Silent Winds, Dry Seas

by Vinod Busjeet

  “We’ll be there in an hour,” Mrs. Madeline Tucker said, in a voice that sounded rather young.

  I wondered if I should tell the receptionist about the clogged tub. I decided that silence is golden.

  * * *

  —

  Upon my arrival at the Tuckers’ house in Farmington, Connecticut, Bill, the teenage son, showed me around the house. In the bathroom, I spotted what looked like a bath plug but could discern nothing detachable as on the English one. “This is a pop-up plug,” Bill explained. “You move this handle on the tub up and down to open and close the drain.” I ran the water and tested the mechanism. Twice. My American education had begun.

  After dinner—barbecued chicken, corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes drowning in gravy, all bland to my taste buds, fluent in curries, French garlic, and Creole rougailles—we moved to the TV room. Mrs. Tucker, her hair in curlers, laid a huge basket of string beans at her husband John’s feet and plopped down on a recliner. The daughter, Kate, a junior at Emory, joined Bill and me on the couch. While we watched Thomas More clash with Henry VIII over the latter’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Mr. Tucker was stringing beans. I couldn’t believe it.

  My attention shifted to poor Mr. Tucker. He lifted his head and caught me staring at him. “I know what you’re thinking, Vishnu. In your country, this is women’s work, and you’re feeling sorry for me,” he said with a smile.

  “Oh, no! You’re more dexterous than my mother at it, and Mama is regarded as the best in the Bhushan clan,” I said.

  Mrs. Tucker got up and stretched her arms towards the ceiling. “You have a way with words, Vishnu. It must be that British education you got on your island,” she said, and went to the kitchen. She returned with a bucket of okra, which she put at Mr. Tucker’s feet. “Our friends from Tennessee ship these to us, and John cuts them before we freeze them.”

  Mr. Tucker looked at me with benevolent eyes. “General Electric sends me to India and Africa regularly, and I know that men there don’t string beans. You don’t have to worry. We won’t ask you to do kitchen work.”

  I looked at my sookwaar hands and remembered Mama’s words about getting used to manual labor.

  On Saturday, the Tuckers took me to a football game. Having gone to Wembley for a soccer game during my week in England, I found the Hartford stadium rather small, and the game dull. The constant movement of the soccer players dribbling and kicking the ball had been energizing; here, the football players stopped playing every now and then and gathered in a circle, where they appeared to whisper to one another before they resumed. Soccer improvisation was more exciting than the American huddle. At halftime, the crowd got excited over the beauty pageant. The guy sitting on the bench in front of me got up and turned, beer can in hand, half his shirt hanging over his jeans.

  “Where are you from? India or Pakistan?” he said.

  “Neither. I’m from Mauritius.”

  “Mo…Mori…Where is that?”

  “It’s an island in the Indian Ocean.”

  “So it’s part of India.”

  “No, it is off the coast of South Africa, twenty-five hundred miles from Cape Town.”

  “Africa,” he said and paused for a moment. He gulped down some beer. “What kind of government do you have there? Tribal government?”

  His questions disconcerted me. What do they teach about Africa in schools? I asked myself. I remained calm and replied, “It’s a Parliamentary democracy, based on the British system. You have a president, we have a prime minister.”

  The man took a bewildered swig. He squinted his eyes, strained to formulate a question, failed, and took his seat.

  The crowd cheered as another beauty contestant flaunted her assets on the field.

  Bill nudged my elbow. “Next time say you’re from India. Mauritius is way too complicated. Too many syllables; people like him can’t handle it.”

  Mrs. Tucker’s face was red. “This man is ignorant. Let’s move to another seat,” she said.

  Mrs. Tucker had barely got up when the man was back on his feet, this time with a fully formed question. “Who civilized your people?”

  I sprang up and faced him. For the first time in my life, I felt my national honor at stake. The honor of a nation only three years old, but my nation nonetheless. In my Oxbridge A-level high school course, two years earlier, I had written a paper on the difference between the words civilization and culture, and I still remembered the OED definition of civilization. I summoned up my courage.

  “Do you know the meaning of the word civilize?” I asked him.

  He was taken aback. He didn’t reply.

  “English is your mother tongue, isn’t it?”

  His face was blank.

  I looked him straight in the eye. “Civilize: bring out of barbarism, enlighten, refine. While your ancestors were barbarians living in caves, my ancestors were building cities. We had a written language; we were producing literature.”

  Two guys sitting next to him forced him down to his seat. His beer can fell from his hands and rattled down the rows.

  I looked around. The white people were red with embarrassment, the Tuckers being the reddest. The Black Americans smiled. A young man with a huge Afro hairdo raised his hand in a Black Panther salute and said, “Right on, brother.”

  The crowd cheered as the loudspeaker blared the name of Miss Hartford 1971.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next two weeks, before they drove me to the Yale University campus, the Tuckers exposed me to the whole gamut of American culture and way of life, from what they called lowbrow to highbrow. Lowbrow: lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken and a visit to the local police station, where the sheriff showed me the short-term detention center where they lock people up for one or two nights before they are arraigned in court. Middlebrow: miniature golf followed by a tour of Mark Twain’s folly of a house in Hartford, which drove him to near bankruptcy. Highbrow: a visit to the Mystic Seaport residence of a classical music radio announcer who was probably in his sixties or seventies. “You’ll see some Andrew Wyeth paintings at his home,” Mrs. Tucker told me before we left. I remembered seeing a photo of Wyeth’s Christina’s World at the American Cultural Center in Madagascar.

  Standing by a piano in his white linen suit and white wing-tip shoes, with Wyeth art on the walls behind him, the radio announcer was an aesthete who could have walked right out of Oscar Wilde’s writings. He played two rare records of Caruso—first time I heard of him—and delighted the Tuckers with stories of the tenor’s live performances. Unfortunately for me, the conversation was not about books, and they used a lexicon alien to me. They talked about arias, cadenzas, coloratura—words I had never heard or even read.

  I was relieved when we moved to the veranda, which overlooked the sea. The old fishing schooners, the rigged ships, and the smaller boats made me nostalgic for Mahébourg, my hometown by the beach. I thought of my parents, relatives, and friends and the fishermen who were my neighbors. I pictured them going about their daily activities.

  A uniformed butler served us a lobster lunch as a warm breeze blew over the veranda.

  “You’ve been very quiet, young man,” the announcer said to me as the butler walked back to the kitchen. “Are you familiar with American music?”

  “Quite! I love Elvis Presley. Also, two years ago the American embassy arranged a performance by Buddy Guy on the beach, not far from our house.”

  “Elvis will be forgotten by the time you’re my age,” he said. He raised his head and scanned the vessels on the water. “Buddy Guy—he’s a brilliant blues guitarist who’ll stand the test of time.”

  He got up, went inside, and called the butler. “Play it loud so we can hear in the veranda,” he said.

  When he came back to the veranda, he sat next to me. “You’re going to hear George Gersh
win’s Rhapsody in Blue, a concerto that combines classical piano with jazz. It has ragtime and Charleston jazz rhythms.”

  I didn’t tell him that I was a complete ignoramus when it came to concertos, ragtime, and Charleston jazz.

  “Listen to the opening clarinet glissando.”

  Another word I had never heard. I thought of the French word glisser, meaning to slide, to glide along. “The music glides,” I said.

  The aesthete’s face brightened. “You’ve got it, young man! It glides. Listen till the very end and you’ll know why Rhapsody in Blue is a kaleidoscope of America, a musical reflection of our melting pot.”

  He patted me on the shoulder and returned to his seat.

  I tackled my lobster with gusto. From the corner of my eye, I caught the butler’s smile of approval as he served a second helping of bread roll.

  * * *

  —

  When I arrived at Yale University in September 1971, I had to report to the financial aid officer, who would inform me what job I had to do as part of my work-study aid package.

  “Take this form to the manager of the Commons dining room. You’ll be working there.”

  The manager was a huge man whose stentorian voice intimidated me as he issued commands left and right. His girth didn’t impede his movements. He was a nimble, Black American version of President Taft, down to the three-piece suit and pocket watch. I must say I was impressed and pleased by the sight of a Black man giving orders to white people. A month earlier in London, I had seen for the first time white men driving buses and taxis, digging soil and fixing rooftops, and how weird it felt—you wouldn’t see whites in Mauritius doing these jobs.

  “Let me show you around the kitchen so you get an idea of what’s involved,” the manager said. For the next fifteen minutes, he showed me giant freezers, meat mincers, meat slicers, bone-sawing machines, baking ovens, chopping blocks, fryers, and the assembly line for washing dishes, among other contrivances. They all seemed to be spewing steam or some kind of vapor. At the end of the tour, the various pieces of equipment were all jumbled up in my mind, pieces of shiny metal indistinguishable one from the other. The closest thing to this kitchen that I had seen back home was a sugar mill. This was an industrial operation, with noises and smells to kill one’s appetite. The sight of the heavy sweat dripping from those manning the machines was another antidote to a good appetite. No aromas of Mama’s kitchen here!

  At home, the stove was just a few bricks arranged in such a way that my mother could insert some dry wood logs, which she would light with a match and blow with the pookni. I never used that rudimentary stove, but I stood next to it whenever I smelled that Mama’s rotis and parathas were ready, so I could have a taste before dinner.

  “Can you be here tomorrow morning?” the manager asked.

  “What would I be doing?”

  “We’ll start you off on the dishwashing line.”

  I had been hoping for a clerical job, where my hands wouldn’t get dirty. My sookwaar hands.

  “Would you have a vacancy for a cashier, sir?” I asked.

  “You’re a healthy, able-bodied young man; you don’t need a desk job,” the manager said. “I take it you’ll be here tomorrow at 6 a.m.”

  I nodded. A nod that could mean either yes or no.

  On my way to Main Street to buy some discounted clothes at the Army-Navy store, I thought, I must find another job.

  But the university was giving me a scholarship, and the job was to supplement my stipend. I knew I should be grateful to them and not sound like Oliver Twist asking for more. Yale owed me nothing: I wasn’t American; I was an unknown student from an unknown country whom they selected over hundreds of deserving students from Asia, Africa, and so many poor nations. Nonetheless, it was hard to digest the thought, the notion of doing manual work. The whole purpose of my seeking a university education was to avoid the backbreaking work that my ancestors from India and my parents had to endure in the sugarcane plantations. Laborers toiled in the fields hoping to save enough for their children to get an education that would secure them an office job. Papa always said, “Better be a maharaja than his valet!”

  I spent the evening not on the books and articles assigned for next day’s classes but on developing a strategy. The Tuckers had told me about gurus from India who milked gullible young Americans with yoga and diluted Eastern mysticism. The son, Bill, showed me posters of a pear-shaped Indian teenager addressing college crowds and he advised me, surely in jest, to consider being a yogi as a part-time occupation. “You are way more handsome than this guy,” he said. “The girls will flock to you.”

  As I sat on the dorm bed, I cursed myself for not having listened to my father. He’d tried to initiate me to yoga, but I was recalcitrant to any form of physical exertion. As for yoga’s spiritual discipline, my atheism couldn’t stomach it, and Papa, caring more about my grades than my religious devotion, didn’t insist. Now, in New Haven, there was no way I could master the various physical forms of yoga in a week or two.

  “The philosophical wisdom is what Americans hunger for,” Bill had said. “The contortions, that’s not for everyone. It’s the spiritual message that Americans want to hear.”

  I could fake the spiritual part: I knew by heart the Vedic hymns sung at home and at weddings and funerals, and my knowledge of the Hindu Scriptures was relatively extensive. Before we left for the airport, my father had given me Saints and Sages, a book by his spiritual master in India, Swami Sivananda, whom he had never met but with whom he corresponded. That day, Papa also gifted me vibhuti. “Sent by the swami from his ashram in Rishikesh, at the foothills of the Himalayas,” Papa said proudly. I could apply that sacred ash on my forehead in the manner of the Indian gurus! Better still, I knew how to differentiate myself: the Indian gurus in America based their message on the god Vishnu and his avatar Krishna; I would ground mine on the all-encompassing god Shiva, the Supreme Yogi, the Lord of the Dance of Creation, the destroyer of demons, the god who is half woman, the god worshipped by Vishnu and the other gods. I would disabuse Americans of the notion that Shiva was only the god of destruction. While the other gurus would be singing “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna,” I would chant the mantra “Om Namah Shivaya.”

  That was my niche!

  I’d teach the Americans the joys of massaging the feet of the great Swami Vishnu Bhushan!

  The yogi-guru fantasy ended when I realized that I wouldn’t be able to sustain the untruth for long. Papa and Mama were hovering over my shoulders, unseen but watchful, and their soundless voices would prick my conscience. Sooner or later, I was afraid, the truth would spill out of my guts.

  I also had to face the fact that I didn’t sound like an Indian. I looked like one, but I didn’t have an Indian accent, not even a British one. In the four weeks I had been in the United States, not a single person had recognized it. In Mauritius, I spoke to my classmates in Kreol, read the daily newspapers and counted in French, studied chemistry and history in English, and greeted grandfathers and grandmothers in the countryside in faltering Bhojpuri. After all, my ancestors had left India more than a century ago.

  There was no way out of this predicament. I reviewed all that I had seen and heard since I landed in America. I delved into the American psyche, more specifically the American psyche on campus. Protests against the Vietnam War were raging throughout the country, and Yale was regarded as a left-wing, virtually pinko school. More than a few white Americans were feeling guilty not only about the war but also about the way they treated other cultures. The previous year, Yale welcomed a huge rally supporting Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, jailed on suspicion of murder; Yale president Kingman Brewster Jr. said he didn’t believe Black revolutionaries could get a fair trial anywhere in America. At a New Haven café I overheard undergraduates wondering why Yale didn’t have what its smaller rival nearby, Wesleyan University, offered: a Malcol
m X House, courses on American Indian music, and a highly-rated classical Indian music program, with some of the top exponents of the art hailing from India. Clearly, sensitivity to other, diverse cultures was important.

  The next morning, I was at the financial aid office. After thanking the financial aid officer profusely for giving me the “opportunity of a lifetime,” I told her that it would be very difficult for me to perform the tasks the dining room manager had in mind for me.

  “You see, madam, I’ve never done kitchen work before. My parents didn’t want me to.”

  “Oh! Why?”

  “Well, in our culture men don’t wash dishes.”

  She turned red but didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve never seen my father wash a glass. He didn’t even take the dishes to the kitchen. My mother wouldn’t let him.”

  Mystified, she asked me a question I thought I had already addressed. “Your mother never asked you to help in the kitchen?” she said.

  “Never, madam. The first time I boiled water, it was in the school chemistry lab.”

  She shifted in her chair. “We haven’t had a case like this before,” she said.

  “You know, I can help professors in the French department grade student papers. I’ve looked at the textbooks for sophomores and juniors; they are elementary, the kind of material we read in primary school at home. Even the model GRE exams in French don’t look that difficult.”

  I paused to let the information sink in.

  “I just completed a year of law at the French university in Madagascar. I came in first in the exams. I also taught French literature to third-year students in secondary school for a year.”

  I handed her a photocopy of the first-year syllabus at the Université Charles de Gaulle, a translation, and the letter from the dean congratulating me on my results.

  She pored over the syllabus and read some parts of the translation aloud.