Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  5/5/05

  Graduation. Who cares? I didn’t want to walk, but Mom and Pap forced me. They weren’t too thrilled by my degree anyway. I told them that I didn’t want to study microbiology in my sophomore year. I didn’t even know if Pap really even understood what that was. He heard the word “biology” in it and assumed that it meant premed. I drove to Chuluota to tell them that I had changed my major from microbiology to religious studies and that I wanted to study folk iterations of the Ramayana.

  “You need to know the difference between a hobby and what can lead to a career,” Mom said from the counter. Pap sat on the wicker-seated stool next to her.

  “What are you going to do with a degree like that? It’s worthless,” Pap said.

  “At least I will be happy instead of studying something that you were never able to do.” I sat on the counter in the kitchen facing them.

  “When you’re hungry, you’ll eat happiness?” Pap looked at me.

  “We’ve sacrificed so much for you already and this is what you want?” Mom said. “At least do something that can get you a job.” Mom’s forehead lines betrayed her worry. Her own husband didn’t have a job. I wonder if she was talking to me or to Pap.

  Well, they came anyway and acted like they weren’t impressed. I mean, Emile never finished college and neither did Pap. Mom only went to college after I was in middle school, so you’d think they would treat this like something special.

  I was accepted to YSS—Youth Solidarity Summer, a program for leftist South Asians in New York in August. But before that Jimi comes. I can’t wait until he gets here.

  6/30/05

  How can I be whole again? Jimi came. He and his ex are getting back together. They hung out at pride. And fucked and fucked, I’m sure. I can’t believe that he came down anyway and told me “We can have sex if we deserve it.” What the hell is that supposed to mean?

  He looked at my wrists and said, “Those look fresh. When did you cut?”

  “A couple of weeks ago,” I said, pulling my sleeves down. I wanted to shut all of my doors to him. I should have kicked him out of the car.

  I can’t believe I drove him all the way to New Orleans. After I did, he said he wanted to spend time by himself in this city because I didn’t know the underground scene here—what the activists were up to. How the hell am I supposed to know what the leftists are doing in New Orleans?

  I brought him a piece of cake and he stopped showering to keep me away from him.

  When we checked into our hotel room it was on Philip Street—the fucking name of his fucking ex—I fell through the floor. I wanted to vanish like smoke, wispy and feathery here and then gone. I knew this would happen. I knew that he would find someone else. I knew that I was unlovable. Why did he have to come down? Why didn’t he just tell me on the phone that it was over? Why did he make me waste my time and money? Why did I give him so much space in my heart?

  Leila said she happened to see him in the airport in Toronto as she was dropping off her dad, and he seemed pretty peppy. I bet he was fucking laughing to be rid of me.

  One day I will see him again and I will show him just what he’s missing. I will do something good and helpful to people. I wrote three poems that I showed Leila and she said that she liked them. I don’t know—who writes poems? Not brown kids who are supposed to be doctors. But then again brown boys who are supposed to be doctors aren’t supposed to suck dick, either.

  7/1/05

  Night still. A hollow

  dovetailing dark I’ve made

  a home. In Ocala National Forest,

  I place a dying dragonfly

  under an oak. Under

  my shadow, lake water,

  an alligator watches.

  God of death, Goddess

  of hearth when you churn

  the milk sea: before nectar,

  poison. Before kindness,

  ruin.

  Antiman

  WHEN I GOT to New York from Florida wearing a Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals T-shirt I had rescued from a pile of rags, my Pupha arrived with Jake to pick me up from LaGuardia. I’d come to New York for a five-day conference called YSS, Youth Solidarity Summer, in which radical South Asian youth from all over the country could network in a progressive space that wasn’t a Hindu marriage camp.

  “You look so gay with that headband.” That was Jake’s version of namaste bhai. Jake had always been a bit awkward around people. Most of his friends were his cousins and other family members. His stare stripped me naked in public.

  I looked up to see if my uncle had heard, but his head was nodding rhythmically to Mohammed Rafi on the radio: Sajan re, jhoot na bolo (“My love, do not tell lies”).

  “Keep your voice down,” I said.

  I walked into the long, narrow home in Richmond Hill, Queens. The smell of saltfish frying with wiri wiri peppers and aloo struck me. Pua was up early, her hair grayed in streaks, and dyed back in an electric red—in what I called Coolie red, which looked like fire in the sun. The scent of her unique spice mix clung to the walls like oil paintings, perfuming my clothes. It was the smell of ocean, salt, cumin, and frying bread. It smelled like my grandmother—like home. My first day in New York had a scent of promise. The city’s bouquet always enticed when I was excited to be there; its fetor repulsed when life became complicated.

  My aunt held a metal spoon and bathed the frying bake in a splash of hot oil. “I thought I’d make a little chikna for your first day. You can eat some now while the bake is still hot. Here, take a plate,” she said, a red-lipsticked smile framing her teeth.

  She put her spoon down and placed the ceramic plate in my hand and scooped out some fish and flapped a fresh bake onto my plate. The bread was sweet with sugar and the fish salted, preserved in crystal. Such a unity of seeming opposites—just like Pua and Pupha, together in a dish.

  Pua came to Canada as a tourist when she was eighteen, having just finished school in Berbice. Her English must have been all kinds of Creole and Coolie—in fact she still talked with a lilt despite her being here for over thirty years. Pap said that her accent was like jeera in the rice; masala in the daal. It’s what makes her speaking beautiful. When she was here as a tourist, my father’s old classmate admitted finally that he wanted to marry her.

  At first Aji was vexed, but ultimately my father, her second-eldest son, brokered their union. Pupha and Pua married in a simple court ceremony and began preparing the paperwork for her green card. They moved to New York City twenty or so years later. It was a simpler time for my family. We were able to come to this country on sponsorships and marry to stay here. Pupha was a mild man, filled with uncle jokes, and had a generous but goofy spirit.

  They eventually had a wedding—she wrapped in a yellow sari, he in a pink jama-jorda. The oblations of ghee, kapoor, lawa, and incense fed the hawan’s flame. They took their marital steps and traded garlands—something I would never do. Marriage, a marro, a hawan, a pandit. Who would stoke this flame for fags, a marriage flame to feed the bed and the hearth? I was not even certain that marriage was an institution worth upholding.

  The next morning, I took the A train to 14th Street and 8th Ave to the first meeting in the Brecht Forum, the Lefty space in the Meatpacking District right across from the West Side Highway and the Hudson. When Prahlad walked in, everyone’s heads turned. His wild curls bounced to the rhythm of his feet. It was a cultural show, and he stamped barefooted on the hardwood. He brought his ghunghru, his dancer’s anklets, that wound as snakes up his wiry legs. The audience intoned the Adi tala while he danced.

  He had come in late. India Standard Time, Brown Time, I thought. Tucking a curl behind his ear, he looked around and found an empty seat in the corner, right next to me. Goosebumps rose on my arms, feeling the movement of air inspired by his motions. He was slim but sturdy with skin as dark as a date, and most likely as sweet, judging from the scent of attar that wafted in with him. Incense and curry. He was like a daily prayer: familia
r and moving.

  I don’t remember which workshop was happening—maybe it was the one led by Zahir, where we were divided up into groups based on the places in South Asia we were “from.” This felt like another way that subcontinental South Asians showed me my outsideness.

  For this activity, my group with two others—a queer transnational adoptee from Baltimore, Ryan, and an East African Ismaili, Hayat—drew maps of India, the Caribbean, Kenya, and the US on a length of brown butcher paper. We scribbled in crayon and the paper did not stretch far enough to make the distance between all of these places we were “from” seem realistic. Our countries were collapsible into a wall decoration.

  “This shit is so messed up,” Ryan laughed. He was tall and stunning, his curly hair cropped short on his head.

  “Yeah—like why is it that people from the subcontinent want to tell us other darkies that we’re not Desi enough?” I said back.

  Ryan looked at me and smiled with his entire face. “Right on, Rajiv—I know, it’s so weird answering all the questions. Like where in India are you from, what do your parents do. It’s bullshit.”

  I nodded. “Even in this activity the ‘real’ Desis literally put us on the outside. Like shit. Why are there no other Indo-Caribbean people here—”

  “Right? and why are there no other transnational adoptees here either?” Ryan shook his head. His pierced tragus and long neck shook as if dancing to music. I’d met someone who understood me.

  I sketched Guyana by way of the United Provinces in 1890. I know my patrilineal ship was called the SS Jura and left from Kolkata and landed in Skeldon, where my family charred in the tropical sun, broke their backs burning cane fields, cutting cane, and hauling it to the punts. They chipped their teeth on the provisions of tinned fish and mutton and drank rum to forget the heartbreak of being exiled from home. Even if they returned to India, their families would never recognize them, so distorted and discolored by toil and sun.

  Prahlad’s skin was smooth; his smile made my stomach lurch. Our eyes met. I could feel the heat radiating off his neck as he stretched to pick up an orange crayon.

  “I’m Tamilian.” He looked directly into my eyes and greeted me with a smile.

  “Uhh—hi, Tamilian,” my voice cracked. I was trying to be funny. Crash and burn right into the cane field.

  “No, I mean,” he said pointing to the map that my mini group was drawing, “my family is from Tamil Nadu.”

  “So that would be … where exactly?” I asked. Of course I knew where Tamil Nadu was. God, what an idiot I am sometimes.

  Prahlad pointed to the southernmost tip of Indian peninsula. “I’m from there.” He grazed my pinky with his finger where he touched the map. Our eyes met again only this time he looked down, smiling.

  I drew a stick figure with curly hair on the butcher paper.

  “Look, it’s you. What’s your name?” I asked, my smile spreading wide now.

  “Prahlad.”

  “As in the child who sat in flame and would not be burned?” I recalled something about sitting in someone’s lap, too. I touched his shoulder and could feel the slight and firm muscles under his shirt.

  “So mythological, no? I like being named after a flamer.” He winked at me and grinned. He looked at me and touched my knee. On my skin: an explosion of fire.

  When I got back to Pua’s home in Richmond Hill I found Jake in his room working on his computer. The floor creaked as I walked.

  I knocked on the door and sat on the bed facing the computer desk. The room was small, just fitting a full-size bed and a small desk.

  “I met some guy today who’s totally hot,” I whispered. I looked at the door I’d shut when I came in.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s he like?” Jake turned from his work to face me.

  “His name is Prahlad and he’s from Jersey,” I said.

  “Oh. Is he gay, too?” Jake’s voice trembled slightly.

  “Yeah, I mean definitely.” Outside the sky was darkening.

  “What does he look like?” Jake asked.

  “He has long curly hair and is very slim—his family is Tamilian I think. He’s also a dancer—classical Indian.”

  Jake laughed. “Definitely sounds gay.” He turned back to his work. I picked up my book and read for about twenty minutes before getting up to take a shower.

  Later that night we went to eat dinner with Pua and Pupha downstairs. Pua looked at me and set the daal and rice dishes on the table.

  “Pupha, Jake, and I are going to Toronto to see Ma over the long weekend. That means that you will have to be here by yourself. Is that okay?”

  “It’s not a problem. I’m sorry that I don’t have much time to hang out anyway because of this conference. It looks like they have us really busy. Just let me know if there’s anything you want me to do while you’re away.”

  “You can begin with eating! Your food is getting cold!”

  That night they packed their Cadillac and left in a puff of non-EPA-compliant exhaust.

  The week passed quickly. I got close with Ryan and Farida, who lived in Queens. Farida pulled me aside after one workshop about the differences between reform and revolution: reform being coded liberal doublespeak about maintaining the systems that privilege the upper-casted, the white, the cisgender, straight, normative power. Revolution, instead, offered a whole new ground upon which we could build equitable foundations together.

  “I like how you think and speak,” Farida’s cheeks pinkened. “You and I are a lot alike.”

  I smiled, insecure in my own intelligence and activist leanings.

  Prahlad and I spent lunches and workshops finding moments for our arms to touch, to rub each other’s backs—sore from sitting too long in conference chairs—to tease the curls from our hair. On Tuesday he found me and sat next to me in the circle. He drew his plastic chair closer and his thigh heated mine. On Wednesday we walked to the park across from the West Side Highway in the Meatpacking District and I kissed him. We walked side by side discussing the importance of South Asian activism on our college campuses and our respective student body’s failures to diversify their political actions, when I grabbed his arm and pressed my lips into his soft neck. We stood on the grass, cars hummed past us in puffs of smoke. We walked hand in hand from then on, along the Hudson overlooking Jersey.

  On Thursday, the night before the workshop’s final party, we drank Jameson from the bottle and traipsed through the East Village, looking for various queer spots to make out in. Or we made out on the street, and made those places into queer spots. We were fairies that turned public spaces into private ones. Saint Marks and 3rd Ave to Thompson Square Park—where instead of squirrels, rats are the tree lords. We kissed under the honeysuckle and marquees. The red fluorescent lights painted our skins in flames.

  “Do you know where we should go?” I asked.

  “Let’s go to my friend’s apartment. She’s not there tonight and she’s cool with people coming and hanging.”

  We took the elevator to the roof overlooking the Financial District. As the door closed, we reached for each other. His attar was a perfume dressed in Jameson. We were a tangle of hair and brown brawn. I could feel him bulge beneath his denim. He licked my neck. The wood veneer door closed in front of us and I fell on my knees, back to the door and ran my fingers along Prahlad’s zipper. He gasped. I had wanted to do this the first time our fingers touched. He closed his eyes. I could no longer wait.

  The door opened on floor 15 to a surprised blonde in a leather jacket. She stammered and refused to get in as Prahlad pressed the “close door” button with a fury. I looked up and we both burst into laughter that did not abate for the rest of the week.

  We poured forth onto this landscaped roof now closed to the public, a queer version of privacy, giggling and giddy, walking hand in hand.

  We found a place to sit where New York lay before us, spread-eagle and eager. We huddled together, his head on my shoulder and my head on his. We laughed at the sheer
impossibility and ephemeral nature of this connection—a Desi and a Coolie on the same roof for a single moment. I knew I would have to put my shirt back on, slip my feet back into my shoes and walk away in a couple of days. I thought of Pua. Would she have any idea what this could mean? I was so excited about this new life; I wanted to share it with everyone. I was getting the hang of being open about queerness. I wondered then, would our own grandparents even recognize us? This connection? We gazed out at the cityscape, looking for clusters of buildings, locating the ones we knew: Chrysler, Empire State, and the Statue.

  “I really want to go to the party with you,” Prahlad said, I felt his breath on my neck.

  “Like, as my date?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.” I tried to conceal my heartbeat flapping like a bird in my throat. I didn’t care about what would become of us.

  The morning of the conference’s culminating event involved a direct action. We would circle outside Karachi Delight, an immigrant-owned-and-operated restaurant in Jackson Heights that perpetrated known abuses of undocumented workers. Unfair wages for slavery. Ryan, Farida, Prahlad, and I along with the rest of the YSS participants brought materials for our signs. Markers, poster board, and righteous anger were the ingredients to brew this protest.

  We spent three days researching the laws around workers’ rights and found that despite their legal status in the state of New York, they were entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay. Karachi Delight provided neither.

  A worker named Asif-bhaiya spoke out in Urdu. “I came to this country and my cousin said that I would be able to work in this restaurant where his friend’s the owner. I would have to wait tables. When I got here, I was put to work in the kitchen. The ventilation was poor and I was forced to work eighty hours a week without overtime. The manager threatened to report me to the authorities if I didn’t comply.” He wiped his eyes with his fingers. I glanced across the room to see that Prahlad’s eyes searched back for mine.