Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  To make matters worse, only four months into her marriage, Smedley found out that she was pregnant. Abortion was illegal and she had to go to Kansas City for the operation. On the train ride back, Smedley was in pain and she sweated and moaned in distress, and according to her biographer, Smedley’s husband asked her to stay quiet and sit up straight in her seat because of the looks she was attracting. Smedley refused to speak to him for several weeks. Six months later, she wrote to her husband, I take the blame. I do not want to be married; marriage is too terrible and I should never have entered it. I was wrong—for you loved me and I do not know what love means. I want my name back, also.

  A shift came in 1917, when Smedley met the legendary birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Sanger had launched a public education campaign. Her attempt to popularize contraception was aimed at liberating women, encouraging them to think about sexual behavior as not only appropriate but also pleasurable. Smedley was twenty-five now. Quite soon after the divorce was finalized she plunged into an affair with a journalist named David Lee Willoughby. The affair left her feeling unsatisfied and lonely, and she tried to quell these feelings by entering into short-lived relationships with other men. One of the biographies I read had this to say: A pessary might allow Smedley to be as sexually predatory as any man. Her inability to trust anyone sufficiently to permit real intimacy, though, denied her the happiness she sought. If she were to feel, as she wished, that her life had meaning, she needed more meaningful work. This search for meaningful activity led Smedley to active engagement with the struggle for Indian independence and her meeting the man who would be the center of her life for so many years.

  There was one disturbing detour, however. Smedley had an encounter with M. N. Roy, a well-known communist leader, an encounter that hurt Smedley and cast a pall on her relationship with Chatto. In late March 1917, after a meeting of a group of Indian and Irish revolutionaries at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City, Roy asked Smedley to accompany him to Grand Central Terminal, where he was to meet two men who were bringing letters from Moscow. It was cold outside and Roy needed to fetch his coat. Smedley accompanied him to his fifth-floor room. Roy came out of the bathroom, where he had gone to wash his face, and found Smedley near the radiator warming her hands. He turned her around and kissed her. For a moment or a little longer, Smedley told a friend later, she liked the pressure of Roy’s lips on hers. But then an older unease suddenly bloomed inside her and she tried to get out of the embrace. Roy was adamant, however, and pinned her down on the bed. Many years later, when Smedley felt that her relationship with Chatto had drawn her into an abyss of self-loathing, and that each day brought with it the threat of a nervous breakdown, a psychiatrist suggested that she write a memoir. She sat down to work on a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth.*4 For the first time, the episode with Roy found its fullest mention in this book’s pages, and Smedley also revealed how what had happened in the hotel room lingered in her life with Chatto. Within the space of three pages in Daughter of Earth, Smedley moves from the love that an Indian revolutionary felt for the narrator, to their quick marriage a week after their first meeting, to the husband’s inquiry whether Roy was one of the men that Smedley had been intimate with earlier in her life. On the night of her hurried wedding, Smedley’s protagonist wakes up to find her Indian husband staring at her, speechless, with a strange, drawn face. He finally asks her a question—Tell me what men said to you…The men you lived with.

  I began working on my master’s thesis for Ehsaan. For a few pages, I would see the world with Smedley’s eyes, and then, with a feeling of uneasy identification, with Chatto’s. That sexual tension, born out of jealousy, was so vivid. Your Honor, I saw myself as if in a mirror, my face night-lit with jealous rage, standing beside Nina’s bed. I was asking her about Jonathan. So many times I had contemplated her past. I imagined her sitting on the deck of a yacht off the coast of Maine. The yacht was owned by a former lover of hers. The two of them were sipping white wine and eating grilled lobster. I returned to such scenes in my mind as I read more. Here was Jawaharlal Nehru, in An Autobiography (1936), remembering Virendranath Chattopadhyaya: “Popularly known as Chatto he was a very able and a very delightful person. He was always hard up, his clothes were very much the worse for wear and often he found it difficult to raise the wherewithal for a meal. But his humor and lightheartedness never left him. He had been some years senior to me during my educational days in England. He was at Oxford when I was at Harrow. Since those days he had not returned to India and sometimes a fit of homesickness came to him when he longed to be back. All his home ties had long been severed and it is quite certain that if he came to India he would feel unhappy and out of joint. But in spite of the passage of time the home pull remains. No exile can escape the malady of his tribe, that consumption of the soul, as Mazzini called it.” Your Honor, I was in pain, I suffered from the consumption of the soul.

  There were also other aspects of Smedley’s story that affected me deeply. Earlier in her book, her heroine described receiving a letter from jail: I read and re-read a letter lying before me. It was from my brother George. I could tell no one of its contents, for I feared that none of the people I lived with would understand. They idealized the working class, and I feared they might not understand the things that grew in poverty and ignorance. They would say my brother would have been justified had he stolen bread, when hungry, but he should not have stolen a horse. Even I, who loved him so dearly, felt this. These words had come from a great distance and found a place close to my heart. What Smedley had written about the unfeeling hypocrisy of those who idealized the working class also applied to the people sitting around me at the seminar table in Ehsaan’s classes. But, more than that, her words took me back to my own relatives in Bihar. Their small worlds, their plain poverty, and the ordinary complications of their difficult lives. Ehsaan had once told us that he did not see a lightbulb, hear a radio, or ride in a car till he was eight or nine years old and he did not fly in an airplane till he was twenty-one. I shared a bit of that past with him and wanted to write out of that experience. Was this only nostalgia on my part? I had left home, and the immensity of that departure sought recognition in my new life. I think that was the main thing. What I was learning in America was new and illuminating but it became valuable only when it was linked to my past.

  * * *

  Ehsaan told me to read a short story by Somerset Maugham called “Giulia Lazzari” because it had a connection to Agnes Smedley. The story is narrated by a dapper fellow named Ashenden. He is a British novelist working as a spy in Europe for his country. Now he is on a mission to arrest Chandra Lal, an Indian revolutionary in Berlin. Chandra is a lawyer by training and bitterly opposed to British rule in India. Although he receives funds from German agents, he doesn’t use the money on himself. He is hardworking, principled, and abstemious; he keeps his word. In all these respects, Chandra resembled the man who was his model, Agnes Smedley’s lover, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. The title character is Italian, a performer of Spanish dances, and a prostitute.

  More than the discussion of politics in the story, the smaller personal details arrested my attention. Here were the two Englishmen in the Maugham story discussing Chandra’s looks. Looking at the Indian’s photograph, the narrator observed, It showed a fat-faced, swarthy man, with full lips and a fleshy nose; his hair was black, thick, and straight, and his very large eyes even in the photograph were liquid and cow-like. He looked ill-at-ease in European clothes. Ashenden’s superior expressed surprise that Lazzari could have fallen for Chandra.*5 He said, You wouldn’t have thought there was anything very attractive in that greasy little nigger. God, how they run to fat! I went back to the description that Smedley had offered of the Chatto character in her novel, Daughter of Earth: He was thin, with a light brown skin, and his hair was black and very glossy. His eyes, shaded by heavy eyebrows, made me think of a black Indian night when the stars hang from an intensely purple heaven.
Over the eyes was an intangible veil of sadness—how could a man with such an intense face have sad eyes! He was perhaps in his early thirties. I wasn’t thinking just of myself, dear reader, and how a white woman might regard me. I was thinking of Ehsaan and his charm. He was my idol. I had not forgotten a news report from the Kissinger trial. A reporter, who was female, had written: Ehsaan is an exquisitely polite man with dazzling white teeth and large divergent eyes which give him an abstracted look.

  In the paper I submitted to Ehsaan, I adopted a more academic tone. I pointed out that the tale written by Maugham invested the British with control and cunning. The qualities of those who populated the fringes of this colonial narrative, the swarthy-skinned inhabitants of a world that was unstable and filled with need, were questionable. Chandra and his ilk were suspect, and their judgment, if not their moral nature, was deficient. These characters might have some fleeting nobility, or passion, and even pathos, but they didn’t have the gift of narrative. Their words didn’t have coherence, and their lives didn’t have the unity that comes from the power to tell a story. There was also the crucial question of love. Ashenden had asked Lazzari if she really loved Chandra, the man he wanted to catch. Lazzari replied: He’s the only man who’s ever been kind to me. In Smedley’s novel, her protagonist said to her Indian lover: I have loved no one but you. (Did I think of the women I have loved when I read those words? Yes, I did. Did I find myself judged? I surely did.)

  In what I wrote for Ehsaan I do not remember whether I examined the congruences or the differences between Maugham’s Chandra and Smedley’s Chatto. In Maugham’s story, Ashenden uses Lazzari to lure Chandra to a port town. Upon discovering that he has been trapped, Chandra swallows poison and dies. It is more likely that I only pointed out that the real-life Chandra Lal eluded the British rulers in a different way than Maugham had imagined. But his end was tragic too. Chatto had been active during the last years of his life in communist Russia. The British still ruled India and would not permit his return. He was arrested on July 15, 1937, during Stalin’s purge. His name appears on a death list signed by Stalin on August 31 that year. He was probably executed on September 2, 1937.

  * * *

  There was a party at Ehsaan’s house. I went to pick up Peter as planned, but when I rang his bell Maya came to the door. Her face was puffy. She said that Peter wasn’t well. Was it serious this time? No? But in that case he could have called! Over subsequent months, this conversation became routine, following a pattern; and for too long, till it was too late, I thought only that Peter was withdrawing from us because he was falling deeper and deeper in love with Maya. This had been Maya’s hope when they got married, and we were all susceptible to this hope.

  The invitation to the party had come from Prakash Mathan, an older student. He was completing his doctorate in international relations, something about the informal sectors of lending in the Brazilian and Russian economies. Prakash wore beautiful silk shirts. That was something I had noticed about him. He had come as a boy from Kerala with his mother after she found a job as a nurse in Houston. His father worked as a car mechanic in India, and he followed his wife to America. At the party, while Ehsaan cooked, Prakash served drinks. While Prakash was mixing Manhattans for us, Cai Yan wanted him to tell me a story he had told her earlier about Ehsaan. Prakash raised his eyes and asked, Which one?

  That was another thing about Ehsaan, there were always stories. The previous week he’d had me over for lunch at his house. The lunch was for a Pakistani friend of his, a doctor at Columbia Medical, whom he had known for many years. He had cooked keema, baingan bharta, and his trademark dal, with a tadka of onion and garlic fried in oil floating on the surface. The doctor was in her late thirties, pretty, and stylishly dressed. Her husband was an American, a well-regarded scientist.

  —Did Harvey tell you about his first scientific experiment? Ehsaan asked the doctor about her husband.

  The doctor had probably already heard about the experiment, probably from Ehsaan himself, but she smiled and shook her head.

  —This was when Harvey was four years old and living in Brooklyn. He was in the backyard and decided that he was going to pee right there. To his surprise, a worm emerged from the little puddle he was making. He promptly concluded that worms came from your urine. He was a scientist. In order to prove his hypothesis, he went back the next day and repeated the experiment. To his satisfaction, another worm appeared from the puddle, just as before. Here was reproducible proof! He told me he held on to this scientific belief till he was nine years old.

  Now, at Ehsaan’s party, Prakash embarked on the story that Cai Yan wanted him to tell me. We were standing on Ehsaan’s balcony with our drinks. Prakash was balancing his drink and a cigarette in the same hand.

  When Ehsaan was in his twenties in Pakistan, some years after he had migrated there from Bihar, he received a Rotary Fellowship to study abroad. He knew he wanted to visit four places when he left the subcontinent. Three of those four places he visited en route to the United States. Now Prakash put his free hand to use, holding up one finger after another:

  He went to the Highgate Cemetery in London to pay homage to Karl Marx.

  He also visited 221B Baker Street, for its well-known literary landmark.

  And he made sure he got the opportunity to wander through the British Museum, where his reaction was, Return the loot!

  The fourth place he wanted to visit was the site of the Haymarket riot in 1886 Chicago. Ehsaan wanted to go there because, as a boy, he had been taken to May Day celebrations in India. He wanted to lay flowers at the Haymarket monument to honor the striking workers who had marched in the first May Day parade. But several years were to pass before he could visit Chicago. He had, by then, been in and out of the country, doing research and political work for several years in Tunisia. In 1967, ten years after he first arrived in the United States, Ehsaan found himself in Chicago. He left his hotel and bought a bouquet of flowers; however, when he got to Haymarket, he could not find the monument. He asked several people, but none seemed to know about the landmark struggle for an eight-hour working day. Finally, someone pointed the monument out to him. It was the statue of a policeman who had preserved law and order on that day long ago. Ehsaan brought the flowers back and gave them to a young woman he liked at the conference he was attending. She later became his wife.

  I clapped my hands.

  —Wait, wait, there is more, Cai Yan said.

  —Well, here’s the thing, Prakash said. All this happens and just a year later Ehsaan gets a fellowship in Chicago. This is at the Adlai Stevenson Institute. And he is giving a speech at an antiwar meeting. He recounts the story about his search for the Haymarket monument. He tells the audience how shocked he was that the historical memory of workers’ resistance, recognized and celebrated around the world, hasn’t been honored in its own place of origin. Not long after, two FBI agents show up at his door. They want to know what he had said at the sit-in about Haymarket and who had been among the audience. It turned out that the Weathermen had just blown up the offending statue of the Chicago policeman.

  —Let’s call him here, Cai Yan said.

  All three of us turned to look at Ehsaan, who was chatting with an old man with a Moses-like beard.

  —Would you like a real drink? Prakash called out.

  Ehsaan heard the question, excused himself, and walked over to where we were standing.

  —Prakash told us the story of how you got to see the four great sights. Including Haymarket, Cai said.

  —Did he tell you that I got a visit from the FBI after I had spoken about Haymarket?

  —What did you say to them? I asked.

  Ehsaan was a master of pauses.

  —They first asked me if I was a citizen of the United States. I said, No. They said, Don’t you feel that as a guest in this country you should not be going about criticizing the host country’s government? I said, I hear your point, but I do want you to know that while I am not a citizen,
I am a taxpayer. And I thought it was a fundamental principle of American democracy that there is no taxation without representation. I have not been represented in this war in Vietnam. And my people, Asian people, are being bombed right now. Surprisingly, the FBI agents looked deeply moved. They blushed at my throwing this argument at them. They were speechless.

  He was smiling. A couple other students had joined us to catch the end of the story. One of them asked Ehsaan how he understood what had happened with the FBI agents that day.

  —Well, at that time, I understood something about the importance of having some correspondence between American liberal traditions and our own rhetoric and tactics.

  It is a tenet of graduate student life to debate such pronouncements. The more serious-minded among us, Pushkin perhaps, had maybe taken a lesson from this tenet, a lesson about aligning pronouncements with practice. But what was to remain with me after all those years was the example of Ehsaan seeking Marx and Sherlock Holmes together in London. It was as if someone from my town had expressed the ambition to read everything by Mahatma Gandhi and watch every Dilip Kumar film! Or better still, a friend showing devotion to the revolutionary life of Bhagat Singh and also taking joy in reciting the batting and bowling figures of Ranjitsinhji.

  From Ehsaan we wanted narrative. We didn’t always care how much of it was nonfiction or fiction. Ehsaan lived—and narrated—his life along the blurry Line of Control between the two genres. Others responded in kind.

  For instance.

  Standing in a kitchen in Amsterdam, where he headed the Transnational Institute, Ehsaan narrated the story of his childhood to the great writer John Berger. Later, Berger gave a fictional name to the Ehsaan character in Photocopies. The details belonged to Ehsaan’s life but the broader narrative was about the Partition. Ehsaan was only thirteen years old and living near Gaya in Bihar when it became clear that India would be divided and there was going to be a new country for Muslims. Riots broke out in the cities. A man in Ehsaan’s village who worked in a printing shop in Calcutta came back with the report that Hindus and Muslims who till yesterday had been neighbors were at each other’s throats. But Ehsaan had seen his own relatives murder his father—he didn’t believe it was religion that taught people to kill.