Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  I carried my Nana’s autobiography with me. In 1885 his father left Kolkata aboard the SS Bern for Lusignan. In his early twenties he placed his hand on the Indian dirt and touched his heart before he boarded the ship, indentured by the British East India Company to work the Guyanese sugar plantations. He had come from the village Rudauli zila, Barabanki, Patgana, then in the United Provinces—firmly in the Ramayana belt. He stayed in Guyana and was allotted a land parcel as a settler, displacing indigenous people there. In this new space his children changed with the land. Their language standardized into Caribbean Hindi and then Guyanese Creole. Like our language, my family’s caste identities transformed into a sleeping memory: unimportant and distant—a difference I would soon discover.

  “Yes,” I answered. I had learned to speak of myself in shortcuts. “We are NRIs who live now in Florida.” A simplifying lie. I looked through the bars of the three-tiered sleeper car. Outside, villages and fields whirred past. Eastern Uttar Pradesh smelled like salt, toil, mustard, incense, and prayer. Somewhere a temple bell rang. Somewhere adhan broke out across the dawn.

  “Good. We are almost to Allahabad. You will have to get down there and take another train to Barabanki,” said the questioning passenger. He looked at the other men in the train car and said, “Desi murghi videsi chaal.” Eastern Uttar Pradesh smeared its mustard and green in the background. Indian chicken, foreign gait. It was true. Even I laughed. I may have looked the same as everyone else in the train car but there was something about my gait, about my affect, that betrayed my upbringing. At twenty-three I had my grandfather’s frame and my mother’s curls. Most people read me as belonging to Delhi or Kolkata—recognizably Indian, but with a marked difference. Perhaps it was my affect—being queer, having grown up Guyanese in Florida, having learned Hindi only from the age of fifteen, being driven to decode the mystery of my Aji’s songs. I stuffed an invisible gamcha into my mouth to keep my secrets inside. If I revealed too much about my origins I would be shunned.

  “Shukriya, thank you, uncle. I have never been there.”

  “May Ram bless you on your travels, beta.”

  As the train car pulled to a halt, outside India watched me back: goats and houses built on piles of brick, each marked with the name Ram, cows wandering unwatched; black buffalo driven by cowherds; butchers with skinned goats—the eyes still in—hanging from hooks in the window; sleeping dogs with severely damaged spines; old men streaking the streets with their streams of expectorated betel nut; the walls with their piss; boys riding two and three at a time on motorbikes.

  I got down from the train in Allahabad and waited to transfer to one that went locally to Barabanki. Three women in niqab passed by me on the platform, followed by a child, maybe eleven, maybe ten, in a topi, hanging on to a red-and-green kite. I squatted down to wait for the next train, and it arrived within the hour. There was only one class of travel from Allahabad to Barabanki: general. I had only ever traveled in sleeper. The windows were open, barred with horizontal stainless steel rods to keep people from falling out. This train was orderly, unlike the previous one. It was sparsely populated. I could smell the man next to me: sandalwood and cumin. No one hung from the roof or the opened doors as in American fantasies. No one was interested in me, my Western jeans, my curious North and South Indian traits: round face, broad shoulders, dark color, my strange way of speaking.

  At Barabanki I got down from the train and headed toward the closest paan stand that I could find. I had after all come “khaike paan Benares wala”—developing the habit of chewing betel nut.

  “Ek tho do, bhaiya, give me one,” I had become familiar with asking. The paan-wallah folded the betel nut into a paan leaf sprinkled with tobacco, black and brown goo, fennel, and elemental lime. I took the triangle and put it in my mouth. The supari was hard, like chewing someone else’s teeth. Benares had spoiled me with its soft betel nut.

  “Is there any place to stay here?” I asked. It was getting late and this place did not exist in guidebooks.

  “Sorry, no hotels around,” he replied, “but there is an ashram just there that you will most likely be able to sleep at tonight.” He pointed down the street. “Take the left by the tree and walk until you see the building on the right. They will be starting arti in just a bit so you will be able to hear the evening prayers as well.” As I walked down the street, my body knew where it was going. I heard the bells start to chime. Hands clapped out a rhythm. Om jai jagdish hare. Victory to the god of the universe. I took off my shoes and rang the temple bell as I entered. Everyone stood facing the shrine.

  After the prayers had been offered everyone sat together and began talking: old and young men together. I wondered where the women were. One old man with missing teeth turned to me, “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “I’m from here.” My Hindi shook on my tongue.

  “I mean where in India are you from?” He must have thought I was an idiot.

  “Uncle, I mean I am actually from here—this very place.”

  Wide-eyed, he pointed down to the ground and said, “Aap hiyan ke hain?” He was so surprised that he had to repeat this phrase several times. Then he asked, “What’s your caste?”

  In Guyana there was a breakdown of caste identity. Brahmins, Shudras, and Dalits all did the same work and lived in the same logies. Caste was less damning there than the caste practices still thriving in South Asia. The truth is that my father’s father was a Gwalbans Ahir, a cowherd like Krishna, and we descended from King Yayati’s son, Yadu; my mother was a Brahmin, the priestly caste on her father’s side. My Nani, my mother’s mother, was Tamilian and came from parents who were Christian converts. My Nani’s mother was orphaned on the boat that reached Guyana on June 18, 1894. She may have had a Muslim mother and was adopted by a Black family in Annandale.

  But according to legend, my father’s ancestors were stripped of their titles and became Shudras, the lowest of the castes that were not Dalit. In fact, according to the Laws of Manu, if a Shudra man should marry a Brahmin woman, their offspring would be a special kind of Dalit called Chandala. Aji used to call us that when we frustrated her. “You a real Chandaal,” she would say. There is not much of an accounting of the women’s castes past my grandmothers. Even this is a too-convenient recounting, as we have been of mixed caste since 1864.

  It was explained to me like this: since we had a Brahmin’s “high blood” we were still able to do some inauspicious religious work—performing the funerary rights—despite being outside the caste system. According to the Vedas, I would have been a body-burner by caste, though I had lived a life of relative privilege in the United States without the direct oppression of caste inflicted on me.

  If I admitted my caste story openly I would not be allowed inside the ashram. I would not have any access to my ancestral home. I would be shunned and considered dead. Of course, in Guyana I could claim to be an Ahir, following my father’s father’s caste. But I would do so knowing it was a lie, one that everyone in my family overlooked.

  “I am a Brahmin. I descend from someone from this zila who was taken to South America in the year of 1885. His name was Sant Ram Mahraj and he lived in Patgana,” I lied through my paan stains. Mahraj—not Maharaja as most people in the United States hear it—is a title given to a Brahmin as a sign of respect.

  All the uncles looked at me and then at one another, stunned as though they had turned to bronze like the statue of Krishna in the background. He was my ancestor and relative on my father’s side. Maybe it was my good luck or karma that led me to his temple in time for prayers.

  The uncle with missing teeth was the first to respond. “Accha?” He scrambled to his feet and went into a back room. Three minutes later he emerged with a scrap of paper with something written on it in Hindi and placed it in my hands. “Don’t open this as yet,” he said. “Take this note and get on the train to Patranga—it’s a twenty-minute ride into the village. When you get off the train walk to the end of the only road in the ar
ea. You will see a sari shop on your left. Go inside and give the shopkeeper this letter.” His eyes sparkled with secrets.

  This was all so mysterious. The pujari spoke up, “Beta, welcome, you can stay here tonight. There is some extra room available in the back. There are two boys about your age who are here from their villages learning the Vedas, so you can sleep with them.”

  I took my gym bag by the handles, shoved the paper scrap into my pocket, and followed the pujari into the dark room where I shed my clothes and climbed onto a cot that I shared with a man called Govinda. In our whispering at night he told me that he lived far from his village and that he left his wife pregnant three months prior. He liked my mother’s name, Anjani, and promised to name his daughter after my mother so that his daughter, too, would be inspired by my ancestors’ great adventure across the sea.

  That night I felt through his chaddis for his hard penis. I closed my eyes and imagined the stars that my ancestors must have seen when they crossed the ocean. Those nights must have been dark and the stars so colorful. I entered into dreams.

  I woke up before dawn and took the first train to Patranga. Govinda led me to the platform and insisted that I ride it until I saw the sign—if I had questions, ask the older men. He also insisted that I ask for clarification when I didn’t understand the Hindi or Awadhi spoken in this area so I wouldn’t get lost. The problem was that the village that I was supposed to go to was called Patgana in my Nana’s autobiography, Lil Lil Dutty Build Dam. In it he chronicled his rise to prominence in Georgetown, Guyana, as a politico and as a pandit, a learned man, someone who knows religious texts. My Nana had studied Tulsidas’s Shri Ramcharitmanas all his life and would give mini sermons from it.

  It was from this autobiography that I learned the name of the village that his father came from. It was called Patgana in 1885. In 2004 there was no Patgana on any map. None of the villages in Rudauli zila were called this—the closest village name was “Patranga”—the name the uncle had written down for me. I thought this an excusable mistake given our distance from this part of the world. Like my last name, Mohabir—pronounced “Maha-beer,” the “O” miswritten by a British agent of the indenture machine. I decided to follow the uncle’s directions and leave off being skeptical as an offering to Krishna.

  I got down from the train and headed for the only street I could see. It was dusty and uncrowded by bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws, or pedestrians. The more I walked the more doubt flowered in my stomach. Wildflowers with large fleshy petals that turned into wings—not wings like butterflies, but wings liked flying foxes—thrashing about, webbed and black.

  The sari shop stood at the end of the row of shops, its doors gaping open like a mouth. Inside two men sat on the cushioned floor drinking chai and waiting for their first customers of the day. Outside they had already splashed water to calm the dust and keep it outside.

  “Welcome, come in, come in. What can I do for you? Are you looking for a sari for your wife—or your mother?”

  Wife. Another frequently asked question. Are you married, bhai-sahib? My no was always cause for concern. I usually replied with something like I’ll marry after my studies are finished. It made good desi sense. Better to get my affairs in order before I got married and had children. But this was another lie that I had habituated into a queer truth. I would never marry a woman.

  “Actually, you know, bhaiya, I’m not looking for a sari. I’ve come to speak with you.” My voice quivered. “I was told to give this letter to you.” I handed him the note scrawled on the paper scrap. I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe the floor would melt, or my arms would fall off. Maybe he would grow wings and a vulture’s beak and tear the flesh from my ribs. Maybe he would laugh. Maybe he would send me away, telling me to get the fuck out of this place.

  He took the long strip of paper from me and uncurled it. He read it a couple of times and then showed it to the other man sitting on the cushion. He was taller, leaner, had broad shoulders and a face that made my knees weak. He leapt to his feet. I could see tears running down his cheeks. He threw himself onto me in a tight embrace.

  “You’ve come back!” he exclaimed.

  “I–er … are you my bhaiya?” I asked him if he was my older brother or kinsman.

  “No. I’m Prem—I am your neighbor. My house in the village is the house right next to your ancestral home.”

  I was dumbfounded. I felt a singing in my ears and the flying fox flapped out of my throat as I gave a deep laugh. I laughed from the anguish of traveling. I laughed from the deepest pit of the Unknown that I feared would swallow me whole. I laughed until tears crawled their itch down my face and neck. I had come home.

  He quickly mounted his motorbike and motioned for me to sit behind him and to hold onto his waist. If we were related, the connection wasn’t too close for me to take joy in having him ride in front and holding him from behind. We wound the dusty avenue until we came upon a lane fringed with trees. He slowed his bike down so that all the people passing could see. They were carrying baskets, earthen pots, bags filled with sabzi, schoolbooks, puppies.

  A group of about five boys and girls trailed us asked, “Bhaiya, who is this?” to which he replied, “Mera parosi, my neighbor has returned from abroad!” All of the children giggled at his outcry. I reached into my bag and withdrew a Dairy Milk chocolate bar and gave it to the eldest girl I saw. I knew this would come in handy. We rounded a corner and there was a large courtyard behind a kuaan, a well that connected this village temple to Durga.

  “Before I take you to your home, you must come and eat with me. My mother will be so happy to see you,” said Prem. We parked the bike at the side of the brick-and-stone house. The floor was a cool, polished linoleum, beautiful by any standard. Prem called out, “Ma. Come. Look who has come into our house.” An old woman with her white hair tied back in a bun emerged in a tan-and-white sari.

  “Who has come, beta?” she asked.

  “It’s our neighbor. He has come back from Guiana.” He said it wrong. He said the colonial name, not Guyana—“Guy-anna”—but “Guee-anna.” Land of tea and sugar. Land of gold.

  “It can’t be.” She approached and came up close and looked me head to toe. I folded my hands.

  “Sada pranam,” I said as I reached down to touch her feet. She caught my hands on the way down and smiled.

  “You must never touch the feet of someone whose caste is lower than yours,” she said. “We are Kshatriyas, warriors and princes. You are Brahmin.” I looked down at my feet, embarrassed by my faux pas. If she only knew. She laughed and commanded her daughter-in-law to bring in three plastic chairs for us to sit in. In she walked, her face covered by her pink sari. She placed the chairs in a triangle and went back to scrubbing the corridor floor on her hands and knees. I was shocked to see how this woman, my bhauji, worked while we all sat and talked.

  “We are like the devas,” Auntie broke the silence. “Two Kshatriyas and one Brahmin. How far have you come, beta?”

  “I am now living in Florida, America, but I have been in Varanasi for the last year studying folk singing.”

  “What about your wife?” Again this question. I wanted to stop hiding. I wanted to tell them that I was queer. Queer sexually, queer religiously, queer by caste, and queer countried. I wanted to scream but I had to play this shadow game of hiding myself to learn anything about where I come from. I had to pretend to be a high-casted straight man.

  “After I am done studying, then I will marry.”

  “That makes good sense,” chirped Prem, looking over his shoulder at his wife. “Shilpa, bring the food. Can’t you see that Rajiv is hungry?”

  Auntie, too, chimed in. “Ohe bahu, bring the food. Rajiv has come from so far away and you have not even offered him water. Come.” Shilpa approached, head and face still obscured by her sari, and offered me a glass of water. I hesitated and glanced from Prem to his mother. Prem looked at me. “Don’t worry, it’s filtered.”

  Unlike most anxie
ties, this one was well worth the worry. I had recently been diagnosed as having three intestinal parasites from drinking contaminated water. The worm Ascaris lumbricoides and giardia coiled about my intestines—hungry to be fed. The pain was crippling. Being bedridden for at least three days every two weeks was common. I felt like my insides were being stabbed and I would shit and vomit at the same time—sometimes unable even to stand up to make it to the squat toilets.

  Shilpa brought out the stainless steel thalis with katoris of daal and fresh rotis. Before Prem took a bite he circled his thali with his water three times and poured a little out. Then he took a piece of roti and scooped some of the vegetables in it and muttered the bhojan mantra. I only caught the piece that I know:

  om sahnavavatu

  sahnau bhunaktu

  sahviryam karvavahe

  tejasvina vadhitamastu

  ma vidvisavahe

  Together, may we be protected—

  nourished together.

  Let us join together to benefit humanity—

  our learning be of joy.

  Let us never be possessed by hate.

  With that blessing we ate the fruit of Shilpa’s sweat.

  The time had come for Prem to take me to the village in Patranga. We had eaten and digested. It was now well into the afternoon, and I was anxious about continuing this journey. Again Prem tapped the back part of his motorcycle but this time he gave me a wink. I mounted and we sped from the side of his bungalow, around the kuaan, passed the temple to Durga, around the bend that led to the paddy fields. We kicked up dirt as we gained speed, dodging large stones in the road. Faces of people walking by raised their eyebrows in surprise. Brave dogs, excited by the commotion, raced behind trying to keep up with the bike. Tears streamed from my eyes. My heart leapt as we sped through the rice growing heavy on their stalks. I was finally going home, to the place I always referred to when explaining where I was “from.” I thought, My body is made of this earth, my blood of this very water.