Part VII
Peter and Maya
I am interested in wisdom. I am interested in walls. China famous for both.
—SUSAN SONTAG, “Project for a Trip to China”
I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.
—JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Cai and I stopped by Maya’s apartment because she was coming with us to the Guggenheim Museum. We were going to see the exhibition of the works of the Chinese artist Liu Huong. In the Times, we had read that Huong’s installations were “quietly devastating.”
Maya had great affection for Cai and they got together often, but I felt that Maya didn’t like me very much. Even though she was always polite, I feared she saw me as unsophisticated and a bit of a lout. How did she form this judgment? Once there were five or six of us at her place wondering if we would have class the next day—the professor had gone to Paris earlier that week. I volunteered to go down to the pay phone at the corner and call the professor at home—if she answered, I’d hang up. When I suggested this, Maya looked at me and said, Kailash, you’re such a creep. This was said with some conviction, and it affected my behavior with Maya. I became nervous. The next time we saw each other, it was again at her apartment. She hugged and kissed Cai. Then I stepped into her doorway, but I didn’t know whether I should kiss her or not. We hugged and I thought she was about to kiss me on my right cheek. Or was it the left? In my confusion, I ended up brushing her lips with mine. I didn’t know then whether I would make it worse if I apologized and so I kept silent.
We took the 1 train down to Eighty-sixth Street and then the M86 bus to the other side of the park. On the bus, I let Cai and Maya sit together. I sat down next to a big sweaty man in a suit. He held a huge bouquet of flowers wrapped in tissue paper; water from the bouquet trickled toward the bus driver. After a short wait in the line at the Guggenheim, we produced our IDs for the student discount and then we were inside.
Liu Huong had been born in Beijing in 1950, and unlike Cai, he had lived through the Cultural Revolution. His parents were doctors who had been sent to the villages to work. Huong’s portraits of his parents in Mao uniforms were austere and utterly devoid of emotion. There was no overt judgment, but the blankness of their expression was haunting. The artist had also painted huge portraits of party officials, and here the intent was less disguised: you saw the men, and one woman (probably Mao’s wife), as scheming and complacent. They were painted, perhaps a bit ostentatiously, with complexions that made them resemble pigs.
After the portraits, we entered the next room, which was dominated by two giant paintings that looked like posters. The caption for the first poster read HAVE FEWER CHILDREN, RAISE MORE PIGS and showed a man and a woman with a small child. On the opposite wall was the other poster, with the caption LONG LIVE OUR BRIGADE LEADER. This latter picture, as gigantic as the first one, showed a group of villagers sitting together in a room watching a woman on TV, who was addressing them. Once again, the figures were so emptied of genuine feeling they appeared as automatons, creatures driven by a controlling ideology.
This was absorbing but not deeply affecting. I was just forming this thought when we entered the third room, and what I now saw made me change my mind. We were looking at an installation titled Hunan School. The whole of the long room had taken on the appearance of an abandoned, decrepit classroom. Benches were broken or overturned, pictures had slid out of frames, maps appeared bleached, and Mao’s posters were stained with rainwater. Dust and a visible air of decline touched everything in sight. In dirty glass closets on the side there were on display old trophies, but they too appeared lost to history: the triumphs they celebrated had faded forever. Huong had painted the walls red up to waist level, but the red paint, just like the white paint above it, was peeling. In a few discarded boxes on the floor there were test tubes, funnels, and some disintegrating books. Every object was evocative and, at the same time, represented decay and death. At the far end were three showcases: desk-like structures with glass tops under which were displayed objects and brief accounts in Mandarin script. These were children’s stories about ordinary items they had picked up or otherwise come across in their daily lives. There was a story about the painting of the benches. Another one about a fly a kid had caught. Cai translated a third account written in a child’s hand: With this rope Li Chen tied the dog Hei Bao to the fence near the school and he didn’t untie him until the next morning. Hei Bao could have died and Li Chen was expelled from school for a week.
We left the museum half an hour later; we were headed to Chinatown for a very late lunch. I was full of praise for Hunan School. The installation showed how the students were doomed. I loved it. But Cai wasn’t so thrilled.
—How many visitors today were made to think of the students killed in Tiananmen?
Maya and Cai talked heatedly, each supporting the other, just as they used to do in Ehsaan’s classes. I knew better than to challenge them, but I could see absolutely nothing wrong with what Huong had done. In fact, he had evoked an entire world for me. I stayed silent. We got to Mott Street, and when we were waiting for the food, I heard Cai and Maya talking about Peter. Their low tones suggested that I ought not to eavesdrop. I hadn’t seen Peter for a long time. I tried to imagine how he would have responded to Huong’s art. It would take me a long time, at least months, to reach a simple understanding of what Cai and I had experienced differently when looking at Hunan School. For me, the richness of the experience had been about conjuring the mundane details of a point in time. Art as an attempt to capture a mood, a feeling, which reflected what it meant to be alive in that place at that time. It wasn’t the same for Cai. The politics of equality and radical change that she cherished had been sullied in China. That was the meaning of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. She had been in school then, and there was no mention in the news, but her uncle, her father’s younger brother, had come back from college in Beijing with a gunshot wound in his arm. I didn’t realize this at once, but what I came to see later was that Cai went to India to find among the peasants and the tribals in places like Chhattisgarh a purer idea of politics. It was her quest, different from, and yet similar to, the hippies going to India in the sixties. It was a tableau full of innocence and that is why the disappointment I later caused her was even more devastating.
* * *
Late one night in Lehman Library, I watched an old Hindi film about China, Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani. The film had probably been made even before Independence. A young Indian doctor from Kolhapur decides that because of the assaults of the Japanese army the poor people in China need medical help. The film was set in the late 1930s. Five doctors from India went on this humanitarian mission, and the film was the story of the one who didn’t come back. Young Dr. Kotnis falls in love with a Chinese peasant girl, played by an Indian woman who speaks in a high, singsong falsetto. Their marriage is seen as a bond between the two nations; the next day the Japanese bombing begins. Amidst widespread death and destruction, the doctor cures diseases and then succumbs to them. The drama of return, et cetera.
The thought came to me: I could perhaps go to China if I could find a connection with the work I had already done. I went to talk to Ehsaan about it. Characteristically, he asked me if I had eaten. He was looking at me with his wide-apart eyes.
—How are you? I get the feeling you are a bit adrift.
I shrugged.
Ehsaan said that it was useless to ask me about the future, I first needed to sort out the issues that were facing me in the present.
—There’s a famous ghazal of Javed Qureshi’s that begins Dil jalaane ki baat karte ho…The relevant lines for you are Hum ko apni khabar nahin yaaron / Tum zamaane ki baat karte ho.
He recited the Urdu couplet and smiled.
I knew the song. Farida Khanum’s rich voice came back to me, a golden length of rough silk: I have no news of myself, my friends / You are demanding a report on the world.
Ehsaan was wearing a pale blue kurta over a black turtleneck. While he cooked, we talked. He was stirring the pot in front of him, not saying too much. He had leftover zucchini in the fridge and was making a chicken curry for us to eat with rice.
I said something about the men whose letters I had read, their strange relationship to sex and to loneliness.
After a pause he addressed the chicken in the pot.
—And Agnes Smedley?
I sensed an opportunity.
—What was she looking for when she fell in with the Indians? Was it the same impulse that took her to China?
More silence from Ehsaan. He was still looking away from me when he spoke again.
—Talking of the same impulse…Cai will be going to India in a month. You are going to China. What am I to make of this?
—In the last couple of years, India and China are being talked about in the same breath. India is familiar to me. I want to go to China to look at India in a new way, to find—
I stopped, suddenly uncertain. But Ehsaan was nodding.
—It’s not just the opium that went from India to China, he said. There was a flow of nationalist ideas. This flow, at different times, was in both directions. As you know, Cai is working on Maoism in India…
I came back to my apartment well fed and slightly drunk. I let the phone ring in Cai’s apartment for a long time and debated whether I should leave a message. I began speaking into the machine, but then she picked up.
—Hi.
—How was your dinner?
—I want to have a drink with you. You want to come over?
—I can’t. I’m putting these highlights in my hair. Can’t you come here?
I was happy to walk over. Cai had silver foil wrapped in her short hair. There was a half-finished bottle of Chardonnay in her fridge that she took out, and I poured the wine in two glasses. She didn’t touch hers. Instead, she took off her flip-flops and stepped into the bathtub. I put down the cover of the toilet seat and sat on it. Dark color flowed from Cai’s hair when she bent her head and poured water over herself.
I took the mug from her hand. The water was warm. My fingers touched the back of Cai’s neck. I lowered my face and kissed her wet neck.
—More water, more water, please. Kailash!
After she was done, Cai sat on her couch, a towel draped around her head. I took a seat on the easy chair. I told her that Ehsaan had encouraged me to look into Agnes Smedley’s friendship with the writer Lu Xun. He had said that I could go to China for a semester. Cai was on her way to India, but the thought of me going to her country excited her.
—Will you go to Shanghai? You can visit Lu Xun Park.
—I don’t know yet.
—You can take a train and visit my parents. It will take just half a day to reach there from Shanghai.
Her parents!
I had never met Nina’s parents. She hadn’t asked me to visit Maine that summer. But here was Cai proposing that I visit her parents. What would she tell them about me? I kissed her and then hurried back to my apartment because both of us had to take care of our TA work for the next morning. I felt very tender toward Cai. A circle was closing. I was happy that I was going to China. I felt confident that I would do good work there.*1 On the walk back, I thought about a day in autumn the previous year. It was the closest we had ever been, both of us settled into the routine of studying and, yes, loving each other. The day was gorgeously sunny and warmer than the rest of the week had been. Some of the students chose to wear shorts and T-shirts at least while the sun was out. Cai said that we should get ice cream. We walked past a bookstore that had taken advantage of the weather to roll out bookshelves with used books piled on them. A pink-covered book caught my eye because of the name on it. Ismat Chughtai. The Quilt and Other Stories. The book had been published by a feminist press in Britain. Two dollars for a used copy. During the afternoon I had planned to grade papers, but I set that aside and turned first to the short story that had inspired the film Garam Hawa. One after another, I read more stories in the book. Ten years earlier, I had read some of those stories in Patna, and now for the first time I was reading them in English. I tried to remember, but the original words would not come back. I had bought the book because it seemed it had been waiting for me there among other books that spoke another language. We shared something, this book and I, we belonged with each other. But where had this obstacle come from? I passed my hand through the pages. The reflection from the red twill lit up her bluish-yellow face like sunrise. What would those words have been in the original Urdu? What had Chughtai got in mind when she described the face as “bluish-yellow”? Was that what she had even written? At least I remembered the original title of the story. I remembered also the summer afternoon in Delhi when I had gone to watch the film for the first time, and how the sorrow had struck home. But here I felt stranded in language. I had become a translated man, no longer able to connect with my own past. What else had I forgotten? The sorrow of the world, but sorrow also for myself, gripped my throat. Without warning, I began to cry.
Till then, Cai and I had been reading in bed. We were lying at an angle to each other, our heads together but our legs pointing in different directions, so that our bodies formed a V. The first sob that was wrenched out of me provided such release that, with a small yelp, I turned and touched Cai. She turned to me with alarm.
—What happened?
But I was like a child, hiding my tears by pressing into her cotton shirt. It was an expensive shirt: she had worn it because in her mind it was summer that day. She realized after a minute that I was actually crying.
—Oh, Kailash, she said, and cradled my head in her arm.
I let the tears come; the sorrow I had felt was abating, and in its place a feeling of exhilaration was taking wing. After a few minutes, I felt empty, and free.
Cai was looking at me, with a slightly worried expression, and I explained to her that I had been moved by what I was reading. It reminded me of what one poet had called the gentle poverty of my homeland.
I wiped my nose.
Without looking at her, I unbuttoned her shirt, which was already wet with my tears. She began to laugh, a short, amused laugh. Wordlessly, I took her breast in my mouth and began to suck as I would a mango when I was a boy. I had been reading about an unmarried girl in Chughtai’s story; youth was passing her by, she would never know a man’s touch. But here was Cai, already panting from the effort of assisting me as I stripped her clothes. I felt my soul had been cleansed by sorrow: I was able to savor what I possessed. She slipped her body under mine, and delicately drew my cock inside her. We were good when we were together. Everything fitted around a memory of what we had always done. She didn’t have the passivity of the sad and helpless girl I had been reading about in the story. When I started pushing into her, she unwrapped her legs and held them up in the air. Cai was one of the quietest people I knew, in public and in private, but she always made noise when we fucked. Her moans came suddenly and resembled the rhythmic fugue-like grunting of geese as they flew overhead when you were lying in the grass beside a river.
* * *
—
Cai flew to Bombay. She published a brief piece in The Village Voice, and Ehsaan pasted the cutting on his door. The story was about the mauling of a child in a town called Akola in central India. A dog had attacked a two-year-old boy and gouged his eyes. The child’s parents were daily-wage laborers. They had been working nearby, mixing clay at a brick kiln, rags tied around their heads. Cai had expertly linked the savagery of the attack, which read like a parable, to the relentless depredations of a system that had ruined farmers. The child’s parents had lost their meager farm and become migrant workers. The much-vaunted liberalization of the Indian market hadn’t brought wealth to the poor; on the contrary, it had made them more vulnerable and left them helpless and alone.
* * *
—
Her next piece was a long interview with a young widow whose
husband, a cotton farmer, had killed himself by drinking the pesticide that was to be used on his land. The farmer was in debt to a village moneylender who charged 5 percent monthly interest. The dead man also owed money to a bank. The expensive seeds he had bought had all gone to waste because the rains had failed. The widow had told Cai that the liter bottle of pesticide her husband had ingested had also been bought by taking a loan of three hundred rupees from a neighbor. The huge subsidies given by the United States to its farmers lowered the price of cotton worldwide while the new laws in India meant that the small farmers there had to contend with reduced earnings and higher rates of interest. I saw Cai’s article and the photograph of the widow, which had been taken by someone called Sebastian D’Souza. The photograph showed the widow holding a portrait of her husband: he was sitting on a chair in the studio, dressed formally in trousers and a shirt. On his feet he wore a pair of oversize slippers. The image, with its quiet pathos, held my attention. I would look at the plastic flowers placed by the photographer to the farmer’s right, and then my eyes would be drawn to the young widow’s sad and beautiful face.
Cai sent me a postcard and then nothing for a while. The postcard showed Salman Khan flexing his biceps. Cai had written that she had been busy and was looking for change; she was going to move to Bhopal and work with an NGO. But that probably didn’t happen because three months later, when we were still dealing with snow on our streets, Cai published a long report. This one was about her travel in the nearby forests of Chhattisgarh with the Naxals who were fighting for land rights. This report, nearly five thousand words long, was published in Mother Jones. It was less an analysis of a skewed economic system, though it was that too, than a record of terrible violence against the protesting tribals. Police executions at the edge of the forest or sometimes even in homes; torture and killings in police stations; army combing operations that included rape and the burning of huts. The report described appalling acts, but the emotion that I felt most strongly was perhaps envy. Cai was living in India and reporting on the changes that had come since I left. I lay sleepless in bed thinking about the thesis I first needed to write. I would have to do this soon. One night I woke up from a dream in which I had walked into the ocean with a book that I had been reading. Cai was standing on the beach. She was saying that we should be leaving now. But before I could get out, a wave washed over me and it swept the book away into the deep waters.
Immigrant, Montana Page 20
