Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  —One of the most interesting words in the English language today is fuck. It is a magical word.

  This was Osho again, speaking out from the tape.

  And then there was a weird, quite exact, and also quite inaccurate, in fact plain wrong, listing of the usages of that word. Osho, in the manner of a schoolteacher, named the grammatical category and then provided an example. And each item was followed by uncontrollable laughter from his devotees. I heard the laughter and imagined half-naked hippies, who had flocked to the huge ranch in Oregon, laughing with tears running down their cheeks.

  Transitive verb: John fucked Mary.

  Intransitive verb: Mary was fucked by John.

  Noun: Mary is a fine fuck.

  Adjective: Mary is fucking beautiful.

  Ignorance: Fucked if I know.

  Trouble: I guess I’m fucked now.

  Fraud: I got fucked at the used-car lot.

  Aggression: Fuck you.

  Displeasure: What the fuck is going on here?

  Difficulty: I can’t understand this fucking job.

  It was weird and incoherent, but my friends were laughing. Here was an example of what Americans meant when they said: It is so bad that it is good. Every now and then, we would press the play button and listen. For weeks, my officemates tried to speak like Osho.

  It was funny because it was Osho, the small-town Indian accent mixed with the ready report on American idioms. That was part of the humor. As was the fact that here was a spiritual leader holding forth on the word fuck. And then there was that part too, which was surely present in the reaction of my friends, about how banal it was in the end. They were laughing at the fact that something quite stupid was actually succeeding. It was fun. (E.g., Surprise: Fuck, you scared the shit—pronounced by Osho as sit—out of me.)

  Rajneesh, for that was Osho’s original name, gave up teaching after he became the “Sex Guru” and began to gather followers from all over the world. Before Manmohan Singh and other political leaders engineered a liberal reform of the Indian economy, at least twenty years earlier than them, Rajneesh was preaching that socialism would only socialize poverty. What India needed was not more Gandhis but more capitalists.

  —But your Osho is a Jain. He comes from a family of merchants. He might speak of God, but he is a man after money.

  This was my father, in his own small-town way, talking about Osho with his psychologist friend one day.

  Osho had no use for scholars. He had no use for religion either. But although he read little, he had made it a point to read the Bible. He read it, he said, like a detective story. It had everything, the Bible—love, life, murder, suspense. It was sensational. He said that his thinking about scholars was the same as that of Mullah Nasruddin. This was the story he narrated: A man came to Mullah Nasruddin and said, Nasruddin, have you heard? The great scholar of the town has died and twenty rupees are needed to bury him. Mullah Nasruddin gave the man a hundred-rupee note and said, Take it, and while you’re doing it, why not bury five scholars?

  The orgies at Osho’s ashram had been reported even in U.S. News & World Report. Peter claimed he had read about them as a teenager in Germany; he had an aunt in Cologne who abandoned her studies, got Chinese tattoos on her stomach, and dreamed of joining an ashram. At Osho’s ashram in Oregon, there were reports of bioterrorism and his followers were accused of plotting the assassination of a U.S. attorney. After Osho was deported from the United States, twenty-one countries denied him entry. He had gone back to India and died recently. That, as they say in America, was a downer. In Oregon, there had been arrests and all kinds of charges by the police. His longtime secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, a woman born in India but married to an American, was arrested on charges of attempted murder. Asked by journalists in Australia about the fears people had concerning the Osho cult taking over that country, Ma Anand Sheela said, Tough titties.

  Tough titties!

  I asked Larry Blofeld, my officemate who was writing a novel, what that phrase meant.*3 He smiled and flexed his pectorals.

  Larry openly accepted my failings and took a consistent tack in his responses. I once discussed Faulkner with him, but even if I were asking a question about a character in Absalom, Absalom!, for example, Larry would answer my query only by making some connection to India. Even if the sole connection he could make was to Indian food served in a restaurant he regularly visited. If he couldn’t make such a connection, he would slip into barely disguised mockery.

  Now, in response to my question, he leaned back and said, Tough titty, said the kitty, when the milk went dry. Ever heard that? It’s not such a hot phrase in New Delhi?

  I didn’t say anything and just smiled politely.

  —Tell me how far is India? Larry asked.

  I shrugged.

  —Okay, answer this question for me, please. What’s closer to New York? India or the moon? I’ll give you a hint. You can see the moon.

  Bile rose in my throat. I was aware of the effort I was making to keep smiling.

  Larry raised his eyebrows. He was asking if I had anything to say.

  No, Larry. As Osho would say, Fuck you.

  *1 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” Xeroxed copy of an article in typescript sent to Ehsaan by his old friend Hall. The piece was published a few months later in Anthony D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World-System (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). See pp. 48–49.

  *2 Nearly all the graduate students in the department were teaching assistants: our tuition fees waived because we were more than willing to serve as anxious, often unconventional, perhaps overqualified, certainly underpaid, but also otherwise unemployable, conscripts in the army maintained by academia. Like many others before me for the past 150 years, I couldn’t have made it out of India without this readiness on my part to be an indentured laborer.

  *3 Larry’s novel was titled Pop. Not about a father, as I had first assumed, but about popular culture. Young people dropping out of college to become singers. It began with a young man driving down from Chicago to the university in St. Louis with his girlfriend. I knew this because I once asked Larry to read me the opening page. It was a magical thing for me, the fact that someone I knew had written a novel. Larry took out his manuscript from a folder with an elastic band around it. His protagonist, Blake, was at the wheel. This was the line I asked Larry to repeat so that I could write it down: Illinois is a large state and during the four hours or so they were on I-55, across the distance that stretched roughly between the block from where Al Capone directed his operations and the small house in which President Ronald Reagan was born, Jessica twice removed her seat belt to blow him.

  Part IV

  Wolf Number Three

  They know I’m a foreigner. It makes me a little uneasy.

  —JAMES SALTER, A Sport and a Pastime

  “There are only three things to be done with a woman,” said Clea once. “You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.” I was experiencing a failure in all these domains of feeling.

  —LAWRENCE DURRELL, Justine

  There had been a complaint. So even before the new academic year began, my second year in America, all foreign teaching assistants were required to attend a workshop where there would be free doughnuts and coffee. The predictable demographic—Chinese and Indians—filled the room. Pushkin was there because attendance was mandatory. Otherwise, he wouldn’t deign to come to such things. He had a volume of Nirala’s poetry with him; he said he was translating it for a London publisher. Pushkin was from Gwalior, from a Brahmin family close to Nehru. He was the son of a politician who had written a book of poems in Hindi. I didn’t know this then but in a few years Pushkin would surprise Ehsaan by being invited to have dinner with Kissinger after he had published an article on Afghanistan in The New York Review of Books.

  His full name was Pushkin Krishnagrahi. He didn’t offer an easy entry into his world but he gave thrilling glimpses of it throug
h some of the things he said. For instance, he once explained he was unimpressed by a particular author because “literary reputations in the United States are merely a function of real estate.” He was rangy and wore his hair long. He had a beard. His seriousness was a part of his getup. He presented his seriousness first at conferences and academic festivals. Yet, even Pushkin was there in the room. Nina, however, was not. Nina, who was American. A native speaker. But she and I had by now become a new tribe of two, speaking with each other in a private tongue, a language of love and lust. I could be reading a book about a peasant rebellion in Portugal but it was easy to look out the window and slip into a reverie. We were sitting on a bench overlooking the Hudson, my hand on Nina’s thigh, sharing a memory. As an American, she considered it her duty to inform me about facts native to the land. For instance, the precise size in miles, length and breadth, of the locust swarm that arrived in Texas in 1875. Eighteen hundred miles long and 110 miles wide. The locusts ate everything in their path, not just vegetation but also harnesses off horses or the clothing hanging from laundry lines. In her presence, I embraced the apocalypse. Nina said that farmers would attempt to scare away the locusts by running into the swarm but they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies. I would lean over to eat away her clothes and she would laugh and push me away. We would kiss, my hand joyfully cupping her breast. But I was not with Nina now. Your Honor, in that room that day they were talking about translation and I suddenly wanted to tell Nina a story. The flight that brought me to America traveled first from Delhi to Frankfurt and then from Frankfurt to New York. On the second leg of the journey, the flight attendant was handing out dinner. The flight attendant was asking, as she came down the aisle, “Veal or chicken?” An old Punjabi woman was sitting next to me. I hadn’t spoken to her. Earlier, I had watched her struggle with the bathroom door and thought to myself that this might be the first time she was traveling in a plane. Was she visiting a son or a daughter who now worked abroad? I hadn’t asked. When at last the trolley reached us, the attendant repeated her question and the old woman said, “No chicken. No chicken.” She didn’t speak English and I understood that she was saying she was a vegetarian. But the flight attendant said, “Okay, veal for you. And you, sir?” I had to stop. I said to the Punjabi lady in Hindi, “Mataji, you probably don’t want it. This is meat. Do you eat meat?” She lifted her hand from the tray as if her fingers had been singed. The attendant said that they probably had pasta left at the back. She gave me pasta too, even though I would have preferred the veal, but I wasn’t in a mood to protest. I was also angry with myself. Your Honor, I’ve never held myself above blame. After all, why hadn’t I left my seat and helped the old woman when she was standing outside the bathroom? I had noticed that she hadn’t even known how to lock the door.

  Right then, at that orientation for the foreign TAs, a woman named Donna was handing out photocopies of an article from The Spectator. A girl was sitting on the grass in front of Farrow Hall. Under the picture it said, Melanie Olson, Astronomy major, dropped a Math course because she had trouble understanding her foreign TA. The girl was wearing a denim skirt and the photographer had taken the shot with the camera tilted up from the ground. Blades of grass shot up in the foreground.

  Peter was seated next to me. He put his finger on the photograph and spoke in a half whisper.

  —Actually, she said she likes taking it in the ass but her foreign TA couldn’t seem to understand her.

  Peter wore thick glasses and smelled of cigarettes and sweat. On the other side of him sat Maya. She was trading barbs with Donna.

  Maya was looking especially beautiful and full of mystery. She had lined her dark smoky eyes with kohl, and her neck and arms sported delicate silver jewelry. She was from Delhi and spoke in a fake British accent. I could see her spending afternoons in air-conditioned rooms in South Extension or Golf Links: lush green potted plants, and cushions on low wooden diwans arranged creatively in patterns of gold, magenta, and red. When I had first arrived in Delhi from Patna for college, people like Maya attracted me. I envied them. And this feeling of envy produced in turn a sense of revulsion. I still hadn’t escaped that confusion of feeling.

  —I’m not here to rid American undergraduates of their provincialism, Maya said to Donna. That is emphatically not a part of my job description.

  Her Chilean friend from Anthropology, Paulo, enthusiastically bobbed his head and beat his hand on the table. Donna pulled her jacket over her stomach and said that there would be time for discussion at the end of the workshop. Maya said that Bush was bombing Iraq. Perhaps this could be the subject of their later discussion.

  Peter raised his rounded chin toward Maya, and said quietly, Do you know this annoying woman sitting next to me?

  His faint show of sarcasm hid a fascination with Maya. Within three weeks of their first meeting, they had become lovers. It was one of the things that I would always think about when I thought about love: acerbic and fragrant Maya in love with the acerbic and slovenly Peter. Did they fall in love because, in a sense, they spoke the same language, their poisonous tongues entwined in a beautiful private dance? Except that when they were together, they seemed quiet and subdued, not at all given to angry pronouncements about the world. Instead, they were attentive to each other, solicitous, generous with their gestures of affection. It seemed they were very happy just to sit in each other’s company. I’d see them with mugs of coffee beside them, reading under the red-and-white awning of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, or standing outside West End Bar smoking endless cigarettes.

  Putting all the participants in pairs, Donna said we were now to engage in role play.

  —You are a teacher who is talking to a student who has missed class because he or she has had to deal with an emergency.

  There were titters. Donna held up three ringed fingers. She read from a chart that said:

  Please pay attention to

  A. making eye contact,

  B. clarity of expression,

  C. showing a friendly attitude.

  Before taking turns playing teacher and student we were to talk to our partners for five minutes. My partner was one of the Chinese students, and the sticker on her chest said CAI YAN. I had seen her before talking to Maya, and guessed she was in International Relations. I felt an inward dread that I wouldn’t understand what she said, but she was calm and spoke clearly. Her manner made me self-conscious and I tried to speak less hurriedly.

  Cai Yan’s parents lived in Quanzhou. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Her older brother was a well-known pianist in Shanghai. Her father had been a bureaucrat but had resigned some years ago and owned a factory in nearby Guangdong. I asked her what the factory manufactured. She had so far maintained a slightly imperturbable smile but now she gave a short laugh.

  —Black Dragon Brand Rollerblades.

  —Indian names always mean something. Is that true of Chinese names too? What does Cai Yan mean?

  —My name…I think it means a bird in spring, or a spring swallow.

  Cai Yan was slim and elegant. The jacket she wore had small buttons shaped like horseshoes. Her hair was black and covered her head like a fine helmet.

  —How are things? I asked.

  —There was a fire in the Laundromat on Saturday.

  —Oh.

  —On One Hundred and Twenty-second Street.

  —I know the place.

  —I was able to save my clothes. But I couldn’t go back in. I tried but was aware of the utility…

  Had she meant to say futility? A little later, when I heard breeze, it is likely she had said breathe. “I found it difficult to breathe.” Did my speech also confound her in the same way? I felt that both of us were playing a guessing game. But there was no mistaking the word fire.

  —Why did you want to go back inside?

  —My bag with my library books was inside. And my journal.

  —You lost them, I asked.

  —A fireman brought them out for me. The librar
y books had charred pages. The journal had turned to wet black ash.

  —I’m so sorry, I said.

  I felt this was the first time Cai Yan was sharing this news with anyone.

  —I wanted to tell you, she said. The fire was the reason I couldn’t complete my homework. I also missed class.

  She saw my expression and raised an eyebrow. Then she gave a slight smile.

  —You see, she said, it was an emergency.

  I laughed when I understood that this was a story, but she didn’t alter her Mona Lisa smile. Apparently she was unwilling to be amused by the stupidity of others.

  Donna had wanted us to play the part of the affable teacher, listening patiently to a student’s brittle fabrications. I had made an error and assumed at first that Cai Yan was describing what had actually happened to her. When it was my turn, I started with the truth. I told Cai Yan that when I was in my teens in India, the walls of the huts close to my village had graffiti on them with slogans like Chairman Mao is our Chairman. We could be on a bus on the highway and it would be held up in traffic for half an hour because of a march denouncing the massacre of protesting peasants. Thin, kurta-clad young men and women singing on the highway: The East is Red! The sun rises! China produces Mao Tse-tung!