Is it possible to reverse the trend of technological advancement—of any advancement? Seems we all have the tendency (& in difficult circumstances almost the need) to look back to days when life was better, air was cleaner, and, with their difficulties, human relationships were easier & more “beautiful.” Confession—I do that a lot. But it seems clear that it’s not possible to reverse it, to go back. Despite the dangers & difficulties, one must apply a moral consciousness to here & now & all that means & commit one’s life to shaping out a future of hope & life. Without knowing what that may mean in terms of proximity to loved ones one still tries to say “yes” at times more weakly than others.
The second paragraph began with the words What were our thoughts last year as man first walked the moon? but was quickly followed by a line that dipped into the personal, recording Campbell’s pleasure at their last meeting. The best part was seeing you in the old fighting spirit and to know first hand that beyond physical confinement, they had no control over you. And then came the part that had given J. Edgar Hoover cause to launch an investigation:
This is in utter confidence & should not be committed to paper & I would want you not even to say a word of it to anyone until we have a fuller grasp of it. I say it to you for two reasons. The first obviously is to get your thinking on it, the second to give you some confidence that people are thinking seriously of escalating resistance. Ehsaan called us up to Connecticut last night. He outlined a plan for an action which would say—escalate seriousness—& we discussed pros and cons for several hours. It needs much more thought & careful selection of personnel. To kidnap—in our terminology make a citizen’s arrest of—someone like Henry Kissinger. To issue a set of demands, e.g., cessation of use of B-52s over N. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, & release of political prisoners. Hold him for about a week during which time bigwigs of the liberal ilk would be brought to him—also kidnapped if necessary (which, for the most part it would be)—& hold a trial or grand jury affair out of which an indictment would be brought. There is no pretense of these demands being met & he would be released after this with a word that we’re nonviolent as opposed to them, who would let a man be killed—one of their own—so that they could go on killing. The liberals would also be released as would a film of the whole proceedings in which, hopefully, Kissinger would be far more honest than he is on his own turf. The impact of such a thing would be phenomenal.
* * *
—
Ehsaan would come and stand behind me, reading the files over my shoulder. I was his teaching assistant that semester, this would have been the year 1991, and I was assigned to organize the papers in his study at home. He saw me reading Sister Laura Campbell’s letter. He was silent for a while and then, leaning over me, underlined with the nail of his right thumb the words should not be committed to paper. He laughed a shrill laugh and turned away to answer a phone call. His voice came from the next room.
—Edward, how are you? We will discuss that but first I must tell you: I have found a cheese that will appeal to you…
I returned to the papers spread out before me.
We are back during the days of the late summer of 1970. Adams brought Francis Hull’s letter to the librarian. It bore the title “The Use and Effectiveness of Group Therapy in the Federal Penal System.” The opening line: An emphasis on relationship seems to have sponsored a growing tendency on the part of the penal administrators to have inmates in more personal contact with one another and with staff members. Immediately followed by a few lines about how keenly Hull had savored Sister Laura’s visit: the best part of the afternoon was your glowing person. Then, as if a discussion was being conducted in a public meeting, he dived into a critical assessment of kidnapping Kissinger. His main query: Why not coordinate it with the one against capitol utilities? Hull expanded on the notion of effective propaganda and the movement for the length of two paragraphs. At the end, he added, Will you permit me a little compliment, Sister? The big difference rests largely with your coming in. And when this odyssey is over, I will learn from you, receiving the education that results from a marriage of minds and souls.
Among the nine folders related to the trial in the study was a clipping that described Ehsaan as a slim, debonair 40-year-old with excellent manners and a dazzling smile. The main story was about Ehsaan raising funds for the defense. Ehsaan had received two thousand letters of support and two that were unfavorable. The most touching letter, the report said, was from a black Vietnam veteran, a former student of Ehsaan’s, who thanked him for being nice to me and treating me like a human being. This vet had enclosed a three-thousand-dollar check, his entire discharge pay—because now that my government has done this to you, you need all the help you can get. The vet had originally intended to use the money as a down payment on a house. Ehsaan returned the check, the report said, suggesting that a hundred dollars would be a fairer contribution.
In another clipping it was noted that a marshal inside the courtroom referred to Ehsaan as that camel driver. One of the Harrisburg citizens in the court’s elevator told the reporter: that Pakistani should be shishkabobed for bringing the country more trouble than it already has. This could have prompted outrage or indignation in my postcolonial heart but what interested me more was the following description in another report, this time by a male reporter, in what gets called a newspaper of public record: Sister Laura frequently wore mini skirts and with her long shapely legs, her smooth complexion, oval face and almond-shaped blue eyes, she looked younger than her thirty-two years. When I read that, I thought of Hull writing to Campbell, Will you permit me a little compliment, Sister? And I saw Ehsaan, near a giant sunlit window in the courtroom, I saw him with his dark, handsome face and his aforementioned dazzling smile, lavishing attention and words on the miniskirt-wearing nun.
* * *
Ehsaan came back from talking on the phone and I turned to the page where he had put his finger on the phrase. His leg was hurting again; I saw him grimace when he sat down. I had a question for him.
—Why did she put all that in the letter?
—The first thing you are taught as a guerrilla in Algeria is the following motto: Quand tu es en prison, tu ne demandes que des oranges. When you are in prison, you ask only for oranges…It takes a lot of revolutionary discipline to resist the temptation to ask for more.
When Ehsaan had been young, that is to say the age I myself was when I first met him, he had gone to Tunisia as a graduate student at Princeton to do research for his doctorate. In nearby Algeria, revolution had caught fire. It was said that Ehsaan had traveled to Algeria and fought in the war against the French. Had he? No one knew for certain. A couple of people remarked to me later that Ehsaan wasn’t averse to mythmaking. I myself never got the chance to ask him, and years later, sitting in a restaurant one rainy evening on Broadway, when I asked his widow that question, she quietly said that she didn’t know. I had liked her honesty, especially when I pressed her to explain why Ehsaan had chosen to stay in the United States and not return to Pakistan when his studies were over. She laughed and said, “In Pakistan the women wore the hijab. Here they showed their legs.” But back in Ehsaan’s office that day, I had looked up from the photocopied letter written in the neat, right-sloping handwriting of Laura Campbell.
—It must have been terrible for them…for these letters to be read out in court.
—Oh, it was appalling, Ehsaan said. They were lovely people, with great dignity. It went on for hours. They just stared at the floor.
The defense lawyer had cross-examined the government witnesses. He didn’t believe Adams had been left with even a shred of credibility. They didn’t need to carry out the charade any longer. The charges were preposterous. He simply got up and said, These defendants will always seek peace. Your Honor, the defense rests. The jury voted ten to two on acquittal for all charges. In the months that followed, both Hull and Campbell quit their religious orders. They got married and opened a community house in a black neighborhood in Bal
timore.
—I went to their wedding, Ehsaan said. They now have two children. You should visit them. They will welcome you.
—During the trial, they must have had a chance to see each other in court every day? That must have been a relief.
—They never hid their affection for each other in court. They always embraced when they came together. It shocked some people. I admired them for that…And that is how one must understand what Laura did in her letter. She was sharing a secret with her lover—that is all. They had kept him in solitary confinement because of his hunger strike in Danbury prison. She was giving him hope. I have to tell you, they often struck me as naïve, but they were also the most honest people I had met.
* * *
Years have passed. It is a hot August day in 2009 and I am at a Starbucks at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. People come here with their bladders full and their gas tanks empty. In the newspaper someone has left on the table there is mention of a priest who had used bolt cutters to cut a hole in a chain-link fence and then stepped atop the silo of a Minuteman III nuclear missile with an antinuke banner wrapped around his body. It is not Francis Hull. But lower in the report, there is mention of Laura Campbell, and then the phrase the widow of Francis Hull. So, like Ehsaan, Hull is gone. Campbell must be in her early seventies now. I call directory information, and a few minutes later, I am asking Laura Campbell for permission to visit.
—Would you like lunch? This is the simple, straightforward question she asks me on the phone.
She is tall, gray-haired. Wearing a T-shirt that says ROTC OFF ALL CAMPUSES. Her denim trousers are splattered with paint. Situated beside a cemetery, the small house behind her serves as a meeting place for activists: on Fridays, which it is today, they distribute food and clothes in the morning. But it is past noon now and on the table set outside the house are scattered the leftovers: an out-of-season woolen jacket, a mustard-colored sweater, old socks, neatly paired. At the far end, I can see a nearly empty container of soup and alongside it an aluminum tray with dry bread crumbs. All around us are tombstones. I ask Laura if it would be possible for her to show me Hull’s grave before we have lunch. She introduces me first to a donkey they have in their stable. She pats the donkey, whose name is Vinnie, and rubs her mane. Then we go among the sassafras trees to look for her three pet goats. Planted amidst the thousand dead, Irish working-class folk from early in the nineteenth century, many of them new immigrants, are walnut and maple trees. Also elm and oak. The goats have as their companion and guard a tall llama named Paz. I pet the goats and try to do the same with the llama but Sister Laura stops me.
—They’re not used to touch. Their tongues don’t distend, so they have never been licked by their mother. But they are very sensitive, very intelligent, oh yes.
A large black marble gravestone with a Celtic cross on it marks Francis Hull’s resting place and Laura slowly runs her hand across the top of the stone. It is a tender gesture. She points out the plum and fig trees close by, and the lettuce bushes and the lines of carrot. When we go inside and sit down for lunch, she holds my hand as she closes her eyes and prays. The meal is simple, pasta, cold cuts, fresh salad. In the car, I had thought I’d ask her questions about Ehsaan and Francis Hull, but I realize that I’m just happy to be in her company. Then I do, anyway.
—All the news reports I had read about the trial mentioned your prettiness and your love for Father Hull. Was that love a part of what you thought of as the revolution?
I feel a bit prurient asking her this, but she doesn’t hesitate.
—You want what is good in your life also to be enjoyed by others.
These defendants will always seek love, Your Honor.
* * *
Life comes at you in images. Every day this summer the photographs in the news show refugees who in a bid to escape their bombed-out cities risk death on the high seas. Fathers with life jackets clutching their children, women with babies clasped to their breasts. It is not clear what President Obama’s response will be to this crisis, but Germany has opened its doors to the new arrivals. On Twitter, the refugees fleeing war compete for my attention with other images of meals people have eaten in restaurants, their pets, or the stunning sunsets seen during beach vacations. I pay attention to what comes my way from India. Just the other day someone sent me a photograph of a CNG yellow-and-green auto-rickshaw in Delhi. At the back, on its yellow canopy, were the words ASLI JAT in Hindi. That was understandable. But below the words in Hindi, were the words in English:
NOBODY REMAINS VIRGIN
LIFE FUCKS EVERYONE
When I was growing up in India, the common signs in English on public transport were variations of O.K. TATA, HORN PLEASE, USE DIPPER AT NIGHT. When did Delhi’s auto-rickshaw drivers become a part of Lord Macaulay’s English-speaking army dispensing metaphorical wisdom about getting fucked? This particular four-letter word—short and dominated by consonants, yet malleable and open to a range of inflections. I’ll tell you a little later the story of a discovery I made, that there was a whole sermon on it by an Indian guru.
EVENINGS AT 7.
MON ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
TUES ABUSED SPOUSES
WED EATING DISORDERS
THU SAY NO TO DRUGS
FRI TEEN SUICIDE WATCH
SAT SOUP KITCHEN
SUNDAY SERMON 9 A.M. “AMERICA’S JOYOUS FUTURE”
That was the postcard I pinned to the door of the office for the English Department’s teaching assistants.*2 The card showed a notice board of the sort you see at schools and churches, with white plastic alphabets inserted into holes in the black board. (The keen pleasure of embracing shallow stereotypes! I was a foreigner. Still am, after more than twenty years.) An arrow drawn on the postcard with a felt pen pointed to THU. Office Hrs, 4–6 PM and my name next to it.
Six of us used the office. Nina’s desk was in the same room. And also those of the other teaching assistants: Pushkin Krishnagrahi, Ricardo Morales, and Larry Blofeld. Closest to my desk was my friend Peter’s. Near my postcard on the door were his office hours (Koerner: T–Thu 1–2 PM and by appt). Partly out of solidarity and partly to taunt me, he had tacked a print of a five-by-seven photo also showing a sign outside a church.
STAYING IN BED
SHOUTING, OH GOD!
DOES NOT CONSTITUTE
GOING TO CHURCH
I could have pasted above my own desk a picture of the Taj Mahal. This was certainly true during the early days, when I wouldn’t have thought twice about stealthily tearing out an Air India ad from a magazine in the university library. The record should state clearly, however, that the first thing I tore out was a reproduction in The Atlantic of an early painting by Picasso. Your Honor, Picasso had painted it after first making love. The brown back of a thin male sunk into the flesh of a shapely woman with commodious thighs. What caught my eye was the woman’s slim and languid arm, with its high elbow, holding Picasso in place. Then, when I began reading writers I hadn’t read in India I tacked their pictures in place of the notice from the church. Brecht, Baldwin. This was still during my first year in America. One day I found a postcard in Greenwich Village that showed a piece of graffiti on a wall. Where had the photograph been taken? There was no indication. It quoted an exchange between a reporter and Mahatma Gandhi:
—Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?
—I think it would be a good idea.
This new postcard had pride of place on the wall: when a visiting student spoke to me, he or she could look past my head and read the postcard. It was like an imagined thought bubble, a witty statement that I wanted to adopt as my line onstage. This was my private version of To be or not to be or Friends, Romans, Countrymen. But then one day, a flyer appeared in my mailbox. The opening words were If God is dead, then you lose the most important word in your language. And you need a substitute. Instead of God, Fuck has become the most important word in our language. The words were from a speech by Osho, who w
as also known as Bhagwan Rajneesh. All kinds of flyers, pamphlets, announcements were put in our mailboxes every day. The difference was that an Indian had written these words. Therefore, I treated them as my own. I made copies for all my friends and officemates. The following day, or the day after that, there was a tape in my mailbox. Both the flyer and the tape had come from a Bengali grad student, Biman, who otherwise kept himself busy with work on his thesis on Naguib Mahfouz. I listened to the tape with great interest. Osho spoke with what in this country was called a pronounced accent. For me, his voice was like the voices of my relatives and friends, even the word English uttered with a sibilant hiss. Osho’s whole lecture was a disquisition on the word fuck. The guru’s talk was repeatedly interrupted by laughter from his American audience. This filled me with elation. I ignored the awful shallowness. An Indian was holding forth on the English language, offering a sermon from below, an unholy discourse on how sex was the new divine, and all the white people couldn’t have enough of it!
Fuck, we belonged!
—First thing, when you wake up, if you repeat the mantra Fuck you five times it clears your throat too.
That was Osho speaking. I played the tape on the boom box in the office.
Osho started as a teacher in a small town in Madhya Pradesh but later became an international guru. People gave up their lives, and their property, to flock to his ashram in Pune. I had heard that Osho told people to free their minds and that, inevitably, there were orgies at his ashram. Sometime in the eighties he moved his ashram to Oregon. My father had a friend from college who was a psychologist from Chapra; he read Osho’s books and wanted to follow him to America. One evening, when I was a teenager, this man arrived at our house in Patna wearing a saffron kurta. He asked my mother for some sindoor so that he could put a red mark on his forehead. Did my mother have a necklace of rudraksha beads? She did! He wet the tips of his fingers at the sink and touched his curls. He was going to a spiritual meeting, he had hopes of impressing a linguist who had come from America. I had always thought my father’s friend was good-looking, he had a lazy charisma, and now, as I listened to Osho’s tape, the memory of my father’s friend came back to me. Some months later he died in a car accident; he never got a chance to travel to America. But Osho, from a similar place, from a similar caste, had made it. He was a role model.
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