by Antani, Jay
The teacher strutted in, silver-haired, his willowy frame dressed in a starched white shirt and brown slacks. He glided in on feet quick as a bird’s. As soon as he appeared, the students all shot to their feet in a flurry of rustling and thumping, and calls of “Good morning, sir” erupted here and there. I made like everyone else and stood up—though the whole thing felt ingratiating and ridiculous.
The teacher sniffed at the air critically, waved everyone back down, and stepped onto the dais that separated the teacher from the students. As he set his notes down at a wooden table in front of the chalkboard, it hit me that this was the same guy I’d seen when I’d stopped by the faculty lounge to speak with the French teacher, the day of my registration. This was the guy blowing all that hot air about getting booked at the scene of a traffic accident. Old Frog Eyes.
Before the lecture started, I slid off the bench and went down to speak with him.
“Sir, I’m a new student,” I said.
Frog Eyes looked up from his notes. “Just a minute,” he said, and I saw his small mouth was crowded with paan-stained, every-which-way teeth. Up close, his features looked softer, almost feminine, with delicate lines creasing both sides. But what gave him his regal bearing was the silvery hair, impeccably parted and combed. He opened a black-bound book. “Number?”
“Hmm?”
“Student number—” He leaned toward me over the table. “I see, this is your first day. You don’t know your number.”
“I’ve been ill. My name’s Vikram. Mistry.”
He slid his pencil down the roll call.
“One hundred eighty-four,” he stated and put a tick mark next to the name. With that, I turned around to return to my seat when I bumped into the first blind person I had ever seen (apart from Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker and that blind girl from Little House).
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.
Dark glasses covered his eyes, and he tapped a stick along as he went, feeling his way along with his other hand. “S’okay, bhai,” the blind student said affably, grinning, adding in Gujarati, “Usually I am the one bumping into others. So, don’t worry. Who’s this?”
“Vikram. Vik.”
He took my hand with his free one. “Pradeep. Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” I said.
I shared a smile with him, then with the girl I saw behind him, in a skirt and a sleeveless blouse. She walked a step behind Pradeep with a hand at his elbow. She helped guide him to his seat, up front, center bench.
“Thank you,” I heard Pradeep say, followed by a name.
“Sure.”
It made me half-stop in my tracks as I returned to my bench. Sure? It wasn’t the word, but the accent she had said it in. American. Unmistakable. The breathy “s,” the lovely rounded “r.” It was a balm to my heart to hear it, for that one second.
I half-turned in her direction and saw her take a seat on the opposite side of the hall—the girls’ side.
She had to have heard me speak, heard my accent, that there was a coincidence here. But she never even glanced in my direction. Apparently never gave it a thought. She just fell into conversation with the girl beside her.
“Okay, okay, let us start,” the teacher boomed.
“PROF. SRIDHARAN,” he wrote in large block letters on the chalkboard. “For those of you who are new to the class today. Or those who fell asleep at my first lecture—” He guffawed to himself, and polite, scattered laughter sounded around the hall. “Let us take up the rise of Modernism in late nineteenth-century drama, shall we?” And he put on a pair of black half-glasses and bent over his notes that lay open on the table.
Sridharan stepped back and opened his mouth to launch into his lecture when a lanky, shaggy-haired student loped in with a notebook in one hand and a pen dangling from his mouth. I noticed he wore a baggy black T-shirt emblazoned with the Harley-Davidson logo. I leaned forward to get a better look as he passed the front of the lecture hall and saw the red banner with “Harley-Davidson” in bold white lettering and an American Eagle perched atop it with outspread wings. This sudden glimpse of American culture caught me off guard.
Sridharan paused, mouth still open, and followed Harley with his eyes.
“Sorry, sir,” Harley said tonelessly. He slid in next to Pradeep on the front bench, throwing an arm along the back of it. Pradeep sensed him there, leaned toward him, smiled. He and Harley exchanged a few friendly words.
“Everyone has settled in?” Sridharan asked brusquely. “Everyone is happy?”
Harley cleared his throat, straightened up. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Sridharan sighed and made a tick mark in his book. Then he took a breath and began. For the next fifty minutes, he rattled straight from his notes—an assembly line of authors, places, dates, pausing only to chalk up names like Galsworthy and Ibsen and Shaw on the board, along with a year when some labor riots broke out.
The air, circulated gently by ceiling fans, filled with the scratching of pens and the rustle of turning pages. As he spoke, I scribbled a few notes, a peppering of facts I thought he might quiz us on, but I was stunned by the fury of note-taking going on around me. Everyone was hunched low over their notebooks and taking down, it seemed, every word that came out of Sridharan’s mouth. The student in front of me filled up several pages quickly, pausing now and then to replenish his pen by dipping it into his inkwell. And his penmanship never flagged; it was always florid and impressive.
I glanced toward the front of the hall and a couple of rows over, to the girl who had walked in with Pradeep. There she was in profile, her black hair tied into a ponytail dropping to her upper back. She held a pen poised over an open notebook, but, unlike the rest of the students, she hadn’t whipped herself into a spasm of scribbling. She just stared serenely ahead, eyes on the chalkboard, listening but only incidentally, and seemed even bored. Then I remembered her from the day I’d come to college to register. She’d worn her hair loose that day, when she’d driven by in the white Maruti.
The moment the lecture wrapped up and Sridharan was tucking away his precious notes, I saw the girl get up and glide out along with a friend. She stopped only once, to say goodbye to Pradeep, and was gone, her friend at her heels.
I checked my schedule and noticed my next lecture didn’t start for another hour. Racking my brains for ways to kill time, I found myself wandering around aimlessly. But then it occurred to me that I was inviting curious stares and attention, and I’d better start moving more intently, act like I knew where I was going, had somewhere to be.
From the first floor verandah, I looked out onto the quad. For the most part, the men and women seemed willfully segregated here. The quieter females kept to their groups, and the gregarious males to theirs. They mingled somewhat outside lecture halls or in the bower that formed the quad’s center or in the canteen on the opposite side of the quad, from which came the clink of soda bottles and waves of laughter. Students crossed the quad on paths bordered by patches of scant grass, shrubs of lilies and roses.
I was relieved to find the college library and eagerly took sanctuary there. The library was cool and quiet, as shady as the lecture halls. I made for the corner, where various newspapers were laid out on a pair of extra-wide reading stands pushed against each other. I scanned the papers—three across on each one, with a bunch more on scrolls hung up on a rack nearby. New York Times? Herald Tribune? Not here. Not one newspaper from west of Ahmedabad. I saw newspapers in Hindi, Gujarati, and a half-dozen other Indian languages. I did find The Times of India, in English. I began reading the English and, as I did, I could feel my brain relax, welcoming the words like old friends.
I heard a rustling next to me: someone turning the pages of a newspaper. I turned to the reader. It was that jet-eyed, mahogany-dark student with the fancy pen from my lecture. He glanced in my direction, a smile on his face, and returned to the paper.
“What language is that?” I asked, noticing the paper’s doodle-like script.
<
br /> “This is Tamil. From Tamil Nadu. Far south.” His accent was typically Indian but not Gujarati. The t’s and u’s were more pronounced, and the words declarative, as if he had polished each syllable, speaking no more, no less than he intended.
“Are you also an English Major?”
“Hm.” He shifted his feet to face me. “English. You are also?”
I nodded. “You were practically writing a book in that class. Does everyone take so many notes?”
“It is the only way to prepare for the essays, no? The exam essays.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been to an Indian college before.”
“Where you are from? London?”
“States.” I explained about my father packing us up, our moving here.
“How long you are here?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. You?”
“I’m here for my B.A. Three years. Then back to Madras for seminary studies.” He turned to the Tamil paper and peered closely at something.
“Seminary? You want to be a priest?”
He didn’t answer right away, didn’t even look away from the newspaper. When he’d finished what he was reading, he straightened, faced me with a smile. “Priest. Yes.”
“Is it far? I mean, where you’re from?”
“Not so far as States, but, yes” he said. “It is far.”
“I’m Vik,” I said, glad to have met someone else far from home.
“Devasia.” We shook hands.
* *
The evening was so quiet. Anand and I hung out with our parents in the tiny balcony off their bedroom. Ghatlodiya settled down now, with the sun fading, and the street cleared of all but a few rickshaws and bicycles. Children could be heard playing in nearby housing complexes and shanties. Pools of rainwater reflected the few streetlights.
Anand sat in a plastic chair, reading aloud the Gujarati alphabet and phrases from a schoolbook. My mother would correct him now and then, in between hearing my father update her on the goings-on at his work. I thought again of how he had a car to pick him up, drop him off, and now my brother too seemed to have door-to-door rickshaw service to and from school (along with a group of neighborhood schoolchildren). My mother, meanwhile, spent her days at home, sealed off from India’s madness. Only I was foundering, on foot and in rust-bucket buses all day all over this muck-filled city.
“Why don’t we get Anand a proper tutor?” my father said, leaning his elbows against the railing. He turned to my mother, “He’s not bad, though,” he said, smiling. “In two weeks, he’ll be a local.”
“Let’s wait till we’re out of here, then we can make all arrangements,” she said.
“There I’ve got news I’ve been waiting to tell you.” He turned, shadowed in the twilight, and I had the momentary sensation he was pronouncing our fate. “We’ll be out of here and in our bungalow by the end of the week.”
The hope in my mother’s voice tensed with caution. “You think we will, or you were told for sure?”
My father nodded, laughing. “I got memo this morning. Bungalow will be ready by Sunday. From there, it’ll all get easier.”
“That we will see,” my mother said plainly, then she turned to me. “How are you, beta?” Her voice calm and compassionate, like the cool of evening.
I shrugged. “Be all right.”
By framing my palms together at right angles, I made a movie screen out of them. I looked through them and followed flocks of swallows against the evening sky, racing together in fitful yet coordinated arcs.
“We’ll get that camera back soon,” my father said.
Anand closed his book and stood. He withdrew into the guesthouse, probably to comb through his baseball magazine again or listen to one of my R.E.M. tapes on his Walkman. My parents went back inside too.
I stayed out on the balcony as the evening darkened. The silence here was so primitive, as if I’d traveled not only thousands of miles but decades and decades into the past—a long ways from the comfort of my American TV shows and phone calls to friends. Here, all I heard was the trill of a bicycle far up the road, a rickshaw sputtering off somewhere. Every once in a while came the faint voices of children and women, the clink of utensils and pots from the shanties. I could smell the cooking fires as the noises faded with the light. It was a primitive silence, a saddening silence, and I felt scared, alone in the sadness.
8
Aroutine took shape. In the mornings, I trekked off to the Ghatlodiya bus stand with my backpack full of books and the tiffin of food to Xavier’s. Classes lasted into the afternoon, till two o’clock—by which time, a monsoon downpour would be lashing the city, and I would be famished.
Behind the college canteen, Devasia pointed out, was the hostel—a gray two-story building with tiled roofing—where he stayed. After classes, Devasia would eat his lunch in the mess hall adjacent to the hostel. I would accompany him, and we would eat together—he, with his Tamil appetite and enough rice on his stainless steel plate to fill the underside of a Frisbee, and I, with my more modest Gujarati portions of roti and vegetables.
“Why you’re not taking food here only?” he once asked me, gesturing to the food being ladled out from pots by the serving boys in the mess.
I shook my head and smiled. “Dysentery isn’t something I want twice.”
My French classes started up that week too. After lunch, I took the bus, bumping and bashing my way to the Alliance Française. On the first day, I paid the severe-looking French witch the seven hundred rupees I owed her. (Happily, I never saw her again for the six weeks I took that class.)
The class met in a small room—too small, that is, for the dozen of us enrolled—but it was equipped with an air conditioner. You walked up a narrow spiral staircase from the lobby of the Alliance and into a noisy whoosh of dreamy-cool air—sweaty, musty, but what a relief.
I kept to myself and my exercise book and wondered what it would be like to kiss our instructor, a round-faced, rosy-cheeked early-twentysomething from Kashmir who had spent two years living in Paris. Her French was efficient, not snotty the way I imagined all things French to be. The words came out of her like water down the stones of a happy brook. She spoke of writing postcards on sunny afternoons at café tables outside the Pompidou.
After two hours of French, I emerged dazed and dislocated. The gravel path of the Alliance, often drenched from the rains, gave way into late-afternoon Ahmedabad. Back to my own life. I staggered up the road and joined the commuters—the bankers, clerks, and housewives—who’d collected together, ready for the melee. When the bus arrived, this civic peace collapsed instantly and something just short of a riot broke out as everyone hurled themselves over each other to get aboard the bus.
It was no different on that day, my second day of French class. I managed to clamber on, shoved up by the velocity of onrushing passengers. The conductor squeezed through—always insisting on his fare—and I pulled out my wallet, paid for my ticket.
Tink-tink!
I hung on to the overhead bar, wedged into a sliver of space. I thought of how it had been two weeks since I sent my letters. Still no word from home. Had my letters gotten lost? I decided I’d write Shannon again—as soon as I got home. What was keeping her so long? And Nate? Karl? The frightening thought occurred to me again that I had been forgotten. I could taste the bitterness rising up inside me and tried to shake it off. Stop panicking, I told myself, write them again. And use a post office in the city, not that miserable shack in Ghatlodiya. I resolved to do that. Just that.
The bus was packed shoulder-to-shoulder now. I held on to the bar and began to doze off, wedged between bodies, to the rocking motion of the bus. Once you got used to the smell, after a long day, it wasn’t too hard to do.
I snapped out of my stupor as we entered the city’s outer neighborhoods, Ghatlodiya the last stop, farthest out. As the bus came to a halt, I anticipated the stampede to disembark. Bucking up my backpack, I pushed ahead and, in the tangle of legs a
nd hands, shouts, and sweat, I got one leg off the bus then the other. Ah! Free! I separated from the mob and took a few steps. That’s when I had the sensation of feeling lighter, of weightlessness, of something—a solid part of me—suddenly yanked from my body. I felt my back pocket—
My wallet!
It was gone. Lifted. Into thin air. Outer space.
I flung myself around, searched faces, for fleeing bodies. But everyone, men and women indifferent, dispersed where they willed. I found myself grabbing at arms, spinning around on my heels, roaming the crowds, looking for the slightest sign. I got a few looks but no sign of the thief. The pickpocket. The asshole who took my wallet. I couldn’t care less about the money inside or the college I.D.—I wanted the photos.
My heart dropped several floors in my chest. Everyone cleared the bus stand, gone every which way, to the bazaars or to wherever they lived. The bus slumbered where it stood; this was the last stop on its route and the driver needed his break. I scrambled back on. I searched the seats, below the seats, the floor of the bus from front to back.
“Eh! Abay-oy!” the driver shouted. He stepped back on the bus, a bulge of paan in his mouth. He immediately pegged me as someone “not from around there,” so he stayed quiet and just stared at me, wild-eyed. Probably he thought I was some harmless lunatic.
“I’m looking for something!” I shouted in English.
But except for mud and scraps, nothing remained in the bus. It was gone. The wallet, the pictures, gone. I felt hate, a sudden impulse to rage, to weep. I staggered off the bus, my mind fuming. I couldn’t speak, not even a swear word (nothing powerful and condemning enough came to my mind!). It was minutes later when I came to my senses, became aware that I wasn’t even on the bus anymore but walking up the road, surrounded by strangers. Without my wallet. My photos. My last links to home.
