Amriika

by M G Vassanji

  A section of the banquet hall had been reserved for the wedding ceremony, watched by about a couple of hundred people seated in rows. Basu was on one side of Ramji, Rumina was on the other, then Michel. Ramji felt intensely aware of Michel’s presence. He took Rumina’s hand.

  The ceremony was officiated by a man in priestly garb; he was moonlighting, actually, as Basu explained. Like the horse, he was also on show — a mathematics professor from UCLA, reportedly the possessor of numerous patents, but now bare-chested and wearing a dhoti, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The bride and groom sat across the ceremonial fire from him.

  When the groom’s jasmine veil was finally lifted, a Caucasian face was revealed, with straight brown hair.

  “He’s an American!” said Basu to Ramji.

  To which someone behind them muttered: “And the bride is not American?”

  “Very apt,” Ramji murmured to a red-faced Basu.

  The ceremony over, the crowd stood up to mingle and search for refreshments. The bride and groom were escorted to a sofa in a reserved area of the hall covered with a blue oriental carpet and scatterings of rose petals, and on each side of them were enormous flower arrangements. Two cameras were on duty.

  The groom appeared to be around twenty-five years old, the bride about the same age. He was of average height and muscular in build. The bride, attired in a traditional red sari and amply though tastefully bejewelled, her face pink with makeup and natural blush, looked breathtakingly lovely. Somehow at a wedding, Ramji observed to himself, the bride’s handlers always managed to give her a look that was at once beautiful, innocent and virginal.

  One reason why Basu had brought them to this wedding in Torrance was to show them an exotic, “multicultural” event — an American wedding that was also Indian, and Hindu. Because it was a controversial wedding, Basu said, many who should have come, friends of the family, had decided to give it a pass. And so bodies were needed, Indian bodies to lend an air of success to the affair.

  Among the Indians he knew, Basu explained, there was always a competition, friendly and sometimes not so friendly, measured by the professional achievements of their children. A doctor or a lawyer counted high. There was a story about the “tragedy” of a couple whose only child secured a place in “only” (as they put it) engineering (instead of law or medicine) and had to move to Phoenix to hide their shame. The story was possibly exaggerated, but it had the ring of plausibility. The different Indian groups naturally preferred their children to marry among their own kind and class.

  And so tonight’s wedding was ill-attended by families with eligible children. It set just the wrong example, for instance, for a girl who was at that tender age when she was prone to get dreamy-eyed over, if not exactly an Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike hulk from the college football team, then perhaps a Tom Cruise, or worse, an earnest poet, when she should be thinking of a fellow-Indian gynecologist or geriatrician who would become that stout Republican unit, a gilded pillar of immigrant society.

  The bride’s father, an acquaintance of Basu, came over. He was a Mr. Anand, a small thin man with a long face and high forehead, wearing a grey suit pinned with a red rose. He was an engineer working for a gyroscope manufacturer. “So nice you could come. Please eat. Please — come — and congratulate the couple.” The happiness on his face looked somewhat under strain.

  Ramji did as he was bid, followed Mr. Anand to meet the couple, who were now by themselves and looked revived. James, the groom, turned out to be a student of commerce. A definite strike against the marriage, if the game were not already lost.

  “Super boy, simply great kid,” Mr. Anand said to Ramji, when they had moved on to make way for other well-wishers of the couple.

  “How did they meet?” Ramji asked. “Do they go to college together?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Anand eyed Ramji for a moment, found him fit to open his heart to. “You know, at first we were dead against the marriage. No way, we said. I’ll lock you up in your room, I told her — not seriously, of course. And my wife, Mrs. Anand, you should meet her — she’s not fluent in English, but she’s very religious — she threatened to starve herself to death. When you bring up a daughter, you expect to be able to talk to her husband — speaking in English is not the same thing. Then Vinita said to us, At least find out more about Jim — that’s his name — talk to his parents. I telephoned the parents and they invited us for dinner. After dinner they said to my wife and me, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Anand, we have accepted your daughter Vini as our daughter, we have known her for over two years. We now ask you to accept our son James as yours.’ They’re an old family, very devout and respectable.”

  “How did they agree to their son becoming a Hindu?” Ramji asked Basu when Mr. Anand was out of earshot.

  “Oh — he has not become Hindu. He simply agreed to the ceremony. And the Anands agreed to a church wedding, that’s taking place tomorrow. It’s a private affair, mostly with Jim’s people.”

  A devout Christian family and an observant Hindu one. What happens to the children of that union?

  Basu read his mind. “They’ve agreed that the children should be baptized.”

  “He doesn’t seem very happy, does he?”

  “Who — Anand? No. They are desperate for their son now, an Indian girl of the appropriate caste is being sought.”

  Basu’s Lata had turned seventeen and was already thinking of university. Basu had on his hands two projects, saving money first for her college fees, and then for the girl’s wedding. The first he and his wife could more or less manage. As for the second … sometimes eligible Indian boys expected gifts — a house or a car were not unusual demands, or wads of cash. What could a socialist editor of a radical newspaper manage for a decent gift?

  Ramji saw a worried expression come over Basu’s face; perhaps he was already regretting having come to this wedding, to be reminded of all the worries of having a daughter.

  “Can you really control them?” Ramji asked, “they’ll do exactly as they please, no?”

  Basu had a hearty laugh at this. “There speaks the concerned father — admit it, now. The idea, as you know,” he said, “is to restrict their options from the beginning — that is the way most parents do it. You can’t lock them up, you and I know that. But you can let them think they choose their friends while you pick the area you live in and the school they go to, and the friends you associate with — and let’s face it, the Indian lifestyle, with Indian people, is very attractive and loving for the children. The rest is luck.”

  Still, Ramji thought — watching Lata and Leila and Hanif and a couple of others meandering freely now among the crowd and chatting and laughing and feasting on Indian buffet — you can never quite say what they will be up to. The kids are a change of weather hovering in the background, waiting to happen.

  Rumina and Michel had wandered off together. Ramji peered into the crowd, couldn’t see them. He felt irritated, then a welling up of anger at Michel’s thoughtlessness. And Rumina did seem to go overboard with her friendliness. He felt terribly unhappy and alone.

  There was loud applause as the bride and groom were escorted to the door, and then showered with rice and flower petals. By this time the bride had changed into a dress. A white Rolls-Royce with chauffeur awaited to take them away to a life of connubial bliss. In American fashion the bride threw her bouquet of flowers over her shoulder; it didn’t land in anyone’s hands, but fell a few feet short of the crowd. There was a scrummage of young girls anxious to pick it up. For each one, hopefully, a doctor or lawyer awaited in the wings.

  Then Rumina appeared, and she was pulling Michel by the hand. Ramji felt his face redden with scorching emotion, the more so as he was certain Lata and Leila had stopped in their tracks to watch him react. Finally he waved at Rumina and she came over with Michel.

  Shortly afterwards Mr. Anand brought his wife to meet them. She was a well-built woman in her fifties wearing a purple sari, also pinned with a red rose, and they all
shook hands and talked of what a wonderful event this was. It was hot, the husband and wife were sweaty, and their roses looked squashed.

  On the drive back the talk was about the horse at the wedding.

  “We went to look at Delhi Delight,” Rumina said to Ramji. “It was quite grand and very solemn. Did you know that Michel is an expert on thoroughbred horses?”

  “No, I never realized that,” Ramji muttered.

  “Hardly an expert,” Michel said. “I used to follow racing news many years ago.”

  He went on to tell them, in some detail, about the kidnapping and killing of Shen-shah, Delhi Delight’s sire, in Ireland in the eighties.

  In bed later that night, Rumina said, “Michel was quite taken by the wedding ceremony … all the rituals and costumes and the music.”

  “Don’t forget the horse.”

  “It was a magnificent sight, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re not going to go on about the horse …”

  “What have you against it?”

  “Someone should talk about the bride and groom for a change, for Chrissakes.”

  “We hardly know anything about them.”

  “Precisely. If you hadn’t been flirting with Michel you might have heard their story.”

  There, he spat it out, this venom he’d been harbouring.

  “You should be ashamed. How could you say such a thing.” A tone of voice, a verdict he’d never heard before, from her.

  She turned away, on her side. Her eyes were open, he could tell, he could see one eyelash flickering. She was waiting, and he moved closer, put an arm around her, felt her heartbeat under the breast in his palm.

  “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t; but he was terribly hurt and wasn’t sure whose fault it was.

  “I was thinking …,” she said after a while.

  “Yes?”

  “You know Dr. Weinstein wants me to go with him to Kenya and Tanzania?”

  “Yes …”

  Dr. Weinstein was one of her private students. For years he had watched African wildlife shows on TV and video, and finally he took it upon himself to learn Swahili to put some authenticity into his African experience. Rumina had been trying hard to convince him to go to East Africa himself, and he always told her he would go only if she accompanied him.

  “If I went with him, it would be a great chance to go back —I’ve never been back —”

  “By all means you should go,” and perhaps meet up with Michel there? “And if I came along too?”

  “That would be nice.” Then, softly: “And what have we decided about Michel?”

  “Let’s wait till tomorrow,” he told her, caressing her hair, tucking away a strand from her forehead.

  He lay on his back, thinking. Soon he became aware of her deep breathing, and he turned onto his side and watched her.

  After a while, when he couldn’t sleep, he got out of bed to get a glass of milk, then went and stood looking out the window of the living room. Outside, the street was deserted, two rows of lamps led off to Pier Ave and beyond. In the background, if he paid attention, was the intermittent sound of traffic on Sepulveda a few blocks away; more mysterious, from the opposite direction, the crashing of waves, the constant drumming, endless. The sky was clear.

  Staring out at the cavern of the black starry night, he thought that that was surely the resting place of what was constantly being lost, funnelled away from the world; it was the repository of lost time. And so nothing was really lost after all, one had only to be able to visit that world out there and look around. In that world lay all that had been in his life. He recalled walking along an empty street at 4 a.m. with his grandmother, on their way to early mosque for meditation. He would have been ten. Uhuru Street, with a watchman huddled in the shadows every few stores, lamppost lights dimly glowing, his chappals padding flippety-flip on the road, hers shuffling shrr-shrr along it. This was the world he left twenty-seven years ago, often dreaming of returning, never quite making it … a world always vivid in his mind, strongly beating in his heart. Africa.

  Then there was Ginnie in America. That gorgeous night together, when he lost his virginity. I loved you, Ginnie, I loved you … in so many ways. My new-found land — remember that poem I sent you, highlighting the lines. How silly you thought I was, quite rightly so; and then that day, They’ve scooped me out, you said, but still cheerful in the hospital bed, puffed cheeks and bald head inside that wig, so close to death. Go where your heart takes you, you said, we don’t judge you, it is a joy simply seeing you make your way in the world.

  It was unfair, to have known her so briefly and lost her. They could have talked of so many things had she lived, and laughed whimsically about the past. She would have told him what he was like then — and she would have brought him back to earth now, said something like: Ramji, you don’t owe anything to the world, except to those you love and who love you.…I wonder what she would make of my life now?

  He walked towards Michel’s door, paused there for a second. Slowly he opened it, and without a sound, stepped in. There was a light from the window that partially illuminated the room. Ramji stood beside the bed, watched the younger man’s breath coming even and soft. He was in pyjama pants only, and lying on his back, one leg bent and resting sideways, the other drawn up forwards, its big toe, curiously, upturned. In his arms he embraced a pillow. The day’s stubble on his chin, the mouth slightly open.

  What dream, what man?

  Michel opened his eyes, was staring back at him. “You want me to go from your life,” he said.

  Ramji took a long, deep breath, his silence implying assent; then he took a chair, sat down by the bed, and said quietly: “Your father called earlier today — just before you returned from your outing with Zayd. He asked me to tell you that.”

  “Oh,” a soft expletive, and Michel continued staring abstractly at the ceiling.

  There was a brief silence between them, a moment of anticipatory stillness, and then Ramji said, in the same tone of voice as before, “How many of you were involved in that bombing?”

  Michel took a moment to reply, then said, “Three.”

  He turned his face and Ramji saw a look of helplessness on him.

  The other two who were involved with him were Shahin and Sadru, university students in Detroit. Sadru’s father owned a hardware store, through which they obtained the nitrites. And Michel had blasting caps, a timer, and other paraphernalia left over from an assignment he had undertaken during his Movement days.

  “So,” Ramji said, “you had set off a bomb before?”

  “Yes. A pro-Iranian newspaper in Toronto.”

  “And casualties?”

  “None, it was Sunday.”

  And the same thing for the bookstore bombing — Michel’s voice rising in pitch: no casualties were intended, the dead woman — Jeanine Summer — worked at his uncle’s store, she had taken the week off and was supposed to have gone on holiday with her boyfriend and child.

  He was now sitting up in the bed, his voice earnest and pleading: “I swear — we didn’t mean to kill … just to teach the town a lesson for its hatred.” He was looking crumpled and very much defeated.

  “You should give up your plans for escaping,” Ramji said, “and turn yourself in. Your friends and family can then arrange a good defence. There’s no escape in any case, you should know that — they’ll find you wherever you go.”

  There was a pause, then Ramji said, “Rumina. She believes you’re innocent.”

  “I know.”

  They discussed a course of action, sat together in silence in the partial darkness of the room. Afterwards Michel lay back in bed, eyes open. And some time later Ramji came to with a jerk of the head, realizing he had finally dozed off. Michel was stretched out full length on the bed, sleeping.

  13

  And then finally it was over. He would never be able to say, later, if the conclusion could have possibly, by different management, turned out better or worse. He had forced th
e outcome, somewhat. Was it out of some belief in justice and accountability; or plain common sense; or fear for himself and those he held close; or the jealousy eating into him? In the most important decisions, in matters that involved his innermost spirit, Ramji had never been able to be unequivocal; his inner life had always been steeped in ambiguity and doubt. He had never belonged to any one place entirely, not stood behind a cause or movement without reservations; when he left a judgemental, jealous God for the cold thrill of reason, he still could not do without portents and symbols, always yearned for moral certainty. The upside to this nature was a partial immunity to betrayal and failure. And so his friend Shawn’s reversal, or Darcy’s diminishment from an awesome and principled god to a weak old man; the realization that Lucy-Anne had lied to him in his room — all these came with a sense of shock, yes, and pain, but sufficiently muted. Only in his current love had he been able to become so totally passionate and absorbed and hopeful. Events, nevertheless, plotted out its demise with the precision of a theorem.

  It was the day of the Shamsi Friendship Walk, which had been organized with much anticipation and fanfare by the Community, to collect money for Third World causes. Some two thousand spectators had gathered at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to watch the almost five hundred participants of the walk. There were people from as far away as Washington, D.C., and Vancouver — friends, well-wishers, Community leaders. On the green field, a stage had been set up for all manner of diversions: a middle-aged rock band playing hits of the sixties; the president of the national Community Council giving the V-sign with both hands, reminding one of Richard Nixon in his heyday, urging people to walk, walk, walk; a jokester; a group of bare-chested Indians dancing their version of African ngoma. Colourful outfits and brilliant track shoes dazzled the eye. Naseem guided her Golden Club with a baton from shade to sun, drinks to bathrooms, to keep them in fine form before the walk. Among the elderly Ramji noticed an obviously uncomfortable Darcy, perhaps itching for a scotch. And the press had once again stood up Naaz, and she was fuming, clipboard in one hand, a pen-whistle and a camera round her neck. She looked ravishing, and seemed to be getting into a number of jostles and tight squeezes, through no fault of her own; and men seemed to go out of their way to greet her, hoping presumably for cheek contact.