Mauritius, I had looked longingly at Le Chaland Hotel, where airline pilots and hostesses stayed, and where one of Tamby’s women had wanted to go. In London, I passed by the Savoy on my way to the apartment where Marx had lived in Soho, but the Rolls-Royces and Bentleys dissuaded me from venturing into the lobby.
Exhausted and sticky from lugging two suitcases from terminal to terminal, I went straight to the shower after check-in. The water pressure, amplified and pumped up to a degree I had never experienced before, turned the banal act of physical cleansing into an aquatic massage. I abandoned myself to the water, body gyrating, eyes closed. America, land of wonders! After a few minutes, I opened my eyes and looked down. The water hadn’t drained from the bathtub; it was sloshing back and forth with bits of hair and soapy gunk dancing around me.
A week earlier in London, I had luxuriated in a bathtub. Back home, my only cleaning options were showers or water poured from a bucket. My cousin’s landlady, pitying my worn-out face after the twelve-hour Mauritius-to-London flight, ran me a bath, showed me the bath plug, and instructed me to pull it out after I was done. So, on my first day in the States, faced with watery slime, I bent down and looked for the bath plug. Not seeing any, I knelt and groped through the length and breadth of the tub, and the perimeter, feeling for rubber or metal components with some sort of chain attached. Nothing remotely resembling the London bath plug. I felt a round metallic protuberance at the head of the tub. Eureka! I pulled it, pushed it, turned and twisted it left and right, forward and backward, all to no avail. Watching Hollywood movies and reading American history hadn’t prepared me for this. By the time I came to this realization, I was dirtier than when I started, and all but craved the rustic water bucket. I rinsed my body and got out.
I switched on the radio next to the bed. “And now it’s time for an American classic, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue,” the voice said.
I sat down on the bed. I couldn’t call for help. The cute receptionist in hot pants at the front desk would think, He came in wearing a suit, looked so sophisticated. He doesn’t know how to use a bathtub!
I went back to the bathtub and tried again. In went my hands and fingers, waddling through the slimy pond. No results.
The grime of the past is not washing away. It’s clinging to me.
But this last thought was a fleeting one. I was too young to have accumulated so much grime, I told myself. Besides, one shouldn’t look for a metaphor in everything.
As I washed up in the sink, I recalled my mother’s hands holding mine. Though she made delicate embroidery after she got married, years of chopping, collec
ting, and carrying sugarcane leaves for cow fodder in early life had hardened her palms, knuckles, and fingers.
“Sookwaar hands,” she said, pressing the flesh on my soft hands. “You’re all books, Vishnu. You’ve never worked with your hands. Papa made sure of that.”
I smiled.
Mama continued. “You should get used to some manual work; you never know what life may bring you.”
Papa countered, “I don’t want Vishnu to be a drone like the rest of us. The Bhushans have endured the drudgery of manual labor long enough.”
Mama sighed, “Vishnu, you must have been a Brahman or a maharaja in your last life.”
Sookwaar, a Hindi word that means delicate and carried among family and friends connotations of effortless well-being. Confronted with the memory of that word in the motel room, I wondered if coming to America was a smart move. I had left behind a generous French government scholarship that took me from a life in Mauritius that straddled the working class and the lower middle class to an upper-class lifestyle at the University of Madagascar. My dorm room, which overlooked a lake, was cleaned daily by a man whose wife did my laundry; he was glad for the extra income and wept when I gave him most of my clothes upon leaving. On the weekends, I dined at gourmet restaurants with names like Éléphant Rose and La Marmite Enchantée. I wanted the prestige and the challenge of an elite American school. But would I survive here?
Survive? That’s not why I came to America. I came here to thrive!
I leafed through my five hundred dollars in American Express traveler’s checks and wondered if that would last me until early September, when Yale University would give me my stipend. Staying at the motel even for one or two days and restaurant dining would eat into what I had saved from my French scholarship money in Madagascar. Second thoughts crept through my mind about appearing impolite or ill-bred to the Tuckers. I called them and explained the problem I’d had with the British immigration officer.
Silent Winds, Dry Seas Page 18