by Antani, Jay
With all of us now on the phone, my father told us he’d accepted a job, the project director position at some newly founded, big-deal national space and physics research lab in Ahmedabad, India. Ahmedabad. India. There was a charge to his voice.
“They offered it to you?” my mother asked, sounding elated. “I thought they weren’t going to finalize anything for months.”
“Funding clearance was fast-tracked,” my father replied. “I just got off the phone with them. They offered me the job just now, officially.”
He went on to tell us that, at the end of the school year, we’d be packing up and moving back to India. That it would do us all some good, reconnecting with family and with our roots, and that it was a high-level post he’d been offered. He sounded like this was his big break, the one he’d been after for years.
I was glad he was so thrilled, but I felt myself shut down inside, go numb. From the familiar way my parents spoke about it, it was obvious that this job, the possibility of moving back to India, had been on their minds for a while now, the subject of many private conversations.
“How long?” I asked him.
“Long-term,” he told me. “It’s a permanent post, Vikram. We wrap up everything at the end of the school year, and then you can start college in Ahmedabad.”
“Long-term,” I heard myself say. “You mean we’re not coming back?”
“When do we come back?” Anand asked, his voice distant, confused.
“In the future, Anand, you may decide to come back,” my father said. “That’s up to you. But this job is long-term.”
My mother said something. I wasn’t paying attention. Then I heard my father say, “Vikram, I want to assure you and Anand on this point. Your education will not suffer. There are many good colleges there—science, commerce, even a design school that’s one of the best, depending on what you want to study. And for Anand, very good private schools. I’ll arrange everything.”
“Did they say about housing?” my mother asked.
“Bungalow right there in Navarangpura, central Ahmedabad. Close to schools, market, and we should also have car and driver, everything provided.”
A shadow fell over me as my father talked. It loomed over the months and the years ahead. It was as if someone took an oil painting, still unfinished, the artist still perfecting his brush strokes, and dumped a can of black paint over it, smeared fingers across it.
While my parents’ voices droned over the line, I put down the receiver and sat back at my desk. I had the feeling of being on the verge of something. A chasm.
And I felt sick staring down into it.
5
S ooner or later, the moment had to come to sign up for college.
My father and I pulled up in a motor rickshaw in front of the drab cement building with the words “St. Xavier’s College of Arts & Science”—written in English and Gujarati—across the front of it. Clusters of students milled about the college’s front gate.
With a folder containing my high-school transcript and grade reports in one hand, I followed my father out of the rickshaw, breathing in the smell of rain-washed asphalt and kerosene.
I took in a view of the place, the place I would have to call college from now on—a cheerless gray building edged with greenery, streaked with soot and mildew.
Off to one side of the building stood a large shed where bicycles and scooters hunched together, sheltered from the dark, brewing sky. Hero Honda motorcycles and Marutis—tiny hatchbacks that I’d seen competing for road space around the city—clustered together in front of the shed.
We weaved past a few students through the front gate and followed a gravelly path toward the college building. Our feet crunched against the earth as we stepped carefully over tire tracks shining with brown water.
Boys in slacks and short-sleeve shirts lingered together, a few in flip-flops, their hair pomaded. The girls flowed by in twos and threes with long black hair pigtailed or braided, all chattering in their salwaar kameez dresses, gold and purple. Long sheer scarves trailed like streamers from their shoulders. Would Nate or Karl think any of them were pretty?
Up a few steps, we entered the mouth of the building—an open entranceway leading into a lobby lit only by the in-pouring daylight. It echoed with the sounds of students, gathered in front of glassed-in cases on either side of the lobby. The cases contained message boards pinned up with various typed or handwritten lists, a shelf of plaques and trophies.
At the other end of the lobby, we climbed a wide set of steps up to the building’s upper floor and made for a door with “COLLEGE OFFICE” printed on a shingle above it.
The college office was a large bullpen where clerks milled about the aging furniture and filing cabinets piled high with paperwork, everything withered and flyblown. The scent of sandalwood and coconut oil laced with sweat wafted in lazy drafts under ceiling fans. In a meek, lilting voice, a student at the front desk was making an effort to explain something to a small clerk, fortyish, with graying, severely parted hair. The clerk had a ferret-like face and wore a pair of oversized, gold-rimmed glasses.
Along the nearest wall was a lineup of photographs—a kind of hall of fame of college principals. I scanned the photos till I came to the last one, a color photo of the current principal. The photo showed a pair of pig eyes obscured by dark spectacles, a downturned mouth tucked between thick jowls, the whole head topped by silvery hair greased and groomed. “Father D’Souza” read the label below his picture.
As I stared into D’Souza’s pig eyes, I heard the ferret-faced clerk shout at the student, “So tell your story to the principal, go on!” The clerks in the office momentarily froze and fell silent. “I asked if you have receipt, but you don’t, so why are you here? Go on, go away!” The student turned, chastened, and slouched away out of the office.
We stepped up to the desk, but Ferret-face didn’t acknowledge us.
My father cleared his throat and said hello.
“Bolo!” said Ferret-face, rearranging papers on his desk.
“Vikram,” my father said, pointing to the folder in my hand. I placed it on the desk. As my father explained our situation and that he wanted to get me registered at the college, Ferret-face thumbed through my grade reports, my transcript. His eyes peered beadily from behind his metal frames.
“What’s all this?” Ferret-face muttered, in Gujarati, examining a piece of paper. He asked if it was the transcript.
“Says so, doesn’t it?” my father replied, pointing to the top of the page. “Grades and classes all listed.”
I leaned over and pointed them out. “Right here—”
Ferret-face nodded, agitated. “But where is GPA?” he asked.
I pointed out my GPA on the transcript.
“This is not first class,” he said and picked at his teeth with a finger. “This is below first class. It is second class. For Xavier’s, all students must enter with first class.”
Fumbling with Gujarati words, I told him to take a look at all the A’s on my senior-year grade reports. Surely, those grades were not second class—
“But here it is saying less than first class.” Ferret-face tapped the transcript with the back of his hand. “I cannot give admission. Unless,” the clerk now lowered his voice, and his tone became as slithery as a basket of snakes, “you want to pay higher fee, right now, to me. Cash only. Then, of course, I would consider—”
My father set his briefcase on the desk so that it thumped hard. “Listen, I have a history here and myself did my B.Sc. here. I know Xavier’s, and this boy’s grades are absolutely fine.” He propped an arm on the edge of the desk and leaned forward. “My company does business with the government, and I’ve got a meeting this afternoon at the education ministry. How would you like it if I told them about your suggestion?”
The clerk shot to his feet, snatching up the transcript, his jaw taut and his bony cheeks shining with sweat. His tone became defensive: “I am doing my job only. Where would Xavier�
�s be if simply I let in every applicant, Mister … uh,” he glanced down at the name on the transcript, then, after a pause, asked, “Mistry?” He peered back at my father. “Eh! You say you got your B.Sc. here? I am B.Sc. also. ’68!” After a pause, Ferret-face asked, “You’re not Rahul Mistry, are you?”
“Do we know each other?”
“Harish Rajkumar,” the clerk said cheerfully, extending his hand.
“Harish Rajkumar,” my father repeated blankly.
“Harish, yaar. Third-year physics. I was playing on cricket team with your younger brother, Hemant-bhai.” He offered his hand again.
My father took it tentatively, smiled, and shook his hand. “Oh, Harish, right, right. That was a long time ago, yaar. Sure, now I remember. The cricket games, right here in the athletic field.”
Harish Rajkumar grinned. His teeth were grimy, brownish nubs. “His brother was the real star player at Xavier’s, huh?” Rajkumar said to me, grinning even wider, as if he were relating a bit of folk myth. “How is Hemant bhai these days? We haven’t met. He’s at the State Bank, no?”
The two of them went on like that, catching up on old times.
I picked my folder off the desk and wondered if my father was embarrassed having a son who was second class. He had to be. Even here, in Ahmedabad, India, I was still second class.
“Fill out and bring back to me,” Rajkumar finally said, handing me two sheets and a paperbound booklet whose cover read “ST. XAVIER’S COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCE SYLLABUS” in crude typescript.
The syllabus seemed to have been written for a defunct boarding school from colonial times. There were courses in Victorian literature, Restoration comedy, romantic poetry, the sort of musty stuff I imagined ancient men in frock coats reading in front of ornate fireplaces.
I filled out the forms, picking English as my major and handed them back to Rajkumar while my father counted out the cash for registration. Rajkumar scanned the form and passed it back to me. “You must put down foreign language.”
“What are my choices?” I asked.
“Sanskrit.”
He may as well have said Eskimo.
“If not Sanskrit, then Pali, Farsi, Hindi,” Rajkumar said, showing his teeth again.
I tried to explain to him that I’d never taken Sanskrit before, knew nothing of it, and asked if there was also a beginner’s course in it or something I could take instead.
Rajkumar took off his glasses and wiped at them carefully with his shirt, shaking his head ponderously. After he put his glasses back on (they looked as dirty as before), he continued, “There is also French.”
French? Did he say French? That I could handle. “French,” I said.
Rajkumar shut his eyes and cocked his head, the way I’d seen Indians do to indicate acknowledgement. He scribbled “French” on the form.
My father paid the registration fee.
“Give my regards to Hemant bhai,” Rajkumar said, saluting with the hand in which he clutched the cash.
My father smiled. “Of course, dost! Chok-kus.” They shook hands.
“Oh, bhaiya,” Rajkumar called to me and in English said, “About your French course. You must speak with Madame Varma about it. French professor. See if she will take you. She is just there in faculty room.” His elbow propped on the desk, he tilted his palm, forefinger extended, in the general direction of the way we had come. “If it is not okay, you must come back, and we must change to Sanskrit or some such.”
His words sounded ominous. I braced myself for my meeting with the French professor.
“Okay, good, at least we’ve got you signed up,” my father said once we were outside the office. He checked his wristwatch. I looked down other end of the hallway and noticed the shingle for “FACULTY LOUNGE.”
“It’s a good thing you two knew other,” I told my father. “Might never have gotten in.”
“I have no idea who that character was,” my father said.
“But you acted like you did, told him your whole life story.”
“He seemed interested,” my father said, shrugging his shoulders, “so I just went along. It got you in, didn’t it?” A quick laugh sounded in his throat. “What a character.”
“And all that about your meeting at the education ministry,” I said. “That was classic.”
“That,” my father checked his watch again, “is actually true. I need to be in Gandhinagar in half an hour. So let’s go talk to this French teacher, but then I’ll really need to rush.”
“I can talk to the teacher,” I told him. “You go on ahead.”
My father thought about this, his eyes popping behind his glasses, and he stroked his moustache. “You sure you know how to get back?”
I nodded. “Of course.” After a few brief but emphatic directives from my father to “stay alert” and “be safe,” he took the stairs, rounded the landing and disappeared into the lobby.
I was on my own now. The hallway teemed with Indian faces, talking, laughing, gossiping. I tried to avoid the stares, the curious glances at my Levis jeans or my sneakers. I took the hallway as quietly, as confidently as I could.
You entered the faculty lounge through swinging saloon doors. It was a cavernous space, with a pair of French windows swung open to the monsoon breeze and the cool gray light. On the large table in the center of the room, where books and folders lay strewn, a copy of the Times of India rustled under ceiling fans.
At the far end of the room, a thin man—a faculty member, I guessed—in his 50s with frog-like eyes and wearing a starched white shirt was holding court before some teachers who sat at the table or on cane chairs against the far wall, some of them sipping from cups of chai. The man’s neatly groomed, silvery hair gave him a dandified look.
The man was deep into his story, carrying on, arms fluttering: “And so,” he said, “seeing the accident, I got off my scooter and went down to see how I could help. The poor chap on the motorbike was absolutely beh-bhaan, you see, unconscious, and the vegetable wallah had broken his arm. So just then, one cop shows up, and I tell him, ‘Thank god you’ve arrived.’ Then he asks me if that’s my scooter parked just there. I tell him, ‘Yes, I stopped to see if I could help these chaps.’” The man spread his arms dramatically. “But that bloody cop, you know what he says? He says I’ve parked my scooter illegally … and he books me!” He slapped his hands together and grinned. Scattered laughs erupted from a few teachers as Frog Eyes shook his head, pleased with his story, and hitched his pants up. “That’s how it is,” he said. “Whole country has gone like that, yaar.”
I took a few steps into the room. A short, gaunt boy in short sleeves, gray slacks, and a pair of flip-flops went around with a wire basket that clinked with glasses of chai. He placed a glass next to a woman, her back to me, in a green sari. She had black hair cut short and sleek. The woman didn’t look up, just raised her palm to acknowledge the boy. She seemed engrossed in a book marked up with notes on the margins.
I approached the woman. The book she was reading—a thick paperback—was in French. The words looked dense, difficult, a thicket of unpronounceable vocabulary, conjugations, and accent marks.
“Excuse me,” I said awkwardly. “I’m looking for Madame Varma.”
She straightened, turned a stern face toward me as she took off a pair of reading glasses that hung from a chain.
“What do you want?”
“I’m a new student here. I’m signed up to take French, and they told me in the office to talk to Madame Varma.”
“Sit down,” she said.
I slid into the chair beside her, and she pushed her big French book at me.
“Translate that for me. Out loud.”
I felt something give inside me. “Um, well,” I said, “I’ve taken four years of Spanish, but never French.”
“If you can translate this, I can take you. I don’t have time for beginners.”
I stared at the scramble of words. A few I could approximate the meanings of, but it was
mostly a disaster, as if English and Spanish had collided on the page, and this new language was the resulting wreck.
I began: “Field … bodies … dead … steal …”
Madame Varma closed the book. “Impossible.”
A fist closed over my heart. “But I need this class.”
After a brief pause, she told me, “Best if you signed for a preparatory class at the Alliance Française. They’ve got a six-week certificate course in starter French. You take that and come to me afterwards.”
I hauled myself up. So much for this.
“Thank you,” I said politely. “Alliance Française, I’ll do that.” I made to leave, anxious to disappear through the swinging doors and into a hole in the ground. Take refuge there, till I either died or got airlifted out of this country.
“One thing,” Madame Varma said. I spun around to face her. “I believe they’re signing up new students this week. Next session starts up in mid-July. Go straight away.”
I saw no choice but to do exactly what she said.
“Oh, um, where is the Alliance Française?”
“It’s near Ellis Bridge.”
“Ellis …?”
“You don’t know Ellis Bridge?”
“I just moved here a week ago. From the States.”
“Just tell the rickshaw wallah you want to go to Alliance Française, near Ellis Bridge.”
My folder tight in my hand, I left the lounge, took the stairs, and left the college past the echoing procession of students in the lobby. I wondered how far this Ellis Bridge was and when (or if) I’d be able to find my way back to Ghatlodiya.
Students puttered in and out of the front gate on their scooters and bicycles, crunching and dusting along the gravel lane. Where the motorbikes and Marutis were parked, I noticed a girl—slender-legged, in a black T-shirt and Calvin Kleins, with thick black hair that spilled down to her upper back—slide into the driver’s seat of her white Maruti. Two other girls in salwaar kameez, clutching folders to their chests, got in with her.