Silent Winds, Dry Seas

by Vinod Busjeet

  His attitude changed to one of concern. He put his arm round my shoulders. Janet’s mom placed her knife and fork on her plate.

  “How did this happen?” she asked.

  “He served in the British colonial army during the Jewish and Arab uprisings,” I said. “He enlisted to earn a living and see the world.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I’d like to visit his grave someday.”

  “We’ll see to it that you go one day,” Janet’s dad said. “I know how it feels not to know where your kin’s resting place is. So many of our people were denied a resting place.”

  The rest of the evening, Mr. Peters showed me photos on the wall of his uncle, aunt, and cousin who died in Nazi camps, and related how Hitler’s troops had destroyed the Jewish heritage in his native country, with the Soviets finishing the job after the war. He told me of his escape from Lithuania. I felt like part of the family as he shared these sad memories with me, a helpless part who could offer little comfort except to listen and express horror at the barbarism of the occupiers.

  “We were from a family of rabbinic scholars,” he said. “My uncle and cousin must have died within a week of their arrival in the labor camps. They had never lifted a shovel in their lives.”

  I noticed that Mr. Peters had soft hands, too, softer than mine were now.

  “Let’s change the subject to something more uplifting,” he said. “The Torah and baseball.”

  I couldn’t see any connection between the American pastime and Moses. As he walked to the overloaded shelves on the wall and pulled out a book, I was afraid he would launch into what Professor Ghita, reflecting on his adolescent years, called “excruciating Talmudic exegesis.”

  “It’s a present,” he said as he gave it to me. “Light reading on the way to New Haven.” It was Chaim Potok’s coming-of-age novel The Chosen.

  “Dad, you should tell him about Stendhal,” Janet said. “Vishnu works for a Jewish professor who teaches French literature.”

  He went back to the overcrowded bookshelf and took out a photo album. He showed me a photo of an elegant house in Vilnius where the French novelist, who accompanied Napoleon, stayed during the disastrous retreat of the Emperor’s Grande Armée from Moscow. “My family lived in the street right behind,” he said. I didn’t know then that four decades later I would visit Stendhal’s house and have a photo taken on its front steps; it had become the proud seat of the French embassy, with a French bookstore on the ground floor. The Peterses’ ancestral home, however, was gone to make way for a public park. Dispirited, I sat on a bench in the park. I thought of Napoleon’s ragged soldiers struggling to keep warm and stay alive in their bivouacs on Vilnius Town Hall Square, a thousand feet away, and the Nazis marching through the city 130 years later, and mumbled to myself about the good luck of growing up on an island far from the maelstrom of world events.

  After dinner, I offered to help in the kitchen. “You wash dishes now?” Janet said with a smile. “You need rest. We have a busy day tomorrow.”

  The next morning she took me to Greenwich Village. “A bohemian neighborhood,” she said. I expected artists and writers, their gaunt bodies dressed in gypsy clothes. What I saw was shops selling drug paraphernalia and posters, mostly psychedelic. I had seen these in the dorms at Yale—where, at any party worth its name, the standard greeting at the door was the offer of a joint—but the selection in the Village was enormous. The most memorable poster was a black-and-white poster of President Nixon sitting on the toilet, trousers on the floor. I stood there wondering what would happen if the shopkeepers in Mauritius displayed such a poster of their rulers. Freedom of expression that was truly admirable! America, land of wonders!

  “Let’s go see the clowns and musicians in Washington Square,” Janet said.

  On the way, by Shakespeare’s, a pub-restaurant on MacDougal Street, about a dozen people stood, listening to a woman who sang to the accompaniment of a Black male guitarist. Suddenly a young Black man sprung out of nowhere and shouted, “What the fuck are you doing here, playing with a white bitch?” The couple froze. The latecomer strode up to them and punched the guitarist’s face. His guitar hit the pavement and his nose bled. The street, so merry with music, turned sad and empty as the couple hurried away.

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?” I asked Janet, my voice and body shaking. Back home in Mahébourg, I had witnessed more ferocious violence, but it involved fights between bellicose guys who were more or less equally matched or who were drunk. I hadn’t seen bullies knocking peaceful people to the street.

  “The police have bigger problems to deal with in this city,” Janet replied. “By the time they get here, everyone will be gone.”

  On the subway train, I told Janet about Tim’s views on his sister dating a Black man.

  “Is this sexual anxiety vis-à-vis the other race?” I asked.

  “It’s worse. It’s fear and loathing of those they regard as traitors to the race.”

  In the afternoon, after a pizza lunch where Janet and her brother tried to reassure me that I’d be okay in the city, Edward took me to Lincoln Center and treated me to a musical, “a uniquely American art form.” It was Man of La Mancha. I had read Don Quixote in secondary school, but I had never imagined it other than as a novel or film, never envisioned such a soulful rendering as the one I saw on the stage, its optimism so different from my recollection of the novel as being dark when I read it as an adolescent. When the hero launched into “To dream the impossible dream…to reach the unreachable star,” I thought he was singing my song, the song of everyone in the audience. I saw a New York different from the one in the morning and different from what the Canadian warned me against. It was a city that spoke to human aspirations, a city of hope against all odds.

  “Let’s walk to Times Square before it gets dark,” Edward told me.

  Brimming with the euphoria induced by Don Quixote’s immortal quest, I looked at the marquees above the theater entrances. It was a cornucopia. Shakespeare and Equus. Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Side by side with Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar was Oh! Calcutta!, its posters showing scenes of total nudity. Once again, true freedom of expression! The Canadian from Alberta was wrong.

  “New York City is the center of civilization, not Connecticut,” I told Edward.

  Edward took a deep breath and exhaled, and we walked some more.

  We came upon a theater where the neon lights were in the shape of cabaret nudes. On the front step stood a young Indian with the urbane mustache of Raj Kapoor, the leading Bombay film star. I hadn’t expected Indians in the United States to be working at a movie house; I thought of them as graduate students, doctors, engineers.

  “First time in New York?” he said.

  I nodded yes.

  “From India?”

  “No. Mauritius.”

  “I’ve heard great things about your island. You guys are quite advanced.”

  I whispered to Edward: “For once, someone is flattering my country!”

  I turned to the Indian. “We’re kind of…westernized. French and English influence. African, too.”

  “You must be more open-minded than Indians, then,” he said.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t met many Indians here.”

  “I’m Krishna. In America I’m Kris. Since it’s your first visit to New York, I have a free movie ticket for you and your American friend. The film started fifteen minutes ago, but you’ll still enjoy it. Go in; it will be my pleasure.”

  He had a refined accent, not the heavy Indian accent of the taxi drivers I met during my week in London.

  Edward and I looked at each other. “What do we lose?” we both said, simultaneously, with a shrug.

  The film was set in the Roman Empire, possibly in the reign of Caligula or Tiberius. For the next hour, the screen b
ared carnal permutations and combinations I had never thought of. I had seen the X-rated Primitive London and The Nights of Lucrezia Borgia at the Odeon Cinema in Mahébourg, but they were children’s movies by comparison. To say that I was indifferent or outraged in that Times Square movie house would be a big lie. I was seeing raw, uninhibited sex for the first time. For all our Western influence, premarital sex was taboo in Mauritius. You read Madame Bovary, saw Elvis romance Ann-Margret, even bought Playboy and Penthouse at outrageous prices, but you couldn’t touch a girl. Now was time to enjoy.

  “Edward, did you see such stuff before?”

  “Nope” he said. “Well, some, yes. But some stuff here was pretty far out.”

  At the door, Kris thanked us and hoped we’d enjoyed the movie. He asked if we were interested in being swingers.

  “My wife and I enjoy it, and we have a select circle of friends we share our pleasure with.”

  He took out his wallet and showed us a picture of his wife—a curvaceous brunette. Then a photo of a blonde, an East Asian, a Black American. “We’re all swingers. It would be great to have you join us. You look clean.”

  There was no man in his portfolio of swingers, which made me suspicious.

  “We’ll be back,” Edward said. “Thanks for the movie.”

  We walked towards the subway station. “Vishnu, further down the road you’ll meet the New York of your Canadian,” Edward said. “That Indian guy has no wife. He’s a pimp. The free movie was a bait to lure us in.”

  Tamby at the Rex Cinema, Kris at the Times Square movie house.

  Still, after the confinement of the kitchen in D.C., the beat and rhythm of Times Square were liberating. After a menacing start, I spent daylight in a twentieth-century Athens of playwrights and artists, and nighttime at a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. This city would have satisfied Kumar’s craving for the excitement and vibrant cultural life he experienced in Calcutta and his yearning for sexual freedom.

  The Tuckers would have seen the day differently: after a highbrow matinee at Lincoln Center, we washed away the culture with lowbrow trash.

  * * *

  —

  When I arrived on campus to start my last year, Professor Ghita was the first person I called. I had no savings left.

  “Would you have some extra hours of work for me? I can start tonight.”

  “What’s the rush? You should unwind before the first day of class. Come by—I’ve brought an excellent Château Haut-Brion from Paris.”

  The professor of music and his lover were also there. Professor Ghita and his wife spoke about their stimulating summer in Europe. “So refreshing after a year of endless TV drivel from Nixon,” he said. His wife talked about how Europeans now loathed America for the continuous napalm bombing of North Vietnam.

  As he poured more wine into the music professor’s glass, Professor Ghita said, “Vishnu here has just spent some time interning on Capitol Hill.”

  “How was it?” said the music professor. “In college I went for light manual jobs, moderately demanding ones that would develop my finger muscles. It helps in piano playing.”

  “Interesting perspective,” I said. “The first time I saw a piano, I was eleven, at school. In Mauritius, that’s for the super-rich.”

  Then I told them about my Sans Souci hubris and the karmic price I paid. I spread my hands out, pressing the parts that were now coarser.

  “You’ll get back your softer hands,” Professor Ghita’s wife said. “One day, you’ll thank Nancy Hansen for the experience.”

  Professor Ghita frowned. “You’re talking like those elites who want to keep people like Vishnu in their place. ‘You have to pay your dues,’ they say to the immigrants and the poor, ‘before you can join our club.’ Their kids don’t pay the dues; they get well-paid internships on Wall Street or go on culture tours in Tuscany.”

  * * *

  —

  Nine months after Sans Souci, I was in the dean’s office.

  “One of our trustees has asked us to identify someone they can train and send overseas. He is president of a bank that wants to expand in a big way. After eight years or so, the person selected could well be in the top tier of the bank’s management. Does that interest you, Vishnu?” the dean said.

  “I’m flattered. Thank you for thinking of me.”

  “You’re graduating with excellent grades. With your language abilities and intercultural skills, you would be a good fit.”

  When I told Professor Ghita about the prospect, he had a laugh that was part a chuckle of satisfaction, part the sarcasm of a Marxist. “La Haute Finance, hein! Tu vas devenir un grand bonhomme,” he said. “I’d be dismayed if you don’t turn out at least a millionaire.”

  A week later, in the early morning, I was at the headquarters of the Bank of Boston. The personnel officer, who had a limp, briefed me about the recruitment process. I would spend the morning in interviews with midlevel technical staff in various departments—accounting, economic research, retail banking, corporate banking—followed by lunch with the Director of Personnel. The staff did not expect me to know the details of banking and specific subject areas. Rather, they were looking “for a certain quality of mind and personality.” I didn’t know what that meant. When the personnel officer added that these qualities were hard to define, that what they meant varied from company to company, and even department to department, I thought there was no point trying to get a better handle on the term.

  By noon, I was interviewing on the fifth floor. The personnel officer who escorted me from floor to floor told me that was a good sign—I was making the grade with tougher and tougher interviewers. Everyone complimented me on my answers; the handshakes were getting firmer. Comments ranged from “You have a unique perspective on what’s going on” to “Your economics is sound.”

  When it was time for lunch, the personnel officer told me that the Senior VP of International Operations had freed himself from another engagement to join the Director of Personnel and me.

  The day had unfolded in a way that was almost too good to be true. But now the stakes were getting higher and I felt sweat in my armpits.

  Lunch was at Maison Robert. “The epitome of good French cuisine,” said the Director of Personnel. As I entered the formal dining room, I now saw—behind the imposing edifice, the charming demeanor of the maître d’, and the menu, listing dishes with sophisticated names—a team of unseen and unsung cooks, dishwashers, and floor cleaners whose underpaid work formed the foundation of the business.

  The senior VP, a lean man with unusually long sideburns for a banker, ordered the rack of lamb. I craved the calves’ brain (Voltaire’s mom made a delicious curry from it) but refrained; Americans get queasy when they see brains and innards on dinner plates. I went for the Dover sole.

  The senior VP inquired about my Senate internship. The tone was aggressive, bordering on rude. “Did you get to perform any task that went beyond filing and licking envelopes?”

  Georgie Espitalier-Noël, my secondary school teacher, came again to the rescue. I could hear him. “Grace under pressure” is how he passed his orals at Oxford.

  I managed a faint smile. “The administrative staff tried to dump the filing and envelope licking on me, but I went to the senator’s senior aide and told him about my one year of law studies and that I really wanted to learn how the American system functions. I said I needed more challenging work.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me that, for an intern, I was a hell of a ballsy kid.”

  “And?”

  “I apologized and I shut up.”

  The senior VP was looking at the way I held my knife and fork.

  “For how long did you shut up?” he said.

  “The next day, he asked me to suggest an assignment that could help his boss. I knew the issue of revenue sharing betwee
n the federal government and states was coming up, and I offered to research it.”

  The senior VP was inscrutable. I answered his questions about the Glass-Steagall Act and the rivalry between American and European multinationals, but I couldn’t guess what he thought of me. He turned to the Director of Personnel. “I’ll skip the coffee and leave you now. Give me a call when you’re done.”

  Half an hour or so later, the call was made.

  “The President wants to see you.”

  The President’s office overlooked Boston Harbor. Unlike those of his subordinates, it had no bookshelves. A few masks hung on the wall—ancient ritual masks from Africa, Brazil, Indonesia. His desk was clear except for a Montblanc pen next to a sheet of white paper. No files or dossiers. No briefcase.

  Everyone who had interviewed me so far wore pinstripe suits, mostly blue. The president dressed in solid charcoal gray. His only concessions to color were his gold cuff links and his red tie.

  When he rose to greet me, I felt there was something singular and extraordinary about him. The sobriety of his office suggested that he was someone who went straight to the essence of things, the core of the matter.

  He stood behind his desk as he spoke. “Vishnu, you come to us highly recommended. My colleagues think you have the intellect and personality for the job. You obviously can navigate your way pretty well across the world. Tell me something: why do you want this job?”

  I had been asked that question so many times since the morning that I made a determined effort to modulate my voice, so as not to sound robotic. I spoke of the intellectual stimulation, the opportunity to grow, to apply what I’d learnt, the wonderful things I had read about the Bank of Boston, and the pleasure of working with smart colleagues, and I emphasized that I was achievement-oriented.

  He walked out from behind his desk and sat in the chair next to me.

  “Indeed, Vishnu, all these speak in your favor. But why banking in particular? Why not manufacturing—say, like General Motors? Or IBM? Why not academia? Is there something in banking that’s especially attractive?”