Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

by Rajeev Balasubramanyam

  IN THE OLD DAYS, Radha used to be the only one he would soften for, the only one who could drag him away from his desk. In Chicago he would take her for what he called “road trips,” which in reality were ten-minute drives around the block until she fell asleep. After they moved to Cambridge, when she was six or seven, she would come into his study and gaze up at him with her enormous eyes and say, “Road trip, Daddy?” and on a good day he would put down his pencil and say, “Why not?” and off they would go, on longer jaunts around the East Anglian countryside, Radha talking incessantly from the backseat.

  A couple of years later, he decided to tell her the facts of life:

  “The West has twenty percent of the world’s population,” he said, “but consumes eighty percent of the world’s resources.”

  He doubted his words had much effect until, a full three weeks later, he was standing outside her bedroom door while she was playing with two friends who had come for a sleepover.

  “Do you know,” he heard her saying, “America eats eighty percent of the world’s food, and has only twenty percent of the world’s people?”

  Close enough, he thought.

  Radha had always taken after Chandra. She was the most adventurous of his children, the most rebellious. Even at sixteen when she cut her hair into sharp, upstanding tufts and wore a dog collar around her neck, he still felt he understood her. By the time she turned eighteen, however, she began to spend less time with him. Everyone assured him this was normal. She was getting ready for university, for life; she would come back when she was ready.

  The problem was that Radha didn’t go directly to university. Shortly after receiving her acceptance from SOAS she announced her intention to go to India by herself for the summer. Chandra had put up a token resistance, but he was actually quite excited by the idea. He had regularly criticized his children for being too Western; Sunny for his refusal to eat anything even moderately spicy, Radha for mispronouncing her own surname, Jasmine for her inability to lisp even a sentence in any of the four Indian languages Chandra spoke fluently. It was not their fault, but there was a nationalist in him who refused to pipe down, unable to get over his guilt at having joined the great transatlantic brain drain in the first place. He wished they could have visited India more often as a family, but it wouldn’t have been fair to Jean, or to any of the children whose friends went on holidays to Europe or Hawaii.

  “I just don’t think you’re getting it, Charles,” said Jean. “She’s not an Indian girl searching for her roots. She’s a Western girl looking for action, which means drugs. They’ve been doing it since the sixties.”

  Chandra listened, but he wasn’t so sure. To him, Radha did have an Indian side. It was there in the way she dispensed with social niceties in favor of verbal tactility, as if she did not see the boundaries between herself and others. It was there in her physicality too, how she would massage his forehead without having to be asked, the way she related to children via touch instead of that stilted British baby talk. The truth was that he couldn’t wait to see how the experience changed his daughter. Yes, he decided, Radha should go to India. It was a cultural, even moral, imperative.

  Radha left with a list of his friends and relatives in various parts of the country, from Trivandrum to Darjeeling, photocopied from his old address book. She would travel alone for six weeks and in August she would meet Chandra in Delhi where he had a conference. He would show her his old haunts. Actually, he’d worked so hard at Delhi School of Economics that he hadn’t really had any, but he’d make something up. Maybe she would have discovered haunts of her own by then. Maybe she would be speaking Hindi, would finally understand where her father was coming from, would throw her arms around him and say, “Okay, Daddy, I get it now,” to which he would ruffle her hair and they’d jump into an air-conditioned Ambassador and head off for Agra or Jaipur while he explained why a human capital-intensive export promotion strategy was the only possible way forward within the context of a globalized economy.

  And all of this might have happened had it not been for Prakash.

  Professor Chandra and his brother had never been close. Prakash was five years older, serious, bookish, and moody. He had left for university when Chandra was twelve and the two had seen little of each other since. By the time Chandra was in his thirties, however, it became clear that Prakash resented him, which, to Chandra, made no sense: Prakash had never wanted to leave India, or to stay in academia; he had quit his PhD in his third year to pursue full-time political activism and then, after a brief jail term during the Emergency, writing.

  Prakash’s first book was published a year after Chandra’s own Why the Third World Matters and with a not dissimilar title: No Bronze Medal for Third World. But it did poorly, gained no international distribution, suffered low sales in India and, unlike Chandra’s book which earned a thick sheaf of both scathing and glowing reviews, was simply ignored by most reviewers, or else dismissed as “standard Marxist fare.”

  Both had written several books since, but Prakash had never gained the renown Chandra did. He had a following among young people who liked his uncompromising attitude, his bare-knuckled debating style, but among his peers he was viewed as a colorful yet unhinged character whose chief occupation was the hoisting of his own flag in the name of the poor and downtrodden, a reputation only exacerbated when it came to the attention of his fellow party members that he had earned quite substantial sums of money consulting for the World Bank in the nineties (a gig he had never thanked Chandra for securing).

  Prakash had never visited America or England: “I have no interest in capitalist countries,” he always said, but Chandra suspected he was afraid of being found lacking, unable to cope with the codes of another culture, that his anticolonial ire would be revealed as a colossal inferiority complex proving that he wasn’t at war with the West at all—but with himself.

  It was impossible for Chandra to visit his brother without an argument ensuing, usually within the first ten minutes. No utterance was innocent. To request a cup of tea was to invite a debate on Monsanto and “big sugar”; to talk about the weather was to risk a diatribe on the hypocrisy of the Kyoto Protocol. And staying silent was not an option either: Prakash would view this as an invitation to explain why Chandra’s world view was symptomatic of advanced colonial brainwashing and would proceed to rectify this with several hours of merciless fraternal reeducation.

  After Chandra’s parents died, Prakash became his closest relative, but their “bickering” as Jean termed it (a choice of words Chandra found unfair) made all visits painful, drawn-out affairs. Mohini, Prakash’s wife (a doctor who, in truth, was the sole breadwinner) made it easier, but she tended to say very little during his visits, would just watch with an expression more pitying than disapproving. On this occasion, Chandra hoped that Radha’s presence would bring out a more human side in Prakash, who had never had children. With Radha around he might let his hair down (what little he had left of it), eat ice cream, tell jokes, visit the zoo.

  * * *

  —

  Radha had been in Delhi for three weeks by the time Chandra arrived. He was supposed to get there in the afternoon but his flight was delayed and it was after midnight when he reached Saket.

  Prakash answered the door, clad in the evening wear of the politically immature: khadi khurta, ill-fitting jeans, a glass of rum pani in his hand. He had grown a full beard, which was new (the last time Chandra saw him—eighteen months ago—he’d been sporting a Stalinesque mustache), but he was still skinny as a teenager; Prakash never put on weight, even though he ate and drank recklessly, a side-effect, perhaps, of perpetual outrage.

  “I brought you some whisky,” said Chandra.

  “Good,” said Prakash, his way of saying thank you.

  “Where’s Mohini?”

  “In bed. She needs to be up early.” Prakash clapped Chandra on the shoulder. “Come on,
your daughter’s in here.”

  Radha was sitting on the sofa dressed exactly like Prakash. She too had a glass of rum pani in her hand and, arrestingly, a cigarette. Her eyes remained focused on the book in her lap even as Chandra stood in front of her, staring. But the moment she looked up, he knew.

  The girl he used to chauffeur around Chicago’s suburbs, the one who later wore dog collars and listened to punk rock music, the only one he could talk to about economics or his colleagues or even, on occasion, his wife, had gone. There was a look in those big chestnut-colored eyes that was all too familiar to him, that seething sense of superiority, as if her mind were perpetually absorbed with matters beyond his puny comprehension. Yes, Radha hadn’t become a drug addict, and nor had she discovered her roots. She had become a Marxist. No, worse. She had become a Prakash-ist.

  The arguing began in earnest the following evening, when Chandra returned from his seminar. Mohini was home and he was glad to see her, helping her in the kitchen while she cooked dinner for everyone despite having just completed a twelve-hour shift. They were both complaining of exhaustion while they carried the food into the living room, and this was how it began.

  “This is bourgeois exhaustion,” said Prakash. “There are workers who’ve been sitting in front of machines since yesterday without toilet breaks.”

  “Bourgeois or not,” said Mohini. “I’m tired.”

  Professor Chandra smiled, an expression of sympathy from the only other person in the house who actually worked.

  “Even communists get tired,” said Chandra.

  “That depends on your definition of communism,” said Prakash, tearing his roti in half.

  Chandra knew he shouldn’t rise to the bait, but he also knew his brother was about to tell him that workers in socialist states never felt tired (Prakash had made far more outrageous claims in the past).

  “So let’s go to a factory in North Korea,” said Chandra. “Let’s see.”

  “Why is it always North Korea?” said Radha. “Why should North Korea always be the cardboard villain in the room?”

  “Not card,” said Prakash. “Straw.”

  “Exactly,” said Radha. “The strawman.”

  “Yes,” said Chandra, closing his eyes with the air of a man diagnosed with a disease too polysyllabic to remember. “I have drawn the short strawman.”

  As the evening progressed the arguing continued, which was normal when Prakash and Chandra were together, only now he was up against Prakash 1.0 and Prakash 2.0, a laboratory-created clone who bore a horrifying resemblance to Professor Chandra’s daughter.

  “It simply isn’t true that colonialism is ‘over,’ ” she was saying, that Prakash-ist smirk never leaving her lips. “That’s nonsense. The WTO is nothing but primitive accumulation under the guise of”—she made the dreaded air quotes—“ ‘free trade.’ ”

  “It’s more complex than that,” said Chandra.

  “Free trade benefits the most powerful economy,” continued Radha, “which means”—she lifted her fingers once more—“ ‘the West.’ ”

  “We Marxists know better,” said Prakash, and put his arm around Radha who nodded with grotesque gravity while Mohini spooned ice cream into Chandra’s bowl.

  “Prakash,” said Chandra, “what have you been filling her head with?”

  Prakash clapped his hands. “We’ve only been talking! She’s a very bright girl.”

  “She can think for herself, Dad,” said Radha while Prakash nodded.

  Chandra looked at Mohini. “What do you think?”

  “I think we need more ice cream,” said Mohini, which was her way of telling him to give up. He had lost. He had lost everything.

  * * *

  —

  It was only when Radha returned to England that the true extent of her Kafkaesque metamorphosis became apparent. Chandra tried to look on the bright side. Dinnertimes were livelier affairs now, full of debate and repartee, their duels enhanced by the fact of their occupying near opposite ends of the spectrum. But it was not long before he realized that there was a far graver problem at hand. Prakash had taught Radha more than Marxism. He had taught her how to hate.

  “Imperialist”…“the West”…“bourgeois”…“capitalist”…these words would fly from her lips like tiny little swastikas, her knuckles turning white, her jaw clenched, her eyes hard as Siberian pickaxes as she sentenced most of the world to the gulag for their crimes against ideology. Any counterargument was met with contempt, the automatic response of the recent convert. “Trickle down! It’s trickling up, for God’s sake!” or, “Do you think the workers are so stupid they can’t manage their own factories?” or, “Have you talked to any peasants about that?”

  Prakash seemed to have convinced Radha that her father was not only her enemy, but also the enemy of all that was good and true in the world, of babies dying of malnutrition, of the blacks in South Africa, of the children incinerated at Hiroshima, of decent, humble, self-sacrificing leftists everywhere who simply wanted to right the wrongs that men like he and Pinochet had caused in their infinite malevolence.

  Jean didn’t help with comments like “God, you’re so brainwashed, Radha,” or Sunny, who simply waved fifty-pound notes in her face. It was Sunny who gave her the nickname Radical Rad, late in his year of triumph in which he’d proved his net salary exceeded that of his father.

  “So you’re a proletarian, are you, Rad?” he asked once.

  “No, knob-head,” said Radha, which was how she usually addressed her brother in those days (that or “prick-face”). “Middle-class intellectuals who’ve become aware of the nature of the system become automatically conjoined with the revolutionary proletariat.”

  “So why don’t you conjoin yourself with a two-up two-down, outside-toilet council house?” said Sunny. “Or I could find you a lovely little spot in the Bronx? You could live over a crack den and get a face tattoo. It’s all the rage with New York proles.”

  “Because, dick-for-brains, I’m not fighting to lower my own circumstances but to raise everyone else’s. How would living in a crack house benefit anyone?”

  “All Sunny’s trying to say—” began Chandra, but with both of them in full flow he rarely finished a sentence.

  “I didn’t ask to be born into a bourgeois family. That’s out of my control. But now that I have seen the correct—”

  “I have been to the promised laaand,” said Sunny. “I have seen the light on the mountaintop and someday aaall my people will be free.”

  Radha had her hands raised in front of her now, palms outward like a bear in attack mode.

  “Well, what would you know about it, you selfish, money-grabbing fuck-wit? Anyone can make money, Sunny. Any jerk-off can play the system. It takes brains to understand it.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Chandra from his armchair, a stupidly self-satisfied statement that, fortunately, went over his daughter’s head.

  “So you understand the stock market, do you, Radha?” said Sunny. “Or gold or crude oil or options or insurance?”

  “Or unemployment or inflation or the money supply,” said Chandra, knowing it was wrong of him to take his son’s side.

  “I don’t want to understand it,” said Radha. “I want to—”

  And then she stopped, as if only just realizing her father was in the room. When she spoke her voice was much deeper, as if she were in the process of transmuting, a Marxist lycanthrope under a full moon.

  “So basically, Dad, if you don’t have a PhD in theoretical economics then you shouldn’t be able to vote, or have an opinion, or have children? Is that it?”

  “What I am saying,” said Chandra in his softest bear-whispering voice, “is that it’s hard to understand the economy without knowing much economics.”

  “And I don’t know much economics?”

  Sunny
coughed the word “understatement.”

  “I think you’re doing very well, Radha,” he said. “You are learning; you are passionate. It’s good. But you still have things to learn. That’s all.”

  “Like…what?”

  “Like a few more facts,” said Chandra.

  “Oh…facts?”

  “It’s something that comes with experience.”

  “Is…it…now?” said Radha. “The older one gets, the more one becomes…like…you.”

  It was always this way. Radha’s fights with Sunny were mere sideshows, deflections from the true source of all evil: Professor P. R. Chandrasekhar, Clifford H. Doyle Professor Emeritus of Economics who, until then, had believed his daughter was proud of his accomplishments.

  He was relieved when she left for university, confident SOAS would straighten her out, that a good education would guide her toward a more thoughtful position so that in later years they’d be able to laugh together at her “Prakash phase.” But he had forgotten that nothing is more dangerous to a fanatic than a little knowledge…except for a lot of knowledge. And over the following years, this was what Radha acquired.

  After she graduated from SOAS their relations seemed to be improving. She visited India once more but was disillusioned with Prakash on her return, talking about “petty tyrants” and “authoritarian patriarchs.” But the politics continued, especially after she moved into a tumbledown wreck of a house in Hackney with six other lost souls who did minimum-wage work in the day and harassed the better off at night.

  But all this was during the heyday of neoliberalism when the opposition consisted of mostly middle-class contrarian ingrates who could still make money if they chose to (and usually did) entirely because of the efforts of people like Professor Chandra. Economists and policy-makers were respected technicians back then, the ones who made things work, the ones without whom the system would fall apart. Yes, it wasn’t perfect—they all knew this—but no amount of rage or egg-throwing would change that.