Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  Ehsaan’s eldest brother held a senior position in the tax ministry; he wanted to claim his place in Pakistan. Ehsaan went with his brother’s family on a train to Delhi, where they were put in a camp in an old fort called the Purana Qila. Although there was a separate section for officials and their families, cholera was already spreading among the thousands of refugees waiting there. The new government in Karachi was providing planes for senior officials and their families. Ehsaan’s family was to board a plane for the short flight to Lahore, but there had been a mistake. They were a seat short. Ehsaan was asked to stay behind and wait for the next available flight. His brother gave him a rifle and some money. However, no plane came and Ehsaan was forced to join a long column of refugees leaving for the border. The lines of people fleeing in both directions stretched for miles, raising dust that hid the distant horizon. As a boy, Ehsaan had seen the river Ganga in flood, carrying away huts and cattle and branches torn from trees. Now, in a daze, he felt he was being carried away in a flood of strangers.

  In their group, there was an opium eater. He had been a beggar in the refugee camp, but in the column, unable to feed his addiction, he began to recover. Even his gait changed. The opium eater, whose name was Abdul Ghafoor, assumed leadership of the group, and he put Ehsaan on sentry duty. Ehsaan carried his rifle with him at all times and he felt protective of the young women among the refugees. He would look at them furtively, admiring the shape of their lips. In the open fields at night, lying under the stars, he imagined their breasts brushing his cheeks.

  On occasion, as dusk approached, Abdul Ghafoor would ask the group to take shelter in an abandoned mosque or the courtyard of a village school. This was better than spending the night in the fields, where fires flared around them and human cries mixed with the sounds of animals. Early one night, the column camped close to a rural railway station, drawn by the sight of a police tent pitched at the other end of the single platform.

  During dinner, four young Muslim men came to the camp, swords in hand, with a woman walking behind them. They were given food, rotis cooked on a small fire and eaten with onions dug from a field. Abdul Ghafoor instructed Ehsaan to stay alert. The four youth had slit the throats of the two Hindu policemen in the tent at the other end of the platform. The woman with them was the wife of a Muslim carpenter from a nearby village. Ehsaan looked at her. She was sitting by herself, speaking to no one. Her name was Jamila. She must have been in her early twenties; a parrot-green dupatta hid most of her face, but a silver nose stud glinted in the faint firelight. After her husband was found knifed in his shed, the villagers had brought the woman to the police tent. The two guardsmen stationed there promised to arrange for Jamila’s transfer to a refugee camp if they weren’t immediately able to put her on one of the trains going to the Wagah border. After a week, word leaked out that the woman hadn’t been allowed to leave. The guardsmen had kept her to cook for them and give them company at night.

  The arrival of the young men and the woman had introduced a disturbance. Ehsaan noticed that people in small groups conversed in quiet, uneasy voices. But after they had eaten, the young men, especially a small-faced man among them, a blue handkerchief tied on his head, had much to say. Ehsaan was on duty and didn’t hear the stories himself. The next morning, an old hakeem in the group, a medicine man from Agra who always had a sprig of mint, or fennel, or a basil leaf on his tongue, told him, not without consternation, that the youth had some nights ago attacked the home of a Sikh shopkeeper. One of the four had been close to the family. The Sikh had a grown-up daughter, still unmarried, and his wife was a tall and beautiful woman. She was known in the community because of her embroidery work.

  When the young men were about to break down his door, the Sikh rushed out in the dark to fight. In one hand, he carried a flaming torch, rags tied to a piece of wood and probably dipped in kerosene. In the other, a long sword. But the four of them were too much for the shopkeeper; they got away with cuts on their arms and a slashed thigh. Inside they found the rest of the family in the kitchen. After giving them a drink, opium mixed with water, the Sikh shopkeeper had used a small kirpan to kill both his wife and daughter. The youth with the blue handkerchief on his head said that all he got were the thin gold earrings worn by the dead girl.

  By midday, the young men and the widow had disappeared down a side road. Ehsaan and his group passed another column going in the opposite direction. The people in the other kafila looked no different: they had tired and drawn faces, they carried meager belongings and food in sacks or in baskets on their heads. Most were on foot. One woman led two goats on a rope. A tall, thin man, wearing only a strip of cotton around his waist, carried on his back a shrunken old woman who looked as small as a child. That night, Abdul Ghafoor sat down with Ehsaan outside the circle of sleeping bodies. Ehsaan asked Ghafoor where the young men and the widow had gone.

  —They told me they were taking her to a camp. I didn’t want to fight them. It is possible they will have sold her to someone by now.

  Ehsaan sat in silence. Perhaps he could have pointed his rifle at the small-faced man and ordered him and his companions to leave the woman with them. He was pondering this when Abdul Ghafoor pointed to the bright moon.

  —Look at that, he said. It looks like a freshly made roti. You reach for it and find that it is burned black on the other side. That is the freedom we have been given.

  * * *

  —

  In the Ehsaan Ali archives at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, there is a letter from John Berger asking him if he approved of the brief narrative that he, Berger, had written about Ehsaan’s past. I must assume that Ehsaan had liked the form that Berger had given to his story. I can only speculate that the choice of a fictional name for Ehsaan’s character was necessary because one or both of these men—Berger and Ehsaan—understood that memory is unreliable.

  * * *

  —

  You can reach Irki, the village where Ehsaan was born, by road from Patna. I went there last summer. It took me about four hours. It was a hot July day, late monsoon season, and the highway went past paddy fields filled with water. Small towns appeared at regular intervals, and the car I was traveling in would need to slow down to a crawl. At one point we stopped to look at a crumbling mausoleum built beside a vast lake whose waters appeared a dark green, the mausoleum’s archways framing the shadows of lovers. We continued on our way, passing tight clusters of crowds on the narrow highway, medicine stores, sheds for grinding wheat, cramped tailor shops, and stalls where chickens were sold from cages in which the birds had plucked each other’s feathers out. A thin road branched off from National Highway 83, past huts and houses built close together, and then a sharp turn to the left near a mosque, a sign that we were in a Muslim part of the village. If we had remained on the highway, in another hour we would have reached Bodh Gaya, where Gautama Buddha had found enlightenment.

  The house where Ehsaan was born has now been divided between relatives by brick walls. A small metal gate stood locked near the wall where Ehsaan’s father had been sleeping on the night he was murdered. I was invited to come inside through a door on the side. The middle-aged woman who answered the door introduced me to her mother, Sadrunissa, who was eighty-two years old and almost completely deaf. Sadrunissa was Ehsaan’s first cousin. Her son-in-law shouted Ehsaan’s name into Sadrunissa’s ear and then, to make it clear whom he was talking about, he patted in the air as if he were touching a child’s head before miming with his fingers the gesture of a throat being slit.

  Sadrunissa began to speak in a high-pitched voice. She had very few teeth left. She spoke of her father, who loved Ehsaan, and then of her uncle, Ehsaan’s father, who believed in justice and equality for all. He used to say, Do not oppress anyone. They killed him for it. She spoke of Ehsaan as if he was still alive and living in America. I didn’t correct her. Her son-in-law told her that I was a journalist. Sadrunissa nodded her head and asked if I was from The Searchlight or The Indian Natio
n. These had been the two Patna newspapers from my childhood; they’d ceased publication decades ago.

  The azaan sounded from the mosque. I had delayed things; it was time for my hosts to break their Ramzan fast. I was left alone while Sadrunissa and her family went inside to pray. While I waited on the veranda, small frogs hopped on the floor and a thin cat crawled down the clay tiles of the roof. After ten minutes, Sadrunissa came out and sat down with me. She took a cracker from the plate on the table and drank water. Her daughter brought out slices of mango and a couple of glasses of Rooh Afza. The son-in-law was a journalist for a small Hindi paper with its headquarters in Punjab. He had stopped asking Sadrunissa the questions I wanted to ask and would try to give replies himself. He said the family that had killed Ehsaan’s father had met with ruin. Their two sons had both gone mad. The family had been cursed. Sadrunissa’s son-in-law was curious about Ehsaan. He urged me to write about him because, he said, no one knew about him in his own birthplace. While he spoke, geckos darted swiftly on the green walls, trapping in their jaws the insects that were attracted by the naked lights. It was turning dark and I wanted to get to Bodh Gaya so I could find a hotel to spend the night. Sadrunissa would interrupt our conversation to repeat, very loudly, what she had already told me earlier. When I got up to leave, she held my sleeve and said that the family had done well. By the time he retired from service, her father was a deputy superintendent of police, and her son had become a doctor.

  *1 The torn sheet with Picasso’s drawing. Proof against any argument that my report on desire is a recent preoccupation. It is true that I have published nothing over the past ten years, but I have notes. E.g., a clipping in my notebook has the following two bits of information: 1. Scientists could not say why some Australian women felt sad after otherwise satisfactory sex. 2. Mares are more likely to intentionally miscarry when they have mated with foreign stallions (“Findings,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2011, p. 88).

  Also, scribbled on an earlier page, the following observation: Prairie dogs kiss more often if humans are watching (“Findings,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2011).

  Your Honor, was it fair on my part to wonder who was the researcher at Harper’s Magazine during those months in 2011 when I was paying attention to that section? Such an avid interest in the quiddities of sex! Young journalist, where are you now? Did you find in love the satisfaction you wanted? In March 2011, for instance, the “Findings” section reported the following: “The sexual arousal of men is dampened by sniffing the tears of a woman.” “Young straight American couples who agree to be monogamous often aren’t.” “Apologies are disappointing.” Such are the gifts of the Internet, Your Honor, a basic Google search revealed that the journalist in question, now an editor at Harper’s, had been born in Delhi! Onward!

  Dear Editor, may your curiosity and interest in the world be rewarded a thousandfold!

  *2 I liked Pushkin for saying things like You know I can see why Pico Iyer says, “One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés.” It gave me a sense of what it meant to possess a global identity. It was something I wanted for myself too. But when I was getting drunk in Delhi with my friend Shankar, a journalist at The Telegraph, he had harsh words about Pushkin. Shankar said that Pushkin was only a jet-setter. He quoted from a piece he had just read to underline his point. “He isn’t global at all. He’s just from another planet. It’s called the First World.”

  *3 It would be years before I would find out that the words that appeared in the opening paragraph of Roger Ebert’s dismissive one-star review of The Night Porter included the following: nasty, lubricious, despicable, obscene, and trash.

  *4 In Daughter of Earth, Smedley transcribed from her life. Even the fictional name that she gave to her protagonist, Marie Rogers, had its basis in reality. Marie Rogers was a name that Smedley had invented years earlier: she had used it to sign all her letters during her involvement with the rebellious Indian nationalists in America. Her book is neither a memoir nor simply a novel. And when I read it, I thought Smedley offered us a model for writing.

  *5 Your Honor, the sting of such judgment but also the comfort! The comfort of knowing that if I too was being judged in this way, then I wasn’t alone. Let the record state that Nina and I had made love in a small patch of grass near the university’s administration building one afternoon. It was the Fourth of July. The U.S. flag flapped above us. I was aware of all kinds of negative judgment, Your Honor. How could she have fallen for me? I suffered under an invisible indictment. And, in response, it was as if I was saying to Nina, I kiss you with my alien tongue, your body taking me in against Article 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Laws, which presses on bodies penalties for encouraging or inducing an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States.

  Part VI

  Cai Yan

  I want to share these lines from a Xeroxed page left so many years ago in my mailbox, with Ehsaan’s scribbled EA in the corner, after we had discussed my possible thesis topic. It is a quote from “Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers” (1799) by Friedrich Schleiermacher:

  “What seizes you when you find the holy most intimately mixed with the profane, the sublime with the lowly and transitory? And what do you call the mood that sometimes forces you to presuppose the universality of this mixture and to search for it everywhere?”

  And this note I had scribbled along with a quote from Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth: I was devoted to my parents. But no less was I devoted to the passions that flesh is heir to.*1

  I remember being awoken once a little before dawn by a sound that I didn’t recognize at first. An Indonesian student lived in the unit next to me in that apartment building on Morningside Drive; his girlfriend was visiting from Cleveland or Cincinnati or some such place, where she too was a grad student. Was someone screaming? No, was she laughing? The sound, a moaning punctuated by rhythmic silence in a way that no ordinary screaming or even laughing can accommodate, went on for a while. Such shameless joy. Alone in my bed, wide awake now, I marveled at the matutinal sexual athleticism of the Indonesian fellow, Katon. He was thin, serious-looking, in wire-rimmed glasses. I think he was studying forestry. What had he done to the white girl from Ohio, what forest spirit had he been keeping secretly stored in a bottle, what animal instinct for pleasure had he released in her now? She was shrieking with happiness and all the birds in the forest were surely going to wake up any moment now and release their song.

  I waited till nine to call Cai Yan. Nina had been gone several months now. I hadn’t slept with Cai Yan yet, although we had spent a lot of time together in classes and even at Ehsaan’s home. Of late, I had started humming a snatch of “Dong Fang Hong” (The East is Red! The sun rises! China produces Mao Tse-tung!) whenever we passed each other in Butler Library or the corridors of Schapiro Hall. She would shake her head in amusement. A month ago, Maya had formed a writing group; Cai Yan and I were a part of that; we often sat next to each other on Maya’s sofa, and I had noticed that each of us agreed with nearly everything that the other said. (Your Honor, how fierce is the romance whose fires are fed by throwing on the flames torn pages of Bakhtin and subaltern studies!) We were ready to spend hours together, I felt. I thought this could be the day. Katon had gifted me an omen. Cai Yan was grading papers for the international relations class where she was a teaching assistant. I asked her to come over to my apartment; she could grade at my place while I cooked an early lunch for her. I told her I would keep up an endless supply of fragrant tea.

  In half an hour, the bell rang.

  I had an old pot, an antique piece that had been Nina’s gift, and I set this on the small desk. While Cai Yan did her work, I prepared lunch. Kadhai chicken, fried gobhi mattar, a tomato and cucumber salad on the side. For a thin girl, she had an enormous appetite. The rice was ready first and Cai Yan didn’t want to wait, she scooped spoons of rice into a bowl and at
e using a pair of old chopsticks that had come with a meal I had once ordered from Chinee Takee Outee.*2 Later, I gave her the rice with the cauliflower and the chicken. She devoured it all. It reminded me of a small animal, and it excited me to watch her eat with such hunger.

  Cai Yan laughed easily, but not when I flirted with her. That kind of play didn’t appeal to her. She received each statement with some earnestness and then evaluated it seriously.

  —Is it true that in China the word for hello translates as “have you eaten rice”?

  She laughed and said yes. Then she said that actually it was usual for a hello to be accompanied by the second inquiry about food.

  —Ehsaan is Chinese in that way, Cai Yan said. He first asks, Are you hungry? Oh, I like him so much.

  We were sipping tea after lunch.

  —I wonder whether there are other expressions that are also very different in Chinese. How might someone ask another person, So, are we on a date?