Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  —To be or not to be, he said, quite meaninglessly. He said the words in English, a language that wasn’t very familiar to him. His voice was lucid and unnaturally soft. A memory roused him momentarily and he laughed, the paan juice bubbling out of his mouth. He had just remembered something from my childhood. He said that when I was four or five, I had told him that I was going to drink more milk. Why? My young self had explained to him that my pee was yellow and I wanted it to be a normal color again.

  My father’s contempt for Lotan Mamaji, his brother-in-law, if described by means of a pie chart, would show 30 percent colored black for the lack of education beyond middle school. On that chart, another 30 percent would be shaded differently for addiction to alcohol, while the last 30 percent would be marked for adultery and lust. The 10 percent of the circle that remained would be a dappled slice attributable to other, unexplained sins. When I was growing up, the conversation between my parents made it clear that there were many flaws in Lotan Mamaji’s character, but I was not very conscious of them. As a boy, I had watched him at sunset feeding the fish in his pond. He stood at the water’s edge. His right fist moving in the air as if he were drawing in a kite that was the only one left flying gloriously in the sky, he threw puffed rice on the water, whose surface was broken by the dark mouths of many fish. When Lotan Mamaji cast his line and drew out a rohu whose scales glinted silver and black, I was moved by his love for me.

  I was telling Cai all this, everything I could remember, all my devotion and my disappointment. If I wanted I could perhaps have used terms we bandied about in our seminars: about the unfulfilled lives or futile deaths of people—because of their class or upbringing—caught between an older feudal order and an emergent capitalist society. There was some pathos but it was better to be clear-eyed about the harsh judgment of history. As grad students we showed ourselves eager to understand contemporary life, but in reality, we were proclaiming our place in the future. I felt this most strongly when our friend Pushkin spoke of how the lives of the many anonymous others had been exceeded by the demands of hectic modernity. They were history’s victims, the poor fucks, while we were not. I hated that brand of all-knowing academic talk. So, it is possible I mourned Lotan Mamaji’s death, and my own childhood, in my conversation with Cai that night like a scene from a movie about a small town. There is a crumbling mansion in the background at the edge of a field. A large man with a mustache is sitting under a tamarind tree smoking a hookah. That morning the man sold to an antiques dealer a portrait with an elaborate frame that had hung on his wall; the portrait was of his father, who had been a minor landowning functionary under the British, and the man got a price that he knew was low but he wasn’t prepared to bargain. Money is scarce, it is needed for food or maybe even medicines, and yet there are also other uses. After he has had a drink, or maybe several, the man is going to lift his body, which feels more and more tired these days, and take a rickshaw to the bar near the movie hall.

  * * *

  By the time the spring semester arrived, our course work was almost done; each of us would now have to write a thesis. While Ehsaan gave Cai books on insurgency in India, he also had a gift for me. Midway through the semester he called me into his office and said that he was going to recommend me for a Ford Foundation Fellowship for summer research. The fellowship earned me a ticket to Delhi. Ehsaan wanted me to push further with my reading of Agnes Smedley and the Indian radicals in America. Late one night in early June, in 1993, I landed in Delhi and the next morning took a train to Patna. I stayed with my parents for three days before returning to Delhi for my research. A taxi from Paharganj station brought me to Sutlej Hostel in JNU, where I had made a paying guest arrangement with a sociology student from Bihar. In the National Archives one morning, I found what I could start with. I had come across the letters of the Indian nationalist leader Har Dayal—whom Smedley had met in Berkeley. Har Dayal was the founder of the Hindustan Ghadar Party. The organization’s newspaper was published from San Francisco, but the letters in the file I found in the archives had been written from Algiers in 1910. These letters were addressed mostly to an older mentor, Mr. Rana, and his wife, whom Har Dayal called Madame Rana. In one letter, he had written to Madame Rana: I shall write more later on. It has been raining all day today. I shall begin to learn your German in two or three months. Next year, I shall write to you in German. Then perhaps you will reply sooner! Who was this woman, perhaps older, but also foreign, to whom this young revolutionary was pouring out his heart?

  That morning, from outside the Reading Room, I could hear voices shouting in Hindi. Perhaps a wall was being painted. The librarian, a short woman with full, surprisingly pink lips, had been on the phone all morning. She would listen to the person at the other end, she would talk desultorily about work, and every few minutes begin to giggle, straighten her sari, and say lightheartedly, Nahin, nahin. I read the letters in the library and copied them in my notebook. The librarian went out for lunch to the canteen. I was alone in the Reading Room, sitting at my usual place. A painted sign to my right said PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE and, on the left, outside the door, on an iron frame, hung two red buckets with the word FIRE stenciled on them in white. I would pass those buckets each day of the fortnight I spent in Delhi: there was sand in them, presumably to be used to douse a fire, but there were also cigarette butts, crumpled paper, torn bus tickets, and clumps of dried paan juice.

  I read more of the letters that Har Dayal had written. He was only twenty-six and already a prominent leader. But behind his discussion of politics, there stretched a vast solitude. (I am doing well, though I feel awfully lonely. Several days pass without my speaking to anyone.) There was a great deal of self-pity also. And moral sentiment, including advice on celibacy. It appeared that Madame Rana had a son called Ranji. Har Dayal wrote in a letter to her: Never let him waste time on arranging his hair beautifully with care. Spartan simplicity should be enforced in youth, so that the character should be manly and not [the last word was illegible]. Further, when he is a little older, don’t take him into society where he should meet girls—parties etc. For between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two, much intercourse with girls should be avoided. It makes a man frivolous and produces the feeling of love precociously, and distracts his attention from studies and moral ideas.

  Har Dayal had been involved in what he called in one of his letters the “bomb affair.” His studies at Oxford had been interrupted. But the rupture in his life was broader: The suppression of the natural filial, fraternal, conjugal, and paternal feelings, the total estrangement from all early friends, whom I loved as the light of my life…And the struggle was not only political. His disturbance was clearly more profound. Consider document number 2388 (11), serial number 11. From the Hotel de la Californie, Algiers, on June 13, 1910. A Monday. Har Dayal had written a fourteen-page letter to Mr. Rana. It passed from the seemingly personal—I often find relief in crying—to the plainly political—I read in the papers that thirty-three confessions have been made in Nasik Trial! That is terrible. Then, apparently only an hour later, he sat down to write another letter to the same address. He declared in this letter that he would take a vow not to ever again do two things: 1. Moneymaking. 2. Sexual intercourse, even with my wife. And then this despairing admission: I have stooped to meat eating, wine drinking, frivolity, sightseeing, gossip, reading tales and novels, and indolence in order to soothe my heart pain and relieve my nerves and get good sleep and appetite.

  I wanted to stop reading when, over and over again, I came across such lines. The tone of self-pity was wearying, yes, but what also depressed me was that the litany of regrets reminded me of my journals.

  What was this freedom that they were fighting for?

  * * *

  When I returned to New York at the end of the summer, Cai was getting ready to leave for India. Her stay was going to be longer, perhaps up to a year. I was going to miss Cai; I already missed her when I was in India. I remembered what Nina had said ab
out finding someone and loving her. I was in love with Cai, I think. But love wasn’t something I equated with a person’s life goals. At that time a part of me considered such a preoccupation selfish or immature or plainly reactionary.

  On a rainy evening Cai and I were walking through the park to Ehsaan’s apartment on Riverside Drive when she stopped to pick up a large magnolia blossom that had fallen from the tree. The white petals were heavy with water, but Cai just took the whole flower and pressed it against her cheek. The expression on her face was one of surpassing sadness. Had she shed a tear? Or was it just the rain? I didn’t ask. Cai was very open and loving, but I always felt that there was an inner knot of sadness that never loosened in her heart, and this melancholy made her real to me. I wanted to surrender all my sympathy to someone. To her. Embrace of sadness was okay, I said to myself. It wasn’t reactionary.

  Ehsaan welcomed us, kissing Cai on both cheeks. She worshipped him, and so did I, but I could see how much she was learning from him. I was failing as a scholar. My research was always too scattered. Perhaps because I wanted to be a writer, my academic questions kept getting entangled in some personal inquiry I wanted to conduct into the complexities of the human soul. Cai had a clearer agenda and a much stronger focus. When Mahasweta Devi came from India for a week’s visit to a seminar where her writings were being taught in translation, Cai met with her to discuss her thesis. With Ehsaan’s help, Cai was reading thick tomes on peasant insurgency in India; she read books on history, literature, and even sociology and religion. Also memoir and journalism, all the books arranged in neat piles on her dining table. Of all the books I had seen in her hands, I had read only one, a memoir by a young British woman who had been jailed in Hazaribagh after her arrest in the company of Maoists. That evening at Ehsaan’s house, Cai was seated next to Ehsaan on the couch and was asking him questions about the writings of an Oxford political scientist on militancy in eastern India. Unwilling to join the conversation, I fussed with the bottles of wine and salted peanuts. But Ehsaan wouldn’t let me do that for long; he asked me to sit and listen while he told Cai a story.

  —As a young man in Lahore, I must have been eighteen or nineteen, I considered myself a communist.

  One evening I and my other communist friends were sitting in a room in our hostel drinking tea. We lived in different rooms but we shared what was called a ward servant. This would be a male of any age, between maybe seventeen and seventy, who would be responsible for anything from cooking to washing clothes to buying newspapers. Yes, even though we were communists we had a ward servant. He was a man around forty years in age. His name was Qamroo.

  Now, this particular evening, Qamroo had made us tea and egg omelets with green chilies in them. We were all feeling very grateful and kind toward Qamroo. Then I said to my friends, This is all fine and good. But we are after all communists. We have to show Qamroo more respect.

  One of my comrades said that we ought to call our servant Uncle. We should call him Qamroo Chacha. But this didn’t seem radical at all. So, I suggested that we would now share Qamroo’s chores. Whenever we could, we would step into the tiny kitchen with its black walls and ask if we could be of assistance to Qamroo.

  Now, I could immediately see that the response to this proposal was less than enthusiastic. My friends said that they were required to attend classes, they needed to go to political meetings, organize rallies. One of them, the son of a feudal landowner in Punjab who had pledged to fight for an egalitarian society, said that he didn’t even have time to post a letter sometimes and had to ask Qamroo to do it for him. Another one pointed out that labor was not degrading; we only needed to make sure that Qamroo felt he got fair wages.

  But how to find this out? That was the question. Well, we must ask Qamroo himself. We called for Qamroo. The loudest of us shouted for Qamroo Chacha, and the man appeared with a grin on his face. He hadn’t heard this name before. But there was an air of solemnity in the room. He was told that he was no longer our servant. He was our comrade. We would all treat each other equally.

  Qamroo was not grinning anymore. In fact, he looked a bit puzzled. He was not saying anything. So the boys explained that they were going to help him with his work whenever they could. Next I asked him if he thought his wages were fair. Qamroo looked a bit afraid, maybe because he thought that with this offer of help we were going to cut his wages.

  I understood this. I said to him that the reason why we were asking such questions was because we wanted to show him respect. In fact, I said, I don’t know why you are standing. Please sit down on that chair.

  More than one chair was suddenly offered to Qamroo, who had never before sat down in our company. We were all well-to-do people. He was our ward servant. During Eid, we would embrace him and say Eid Mubarak and give him money, but how many times in a year do you have Eid?

  He cooked for us every day; he washed our shirts, our trousers, and our dirty underwear. He swept the three rooms where we slept. We didn’t even know the names of his two children, who lived with their mother in the village. But we were now calling him Chacha and asking him about his needs. He had gastric ailments and his teeth chattered at night.

  We were stronger than he was. We held his arms and asked him to sit in the wooden chair we had put in the center of the room. Please sit, we said, please sit with us. Against his resistance, we pulled him down and released his arms only after he had seated himself. But once we loosened our grip on him, he found himself propelled out of the chair. He just couldn’t sit there and since we wouldn’t let him stand in the room he left at once despite our cries.

  Ehsaan paused. He kept looking at Cai.

  —Do you understand what I’m trying to do here? I want you to remember this story and when you go and talk to the Maoist leaders who have spent their lives in villages, relate to them my story and ask them, Why didn’t Qamroo sit on his chair? Let them hear my story and answer you. You will then have your book.

  I remember that evening very clearly. I remember Ehsaan’s story and what I also remember, as if it were a scene in a film, is the way in which Cai and Ehsaan sat together discussing historical change. Many years would pass before I was able to give meaning to that scene. Ehsaan and Cai were able to see the future, while I was either blind or simply too perverse to draw a straight line between my love for Cai and the society they were describing. Cai took Ehsaan’s advice and wrote the book that he wanted her to write. About ten years ago I found her on YouTube discussing her new book. She was sitting onstage under a white-and-red tent at a literary festival in Delhi. The man interviewing her was a BBC journalist and Cai was telling him about living in a village in Chhattisgarh and she then invoked her teacher who would have been pleased to see this book.

  In that same video, you can see Cai reading, interrupted only by laughter from the BBC man, a letter to Edward Said that Ehsaan wrote shortly before he died. Cai wanted the audience to appreciate Ehsaan’s exaggerated and mordant style, the pleasure and flattery with which he offered his criticism on an op-ed by his comrade Said:

  Son of Palestine, Friend and Ally to the Wretched of the Earth, Keeper of the Flame in the World, the Text, and the Critic,

  I made a brave attempt to attend your talk yesterday but the press of bodies at the door was deeper and denser than even experienced in the tinbox buses on the crowded, sticky streets of Lahore or Accra. I saw the brief dazzle of your features and admired, from a distance, the elegant shine on your Savile Row suit. Then you began to speak! Such flowing oratory! Has anyone else ever been more eloquent on the narrow and constricted semantic field through which Islam is interpreted in the West? But I wanted to hear you and discuss these things in person, and not from behind a wall of perspiring bodies! When will you provide this timid and undeserving soul the benefit of your attention? I published the attached in Dawn last week—it was already in production, alas, by the time your own words on the subject fell like rain on my parched soul at your public address last afternoon—and I hop
e you will read it. I have tried in my own weak way to say something meaningful about Islam not only by saying that the Western construction of Islam is a fiction, a purely ideological construct, but by insisting on presenting the concrete, not to mention divided, struggles under way in polities that happen to be Islamic.

  As always, with a sense of devotion that is your due and tender regards, I remain,

  Ehsaan of no consequence

  *1 Morality is of interest to him, but morality always in conflict with itself. This is what makes the Mahatma more interesting than a box of tissue paper or, for that matter, a source of inspirational quotes printed under Gandhi’s toothless smile on the covers of children’s notebooks all over India.

  *2 Your Honor, that name! You decide. Open and plainly literal pandering to the stereotype of a pidgin-speaking Oriental—or, instead, a playful linguistic mockery practiced by a consciousness primed by Asian-American critiques of representation?

  *3 Cai Yan’s report from her shopping expedition was that the cashier was a white girl dressed all in black and with black lipstick. Her black T-shirt said in white letters: JESUS SAVES I SPEND. When she was growing up, Cai Yan said, people in China wore clothes that were nondescript and didn’t make any statement. It surprised her but also interested her that in America people wore T-shirts that made all kinds of bold assertions about the wearer. Had she observed this because she was Chinese? I didn’t think so. I feel it is a shared immigrant trait. You come to America and just like you try to understand road signs you also take note of T-shirts. The affluent-looking middle-aged white man in Coney Island with the T-shirt shamelessly announcing: MY INDIAN NAME IS RUNS WITH BEER. Or, more recently, the somewhat cheerful and overweight woman, possibly a Latina, who passed me on the street wearing a T-shirt that said: FCK, and below that, ALL THAT’S MISSING IS YOU.