* * *
Despite such declarations, I remained as celibate as Swami Vivekananda. But I was starting up a friendship with a woman named Jennifer.
While waiting for classes to begin, I landed a job at the university bookstore. My fellowship payment wasn’t going to start till a month and a half later. I had no money and I couldn’t ask my parents for anything more. After the airfare had been paid for, every additional demand for a purchase had been met with a look of panic on my poor mother’s face. I had overheard my father dramatically declaring to Lotan Mamaji that because my education was important they were resigned to getting by on eating bread with salt. This wasn’t entirely true, and he would never have said that in front of me, but I was aware that money was scarce. The bookstore paid very little—the job was classified as “work-study” and we didn’t make minimum wage—but I liked handling books. I told Jennifer, with only the slightest trace of uncertainty in my voice, that I was a poet. Jennifer had been employed there for years and was now in charge of the humanities section. She was tall and thin and she tied her long brown hair at the back in a ponytail. I guessed she was about ten years older than me but I could be wrong. I never asked her because I had been told it would be impolite. I learned that Jennifer had suffered a nervous breakdown on the night before her master’s exam and quit grad school. I was told this by our Zambian co-worker, who had also dropped out. His name was Godfrey, and everyone just called him God. He had worked in the bookstore beside Jennifer for years, and they both knew all the professors, some of whom had been their teachers long ago.
—It was very tragic, very tragic, God said about Jennifer, the vivid whites of his eyes expanding with a fine appreciation of horror.
He said Jennifer’s boyfriend used to bartend at a place downtown. He was killed in a motorcycle accident on FDR Drive late one night. She was riding behind him and her lover died in her arms.
This glimpse of a tragic past gave Jennifer’s life depth. But I was more immediately drawn to her clear skin and wondered what she smelled like. Jennifer dressed simply and while standing across from her on the stockroom floor I was conscious of the slope of her breasts under her pale cotton shirts. When I was alone, I imagined the white of her thighs inside her blue jeans. I had never seen a woman’s naked thighs before. Everyone at the bookstore liked Jennifer because she was smart and had read more widely than any of us. She was also kind to me. When I complained to her once that I didn’t want to go to the International Student social, she took me instead to a screening of Michael Moore’s documentary Roger & Me.
Moore wanted the chief of General Motors, Roger Smith, to come back to his Michigan hometown and meet the people who were losing their jobs. The film confirmed what I was already discovering about America. Poverty or homelessness wasn’t something I needed to associate only with India. Roger & Me explained the reality I had seen outside the university gates. Only a hundred yards from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where people with cameras stood in line to gain entry, I saw an old white woman walking along slowly with shit running down her swollen legs. A middle-aged woman passed me with her little girl. As she came close to the old woman, the mother covered her daughter’s eyes.
The film rescued me from my passivity. It made me think about the outside world but I was thinking also of Jennifer. I would have liked to kiss her as she lay naked in my arms; I also wanted her to see me as a man with a camera. Michael Moore was honest and funny even while he seemed to embody a shambling slovenliness. I aspired to be a witty raconteur, open about wanting to seduce Jennifer with sparkling essays about ordinary people dropped in the maw of late capitalism. But that probably wasn’t how Jennifer saw me. Near the checkout counter at the bookstore, there was a postcard stand and one day she picked up a card and called out to me.
—Is this you? She looked amused. She said, I recognized the hair.
I looked at the card. There was a sketch of a man sitting at a table, holding a mug, his eyes downcast. He had black curly hair. Below the sketch was a short story:
The waitress came over and took his order for iced tea. She did so without flirting at all, something that disappointed and depressed him.
—R. KEVIN MALER, “Counterfeit”
The story made me laugh, and though I was happy that I was the cause of Jennifer’s amusement, I knew she was being critical. Her remark made me feel shallow. I decided I would spend more time with her. And even after classes had started, and I no longer worked at the bookstore, I stopped by each Tuesday and Thursday to eat lunch with Jennifer.
—Kailash, have you ever gone apple picking?
When Jennifer put this question to me I explained that apples in India grew in the mountains, in Kashmir, or in hill stations like Shimla. I had never been north of Delhi.
—I am from the burning plains, I said to her melodramatically, and she smiled at me then, kindly, but with enough restraint to stop me from going further.
Jennifer was one of the few people who called me by my full name. In one of my classes, a fellow graduate student had given me a nickname. Although names were shortened in America, this wasn’t true in my case. My German friend Peter had begun calling me Kalashnikov instead of Kailash. It was a mouthful, but people were sufficiently amused and so he never gave up on the joke. Then someone shortened Kalashnikov to AK-47. On occasion, people called me AK or, sometimes, just 47.
On a Saturday morning, Jennifer rang the downstairs bell and called my name on the intercom. This was another thing about her; she never said her own name, even on the phone. This was a lesson to me in intimacy. You gave someone you loved a new name, or you uttered the name as if it were your own.
We left in her beaten-up blue Volvo, driving an hour or more north of the city. I had no idea that apples grew on short trees so close to the ground or that there were so many different varieties. We picked our apples and then bought cider doughnuts. I returned that evening with two paper sacks filled with fruit. When I bit into one and the sweet juice filled my mouth I immediately sat down to write a letter to my parents in Patna. I told them that my room smelled fresh and sweet. At least for the moment, I forgot my anxiety about money, forgot too the necessary practice of converting dollars into rupees, or weighing apples against the dwindling balance in the account book—will I again be nine or ninety dollars short at the end of the month? While I was writing the letter, my worries receded. Even my loneliness acquired a pleasant hue, the way objects appear to glow in the light of the setting sun. Earlier that day, I wrote, I had walked between the long rows of trees and I had plucked apples with my own hands. I talked about autumn and the way in which the leaves changed color in this country. I did not say anything about Jennifer.
The truth, Your Honor, is that the immigrant feels at home in guilt. How could I deny guilt and wrongdoing? I’m not talking only of the lies I had uttered when I applied for the visa, no, I’m aware at this moment only of the guilt of having abandoned my parents. A slippery slope, this. My father, my mother, my motherland, my mother tongue.
* * *
Hello, USA, 212-555-5826? That is how the telephone operator from India began. Yes, I shouted, yes. It appeared that the ocean that separated us was roaring in my ear. I switched to Hindi but the operator kept speaking English and then confirmed my name. Next, my father hurriedly greeted me, and asked me how I was, before giving the phone to my mother. These calls were expensive, I knew. When my parents requested the call, they would have paid for the first four minutes at the post office. After those minutes were up, the operator would break in to ask if we wanted to continue talking. This was only the second phone conversation with my parents. The first conversation had been about my having reached New York City.
—Why have you not written? No word for so many days.
—I have, I said to my mother. I did, just last night.
—Is it very cold there?
—No, no. I went to an apple orchard yesterday.
—We took a rickshaw and came
here to call you because I woke up from a dream…
She wouldn’t tell me what she had seen in her dream, and so I told her that the only reason I hadn’t written was my classes. I had been busy. I knew the cost of the call was prohibitive but felt secretly happy when my mother said, Extension, please.
They were going to visit my grandmother in the village for Diwali.
—Send her a postcard too, my mother said. You don’t need to write anything much. Just write, Mataji, I am well. Just four words and she will be happy.
My grandmother couldn’t read or write. She would have asked someone in the village, perhaps a kid walking back from school, to read my letter aloud to her. Or my cousins Deepak and Suneeta, if they weren’t stealing anything at that time from her garden or her granary. About once a month, I sent my grandmother a postcard. I would sit down to write and then imagine a school-going child reading out my words. To bring to the young student a sense of wonder I would add a line or two about life in America:
When it is midnight in India, it is the middle of the day here.
Even the people who collect garbage have their own truck.
You cannot travel in a train without a ticket.
To go from one part of the city to another, I use the train that runs underground.
When I cook, the supply of gas is just like water. It is delivered through a pipe connected to my stove. No standing in long lines here for gas cylinders.
* * *
It was a Saturday afternoon during the early fall of 1990. Jennifer and I took the subway down to Lincoln Center. The plan was that we would walk across Central Park and emerge on the other side near Hunter College. We were going to the Asia Society to see an exhibition of photographs by Raghu Rai. As we were coming out of the subway station at Lincoln Center, Jennifer caught sight of a sign that said: GANDHI WAS A GREAT AND CHARITABLE MAN. Beneath, in smaller type, were the words HOWEVER, HE COULD HAVE USED SOME WORK ON HIS TRICEPS. It was an advertisement for a gym. If you joined early, you could save $150.
I said to Jennifer that the Mahatma would have found the price of the packet a bit steep. But he would have liked the thriftiness of the early-membership plan. Jennifer asked if I was offended by the ad, but I said I wasn’t.
In India, Gandhi had been a face smiling from the walls of the decrepit offices in the small towns of Bihar. This use of his image for a New York City gym returned me to his different purpose, one that took the Mahatma out of the museum. This wasn’t unknown in India, it was just ignored by official pieties. This was the irreverent Gandhi of the Indian marketplace. Long live Gandhi Safety Match. Long live Bapu Mark Jute Bag. Long live Mahatma Brand Mustard Oil.
A poster with the arrow pointing down to the exhibition space had a quote from Raghu Rai: A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever. The exhibition, made up exclusively of black-and-white images, was in a long room in the basement of the building. Upon entering, our eyes fell on the photographs on the facing wall. These were pictures from the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal from six years ago. On the other walls were images that Rai had made in Delhi and Bombay. We went up to the Bhopal pictures first. There were three of them. One was the iconic image of the unknown child being buried, its eyes wide open, a hand covering the body with ash and rubble. There was a second picture of a child’s corpse. This was a girl. A piece of paper was pasted on her forehead, with her name, Leela, in Hindi, and also her father’s name, Dayaram. I hadn’t seen the third picture before. It showed a man on the deserted road outside the Union Carbide factory carrying a bundle on his shoulder. Jennifer took my hand in hers when I went closer to the picture to read the caption. Then I saw what she had already seen. What I had at first thought was a quilt or a heavy blanket was the man’s wife. A pair of stiff, naked feet protruded from under the paisley pattern of the dead woman’s sari.
The pictures from Delhi were on the wall to the right. In the center was a photograph of Indira Gandhi sitting in her office with her back to the camera. She was the prime minister at that time. A lone woman with about twenty men in white dhoti-kurtas, Nehru caps on their heads, all of them caught in poses of genuine servility. Another of a young swimmer, outlined against the sky, about to leap into the pond inside a sixteenth-century monument. In the background, in the far distance, the modern monuments, the tall skyscrapers in Connaught Place. My favorite image was one that Rai had shot from a rooftop in Old Delhi. The dome of Jama Masjid, its minarets, and the tops of other buildings formed the far horizon; dusk was creeping in, evident from the lights that had come on, and occupying the foreground but still far away, so that one didn’t seem to disturb the privacy of the act, was a woman in an illuminated room. It appeared that the call for the evening namaz had just come from the mosque. The tile work and the trellis formed a delicate pattern around her, while the woman herself, or what we saw of her, was bathed in white light. She had her head covered, her hands open in front of her in prayer.
Jennifer and I walked over to the Bombay pictures. These were new to me, a different order of urbanity. Two men reading newspapers, islands of serenity, while around them were the moving, blurry bodies of commuters at the Churchgate railway station. Women arguing at a fish market; a socialite sitting in her living room in front of a giant, expensive oil painting; men in crisp white holding dark briefcases near the Jehangir Art Gallery; dabba wallahs; workers building a skyscraper in Colaba. In this air-conditioned space in New York, you didn’t feel the heat in which the photos had been snapped; perhaps because Rai had made expert use of the flash, the pictures were so evenly lit, you seemed to have stepped into a land without shadows. Jennifer wasn’t saying anything, but as I’ve said, she had taken my hand in hers. I liked this. We stood in front of an image of thin-limbed boys playing a game of marbles in a backstreet. All around them were crumbling walls, tin roofs, and dirt, but Rai had caught the fluid movement of the boys and their extended limbs.
* * *
—
When I was in school in Patna, I wanted to be an artist because the placid expanse of the river Ganga close to my home, and sometimes a solitary boat with a dirty sail or a red pennant, looked beautiful and somehow easy to draw. It wasn’t easy, of course. But even my failures perhaps were teaching me how to see the world around me. I could be sitting in a crowded bus bringing me back from school and a voice running in my head would name the objects I saw being sold on the street, their colors, the look in the eyes of the sellers.
Jennifer and I were standing in front of a Raghu Rai photo of about a dozen buffalo feeding in a khatal (in Bihar and Bengal, khatal or khataal is the word for a cow pen) in Bombay. Hanging above the dark beasts, which were linked together by chains, and suspended from the roof of the shack were cots on which men sat or slept. Around them, from hooks and nails, dangled buckets for milk and also items of clothing. Small, cramped lives, but I was familiar from my childhood with what was shown here. I knew the smell of that khatal, the stink of animal waste and the hum and buzz of flies, and I knew I could speak the language used by those men sitting bare-chested near the buffalo. I turned to Jennifer.
—If I ever write a book, I want this picture on the cover. It will be called Migrants.
—It is an amazing picture, she said. There’s so much happening here.
* * *
Jennifer brought me sandwiches made of hummus and olives. I had never eaten this food before. We crossed the university quad and sat on the stone steps of the library. Just the previous week the weather had been chilly, and one night I had seen the glitter of raindrops on my window, but this day was unseasonably warm. Bright sunlight falling on the windows of the buildings and on the faces and limbs of students sprawled on the grass. The day felt a little like those days in India when the exams were over and you could sit out in the sun peeling an orange. Jennifer took off her blue sweater. She was wearing a T-shirt with thin black horizontal stripes. I studied the freckles on her pale arm and then I took off my jacket too.
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Immigrant, Montana Page 2