by Antani, Jay
I felt sort of absurd now, taking up the director’s time with this envelope in my hand, when he apparently had more important things on his mind. “I’ve brought some photographs,” I pressed on, “if you’d like to take a look—”
“Mister … Mistry, is it?” Menon sighed. “There’s nothing I, nor anyone here, can do for you. We’ve a highly structured program here, and we don’t accept transfers. Why don’t you finish your B.A. then apply for our postgraduate program, but just now, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.” Finish your B.A.? The words sucked all the oxygen out of the air.
“But I wouldn’t need to transfer,” I said. “I’d be happy to apply as a first year. I think N.I.D. would be perfect for me. If you’d consider these,”—I held out the envelope in my hands—“I’d appreciate it.”
Menon exhaled impatiently. “Quite impossible. We have an exhaustive selection process. All our students are the best of the best.” He began to chuckle lightly to himself. “You can’t just—” Then, assuming a serious expression, he pointed to my envelope and added, “See, leave your things just there by my door. If I find they have merit, perhaps you can take a class here and there while you finish your B.A. Just now I’m running late.“
I wasn’t going to leave my “things” by his door. I knew he’d shove it under a pile of junk in his office and forget about them.
“Well … thank you,” I said. He offered his hand. I shook it. I couldn’t believe this was the end of our meeting. Menon told me good luck then shuffled away to the editing suites. I watched him standing at the door to the suites, his back to me, greeting his students and discussing their work. A vague feeling of disappointment and embarrassment began to fill inside me. I felt suddenly anxious to leave.
Out on the lawn, students gathered in groups. A boy went around with cups of chai on a tray, handing out chai to takers. On the lawn’s far side, a groundskeeper went along trimming the shrubbery. I followed the pathway back toward the gate.
In just the little I’d seen, I sensed that N.I.D. was everything Xavier’s wasn’t, a place where I could change things around for myself. Finish your B.A., he’d said. Good lord! That was two years from now. And then what? I wasn’t guaranteed acceptance to this school. What was I guaranteed? The only guarantee I had was my admissions letter to Wisconsin. There, in the drawer of my desk. But it was just a letter. It was not a future. A future you made on your own. Good luck with that.
Just ahead, I noticed the student, the one named Mr. Bose, short, floppy-haired, in a T-shirt and jeans, on the grass, smoking a cigarette alongside a group of friends. There were four of them together, two guys and two girls. As I passed, Bose nodded hello to me, and I waved back.
“Good luck with your meeting tomorrow,” I told him, slowing as I passed. “He seems tough.”
Bose chuckled. “You don’t know half of it, yaar. I just don’t want a bounty on my head from those Union Carbide bastards.”
“Like Salman Rushdie, he’s like Hindu Salman Rushdie?” the guy sitting opposite Bose said, chuckling. He wore close-cropped hair, a scruffy beard and round-rimmed glasses, giving the impression of an Ahmedabadi chai-café intellectual. “Corporate fatwah. You’re finished, butchu!”
“Don’t even say that,” Bose said, shaking his head and drawing on his cigarette.
“Sounds exciting,” I said. “Hope you don’t run into more trouble.”
I recalled Union Carbide now. Images on American TV of dejected, impoverished factory workers, all victims of a poison gas leak from the plant, huddled like concentration-camp inmates against the grim walls of their shanties. I recalled feeling sorry for them, but also resenting them, their emaciated and hopeless faces signaling to Americans the sorry plight of the place I was from.
“Are you a student here?” Bose asked. Before I could answer, he pointed to the envelope in my hand, and added, “Those drawings or what?”
“Photographs,” I said. “I wanted to show them to the director, thought it might help my case. I was thinking about transferring here.”
“Sit down, dost,” Bose said cordially. “You smoke?”
I shook my head and sat on my haunches.
“Sunil. Sunil Bose.” He extended his hand. I shook it then shook hands with the others. I was amazed: Sunil was into video production, so was Scruffy-Beard. He and Sunil were making a documentary together on the Bhopal disaster. Of the two girls, the one with short, stylish black hair—what Kamala Auntie would call a “boy cut”—was an animation student, while the other—more aloof, but with a ready, pretty smile—was studying furniture design. I couldn’t believe such things could be studied here, in the midst of Ahmedabad. The tea boy came around. Scruffy-beard took a cup.
Sunil and I got to talking about American movies. He told me about how, after a screening of Jaws at the Calcutta Film Festival (he was from Calcutta), he snuck into the projectionist’s booth, found a discarded length of film—a foot or so—on the winding bench and pocketed it. “It’s two shots actually,” Sunil explained. “One is the close-up of Quint, screaming, blood pouring out his mouth. Next shot is the shark pulling him in. Best scene in that film.”
“Solid movie, yaar,” Scruffy-beard chimed in, pulling a cigarette from the packet Sunil held out to him. Scruffy-beard poked the cigarette into his mouth then dug into the deep side pocket of his kurta to fish out a matchbook.
“That’s fantastic,” I said.
“I’ve got it on display in my hostel room,” Sunil said, nodding his head with an assured, indolent air. “In a box frame that I myself made. I put one bulb behind the film that I can turn on so people can see the frames.”
“It doesn’t work,” Short-haired Girl said, sneering playfully at Sunil. She took a cup from the tea boy’s tray before he moved off to another group elsewhere on the lawn.
Sunil laughed and tugged at her hair. She swatted his hand away, laughing.
“Where you studying now?” Sunil asked, flicking ash from his cigarette.
I gave them my whole story. America. India. That I was at Xavier’s now, an English major.
Aloof Girl groaned. “I’m so sorry.” Hers was a low, velvety voice, surprisingly seductive.
Scruffy-beard and Short-haired Girl glanced at Aloof Girl, and they all shared a laugh. I wondered if it was at my expense. Sunil only nodded, smiling thoughtfully. “Well, you’ve got to get B.A. somewhere, right?” he said. “I heard actually Xavier’s is quite a good school.”
I weighed a reply in my head when Short-haired Girl said, “It’ll make you, like, the sharpest cog in the wheel.”
“Do they allow transfers here?” Sunil asked.
“Not from what Menon told me,” I said.
Short-haired Girl’s face grew taut, then she lowered the teacup from her face. “Either you’re here from the start or not at all.” Here from the start or not at all. One of us or one of them. I felt one of neither.
By now, Aloof Girl seemed to have lost interest in our conversation. She lowered herself onto her elbows and gazed around the lawn as if she were looking for someone.
Short-haired Girl took the cigarette from Sunil’s hand. Clutching it in her fingers, she pointed at me. “Don’t turn into one of the cogs, my friend. The system can turn the best of us into one of them.” She punctuated “them” with a wave of her arm in the general direction of the outside world. “Stay strong.”
“Stop messing with him,” Sunil said to Short-haired Girl, giving her a light shove and taking his cigarette back. They laughed together as if there were a rare and secret compact between them.
Scruffy-beard tossed out the rest of his chai onto the grass. “Lousy stuff, man. They’ve got proper chai in Delhi. Chandi Chowk. You get world’s greatest chai there. Here, it’s like sewer water with sugar.”
An awkward silence followed during which I was aware of the buzz of cicadas, the distant barking of a dog and the exchange of polite stares. I raised myself to my feet, saying, “I better be going.”
&
nbsp; “Come round again,” Sunil said. “I’m usually here. Or in my hostel room.”
“Or in hers,” Scruffy-beard broke in and started chuckling. Short-haired Girl cleared her throat and glared at Scruffy-beard, who shrugged his shoulders, grinning, as if to say, “What’d I do?” The air felt warmer, heavier. “Okay,” Scruffy-beard said, drawing from his cigarette, “I’m going to go get those Bhopal tapes.” He got up.
“Yeah, best you go now,” Sunil said sternly then turned to me. “So why don’t you bring ’round your pics next time. Are they cool? What do you take pics of?”
“I can show them to you now if you want,” I said, turning the envelope in my hands.
Sunil’s tone turned guarded. “Right now, yaar, I’ve got to get back to editing. A lot of tamasha going on. But I promise next time …”
“Sure,” I said. “So long.”
I got about twenty steps toward the gate when I heard Sunil’s raised voice: “Good luck!”
I waved back, smiling, and saw Scruffy-beard walking in the opposite direction, back to the main building. Sunil was stroking Short-haired Girl’s ankle, laid across his lap. He didn’t seem in a hurry anymore to “get back to editing.”
“And if you ever find yourself in Bhopal, take lots of photos and send to me, dost! We’ll nail those Carbide fuckers. You watch, huh?” He whooped loudly and raised his cigarette-holding hand at me. I waved back and found myself glad to be getting away from here.
21
Something about that experience at N.I.D. did it.
The experience actually made me grateful for Xavier’s. Sure, I stuck out like a sore thumb, but strangely I felt like I (almost) belonged there, like the oddball loner in the far corner of the family picture.
Menon and Bose and those beautiful girls were all members of the cultural elite, but why did they have to be so cruel and snotty about it? Xavier’s had its own snotty crowd, but it wasn’t cruel. See, the kids at the Xavier’s canteen had money but no ambition. Not even any pretense to ambition; they would’ve been laughed at by the N.I.D. crowd. And that’s what endeared the Xavier’s kids to me, made them more down-to-earth in my eyes.
Still, my relief in retreating to Xavier’s was not the reaction I expected or wanted or found very comforting. Xavier’s was still Xavier’s, a place of boundaries, dead ends, and boredom. I switched to plan B.
Sorting through the stacks of photos from over the past few months, I picked out a couple dozen that might make an impression. I found the matching negatives, went to the photomat, and made copies—blowing them up and flattening the finish. I also did something new: I had the photo wallah (his name was Ajay) test a few out with over-and underexposures.
Some of the tests flopped: Anjali was completely bled out in one of the Diwali shots, replaced by an orange blob with ghostly eyes. In another, a minaret of the Taj looked so faded, the marble edging so blurred, that you’d think the camera had cataracts. But the others … interesting. Sharp. Surprising. Diwali rendered as a psychedelic fever dream, an India processed by alien retinas: it was what I’d been after all along. With the pictures blown up, it was like seeing the photos for the first time, taken by someone else.
The glass counter in Ajay’s shop was stocked nominally with photo supplies, mostly photo albums of various sizes and a meager selection of Kodak film rolls. But Ajay did have a black vinyl portfolio with a zippered seam. It was modest, looked like it’d been stitched together in a hut by small, nimble hands back in Ajay’s native village. Nothing fancy, but it would do the trick.
Over the next couple of nights, I arranged the photos inside the portfolio. Then I opened the application booklet for Wisconsin, looked up the director of the art department. It gave no name. Just an address. I wrote up a letter introducing myself then made a request for the director to consider the pictures. I wrote that while technically I was an international student, I’d gone to high school in Wisconsin, that I was driven and dedicated to my art, and given my circumstances, any financial help the department could provide would greatly ease things up, etc. etc.… It was a long shot, a Hail Mary, but it’s all I had left.
My mother would need long-term treatment and medicines—that wouldn’t be cheap. If I wanted to go to the States, it had to be with as little damage to my parents’ bank account as possible. I didn’t want it raising a whisper of distress in this house. No. My leaving and the costs of my leaving had to pass through here with no more effect than the wind blowing through the balcony, ruffling the sheets on the line and the pages of one of the notebooks on my desk. No. This America thing was my idea, and I didn’t want my parents feeling the burden of it.
But you know what was weird about the letter? The stuff in it that I wrote—about my dedication and so forth—it all felt genuine, and it felt good to write it all out. It was like my heart was speaking. Not one word of it set off my internal bullshit detector.
Stashed in a corner of the pantry, I found a box, last used during our pack-up from Wisconsin and stuffed full with Ziploc bags of turmeric, coriander, and dhana jeeru. I removed it all, put my portfolio inside, along with the letter, and rushed it over to the post office the next morning. I sent it registered Speedpost. I wasn’t taking any chances.
Later on, sitting in Sridharan’s lecture, it occurred to me how sharply pungent with Indian spices that box had been. The delivery could cause the entire art department to smell like an Indian spice shop. You can leave India, I thought, but India never leaves you.
* *
During this time, my mother was able to resume something of her normal routine—handing in a list for the grocer to fill and deliver; running shirts, slacks, saris for pressing; overseeing the garden; chopping vegetables in the mornings—okra, potatoes, eggplant—that Kamala Auntie would use to cook our dinner. It pleased me to come home and hear her voice in conversation with Kamala Auntie or Anand, but these interactions were short-lived. Once she’d seen to putting lunch on the table, she would retire to bed.
After putting dinner together, Kamala Auntie would phone Hemant Uncle at his State Bank office in Baroda. She would then watch the Gujarati serials that played over the local Doordharshan feed, about two hours’ worth. These tended to be crude productions, equivalent, I imagined, to the public-TV shows that Karl helped out on at WHA, only broader, louder, and peppered with laugh tracks. Anand complained to me that we needed a second TV while Kamala Auntie was here so he could play his Nintendo.
My father returned to reporting the goings-on at work. The institute had landed a government-funded astrophysics project ahead of the launch of an ISRO weather satellite scheduled for that fall. He relished the details: how they were computing the satellite’s launch trajectory, correcting for the effects of the sun’s gamma rays once it was in orbit, and the velocity they needed to ensure the satellite would travel in order to stay above the Earth. Anand found it intriguing too, his attention drifting from his plate to ask questions that eventually veered into more exotic topics: Was life possible on Venus? “No.” Mars? “No.” Neptune? “Impossible.” Could moon dust kill you if you ate it? “That … yes.”
I asked my father if he’d had any luck contacting the specialist in Bombay, the one the doctor had spoken to us about.
“We go at the beginning of next month,” he said, wrapping his fingers gently around my mother’s hand.
“And let’s put it behind us,” my mother sighed, “and move on. I’ve been away from you all too long.”
“We?” I said. “You mean we’re all going?”
My father pushed his plate away. “Of course. How else will you apply for your student visa? You will need to go the consulate yourself, you know, and present your application in person.”
“Student visa?” I feigned utter ignorance.
My father emptied the last of his dal from the steel bowl and cleared his throat. “How else will you get to Wisconsin?” he said.
I blinked. “How did you know about Wisconsin?” I turned my gaze to Anand.<
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“I told him,” Anand confessed with a mix of guilt and pride.
“You went into my desk and read the letter?”
“You told me it was nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to know. For sure.”
After dinner, I stood with my father on the balcony as the University Road traffic passed back and forth, fretted with honking, the clashing of gears from buses, the puttering of the rickshaws. Headlights blinked on as the sky’s bands of pink and purple began to fade. Shadows darkened over the balcony. The wind shifted and, for a moment, carried the scent from the rose bushes below.
From the living room, I could hear Die Hard pounding from the TV. Anand had rented it again, a dubbed copy, from the corner paan shop. I heard Kamala Auntie speaking above the noise of machine guns, asking Anand who was shooting at whom and what was all that racket about. Anand’s voice rose above the TV as he explained the plot to her point by point, and it stunned me how fluent Anand’s command of Gujarati had become. Eight months ago, he knew zilch. But listening to him now, I thought, this kid’s a genius.
“I knew you boys would one day go back to the States,” said my father, leaning against the parapet. “But I thought perhaps after college, for graduate school or something. I didn’t think it would be so soon.”
We stared out at the cricket grounds of the H.L. College of Commerce across University Road, thronged now with children, strolling families, and students playing pickup games of cricket.
“I didn’t think it would come up this soon either,” I said. “But”—I fumbled for the words—“for who I am … what I want to do, I feel I’m wasting my time here.” I told him about my recent visit to the N.I.D., the general feeling that I was spinning my wheels, that I didn’t think I could hold out another two years before I had any say in my future. “It’s just not my world,” I said, adding that I’d made a couple of friends at college, good friends, but this was about so much more. “I can’t help feeling … that I’m letting something slip away.”
