by Tony D'Souza
The table was set on the porch, my sister was asleep in her crib. Even I was in my bed in my room, not asleep, though I knew I wasn’t allowed not to be. My father had grilled steaks, had turned potatoes in foil over the hot coals all through the evening. The letter he’d written to my grandfather telling him it was time that Sam married a Konkan girl was stamped and sealed on his desk. My mother drank wine too quickly in her dress on the couch, which she did now sometimes. The only thing missing was my uncle.
My uncle’s headlights swept through the living room, and my father set down his newspaper to meet him at the door. My mother stayed on the couch. My father opened the door, and under the light of the entry, there was my uncle Sam, a bouquet of blue tulips in his hand, a young black woman on his arm.
Kissing on the Moon
The Konkans of south India are only two shades removed from the color of the girl my uncle brought to that dinner. For the better part of two millennia, the taller, lighter Aryan North Indians have been encroaching on the southern Dravidians’ lands. Somehow, the dark Indian peoples have hung on, the Konkans among them. Five hundred years after Vasco da Gama’s men trudged through the surf to spill their seed into the women of the palm-fringed Konkan Coast, the white blood has become nothing more among them than a murmur here and there, the odd child born with green eyes, tea-colored skin draping every ninth or tenth cousin. The rest come into this world as dark as the last act of evening before night.
The Konkans as a people are no more or less guilty of racism, sexism, classism, or any of it, than any other people in the world. They adhere to the general declension of the merit of the skin colors that the world has long agreed upon, with white being the best and black the worst, and whether she is clad in a burka or a bikini, a woman will always be judged by Konkan men firstly on her looks.
But the Konkans’ prejudices and hates have evolved over the centuries to fit their unique needs as a small Catholic people in a sea of Muslims and Hindus. Their history of colonization leaves them favorably disposed to Europeans, and that white people are better than they are they accept instinctually. Otherwise, how could those white people have come all that way and done all those things that they did? White women are the most desirable and forbidden in the world, and white men wield power and intelligence. At least until the borders of the Slavic peoples are reached, and then it becomes easy again to think of oneself as better than those drunk and bearded Russians, those manual-laborer Poles. Generally, the Konkans delineate the value of Europeans along the same south-to-north hierarchy as everyone else does, with the dark-haired Italians and Spanish not quite as good as the French, and the French not as good as the Germans, with the British the best of all, and the English by far the best of Britain, especially in and around the “home counties.” The blond-haired Scandinavians are more akin to a different, and better, species of human, but they are not superior to the English, because the English conquered the whole world. The Irish don’t matter of course. Gypsies are of course garbage. The Konkans have mixed opinions about Jews. While they admire and identify with them, take pride in their own status as the “Jews of India,” when the going gets tough, the Konkans are not above some friendly Jew baiting. Where the Konkans finally differ from other people is in regard to the Portuguese. While most dismiss the “Pork & Cheese” to the rank of the greasy Greeks, Konkans still think abnormally well of that long-diminished sailing superpower, which brought the rootstock of their culture to them in its little caravels.
But the people the Konkans hate, and not with Mickey Mouse Basque-to-Castilian bile, but with full-on Armenian-to-Turk acid, is Muslims, and more specifically, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indian Mohammedans. Why couldn’t they have shut the fuck up before Partition? How could they have turned their backs on India? Thank you for the Taj Mahal, but why do you insist on fucking up our neighborhoods, with your fucking green houses and that goddamned wailing five times a day? And why do you cover up your women? We know it’s because they only have that one long eyebrow. And the mustache. And the beard. So you converted to Islam to escape being harijans. Guess what? A harijan is still a harijan. Go fuck yourselves for fucking up our India, you fucking Muslim fucks.
Hindus, surprisingly, are rather admired by the Konkans. Though the Konkans know that the Hindus are all going to burn in hell in the end, still, who can’t help but like all that music and dancing? Hindus invented the sari and the bindi. Bollywood films are quite pleasing to watch. Hindus are generally a kind and gentle people, rather harmless. They believe in a god who is a monkey. Of course they got mad about all that stuff during the Raj. But who could blame them really? And look at how well they held their temper afterward. Thank you for making them do that, Mahatma Gandhi.
But this admiration is extended to the higher castes only. Once we descend into the ranks of the craftsmen, and then down to the manual laborers, Konkans can only muster tolerance, and as far as harijans are concerned, we’ve left the realm of Homo sapien sapien. Impoverished Konkans, too, are hard to take. You’re a Konkan, man, how did you let yourself get poor like that? Sikhs are good, different. Their turbans are quite stylish. Do they really have to wear that special underwear? Wouldn’t it be nice if they started killing Muslims again? And what about those crazy Parsi Tatas? Feeding their dead to vultures, taking their sisters to bed? Is that what it takes to make all that wealth?
To wrap up the world, Konkans don’t know where to rank slant-eyed Asians, and black people aren’t humans. But neither race can work up any real hatred out of the Konkans either. Simply put, Asians are irrelevant, blacks are not human. Blacks do look like monkeys, though, and that’s a funny thing.
My uncle Sam knew all of these things when he decided to bring Jacqueline Reynolds with him to that dinner where he knew my father was going to tell him he had to marry. And he also knew my father’s particular biases and dislikes. While my father didn’t truly hate anyone but himself, he didn’t like Mexicans because he was taken for one by white people, and this shocked him every time, because my father thought of himself as white. He disliked the Hindus in this country who still practiced traditional ways. He especially disliked Patels from Gujarat, who had immigrated in droves to the Chicago area at the same time that he did. They bought all the 7-Elevens, liquor stores, and Super 8 Motels, and they didn’t assimilate well because there were enough of them that they didn’t have to. The Patels thought that yelling at patrons and not speaking English while chewing on veg samosas with a Ganesha poster on the wall was good customer service, and so the white people started their camel-jockey, sand-nigger, and dot-head jokes and lumped my father in with them, causing my father to hate the Patels. As far as black people went, my father couldn’t care less. He’d never had to deal with them. Until my uncle brought over Jacqueline. And even then it wasn’t about the girl.
The dinner was as tense and awful as my uncle had promised Jacqueline it would be, and after they left and my parents were alone together, my mother took out her earrings in the bedroom and said to my father as he sat on the edge of the bed looking at his fingers curled with rage, “Start breathing, Lawrence. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack. That was neither very nice nor very smart of Sam. But why didn’t either one of us have the imagination to think that he might have already had a girlfriend?”
Jacqueline had free passes through her school all summer, and so her and my uncle’s first date had been to the planetarium, on the pier past the beach where my uncle used to meet my mother those days when they’d been planning on how to get Winston into this country. They had sipped Cokes through straws and looked at a diagram of the solar system.
“Saturn has all those rings,” Jacqueline had said. “And Jupiter’s nice too with that red storm.”
My uncle had said, “I prefer this bluest one.”
“Did you know about the planets when you were in India?”
“We could even see them in the night sky.”
My uncle Sam had met her at the DMV on E
lston, where he’d gone to renew his license late one afternoon. He took his ticket, sat down beside her. There were other open seats among the crowded benches, but that’s where my uncle chose to sit. On his other side was an old Mexican man in a straw hat holding his ticket on his knee. My uncle crossed his legs in the Indian style, which, even after four years in this country, was still his natural way. The girl was dressed in a navy blue skirt, a cream blouse, and her hair was pulled back tight in a ponytail. She held a purse on her lap that matched the color of her skirt. She was well put together and pretty.
“Here or there,” my uncle said to her under his breath, “government is always the slowest thing.”
“We get what we pay for,” she said back.
My uncle looked at the clock on the wall, at the faces of the people, at a child sleeping on the floor beneath his mother’s seat. There were dog-eared magazines scattered on the short table. People here and there were leafing through them. My uncle leaned toward the girl and said, “I admire your ring.”
“My mother gave it to me.”
“What is the stone?”
“Citrine. From southern Africa.”
“It’s very pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“It looks nice with your outfit.”
“Thank you very much.”
My uncle looked away from her then, out the window across from them at the sky above the lot. Three pigeons wheeled down into the lot and were lost between the cars. Some children came running out of the pizza parlor with balloons tied to their wrists.
“Where is your ‘here’?” the girl said quietly.
“My here?” asked my uncle Sam.
“When you came in. You said, ‘Here or there.’ Where is your here?”
“Norridge Park.”
“That’s nice. And your ‘there’?”
“India.”
“India as in Gandhi?”
“That very same India.”
She smiled and straightened up. She said, “You have to excuse me. I get nervous about these things. I know I don’t have to. It’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing. But I start to think about it and my heart beats fast. They put you in the chair, and all I can think is that I’m going to miss every question and they’re going to take my license away.”
“Everyone gets nervous about these things,” my uncle Sam told her.
“Not everyone. There are some people who can do these things in their sleep.”
“That isn’t me.”
The old man’s number was called, and when he didn’t seem to notice, my uncle touched his shoulder and said, “Compadre, es suyo.”
“Gracias. No sé los números en inglés después de diez.”
“How many languages do you speak?” the girl asked.
My uncle Sam counted them out on his fingers. “Hindi, Kannada, English. A little Spanish, and Konkani is my mother tongue.” He’d needed all the fingers on his hand.
“After a glass of wine, I can do a Southern drawl.” She laughed and touched his wrist.
My uncle passed his test with ease as he knew he would, smiled for the picture, and then held his new license in his hands a minute, wondering if the face of the man in the photo could be his. Everyone knew that DMV photos were unflattering, but he found his particularly bad. Was his nose really that broad? Could his chin really have that bulb on it? He put the warm plastic in its place in his wallet.
Outside in the lot, the clouds were scudding across the spring sky. The girl was there, smoking a thin cigarette.
“It was as easy as that, wasn’t it?”
“I told you that it would be.”
“My name is Jacqueline,” she said and held out her hand.
“My name is Sam.”
“I’ve always been fascinated by Hinduism.”
“Then I’m very sorry to tell you that I’m not that kind of Indian.”
My uncle went on dates with women, usually set up by his friend Javier, Puerto Rican girls from the old neighborhood, a girl from El Salvador named Maria. But never had he felt more than the vaguest of interest in any of them. None of those relationships had amounted to much but dinner somewhere, shooting pool in some bar, maybe some necking in the car at the beach, and some of the girls would tell him to call again. My uncle would drop them off at their homes, and wouldn’t. Javier once got frustrated with him and said into the phone, “That Maria liked you, Sam. And there was nothing wrong with that Maria. What are you saving yourself for? If you aren’t even going to try, then you should leave these girls alone, get on a plane, and marry a girl in India.”
For their second date, my uncle Sam and Jacqueline went to Club Alabam on Rush Street for jazz. There was a cover to get in, and the man at the door patted my uncle down for a gun. Jacqueline wore a black dress and my uncle Sam wore a jacket and tie. They stood at the bar because it was crowded, and nearly everyone in there was black except for two dark-haired white women who sat at a table in their cocktail dresses near the stage, smoking cigarettes and looking bored, and then there was a long bebop saxophone solo, and Jacqueline sipped her whiskey and Coke through a straw, looked at my uncle out the corner of her eye, and cocked her hips in a way that told him she was having fun. When the music turned to rhythm later, they got up from their table and danced.
My uncle called Jacqueline at her apartment two weeks later. He was sorry he hadn’t been in touch. Things had picked up at work and he’d been busy. He knew that she understood. Would she come to a dinner at his brother’s house? It was never any fun over there, and he wouldn’t mind some company for it. An hour or two with his brother and his wife. They could do something afterward.
At the dinner, my mother had hurried to set a fourth place, and the more she drank, the more she revealed herself. Did Jacqueline like teaching? Jacqueline didn’t mind it. My mother had liked teaching, too, the four years that she’d had to do that. Jacqueline was only in her third year. Had she started carrying over lesson plans from year to year yet? Jacqueline nodded yes. My mother had made new ones every time. Where had Jacqueline done her degree? Jacqueline had gone to UIC at night.
“You could do worse than UIC,” my mother had said, the candlelight in her eyes.
Jacqueline had nodded as she’d looked at her wine. “It’s not the University of Michigan.”
My mother regretted each of those words as soon as they left her mouth. Still, she couldn’t help it, and the shock of just how jealous she actually felt was like discovering a new continent. Of course, my father hadn’t said anything at all.
“I’m sorry about them,” my uncle had said to her in the car, and Jacqueline had said back, “They aren’t awful people.”
Then Jacqueline told him, “You know what, Sam? I was pretty excited about this. I was looking forward to seeing the inside of their house. But there wasn’t one Indian thing anywhere. I have more Indian things at my place than they do.”
My uncle said as he drove, “Didn’t I tell you that we aren’t those kinds of Indians?”
The dinner had tired my uncle out, and when he dropped her off at her place on Forty-third, Jacqueline leaned in the window of the passenger’s side and said to him, “You can call me if you like. There’s you and them, and I can tell the difference.” Then she let herself into her building.
At home, my uncle thought about the girl. Why had he done that to her? Why had he used her to make Babu mad? And why had the thought of Denise made him want to do that? Now he would be in trouble with Babu. Now he would be in trouble with both of them. But that was all right, too, wasn’t it? Now was the time for them to hurt each other.
My father composed a letter to my grandfather. This took all day Sunday in his study, and Monday in his office. No matter that he hadn’t often written to them, he was Babu, and they understood that he would write when it was necessary. Now was a time when it was necessary. My father burned with anger. He crumpled the papers to start again. Even work didn’t matter for a change, after what Samue
l had done.
In the final letter, my father detailed all of my uncle Sam’s transgressions against the family. Sam was running around with loose women. Sam had turned his back on his brother and all the values the Konkans held dear. What would become of Sam if nothing was done? And then who would be the next one to be disobedient? When he had finished the letter, my father read it to my mother on the couch. My mother nodded when he finished reading. Despite herself, she said, “All of that sounds fine to me, Lawrence.”
My uncle took Jacqueline to The Taj restaurant on Devon Avenue the next Friday to make up for the uncomfortable dinner. They ate korma and vindaloo and naan with their fingers, and my uncle Sam drank a Kingfisher beer, and Jacqueline laughed because of the mess she made of herself with the food. The waiter in his cummerbund and red turban was attentive and serious, and he pretended not to notice her inarticulate eating, which made it even better. All around them on the walls were Mughal portraitures of men playing sitars for women in saris seated on cushions, and even when they left, the hostess in her elaborate silk sari pressed her palms together and said, “Namaste.”
The next weekend, they went to the planetarium again, because it was raining and also Jacqueline had those passes from Dirksen Elementary School, where she taught. Downtown was the halfway point for both of them. And so what if they’d already done the planetarium? They’d had their first date there, it was free, and they had both liked it. In India, my grandfather was reading the letter my father had written.
Jacqueline and my uncle sat in the dark theater in the plush, reclining seats and watched the star show that the strange machine projected on the domed ceiling. There were shooting stars and supernovas, quasars and the Crab Nebula. Part of the show connected the dots to reveal the outlines of all the constellations of the zodiac. On their way out of the theater, they looked in the hall at a lighted chart of the expanding universe, at the case of dimpled rocks that Neil Armstrong had brought back from the moon.