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by Sameer Pandya

  “What do you want from me?” I asked, my tone quiet and questioning, hoping that talk would get us through.

  “We want you to stop making offensive, unfounded statements in class,” the bearded kid said. “We want you to treat us with respect. You’re living in the West, teaching in the West. Maybe you could at least try to act like you don’t hate it and us so much.”

  There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd.

  “I don’t hate the West at all,” I said. “I’m a product of it. Like all of you.” I heard some sounds of disagreement. I continued: “But criticism, dissent, is one of our core values. That’s what I’ve been trying to teach you this term. Parts of America are admirable, other parts are not.”

  “Why don’t you critique the Africans that sold the slaves as much as you critique the whites that bought them?”

  The beard was clearly the spokesman. Every time he said something, the rest of the group backed him. I tried to come up with an answer that wouldn’t lead to more questions. I shouldn’t have stopped walking; I’d have been safely in my office by now, admiring my new light, arguing with Dan about whether we were going to have Korean tacos or chicken salad for lunch.

  “We can’t talk about these issues in this kind of conversation,” I said. “That’s what the classroom is for. I saw that many of you weren’t there today. Come back next week. Let’s talk through this. Let’s figure this out.”

  “Some classrooms may allow for discussion, but yours doesn’t,” the beard continued. “All we hear are your half-baked ideas. We don’t get to talk. All we get is you, spitting on the graves of our ancestors. You don’t respect us.”

  I looked at him and all of the students behind him. I took one step away, trying to signal to the crowd that I was done and needed to be let through.

  “Don’t walk away.” This time, a big, tall student I didn’t recognize was speaking. “You stay here and you listen to us.” There was a threat in his voice.

  Right then, I didn’t know what would happen if I walked away. I’d felt a vague sense of fear when I first saw the crowd, and that had only grown more acute. There was no one here to protect me, to come to my defense. I thought at least Carla would have stayed behind. I tried to find a quick exit. I wanted to run, but if I did, I’d never be able to enter that classroom again. I saw Robert. Will you please tell your friends to let me through? Even pleading with my eyes was humiliating. No matter. He just stood there with a blank expression on his face.

  There was a slight opening in the crowd, and through it, several feet away, I noticed that the bulletin board where I’d seen the flyers for the Emily Baker reading on Monday was now covered with Haji flyers. But these were different from the one I’d seen earlier. Now they had a diagonal line across the face.

  I suddenly felt disoriented, as if my synapses were short-circuiting. I could see everything that was happening around me, and yet I couldn’t piece it together.

  “I treat you with plenty of respect.” My voice was louder than before and rising with every word. “I come into the classroom ready to work. But so often I don’t get anything back from you. You’re lost in your phones, completely uninterested in anything I have to say.”

  I pushed past a few students and went up to the bulletin board. Before I quite knew what I was doing, I was pulling down all the flyers, crumpling them up, and yelling: “You can’t do this. This is not OK. You have to leave me alone!” I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I kept telling myself to stop, but I couldn’t. My voice kept rising. “You have no right to mob me like this. No right at all. I’m so tired. So tired of all of this.” I’d had my back to the students. When I turned around, they’d all gone silent. “You want me to respect you? Fuck that. Not when you behave this way. You have to respect me.”

  Robert was still there, now with some concern on his face. The beard had finally stopped talking. I wanted to walk up and slap him. My ears were ringing and I couldn’t think straight. I had scraps of paper in my hand. I released my fingers and they fell to the ground. My left hand moved instinctively to the front pocket of my jeans. At the bottom I felt a wet spot.

  I walked back to my office. As I did, I checked over my shoulder. Most of the protesters were still in place, but the beard and a young woman were behind me, following. I entered my building and waited for the elevator doors to open. The two of them caught up. I did my best to breathe in and out, deeply. Perhaps my mother’s saffron-wielding friend was on to something by starting his day with calming yoga. They got in the elevator when I did. The beard’s earlier look of confident defiance had softened, perhaps unnerved by my freak-out.

  “What are your names?” I asked.

  “I’m Alex,” the beard said. “And this is Holly.”

  Holly seemed like a nice enough young woman, her dark roots showing through her blond hair.

  “Alex and Holly,” I said, “I’d appreciate it if you would leave me alone.”

  “Why won’t you talk to us?” Holly asked. “You have office hours, right?”

  I had expected her voice to be mousy, but it was strong and direct.

  “They’re canceled today.”

  “But you’re here,” Holly said.

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  The elevator doors opened. I walked to my office, with Alex and Holly following behind. My hand was too unsteady to get the key into the slot. I stopped, turned around, and faced the students. “I’m not going to say this again,” I said, my voice livid. “Office hours are canceled. Please leave.” As I said this, Cliff stepped out of Mary’s office. We made eye contact. Alex and Holly didn’t budge. I put the key in the lock, opened my door, and quickly closed it behind me. I couldn’t stop my body from shivering.

  “What’s going on out there?” Dan asked, sounding worried.

  There was a knock on the door. And then another.

  “Please leave,” I could hear Cliff say. “It’s time for you to leave now.”

  Several seconds later, a knock. “Raj, it’s me.”

  I opened the door and Cliff came in. Inviting him into my office, empty of books and any sign of a lifetime spent learning, made me feel pathetic.

  “Cliff, I need some help,” I said.

  “Dan, can you get a glass of water?” Cliff said.

  Dan left the office and came back with a small water bottle. I drank it quickly.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. Without waiting for a response, I left my office and went to the bathroom down the hall, stepped into a stall, and locked it. I checked my jeans. I had never been so glad in my entire life for the glorious deep blue of new 501s. I placed my hand on my groin and felt the wet spot again. It was just a little, but I had lost control right before I started ripping down the flyers. I straightened myself up, stepped out of the stall, washed my hands, and went back to my office.

  “What happened?” Cliff asked.

  “A group of students were waiting for me when I finished class today, gathered for a protest.”

  “Protesting what?” Cliff asked.

  “Me. They say I hate white people and Western culture. There must have been, I don’t know, fifty of them? A hundred? They were fine at first, but then they got aggressive. I may have lost my temper for a moment.” I tried remembering as clearly as I could exactly what I had said. “I feel embarrassed about the whole thing.” But it wasn’t just embarrassment that I felt. Sadness was now working its way through and settling into my body. It was the sadness of having openly admitted what I thought I’d done a pretty decent job of keeping enclosed. Respect me. At some point, I’d been on an upward trajectory with my job. Not a rising star, but someone with a little shine. But that was all gone. And as the years went by, and I walked around the campus unnoticed, I had lost some sense of myself. And my sense of self-respect. I hadn’t realized how deeply I felt that.

  “Are you all right?” Cliff asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. It was hard to keep my thoughts straight. “Bu
t I have to prep for my afternoon classes.”

  “We’ll figure out your classes,” Cliff said. “This is unacceptable. Dan just told me about the flyer downstairs.”

  “They’re also up near my classroom.”

  “You’re going home,” Cliff said.

  “I’ll teach your classes,” Dan said. “I’ll take care of it. You go.”

  I wanted to thank him, but all I could muster was half a smile. This serious, responsible Dan scared me.

  “Everyone simply needs to cool down,” Cliff said.

  “From the look of it, I don’t think anyone is cooling down,” I said. “What’s going on, Cliff ? I just want to teach my classes. Do my job. I’m a very small cog in this machine.”

  “I know,” Cliff said. “I know. Let me call the dean right now. This is ridiculous. I’ll be right back.”

  He opened the door.

  “Does he have time to see us now?” I could hear Alex say.

  In a raised voice, Cliff said, “If the two of you don’t leave this department immediately, I’m going to call the campus police and have you both arrested.”

  “This is a public university and this is a public space,” Holly said. “We have a right to be here.”

  Dan went and closed the office door. “You want me to get us some food?”

  “I can’t eat,” I said. “This is bad, Dan.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Dan said, sounding genuinely concerned.

  “Can’t you just lie?” I asked. All I wanted was for Dan to make light of the moment.

  “It’s going to be perfectly fine,” he said with a forced smile.

  “I’m sure parents are calling the dean right now, complaining about what I’m teaching their kids. That fucking video. The judgment has already been made. I’m going to be the scapegoat for everything people hate about liberals and colleges and professors.” If they needed a cliché to go after, wasn’t Josh Morton the better choice? “This is a shitty job with too much teaching and no power. But I need this shitty job. I can’t lose it.”

  “You’re not going to,” Dan said, trying hard to sound reassuring. “Let’s just see how this goes. And the silver lining: you’re done teaching for the week. It’s already the weekend for you.”

  “Does this mean I don’t have to grade the one hundred essays sitting on my desk at home?”

  “I give you permission to toss them in the garbage.”

  “Are you sure you want to teach my classes? I can cancel them.”

  “It gives me something to do. I can’t sit here for the rest of the day.”

  I took out two documentaries from my desk drawer. “Show these. I save them up for a rainy day when I’m totally sick of teaching.”

  “Which one for which class?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  There was a knock on the door, and then Cliff walked in. “I’ve left a message with the dean. But if you’re ready to go, I can walk you to your car. Maybe we can get some lunch if you’d like.” He picked up my bag. “Come on.”

  I was expecting Alex and Holly to be waiting still, but the hallway was empty. We went down the elevator. As soon as we stepped out, we heard the loud buzz of conversation. Perhaps a quarter of the students who’d protested in front of my class were now seated in an orderly circle on the floor. When they saw me, they all stopped talking. Several of them had lit candles. Whereas before they seemed angry, now they were subdued and purposeful. They were holding some of the same signs, but Alex and Holly had a new one: If Gandhi Could Do It, So Can We. #HungerforRespect.

  Holly yelled out loud, for my sake and theirs: “We won’t eat until that man is gone from this university!”

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d assumed some planning had gone into the protest in front of my class, but now I realized something much larger and more organized was afoot. These students had gotten together and planned a big, loud protest as the setup for a more strategic strike to get rid of me. I didn’t think I was worth the trouble.

  I started smiling.

  “What’s so funny?” Alex asked. “Does our hunger make you laugh?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m just happy some of you were listening during my classes.”

  “Gandhi belongs to us as much as you,” Alex said.

  “You’re absolutely right. That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard in a long while. And please, you can use him all you like. But remember that he was a man of extremes who held his convictions very tight.”

  “We’re not in class,” Alex said. “We don’t have to listen to your bullshit.” At that, he turned to Cliff: “It’s a disgrace that you’ve employed this man. We demand you fire him right now. Do the right thing.”

  Cliff didn’t bother to answer. We walked out.

  “We’re going to need some help here,” Cliff said once we were outside. “This is a fine act of thuggery.”

  “At least now we know their demands.” I wanted to make a demand of my own: to rewind the week to Sunday morning so that I could start all over. “Am I going to be all right?”

  Cliff was perplexed. Was I asking about my emotional, psychological state? If so, he was ill equipped to help me with that.

  “I mean, is my job going to be OK?”

  At this, Cliff’s face perked up, as if I had asked him how Hegel fits into modern intellectual history.

  “Of course your job is going to be OK. By the time you come back to your classes next Monday, this will all be in the past tense.”

  Cliff was not a cheerleader about anything. His tone was always calm and even-keeled. But I got the distinct sense that he was trying to wish a reality into existence by visualizing his desired outcome.

  “I think I’m just going to head home,” I said. “Can we take a rain check on the lunch?”

  “Of course. Take it easy for the rest of the week. I’ll be in touch as soon as I hear from the dean.”

  I walked to my car and sat inside for a few minutes, staring out the windshield. As I was about to drive off, I saw Robert, about fifty yards away, watching me. Had he been there all along? There was something menacing about him, but there was also something in his empty eyes that reminded me of another young man his age whom I had met years earlier, while trying to immerse myself in a clash of two seemingly different cultures.

  * * *

  In the early aughts, I had landed in Ahmedabad for a year of dissertation fieldwork. I was born in the city and had spent my first eight summers there before we emigrated. In the years since, I had remembered those summers through soft evening light. My father’s father—a successful attorney, driven by childhood poverty, his reputation built on smart lawyering and the six months he’d spent as a political prisoner in a British jail—had an enormous rambling house, and in the summer it would be filled with roughly fifteen cousins and their parents. There were green parrots and brazen monkeys in the trees surrounding the house, talent shows on Sunday evenings, cricket matches in the gully outside, and when the heat was blazing, we would all sleep on the rooftop terrace, awakening to a cool morning breeze and peacocks perched on the ledge. If bad things were happening, in the world or in the house, I was not privy to them.

  As I got older, I intellectualized the city, seeing it as a cultural hotbed that had been entirely overlooked. Gandhi had spent much of his adult life there, using it as his base for the final decades of his life. Local industry was dominated by the Sarabhais, an old family that had started in textiles and moved on to manufacturing pharmaceuticals, dyes, and pigments. Unlike Bombay and Calcutta, Ahmedabad had no colonial architecture, and both Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier had designed major buildings there. Their love of concrete had trickled down into the design of single-family homes throughout the city. In the mid-1950s, Charles and Ray Eames had visited as Nehru’s guests and helped set up India’s first design school. One of the Sarabhai heirs had traveled to New York, met John Cage, and they’d talked Indian music and philosophy. Draw
ing on that exchange, Cage concluded that silence was the best way to out-Stravinsky Stravinsky. Decades of rich modern history, and all the while, hostility between the city’s Hindus and Muslims had simmered, but had never overwhelmed the place as it had elsewhere in India.

  When I had originally planned my fieldwork, I envisioned writing an ethnography of the city. Bombay got all the glamour love, Delhi the historic love, and Calcutta the intellectual love. No one ever talked about Ahmedabad. I would call my dissertation The Life of an Unknown Indian City.

  But in February 2002, roughly six months before I was set to arrive, the city convulsed in rioting. A train carrying Hindu passengers returning from a pilgrimage had been set on fire, killing nearly sixty people. The moment had triggered violence across the state of Gujarat, particularly in Ahmedabad. Muslims had killed Hindus on the train, and now Hindus killed Muslims on the streets, both groups pointing back to hundreds of years of mistreatment by the other. The stories of rape, of women being sliced up with dull knives, and of families being burned alive were too much to take, because of the brutal acts themselves, but also because these were my people engaging in acts of violence and trying to justify them by saying that they had been victims of Muslim violence for too long. If my family had never moved to America, and I had grown up in Ahmedabad, would I have been right there in the middle of it? I’d like to think that I’d have condemned it. But who knows? By the time I arrived, my research had transformed; now I planned to write a requiem: The Life and Death of an Unknown Indian City.

  I’d already made my return-to-my-roots trip in college. I took a lot of moody pictures of old Ambassador cars, insisted on eating street food, and visited with cousins who had moved on from the lives I’d thought they still lived. I earnestly went through my grandfather’s dusty bookshelf, bringing back with me his copy of Emerson’s Essays, Nehru’s The Discovery of India, and a tattered three-volume set of Capital. I liked the idea of my grandfather as an exceptionally well-paid Marxist.