Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  —Nice. I see that my cousin did a good job on his wooden weaving machine.

  I didn’t check to see if the others were amused or full of contempt. Probably both. All that mattered was that Nina was smiling.

  —Your cousin? The one who lost his arm in the war?

  —The very same. As a matter of fact, just last month he was brought to London—to present a bolt of the finest silk to the queen at the Festival of India. A thank-you for having ruled over us.

  —Well, I thank your cousin for his nimble fingers. I prefer his wooden machine to all the mills of northern England.

  Your Honor, by the standards of a court of law, we were full of lies. But how liberating were those lies! They gave me so much pleasure!

  I laughed at her remark. I didn’t want the banter to end.

  —The mills are now closed, I said, and I hear they are all full of regret.

  —Yes, serves the English fuckers right. May they suffer from gout and be forced to take the air in Brighton.

  Nina was sitting down and, laughing, I put my palm on the back of her neck. She lowered her head as if I had just announced that I was going to give her a massage. And that is what I proceeded to do, making slow circles at the base of her skull with my thumbs, eyes fixed on the point where her hair was the shortest. I was conscious that the talk in the room had grown quiet but I wasn’t going to stop. When Nina murmured her thanks I brushed the small bones on the back of her neck with my fingers bunched together. Her skin felt cool. I was flooded with a sense of peace.

  This was the first time I had touched Nina. By pressing against the back of her chair, I could hide my erection. I was trying to breathe normally and stay quiet, but silence seemed to weigh the moment with a significance and I didn’t dare contribute further to it. I began to blabber.

  —Madam, I say this not to brag, but to make myself accountable: I come from a long line of mystic masseurs.

  —Your immense promise is evident to me, Mr. Biswas.

  The professor, David Lamb, walked in. Quiet, precise, wearing glasses that a decade later would be called Franzenesque. Lamb noticed what I was doing. I bet he would have liked to get into bed with Nina. It would no doubt happen very naturally with him. The two shared so much, conversation between them would flow without the need to pretend or exaggerate. They would sit at one of the restaurants uptown, drinking wine with cheese and olives, exchanging jokes about a performance they had both seen separately at the Public Theater. One of them would mention dinner, and the other would readily agree. When night came, it would only simplify rather than complicate things. And, in the morning, Lamb would pick up his stylish glasses from the side table and look at her smiling at him. When she sat up, he’d say something funny and she would bend down and kiss him on that impressive nose. He saw us, my hands upon her neck, and said nothing.

  I removed myself to the remaining seat that was across from Nina. If she was at all conscious that we had engaged in an intimate act she didn’t reveal it. Our eyes didn’t meet during the rest of the class. I would think of Nina’s lowered head and exposed neck when, weeks later, I found a book called The Art of Sensual Massage among the seven or eight books stacked in her bathroom. A blue circle on the cover said OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD. Even today I can step into a health food store and the sight of candles or bottles of almond oil will bring back the dreamy, low-lit aura of limbs tensing and then easing under the pressure of my fingers. There is a particular smell I can catch in my nostrils, faintly floral mixed with something more warm and earthy, which is for me the smell of anticipation or, more accurately, the scent of the soon-to-be-fulfilled promise of sex.*7

  * * *

  One evening students rushed into the university library, screaming, and threw fake blood over each other. The red liquid spilled on the library floor and on some books open on the desks. The students were enacting a scene from the war in the Gulf. General Schwarzkopf’s controlled press conferences were clearly too sanitized. In the students’ enactment, a few “medics” carried out the “wounded and dying.” The leader of the group, Marc Rosenblum, said that the students at Mosul University, where the United States had bombed the cafeteria, “didn’t have the opportunity to get pissed off because their books had been damaged.” I was in my room and missed out on the whole thing.

  I also missed out on a “kiss-in” that Siobhan and her friends in ACT-UP had organized in lieu of a teach-in. The event was reported in the campus newspaper, Daily Spectator, with a somewhat obvious picture of two female students kissing while Senator Jesse Helms scowled at them from a poster held aloft in the background. People gathered on the steps of the library nearly each day with banners to protest the war. I often saw Nina among the protesters. I would arrive there and scan the crowd for a beret and a Palestinian scarf. Also, dark shades and often a cigarette in her hand. That was Nina. I dreamed of walking up to her and kissing her hard. I’d run into her in the TA office but I found the public vibe more inviting. She intimidated me. The war was discussed everywhere. I tried to attend the protests but I also had to deal with my own courses and the class I was teaching. It was too much. I would be eating a quick lunch in the café in Pulitzer Hall and catch on the television screen the press briefings that the military conducted. I had missed the show on PBS where both Ehsaan and Said had appeared. To add to everything, there was always the worry about money. If during a particular month I sent a hundred or two hundred dollars to Lotan Mamaji’s family in Ara, it put pressure on me to be frugal. In my sleep I would have dreams that were filled with a vague anxiety: I was leaning over a bridge in my village, trying to spit into the river below, but my mouth was dry and nothing came out. In the blank water beneath me, small fish swam.

  Soon it wasn’t so cold anymore. The war ended; the protests had made no difference. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said on television that the Iraqi Army was conducting “the Mother of all Retreats.” The scene outside my window changed. Dirty snow that had stayed seemingly for months under the dumpster and mailboxes melted. A dogwood tree in the park put out tight buds that became beautiful red flowers. I could see turtles in the green pond. And there were daffodils! Your Honor, is there an immigrant from India or Jamaica or Kenya who isn’t thrilled to see the first daffodils of spring? The honest person forced to memorize Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils without having a clue about what those flowers looked like can celebrate spring with the kind of joy that the native born can never know. This is how we know we have arrived!

  I had just had lunch and was on my way to the library. I told myself that I could read later, when darkness had fallen, and that right now, given how bright and warm it was outside, I should perhaps find a friend to have a beer with. Larry was probably in the TA room, slaving over a critical work on Bellow. He could easily be persuaded to put on his Ray-Bans and sit outside in the sun at Max Caffé. In the office, I saw that the overhead lights were off but Nina was there, sitting at her desk, her face bathed in white under her table lamp. A green frog jumped out of my chest and plopped down in the little pool of light beneath Nina’s chin. Or, that is how it felt. My heart had turned into a frog and escaped from my body. It now lay pulsing under the eye of a woman I loved from a distance.

  —Comrade Nina!

  In response, an amused shake of the head. A balanced mix of enthusiasm and indifference.

  —Comrade IRS to you, my friend. I’m trying to do my taxes.

  Taxes! With a dramatic flourish I extracted from my backpack a yellow folder I had been carrying for a week: my W-2 statement, a dozen receipts from the university bookstore, the bus and hotel receipts from the graduate student conference on Rushdie in Buffalo. My fear of Nina made me bold.

  —Nina, I beg you. Please stop. Let’s do our taxes together.

  —Why would I want to do anything so painful with you?

  —Comrade IRS, let’s have a beer, then. But let’s also do our taxes together. I cannot make head nor tail of those forms.

  She agr
eed that it was glorious outside, gathered her papers, and switched off her lamp.

  In the TA office, the light that filtered through the window was weak, half-nocturnal. For a moment, Nina stood still, thinking. A fish suspended in water. A thin blue sweater hung loosely from her shoulders. Something clicked in her mind, and she darted toward the door, all brisk efficiency.

  —Do you have the forms?

  —No!

  We stopped at the campus post office to pick up the tax return forms. Every chair and sofa at Max Caffé accommodated an affluent law school student, so Nina decided we could go to the tiny park near her apartment instead. She grabbed a blanket and a cooler from her place. A short trudge up a hill till we came to a small stone tower built to commemorate the death of sailors at sea. Was it on that first visit, or later, that she told me all those vessels that had gone down were slave ships? No mention on the plaque of the hundreds crammed together under the grated hatchways, men and women and small children drowned with the manacles still bound to their ankles and necks.

  Nina spread out the blanket on the grass. In the cooler that I had carried I found three bottles of beer and, in a silver-foil bag, spoons and a pint of ice cream. In the distance, maybe three hundred yards away, visible through the black trees that were still bare, was the highway. Nina laid herself down on her stomach, pen in hand, the pages of Form 1040NR spread out in front of her. Name and address, she said, and without waiting for me to reply, began to write. But my mind wandered.

  Filing Status

  Exemptions

  Adjusted Gross Income

  Line of Your Spine

  Your Legs

  Oh, Nina’s Legs

  I readily responded to her questions, mostly by making up my answers, and like a shrewd lawyer she accepted what I told her.

  —Don’t fuck with the state, Nina warned. She looked up, her dark glasses hiding her eyes. I don’t want to see you deported, she said.

  Did she mean it in the way I hoped? Later, she would say yes, but in this and other instances, I kept an open mind. The only point worth considering, Your Honor, is that it was the solemn enactment of the fundamental duty of the citizen, paying taxes, which brought the two of us closer together. While she showed her agility with numbers, I smelled the grass and imagined pulling her skirt down the length of her smooth legs. Her breasts were pressed against the hard ground. I wanted to cup them and hold them gently, patiently, while she quickly multiplied 1094.19 by 6.

  She brought her calculations to a close. It turned out that $187 was to be refunded to me. I signed my name at the bottom of the form.

  —Thank you, I said, thank you.

  She pushed her shades up on her head.

  —What are you going to do with your dollars?

  —Can I take you out for dinner?

  We went to La Cucaracha. With the first sip of my margarita, a fine calmness descended on me. I wasn’t acting cocky, and to be honest, my mind wasn’t entirely free of doubt. Still, I wasn’t worried about Nina and me anymore. There was little anxiety. In fact, there were moments when I felt certain that this woman who was laughing and mocking me as she ate tortilla chips was waiting for me to kiss her.

  —You are in some terrible situation on a ship, let’s say. A field trip gone horribly wrong. And the only way you can escape is if you slept with one of your professors. The question is: who would you not sleep with, like never, never, not in a million years to save your fucking life?

  —Bonnie Clark, I said after a pause.

  —That was too easy. Let me change the question: who would you absolutely want to sleep with, even if you were doing this only because the pirates who had captured you were going to kill you otherwise?

  I would sleep with you. Only you. But more important, can’t time just stop? I want this minute to last forever.

  —I’m not afraid of death, I said instead.

  —Why can’t a dog tell a lie? Is it because he is too honest, or is it because he is too sly? Poor Wittgenstein!

  I had not read Wittgenstein. But David Lamb, our professor from CLIT 300, had read Wittgenstein, and Hegel, and Kant, and Stanley Cavell. Lamb had once said at a party that whenever he suffered from insomnia he read Derrida: Not because he makes me go to sleep but because he makes staying up a pleasure. As I thought of Lamb, a sliver of ice lodged itself in my heart. My earlier assurance ebbed, and I felt stranded on the shore, watching the boat slowly receding. My father had grown up in a hut. I knew in my heart that I was closer to a family of peasants than I was to a couple of intellectuals sitting in a restaurant in New York. Our dinner of skirt steak and jumbo shrimp was nearly over, and now because I was uncertain why we had been laughing only a minute ago, a sense of fatalism began to overtake me. The fickle human heart, prone to despair. How quickly the boredom sets in.

  Perhaps Nina noticed a change.

  —Okay, truth teller, she said, it is time to get you off this ship and into your bed.

  We got into Nina’s hatchback and she said she shouldn’t have drunk so much. I was relieved when I saw that Nina didn’t turn onto her street, that she was going to drive me back to my place first. The tension eased. Now that I didn’t have to contemplate whether or not I was going to be asked to come up to her apartment, I could relax again. But to deal with this disappointment, I wanted a cigarette.

  —You know what I’d like right now? I said cheerfully.

  —A blow job?

  I laughed too loudly, and she laughed too.

  When she dropped me off, Nina said she needed to use the bathroom. I heard the noise of the flush in the toilet. And I moved away down the corridor, to open the front door for her. Instead, as soon as she came near me, I said, Don’t leave.

  My hand went up to her cheek.

  —Finally.

  She made those quotation marks in the air with two fingers of both hands when she said that word. She wasn’t done.

  She said, Jesus, is the paint dry yet?

  A person who is laughing is difficult to kiss, so I hesitated a moment. She put a finger on my mouth and leaned in closer, a serious expression on her face. The soft crush of her lips on mine released a fury of desire in me. We kissed for a long time, standing in that hallway, Nina’s back pressed against the wall.

  I am from a land of famines, Your Honor, and I displayed such hunger, such astonishing greed. Eager to touch every part of her, I turned Nina around so that her back was to me. She raised her arms, her palms flat against the wall. I was the blind man. Her breasts were in my hands. One afternoon in Delhi, Noni had gone with Deepali from Sociology to Surajkund. They came back late. What did he most like about her? Noni said that Deepali’s breasts were like kabootars in his hands, two soft, startled pigeons fluttering under his fingers. Your Honor, this is the truth of my American Dream: to possess the life of a Sikh from Patiala. At least, that is what the dream was till I met Nina and she took me, almost daily, to other neighborhoods. During my adolescence, I used to make guilty entries in my journal. I never once wrote down the word masturbation; I only recorded that I was “distracted.”*8 In my teens, I had been innocent of even something like a Victoria’s Secret catalog. Your Honor, Nina made such self-consciousness a thing of the past. Nina, once we became lovers, rid me of my guilt. She’d examine the pictures in the catalog and ask me which model I wanted to fuck. Where do you want to do it, the wooden deck visible toward the top of the picture, or right here on the sandy beach where she has planted her red toenails?

  All through that afternoon, while she had helped me with my taxes, I had gazed at Nina’s legs crisscrossed on the woolen blanket. Now, crouching down in the hallway, beside my bike that I had bought from a Chinese electrical engineering student for twenty bucks, I was kissing the backs of Nina’s knees. I kissed her and licked her, pushing my tongue everywhere I could. In touching her, I was touching the sea, I was walking on soft sand, I was tasting the salt of my infinite longing. I heard her sigh when I moved my hands up to her crotch. Then she
said, Let’s go to your bed.

  I apologize, Your Honor. Even at that moment, I could almost hear my mind repeating clichés, Such a long journey. I was thinking of the long wait for carnal contact with Nina but that phrase—it was the title of a new novel by a writer from Mumbai living in Toronto. Such a long journey. I had heard Maya use it after a hunt through different stores for a samosa but it was supposed to encapsulate the immigrant condition. I dreamed of being a writer, and even while fumbling with the clasp on Nina’s bra, I sought language for my experience. This search was part of the pleasure of the moment. It had been a journey not from hallway to bed but from the long wanting to the moment of fulfillment. This is what sex with Nina had meant to me: keen desire and struggle and, just when it seemed that the goal was still so far, success. This ache that I had nursed so long, as if for a lifetime, ended with Nina naked under me. A pair of white thighs opening, legs wrapped around my torso and then spread wide. Her head was inching closer to the wall behind her, and putting my hand protectively on her hair, I moved deeper into her. Her moans soon turned, with a half gasp, into the sentence that the article in Cosmopolitan had said every man wants to hear, I’m going to come.

  *1 A woman’s voice coming to you in the night’s silence: You are lost in another world unknown / I am left in this crowded one alone.

  *2 A distinguished Dutch professor whose own research was conducted in Indonesia taught the ethnography course. He also had an interest in South Asia and the previous week he had screened a short documentary about a servant boy in a small town in India. I had found the documentary moving. Growing up, I had witnessed the abuse of children employed as servants in homes all around me. But my own experience with servants was a bit different. Jeevan, a young, low-caste man from our village, was the domestic help in the house when I was a boy. I must have been around four when Jeevan brought me to the bathroom door and asked me to peer inside. I hadn’t noticed the crack in the wood before. And now I saw, as if in a film, my unmarried aunt, my father’s younger sister, standing under the shower. I distinctly remember being puzzled, and perhaps embarrassed, by the patch of hair below her stomach. How had Jeevan known that I wouldn’t tell my parents about this? This question didn’t occur to me till I was in my late teens. I had forgotten the scene for years and cannot now recall what forced its return. I saw Jeevan in the village before I left for the United States. He was a farmer now, prematurely aged, every part of his body shrunken except for the toenails on his cracked, bare feet. The soles of his feet had holes in them, as if a tiny screw had been put in and then taken out before repeating the process elsewhere, holes that Jeevan attributed to his standing for hours in the water in his paddy field. I photographed his feet and used the image in my first book, Passport Photos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).