Immigrant, Montana, was a small town with an old saloon and two stores that rented canoes and fly-fishing equipment. For a souvenir, I bought a fly, an iridescent form speckled with blue and gray; under its belly was a shining hook. Black granite mountains rose high on the other side of the Yellowstone River. The river flowed a short distance away from U.S. Highway 89, which cut through town. When I walked down toward the water, small grasshoppers leapt out of my way. The river water shimmered in the sunlight, and it was difficult to see the trout. The sun and the infinite blue sky, everything was beautiful, and yet this place could well have been a ghost town. It was a name that I had long carried in my imagination; it now belonged to the past. For all these years it was a name that brought together, like the two hands of a clock meeting at the right hour, the two most deeply felt needs of mine, the desire for love and the hankering for home. But there was nothing here for me.
* * *
Last summer, I was at a writers’ colony in Portland, Maine. The town in which Nina’s parents had a cabin was only fifteen minutes away. I looked up their name in the phone book and was surprised not to find anything. But an online search quickly yielded results. There was an obituary in The Cape Courier, the local paper. Nina’s mother had died due to heart failure. The first paragraph gave the date and cause of death. The short paragraph that followed made me certain Nina had written it. For Mrs. Robin, the day imposed a simple rigor that had to be met with an aesthetic offering; her instincts were democratic, and she aimed for elegance and economy. She cast an equal, but critical, eye, on the layout of the morning newspaper, the township’s budget allocation for the area schools, the arrangement of flowers on the desk in her study. She was an artist and an activist. Over the past year, during her convalescence, she wrote many letters to editors of newspapers on matters of concern like rent control and graduated income tax; when she had energy left from such endeavors, she painted lovely watercolors of the kestrels and bohemian waxwings that sat on the branches of scrub pine and juniper behind her house. She spoke amiably to the ringed plover and red-necked stints she encountered during her strolls on the beach, and came home to play a wicked game of rummy. Mrs. Robin is survived by her husband, Joseph; her daughter, Nina; and her twin grandchildren, Rebecca and Adam. Suddenly, in that familiar land called language, the painful past was alive again.
While working on this book, I was searching for a particular postcard from Nina. I didn’t find it, but look—here’s a detail from that reproduction I had torn out of a magazine during my first days in this country. The Lovers by Picasso, 1904. The drawing was done after Picasso first made love to Fernande. (He would have been twenty-two at that time. Had he really not made love to anyone else before? I think I unconsciously decided this was his first time because I was older than he.)*1
* * *
—
A couple of days or maybe a week after our final breakup, I had seen Nina at Riverside Church, where a teach-in was being held to discuss the acquittal of the cops who had beaten Rodney King. I was seated in the last row but had a clear view of Nina as she stood with her back to the wall. She had joined her palms together as if she were praying. How many times had I held those hands! I could go up to her and kiss her fingers, if she would let me. After ten minutes, I rose from my seat and left the meeting. It was too sad to keep looking at Nina.
* * *
—
In the days that followed I felt that I had failed not only in love but also in life. I fretted and moped because others around me were doing far more interesting things. My friend Peter had gone to Hamburg with Maya; from Germany, they were going to travel to France. Maya’s parents were flying from Delhi to Paris, and they would come down to the South of France, to a village near Avignon, where Peter’s uncle, a gay man and a successful painter, owned a farmhouse and several acres of land. Peter and Maya were getting married there. Maya was hoping that being married would make Peter happy. She was tremendously excited about having a Hindu wedding in the French countryside. We had all been invited, but no one could afford it. (Except Pushkin, but he had indicated that there was a conflict.) Larry was working as a teacher at a summer camp for teenagers among the California redwoods. His novel was going to be published in a year. Kurt Vonnegut had given him a blurb. Our officemate Ricardo was preparing a paper on cities and slums. Cai Yan was interviewing an Indian sociologist in London who had once been a member of the Naxalite underground in Bihar. Even Nina, despite the distractions of our troubled relationship, was making progress with her project on those she called the daughters of Mother Jones—Grace Lee Boggs, Audre Lorde, and Angela Davis.
Pushkin had received a grant for a translation project that was now nearly complete. He was translating from Hindi into English the story of a fifty-eight-year-old, low-caste man who had spent his life as a manual scavenger on the outskirts of Delhi, carrying shit on his head or on a cart, shit collected from row upon row of old houses. When I read the section that Pushkin showed me, I felt envy. Pushkin was already the writer I wanted to be. And, in translating the testimony of the untouchable man, he had done good work, not just because it was time well spent but because the story, even in translation, carried the hurt of the real. As a young reviewer in Delhi, Pushkin had railed against academics and activists on the left; in a surprise turn, which of course made sense, after coming to New York he had become the voice of the oppressed.
I had once known a man named Prabhunath whose father had been a minister in the Charan Singh cabinet. This fellow Prabhunath was a landlord in Palamu, and he had said to me that the low-caste people would always remain under the upper castes.
—You see, balls. He was pointing at his crotch. Balls will always hang under the cock, he said.
People like Prabhunath belonged to an older India. That particular India was alive in news reports that came to us about young couples lynched for marrying across caste lines or a Dalit beaten to death after drinking water from a well for Brahmins. Unlike Prabhunath, Pushkin was a member of the new India. He was a Brahmin, and his place in the world owed a lot to his past, but he had disavowed his origins and was now at home anywhere in the world. He wouldn’t talk of a Hindi writer from Jaipur without also mentioning Jorge Luis Borges and Buenos Aires or Nâzim Hikmet and the Sea of Marmara.*2 When it came to romance, he probably thought it would be provincial to sleep with someone who was taking classes with you. He was more adventurous. I heard he was dating an opera singer in London. She was famous for her radical views. The previous winter she had gone to South Africa to sing for Nelson Mandela. If you caught Pushkin walking across campus on a Thursday night, he would, always very humbly, turn down your invitation for a drink. He was going to wait till he was in the air, he might add a bit later. He was on his way to La Guardia, where he was going to catch the late Virgin Atlantic flight to London.
I must sound bitter. I have good reason. One night during a conversation that went exactly along those lines, I asked Pushkin why he wasn’t going to France for the wedding of our friends. Pushkin said he had already said yes to the organizers of a literary festival in London. Usually, he was parsimonious with information, but now and then he threw me a crumb. He was going to moderate a discussion on the representation of violence. Who was going to participate in that discussion? Oh, it was going to be the writer J. M. Coetzee and the philosopher Judith Butler. Pushkin then asked me politely what I was planning to do that night. The desi taxi drivers were going on a strike the next day in New York and I was meeting one of them to perhaps file a little report for a newspaper in Delhi. Pushkin nodded and we soon went our separate ways.
That night, after making me wait half an hour, Imran pulled up in his cab at the corner of Amsterdam and 121st. We sat talking in the car for a bit and then he started driving. He took a fare down to Wall Street. From there we went to the East Village to drop off another customer. It would be midnight soon. Imran asked me if I’d like to watch dancers and I said yes. We drove uptown for another fifteen m
inutes. Heavily weighted curtains inside the front door and then in the darkness, the glow of bodies: young women, completely naked, stood like mannequins in a row behind glass walls. Imran was my knowledgeable host. He led me inside toward the music that flowed out into the semidark in an intensely pleasurable stream. Here customers, mostly men but also women, sat around tables. On both sides were wooden benches where women were performing lap dances. Waitresses milled about carrying trays with drinks. At one table, two Indian men, young and stylish, were smoking cigars. A beautiful black woman, wearing a golden thong, her breasts bare, came up to Imran and me. We exchanged hellos. Imran offered her a drink. She wanted a Cosmo, she said, and I asked for a gin and tonic. A moment later I thought of Pushkin. It was his favorite drink. He must be having his drink by now. In a little while, Imran was going to pay the black girl twenty-five dollars to do a little lap dance for me. She would put a hand lightly on the back of my chair and dance, her mouth close to mine, her breath smelling faintly of a mint-flavored gum, and then she’d pull herself higher, coming closer, so that she brushed her nipples against my cheeks. All the while, she never stopped making conversation, asking me to name my favorite restaurants, as she turned one breast and then the other toward me. I said I couldn’t recall the names just then and she laughed and, taking my hand, pushed it down under her thong, snapping the band on my fingertips. I turned my head and saw just five feet away an old man, maybe seventy years old, staring impassively in front of him as a girl sat on his lap. That night, when Imran brought me back to my apartment, I was aware that I hadn’t even asked him enough questions to be able to write a newspaper report about the strike. Instead, I had visited a nightclub. Anyone wanting to become a writer couldn’t say no to experience. As I was falling asleep it occurred to me that I, unlike Pushkin, was doing no writing. I didn’t dwell on that thought. I was mostly thinking of the thin black girl in the bar with the fragrant breasts who had said her name was Zaire. I was never going to see her again but the scent of her body clung to me. In the dark of my room I shut my eyes and saw the glitter on her skin. I wanted to make love to her. She had said, Remember I’m Zaire, just like the country, come and visit me again real soon.
* * *
I needed to write another paper for Ehsaan. On my transcript, I still had an “Incomplete” from my second semester. We had read Fanon in his class. In one of the chapters Fanon had written about love between a black man and a white woman. I asked Ehsaan if I could write about desire. I was thinking of what Nina had once asked me about the movie The Night Porter. The messiness of love. The complications of desire, especially forbidden desire. Love despite, or in spite of; love beyond and across dividing lines. That must have been at the back of my mind when I thought of that movie’s presentation of love between the Nazi officer and the woman in the concentration camp.*3 Was there a film in the postcolonial context that I could focus on? Ehsaan said yes. He mentioned the films made about love during the Partition. Then he stopped.
—Are you familiar with the name Agnes Smedley?
I hadn’t heard of Agnes Smedley. She had died in 1950, and although I didn’t know this then, she would change the course of my life.
Early in the century, in March 1918, a trial was held in New York City—United States of America vs. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Agnes Smedley. Chattopadhyaya, or Chatto as he was called, was a nationalist who had arrived from Calcutta under the pretext of pursuing graduate study in physics. He was from a famous, well-educated Brahmin family; the poet Sarojini Naidu was his sister. Smedley had been born in a poor family in Missouri, and she was trained as a teacher. After hearing a lecture at Columbia University by the great Indian leader Lajpat Rai, she offered help. He asked her to type a manuscript about his experiences in the United States in return for private classes on Indian history. Smedley admired Rai immensely but didn’t follow his moderate politics; after his departure, she fell in step with the Bengali revolutionaries who were looking for allies in their battle with the British. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya was one of them. The trial in which Chatto and Smedley were charged with treason was based on the discovery, the previous March, of thousands of dollars in cash as well as machine guns and ammunition in a Houston Street warehouse in Manhattan. The money and the weapons had been supplied by the German military attaché. The defendants were accused of smuggling arms supplied by the Germans to aid radicals fighting for independence in British India.
While in prison, Smedley wrote stories about the prostitutes, alcoholics, lunatics, and thieves who surrounded her. She had been familiar with poverty in her childhood and youth. Perhaps because of her past, and also because of her politics, her portraits of those she met in prison were a not-so-subtle denunciation of the immense class divide in American society. And later, upon her release, after she had witnessed for another decade the struggles of the Indian revolutionaries in exile, she also wrote an autobiographical novel. Ehsaan wanted me to study Agnes Smedley’s literary outpourings and conduct research on the trials of the Indian radicals on both coasts. Maybe my thesis, he suggested, could grow out of this project.
The lives I was reading about quickly seized my interest. The accounts of the early Indian revolutionaries in New York and California filled me with energy. And envy. I wanted to inhabit more and more deeply the stories of their precarious but exciting lives and their loves. Slowly at first, and then with a rush, I saw in the strange relationship between Chatto and Smedley an omen.
* * *
—
Chatto was held in prison for eight months and Smedley for seven to eight weeks. When he was released, Chatto was a physical wreck, unable to walk even a few steps without Smedley’s help. In January 1919, they traveled together to France to take part in the Paris Peace Conference, and later, in 1921, to Russia to attend the Comintern gathering. They didn’t obtain an audience with Lenin and had to leave disappointed. Assured of German support, they traveled to Weimar Berlin to escape British spies. Berlin was staggering under inflation. Smedley found out to her dismay that six weeks’ wages could get a working person only a pair of boots. The economic crisis also forced Chatto to give up his plans of founding an organization in Germany that would build support for India. By the fall of 1923, the inflation in Berlin had reached its peak. Smedley wrote in a letter that she had been mutely observing people dying a slow death. There was a small church on her street, and she’d watch funeral processions arrive and leave. Workers used all of their wages for just a couple of loaves of bread, some potatoes, and margarine. Meat and fruit were beyond their reach. She could not find sugar in any of the stores.
When Smedley first met Chatto, she thought he looked fierce but also ugly, with dark, glittering eyes set in a pockmarked face. He was a short and thin man, in his early forties but with already gray hair. In the reminiscences of a well-known Danish novelist, Agnes Smedley was described as bright and vivacious, full of vigor, fond of wearing costumes and dancing. But despite their physical differences, Smedley and Chatto were attracted to each other and became lovers. They discussed politics with great excitement, and she later said that he was the first man to whom she hadn’t lied that her father was a physician.
U.S. attorney’s encrypted telegram regarding Indian nationalist activity in California. Dated May 8, 1917.
I was soon immersed in the account of their relationship. Smedley’s education had been haphazard, and her childhood had been harsh. Chatto, on the other hand, was a polyglot who had been educated at Oxford, and had lived a luxurious life. However, neither his education nor his family’s wealth saved him from pettiness. In more than one letter, Smedley discussed her problems. In one she wrote that Chatto was suspicious as hell of every man near me. There was also some professional jealousy. Smedley published an article about Indian immigrants in The Nation, and Chatto commented disapprovingly that she was showing off. Smedley had other complaints. All the time she was in Berlin, the small home that she shared with Chatto was overrun by guests. Smedley wrote
, Moslems and Hindus of every caste streamed through as though a railway station or a hotel. Students came directly from their boats, carting all their bedding and cooking utensils. Smedley didn’t really know how to cook, but she was now expected to do just that. In the margins of the same letter, she wrote: I cook until the very walls of our home seem to be permeated with the odor of curry.
U.S. attorney’s query about cracking the code in an intercepted note sent from Germany to Indian nationalists in the United States. Dated December 19, 1917.
When she had been only twenty-two and working as a teacher in Missouri, Smedley had married an Irish socialist. (This was some years before she met Chatto.) Her husband was a union organizer and journalist. He lived in St. Louis and traveled a great deal; this suited Smedley because she didn’t want to be tied down to a domestic life. She was squeamish about sex. She was opposed to the idea that the mere act of marriage should require that a woman suddenly welcome a physical relationship with a male; she also detested the prospect of becoming a vessel for bearing children on a regular basis, which had been the fate of her own mother, who had succumbed to madness after giving birth to her seventh child.
Immigrant, Montana Page 15
