by Antani, Jay
Studying for midterms meant writing up dummy essays based on anticipated topics. Like the rest of my classmates, I found myself in a fury of memorizing and writing by rote: I devoured every word from the Macmillan History of English Literature and my poetry volumes, dredging up dates, names, titles, quotations, and lines of verse as I cobbled together one essay after another. It was unnerving, especially because the only way to ensure higher marks, from what Devasia told me, was by pounding out exhaustive, long-winded essays—six, seven, eight, nine pages at a stretch. If it wasn’t English, then I was taking stabs at psychology or economics essays. But it didn’t matter the subject: after a couple of hours at it, with the sun throbbing at a steady wattage from the windows, I would be nodding off.
There were times I gave in to the drowsiness, slipped into the embryonic waters of an afternoon nap. I often woke to the hammering voice of Anand’s tutor, enunciating the Hindi alphabet forcefully, repeatedly, in the living room.
Late one afternoon, Anand’s tutor already gone, I woke to my father’s car pulling up the drive. My eyes opened to the Macmillan lying on my face. I got up, annoyed at myself for passing out again. From the kitchen, I heard my parents talking. I lingered in the hallway, listening into the dining room.
“How did the appointment go?” I heard my father ask in Gujarati.
“She thinks cell count was a little high,” my mother replied, appearing from the kitchen, her hands gripping a pair of tongs that held a small wok full of vegetables. She set the wok down on the table. My father followed with cups and plates. “She wants me back for X-ray.”
“When?”
My mother noticed me.
“Soon,” she said and clamped up.
There was nothing for it. I walked through the dining room, past both of them, into the kitchen. Pretending I was thirsty, I opened the fridge, got out the jug of water we kept there—boiled and filtered—and poured it into a steel cup.
“It’s okay,” my father muttered. He switched on the oscillating fan perched on a high shelf in one corner of the dining room. It whirred noisily, buffeting each of us with drafts of warm air. “It’ll be okay.”
“What will be okay?” I asked casually, sipping the water.
My father set the plates around the table. “Conference,” he said. “Got a conference in Bombay in a couple of weeks.”
“Chalo, Anand,” my mother called into the living room where Anand was watching our video copy of Star Wars again. “Dinner.”
I washed up and joined my father at the table.
“I know Ma has been to see the doctor,” I told him confidentially. “If there is anything …”
“If there is anything you need to know, we’ll inform you.” His voice was stern, officious. “Right now, keep to your studies. And that’s it.”
Anand entered the dining room and pulled up a chair. We passed around the container of rotis. My mother served us from the wok and from the pot of dal.
“So I’ve got a conference coming up in Bombay,” my father said again. “I’ll be gone a week. Look after your mother.”
“Maybe you could look into the video camera?” I asked.
He nodded, scooping the vegetables on his plate with a roti. “I’ll do that. We’ll get that back.” Then he asked Anand how he was getting on with his schoolwork, about the tutor.
“I already know more than he does,” Anand said.
“We’ll see about that when your marks come in,” my father replied then added with a chuckle, “That’s what I like to hear, though. We Mistrys are like that. Always ahead of the game, no?”
Was there a game here? If so, I felt miserably behind.
“Okay,” my father consented, “we’ll look into a new tutor for you.”
“Can you also look into a Nintendo? Remember, you made me give up my old one—”
“Yes, yes! Nintendo, fine, but we’ll look into that at Diwali only. Right now, we’ll figure out a new tutor for you, and you continue with your schoolwork.”
That must have been agreeable enough for Anand because he quieted down and picked at his plate. “Are we visiting Hemant Uncle over Diwali?” he asked, chewing.
“Maybe.” My father looked at my mother. “And before I leave for Bombay,” he added, “I’ll get a new gardener. That front area looks rubbish. Then again, who knows, we may move into better quarters next year.” His eyes lit up. “Probably in Gandhinagar, much cleaner than Ahmedabad or Ghatlodiya. And you can keep attending Xavier’s.” He waved his hand at me as if he were conferring divine privilege. “Or, if you like, you can try the National Institute of Design. Excellent school. They’ve got media and …” He fumbled for the appropriate terms. “Video and all. And they’re right here.”
My mother, I noticed, ate quietly, keeping her eyes to herself, lost in her own thoughts.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said.
“You’ll need to finish your B.A. first I think before you can go to N.I.D.,” he added, half to himself. “But why not check it out first? Go there.”
I shifted in my chair, uncomfortable with his paving my future for me.
“In meantime,” my father continued, turning to my mother, “we’ll get gardener and new car by the end of year. Why not?”
“That would be awesome,” Anand said.
“Why don’t you get settled into your job first?” my mother said, summoning her strength. “You’ve only started there three, four months. Anything can happen. Who knows, they may cut you off, and we’ll be left with nothing again, like two years ago.”
“How did ‘two years ago’ get into this?”
My mother lowered her tone, and her face assumed a false calm. “I just need some peace right now. Not another move or any big plans.”
My father grunted. “This is not like two years ago, or three, or four, or whatever.” Drafts blew uselessly and loudly from the fan up on its perch. “It’s going to be different here. How do you still not understand that?”
They kept their gazes lowered. Anand and I spied looks at each other then at our parents. The dining room’s single tube light cast an eerie pall over us, and the blackness of night behind the screened-in windows gave nothing of the world. This room felt like a cell for condemned souls. How did we get here? Was there a way out?
11
My writing hand achy, eyes bleary, brain sore, I retreated to the library in between my Victorian poetry and French midterms. I wanted to hide out there while I decompressed.
Devasia was on his way out as I walked in. He pointed to me and arched his eyebrows—his wordless way of asking how I thought the exam went. I made a “so-so” gesture with my palm then pointed back at him. He answered with a “thumbs-up” and a shrug. We shared wary smiles as he exited the library, and I stepped up to the counter.
I asked the librarian for the current issue of Time. He shook his head, waved his hand to the magazine rack behind the counter, and told me it was checked out. He’d let me know when it was back.
That was disappointing. I’d counted on spending a bit of my downtime before the French exam getting acquainted with the latest from America. I settled at a table with an exhausted sigh and hoped the wait wouldn’t be long.
I flipped open my notebook and got out my copy of Les Misérables, using the automatic exam-time anxiety to brush up on my notes. Madame Varma had made us all get French-language editions of Les Misérables, and we were reading several chapters of it, discussing its finer points in class. Comprehension was a steep climb at first, but the Alliance course had gotten me up to speed well enough to get over the hump. I reread the opening passages of the novel—the same section that Madame Varma had made me translate when I’d approached her about joining the class at the beginning of the year. I had flunked her on-the-spot quiz that day, but since then, it was as if I’d drunk some magic potion. My brain had learned to decipher the language’s squiggly, accented gobbledygook, the way your body learns to make antibodies against an invading virus and keeps you
alive.
But instead of studying, I found myself doodling in the notebook. It loosened up my rigid fingers to doodle and let my brain relax. Odd protoplasmic shapes and squiggles, and pretty soon I was drawing heads and hands, eyes and faces.
I found myself drawing a series of storyboard frames on a page in my notebook. Now what to fill them with? I began doodling, and it became a rickshaw, splashing like mad through the rain. Next, I drew a harried, rain-slicked face in the passenger seat, a hand gripping a metal bar. In the following squares came shadowy figures scurrying in the rain; the rickshaw lurching to a stop behind the diagonal frenzy of rain; a woman crashing into a milkman on a bicycle. I drew in a delirium of recollection, as if I were revisiting a dream.
A hand entered my view and dropped a magazine onto the table. It was Time being set in front of me. “Thanks,” I said to the librarian who didn’t turn around but continued his shuffle back to his post.
On the cover, the space shuttle blasted off from its Cape Canaveral launchpad in a wake of light and smoke that made the image look strangely celestial. I thumbed through the issue and my heart was received with articles about the next Indiana Jones movie and one about U2’s tour of the States (Nate had mentioned in a letter that he was seeing the show in Chicago). Here were messages from America. I brought the magazine to my face and took in the scent of the page.
“What’s up in America?” a voice called out, and I started.
It was Priya. She came up behind me with a smile and sat down across from me at the table. I wondered if she’d seen me smelling the magazine. How embarrassing!
I had not spoken much with Priya since our conversation in the canteen, and that was almost two months ago. Since then, it had been polite hellos and brief bits of business about the French class.
She was plainly beautiful today. Her hair was gathered back in a ponytail, and a thin copper-colored necklace took the curve of her neck. The necklace had a gold pendant in which a tiny figure was embossed, worn over the front of a faded maroon T-shirt with “BOSTON COLLEGE” on the breast pocket.
“What’s up in America?” I said. “Lots that I’m missing.”
Priya didn’t respond, just opened her French notebook and her copy of Les Misérables. Of course, she didn’t really care about what was happening in America, I thought. After all her smug talk in the canteen trying to put America in its place, she couldn’t care less. My guard was up. Then she said, “You know what I’m missing? MTV.”
It was a sincere remark and made me feel more at ease. “I know. There isn’t much to TV here, is there? Except that one channel. It’s like we’re living in East Germany or China.”
“Love Boat, oh my god. And Dynasty.” Priya’s face lit up with recollection. “And I was obsessed with Remington Steele. I tell my cousins to tape episodes for me and send them over. I’ve got a whole shelf of American TV. You can borrow them whenever.”
I never watched any of the shows she’d mentioned, but her conjuring up familiar names from faraway, things only the two of us knew, made me feel warm and connected to her.
“Do you still keep in touch with your friends there?” I asked.
“I’ve got one friend who keeps in touch,” she said. “But friends drop away after a year or so. It’s too long a distance.”
What a harsh thought and probably true. I didn’t want to consider just how true, so I changed the subject.
“Music,” I said. “Where do you get your rock and roll around here?”
“My cousins tape the Top 40 off the local station for me, so I keep current. Well, current, with a six-month delay.” She laughed. “Same with TV, movies. Cousins bring them over, or I catch up when I visit.”
“Top 40?” I said teasingly. “I was afraid of that.”
“What’s wrong with Top 40?”
“Nah,” I countered, “you want the good shit, not Whitney Houston and Madonna. I’ll make you a mix.”
We were quiet for a few minutes after that, turning to our studies. I looked up from my notebook and watched her lips as she read the French sentences from Les Misérables. She paused and looked up to ask if I felt ready for the exam.
“I’ve no clue,” I said. “French has been kind of a crash course. I still don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”
She glanced at me and shrugged lightly. “Mais vous pouvez parler en Francais tres bien, je pense.”
“No, no,” I said, flipping through the magazine. “C’est un situation tragique.”
That got a quick laugh out of her before she asked, “So this is what you do between classes? Sit in here with your Time magazines and get your dose of America?”
I nodded vaguely, mentally scanning for sarcasm in her tone. Regardless, it was true. I couldn’t deny it. My company consisted mostly of myself and occasionally Devasia and Pradeep. In fact, for Pradeep, I had begun dictating class notes into a tape recorder. After Sridharan’s lectures, I would join Pradeep in his hostel room and read out the notes I had just taken, point by point, into his tape recorder. Devasia and I were his main sources for these audio notes, and Pradeep used them to study for the exams. Besides those guys, I didn’t mingle with anyone else.
And for whatever reason, I’d been oblivious to Priya. She kept to her group, Manju, Hannah, Ashok, and their clique: Ahmedabad’s moneyed. The reverse-expatriates. Hers seemed a rarefied class that existed somewhere above the soot and misery and smoke of the rest of the city. Priya was out of bounds to me, in principle anyway.
In America, I had always felt hopelessly out of place, unaccepted by the popular kids in school. I felt classless and outcast, and I came to despise the snobby and rich kids—Indian, American, didn’t matter. But here—the place of my roots, where my father suddenly had a steady and high-ranking job, where I was in social proximity to Priya—I could, theoretically, mix with those of her social class. I belonged to it. But the thought made me queasy. Mingling with Priya’s friends, her too-cool-for-school clique, would’ve felt like a betrayal—to myself, my past, to everything I’d gone through. So, yes, I chose to sit here, in the library, a social and cultural neutral zone, and get my dose of America.
“And it’s quiet in here,” I said. “No one bothers you.”
Priya said she felt even less ready for the exam than I did. She glanced through her notes, her attention flitting hummingbird-like up and down the pages. I kidded her about her nervousness; it had to be a put-on. In class, whenever Priya would read from the text, her pronunciation was flawless. It transfixed me. And her answers to Varma’s questions, so easy, natural, I felt like she could teach this stuff herself. How could she not be ready?
Finally, her eyes lifted from her notes, and she said, “You know how we have to prepare essays for all these possible questions?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said groaning.
“I’ve never gotten used to that,” she said. “Makes me feel like the cows out on the street.”
I gave her a questioning smirk.
“We’re graded on how well we chew all this up, and”—she mimicked throwing up—“regurgitate it all. It’s sick.” I was surprised to hear her then bring up how much happier she was studying in America. She remembered school being fun, more imaginative, where it didn’t feel like you were cattle forced up and down the chute, you were made to think for yourself.
“Let’s go,” I said, my heart leaping. “Chuck all this, and let’s go there right now.”
“Shhh.” The mousy-looking librarian glared at us.
We went back to our notes, but a minute later Priya leaned toward me. “Are you going to the Diwali show?” she asked.
I shrugged maybe. The show was tonight. Pradeep was competing in the talent contest. He’d been preparing for weeks. Sometimes when I would show up at his hostel door with my notes, ready to dictate them, I would hear him in his room practicing an Indian ghazal, his voice rising and falling gracefully to the sitar and tabla playing on the tape recorder. I knew nothing of Indian music, but
I had to admit Pradeep had a beautiful singing voice. “I suppose I should go for Pradeep,” I replied, but Priya’s attentions had turned to her beat-up Les Misérables paperback.
“There are, like, pages missing from this,” she said, pursing her lips. “I mean, we haven’t gotten to these chapters yet, but …” She shut the book and slid out of her chair. “I’m going to go downstairs and see if I can replace this. Maybe they have another copy. Be right back.”
“What do you mean downstairs?” I asked.
She jerked a finger toward the floor. “That’s where all the books are.”
That’s when I realized that all I had seen of this library was this room: the tables, the reading stands, the large cabinets along the walls housing musty volumes of literary essays. I’d assumed this was all there was to the Xavier’s library.
“Wish I’d known that before I spent two hundred fifty rupees on this.” I waved my brand-new copy of Les Misérables in my hand, a French-language version I’d chanced on at the Alliance Française.
“At least yours is in one piece,” Priya said, turning my book over in her hands, her lovely hands.
“Shh!” It was that librarian again.
“Sorry,” I said. Then I got up to follow Priya, in her Boston College T-shirt and Calvin Kleins, past the checkout desk and through a door at the far end.
We descended two short flights of stairs lit by a naked hanging bulb. At the foot of the stairs, an open doorway led into a kind of cellar. Visible in the dim incandescence, a musty, low-ceilinged room was filled with bookcases divided by a central aisle. I scanned the rows and rows of shelves, each receding into the dark. History, philosophy, physics, botany—the names of various fields were scrawled on yellowing labels on the sides of the shelves. It was as if Priya had led me to an ancient burial chamber, and except for us, it was empty. And it smelled of the slow attrition of termites and dust. But to me the place was thriving with life: the bookshelves were bursting with a mysterious, longed-for harvest.