Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

Nina laughed. You want to know whether I’m fertile?

  Although she was laughing when she said this, her look was calm and assessing. I too laughed. There was a great deal of nervousness in my laughter because I didn’t know what to say.

  —No, I told her, I only wanted to know whether you are going to register for Comp Lit 300 next semester.

  —As a matter of fact, I am. How can I not enroll in a course that appears on the transcript as CLIT 300?

  More laughter.

  The following week in the film class we were discussing Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses. The professor was a small Frenchwoman whose face and neck would get covered in hives if you asked uncomfortable questions.*4 An Italian girl was making a convoluted argument about Japanese cinema; she had recently watched a film about a nuclear explosion on Mount Fuji. Nina was sitting in a chair next to me. I remembered the haiku about the cuckoo that Jennifer had given me. I wanted to write a quick haiku. But not about the cuckoo’s lonely call. My fascination with Nina demanded a riskier expression of love. I passed a scrap of paper to her. On it I had written:

  Wet moss between your thighs

  Semen

  Rains on Mount Fuji

  She surprised me by putting a small tongue out as if she was licking ice cream.

  Suddenly, I was buying magazines like Cosmopolitan at the supermarket if they had headlines like TEN HOTTEST THINGS YOU CAN SAY IN BED or SEVENTY-SEVEN SEX POSITIONS. What did I learn from them? That I was supposed to say, Is it okay with you if I take this slow?

  During a long-ago winter afternoon, in Delhi, in my early teens, I had watched Tootsie at the Chanakya cinema hall. Dustin Hoffman, disguised as a woman, listens to the beautiful Jessica Lange complaining.

  —You know what I wish? That a guy could be honest enough to walk up to me and say, “I could lay a big line on you, but the simple truth is that I find you very interesting, and I’d like to make love to you.” Wouldn’t that be a relief?

  That had given me insight, except that it was short-lived. For, later in the movie, Hoffman, now without his disguise, sees Lange at a cocktail party. He tries out that speech on her and before he has even finished she has thrown a glass of wine in his face.

  A better person would have learned to walk a fine line between the two conversations. Not me. I swung from one extreme to the other. Hence my hunger for instruction. When I met Nina I also bought Romance for Dummies by Dr. Ruth. Dr. Ruth encouraged you to make noise while having sex: While you retain the right to remain silent, perhaps you could speak up a little before your final act. She said you never know how you’ll react unless you give it a try at least one time. I enacted a silly pantomime when I came inside Nina that first time, not a war whoop exactly, more of a raised fist celebrating the revolutionary storming of the barricades. She, on the other hand, was silent, even pensive, though later that night she was affectionate, smiling, and this took away some of my foreboding. But here I’m getting ahead of myself.

  * * *

  There had been that one time even before Jennifer and I had broken up.

  In my department mailbox, just before Thanksgiving, there had appeared a red flyer for a party at Peter’s. I showed Jennifer the flyer but she wasn’t interested.

  Calling all foreign TAs. Come and learn to speak English by watching Down by Law (dir. Jim Jarmusch).

  We will begin at 8 PM. 514 W 121st Street, Apt 3B. Door on the Left. Bell doesn’t work. Don’t let the cat out!

  B.Y.O.B. 242-7311.

  Host: Peter Koerner.

  I took a bottle of wine for Peter. There was a naked woman on the label with the name Cycles Gladiator printed above her. The woman had a fleshy rump and long, fiery orange-red hair flying behind her. She was floating in the air, her hands on the handlebar of a bicycle outfitted with tiny, colorful wings. This would be to Peter’s liking.

  Maya from International Relations was already there, looking like the rani of Awadh, a cat in her lap. Flowing silks and a sleepy animal with jeweled eyes. I recognized some of the others. There was Jean, the French graduate student and a black belt, who, I had heard, counted loudly (three hundred forty-three…three hundred forty-four…three hundred forty-five) when he was fucking. This information had come from Jean’s housemate, an Irishman who had described himself, by way of comparison, as a “semisilent fucker.” Paulo, one of the Chilean anthropologists, was also someone I knew. He was there in the company of a woman with the semblance of a mustache.

  I uncorked the bottle of wine I had brought. Then I saw Nina stepping out of the bathroom, an air of privacy still attached to her. An invisible current, like a rush of air lifting a kite, entered my body. Nina wasn’t even a foreign TA—what a lovely surprise! I went up to her hurriedly but she thought I only wanted to go to the bathroom and stood sideways, her back pressed against the wall to let me pass. We smiled at each other and I kept walking. Inside, I studied my face in the mirror. A wild thatch of black curly hair. Round-rimmed glasses that failed to hide thick eyebrows. The face looking back at me wasn’t ugly, but it was definitely ordinary. It didn’t inspire confidence that a woman in the room outside would look at it and think she wanted to kiss it. I had been with Jennifer earlier in the evening, we had eaten cheap Tibetan food together. But the women in Peter’s house, with whom I had sat in classes, were still strangers to me.

  When I came back I saw that Nina was sitting on a small sofa with Paulo. I positioned myself on the armrest next to Paulo and stayed silent because Nina and he were discussing the music of Ornette Coleman. Others in the room were also talking among themselves and drinking. Siobhan quoted a line from a short story she had read in an American lit class: To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. I hadn’t heard the writer’s name before—and what was he really saying? Siobhan was mocking the politics embedded in such desire. The people around her agreed with the analysis. One of them, Marc, a poet who always carried a tiny tin of Altoids in his hand, touched his hair and said, You can absolutely date this brand of sexuality. It’s an artifact of the Cold War! But I liked that line from the story even though I didn’t understand what it meant. I wish I had said it myself. Through the glass door on the left I could see the small group standing on the patio outside—another feature of life in America, where you went out into the fresh air to smoke. Inside, just before he put the film on, Peter went up to Maya and kissed her on the cheek. Maya touched Peter’s face, and then made space for him on the sofa. The cat jumped off her lap. For a moment, or a little longer, I thought about what I had just seen. Maya’s undisguised affection for Peter and her plain, loving gesture in front of everyone else. When had they fallen in love? It gave me a little bit of a shock but it also made me feel guilty: I thought of Jennifer and what she had said once about my not wanting to touch her in public. Even if we had made our love public I wouldn’t have acted like Maya. I would not have rubbed our noses together and smiled at one another while our friends pretended not to notice.

  The film was in black and white. An Italian man named Roberto was wandering in the night in New Orleans. Roberto carried a notebook with him and he diligently recorded all the American idioms he heard. He ended up in the Orleans Parish Prison, every surface in the film lit up with the dramatic lighting familiar to me from the Hindi films of the fifties or the sixties. Roberto attempted to speak like an American, except that he kept mangling his sentences.

  —Jack, do you have some fire? This was Roberto asking his cellmate for a match because he wanted to light his cigarette.

  Whenever I laughed, I looked at Nina. She was watching the screen with an amused expression. Roberto was charming; he had killed a man after an altercation at a game of cards, but he insisted that he was “a good egg.” And he was! He had found a way to escape from prison. On the run, he lost his “book of English,” but he continued to entertain. He had memorized the American poets in translation, Whitman and others. I heard Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in Italian.

  On the lam, Robert
o found love. During these scenes I would sometimes think of Jennifer and at other times think of Nina. The film made me sentimental, lovesick, and Roberto’s good luck gave me courage.

  —Are you walking home? I asked Nina when she was leaving.

  The sidewalks were darkened by the fallen autumn leaves. A shiny car passed slowly, music coming out of its open windows, and Nina said something about loving Prince. In a high falsetto, she sang, Cause nothing compares…and then skipped ahead of me. I ran behind her.

  —Do you have some fire?

  Nina was game. She pretended to give me a light, and I made as if to shake out a cigarette. When I cupped my hands around the pretend flame, her hands were nesting in mine. I found her touch thrilling. Even before I had reached her building, about five or six blocks from mine, I began to ask myself if I would ever kiss those hands. Her hands, her smooth arms. Her lips. Despite it not being very cold on the street my teeth began to chatter with excitement.

  When we got to her street, Nina stood at the door and said, Do you want to come in?

  —No, I said, a bit too quickly, and the hand I half-raised to say goodbye was almost reaching toward her. I turned away into the dark. Jennifer might call soon at home, I thought. That was part of the reason I hesitated. The bigger reason was that I was a coward. I was disappointed that I hadn’t had the courage to say yes but I was also secretly exulting. Nina’s invitation was an augury for the future.

  * * *

  —

  A week before the Christmas break, papers were to be submitted for all the classes. I could type them in my room or go to the library and use the word processors. I was only just learning to write academic papers, and I feared that I was going to do badly. And what was I going to write about for Ehsaan?*5 I asked him about the letter he had read at the teach-in. He gave me the title of a book by a British historian named David Omissi; in that book, I found other letters by Indian soldiers serving in the First World War, most of them in France. It would be best, I decided, if I could stitch together my commentary by taking excerpts from the letters I liked.

  Fateh Mohamed had written in his letter sent to Punjab: The cold for the last five or six days has been more intense than we have experienced during the two former winters. If one puts water into a vessel it is frozen in ten minutes. At the same time, there is a strong wind. If France had not been such a sympathetic country, existence under such conditions would be impossible. Through the kindness of these people [the French] we pay no regard to the cold. They themselves refrain from sitting near the fire-place and insist on our sitting there. Moreover, instead of water they give us petit cidre, which is the juice of apples to drink. Personally, except in the trenches, I have never drunk water.

  Too readily, I identified with what was in the letters: the desire to report on what was new but also to exaggerate, to make things extraordinary, to say that I eat meat every day or that I’m served juice and wine.*6 In most letters, however, the pathos was the plot. Consider the cry in another letter (less a letter than a single keening note) from Muhammad Akbar Khan to his home—Is my parrot still alive or dead?

  A letter from Tura Baz Khan of the 40th Pathans from the Boulogne Depot in France: [He had enclosed a cigarette card of The Duchess of Gordon after Sir Joshua Reynolds.] This is the woman we get. We have recourse to her. I have sent you this [her picture] and if you like it, let me know, and I will send her. We get everything we want. [Letter withheld.]

  A letter sent to Peshawar—I have been in Hodson’s Horse for the whole thirty-three years. During a railway journey when two people sit side by side for a couple of hours, one of them feels the absence of the other when he alights: how great then must be the anguish which I feel at the thought of having to sever myself from the regiment! Such fine feeling! When I read the old soldier’s letter I found myself thinking that this intense vibration of sentiment, the sense that the sender had about the sorrow of attachment, could only have been the result of a long experience with separation and loneliness.

  At times, the soldiers seemed aware that the censor authorities would be reading their letters. They offered praise for the British king. They tried hard to reassure their loved ones. The soldiers were often careful in their phrasing of demands for goods that they could use to make themselves appear sick. Or high. But they also made mistakes. One soldier wrote to say that the next time his relatives sent opium to France they should only say that it was cream to be rubbed into his beard. The letter was withheld by the censors.

  * * *

  —

  Letters like the one by Tura Baz Khan appeared unusual or transgressive to me, full of sexual boasting, and I was left unsure about what to make of them. But other letters, also touched with personal and sexual feeling, drew my attention for other reasons. A letter that I commented on at length in my paper had been sent by a soldier from the 20th Deccan Horse regiment, stationed in France; I didn’t entirely understand the letter or its circumstances, but I was drawn by its quiet undercurrent of sadness and resignation. It was addressed to the headmaster of the soldier’s village in Punjab, and though it concerned a matter that was intimate, the language of the letter was formal, even abstract. For me, it was an example of a writer standing on the edge of grief.

  My idea is that, since it is now four years since I went to my home, my wife should, if she wishes it, be allowed to have connection according to Vedic rites with some other man, in order that children may be born to my house. If this is not done, then the family dignity will suffer. Indeed, this practice should now be followed in the case of all wives whose husbands have been absent for four years or more. It is permitted by Vedic rites, if the wives are willing. Everyone knows that that article, the consumption of which is increased while the production is stopped, will in time cease to exist.

  Other letters were easier to understand but difficult to accept. A brief unambiguous missive from Kabul Singh of the 31st Lancers: Asil Singh Jat and Harbans have done a vile thing. They forcibly violated a French girl, nineteen years of age. It is a matter of great humiliation and regret that the good name of the 31st Lancers should have been sullied in this way.

  I got the paper back by mail instead of finding it in my department mailbox. In two places on the paper, Ehsaan had written Good in the margin. There was a paragraph of typed remarks on notepad paper stapled to the last page. Ehsaan had found my commentary on the letters a little thin. There were various questions that I could have considered: What were the rules regarding desertion? How much did the soldiers earn? What was the imperial expenditure during the war? What were the customs as well as the laws regarding marriage? What was the punishment for rape? My eyes went down to the last line of the paragraph. I had escaped grievous bodily harm: he had given me a B.

  * * *

  Your Honor, once again the desire to explain who I am. The stories of the soldiers bring to mind the tale of an ancestor on my mother’s side, Veer Kunwar Singh. He had fought not for the British but against them. Kunwar Singh was already eighty years old when he joined the revolt against the East India Company in 1857. He began his campaign by ambushing the British forces near the Sone River. Two days earlier, rebellious sepoys had sacked the treasury in Ara, a stone’s throw away from the house where, a little over a century later, Lotan Mamaji was born. The sepoys had also broken open the jail and released the prisoners. The local Europeans, numbering only ten, took refuge in the house of the railway engineer, a man named Boyle; they fortified the door with a billiard table and sandbags. From the nearby garrison town of Buxar, one Major Eyre led loyal troops who helped liberate those hiding in Boyle’s home. Eyre’s artillery power prevailed against Kunwar Singh’s ragtag army, but the old warrior escaped on his horse. His wounded sepoys were executed in the town square. Eyre went to Kunwar Singh’s estate and ordered the burning of the fields and huts in the surrounding villages. Singh’s estate home was also destroyed and the temple he had built vandalized. In September of that year, two months after Kunwar Sing
h began his campaign, the British took into custody in Delhi the aged emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and sent him into exile to Burma. But Kunwar Singh soldiered on. During the course of an entire year that followed, even during the monsoon months, he participated in battles and led guerrilla attacks up to three hundred miles west of Ara. In April 1858 he defeated the British forces in Azamgarh.

  * * *

  When the enemy returned on the offensive again, Kunwar Singh conducted a brilliant withdrawal of his forces for over 150 miles. Despite their superior firepower and their leadership, which had been tested in the Crimean War, the English soldiers were unable to ever capture Kunwar Singh. He was to die later in his home, his own golden banner flying from his rooftop. But the reason he is remembered today is the story told of his crossing on the Ganges at Shivpur Ghat. The incident took place on April 21, 1858. Kunwar Singh was on a boat, guiding the withdrawal of his troops being pursued by the British infantry. His boat was receiving fire from the gunboat Meghna, one of three gunboats deployed on the river. One of the rebel boats capsized and then the boat on which Kunwar Singh stood also took a hit. His left arm was shattered by a cannonball. An amputation was the only cure in those days, and according to the story that is repeated today Kunwar Singh drew his sword with his right hand and, chopping off his left arm, let it fall as an offering to the holy river.

  * * *

  CLIT 300 was titled Brecht and His Friends. During that second semester, I saw Nina in classes twice a week. I flirted with her more confidently because I saw that she didn’t take me seriously—although now that Jennifer and I had parted ways, I prayed constantly that Nina would take me seriously. Once, I stepped into the classroom and saw her seated in a circle of four or five others. I noticed right away that her outfit, a pale raw silk vest over a sleeveless cotton shirt, had been made in India. She probably bought it from a place like Bloomingdale’s but as far as I was concerned it might well have been a gift from me. Stepping close behind her, I felt the fabric of her vest with my fingertips.