Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  Your Honor, this is not a parable. I have narrated this auto story, ha ha, because I was in the car yesterday driving into Saratoga Springs to buy wine. On the car radio there was a report on children learning about death at a grief support center. The children were being encouraged to process the death of a family member. So many kids whose fathers had committed suicide, in some cases with a gun to the head. Today is Father’s Day and I can’t stop thinking of the voices of the children I heard yesterday. One little girl, the reporter said, had watched her mother have a heart attack. In the playroom at the grief support center, this girl picked up the toy phone and spent the entire session dialing 911. “Hi, 911, my mom’s dying. Hurry. Come quick.” “Hi, 911, my grandma’s dying. Hurry. Come quick.” And listening to the show I thought of Jennifer. I said nothing, wrote nothing, to her after she asked me to leave her house. We never talked frankly about anything. The story I’m telling here of the trip to the DMV and to the restaurant is my first step in that direction.

  * * *

  And what of Ehsaan! Ehsaan, beloved by his students—and also the FBI. When he died, Ehsaan was struggling to establish in Pakistan a university that would teach the humanities. The university was never built; according to The Economist’s obituary of Ehsaan, he died before a rupee was raised for it. If he came close to finding a sudden, unexpected visibility after his death, it happened after the September 11 attacks, when Ehsaan’s 1998 speech on terrorism found a new life on the Internet. In that speech, Ehsaan wanted terrorism by disaffected groups to be seen in relation to the much wider, more destructive use of state terrorism. In a characteristic move, he began by pointing out that President Reagan had welcomed the bearded mujahideen from Afghanistan to the White House and called them “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” Then, once the Soviet Union had pulled out from Afghanistan, the same people became terrorists in the eyes of the United States. A host of op-eds quoted Ehsaan in the months after the attacks, calling him “prescient” and “the face of progressive, secular Islam.” All this praise compelled me to look on YouTube for footage of Ehsaan in the years before I knew him. There were several clips of him, not just years but decades before the September 11 attacks, warning the United States that the support of covert operations worldwide would one day come back to haunt America. If the U.S. was going to be undemocratic elsewhere, peace was also unlikely at home. In one video of a teach-in from the late seventies, you can see Ehsaan explaining this contradiction by telling his audience: A man cannot be violent and sadistic to his mistress and be gentle to his wife.

  Ehsaan had introduced me to the work of Agnes Smedley, and my thesis project had taken me to China. Smedley was tormented by the FBI, and even when she was dead the House Un-American Activities Committee held a posthumous hearing about her. Smedley’s biographer has written that it wasn’t till the 1970s that, after years of obscurity and historical neglect, Smedley emerged as an unblemished heroine of the modern women’s movement and Daughter of Earth was reissued to critical acclaim. While reading about Smedley’s resurrection, I asked myself whether Ehsaan’s reputation would enjoy a similar rebirth. Will Ehsaan find fame? When a critic called the writer Richard Stern almost famous for being not famous I thought of my old professor.* This book is a token of my fond remembrance. I have seen the declassified FBI files on Ehsaan’s activities in this country. There is no element of doubt in those files, or much of ambivalence; certainly there is no feeling; the masked writer of those reports, name redacted, the anonymous hack of the state, isn’t required to risk vulnerability. All of which is understandable, of course, but my purpose here is to engage in magical thinking.

  I’m back on a plane that has now reached New York City. I’m returning from a research trip to China. The young woman I’m in love with is neither from my country nor from the country where I’m now living. Our countries have in the past fought wars, and our meeting here in New York City is the result of border crossings. We are working with a mentor we adore. My lover is in her university apartment and when I look out of the plane’s window I do so with the certain knowledge that of the millions of glittering lights beneath me there is one light that is hers. This naïve thought might be the result of my long travel, this sense of exhaustion that I’ve endured during my research. It’s also possible that, just a generation removed from rural life, I am dazzled by the trappings of urban civilization. In our mentor’s class, a line from Trotsky: Yet every time a peasant’s horse shies in terror before the blinding lights of an automobile on the Russian road at night, a conflict of two cultures is reflected in the episode. I am and I am not the peasant; I am never not the horse. I marvel at the fact that there is one phone number, the right numbers in the right combination given to the phone operator, which will make the phone ring in the room of the one person in the world who is waiting for me. All of that is true. But there’s more that I want in that moment. I want to present my best self to my lover, and tired as I am, I want to sleep with my limbs entangled in hers. As I look out of the plane window into the night, I can taste her in my mouth.

  * * *

  But first a question: aren’t we condemned to repeat our stories and write the same book over and over again? Or, to put it differently, don’t we fall in love every time with the same person and make the same mistakes? I sometimes feel that all my life I’ve been faithful only to the fact of this experience—so that all my nostalgia is for my familiar struggles and my all-too-familiar failings. An account of what is familiar becomes the story of one’s life. It is life. I have always wanted to be in love; all I have managed to do is tell a story. That is not entirely accurate. I’m like the monkey who, crouching in front of a mirror, tries on a hat. He is only imitating his master. But the monkey has plans for this summer night. Although it is difficult to think clearly, or to remember previous nights, not least because his idea of who he is or was is mixed up with what he thinks he must become, he would like to step out precisely at 7:00. He will pause to sniff the open air. Then he will sally forth. Hat on his head, arm in arm with someone who knows about his journey, who will turn her head and smile when he starts humming his song.

  * Later, I read in Stern’s obituary in the Times the following comment from Philip Roth, but this reminded me not of what I admired about Ehsaan but about Roth himself: One of the reasons he never became famous—he was most famous among famous writers—was that his tone was hard to grasp, and some readers didn’t feel morally settled, Mr. Roth said, not because he was difficult or abstruse but because he was generous to all his characters. And that befuddled them. (On second thought, these words apply to Ehsaan too. His generosity to all parties baffled the righteous guardians on both the left and the right.)

  Author’s Note

  Immigrant, Montana, doesn’t exist. Although I visited the town of Emigrant, Montana, in August 2008, immediately after Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, I wish to state that the map presented here is faulty. Even the historical account accords only with what is remembered. Memory is real but it is not accurate. It is arguable that history is not accurate either; however, this novel isn’t the place to stage that particular debate.

  After Barack Obama was elected president I read about his courting Michelle. She was his boss, assigned to advise him during a summer job, but Obama began to ask her if she would go on a date. Before the end of the summer, she agreed to go out for a movie—Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing—and an ice-cream cone at Baskin-Robbins. The clipping in my notebook includes these lines: Vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard in 2004, Barack met Spike Lee at a reception. As Michelle has recalled, he told Lee, “I owe you a lot,” because, during the movie, Michelle had allowed him to touch her knee.

  Here is a partial list of those to whom I owe a lot:

  for providing conditions to write, the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, the Norman Mailer Center, the Corporation of Yaddo;

  for help on sections of an early dr
aft, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Scott Dahlie, Sheba Karim, Siddhartha Chowdhury;

  for reading the final manuscript, Karan Mahajan, Kiran Desai;

  for their various acts of encouragement and friendship over the years, my thanks to Rob Nixon, David Means, Ken Chen, Amit Chaudhuri, Teju Cole;

  also, for their support, Ian Jack, Rick Simonson, Suketu Mehta, Erin Edmison;

  for early conversations about Eqbal Ahmad, Zia Mian, Dohra Ahmed, Robin Varghese, Julie Diamond, Anthony Arnove;

  for bringing out the Indian edition, Shruti Debi, David Davidar (again), Aienla Ozukum, Simar Puneet, and Bena Sareen;

  at Faber, the singular Lee Brackstone, and at Knopf, the inestimable pair of Sonny Mehta and Timothy O’Connell, and also the wonderful Anna Kaufman, no simple thank-you will suffice;

  and, for making all this happen, David Godwin, Susanna Lea, and Lisette Verhagen at DGA.

  This novel is about love, and since love comes at a price, I acknowledge my enormous and unpayable debt to my loving family, particularly Mona, Ila, and Rahul.

  Most quotations are accompanied by attributions in the body of the text. Where the source isn’t provided, as with clippings from notebooks, a simple Google search will do the job. In addition to the titles mentioned in the novel, I have used the following books: Grace Paley, Just As I Thought; Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch; David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18; Harold A. Gould, Sikhs, Swamis, Students, and Spies; William O’Rourke, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left. The reference in a footnote to a Pico Iyer quote comes from The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, and the response to it is taken from a review essay by Kai Friese, “Globetrotter’s Nama,” Outlook, August 28, 2000; the art installation Hunan School is very much inspired by Ilya Kabakov’s remarkable School No. 6 at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; I had enjoyed my exchange with Yu Hua at the Asia Society and I have quoted from his essay on Lu Xun; a malicious but accurate remark is borrowed from Paul Theroux’s entertaining book Sir Vidia’s Shadow. Ehsaan Ali is a fictional character, but parts of him are based on my interviews with family, friends, and former students of Eqbal Ahmad; I have relied upon Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian; I also interviewed Stuart Schaar, who is the author of Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age; my thanks to the staff at the Hampshire College archives for showing me the letter written by John Berger. I have drawn upon Ruth Price’s excellent The Lives of Agnes Smedley while recasting details of Smedley’s loves. Unless otherwise indicated, use has been made here of found images and I will make grateful acknowledgment if any further debts are owed.

  “ ‘Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between,’ my father would often advise me, but it seems to me that Mr. In-Between is precisely where we all live now.” So writes David Shields in Reality Hunger. This is a work of fiction as well as nonfiction, an in-between novel by an in-between writer.

  Illustration Credits

  1  Dr. Ruth © Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Wiesenthal/Getty Images; Dr. Watsa © Ritesh Uttamchandani

  2  The Duchess of Gordon after Sir Joshua Reynolds © Frick Collection

  3  Indian soldiers © Imperial War Museums (Q 53348)

  4  Henry Kissinger © Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  5  Picasso’s The Lovers © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  6  Boy at Partition Refugee Camp © Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  7  House in Irki, courtesy of the author

  8  Sasaram, courtesy of the author

  9  Sam the space monkey © NASA

  10  Statue of the monkey god Hanuman in Bihar, courtesy of the author

  11  Still from the Hindi film Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani

  12  Widow with portrait of deceased husband © Sebastian D’Souza/AFP/Getty Images

  13  Mausoleum in Bihar, courtesy of the author

  14  Satyajit Ray sketches reproduced in arrangements with HarperCollins Publishers India Private Limited from the book The Pather Panchali Sketchbook, edited by Sandip Ray and first published by them in association with Society for Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives © Sandip Ray, 2016

  A Note About the Author

  Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty, and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of nonfiction and a novel. He lives in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, where he is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. In 2016 Amitava Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (General Nonfiction) as well as a Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists.

  An A. A. Knopf Reading Group Guide

  Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar

  Discussion Questions

  In the first paragraph, why does Kailash as a new immigrant say he “felt insufficiently authentic”? What does he mean when he says he “needed a suitable narrative to present”?

  In part I, why does Kailash think that immigrants feel “at home in guilt”? What makes them feel guilty?

  Throughout the novel, Kailash’s thoughts are written like a testimony in court. Why does Kailash feel like he must defend himself?

  Why did Jennifer feel that she had to distance herself completely from Kailash at the end of part I? Do you think her actions were justified?

  What is the importance of Ehsaan’s stories to Kailash and the other graduate students?

  Do you think Ehsaan’s plan to kidnap Kissinger at the start of part III was hypothetical or serious? Does the author’s note about Eqbal Ahmad change your opinion? How so?

  How does Kailash’s relationships with Jennifer, Nina, and Cai differ? What does he learn from each relationship?

  How do the sex gurus Dr. Ruth, Dr. Watsa, and Rajneesh/Osho influence Kailash’s understanding of sex?

  Why do you think Peter told Kailash about Maya’s past with her uncle? Should he have?

  In part IV, was Nina justified in telling Kailash she was going to Maine when she really was with her ex-boyfriend’s dying mother? Would you be honest or lie? How would you feel if you were Kailash?

  In part V, what is the significance to Kailash of the place Immigrant, Montana, and Wolf Number Three who had been shot there?

  In parts I and V, Kailash compares monkeys and Indian immigrants. Compare and contrast their journeys to America.

  At the end of the novel, Kailash says that he “wanted very badly to go back to what I had ignored in my thesis. I wanted to write about love. Not just the story of one love, its beginning or its end, but the story of love and how it is haunted by loss.” How is this theme reflected throughout the novel?

  What is the significance of the various photographs throughout the book?

  Why does the author frame Kailash’s story with him looking back on his life? For assistance, read the epilogue.

  Suggested Reading

  A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley

  The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

  The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

  Open City by Teju Cole

  This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

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