Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  —“Dong Fang Hong,” Cai Yan said, with a trace of excitement. That is the name of that song.

  She said she had sung it in school.

  As Donna had instructed, I maintained eye contact with my partner and exhibited a pleasant and friendly manner. I began to show off.

  I asked, Do you know Lin Biao?

  Even in the eighties, with Mao and Zhou Enlai already long dead, and the reformist Deng in power, China meant something different in India. There were still communist groups in the villages around my hometown that were fighting for a peasant revolution. Mao was their god. Often in the trains going past Ara, there would be motley crowds of young men and older folk who would sing songs about the social change about to come with the blessings of Mao. Everyone in those groups had the same look of zealous certainty on his bearded face, and their singing needed no further accompaniment than the sound of the train and a tambourine.

  The name that I had thrown at Cai Yan, Lin Biao, belonged to a legendary associate of Mao’s. Lin Biao was later accused of political treason and died while attempting to flee in an airplane. I knew his name because I would read in the papers that the Maoists in the Bihar countryside were following the “Lin Biao line.” This meant the belief that one day the villages would rebel and overwhelm the passive, decadent cities. For Cai Yan’s benefit, I invoked danger. In my late teens, I would be sitting at breakfast with toast and scrambled eggs, a novel by Somerset Maugham beside my plate, and a crowd would surge at the mouth of the street. I added color. I said that the radicals, waving red flags, would sometimes allow me to leave for my classes. When I came back, there would be three cows standing in the garden outside. In the bedroom in which my parents slept, a new family would be sleeping after having chopped up the bed for use as firewood.

  She listened seriously but without any curiosity.

  —I was exaggerating, I said.

  —I know, she said. She spoke softly, even serenely. There was no smugness in her.

  But I was wrong to think that she hadn’t been curious. As I realized much later, the mention of Lin Biao’s name was a mistake. I had invoked it on a whim, but to Cai Yan it meant nostalgia. Nostalgia not for the China of her childhood but for the poor villages of my past. In such fleeting connections are destinies shaped. Before two years of our graduate study were over, Cai Yan would talk to Ehsaan and decide she would write about Maoist struggles in various parts of India.*1 By the time that happened my romance with Nina would have gone the way of operator-assisted trunk calls and mimeograph machines.

  * * *

  Hanif Kureishi’s book The Buddha of Suburbia was published the same year that I came to the United States, and I discovered it a year later when I read the novel for one of my courses, the one called Black Britain. The book presented an England strung out on what one character in Buddha called race, class, fucking, and farce. I embraced this eclectic attention. (Race & Class incidentally was the name of a serious journal—Ehsaan was on their editorial board—but Kureishi wanted to mix it up with Fucking & Farce. Mind and body, together! ) Then I watched a video of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid in the library. Kureishi had written the screenplay. Shashi Kapoor played Rafi Rahman. A handsome Pakistani politician who is charged with having introduced martial law in his country and other attendant abuses like torture and maiming. One episode in the film affected me the most. Rahman goes to meet Alice, the woman he had loved when he was a student in London. In Alice, Rafi had found his white woman. She had loved him. He had made promises to return, but never did. Alice, played with a kind of luminous fragility by Claire Bloom, takes Rafi to her cellar and shows him the clothes she had packed, the books, the shoes, the bottles of perfume. She shows him the diaries from 1954, 1955, 1956, inscribed with letters to “My Darling Rafi.” But Rafi has no response for Alice when she says to him bitterly: I waited for you, for years! Every day I thought of you! Until I began to heal up. What I wanted was a true marriage. But you wanted power. Now you must be content with having introduced flogging for minor offenses, nuclear capability, and partridge shooting into your country. I thought of Jennifer as I sat alone in the library carrel watching this scene. Would she ever say that she had waited for me?*2

  While writing a paper on Kureishi I came across a remark he had made to an interviewer: “I like to write about sex as a focus of social, psychological, emotional, political energy—it’s so central to people’s lives, who you fuck, how much you love them, the dance that goes around it, all the seduction, betrayal, loyalty, failure, loneliness.” This appeared like a credo I wanted to adopt. Not so much about writing but about sex being central to our lives. Still, I wasn’t very confident and took the quote, which I had copied down on an index card, to my friend Peter. He sucked on his cigarette and nodded his head when I read out Kureishi’s words to him. Right on, he said, and then asked if I wanted a beer.

  We sipped our beers. The light of the setting sun flooded the room. Peter got up and put on a music tape, one that he used to play in our shared office, Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. When he sat down with a fresh beer bottle, I thought Peter looked thoughtful, maybe even sad.

  —Sex is a difficult thing, he said.

  I stayed silent.

  —It’s important, of course, as Kureishi says. I guess I’m saying it’s a huge and complicated thing and it’s not always possible to get to everything underneath.

  Peter had so much heart, and such honesty always. He had spoken to me in the past about his struggle with depression, an illness that ran on his father’s side of the family. I think Peter was open with private matters because there wasn’t a trace of malice in his heart. Still, he surprised me by telling me about Maya. He said he stayed up late one night at Maya’s place. It might have been TA work. Then, in the dark, he felt his way to the bed where Maya was already asleep, and accidentally bumped into a package left on the floor. At the sound, Maya screamed and getting up from the bed rushed into her closet. Peter couldn’t understand what was going on. In fact, he said to me, he was perhaps screaming too. He was scared of what had happened, and quickly put on the light.

  —It’s only me, it’s only me.

  Maya said nothing in response. Peter said that Maya always slept naked in bed and she looked especially vulnerable coming out of the closet. He got into bed next to her. He had been scared, Peter thought now, because he was seeing Maya suddenly as someone alien. She went back to sleep or that is what he thought but then Maya sighed and adjusted her head on his shoulder.

  —Sorry, she said quietly to him. It has to do with something that happened in my childhood.

  Peter waited in the dark. She didn’t say another word. The next morning he mentioned what had happened but Maya wouldn’t say anything more. He took the hint and never brought it up again, but just the previous week, after Maya was angry with Peter about his staying quiet for hours not speaking to anyone, Maya told him about her past. She said that when she was in high school in Delhi, her parents were in Moscow for two years. Her dad had a position in the Indian embassy. Maya was left behind to complete her school year in Delhi. She stayed with her uncle in Jor Bagh. This man wasn’t really her uncle, he was her father’s closest friend from college, a successful lawyer and on the governing board of the Delhi cricket association. He came home from the club late and raped her every night except when she had her period.

  —Every night. Forget rape. Just think, every night. How do you wrap your head around such a thing? She was sixteen. I didn’t even ask her how long she stayed in that house.*3

  * * *

  I didn’t mention any of this to Nina perhaps because I almost instinctively felt that she would think it was wrong of Peter to tell me about Maya. After all, Maya wasn’t my friend. I was tempted to tell her about my conversation with Peter when we came back from watching Thelma & Louise, but in the end I said nothing.

  The film had been playing for several weeks at the movie theater near Eighty-fourth Street on Broadway. A light drizzle was fallin
g. In the early afternoon Nina and I walked over to the theater and settled down with popcorn and giant sodas. Thelma’s ridiculous husband reminded me of a cousin of mine in Dhanbad. I had seen him hold his hands out and wait for his wife to button his sleeves and strap his watch on his wrist.

  When the two women stopped at the roadhouse, I felt the tension growing within me. Thelma was drinking and dancing with a man named Harlan. Later, just as Harlan was about to rape Thelma in the parking lot, Louise stepped into the frame with a gun. A minute later, when Louise shot him, Nina let go of my hand and surprised me by clapping. I clapped too, and then a few others in the theater joined in, although at least one person, a man from a row behind us, asked us to quiet down.

  There were funny moments in the film but it wrung the sadness out of us. Thelma, played by Geena Davis, undergoes a huge change (she gets radicalized, as Ehsaan would say), and Louise, the Susan Sarandon character, is strong and clearheaded and entirely without illusions. While watching the movie I knew that Nina would later ask me which scene was my favorite. I had very much liked Thelma’s resolve at the end when she says, I can’t go back…I mean, I just couldn’t live. Or earlier, her saying to the cop before locking him in the trunk of his squad car that he should be nice to his wife: My husband wasn’t sweet to me. See how I turned out. In another scene, Louise is a bit dismissive of her boyfriend Jimmy’s affection. She tells Thelma, He just loves the chase, that’s all. It made me think of something Jennifer had once said about me, but I wasn’t going to say this to Nina.

  The popcorn and the soda robbed us of our appetite. We sat on the steps outside Nina’s building with a couple of Coronas.

  —Did you immediately know why Louise didn’t want to drive through Texas?

  —I didn’t, I said.

  An old woman walked past us on the sidewalk with her tiny dog on a leash.

  —Did you? I asked.

  —It was the most powerful thing about the movie. The past that lies there under the surface.

  When I heard Nina say this, I thought of Peter and what he had told me about Maya. I didn’t have the courage to say anything about Maya. Instead I said, I liked that song about the woman who realizes that she’s never going to ride through Paris in a sports car…

  —Marianne Faithfull, Nina said. The song is about a suicide. You should listen to another song of hers called “Broken English.” I should have it upstairs.

  This was the moment during the evening, with the street darkening as we sat on the steps, when I began telling Nina about the teenage daughter of my father’s first cousin. Suneeta lived in the village where my father had grown up. Her father was a farmer like everyone else in the family, but he was also a drunk. He got into scraps and often beat his wife, a tall woman who people said was very strong herself. Their house was separated from my grandmother’s by a narrow dirt lane. Deepak, Suneeta’s elder brother, had taken after his father. When he was a boy, he would follow me all day when I visited the village, eager to bring me fruit or jump into the village pond if I asked him to. But he was now grown up. My grandmother complained that Deepak stole her grain. Like his father, he would climb the khajur tree and drink the toddy straight from the pots that the tappers had hung there.

  Suneeta was tall like her mother. Her skin was fair and she had light brown eyes. When Suneeta entered her teens, she was shy with me. I had barely exchanged a few words with Suneeta, but there were many complaints about her. Suneeta sneaked into my grandmother’s small kitchen garden and stole the spinach. I remember her in a cheap, orange cotton sari, her hair slightly unkempt, looking attractive and just a little bit dissolute. The news of her death came as a shock. At first, the story in the family was that the girl had been trapped in love by an older, wily man, a distant relative of ours. I was told that Suneeta would go into the mango grove behind my grandmother’s house to meet her lover. He lived in the village too, and was married, and this man had killed her. This story, like all stories in my family, hid something even darker. Later, I learned that one night Suneeta had gone into the house of a distant relative of ours to steal and was caught. The man kept her imprisoned in a room for a couple of days and raped her. Another friend of his also joined in. When word got out, Deepak and his father walked into that house and slit Suneeta’s throat. When the police arrived from a nearby town, things were so handled that it was the rapists who were charged with the murder. They were now in prison and would die there. I was told that Deepak didn’t even return home; he disappeared from the village and was working as a day laborer on a railway line in Assam. A few people believed that he had come back and was a rickshaw puller in Patna. When I next went to the village, Suneeta’s mother held my hand and cried for the children she had lost.

  Night had fallen now. After a while, Nina had a question.

  —Did she approve of what Deepak had done?

  —I didn’t pry for details.

  —I don’t mean, Did you ask her if he was able to behead her in a single motion?

  —I know what you mean.

  —I guess I’m saying—

  —Well, I was finding it difficult to talk to her. She was holding my hand and crying. I was also distressed because, every few seconds, she kept lifting my hand to her eyes, using it to wipe her tears.

  * * *

  Nina enrolled in a course taught by Ehsaan called Flags and Rags. She hadn’t been in Ehsaan’s class during the first semester I studied with him. That fall, Nina was taking a course in Marxism and deconstruction with an Indian professor and another course in Victorian literature. The class on Victorian novelists was taught by a star in her field whom I had once met at a party—the Victorianist sat on the floor in the kitchen, drunk, snot running down her nose, while her husband entertained the nervous students in the living room with his stories about teaching in Africa. Flags and Rags was structured as a critique of nationalism. I was in that class with Nina and Cai Yan and several others. We read Gramsci and Tagore because Ehsaan’s heroes were failed revolutionaries and poets. Nina liked the syllabus, she liked Ehsaan too, but she often joked that she had signed up because of a mistake. She had at first thought the course was about fashion and it was called Fags and Rags.

  We began going to a bar on Thursday nights. Starting at nine, anyone could take the microphone and recite poetry. Five people in the audience chosen at random used scorecards to mark poems on a scale of one to ten. One night a slim man, clean-shaven and bald, reading a poem about queer love and clear rage. Then someone with Bobby Kennedy’s face printed on her trousers reading a poem about her lover, and an Indian woman in the audience shouting that she wanted a ten for that one: I love poems which have nipples in them. The emcee tilting his bearded face and saying, Let’s have a tête-à-tête about that, ha-ha. A young black woman in a baseball shirt with JUNGLE FEVER written on the back softly reciting a lament about the many moons of unwanted pregnancies and deaths in poor homes. That first time, on the late-night subway bringing us back uptown to our apartments, I put my mouth close to Nina’s ear. As if I were standing in the bar speaking into the microphone, I improvised words that were delivered to the backbeat of the train’s moving wheels:

  I read in a book, baby, that this is the hour of the immigrant worker—after the milkman and just before the dustman.

  With his immigrant love, his love poem is a stammer at your doorstep at dawn,

  a terrible, trapped-up hope in this hour of becoming.

  It has nothing of the certainties of those who give names to bottles of wine in the languages of Europe.

  A woman just into her twenties, from Shanghai, alone at an underground train station

  in the middle of New York at night

  after working overtime in a garment factory,

  looks at her hands for a long moment

  in the bluish light of the station.

  Such were the discoveries during that semester. Nina gave me a book of poems by radical Latin American poets. Pablo Neruda had written odes to ordinar
y things like the tomato and the onion; I composed rapturous lines about Nina’s mirror, her favorite scarf, and a pair of spoons in her kitchen drawer. I was also reading modernist poets who wrote in Hindi. My poetic interest widened and I had soon compiled a set of political poems that began with a rousing line I had stolen from Joseph Heller: Even that fat little fuck Henry Kissinger was writing a book!*4

  Tongues untied, Your Honor. The language of liberation that came through language itself. And then the liberation of the body. In the cabinet where I store my passport there is a yellow ticket from Billy Bragg’s Rumours of War concert. The ticket was stapled by Nina to a card on which she had copied down a line that Antonio Gramsci had written in a letter to his future wife: How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures?*5

  The Billy Bragg concert was at the nearby Beacon. Nina and I walked there together, holding hands. It was a small theater and it was packed. Bragg wore a black T-shirt and black jeans, the guitar hanging from his shoulder. His songs were against war and against greed. It seemed to me that if he kept singing any longer, all the punks in the front row who were dancing by simply bouncing up and down would start tonguing each other. Nina and I went drinking afterward, and when we were walking back to her apartment, she sang Bragg’s line over and over again: I dreamed I saw Phil Ochs last night. When we got back, she didn’t lead me to her bed, where we often made love and slept with our legs entangled three or four times a week; instead, carrying a blanket in one hand and a small flashlight in another, she led me to the roof. We were in the dark on the top but all around us were the lights of the city.*6 On our right, spanning the darkness, the towers of the George Washington Bridge. The illuminated bits of Cliffside Park in distant Jersey afloat in the waters of the Hudson. Nearby the red glow of a sign for a parking garage.