“Vishnu, let me check with the French department. I’ll give you a call in the next two days.”
On my way back to the dorm, in Memorial Quadrangle, I ran into Janet Peters, a fellow student I had met on my first day on campus. She was from New York City, taller than me, and she worshipped Gloria Steinem. I told Janet about my conversation with the financial aid officer, in a tone that reflected the matter-of-fact nature of the episode for me. She had a grin of a smile.
“You know what we call this in New York City? Chutzpah!” she said.
She bent her neck, moved her face closer, looked into my eyes, and licked her lips, à la Lolita.
The smile evaporated. “Good-bye,” Janet said.
Two days later, as I was grabbing my books for class, the resident adviser knocked on my door and asked me to pick up the dorm phone at the end of the hallway.
“Vishnu, Professor Norman Ghita, who’s blind, needs a reader. Call his office to arrange for an interview,” the financial aid officer said.
For the next two years, until my graduation, I got paid for reading the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, the lascivious but thought-provoking works of the Marquis de Sade, and, occasionally, some student papers written in French.
I worked at the professor’s home, sometimes late into the evening, for twenty to thirty hours a week. Watching Professor Ghita operate his bulky braille typewriter was a revelation. His fingers moved across the keys and pressed on the carriage return lever and the space bar like a pianist or an organist at his instrument. When I told him I’d never even heard of such a machine, he asked me to draw near, took my hand, and ran it over the raised braille dots impressed into the paper.
His constant reworking of the same sentence was my first brush with serious writing. “Clarity, Vishnu, clarity above all is what we should seek,” he said when I told him I didn’t see much difference between the fourth and fifth versions. One evening, he came back from a much anticipated lecture by the visiting Jürgen Habermas and looked unhappy. “Why can’t these German philosophers speak clearly?” he said. He asked me to pull Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste from the bookshelf. I read the first paragraph aloud until he interrupted me. “Maybe it’s because of his cleft palate. I shouldn’t be so harsh.” Four decades later, I’ve forgotten Jacques’s picaresque journey and amorous adventures, but I can still evoke the first sentence of the blind professor’s introduction to that work, so often had he revised it: “Qui est donc ce philosophe qui a osé mettre au centre de son roman l’histoire infernale de Mme. de la Pommeraye et le Marquis des Arcis, histoire d’une vengeance aussi raffinée que machiavélique.”
The job came with an unexpected bonus. Professor Ghita, a Romanian Jew with a Princeton education, whose parents fled from the Nazis, a proud Marxist who enjoyed close friendships with the French leftist intelligentsia, introduced me to the finest of French wines.
He started with a Pouilly-Fumé. Three or four weeks later, he poured a Pouilly-Fuissé.
“Do you like this one better than what you had last time?” he said at the end of the dinner, as his wife put a record on the turntable.
“They both taste good,” I said.
“You mean you don’t taste any difference?”
“They are both Pouilly. I suspect the Pouilly-Fumé smells or tastes like tobacco,” I said.
Professor Ghita smiled and gave me his hand. As I walked him down the steps to the basement where I read to him, he said, “Pouilly-Fumé is from sauvignon blanc grapes, grown in the Loire, Pouilly-Fuissé from chardonnay grapes in Burgundy. Different terroirs, different grapes, hence different aromas, different tastes. Fumé means flinty aromas, a smoky bouquet. C’est un vin sec et parfumé. Le Pouilly-Fuissé est un vin minéral, puissant et structuré. We’ll have to expand your wine vocabulary and refine your palate. Next time, we’ll do a Sancerre, a sauvignon with more depth and texture.”
He had me over for lunch or dinner every month. The university was paying me the minimum wage, $1.60 per hour. The pleasure and thrill of tasting new wines and eating homemade French food, on top of the intellectual stimulation of the work, kept me from looking for a higher-paying job.
For my first New Year’s Eve in America, the professor and his wife invited me to dinner. Their son Ira was back home from Stanford, where he was a sophomore. Two friends of the family, a professor in the music department and his lover, joined us.
“A Saint-Émilion to accompany the steak,” Professor Ghita said as he uncorked the bottle of wine.
After the glasses were full, the music professor took the bottle in his hand, read the label, and turned to me. “Not any Saint-Émilion. A grand cru, Vishnu. Among the best,” he said.
That day, away from home, I missed my parents and Cousin Shankar. I thought of Kalipa and Fringant, and how on New Year’s Day the rum would be flowing in their home and in the neighborhood. The sadness, however, was accompanied by the joy of being with Professor Ghita and his wife in their warm dining room, watching the blanket of snow outside. I knew how lucky I was to be Professor Ghita’s reader.
When I left the professor’s home, he said, “Next New Year’s Eve, we’ll celebrate with a premier cru. The very best.”
* * *
—
As the summer of 1972 approached, students with connections trumpeted the summer jobs they had landed in investment banking. “Morgan Guaranty Trust, 23 Wall Street,” said one. These students had been extolling the virtues of a simple hippie life during the academic year—with some flowers in their hair, anti-war T-shirts, and unwashed jeans—while keeping a well-stocked refrigerator in their dorm room and a fancy car on campus. The less fortunate ones would be selling ice cream at Dairy Queen or flipping burgers or touting the benefits of various lawn mowers to clients in suburbia.
Most of the professors planned to spend the summer out of town. Professor Ghita would be in Paris. With apprehension, I looked again at my soft hands. I heard Mama’s admonition pitted against Papa’s warning about drones being exploited by the upper class. Unwilling to be a drone, I searched all the notice boards on campus, even in those departments where I had never set foot. I combed the hallways and the library, foraged and ferreted out information on summer jobs. When I told my residence hall mates about my application to a summer program combining morning political science classes at a university in Washington, D.C., with a congressional internship in the afternoon, they were supportive but skeptical about my chances of success.
“You’ve been in this country a little less than a year. The program staff will wonder how you can assist a congressman in his work.”
“You’re not a U.S. citizen and don’t have a green card. That could be a problem.”
A few were unkind. “You should try manual work. You’re being pretentious, elitist, just wanting to use your brain.” Hearing children of the elite scoff at elitist dreams was the height of dramatic irony. That made me more resolute.
A few years earlier, in secondary school, one of my teachers, Georgie Espitalier-Noël, speaking of his student days at Oxford, had mentioned an American student who in his written examinations purposely slipped in a reference to an American poet little known in Britain. At the orals, the Oxford don, who had never heard of the latter, fell in the student’s trap and asked about the poet. The American expounded at length on the subject, and earned a first-class honours. I learnt from Georgie’s anecdote. As part of the summer program application, I submitted a comparative analysis of the newly drafted Mauritian and Madagascar constitutions—totally unfamiliar territory to American academics at the time.
The university in Washington admitted me with a full scholarship.
* * *
—
My roommate in the Washington summer program, Tim, was born and attended college in Tallahassee, Florida. White, clean-cut, well-shaven, he wore a seersucker suit to class and
addressed people as “sir” or “ma’am,” a far cry from my long-haired Yale classmates, many of whom, to my initial consternation, addressed the dean and professors by first name. A well-bred man by Mauritian standards. I let him select which part of the wardrobe he hung his suits in; he had no problem with my having chosen the bed overlooking the lawn. During the second week, after we had settled one evening, Tim on the couch and me on the desk chair, he asked if I had taken any American history courses at Yale.
“No, I’m focusing on economics. No cocktail party education for me. I need a well-paying job when I graduate.”
“But surely you know some American history to have gotten into this program,” Tim said.
“My secondary school textbook had a chapter on the American Revolution; one on Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War; and one on FDR and the New Deal. In Mauritius, I learnt a lot from the radio and newspapers. Stuff about the Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, and Vietnam.”
Tim wasn’t impressed. So I added, “Last semester, one of my courses examined the Cold War and McCarthyism.”
“What do you think of McCarthyism?”
“The Ku Klux Klan lynched Blacks to death. McCarthyism lynched people’s reputations to death,” I said.
“That’s what they teach you at fancy East Coast colleges and in British textbooks. America needed Senator Joe McCarthy to weed out the Commies from our government.”
He rose from the couch and walked towards me. “You mentioned Martin Luther King and the KKK. In the South, the genesis of the Klan is fresh in our memory. Do you know what happened at the end of the Civil War? Blacks were running amok, and we had to protect our women.”
“Is that the Confederate chronicle of history?” I asked.
“Look, Vishnu, where I come from, the Civil War is still alive. I go to bed sometimes thinking of Sherman’s march through Georgia. You have no idea how barbaric he was, ordering his troops to set Atlanta on fire.”
“More than a hundred years have gone by and Sherman’s still gnawing your entrails?”
An uneasy silence descended in the room.
Tim walked away and pulled some books out of his satchel. “I have a lot of reading for tomorrow,” he said.
Then I surprised myself. “Tim, how would you feel if your sister dated a Black man?”
I didn’t know whether he had a sister.
“She’s free to do what she wants, but I won’t like it,” he said.
“How would you feel if your sister dated a man like me?”
He took a deep breath, the kind the doctor asks you to take during the annual physical. It didn’t help. As soon as he exhaled, he convulsed with a nervous cough, which lasted for a few seconds. He mumbled some words I couldn’t grasp.
That night, almost a year after my arrival in the country, I went to bed asking myself if there was more than one America. Tim’s America of racial anxiety felt so different from the America on the Yale campus. Was there an America of the Northeast and one of the South?
We were a week into the program when we heard that burglars had broken into the Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate building. Not long after, cash found on the burglars was linked to a slush fund to reelect the president. Most of my classmates thought the break-in had been staged by the Democratic Party to discredit the Nixon administration. When I compared the incident to the Teapot Dome scandal, the professor said, “We have a Ph.D. in American History here.” My classmates reacted to the sarcasm with smiles and laughter. The tenor of the class discussions and lectures was clear: the program had a conservative political agenda. At the end of the second week, I decided to spend less time in class and more time as an intern. The Tuckers had written letters on my behalf, and a senator had agreed to take me on, for no pay. The senator’s aides were only too happy to have free labor.
At a get-acquainted party for interns at Hawk n’ Dove, on Capitol Hill, I spotted a redhead sipping what looked like orange juice. Everyone else, or so it seemed from the boisterous chitchat, had imbibed more than a few beers. I found it odd that an attractive woman like her was standing alone. I looked at her name tag.
“Hi, Nancy, who are you interning for?”
She told me the name of a congressman from Nebraska.
“I must confess that’s a part of the U.S. I know nothing about. What is it famous for?”
“Beef, pork, and corn,” she said.
“Beef, pork, and corn,” I repeated after her. “Beef, pork, and corn. You make it sound so musical.”
Maybe I’d had one drink too many when I made that comment, or maybe that was my way of being flirtatious, but it captured her attention. She laughed. I laughed.
She peered at my name tag.
“Vishnu. That’s an Indian god, but you don’t have an Indian accent. Where are you from?”
I was in a playful mood.
“Why not take a guess?”
“India or Sri Lanka.”
“No.”
“Nepal.”
“No.”
“England, then.”
By that time, Nancy and I had moved very close to each other.
“Mauritius,” I said.
“You’re making that up!”
I put my arm around her waist. She backed away.
“You’re fast,” she said. Her voice expressed surprise, not criticism or anger.
“Do you always drink orange juice?” I said.
“I don’t trust what they serve here. This is such a dive bar.”
“What else do you drink?” I said.
“In my Aix-en-Provence semester, my host family introduced me to wines. I’m still a novice, though.”
“Would you like to go to a French restaurant with me?”
“I can’t tonight.”
“This weekend?”
As I walked out with Nancy, I saw Tim. It was hard to figure out the look on his face. I wasn’t sure if he was distressed for the woman or stunned. He must have watched our guessing game.
It had been more than a year since my last gourmet meal—at La Marmite Enchantée in Madagascar. In America I had relearnt my frugal Mauritian habits. My scholarship and minimum-wage campus job confined my culinary experiences to cafeteria food and pizza, except for the fine wines savored monthly at Professor Ghita’s home.
Nancy Hansen and I deserved a gourmet meal.
Around that time, the most-written-about French restaurant in D.C. was Sans Souci. Kissinger was an habitué, and JFK and Lyndon Johnson had eaten there. The waiting list for reservations was long.
“Pourrais-je parler à Monsieur Bernie Gorland, s’il vous plaît?” I said on the phone.
A woman replied that the owner was away.
“Dans ce cas, Monsieur Paul DeLisle s’il vous plaît,” I said.
The famed maitre d’ was also absent.
I switched to English. “I’m thinking of making a reservation, but I first want to ascertain if you serve a particular wine.”
“We have a fine selection, sir.”
The names of some vintage wines Professor Ghita had mentioned to me came in handy.
“Do you have Romanée-Conti?” I asked.
“I’ll have to check with the sommelier, sir.”
“Could you please also ask him if he has Petrus.”
She came back a few minutes later. Her tone was different, softer, eager to please. “We’ll try to accommodate your tastes as best we can, monsieur. When would you like to come?”
That Saturday, Nancy picked me up on campus. She drove a white Chevy Impala and wore a sleeveless two-tone dress, navy blue and white.
“Where are we going?” she said as I got in.
“Sans Souci, near the White House.”
“Is that a joke?”
I shook m
y head.
“You’re serious? How did you manage that? My congressman couldn’t get a reservation until next week.”
“His staff didn’t do proper research,” I said.
Sans Souci did not disappoint. The Maharajah-of-Baroda impersonator from Mahébourg would have felt at home. The gold-and-green decor and the airy layout were impressive, the clientele elegant. Nancy’s eyes said wow. The warm ambience and the glow on her face kindled my hopes for an evening of romance.
I didn’t expect the dinner to be inexpensive, but I had a plan. Go for dessert and coffee in Dupont Circle, where prices were more reasonable. At Sans Souci, I wouldn’t let the sommelier pressure me; I believed I knew enough about wine to order a cheaper but equally gratifying alternative to the fancier ones.
As soon as the sommelier started extolling the virtues of his favorite wine, before I could say anything, Nancy spoke. “Let me see if you have any of the Bordeaux wines I tasted in Aix.”
Good thing she’s a novice, I thought as the sommelier handed her the wine list.
“Vishnu, you should get this Pauillac. I’ve had it and I love it. It has flavors of cassis, blackberry, and tobacco.”
Of the three Pauillac wines, she picked the highest-priced one! It was not the most expensive on the list, but it cost enough for my heart to palpitate.
The sommelier wasted no time. He pounced. “Monsieur would be wise to go with that Pauillac. Madame loves it.”
The wine was exquisite. I ordered the cheapest entrée on the menu.
We spoke about Nebraska, the spiraling Watergate scandal, and our personal likes and dislikes. But my palpitation wouldn’t stop. My brain was busy calculating and recalculating the cost of the dinner as Nancy waxed eloquent on the wine every time she took a sip. On her second glass, she switched to French: “Un vin racé…un nez de fruits noirs mûrs…une belle déclinaison de notes de tabac et d’épices…une bouche généreuse…” A sophisticated wine-tasting vocabulary that a native French connoisseur would commend. The last phrase about “a generous mouth” took my eyes to her full lips; I fantasized a French kiss.
Silent Winds, Dry Seas Page 20
