Mr. Venu enthusiastically waved his hands about, and made it a point to tell me that he had been trying, to no avail, to get Father Antonisamy to eat in his restaurant for the previous two years—and that I should be very honored that the principal had ventured off school grounds on my behalf. “Yes,” I agreed; it was an honor. Then he brought out his head cook, puffed out his chest, and proudly told us that it was the man’s wedding night, but he forced him to come in to cook because it was such a joyous occasion to have us at the restaurant. Now I was ashamed.
The cook bowed deeply, bobbled his head, and then scurried off—I assumed he was frantic to head back to his big night, which had been put on pause while he slaved away stirring curries bubbling in red clay pots to make our dinner.
Next, Mr. Venu opened a bag he was holding and pulled out a silk shawl, which he draped over my shoulders; then he and Father Antonisamy clapped while nodding their heads, telling me that this was the traditional welcome in South India.
Back at the hotel, sleep hit me like a brick in the face.
I dream that night: It’s the middle of the night in our house in Scarborough, dark and quiet—only the light from the upstairs bathroom is on. My sisters and I hold on to the railing of the banister upstairs, peering down to the floor below. Dad is talking quietly to someone, a stranger we don’t recognize. Something about Ma and a heart attack. We strain to hear what they’re saying. Somehow the three of us know—Ma has died. I can’t breathe—I fall to my knees, losing all control of holding my body upright. When I argued fiercely with her, usually over something stupid, she’d shake her head and say through tears, “When I’m gone, you’ll be sorry. One day, you’ll know what it’s like not to have a mother.” Yeah, whatever, Ma, I would think. The feeling is unbearable. Her smiling face comes to mind, then her laugh—to be seen and heard never again. I am frozen, numb; I want to move, but it’s impossible—everything is dark, dad is talking about funeral arrangements. Poor Ma . . . No, no, this can’t be happening . . . I can’t breathe . . .
I woke up and caught my breath—I wiped away the stream of tears that had soaked my face. That’s what it will feel like. I shuddered. Ma was right—I’ll be sorry. Never before had I dreamed something that was so very real. Holy Mary—I’m never yelling at her again.
Was India to blame for my crazy dream, this ancient land of mysticism, sages, and soothsayers? I picked up the box of the anti-malaria pills that were sitting on my bedside table. They had been prescribed by my doctor, to be taken two weeks prior to travel and then regularly throughout the trip. Mefloquine. Sure enough, in the fine print under “side effects,” there it was—vivid dreams.
When my dad and Ma were fighting, when things got really bad and he’d threaten to kill her, she’d do her best to remain defiant, countering every one of his insults with a stronger volley. The matches always seemed to end in the same place, though. “If I die,” Ma would yell, in one of her last attempts to reason with this madman, before her voice would break and she’d be fighting back tears, “God help these children . . .” And as my sisters and I listened from upstairs, that falter in her voice was the moment of real fear for us, because it was the first indication of potentially being defeated by my dad. The first glimpse of reality of life without Ma—and the scariest part of it all, this feeling of being completely and utterly lost. She was the glue that kept our lives together. She cooked, cleaned, paid the bills, washed our clothes and put them away, worked two jobs, and attended every parent-teacher meeting. She’d pack our lunches for school every morning, and every night before we’d go to sleep, without fail, she would kiss my forehead while whispering, “I love you, kanna. God bless you.”
In that hotel room in Pondicherry that night, I recalled a dusty corner of our basement in Scarborough where a framed black-and-white picture sat forgotten on the floor—Ma at nineteen, wearing a white sari and playing the veena—a big, South Indian plucked instrument. But it dawned on me that I was so far removed from the early life of the girl who was playing that veena. The Ma I had always known was a woman who wore super-high heels, maintained a trim figure and exuded a Beyoncé-esque elegance. Now I realized that Ma was a vestige of a different world. She had come from this ancient land of saris, monkey-infested temples, astrologers, and palm readers—a world of arranged marriages and curries cooked in clay pots over wood fires, a culture in which women never, ever cut their hair. To Ma, an elephant wasn’t a zoo animal or an exotic creature on a postage stamp—it was a work animal, one that walked with a heavy gait on the dirt road in front of her childhood home, on its way to a ten-hour shift of clearing the fields.
Ma had assimilated to a life in the West, but I guess I had taken for granted that my roots, my cultural heritage, were stored in a beautiful, little four foot ten, ninety-pound hard drive of sorts, and that was Ma. I could not bear to lose her.
This revelation felt like a gift, provided at just the right time. Here you are in India; go out there and become Tamil for yourself. The bustling town around me was filled with all the necessary components—Indian families, colorful marketplaces, and ancient stone temples, engaged in all manners of Indianness; all I had to do was cross the street.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Mohammed comes to the mountain . . .
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 06:37:56
Dear Rajiv,
May your travels continue, across oceans and into mountains, and especially, into remote corners of your imagination.
Glad to hear Pondicherry is still standing. A wonderful place, alive despite the decay, like all of India.
Yours,
Yann
5.
THERE WERE ABOUT THIRTY boisterous Indian boys in the classroom, all sixteen years old and dressed in their school uniforms—crisp white dress shirts, gray trousers, and slate blue ties. Their eyes were all on me as I made my way to the back of the room and I stared right back at them. I looked just like them, except I was wearing blue jeans and a Madras plaid shirt, and yet they looked at me mystified. My shirt was plastered to my back with sweat, but despite the overwhelming heat and humidity, I was enthralled to be here—the Mecca of my research—a Pondicherry classroom full of all the subtle nuances I hoped to take down and emulate as Pi.
Two boys were wobbling their heads in characteristic Indian fashion. I began rummaging through my bag for my pen and notebook, eager to take down these first observations, when the whole room suddenly went completely silent. I was still searching for my Bic rubber-grip pen when . . .
“Haah! So, then, you are whom?” A short, squat teacher with huge thick-lensed glasses had appeared out of thin air, standing beside my bench—a Tamil man in his late fifties who was bald save for the two patches of hair over his ears. He also had two tiny patches of hair growing out of his ears.
The boys were scurrying into their places, taking their seats on the rows of benches in front of me. “Good morning, sir! God bless you,” they all shouted out in unison, in English. The teacher impatiently waved his hand in their direction as the boys raised their arms together in a gesture of reverence and continued, “Praise the Lord!” I rolled my eyes in my head at the formality of the colonialism that still remained here—these boys were probably all mostly Hindu.
With a furrowed brow, the teacher smiled curiously and rocked back and forth on his heels a few times, waiting for my response. “I’m Rajiv.”
A puzzled look came over his face and he leaned in, motioning for me to repeat my name. “Rajiv . . .” I said again tentatively, “Um, I’m here for some research. I have permission from Father Antonisamy to sit—”
He cut me off, “Your name, once more?”
I was baffled, and nervous. My plan to draw as little attention to myself as possible had very quickly turned on its head to bite me in the ass.
One of the boys seated on the bench in front of me must have recognized the problem, because he quickly rose up and chimed in, �
�Raaa-jeeve, sir,” rolling the R heavily and placing the emphasis on the RA.
“Ahhh! Raaajeeve,” echoed the teacher in his high-pitched, nasal voice, bobbling his head. The boys in front of me bobbled their heads, as well, pleased that we all now knew what my name was. I made eye contact with the boy who had stood up, giving him a smile of gratitude. He smiled back and as he sat back down, it dawned on me that I probably should have stood up to address the teacher.
I was always aware that my last name was not a real Tamil name, as my dad’s true name was Nadarajah Surendiran. He once told me that there weren’t enough boxes on the form at the immigration office when he first arrived in Canada, so he hastily had to omit a couple of letters to make it fit, but who knows whether that’s even true—it’s very likely he was telling me this story after spending the afternoon with his best friends, Jack, Jim, and Johnnie—Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and Johnnie Walker, that is.
My first name was the part I thought was authentic, but in that classroom in Pondicherry, I discovered that I had lived my whole life pronouncing my own name incorrectly, like a big dum-dum. My parents followed an old Tamil tradition and never addressed me by name but instead called me mahan, the Tamil word for “son,” or kanna, a term of endearment meaning “precious one,” but also a nickname for the blue god, Krishna, who wears a peacock-feather crown. My way of saying my name was always a short Rajiv, no emphasis on any particular part of the name, just one very fast Ruj-eve, almost as if it were accented with French. I had never really thought about the origin or meaning of my Indian name. Perhaps it’s because it wasn’t one that solicited questioning in the English-speaking world, unlike a girl in my ninth grade math class, a new implant from Bangladesh, a shy, little thing named Jannatul. By eleventh grade, she had grown aware of the salacious implications of her name and made a conscious effort to be addressed as the much more subtle Jan. The only things I knew about my name were that Ma picked it only because she liked the sound of it—and that it was the name of the prime minister of India—a handsome, princely figure named Rajiv Gandhi—who was serving at the time of my birth. He met his untimely end when a woman greeting him at a public event bent down to touch his feet in the traditional form of respectful salutation, only to set off a bomb under her sari, killing herself while assassinating the prime minister and over twenty-five others—brutal.
There were no backs to the benches we were seated on, and after a couple of hours of sitting up straight and rigid, the entire class was slouching and twitching as the teacher lectured in a jumbled mix of English and a formal version of Tamil that was too florid for me to understand. I was jet-lagged and started nodding off, so I tried to keep my eyes open by taking note of my surroundings, surveying the details of the room—crumbling plaster walls with flaking baby blue paint, twenty-foot ceilings, an old ceiling fan whirring overhead. There was a small crucifix attached to the chalkboard. To my right was an arched window that opened onto the covered exterior corridor, providing a beautiful view of the courtyard. The windowsill seemed to be the designated holding area for dozens of strange, brightly colored bags made of woven plastic gimp. The wooden bench I was seated on was smooth and worn from years of use, with a dark and shiny patina. This classroom felt like sacred ground to me—it was a significant part of Pi’s life and a major setting in the novel. The teacher made his way through the rows, checking homework, and I was jarred out of my daze when he violently smacked his ruler down on one boy’s notebook and snapped, “The date, idiot—the date!”
It was still midmorning but the heat was intense, and just as I was beginning to marvel at the boys’ ability to remain focused, the one who had said my name poked the boy beside him in the ribs with the end of his pencil, making him jerk and knock the underside of the desk with his knees. The teacher turned around from the blackboard and yelled out something in Tamil, pointing to the innocent boy who had been poked. He slipped off the bench and knelt on the floor, remaining upright. I recalled this form of chastising that Ma had enforced only a few times when we were small kids—it got uncomfortable really fast. What amazed me was that there was no arguing, no back and forth between the kids and the teacher—no “It wasn’t me!” or “Whaaaaat?” This is not what would have transpired back in Toronto—I recalled an incident in eleventh grade English class when a student spat in the teacher’s face after an argument about his final grade.
Class ended and we were dismissed for lunch. We were all filing out of the room when the boy who had said my name appeared beside me. “King of life,” he said in heavily accented English, his voice prepubescent. “Raj, like raja or king, and jeeve, jivan, jivatma—Sanskrit for life, the soul. Rajiv . . . king of life.” He was taller and thinner than I was and had a big grin on his face as he looked down at me with two huge black eyes. For the first time ever, my name meant something to me.
“I am Akash,” he continued, “and if the king of life is not preoccupied for lunch break, you may sit with me and my classmates.” I had the sudden urge to pull out my tape recorder. This was the accent that I was hoping to mimic—the realest form of it, a sixteen-year-old Pondicherry boy, a native Tamil speaker who was conversing in English.
Boys from every other classroom in the school were making the mass exodus to lunch, and the corridors became a sea of brown faces with shiny black hair. It took me by complete surprise when Akash reached down and swiftly took my palm in his, holding my hand as he led me through the crowd. Boys hold hands in India and it isn’t romantic. I didn’t want to appear ungrateful for his kindness; still, it was new to me and it took quite a lot of effort to not pull my hand away.
The corridor and the courtyard were quickly filling with boys, each one of them claiming their spot in a sort of human jigsaw puzzle. Akash was still holding my hand when we stopped at a shaded corner of the corridor, in front of three other boys from our classroom—Rohit, Deepak, and Karthik. Each of the boys was holding one of those colorful woven plastic gimp bags. I watched curiously as each boy pulled out a little towel, placed it on the stone floor in front of him, and then sat down, cross-legged. I joined them on the ground and then a mild interrogation began: “Where you are from?” asked Rohit. He was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, with North Indian features that were model-handsome—even though his nickname was “Nosey,” because of his large, beak-shaped nose.
When I said Toronto, and then clarified by saying, Canada, Karthik quickly cut in, “Tu parles Français?” His eyes were droopy and his deep voice sounded eager.
I responded in French with, “Yes, of course,” and he beamed.
Deepak, the alpha of the group, who sported a mustache and was taller and thicker than the others, shoved Karthik and filled me in about his obsession with learning French (a language that still had a presence in Pondicherry).
“Will you be attending classes here?” Akash asked. They didn’t seem to have stars in their eyes when I spoke of Hollywood, and just bobbled their heads as I filled them in on Life of Pi, the movie, and my research plans.
Then Nosey leaned in and squeezed my upper arm with his fingers. “Big biceps, very nice,” he noted, and the others followed suit, each taking turns to squeeze my arm. “Yes, very nice,” echoed Karthik, then, “Quite firm,” Akash said. (FYI: They were not “nice” or “big”—these observations were simply relative to emaciated Indian standards.)
“May I have a look at that fancy pen you were using?” asked Deepak. I pulled out my ordinary ballpoint and handed it to him. “Oohhhh . . .” he said, gently caressing the rubber shaft with his fingertips, “. . . so very soft! We are not having access to pens like this in India.”
“Take it; I have another one,” I offered. Then there was a flurry of arguing in Tamil, the other boys accusing him of a rude welcome to their new guest. “No, no,” Deepak said, preciously handing the pen back to me, “I simply wished to inspect it.”
The boys each reached into their gimp bags and brought out stainless-steel tiffin containers—these three-tiered lunch pai
ls contained either rice and various vegetable curries, or other Tamil meals that were best eaten when assembled just before consumption. I had no lunch, but politely declined when they insisted that I share theirs. Another round of questions: Where was I staying? How did I get to school? Was there anything I needed? They finished eating, and after packing away their tiffin containers, Deepak whispered something to Akash and then leaned in and quietly said to me, “You come with us now . . .”
We stepped around the maze of seated boys, snuck out of the school’s back gate, and as we made our way down a tiny, quiet side street, Akash explained what was happening. They were forbidden to leave the school grounds, but every now and then they snuck off to have some “fun.”
“You like video games?” he asked slyly.
“Yeah, sure,” I lied. I was never a video game kind of kid. Cleaning out my chicken coop or hand-pollinating the blossoms in my pumpkin patch were much more appealing.
We arrived at a tiny, old, and decrepit building with a roof made of woven palm leaves, and an adorable little kid, about seven years old, ran out to greet us. He was barefoot and wore red cotton shorts with white trim and a ragged T-shirt with Bart Simpson on it. He held out his hand and each of the boys handed him a five-rupee note (about seven American cents). The little boy had his eyes on me the whole time, and in a tiny, squeaky voice cried out in Tamil, “Who is this?” Deepak told him to “never mind,” and pushed him aside, ducking and making his way through the tiny doorway into the dimly lit building. We all followed as the boy lingered nearby and imploringly continued in Tamil, “Who is this? Where is he from?” I turned to him and met his gaze. The other boys headed over to pinball machines and little video game booths that lined the tiny room, but I was fascinated by this little kid. He stared at me with these hazel eyes that emitted a look of such intense wonder and curiosity. He pursed his lips and tilted his head to one side. I understood that this kid couldn’t afford to go to school and this was his job—running this game hut for some money-making landlord. He walked around like a little boss and checked in with all the kids playing games, selling them glass bottles of Fanta and Coca-Cola, but turning to look at me regularly.
The Elephants in My Backyard Page 5