Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  —Last year on this very day, Jennifer said to me, I returned from a three-week trip to Nicaragua.

  —Nicaragua?

  —I went there with my friend Lee. We stayed with campesinos and worked on a farm and then on a small dam near Managua.

  This little detail produced a twinge of jealousy.

  —Is Lee a man?

  —Interesting question. Lee used to be a woman. Laura. She went to school with me. Then she decided she would prefer to be a man.

  New food, new knowledge.

  —Tell me something about your childhood, she said to me after a while.

  I didn’t have a story like the one about Lee. I found myself describing the red-bottomed monkeys outside Lotan Mamaji’s home, and then told her the story of the monkey finding my uncle’s gun and pointing it at my cousin in her crib. Jennifer wasn’t as surprised as I had hoped she’d be.

  —Kailash, what happened to your cousin, where is she now?

  That was all she wanted to know.

  She wouldn’t have thought it a very big deal, so I didn’t tell Jennifer that I couldn’t even make it to my cousin’s wedding. But I had felt guilty about it for years. I couldn’t tell her that in a photo I saw of the ceremony years later, the sign that the painter had put up outside, with a lotus flower and a colorful pot with a coconut on it, also contained a spelling mistake: RAJESH WETS SHALINI. So, instead, I told Jennifer about the summer afternoons when we were teenagers and my cousin would listen to sad Hindi songs on her radio: songs of unrequited love during those months when we waited for rain. In the blind alley below us, a cycle-rickshaw, the sun’s glare reflected off its metal rims. The rickshaw appeared defeated, skeletal, because it was now missing both a rider and a driver. With a gurgle, the water supply from the municipality would resume at three each afternoon. My cousin sighed when a favorite song of hers, from the film Guide, started playing. If we were lucky, there would be another sound—louder, more insistent, filled with greater yearning than any sound heard all afternoon—the call of the koel hiding in a mango tree. The heat left everyone lethargic, even stoic, but not this koel, who was unafraid to make a spectacle of his suffering. No, not just spectacle, he was making a song. Such unabashed glory, such art. Years later, in college in Delhi, I wrote a short poem about the koel and mailed it in a yellow envelope to Khushwant Singh. I was surprised when the old writer sent back a letter, praising the poem’s simplicity and my art, encouragement enough for me to wax poetic when, sitting on the steps of the library, Jennifer asked me what I missed most about India. That afternoon, I was only imitating the koel.

  The next day, she put a simple white card in the mailbox in my department. It had a haiku by the poet Bashō.

  Even when I am in Kyoto

  When I hear the call of the cuckoo

  I miss Kyoto

  To show my gratitude for her gift of lunch and the card, I gave Jennifer a packet of jasmine incense. It had sat unopened in the suitcase that I had brought with me from India. She put the roll up to her nose and thanked me sweetly, and then said that one day she’d have me come over to her apartment for dinner. That remark made me think that Jennifer liked me, and that maybe I ought to cook an Indian meal for her when the opportunity presented itself.

  The semester’s work took up my time. Once or twice, we went to campus events together. A Diwali festival organized by the South Asian students, chaat and spicy chana masala from a Bangladeshi restaurant close by, each plate costing three dollars. Pepsi and Sprite in small plastic cups for a quarter. The organizers asked everyone attending to pick rose petals from a plate and throw them at the plastic idols of Ram and Sita while they screamed “Happy Diwali.” One of the women, an undergrad from Jackson Heights wearing a salwar-kameez, went around putting red tikas on our foreheads. When I thanked her, she laughed nervously and said loudly that when we went back to our apartments the other students would say that we had ketchup on our foreheads.

  I talked to a couple of the Indian girls there, and I caught them looking at Jennifer while they spoke to me. During that first semester, there was at least one girl in my class whom I liked. Well, there were several I liked, but there was one in particular. I hadn’t spoken to her much. I would have found the prospect of talking to her daunting, but Jennifer was easier to be with. She had slipped down the social ladder when she dropped out of school. It made her approachable. Or maybe it was because she was older and lived frugally. Is that what I thought at the time? More than once, offhandedly, Jennifer had indicated that she found me good company, and I felt pleased, as if she had recognized a hidden part of me.

  One evening, we went to listen to Edward Said playing Bach piano concertos in the chapel. Jennifer had taken classes with the famous professor. I spotted two of my own professors there, including Ehsaan Ali, who had come with his wife, who was white. Western music was new to me but I saw that Jennifer was moved by it. I was in classes where Said’s writings were discussed and in the weeks to follow I would start to speak of my own identity in ways that were influenced by him, but on that night, the night of his performance, Jennifer introduced me to a new idea of music that had come to her from Said. This was during dinner at my apartment after the concert. We were eating the mattar paneer and biryani I had prepared for her, and she was speaking about music in an even, clear way, telling me about polyphony and counterpoint. This kind of talk made her at once more interesting and mysterious to me. If this were a movie, I imagine a montage of scenes, like this one, that introduced me to America—a discussion about Bach, the first taste of Mexican food, the first rock concert, lectures by the teachers I came to admire. And the footage of the first snowfall. The blue of the cold afternoon, and as if someone had cut the sound from the universe, snow drifting down in the stillness. When it stopped snowing, we went sledding down a hill in a park on the other side of Morningside Drive. This was a pleasing discovery, but even as I was riding down the slope on a sled I asked myself if what I had with Jennifer was love. Every week, I spent time with my other friends, those whom I saw in my classes. I didn’t discuss Jennifer with them. In the beginning at least, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

  But testaments to distant love were an entirely different matter, Your Honor. I was getting better and better at that. In a literature class that fall, my class presentation was about a poem that described Indian Fulbright scholars in Egypt coming across millennia-old mummies swathed in muslin from Calicut. What a surprising connection! The poem marked for me the discovery of India, and the extraordinary richness of its past. In that same class, I read about a young Sarojini Naidu, homesick and feverish with love in Cambridge, writing letter after letter to a doctor in the nizam’s army who would later become her husband. I imagined writing similar letters myself—even if my lover in India was nameless and faceless. Before the semester ended, I sent a letter to the editor of the student newspaper describing the previous night’s experience of attending a concert-performance by the tabla player Zakir Hussain. I had never loved India as much as I did now, when I was so far away.

  * * *

  The one activity that was perhaps the most stable part of my identity that first semester was the seminar I was taking with Ehsaan Ali. His class Colonial Encounters was held on Friday afternoons. The seminar participants required his special permission to join. I had heard that he brought red wine each week to his classes and you sat around discussing the day’s readings while sipping wine from small plastic cups. When the semester began, I went to Ehsaan’s office in Philosophy Hall to get his signature. Third floor, after the set of dual radiators, next to the notice board covered with announcements. The door was open and I saw that he was on the phone. With his right hand, he pointed to a chair. The tenor of the exchange suggested that he was being interviewed. Then it became clear that the interview was about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

  —Well, Bush has said that a line has been drawn in the sand. He claims that he has no dispute with the Iraqi people. His war is going to
be against Saddam. Do you believe the ordinary Iraqi, suffering in her home or in a hospital, is going to think our president is being honest? No, let me explain…

  While he was speaking on the phone, he was looking directly at me, and I found myself nodding. The window was open behind him and on the wall to his right was a framed poster for The Battle of Algiers. I had watched the film, when I was in my teens, in Pragati Maidan in Delhi. The poster’s background showed grainy black-and-white warren-like homes in the qasba, and leaning into the frame from the sides were the Algerian Ali La Pointe on the left, and on the right, the French military colonel Mathieu.

  The film’s director, Gillo Pontecorvo, had sought out Ehsaan when making the film. Pontecorvo had arrived in Algeria with his screenplay but accidentally left it on the top of a car. Parts of the screenplay soon appeared in a right-wing paper. So Pontecorvo recast the story, basing it on interviews with revolutionaries: a fiction written under the dictatorship of facts. Ehsaan was in Algeria then and became one of his advisers. Except that the student who told me all this, a thin, saturnine man from Gujarat, was not a credible source. He would even have put Ehsaan in the film as the main actor, a man from a scrappy background emerging, not without charisma but mainly due to the pressure of history, into the forefront of a glorious struggle. Truth be told, I wasn’t too far from holding the same view myself.

  * * *

  —

  Ehsaan was a man born in a village not too far from mine. He migrated to Pakistan during the bloody Partition, and later came to America on a scholarship. Awarded a doctorate at Princeton, he toured the globe and made friends with Third World leaders, especially in Africa. He had been tried for having conspired in a plot to kidnap Kissinger! How could I not look up to him? He was our hero—and thus, all heroic. He had crossed boundaries. He was a man who was without a nation, and a friend to the oppressed peoples of the world.*2 When Ehsaan died, in 1999, after a battle with cancer, Kofi Annan would pay tribute at his funeral. But all this was still in the future. Even the immediate deaths in Iraq were far away. Two days after the cease-fire went into effect, planes from the USS Ranger bombed and strafed thousands of Iraqi fighters fleeing in their vehicles. That road came to be called the Highway of Death. How did the men die? I would know the answer when a photograph was published many months later, showing an Iraqi soldier burned alive while reaching out of his truck. But on the day that I met Ehsaan for the first time, this massacre had not yet taken place. The Iraqi soldier was still sitting on a chair outside the barracks listening to music or to the excited report of horses galloping around the old racetrack in Baghdad.

  * * *

  —

  —You can do the math, yes? Clearly, some kids can die to make us feel safer. And the tragedy is doubled because we are not going to be safe…Listen, I have a student waiting to see me. I have to go. But if you have any questions about what I have said, call me back. I’ll be here till four.

  Without saying anything, Ehsaan reached out and took the yellow form that I was holding in my hand. He quickly signed it and then leaned back in his chair.

  —Where were you born?

  —India.

  —That is obvious. Where in India? My guess is Uttar Pradesh.

  —Next door, sir, in Bihar.

  —A fellow Bihari. I was born near Bodh Gaya.

  He was grinning when he said this. I smiled too but I didn’t want to tell Ehsaan that I already knew a lot about him. There was a reason for my silence. I had read in an interview that as a boy Ehsaan had witnessed his father’s murder. This was several years before Ehsaan left for Pakistan, traveling alone in a column of refugees. He was only five and lying in bed next to his father when his father’s cousin and his sons came in with knives. Ehsaan’s father knew they were going to kill him, but he covered the child’s body with his own. I didn’t want to acknowledge my awareness of the sadness in Ehsaan’s past. I didn’t know then that, as the weeks turned into months, and then into years, the details of Ehsaan’s life would become a part of my life and the life of a woman I loved.

  * * *

  One night Jennifer called me to ask if I’d go ice-skating. She said that we could rent skates at the rink. Back in Patna, I had learned to use roller skates on the smooth straight road, lined with gulmohar trees, that led to Governor House. Ice-skating required a different kind of movement and control. I held Jennifer’s hand and skated around, following her instruction that we sketch a figure eight on the ice. Jennifer was wearing a woolen hat, and so was I. We wore scarves. The hands that we extended toward each other were gloved. Just then a tight group of men wearing fluorescent suits winged by like a flock of geese. I gave chase, hamming it up, and inevitably, stumbled and fell. I was laughing, and Jennifer was too, and when I was back on my feet with her help, I kissed her, first on the cheek and then, my gloved right hand cupping the back of her head, on her lips. It seemed the most natural act in the world, and yet it filled me with intolerable excitement. We skated for a while longer on the hard ice, and as we went in widening circles under the night sky surrounded by the lights of the city, I felt a euphoria that made me weightless and lifted me to the stars.

  —Are you in a hurry to get home? Jennifer asked this question on the subway.

  —No, no, I have nothing to do. The effort required, Your Honor, to not sound overexcited and instead only a bit bored.

  When I tasted the scotch in Jennifer’s apartment, I imagined that her mouth too would soon offer the same taste to my tongue. Yet she didn’t kiss me. Saturday Night Live was on, with Dana Carvey imitating President Bush. I kept my eye on the television and then, weak from waiting for something to happen, I stretched out on the futon. Jennifer came closer to me and, leaning down, unbuckled my belt and smiled through sleepy eyes. Then she took me in her mouth. I hardly dared look down at her head, and even less at her parted lips and her tongue. I didn’t dare to look, yes, but I did, amazed. Her eyes were closed. I stared at her open mouth and at my cock in her hand. Could she sense that I was looking? I jerked my eyes away, noticing on the side table a new book by Geoffrey Wolff that I had seen at the bookstore, and the glass of scotch beside it, and further away, beside the door, the dark stain of melted snow where Jennifer had taken off her leather boots. For weeks I had asked myself if the two of us would have sex. It had often seemed possible, at least in my fantasies, and then not. Now it really had happened—I wanted to be able to tell someone and didn’t know whom. That’s what I thought when I looked down at Jennifer’s head again, her hair golden and shiny except for four or five, I didn’t count them, gray hairs, her body close to me but also distant in my mind, removed far enough to allow me to compose an excited report from the front. And then none of these thoughts mattered.

  Before I left India for America, one of my friends made me promise that as soon as I had finally fucked someone, I would send a postcard saying, I have eaten cherry. I had mailed the postcard after only my second week in the country, as a joke, laughing to myself. Now I wished I had waited.

  * * *

  Jennifer would shop at a co-op close to her house, buying half a dozen kinds of tea. Peppermint tea, green tea, and also black tea with chocolate or blood orange, the more austere Sencha, the cloying and unpalatable cinnamon spice, the smoky flavor of Lapsang souchong, which I came to prize. She would get me to try foods that she thought I would like. Pasta, baby corn with lemon juice and tarragon, roasted leg of lamb without the spices I was accustomed to, or shrimp sautéed lightly and served with chopped scallion. One afternoon, in the green plastic basket, she also added a strip of condoms. I recognized the brand; Jennifer kept a similar strip under her mattress and reached for it on days that were marked with an X on her wall calendar. I had never bought condoms in my life. The woman at the counter didn’t even look up when she rang up the condoms, a bar of Kiss My Face soap, a candle, celery sticks, a cucumber, a bottle of tomato sauce, and a packet of ravioli. In Jennifer’s apartment, I learned to enjoy tea from China and
South Africa and Malaysia; I liked sitting on her rocking chair, which I would drag into a rectangle of sunlight; I spent afternoons reading books from her shelves, writers like Jean Genet and Angela Carter, whom I hadn’t encountered before. She had a black cat and this was new too, stroking the cat as it lay on the wooden floor. I discovered that Jennifer had played the piano since she was a child, and gave lessons to little kids on the weekends. Young mothers, who appeared to be of Jennifer’s age, brought their children to the apartment. When they saw me, they hesitated at the door, hands resting nervously on their children.

  The inquiring gazes of those women at the door made me ask myself the question, Are we now an item? This was a phrase that I had recently acquired; the words appeared strange to me. And also the sentiment. The truth was that even at the end of the summer, although I hadn’t told anyone at the bookstore that we spent time with each other, people had noticed. Often, I would be asked where Jennifer was, or what time she was coming to work. Jennifer hadn’t changed her behavior with me—or she had changed it in ways that only I noticed. I was content with this; I didn’t want anything more at that time. There was an imbalance in our histories. I felt she had lived a full life and I hadn’t; I had only begun to experience life, which is to say, sexual life. If I were living in Patna, I’d have immediately thought of marriage, but not here. Here, just a few months into my stay in America, I was finally leading a fuller existence. I understood that this newness couldn’t be shared with those I had left behind. I couldn’t imagine writing and telling my friends in Delhi, those who had sat laughing and hooting in the dorm only a few months ago, that I was sleeping with Jennifer. At least I couldn’t tell them anything about her that wouldn’t appear a betrayal. The reverse was also true. Was there any way of introducing my friends from Delhi into my conversations with Jennifer without turning them into sex-obsessed hooligans? Twenty-year-olds who looked at women and acted like the two adolescents I was later to watch on American TV, Beavis and Butt-Head. It was easier to keep the worlds apart, even if doing so meant seeing myself as split or divided. I was already learning that I was moving away from my parents; their world now seemed so different from mine. I wrote them fewer letters. My classes, everything I was learning, made up my new reality. Except that one day I looked in the mirror and felt the sudden clutch of vertigo. I saw a future in which Jennifer and I would be married, living in a small town maybe in Ohio, where I’d find a job teaching at a college while trying to write on the weekends. During family holidays we would drive to her parents’ home and each year someone would look at me and repeat the joke about Indians coming to Thanksgiving. We would return home the next day, the road winding endlessly into the future. Were there hills in Ohio? I felt I was rising and sinking with each passing breath. Then I realized that the mirror was moving. The wind made the sound a kite makes when struggling to get off the ground. When I looked outside through the grimy bathroom window I saw that the few leaves left on the branches of the trees outside were in danger of being swept away. I was safe in my apartment, and there was no immediate peril of any sort, but I was overcome by a feeling that took root then and has never left me, the feeling that in this land that was someone else’s country, I did not have a place to stand.