Your Honor, believing flirtatiousness to be foreign to Cai Yan, I spoke in an earnest manner. The gates didn’t open. No one can keep the foreign away, or not for long, but Cai Yan was untouchable. Although she smiled she didn’t seem to admit the thought that I was trying to seduce her. I stood, a stranger, a supplicant, a homeless alien, at the gates of an implacable continent. I saw her as if at a huge distance, standing alone at the end of a long road.
—I don’t think anyone says things like that. People just know.
Which, of course, left me not knowing much. Nothing troubled Cai Yan’s serenity. She still spoke with a half smile. While I waited, she remarked that she was making such swift progress, she must keep grading papers. I left her at my desk and went away to read in bed.
Cai Yan finished all her grading work in the evening and announced that she was going to step out for an hour. She didn’t give any reason why she was going to come back to my apartment. When she returned, she was carrying two heavy grocery bags. She had brought beer and also pork and shrimp for homemade dumplings.*3 We drank beer and after I had chopped cabbage, chives, and ginger, Cai Yan mixed them with the pork and shrimp that she then put on rows of dumpling wrappers. The smell of sesame oil filled the apartment. Soon it was time to eat. The dumplings were delicious. They were first dipped in ponzu sauce and we sprinkled scallion on them before popping them in our mouths.
I didn’t think anyone else in the entire apartment building could be having better food that evening. It was a date, I felt it. To make conversation, I said that I was ashamed that I had done so little work all week. This is the kind of thing all graduate students say. But Cai Yan paused. She wanted to know if I had ever felt shame.
Real shame?
I thought of the time I was caught stealing two books from the book fair in Delhi. I thought about that incident but didn’t allude to it. Cai Yan was looking at me without any impatience or, for that matter, heightened expectation.
Then I remembered lying to my parents about my exam results when I was in high school. I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done till my mother found out. There was also the shame of not having gone to see my friend when his father died. I was in my first year of college. My friend was someone I hung out with often, but I had never been to his house before, and I used this as an excuse to stay away. But it hurt when I saw him at the tea stall in Patna. He was standing there, his head shaven, and I had said nothing. Yes, it wasn’t that I hadn’t gone to his house. Instead, it was the fact that I hadn’t had the courage or grace to offer condolences to a friend who had lost his father. I was ashamed also when a teacher I liked in school saw that I was cheating and turned his head away to give me a chance to hide my notes. All these incidents came back to me, but again, I didn’t offer them to Cai Yan.
My silence didn’t appear to disturb her.
—I was ashamed, Cai Yan said, when my cousin’s husband called me on my phone and asked me to meet him. He was a doctor in Shanghai. I had just finished high school. He said he didn’t love my cousin anymore. When I didn’t say anything, he said, I mean it, I don’t even like her smell. I would like to take you out for a drive. I have bought a new car and when I bought it I told myself that I want to take my dear cousin-in-law Cai Yan for a drive. I know a place about an hour away where we can have a special lunch and then take a walk in a garden. There are luxury cabins beside a lake if we want to rest. When he was saying these things, I said nothing. At a birthday party some weeks later, he pressed my breast and I felt I was going to vomit over his hand. I told my cousin what had happened. She slapped me on my left cheek but after that her husband never came near me.
I sipped my beer while Cai Yan spoke. She spoke matter-of-factly, with her mysterious half smile, as if she was amused by what she was saying. When she stopped, I began talking, perhaps because I didn’t know how best to respond to her.
I recalled a half-forgotten incident from the time when I was a teen and my family had gone on a trip to Gujarat. I have repressed the name of the small town we were visiting. We had arrived at an old stone monument and looked around first for a bathroom. There wasn’t one. Then we climbed up the medieval monument, several floors of narrow stairs, and arrived at the top. My mother said she was helpless. She continued to apologize before I understood that she needed to urinate. I told her to use a corner of the room while I stood on the staircase blocking access. Where was my father? I think he had climbed down already. My sisters were with me. Ma chose to relieve herself near a small drain hole in the corner. But this was a mistake. When we came down, it became clear that the men below, those who sold entry tickets to the monument and also manned the tea shop, knew what had happened. Did I turn back and look up at the large wet patch visible on the wall high above? Perhaps that was the first sign. I remember clearly what the men were saying and without looking at her I tried to imagine the confusion and shame on my mother’s face.
We talked like this that night and several other nights. I slept on the couch in Cai Yan’s apartment; on one of those nights I said to her that we needn’t sleep apart, we could share the bed, but it was as if I hadn’t spoken at all. Her expression didn’t change. She retained her serene half smile and brought me a pillow and a blanket where I was sitting on the couch. I had begun enjoying these nights, finding comfort in the acceptance of a near intimacy. One night, a cat was in her apartment. The cat was named Frida Kahlo and belonged to Maya, who had gone out of town for the week. Late that night, I lay on Cai Yan’s couch watching television. The PBS station was showing a documentary on Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who died in the Challenger disaster. Cai Yan had already gone to sleep in the bedroom. The cat was with her. When the shuttle had burst into flames, I was in high school in Patna, but I had watched on television McAuliffe’s students counting down five-four-three-two-one. Their teacher lived for seventy-three more seconds.
When the documentary ended, I realized that I had probably never watched the footage of the kids: we didn’t have a television in Patna. It is possible I had read about it in the newspaper. McAuliffe had taken with her on the flight an apple that her students had given her. That is how I learned about this custom in America. The scene stayed with me. As well as what Ronald Reagan had said to the schoolchildren, using words that I later found out were borrowed from a World War II poet: We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. I went to sleep thinking that when I had read about the disaster I hadn’t foreseen the trip to America and my life as a student in New York City. There was no way I could have imagined or expected the experiences I was going to have. This moment in Cai Yan’s apartment, and all the moments that had preceded it during the past three years, was alien to me. There was nothing that connected them to what I had known in Patna or the years I’d spent in college in Delhi. On those days when I sat in the university library, reading The Times of India or The Statesman, which arrived from India a week or sometimes a fortnight later, I allowed self-pity to take root in me like an affliction. Sachin Tendulkar had scored a big century against England in Chennai, but by the time I read about it the next Test match in Mumbai was already over and India had won the series 3–0. Weddings and deaths happened at a distance, and the distance was also inscribed in time. Which is to say, if you’ll indulge me for a drowsy minute, I had often felt as if I had been sent into space.
Sometime during the night, Cai Yan touched my shoulder and woke me up.
—Frida is impossible, she said. She is keeping me up. I’m going to put her here and close the door. You come and sleep in the bedroom.
Who was Frida? As I stumbled into the bed I remembered the cat that Cai Yan was looking after and then I promptly fell asleep. When I woke up again, it was still dark and I became conscious that I had my arm around Cai. This thrilled me. I brought my face closer to her hair. The familiar smell of ginger was mixed with something el
se. I moved closer to her and felt her push her ass against me in her sleep. My heart was beating wildly, and I was certain that this hammering would wake her up. I put my hand on her breast. Was Cai awake? She was. She turned toward me in the dark and allowed me to press my lips on hers.
The next morning she acted as if nothing had happened. She didn’t talk about it and I didn’t either, but it was impossible to go back. In September, I returned from a three-day visit to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Cai was very interested in my photocopied letters of Indian radicals and also the newspaper reports of Chatto’s interrogation in Berlin. I read to her from a memorandum sent by the U.S. acting secretary of state on May 27, 1916, to the U.S. attorney general (with reference to the so-called Indian Revolutionary Movement in the United States) while reclining on her couch. I felt her toe on my feet and, since she didn’t move it away, I slid my foot along the length of her shin. Then I put my hand there.
—Shin, I said. Is that the only part of the body that sounds Chinese?
—There’s also chin, she said.
I kissed her chin.
—Tung, I said.
And sucked her mouth.
That was the first time we fucked.
October 8. Maya made pakoras using green chilies and invited Cai to her apartment. She told Cai that I was welcome too. Her apartment was on the next street and we took a bottle of wine with us. Peter wasn’t there. Maya said that he had bought a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov and had told her before leaving for a café in the morning that he wouldn’t come back till he had finished reading the remaining four hundred and fifty pages. Cai told me later that Maya had confided in her that Peter was depressed and advised to take “a ton of medication.” Maya had spoken to Peter’s mom in Germany. The mom simply said that she was dealing with the same problem. Peter’s father, she said, “only liked his black dog.” When I came back to my apartment with Cai that night, I saw that there was a letter for me from Patna. The handwriting on the blue aerogram looked vaguely familiar. It was a cousin on my mother’s side called Pappu writing to inform me about Lotan Mamaji’s death. Written in Hindi, the letter began: It is with great sorrow that I’m writing to inform you…The third line said that it had been a matter of great hurt in the family that Lotan Mamaji had died under most unfortunate circumstances. What the hell did Pappu mean? By the time I reached the end of the letter I had concluded that Mamaji hadn’t died alone. Along with him, because of whatever circumstances Pappu had hinted at, Lotan Mamaji’s adopted son, Mahesh, had also passed away. Several months would go by before I learned the truth: Lotan Mamaji had been murdered by Mahesh.
Mahesh was in his teens when Mamaji adopted him. He was the son of the woman who was Mamaji’s mistress in Dhanbad. This is what Pappu had meant in his letter when he described the “twofold loss”: Mamaji was dead and Mahesh was in prison. My sister told me when I was on a visit to Patna that Mahesh had tied Mamaji in a chair and then tortured him, asking him to sign over some property. Mamaji had signed the legal forms readily enough, but Mahesh wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to avenge the humiliations of his past. How much more does certainty seem to lie at the tip of a steel knife than it does in rumors about your parentage!
But when I had first received news of Lotan Mamaji’s death, the letter, which I also translated for Cai, was a puzzle. There was no way of unlocking the mystery of the death that night. So long ago, it seemed, I had told Jennifer about the monkeys on Lotan Mamaji’s balcony. The story of the monkey’s suicide. It was a story from my infancy in Ara. In later years, of course, I had spun that personal story into a broader narrative. Monkeys as metaphors for migration. The poor monkeys found electrocuted near the Hanuman Mandir in Connaught Place had lost their natural habitat. The modern-day menace of marauding monkeys, reported by Indian newspapers fond of alliteration, had to do with urban expansion and destruction of forests. That’s what I had originally thought. Then came the discovery that another important reason was the massive annual export of young male monkeys right up to the 1980s. The monkeys from Indian forests were living and dying in American labs. This story rescued the monkeys of my childhood from where they were stranded in nostalgia; they were now swinging from branch to branch on the tree of history.
One newspaper reported the request made in March 1955 by India’s finance minister that senior officials in the United States please explain why the monkeys were needed from India. The Indian government had earlier been told that the monkeys were needed for scientific research on infantile paralysis and for the production of polio vaccines. Was there any reason to doubt this claim? The report doesn’t say. Another account mentions that the Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai banned the export of monkeys in 1978 because the Americans had violated their promise that the monkeys would be used only for medical research. Desai had cause to suspect that they were being put to military use to test defense systems and new weaponry. NASA’s public records indicate that on June 11, 1948, a V-2 Blossom launched into space from White Sands, New Mexico, carried Albert I, a rhesus monkey. On June 14, 1949, Albert II was sent into space, gaining an altitude of eighty-three miles. Upon return, the monkey died on impact. On December 8, 1949, the last V-2 monkey flight was launched at White Sands. On this occasion the passenger was Albert IV. “It was a successful flight, with no ill effects on the monkey until impact, when it died.” In September 1951, a monkey named Yorick was sent into space and survived.
While reading about them I told myself that if I had at all been using the monkeys for autobiographical purposes I needed to stop and take note of the fact that they went further than I ever did. An adult monkey has the intelligence of a two-year-old human, and when zipped into its suit, locked in a metal case, its confusion and, if I can use this word, its courage must have been extraordinary. The NASA site notes that without the use of these animals in the early days of space testing in both the USA and USSR, there could have been great loss of human life. These animals performed a service to their respective countries that no human could or would have performed.
Was there a link between Indians and monkeys? The Republicans think so. In 2006 a Virginia senator named George Allen called an Indian-American youth a macaca. Allen was on the campaign trail and the teen he called macaca was working for his Democratic opponent. At his rally, Allen drew his supporters’ attention to the young man, “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world…”
Then he began to talk about the war on terror.
I was only nine months old at the time of the monkey’s suicide, and when I returned to Lotan Mamaji’s house a few years later the monkeys were still there, removing and eating what my young cousin said were lice from each other’s hair. Beneath the tamarind tree’s branches the mohalla’s pigs rested like sacks of rotting wheat. They were actually black in color but were often coated with the dry brown mud of my birthplace. That summer I was quite taken with the pigs because they appeared in their loose packs, incessantly grunting, beneath the hole in the toilet, a wooden board placed a few feet above the ground, pushing their snouts inside the buckets under us.
I was already fifteen when, lying drunk on a mattress where I would find him the next morning sleeping in his own shit, Mamaji laughed at the old memory of my surprise at the sudden appearance of the pigs. The tears from his small eyes mixed with the red juice of the paan that bled from his mouth. We had come as members of the baraat party of the bridegroom for a marriage in a village called Garhi. It was about four hours’ drive from Ara. Our hosts had made available the one large hall that was all there was to the village high school; sixty men were to eat and sleep and while away our time for the next two days in that room, surrounded on three sides by the monsoon rains, which had filled the village with water and the unrelenting croaking of bullfrogs.
Earlier that evening, I had watched Lotan Mamaji take out the moist bundle of hundred-rupee notes from under his sweat-drenched kurta and offer them, one at a time, to th
e dancer who had been brought from Calcutta for twenty thousand rupees. The elderly men from the district’s landowning families had at last been able to watch live the dances first performed by Meena Kumari in Pakeezah a few months before she died of alcohol overdose. The village had no electricity, but a loud fuel-powered generator had been hired and brought from Ara. It lit three large bulbs, which attracted millions of moths and more than two hundred villagers. The dancer didn’t seem mindful of the rivulets of sweat flowing down her front and back. Mamaji was lying on a thin mattress, leaning on his left elbow, his back propped by a pillow. In his right hand, he held a glass of Ambassador whiskey, which he would repeatedly refill. Whenever the dancer came close, he would set the glass down and grasp at her bangle-laden arm. If she lingered within reach or sat down in front of him, he would put a hand on her waist or push money down her blouse. Every time that she bowed and salaamed, he smiled at her and touched his mustache like a villain in a Hindi film.
During one performance, Mamaji allowed the woman to put in his mouth a paan that she had herself folded in front of him, placing a clove and a cardamom on the betel leaf with a show of delicacy. When she sat that close, she looked different. I saw the paint on her face and how sweat streaked the makeup on her cheeks. She had a hairy mole above her upper lip.
When the dance was over, a heavyset young man who had sat close to us through the whole evening helped carry Lotan Mamaji to the high school hall. The room was still bare even an hour after midnight except for an old man coughing in his sleep in the corner. Mamaji opened his eyes when I had settled his head on a pillow. He looked at the young man who was still standing next to me and then asked me if everything was okay. Then he drew out his .38 and pushed its barrel into my palm.
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