by Antani, Jay
I saw a shelf labeled “VISUAL ARTS.” The books there, for the most part, were moldy textbooks on Indian miniature painting. I rifled through them for images of Hindu erotica, found none, just words like millions of dead ants on the page. Then, on the tattered spine of one hardcover, I saw American Photography to 1970. The year I was born. I grabbed it, and the instant I opened it, it fell apart in a dozen pieces: pages fell from the binding, scattered on the floor, leaving fibers like nerve endings dangling from the spine.
“What happened?” It was Priya in the aisle. She had managed to find another copy of Les Misérables.
I gathered up the pages and shoved them back into the book.
“Looks like you found a dud,” she said. “Be careful with the books down here. They’re barely held together.”
“Might be a dud,” I said, tucking the book under my arm, “or it might not.”
“Let’s get this over with,” she sighed, and we walked toward the stairs.
“And where are you off to for your Diwali holiday?” I asked her, teasingly. “Don’t tell me. Is it some fancy-pants hill station in Rajasthan? Or is it London this year?”
Priya shooked her head, smiling. “What do you think we are? The leisure class?”
“Yes, actually,” I smiled.
“I’ll be right here in Ahmedabad the whole break.” We took the stairs. “No hill stations, no London. Been there, done that. What about you?”
“Visiting my uncle in lovely and scenic Baroda,” I said with a touch of sarcasm.
We got to the landing where she paused. She began penning something down on the cover page of her Les Misérables. “If you get bored, here is my phone.” She tore away a strip of paper and handed it to me. “I’m sure me and Manju and Ashok and all will be hanging out somewhere, sometime.”
I said I’d do that—though I had no intention of mingling with the others she’d mentioned—and pocketed the number. Then I thought of how there, in the privacy of that tiny landing, we’d shared an intimate thing, this surreptitious passing of a phone number. A moment all our own, finally, outside the boundaries of life at St. Xavier’s.
* *
I found a camera sitting on my bed. A still camera. I found it as I entered my room after my last midterm, burned-out and ready for the Diwali holiday. A month’s break from insufferable Xavier’s. All I could think of till then was lounging the afternoon away, looking at the Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans photographs in the book I had checked out. But here was a camera. Three rolls of film lay next to it.
I unsnapped the carrying case—“MINOLTA” studded across the front—and looked the camera over. I peered through the viewfinder; it beat framing shots by joining my palms at right angles, something I caught myself doing all the time here, standing out in the balcony. A fixed lens, a focus ring, a frame-advance lever, and a tiny handle you turned to wind up the film. Very simple. But I had no recollection of this camera.
“Whose is this?” I asked my mother. She was in the kitchen, preparing rotis for lunch.
“Don’t you remember?” Just as she said it, I did: Indian potluck parties in Ithaca when I was in sixth grade, the Grand Canyon on our drive out to Los Angeles, Anand’s birthday party at the Chuck E. Cheese. The camera was present on all these occasions, but it had fallen out of use after we’d moved to Madison. “Your father was sure he had that camera, and he was right. He found it while he was packing this morning.”
As I was taking my last midterm, my father had left for his conference in Bombay, a day’s train ride away.
“So we’ll see him in Baroda?” I asked.
“That’s the plan,” my mother replied, using pincers to flip the roti over the flames so that it puffed up, a transformation I always thought magical. “Your Hemant Uncle expects us there in two days. Your father will come to Baroda after his conference.”
“Let’s hope he comes with the video camera,” I said.
After lunch, I loaded the Minolta to test it out. The shutter release clicked just as surely as if the camera were brand new. I began by snapping photos from the balcony, of all the things I’d been craving to capture: the sprawling peepul at the center of the crossroads, its upward-outward nimbus of green that could itself be a landscape against the blue-silver sky; the farmers reclining on their carts in the peepul’s shade; the hard, soot-eaten angles of the shopping complex whose boxy corners fought with the sinuousness of the trees and telephone wires foregrounding it. The camera gave me the containment I’d craved ever since arriving in India. It gave me a way of trapping the world in a tiny box, impressing order where there was no order at all. Looking through the viewfinder, pressing the shutter release, hearing the click did something to my bloodstream, and it felt a bit like a junkie getting his fix after a long dry spell.
12
I brought along the camera to the Diwali show that night. A soft October breeze carried the tempting sweet-and-savory aromas from the bhelpuri and meethai stalls that vendors had lined up outside the college grounds. The stalls’ kerosene lamps speckled the road and illuminated the crowds of customers happily packed around them. I walked through the front gate under trees now strung up with Diwali lights, creating a constellation all their own. Tiny clay lamps placed on ledges here and there gave the place a magical, mysterious illumination.
It seemed like every student and teacher from Xavier’s was here and had brought their families tonight—the place was jam-packed, giddy with the anticipation of the holiday, more socially at ease than I’d yet known Xavier’s to be. People milled together along the drive and the front entrance of the college or strolled the athletic grounds, sipping from bottles of Thums Up Cola or eating bhelpuri from newspaper wrapping. A cacophony of cheering and of garba music from loudspeakers radiated from the athletic field—I saw a stage had been set up there overhung with a battery of lights, and a garba was in progress before an audience of maybe three hundred, clapping along to the dandiya rhythm.
Dancers swirled together in a circle onstage—the women in brilliant red and gold saris, the men in orange turbans wore matching, Gujarati-style tunics and white leggings—all striking their dandiya sticks together. They struck in time with the music being sung and played by a row of musicians seated on cushions behind the dancers. A male and female singer performed at microphones, each chiming cymbals along with the harmonium player and two tabla players. The music bursting through the loudspeakers rose in pitch, quickened in tempo, and the dancers kept pace, bowing, whirling, dandiyas clashing, as the audience whooped, clapped, whistled more and more energetically as the music rose. The music and dancers churned up together into a fury, till everything dropped in a final note, and a clash struck simultaneously on stage. The singers, musicians, dancers, everyone bowed with joined hands, and the crowd got to its feet in a fever pitch of applause. I found myself swept up too, breathless, clapping and cheering, and I hoped I hadn’t missed Pradeep’s performance. I looked around but couldn’t find Devasia and decided to head over to the hostel.
Devasia was still in his room, and I was glad to have found a friend on a night teeming with strangers. He invited me in, said he was almost ready. He was dressed in his typical kurta pyjama, neatly pressed, and stood in front of a mirror, combing his glossy hair. He shared this room with another South Indian student either already gone for the Diwali holiday or at the festivities outside.
“Quite the big fiesta outside,” I said. We could hear the crowds, an announcer through the loudspeaker introducing the next act.
“I also did not believe it would be such a party,” Devasia replied, putting the comb back into the top drawer of his desk.
I scanned the gray room, furnished with only two metal cabinets, two cots, and two desks. A wooden cross hung above Devasia’s desk. Other than that, only a calendar picturing the actress Sridevi, belonging to Devasia’s roommate, hung on the wall. I snapped a picture of him leaning over his desk with the cross behind him.
“You have got new camera?”<
br />
“Old camera,” I said. “But it works. Thought I’d send some pictures home to friends.”
“You can have exhibition or something here at college,” he said, snapping into place the metal wristband of his watch. “You are going somewhere for Diwali?”
“Just Baroda. My uncle lives there. You, Madras?”
His head swung in that bell-like motion I was now used to. “My parents, they are expecting me, no?”
Parents, I thought, always expecting something. It made me wonder: “Devasia, if you didn’t have to become a priest, what would you want to do?”
He turned to me with a puzzled look. “Have to, meaning?”
“Meaning most students study what their parents did, or what they’re told to study by their parents. Seems that way a lot here.”
Devasia cocked his head, not understanding. He checked his appearance one more time in the mirror mounted on the face of the metal cabinet then turned to me. “See,” he said, “my mother is teacher, my father works for Madras electricity board. They have not said to me I must go for this profession or that one, or get married or not. I have made my choices myself. Since I was six, seven, I was active in church, our charity work, so forth.”
“So you’ve always wanted to be a saint?” I asked, more sarcastically than I meant to, as we made for the door.
Devasia chuckled under his breath. “But I enjoyed. Our minister encouraged me to begin seminary studies. And for that I am here.”
“And after you’re done with all your studies, you think you’ll be a priest in India or, you know, join a mission somewhere else?”
“In India. Why not?” he said. “There are many churches in South India. Many Christians. I will do my work in Tamil Nadu only.”
“What’s it like there?”
Devasia fished out a key from the pocket of his kurta, and we stepped out of his room.
“It’s not like this in South.” With a faint air of disdain, he gestured with his hand to indicate the surrounding city. He turned the lock on the door, and we proceeded along the hostel corridor to the stairs. “So dirty here,” he said confidentially. “People defecating on the road. It is disgusting.”
I did not consider Ahmedabad my city, but somehow I took what he said personally and felt ashamed.
We could hear another music performance come booming through the loudspeakers over the hostel roof. A male-female duo sang a bubblegum Hindi pop song, accompanied by its backing disco melody blared through a boom box. I recognized it as “Ek Do Teen,” a flashy number from a current Bollywood movie that I was beginning to hear incessantly from car radios and the chai cafes around college.
We decided to check Pradeep’s room, and as we approached, we could hear Vinod’s voice coming from inside. Gently, I pushed the door open to find Pradeep, in a dress shirt and dark shades, shifting from foot to foot impatiently, his stick in one hand. Vinod lay back on the edge of the bed, wearing his Harley T-shirt, laughing hysterically—face sweaty, mouth wide open so I could see a missing tooth in the upper corner.
“Chalo, Vinod, I must go,” Pradeep said, at once agitated and nervous.
I knocked on the door.
“Who is there?” Pradeep turned, startled.
“It’s Vik and Devasia.”
“Ohhh,” Pradeep said, relieved, as if we’d just saved his life.
“Vik! Devasia! Help me to get Vinod from here. The show has already started. I’m now late.”
“Help him?” I wondered.
Vinod sat up on the bed, his eyes distant and a smile skewed across his face, hair disheveled. He didn’t reek of alcohol, but stepping into the room, I picked up the distinct whiff of marijuana.
“Hey, hey, American,” Vinod yelled. He broke into a fit of laughter and raised his palm. “High five.”
I humored him. “Vinod, we need to get out of here.” I touched his shoulder and tugged at him lightly. “Pradeep’s on in a few minutes.”
Vinod raised his arm as if to swat mine away. He looked at his shoulder where I’d touched him, then at my hands as though I’d infected him with something. “Why don’t you bugger off?” he said. “Go when I am ready, yaar.” That familiar aroma of charred, pungent cannabis filled the space between us as he spoke.
I returned to Devasia, who stood at the door with Pradeep, and told him, “Why don’t you take Pradeep where he needs to go. I’ll get Vinod out of here.”
“Thank you, yaar,” Pradeep said. The two turned and left the room.
Vinod stood over Pradeep’s desk, humming a Hindi tune to himself and rolling himself a joint. When he finished, he toked deeply and sat down again.
“How long you been here, Vinod?”
Vinod held it in then exhaled. “It’s compulsory I am here,” he droned. “I am Pradeep’s manager.” The smile from his face morphed into a scowl, and his eyes wandered to the door. “He is gone?”
“They left because Pradeep’s about to sing,” I said, “so let’s join them.”
“One minute.” He held up an index finger, then two fingers. “No, two minutes, two minutes, two minutes …” He took another hit then extended the joint to me.
I waved it away.
“It’s good weed, yaar.”
“You smoke a lot, Vinod?”
Curls of smoke rose from his mouth, and he settled back on the bed, propped on his elbows. “Only way to get through Xavier’s,” he said. He considered his joint up close and spoke to it. “Need to get high once in while when you’re in such low place.”
I could tell the performance of “Ek Do Teen” was in its final stretch—the synthesized tablas and keyboards from the boom box rising in a crescendo with the onstage vocals. The audience clapped along to the happy rhythm.
“I’ve never been in such boring place,” Vinod muttered sleepily then began laughing again. “We got to get Sridharan stoned, man. Can you see it?” He rolled onto his side, doubled over. “That damn class would actually—I would actually want to attend in that case.”
The song finished onstage in a crescendo of tablas, and a round of applause rose up.
“I thought you were Pradeep’s manager, Vinod,” I said impatiently. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Vinod took another hit, then snuffed out the joint with his fingers and tucked it away in the front pocket of his jeans. “For you, American, there is no worry,” he said wearily, somewhat acerbically. “For me,” he waggled his thumb back and forth, “no chance.”
He sat up and hunched there in silence at the edge of the cot. Then he slapped his knee. “Let’s go,” he mumbled, but instead of standing up, I could see his body was threatening to lie back down. So I leapt forward and pulled him back up. He began singing a song to himself, a whimsical old Kishore Kumar tune from the ’50s that, suddenly, I remembered Hemant Uncle playing on the family stereo, back when I was a five or six. My father still sang that silly song now and then, and got a laugh out of it.
Vinod stood a head taller than me, and he was not small, so it took some work to get him to his feet and out the door. The stage was set up just around the corner, behind the hostel building, but Vinod was already dragging his feet halfway up the veranda.
We made it to the path that led from the main gate to the athletic field. I could see through the spangled trees, under the stage lights, that the announcer was back on, droning words through his microphone. Meanwhile, the wind brought the aromas from the gathering of vendors outside the gate. I could hear the vats of oil sizzling. Pungent, flavorful smoke rose in clouds, illuminated yellow by the kerosene lamps. We moved past the scooters rolling in and out through the gate, hardly noticed in the half darkness and in the pell-mell of festivity.
Suddenly, Vinod stopped in his tracks. I asked him if something was wrong, but he only smiled and shook his head. Then he threw his arms around me, and I was steeped in the smell of sweat and cannabis. “I am gone,” he groaned.
“You sure are.”
He backed up on his heels, and a contented sm
ile came over the half-dazed, half-tired look on his face. “No,” he said, pointing beyond the gate, “I am gone.” He turned around and shuffled toward the gate, past incoming scooters, weaving past the procession of half-shadowy figures.
“But Pradeep is about to sing,” I shouted. “Shouldn’t the manager be there when his talent is about to go on?”
Vinod’s shoulders shook, and he broke into laughs again. Jovially, he slapped a student on the back, startling him, and walked away. “Happy Diwali, American!” he shouted, raising his hand and disappearing into the busy road. I wondered where he was wandering off to.
I decided to locate Devasia immediately. I stood at the back of the audience, scanned the crowd sitting and standing in the aisles. Everyone from college had to be here. The audience had swelled to four hundred or so—a sea of heads backlit by the stage lights, but no sign of Devasia. I looked up to see a canopy of eucalyptus leaves lit magically in the stage lights, glowing as if from within against the night. I snapped a quick series of shots of the crisscrossing leaves.
“Are you Xavier’s resident photographer now?”
It was Priya walking by, joined by members of her clique. There was Manju beaming at me, and Hannah, Ashok, and a few other faces I didn’t recognize.
Pradeep went on next, and he was the sensation of the night. He performed an extended ghazal—I knew he had a nice voice, but tonight he sounded like a recording star. Mellow, nimble, untiring, and confident, his voice owned the ghazal, starting with a flamboyant up-and-down spiraling of notes, a steadying out before the tabla player accompanying him struck the ghazal’s rhythm. Pradeep had the crowd hypnotized, and we roared and cheered him on, and when he finished, everyone demanded an encore. He went to sing three more songs—more popular tunes that I had heard my parents sing around the house at one time or another—that got the members of the audience singing along excitedly.