by Antani, Jay
I stepped out onto the dusty edge of the road. The buzzing of rickshaws—metallic, black-hooded hornets, fierce and angry—filled the road. Two of them were parked near the gate. I saw a pack of students pile into one of them, and the rickshaw tilted at a dangerous angle to the road. Didn’t matter—the driver revved the thing up and off they went.
I steeled myself and walked over to the other rickshaw. I trained a sure, casual stare at the rickshaw wallah—he had pudgy, red-rimmed eyes, wore a dirty-white shirt. “Ellis Bridge,” I told him firmly, “Alliance Française.”
He jerked his jowly face and rolled his red eyes toward the back seat. Before I got in, I remembered something my father did insistently each time he took a rickshaw anywhere. I took a look at the meter, fixed next to the handlebar and made a circling motion with my finger. “Zero that out,” I told him in Gujarati.
“Haah-haah,” the rickshaw wallah said impatiently. “Have a seat, bhai,” he said in Gujarati. He turned the dial on the meter to “0000.” So far, so good.
As we started off, I saw the girl in the white Maruti pull out of the gate. She turned onto the road and zipped away in the opposite direction. I could see her as she passed, behind the wheel of the car, wearing sunglasses, her skin a medium bronze, talking to her companions, her teeth flashing. She pushed her hair back and sped off. From around here, I thought. Yet not quite.
* *
The sun bore heavily through breaks in the clouds as we made our way to Ellis Bridge, past frantic roundabouts and the Law Garden—hidden by high hedgerows fronted by pav-vada and bhajiya stalls clamoring with noontime crowds. Ellis Bridge, the structure that gave the local neighborhood its name, was another in the series of concrete linkups between the old and new sides of this city divided by the Sabarmati River, now robust after all the rains. Commuter buses—red-painted, rusted, with fumes chugging from their tailpipes—came growling in from the old city, packed to bursting with passengers. Passengers would clamber on or hurl themselves off before their buses even came to a stop.
Compared to all this chaos, the Alliance Française was a sanctuary—a peaceful courtyard fringed with hedges and buildings. I paid the rickshaw wallah (though, having no clue how to read his mileage counter, I took him at his word) and proceeded through an opening in the front gate of the Alliance. It was the side gate, really, propped open wide enough to let visitors in. I went along the gravel walk, under the arcade that ran the length of the Alliance’s redbrick compound.
A sign pointed me in the direction of the school, which lay at the end of a short, winding brick path on one side of the far building. There were roses, daisies, and marigolds here and a pair of eucalyptus trees that gave shade as you approached the school’s steel-mullioned glass doors. People passed politely in and out of the doors, carrying folders and forms, everything in French. A flier advertising a Chopin recital was Scotch-taped to the glass paneling. I approached the door and could hear a swell of conversation from inside.
It was as if I had entered a parallel dimension. For a suspended moment in time, I was no longer in Ahmedabad, India, but hovering in some bizarre zone between India and Europe. Here was a cool, spacious lobby with French-language travel posters and books on shelves. A wrought-iron spiral staircase ran upward from the middle of the lobby.
I stepped up to the small registration desk where sat a severe-looking white woman, her face grooved with age, sacrificed to the hardships of Indian weather. She hand-stamped a form—tap-tap-tap!—and thrust it back into the hands of a twentysomething student. The student made that bell-like, side-to-side swing of his head and sauntered away.
“Yes?” the woman said to me sharply. I got the feeling she was always pissed off. I felt intimidated, and that made me resent her—the irritable, high-and-mighty memsahib addressing her Indian coolies.
As calmly as I could, I explained how and why I needed to sign up for the beginner’s French course.
Automatically, she handed me the registration form, and in her French accent—an accent I’d only heard in Truffaut movies and Looney Tunes cartoons—she told me the fee would be six hundred rupees.
That caught me off guard. “Can I pay you next time?” I asked. “When the class starts up? I came here straight from college and didn’t realize about the money. I’m sorry about that.”
“Seven hundred in that case. You bring money with you on the first day.” There was that accent again, so superior and European.
First it had been that customs agent who busted our chops before taking my camera away. After that came the post-office clerks and rickshaw wallahs. Just today, it had been that ferret-faced clerk at the college office and that sourpuss lady professor. They’d all given me attitude. Now here was Madame Pissface pissing and huffing at me like I was her servant.
I signed the stupid form, pushed it in her direction, turned around, and left without giving the old biddy another look. Two can play at this game. I stomped away.
“Monsieur?”
I kept on stomping.
“Monsieur?”
“What is it?” I shot her a look.
“Yours?” She was tapping my folder with her pen. (The folder with all those second-class grades.)
“Oh, uh, yes, thank you.” I went back, snatched it, and hurried out. I hoped to God she wasn’t going to be my French teacher.
* *
It had gotten darker outside, the sky swollen and black now. As I walked back toward the front gate of the Alliance, splotches of rain began hitting the gravel path. That’s when I realized I didn’t have enough cash for a rickshaw back to Ghatlodiya. The sky rumbled as if the monsoon gods were clearing their throats, warming up before the big show.
I hurried out through the side opening in the gate and hailed down a rickshaw. But when I told him where I needed to go, he shook his head, said he wouldn’t go that far, citing the weather, and motored off. A second rickshaw wallah, though, after a pained and momentary scowl, gestured for me to get in.
Soon we were zipping along through a late June-early July downpour. I held on tight, my grade-report folder tucked under my shirt, as the rickshaw’s motor whined through rain-slashed roads, the rain swirling beneath us, the tires becoming pinwheels of rain. The rickshaw wallah, hunched low over his handlebar to peer through the blurred, wiper-less windshield. Black umbrellas mushroomed everywhere and beneath them figures were either rushing along or clustered together at bus stands. A goods truck roared past us, blowing its shrill electric horn, splashing water across the rickshaw’s windshield, and almost throwing a man just ahead of us off his bicycle. As we passed him, I took a look at the man on the bicycle, thin-limbed, soaked through, pedaling hard. He pushed hair out of his eyes as we passed, and he squinted through the gray scrim veiling everything, the whole world around him. A cow, eyelids half-closed, hunkered beneath a vast, sagging tree in the middle of a roundabout.
In Ghatlodiya, the road got too narrow to contain the slog of bicycles, scooters, rickshaws. A bus roared black fumes past us, passengers packed together, the opened windows and doorway a riot of limbs and torsos. The mildewed apartment blocks loomed on one side, with TV antennas like charcoal etchings against the rain, and telephone wires crisscrossed like vines off their parapets. There was no drainage here, and the waters had risen quickly to make an ankle-deep lake of Ghatlodiya. Without hesitating, the rickshaw wallah weaved straight into openings in the traffic, pitching the rickshaw so sharply a couple of times that I thought we would tip over. Wildness and strangeness all around me, I wanted my video camera, some way to record all of this—the commotion of traffic, rain, floodwaters, the honking of horns. A way to contain the disarray for myself and organize it so that my own mind could make sense of it. I wanted to share this with the people who, for almost two weeks now, lived only in my mind, to share this with Shannon, Nate, Karl, so I wouldn’t feel alone in it, grasping for sense.
Just then, the rickshaw wallah sped up hard, wanting to pull ahead of the bus that had now stopped t
o let off passengers. We swerved past them before I felt the rickshaw jerk violently to a halt, and I saw a woman—small, a plastic bag in one arm, under a black umbrella—stutter-step backward to avoid us, saw her collide then with a milkman on his bicycle. Next thing, all three—the woman, the milkman, and his bicycle—went clattering in a whirl of panic and shouting into the water. The woman was sunk up to her elbows, her umbrella rumpled and smashed-in, and her bag’s contents of leafy greens, bananas, onions, and something wrapped in newspaper all thrown from her hands and scattered in the water. The milkman’s bicycle had tin pots attached to the rear of the frame. Their lids had been knocked loose, and milk poured from them into rain puddles.
The rickshaw wallah cut the motor and got out. We both got out. Sloshing through the water, I went over to the woman and helped her to her feet. The milkman berated the woman for not watching where she was going, and the woman turned around and did the same to the rickshaw wallah.
I shoved the onions, bananas, and the newspapered package back into the bag—everything miserably wet—and handed it back to the woman. The rickshaw wallah got the bicycle upright on its kickstand while confused passersby all gathered to watch.
“Are you okay?” I asked the woman.
She turned from her berating and told me in a voice suddenly calm and collected, “I am fine.”
The milkman and the rickshaw wallah were in a full-blown argument now, slinging names at each other. The milkman was complaining about all the milk he’d lost, gesturing madly at the pale-white nebula of milk and rainwater at their feet.
The woman checked her bag and then picked her way, soaked, from the uproar. That’s when the milkman shoved the rickshaw wallah and the rickshaw wallah shoved the milkman. This wouldn’t have much mattered were I not standing directly between the milkman and his bicycle. The bicycle and I went down together like clumsy dance partners. Gulps of water went down my throat, and I panicked, sputtering, coughing. I felt my back, my pants, my head, everything soaked through, and my arms caught between bicycle spokes. I tried to pry myself loose.
Immediately, others rushed up and pulled the men apart. I felt hands grab me by the armpits and haul me up. I shook water from my eyes and spat several times. The rickshaw wallah put his hand on my shoulder, called me “boss,” asked me if I was all right. I felt woozy, nodded, and we sloshed back through the ankle-deep water to the rickshaw. The rickshaw wallah complained about the audacity of the milkman, whom I could still hear hollering as a couple of locals tried to calm him down and lead him away with his bicycle. One of the pots was missing its lid.
After that, nothing but silence. The confusion of the rain-crazed world became strangely muted as if I’d lowered the volume on everything with a remote control. I heard only the hornet-like buzzing of the rickshaw motor, and the washing-over of the rain. From inside my shirt, I pulled out the folder with my transcripts and grade reports—all drenched now.
The driver kept his gaze fixed on the road, hands gripping the handlebars tightly, revving the engine as we tore through the final stretch back to the guesthouse. Maybe he was pissed off, maybe he was ashamed by what had happened. Maybe both.
My mother, Anand, and Anjali were seated on the couch, and Hemant Uncle was at the dining table when I got in. The laugh track of a Gujarati sitcom blared from the TV. Dal and incense wafted in from the kitchen. I sloshed into the living room, feeling every bit like I was invading this quaint domesticity.
“I need cash for the rickshaw,” I blubbered.
My mother got up from the couch, looked me up and down, and asked what had happened. I told the story, and that got Hemant Uncle chuckling as he sipped from a cup of chai. My mother tsked and shook her head before asking if I was all right.
I nodded and jerked my head toward the door. “Rickshaw’s waiting downstairs.”
“After what happened, he still expects to get paid?” my mother said, putting on her slippers and grabbing the umbrella leaning next to the door. “Anand, get him a towel.” But before he even got to his feet, Anjali had darted off the couch and, in seconds, had a towel in my hands.
“It’s okay, bhabhi, I will go,” Hemant Uncle said. He took the umbrella from my mother and went down the steps to speak with the rickshaw wallah.
“Go, Vikram,” my mother said, her tone calming down. “Go upstairs, change your clothes.”
* *
As I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed and began picking out clothes, I thought over the events of the past few hours, beginning with my trip to St. Xavier’s up to now in those drenched clothes in rain-sodden Ghatlodiya. And I realized that I didn’t feel depressed or resentful or angry or ashamed or anything—none of the feelings I’d gotten so used to over these past many months. In that moment I felt like the man I wanted to be for Shannon, for Nate, for Karl—a man on an adventure thousands of miles from home—and here was something I could share with them, wanted to share. An adventure I’d had.
I felt oddly energized, at peace with and proud of myself. Maybe it was just my ego or maybe it was my truest self calling out to me. A man of action! What a rare feeling. I knew it wouldn’t last—what does?—but I was happy to know I could be that man, if I wanted to be.
6
“Vikram, good morning,” Hemant Uncle boomed as I shambled down the steps the following morning. “There’s chai and food waiting.”
A Hindi jingle played on the radio sitting next to the TV.
Everybody had gathered around snacks and cups of chai at the table. At the center of the table were opened wrappers seeped in grease and piled with savory bhajiyas—battered and crispy fritters topped with cilantro, chilies, and diced onions. Judging from the Hindi-language newspapers the bhajiyas came wrapped in, they had to be from one of the snack stalls up the road. Next to the bhajiyas, I saw an opened wrapper of fafadas—savory fritters shaped like flutes and accompanied with the same condiments.
“College food,” Hemant Uncle joked, chewing, wiping his hands. “You’re in college, now, no? So sit down.”
The radio advertisement switched to the deadpan monotone of a sports announcer calling the play-by-play at a cricket match.
“You’re not looking so much wet this morning.” Hemant Uncle laughed, sipping his chai.
“Luckily, you didn’t get hurt,” my father said. “Stay away from street fights.”
“Did you get cut on anything?” Anand asked, looking up from a book in his hands, its covers freshly bound with laminated brown paper. “Because you could get tetanus.”
“No one has tetanus,” my mother said, irritably, then to me, “Did you take your malaria pill?”
“No cuts,” I said and went into the kitchen where we kept a bottle of malaria pills in the cabinet. These were gargantuan pills—horse pills—pink, the size of nickels. I choked one down with a swig from the water bottle on the dining table.
“Thanks, Vikram,” my mother said. “Now if I could just get your father and brother to take.”
“I took mine!” Anand snapped.
“Easy, easy,” my father said. “After breakfast, I’ll take the pill. It gives me nausea. After I eat, I’ll take.”
“You’re going to cause problem by not taking those pills.”
My father discarded the matter with a fan-like flip of his hand as he savored a bhajiya.
“Not so many, watch it,” my mother warned.
“Don’t worry, bhabhi. We were the first customers at that stand this morning. This is good oil, it’s fresh,” Hemant Uncle assured her.
“Not just that,” my mother replied, a note of tenderness in her voice. “He has a weak stomach.”
“I’ve been eating this all my life,” my father boasted, picking up another bhajiya. “Since I was a child.”
“You’re not a child now, are you?” my mother countered steadily, quietly.
I glanced at the book that Anand was flipping through. “What is that?” I leaned over him to take a look. “Holy crap, is that Sanskrit?”
“I have Gujarati, Hindi and Sanskrit,” my brother said glumly.
“Don’t worry,” my father said to Anand, “we’ll get you a tutor.”
“You will learn,” Kamala Auntie said with a snap of her fingers, “very fast.”
Anand groaned and picked through the book.
I examined the fafada, turning it over in my hands, sniffed it.
“What’re you sniffing it for?” my mother scolded.
I took a bite. Like the bhajiyas, the fafada was redolent of corn flour, masala, and oil. Not bad, I thought, and finished it. I took another.
“When does your school start?” I asked Anand.
“Monday,” he muttered, putting aside his book.
“Me too,” I said. “Don’t worry,” and, in a lower tone, I added, “you’ll be okay.”
From the radio came the eruption of cheering crowds, and the announcer’s voice lit up with enthusiasm—a jubilant tumbling of Hindi words poured from the radio, filling the room.
“This is Indian national team,” Hemant Uncle said, glancing first at me then at Anand. “They’re playing match against England.”
“You’ll like this, Anand,” my father urged. “Similar to baseball.”
“Doubt it,” Anand muttered and sipped from the cup of milk.
“How did everything at Xavier’s go?” Kamala Auntie asked my parents hopefully.
“A bit of dada-giri, but he’s all set now.”
“You’ll enjoy Xavier’s,” Hemant Uncle told me. “We had much fun during those days.”
“Heard you kept getting in trouble with the principal,” I said.
“Achcha,” Hemant Uncle said. “That Father Prieto, I did not like him. He did not like me.”
“That’s what Pappa told me,” I chuckled.
“Father Prieto, he was living in housing colony near Xavier’s at that time. I used to make mushkari with my friends, and all the time getting into trouble for that. One time, we made this, uh, enormous jaangiyo … how you say … underwear … from dhoti fabric, and we hung on his clothesline. So that all the students passing his house, they’ll see that only. So whenever someone would ask in which house is Father Prieto staying? You tell him look for the biggest jaangiyo. That’s his house.”