Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  I was not to see Jennifer till a year had passed and it was winter again. I was with a young woman I liked. We had gone in for a hurried lunch at Ollie’s, the Chinese restaurant near the university gates. We had eaten spicy mock duck with steaming bowls of rice. When we stepped out in the cold, I touched my friend’s elbow. I was about to tell her that I wished I had drunk a Tsingtao. I stayed silent because I was looking at Jennifer. I knew the coat she was wearing and also the gloves. Our eyes met. She didn’t acknowledge me but her upper lip curled up over her teeth in such distress that I was transported to the room in the clinic where I had seen her lying on the bed with the sheet drawn up to her neck. I looked away and walked briskly ahead of my new friend, who, after she became my lover, never asked me anything about Jennifer and so we never discussed what had happened between us.

  *1 Bill Clinton on President Obama’s reelection: He’s luckier than a dog with two dicks.

  Of course, Bill Clinton deserves a footnote in any book on love. My writing notebook also has this quote in it: I—but you know, love can mean different things, too, Mr. Bittman. I have—there are a lot of women with whom I have never had any inappropriate conduct who are friends of mine, who will say from time to time, “I love you.” And I know that they don’t mean anything wrong by that.—Bill Clinton, testimony before grand jury

  *2 I wanted to title this book The Man Without a Nation. I applied for a grant but failed: that made me regard the title with suspicion. But the title was inappropriate for a novel. It seemed more suited to a nonfiction study about a kind of discrepant cosmopolitanism that develops as an antidote to sectarian conflicts and murderous nationalism. For a brief while I thought the book would be called The History of Pleasure. I had picked up the phrase in a Philip Roth novel where the narrator had this to say about himself: But I was a fearless sort of boy back in my early twenties. More daring than most, especially for that woebegone era in the history of pleasure. I actually did what the jerk-off artists dreamed about. Back when I started out on my own in the world, I was, if I may say so, something of a sexual prodigy. Sexual prodigy? Your Honor, a hunger artist, more likely. The proposed title overwhelmed me with its ironies, and so it too was abandoned.

  *3 Orgasms of twenty years ago leave no memory, wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights. Is that really true? I’m thinking now of the day only last year when I had walked past the store above which Jennifer had lived. It was a cold autumn day. The pale green paint on the wall of her apartment was still the same and looked dirty. The window where I had often sat and read books had a white fan placed in it. I wondered who lived in the apartment now. I thought I might buy something in the store. A large handwritten sign with jagged edges, orange in color, had been pasted to the front door: NO PUBLIC RESTROOM.

  Part II

  Nina

  Another clipping in the notebook for this novel. This one from a magazine essay by Abraham Verghese.

  His voice took on a conspiratorial tone: “I heard that one of our buggers, when he landed at Kennedy, he met a beautiful woman—a deadly blonde—and her brother outside baggage claim. She was very, very friendly. They offered him a lift in a white convertible. They took him to their apartment, and then you know what the brother did? Pulled a bloody gun out and said, ‘Screw my sister or I’ll kill you.’ Can you imagine? What a country!”

  (In the Verghese quote, I had identified with the fantasy, but reading it now what catches my eye is the music of that insistent—because it springs from what is dubious—detail: very, very.)

  We sat with wine in plastic cups.

  Coming down the steps outside his apartment building, Ehsaan had stumbled and twisted his ankle. Walking turned out to be difficult for him and our seminar temporarily shifted to his home. The subjects of discussion that day were issues of displacement and exile, focused on the writings of Edward Said (“Reflections on Exile”), Assia Djebar (“There Is No Exile”), and Anton Shammas (“Amérka, Amérka”). One of the students in the seminar, Negin, who was Iranian and had grown up in Los Angeles, said she had really liked Djebar. There is no exile for women. When women lose their country and live somewhere else, the customs of the old country follow them there. They are never able to escape it. Negin’s mother had said to Negin’s elder sister, who was studying law, Don’t be a whore. The mother wanted a marriage in which the family would play a part. But the sister was fighting back. Like one of Djebar’s characters, Negin’s sister told her parents, I won’t marry.

  Ehsaan was sitting in a chair with his leg raised and resting on a stool. He tilted his head toward Negin as she told her story and then, when she stopped, he told us about his mother. When Ehsaan left his village, Irki, in 1947, to accompany refugees escaping to Pakistan, his mother remained in India. Her exile was different from Djebar’s. Ehsaan said his mother saw the people who were fighting for Pakistan as reactionary and insufficiently anticolonial. That was one side of the picture. On the other side, unlike Ehsaan’s older brothers, who had eager plans about what they wanted to do in the new country, their mother was faced with a simpler task. Ehsaan’s sister Aba had fallen sick. She had typhoid.

  —My mother decided to take care of my sister, who would not have been able to make that arduous journey.

  —When did you see them again? Negin asked.

  —I didn’t, not my sister at least. She died. This was about ten, eleven years later. I saw my mother then. She came to Pakistan for a while before returning again to the village in India. She had liked the life there. We brought her back when she fell ill. She died in Pakistan.

  He fell silent. I thought of my mother in Patna. She was waiting for me to come back after I had received my degree. Soon she would be old too. And my grandmother in the village, whom I could see in my mind’s eye placing two or three red hibiscus flowers on the shrine in her courtyard. The shrine was a dark stone, no bigger than a fist, on a brick and cement pedestal about four feet high that had projecting from it a tall bamboo with a red jhandi on the top. The brief morning prayer was my grandmother’s first act of the day after her bath, her hair still wet, a fresh cotton sari wrapped around her. As it happened, I was never to see her again. On my second Diwali in America, I called my neighbors’ phone in Patna so that I could speak to my parents. My sister came to the phone and said that our parents had gone to the village to take care of my grandmother, who was very sick.

  —She was asking about you—that’s what Ma said.

  —Why didn’t you go?

  —I just got back today. I have my exams in three days.

  —Are you celebrating Diwali?

  —No fireworks in the house this year, she said.

  My sister, older than me, was telling me that our grandmother had died. This clear thought came to me only after I had hung up the phone. My next thought was that my sister must have rushed home from our neighbors’ crying. When I imagined this, my own tears came. Before I left India, my grandmother had joked that I would marry a white woman and become a sahib. I would never return home. But I’m going to bring my white bride to the village, I said to her. And she said, No, no, don’t do that. She will ask you why your grandmother has got such a flat nose. It is flat like a bedbug’s back.

  A letter from my mother arrived two weeks later. It wasn’t an aerogram letter. Instead, it was an envelope with a photograph inside of my dead grandmother’s face with a white garland around her head. My mother had written that I shouldn’t feel bad, that my grandmother had passed away peacefully. I was asked to pray for her peace. Light an agarbatti and put it near the photograph. Think good thoughts, my mother wrote.

  The discussion at Ehsaan’s house that day began with Said’s line that exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. Said was Ehsaan’s friend; we all knew that both had worked together for the rights of dispossessed Palestinians. But the story that Ehsaan was telling us about his mother and his sister made me think of him as an exile too, suffering what Said had described as crip
pling sorrow of estrangement. Your Honor, I’ve been asked when did it all start? When did I start becoming the person I am today? I don’t know whether there is a simple answer to that question. But it was perhaps during that seminar session in Ehsaan’s house that, under the influence of Said’s words, I started to think of everything heroic or glorious in Ehsaan’s life as nothing more than attempts to overcome that great sorrow.

  For this class, we had also read a recent magazine piece by Anton Shammas, a Palestinian writer who grew up in Israel. Ehsaan wanted us to tell him whether the idea of a “portable homeland,” the things that migrants carry with them, appealed to us. I spoke up. I said that I had found very moving the story that Shammas had told of a Palestinian man bringing to San Francisco the small plants and seeds that were native to the West Bank. And, hidden in his heavy black coat, the seven representative birds of his homeland: the duri, the hassoun, the sununu, the shahrur, the bulbul, the summan, and the hudhud, small-talk companion to King Solomon himself.

  Even the names of the different kind of birds were charming. When I read that list, I thought of the birds of my own past, and of the koel’s song in the summer.

  Ehsaan was smiling. He raised the glass of wine in his hand.

  —Kailash, please tell us, when you left home recently and traveled to America, what did you bring with you?

  —I was thinking of that question when reading Shammas. I carried in my suitcase a copy of The Illustrated Weekly of India with a photo essay on Bihar. The photos are in black and white. I recognize them as images from the place where I have my roots.

  —The magazine with the pictures, Ehsaan said, instead of what someone in an earlier time might have done—the earth from his native place in a jar, perhaps.

  He looked at the others.

  —I brought pictures of my parents and my dog, Peter said.

  Others had probably done the same because they were nodding.

  When no one else offered a response, Ehsaan said that Palestinians who left their homeland and were never able to return still keep the keys to the houses they had been forced to abandon. The keys are useless now because the locks are gone. But those keys are the portals to homeland.

  I had left home willingly but was still struck by how little I had brought with me. It was as if I imagined I was going to discover a new self. I thought of my own room in the university apartment. The walls were bare—there was a window but no pictures—and the room smelled of the cheap synthetic sheets I used. There was a lemon-yellow electric blanket on the bed. Instead of my parents’ photographs, I had carried in my suitcase a magazine, my certificates, my degrees, a fading diploma or two. I had brought with me a few music cassettes in their brittle plastic cases. Geeta Dutt, C. H. Atma, Mohammed Rafi, Hemant Kumar. In my apartment, I read for class while lying in bed, music playing on my radio–cassette player. For many years, often full of self-pity, I would think that Lata Mangeshkar was singing the anthem for people like me: Tum na jaane kis jahan mein kho gaye…*1

  * * *

  One day in class, my classmate Siobhan, who seemed to be a current or past officeholder in all the progressive student organizations on campus, said that there was going to be a teach-in. War was imminent in the Persian Gulf. President Bush had sent the troops to Saudi Arabia and they were going to proceed to Kuwait to force Saddam to withdraw. There was a goateed speaker from Political Science who spoke for a long time on the role of the oil economy in the war. The Iraqi invasion in Kuwait had actually benefited the oil companies in the West. The rise in oil prices had earned them huge profits. This was true not only of those in the United States but also of companies based in other countries, all the way from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela. It was just that Bush couldn’t allow Iraq to dictate terms or control worldwide oil prices. In just the past few years, U.S. reliance on Gulf oil had gone up fourfold, and if we understood this we would know why the U.S. troops had been sent to the Middle East.

  When the speaker finished, a group of students began to chant “No Blood for Oil! No Blood for Oil!” Others were holding up signs. One said, A KINDER GENTLER BLOODBATH. Two young women were holding the ends of a bedsheet on which they had spray-painted the words GEORGE BUSH IS HAVING A WARGASM.

  The writer Grace Paley, a tiny woman with a halo of silver hair, was asked to address the crowd. She spoke about a marine named Jeff Patterson, who, back in August, refused to join his unit. He sat down on the airstrip in Hawaii, unwilling to fight in a war he didn’t believe in. He had joined the Marine Corps to receive an education, but the time he spent at bases in Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines changed his outlook. He was the first protester from among American ranks; others were to join him later. Paley read out a statement from Patterson: “I have, as an artillery controller, directed cannons on Oahu, rained burning white phosphorus and tons of high explosives on the big island, and blasted away at the island of Kahoolawe…I can bend no further.” Before she ended, Paley said she agreed with what had been said about oil and war. The reality was even worse, she said. There was alternative energy for everything in normal, comfortable American life—television, air conditioners, light, heat, cars. There was only one enterprise that needed such a colossal infusion of energy that no alternative to oil would work—and that was war. A tank could move only seventeen feet on a gallon of gasoline. This war was a war to ensure that America could continue to make war.

  Next it was Ehsaan’s turn. Siobhan introduced him as her favorite professor. She said he had only recently spent a year teaching in Beirut. Ehsaan was wearing a tan sweater over a black turtleneck. His gray hair was cut short. He looked handsome. He smiled and said that as it was a teach-in he wouldn’t waste time making jokes about Vice President Dan Quayle. Except we needed to be clear that in imperialist adventures the children of the rich didn’t bear most of the ordeal. In other words, we should note that Quayle didn’t enlist to fight in Vietnam, and instead, he joined the National Guard. Nearly sixty thousand Americans were killed in the Vietnam War, but of that number, fewer than a hundred were members of the National Guard.

  Despite his cowardly record, Quayle had only the previous day spoken in New York, not two miles away from where we were meeting, in favor of an assault by the United States. Ehsaan had questions for Quayle: Who will fight in our army? Who will be fighting in the Iraqi army? Who will get killed? He followed these questions by saying that, like Grace Paley, he was going to read a letter written by a soldier. The letter had been written by an Indian sepoy during the First World War in what is present-day Iraq. The soldier was fighting in Mesopotamia in the British Army. He had written home in 1916 that a part of the 7th Brigade, in which he was fighting, was besieged and surrounded on all sides by the enemy. Attempts have been made to rescue them, but without success. There was a fight on 6th March and heavy losses to us in the attempt to relieve them. Some of our men are in the besieged force, twenty in number. They have eaten their horses and mules. They have a quarter of a pound of flour each per diem. We are hopeful of being sent to join the relieving force. Such precision about the pain and the suffering of comrades fighting in a war. A war, mind you, that has nothing to do with the private destinies and choices of these Indian soldiers themselves. The whole truth is even more unbearable.

  Ehsaan’s voice rose higher. From records kept during the siege we learn that British officers amused themselves by designing menus featuring horseflesh. We also learn that Major Stewart’s devoted batman was killed while bringing his mule-steak lunch to his dugout. No need to guess the race of the batman. He was killed because Churchill had acquired for the British government 90 percent of the shares in a corporation called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It was necessary to control Basra; the lives of thousands of Indian soldiers be damned. If we are really interested in supporting our troops, which not incidentally are made up of a huge number of disadvantaged youth from minority communities, if we are interested in supporting these young men and women of color, then let’s not put them in ha
rm’s way to benefit a group of oil companies and the government that promotes their interests everywhere.

  Loud applause at the end. I looked around for Nina but she wasn’t there. My hands were cold and I liked the idea of sharing one of her Dunhill cigarettes. But I had an ethnography class in Schermerhorn in ten minutes and so I rushed away without even shaking Ehsaan’s hand.*2

  * * *

  Nina and I met in a film seminar that first semester.*3 She had short-cropped hair, large brown eyes, and impetuous lips. Her movements were full of allure; she was small-built and athletic: a dancer till her late teens. Even when she was not moving, just sitting in the dark watching the films that were screened for us in the small classroom, I was always aware of the outline of her features. Sometimes, instead of watching the film, I’d study the light on her face. We had spoken a few times in class and once after a party at Peter’s, I trying too hard to be witty, and she managing to be so quite effortlessly.

  One day, after the screening of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, I saw Nina bent over the water fountain. She raised her face, her mouth still wet.

  —I wanted to ask you something, I said to her.