Rekhev smiles slightly.
“She is familiar to me,” he says. “You know, I can understand your Nana much better than I will ever be able to understand you.”
We sit in silence, drinking our tea. I watch through the doorway of the café as a man tries to tie a large block of steaming ice to the back of his bicycle. He unfolds a woven tarp, which he wraps around the block; he winds a length of twine around the block and expends a good deal of effort to stop the block from slipping.
“Look,” I say, gesturing outside. “That man is trying to carry ice.”
Rekhev looks over his shoulder, unimpressed, and returns his attention to his teacup. I feel like a foreigner.
“What does your name mean?” I ask Rekhev, seeing it written on the cover of his notebook: Rekhev Bharadwaj.
“Bharadwaj is the name of my gotra. Do you know what a gotra is?”
I shake my head no. “My gotra is my clan, my lineage from the Brahmin sages, or rishis. We are Mohyals, Hussaini Brahmins who fought alongside the grandsons of the Prophet in the Battle of Karbala. Is your family Shia or Sunni?”
“Sunni.”
“Too bad,” he says, wryly. “We were allied with the Shiites. The Mohyals believe that an ancestor of ours named Rahab Sidh Datt became close with Imam Hussain while living near Baghdad—this would have been in the late seventh century. When Hussain was traveling from Medina to Karbala and was attacked by Yazid’s army, Datt’s family was part of the entourage. He and his sons fought alongside the Imam, and seven of Datt’s sons died in the fighting. Those who survived settled across northern India, mostly in the Punjab. My ancestors were Hindus, but some of their traditions were quite influenced by Islam.”
“Your family is not so different from mine, then,” I say.
“I suppose you are correct,” Rekhev says, looking doubtful. “This was centuries ago, of course. My family are fairly traditional northern Indian Brahmins now. But the history remains.”
“Do people know about your community?”
“Not much—some. There are those who would like to erase this past, of course. But I had an old uncle who used to recite this saying: ‘Wah Dutt Sultan, Hindu ka dharm, Musalman ka iman, adha Hindu adha Musalman.’ It means: ‘Oh! Dutt, the king, who follows the religion of the Hindu, and the faith of the Muslim, half Hindu, half Muslim.’ My uncle was an Urdu poet. He spoke better Urdu than many Pakistanis. You see, some threads continue.”
“And what about your first name? Does it have a meaning?”
“All names have a meaning,” Rekhev says, bristling. “In the Chandogya Upanishad there is a small reference to a rishi called Rekhev, just two lines. A king comes to him seeking tatvagyan, the knowledge of elements. He has his daughter with him, the princess. And Rekhev says that he will give the king knowledge only because his daughter is very beautiful. ‘Why would he say that?’ people wondered. There have been centuries of discussions among scholars about these two lines. Someone wrote a novel based on these two lines, called Diary of Anonymous. It’s a shame you can’t read it; it’s in Hindi. Rekhev is the hero of Diary of Anonymous.”
“Is it the story of Rekhev’s relationship with the king and the princess?”
“No, in fact it is the explanation of those two lines from the Chandogya Upanishad, of what came before that meeting.”
“What was the story?”
“It’s a long one. Shall we have another cup of tea?” Rekhev asks me, and I nod.
“Bhaiyya, do chai,” he says to the waiter, who swiftly returns to the kitchen with our order.
“Rekhev had been looking for the princess for his entire life. In the beginning, Rekhev used to do meditation and tapasya, or penance, in the jungle, because he was a sage. He had never seen a woman in his entire life. On the day when this story takes place, it was raining hard. The princess was passing through this jungle and had an accident: her cart broke down. Because Rekhev had never seen a woman, he thought that the princess must be a man-god, a dev-pursh. Because she was wounded, Rekhev offered to carry her on his back. She said that this would not be proper, because she was a woman. ‘What is a woman?’ he asked her. She told him, and he understood, recognizing the idea as familiar, though it was outside of his experience. What is the English word for manobhava, for an idea of something . . . ?”
“‘Concept’?”
“Concept. She made him understand the difference between concept and something tangible, between concept and . . .”
“Matter.”
“Exactly. Between concept and matter. He said, ‘Because you have made me understand the difference between concept and matter, you are my guru.’”
“How did she leave the jungle?”
“I am not sure. The princess returned to safety somehow, and Rekhev sat down near the broken cart and started to meditate. He got a rash on his back because of the improper idea of carrying the princess on his back. He stayed in this position for a long while, for years even, scratching his back and meditating, trying to understand his guru. Then he went on a journey to find her. He found a very old woman who told him that he had information but he lacked knowledge, because he had not done satsang. Do you know the meaning of satsang?”
“Satsang is when people gather to sing devotional songs, right?”
“No, no. I suppose some people call that satsang, but the real meaning of satsang is ‘noble friendship.’ You see, Rekhev was all alone. He hadn’t related to anyone.”
“Did he go, then, in search of noble friendship?”
“He did. This is the preoccupation of most of the book. It might make an interesting film, actually. Now, this is my own idea, and you can make of it what you will, but I believe that when you take information from one sphere to another, only then does it transform. It changes from information to knowledge. I think this is why people travel.”
“But you don’t travel.”
“I have not left Pune for some time,” he says, lighting another cigarette. He suddenly looks very tired. “Shall we go back?”
“Yes, let’s do that,” I say.
As has quickly become our pattern, we walk back to the campus without speaking. Darkness has fallen, and the dinner hour is over. Once again I will have to make my meal out of wheat biscuits, potato chips, and bottled water, I think to myself. My head aches from the amount of information I have tried to absorb in one day. I wonder why Rekhev has chosen me to tell all these theories to. He seems to take it all so seriously.
“Good night,” I say, extending my hand when we reach the entry to my compound.
“Good night,” Rekhev says, shaking my hand quickly. “You may not see me for some time.”
I try not to sound disappointed. “Why is that?”
“I have some work to attend to,” he says, mysteriously. “But we will meet soon.”
As he walks away, I call out, “Good luck, then.”
“Luck?” he says, looking back at me over his shoulder.
“Good luck with your work, I mean.”
“Luck is written in the Fates,” he says, and weaves his way among the passing cars to the main campus gate.
His words make me smile. I turn around and walk back to my room, wondering if he was intending to be so cryptic.
10
RICHARD AND SAMINA
CHESTNUT HILL, 1986
I first heard the story of my mother’s fascination with America at a party my parents threw when I was eleven years old. It was a Saturday night in the beginning of December, and my mother and grandmother had spent the day preparing chicken biryani, filling the house with the smell of toasted cumin. The lights were turned down low, and my father had built a fire in the sunroom and put on one of his Pakistani folk records. The sunroom was in a far corner of the house, just off the more formal living room, and it was slightly sunken, one step below the rest of the ground floor, so that you had to make a small step down to enter it—a small but deliberate motion signaling that this was a different sort of room. This
was where my mother and grandmother told stories. The walls were paneled in rosewood, and lined with large windows that opened like swinging doors, letting in sun in the daytime and letting out smoke from the fire at night. A pair of old Indian puppets hung above the fireplace, carefully placed by my father so that they faced each other with their arms raised and their mouths open, appearing to be in mid-conversation.
By eight o’clock, the house was crowded with my mother’s friends from Pakistan and my parents’ friends from Boston, drinking cocktails and laughing. Dinner was served on the thick metal thali plates with matching cups that we used for company. Guests praised the biryani, and several American women gathered around my grandmother, asking her how to make it. I heard her begin to explain, shyly, “Really, it’s not hard. You just take ginger, garlic . . .”
After dinner, everyone gathered in the sunroom. Someone asked my mother to tell a story. Her friends referred to her anecdotes as “Samina stories,” and that night, someone asked about her first trip to America. She laughed and said, “It all started at the movies. . . .” Cassim and I took seats on the floor of the sunroom, settling in next to Nana as the story began.
“When I was eight years old, my father took his three wives, eight sons, two daughters, four nephews, and five servants to the Paradise Cinema in downtown Karachi to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, and that day I decided I wanted to come to America. The movie was in Technicolor, and I had never seen anything so magnificent. There was a trapeze artist, an elephant trainer, a clown. . . . I remember thinking, ‘Is this what America is like?’”
My father sat across the room from my mother, smiling. No matter how many times he might have heard these stories, he always looked as though he were hearing them for the first time.
My mother went on. “When I was fifteen, I began heavily campaigning to be allowed to apply to study in the United States. I convinced my first cousin Uzma to apply with me to the American Field Service exchange program. Uzma was fair, much fairer than me, with long shiny black hair and long eyelashes, and we were best friends. My brothers called us ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”
The guests laughed. My mother liked to joke about not being pretty when she was younger, but I’d seen the pictures, and I knew she was exaggerating.
“Uzma had an aunt who worked at the Pakistani Consulate in Paris and periodically sent her French magazines and underwear, and Uzma was fascinatedby Europe. She wanted to go to Paris, but I explained to her that America was a much better choice—it was the land of Elvis Presley, our favorite singer. I offered to help her with her essay and she relented. We completed our applications and hand-delivered them to the U.S. Consulate, and then we waited for a response. Every day after school, I would ask Majjid, the majordomo of our household, if any mail had come for me. And every day Majjid would say, ‘No, beti, there was no letter,’ shaking his head. ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ It seemed like the letter would never come.
“One day, after more than three months, the telephone rang after dinner. It was Uzma. ‘Did your letter come? Did it come?’ she asked.
“‘I haven’t had any letter. What does yours say?’
“‘Oh, Sam, it says I am going to Lockport in New York State! I am going to stay with a family called Parsons! And they have two boys in the family, and one girl, who is also fifteen! Oh, Sam, this is so exciting!’”
My mother shook her head sadly. “Truthfully, I was terribly unhappy. I thought to myself, How could Uzma have been accepted and not me? It seemed wildly unfair. Not only was I not going to America, I was also losing my best friend. Five days later, I shuffled home through the gate after school and Majjid was there waiting for me, looking jubilant.
“‘A letter for Her Majesty!’ he announced.
“‘It’s come?’ I dropped my satchel and ran up the stairs to the kitchen storeroom—the only place where I could shut the door and open my letter in privacy. There it was. Thick, pale blue, and covered with American stamps. I was going to America! To Manhattan!
“There was so much to do. I had to pack my clothing for an entire year in two steamer trunks, and in these I had to fit gifts for my American family. And I had to do research. I went to the U.S. Consulate and asked to see photographs of Manhattan. The consul general’s secretary got up on a stool and brought down the Encyclopædia Britannica, and showed me pictures of the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Empire State Building. I studied these carefully, and imagined everything that I was going to do in America. I couldn’t wait to get there.”
My mother paused, smoothing the fabric of her salwar kameez.
“When it was finally time to go, Uzma and I were taken to the airport in a long caravan of cars, garlanded with strings of flowers, photographed, wept over—most of our relatives were convinced that a terrible fate awaited us.
“We took an Alitalia flight to Paris, where we planned to spend two days before meeting the steamship that would take us to New York. A cable had been sent to Uzma’s auntie Seema. She was instructed to put us up and chaperone us in Paris. Our mothers stood close to one another on the airport tarmac, watching their fifteen-year-old daughters boarding a 747, looking very nervous.
“I remember that once we were inside the plane I was quite struck by the clean beige surfaces of the interior; I had never been on an airplane before. When the dinner service was distributed, I was quite amazed by the minuscule amounts of food placed into tiny compartments in the tray, and I began poking at it.
“‘Don’t eat it. It might be pork,’ Uzma whispered fiercely.
“Since it is forbidden in the Qur’an, we had been carefully instructed to avoid pork. Neither of us had any idea what it looked like.
“‘I’m eating it,’ I announced.
“An hour later, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and we clutched each other’s hands.
“‘It’s because you ate pork!’ said Uzma, frightened. ‘This plane is going to crash because God is angry with you!’
“We prayed for God to forgive me, and asked for his blessings to safely land in Paris.
“‘Please, God,’ I pleaded, ‘I promise to be obedient if you will just let this plane get us to France.’
“Ten hours later, we landed at four a.m. local time. We sleepily emerged from the plane and entered the airport terminal to look for Auntie Seema. We found a bench and sat down, surrounded by our four trunks. After an hour, there was still no sign of her. The airport police approached us to see what the problem was. Uzma spoke a little French, and she managed to explain that Seema worked at the Pakistani Consulate in Paris. The police were clearly exasperated, unsure what to do with two lost girls, but eventually they rang up the consulate. This being August, Seema was on holiday in the French Riviera, and had not received the cable from Karachi. The consulate sent a car, and we were taken to Seema’s apartment.
“We were very hungry. We looked around the apartment and found some spare change in a jar in the kitchen. We decided to venture out and see what we could buy with it, and found a small shop not too far from the apartment. We selected two bottles of milk and two croissants, which we placed on the counter. We laid all of our change on the counter and looked up at the cashier.
“‘Is it enough?’ Uzma asked.
“The man waved us away dismissively with his hand, indicating that we should just take our breakfast as well as our change.
“We walked down the street, drinking our milk and eating the croissants. We couldn’t believe our luck.
“The consulate sent a telegram to Seema’s hotel, and she had to cut short her vacation and take a train back to Paris. In the interim, a car came twice a day to fetch us and take us to the consulate for our meals. In between, we wandered the streets of Paris, looking in shopwindows. Auntie Seema arrived just in time to put us on the ship that would take us to America.
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