by M G Vassanji
BOOKS BY M. G. VASSANJI
The Gunny Sack (1989)
No New Land (1991)
Uhuru Street (short stories, 1992)
The Book of Secrets (1994)
Amriika (1999)
Copyright © 1999 M. G. Vassanji
Cloth edition published 1999
First paperback edition published 2000
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Vassanji, M. G.
Amriika
eISBN: 978-1-55199-709-4
I. Title.
PS8593.A87A7 2001 C813’.54 C99-931343-6
PR9199.3.V27A87 2001
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The epigraph on this page is taken from the Constance Garnett translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com
v3.1
For Nurjehan
The last train on Sunday
always left too soon.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Beginnings
I - Schrödinger’s Cat: (1968–70)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
II - A Grand Reunion: 1993, a week in midsummer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
III - Phantom Obsessions: (Fall/Winter, 1994–95)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Author’s Note
Facing west from California’s shores,
.…
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
.…
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)
– WALT WHITMAN
“Facing West from California’s Shores”
Beginnings …
March 2, 1995
We come from a small people, though we did not think of ourselves as such.
Aeons ago, or so it seems now, it was circles of time and recurring rebirths that gave meaning to my innocent world; as did an unknowable but ever-present God who could at once take on friendly, familiar shapes — a fish, say, or a tortoise, or a prince out in the jungle in the company of a woman and a band of monkeys — and at other times be an irascible, possessive father. This was a time when invocations worked miracles, angels kept watch over us, and djinns lurked in the grey shadows of the sunset. Everything was for the better, though, and because of our basic goodness it could only improve.
But all this I left behind, having cut loose on a tangent one day and escaped into come-what-may. And here I stand, after so many years; and perceived from this, its westernmost rim, the earth is flat. And my destiny ends here — a dive in the sand. There is no going back, of course; just as surely there’s no going on and around to where I began. I’ve arrived here shorn of places and ready-made truths. In this bewildered state in which I now find myself, following the recent event that gained me (if you recall) an instant of notoriety and media spotlight, as I await my beloved without too large a hope and chase shadows of vanished omens for meaning, I sometimes indulge in beginnings. I try to imagine some starting point in the past when that destiny began, that movement to reach out for a larger world. The furthest back I can go is to a medieval time, a tumultuous epoch in which I see a mystic mendicant who left a Persia ravaged by the Mongol Khans and sought refuge in the rich and chaotic soil of Hindustan — the larger India, today’s South Asia — and found the people of my race and whispered to them of better worlds.
I write this account not without encouragement — to imagine beginnings, yes, and more, to sustain them and guide them to my present condition, here in the obscurity of these rented rooms near a beach. Thus, I’ve been told with compassion, will I heal my wounds, and (in admonishment) even save my soul from endless torments. As I write these memoirs, I must admit to this too: the probing attentions of a certain representative of the law. He does not interfere as yet but hovers just beyond the edge of my narrative.
Three kids, college age, are among my visitors here. They come because, so they say, of the funky beach around here; but also, I believe, out of sympathy and concern for someone they call “Uncle” simply because I belong to their parents’ generation. Their burdens are of a different order: they discuss sex and AIDS, religion and intermarriage, the hangups of their immigrant parents; and their own impending futures. But I suspect they too are sometimes drawn to beginnings. And do I delude myself into thinking there’s a certain wariness too, and awe, at some challenge from the past I may represent? Their names are Leila, Hanif, and Lata. Whatever their reasons for coming, their age and innocence do take me back to a more historical beginning.
My mind often returns to the same point, if not an actual then a constructed origin: a short stout old woman in a soft long dress, with greying hair somewhat loose and wavy in front but tied behind in a small bun, who —
Grandma was a singer, and a healer. I don’t know which first. She never sang when she healed but she muttered strange prayers, using mysterious powers she claimed were her birthright. But when she sang, she opened curiosity and old cupboards and strange premonitions and desires, even the desire to get away, leave everything behind.
Translating an old folk hymn is like transporting a village house to a city avenue, it loses vitality, colour, significance — but here goes: one of the verses she used to sing went, “Higher and higher I climb / waiting for my Swamiji — Lord — to arrive …”
I would then imagine Grandma sitting high up on some tree branch, gazing out westwards towards the horizon in anticipation of that Swamiji, that Lord, who would come on a white horse in the company of princes riding elephants and amid the sounds of trumpets and tambourines to take her away to a promised land.
Our ancestors were Hindus who were converted to a sect of Islam, and told by that refugee from the Mongols to await the final avatar of their god Vishnu. In Grandma’s words, the sun would arise that day from the west. How far was this west? Where did it begin?
My people sought it first in Africa, an ocean away, where they settled more than a
hundred years ago. But in time this west moved further, and became — America; or, as Grandma said it: Amriika.
When I departed for that Eldorado she came to see me off at the Dar es Salaam airport, taking a ride from the local coal seller who lived across the street. The three of us sitting in the front of the pickup, my vinyl suitcase in the coaldust at the back, collecting black ugly smudges which eventually faded into a residual grey that I would treasure for years. The weekly flight to London left late at night. The airport was crowded with passengers, relatives, and those who had driven over just to have a look-see at a plane taking off into the dark, with people flying away perhaps never again to be seen. Sona, my classmate who was going with me, was of course there, having arrived before me. And also in that small throng there was Darcy, the awesome intellectual and Grandma’s patient, who had come to know her quite well in the past few years. I remember going through the immigration checkpoint and turning around for one last look at Grandma: standing stiffly among the crowd, feigning sternness for grief, her right arm still raised in the goodbye she’d said minutes before, the hand closing and opening as if mechanically in one endless farewell.
I never saw her again. And Darcy, her friend who had now come to stand beside her? I saw the old magus years later when I’d almost forgotten he existed, and he offered a magic potion, a going home of sorts … but I’m getting ahead of myself, there’s so much in the middle.
It was August 1968; a young man, about the same age as my three young visitors, left home.
I
SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT
(1968–70)
“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to perils, to love, to vain effort …”
– JOSEPH CONRAD
Youth
1
“The pigs charged and we threw rocks at ’em —”
“Right on, man!”
Amriika. America.
Sirens hooting in the night, so demoniacally urgent, so persistent, sending chills up his spine where he lay wide-eyed in his bed, grappling with a world that had just cracked open. And he thought, What satanic crime is being committed somewhere? …
All around him a soft penumbral darkness, a stillness scored by the straight lines of dormitory bunk beds, spooky four-legged skeletons of iron standing upright in rows. On the brick wall behind him, some feet away, a barred frosted-paned window admitted muted, fitful versions of the frantic streetlife outside. The hum and grind of vehicles behind the wall, and a few human sounds: footsteps; discarded, disposable fragments of conversation. Headlight beams through the window, and flashing blue police lights, and the deafening sirens, behind him now, his heart pounding. Here? The sounds, the flashing lights, went away, disappeared into distance, anonymity.
“… goddamn fascist pigs — it’s a fuckin’ fascist country, that’s what —”
“Right on …”
Is that all he can say? The second voice, deep and gravelly, belonged to a black guy with an Afro hairstyle. I know what they’re talking about …
The other voice, thin and whining and anxious, came from the bunk above his. The guy who occupied it was white, with a beard and long hair down to his shoulders, who’d stared at him in disbelief earlier as he came back from the bathroom changed into his brand-new striped pyjama suit.
The Afro, who was in the adjacent upper bed, was now saying, “Malcolm says we landed on no fuckin’ Plymouth rock, this fuckin’ rock landed on us, man … we gonna push it right back on their ass.…Yeah, man …”
That was quite a mouthful, coming from him; it reverberated like controlled thunder. The swearing made Ramji flinch. He wasn’t used to it in English, this way, up close.
“You’ll be there at the Commons tomorrow?” the white guy asked.
“You bet.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
America.
Elvis. Yes, that was the first revelation from an alien world, before there was even a picture of America in the head. “Jailhouse Rock,” and parents complaining of uncontrollable kids jumping on beds and chairs when it was played on the weekly request program in Dar es Salaam; and they had it banned! “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” that beautiful ballad sung to a music box in Hawaii, and I so much wanted to be in love. But more than that, more than Elvis — Kennedy. Ich bin ein Berliner, we all knew that much German; and America was saving the world from godlessness. Then Kennedy shot dead. Just that, a giant newspaper headline glimpsed in a vendor’s hand, and it seemed a little more charm was gone from our world. And beautiful Jackie — why did she have to go and remarry. Soviet premier Khrushchev banging his shoe at the UN, the U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia, the Cuban crisis. Perry Mason the lawyer-detective and Della Street his secretary having coffee and doughnuts in some café in Los Angeles, discussing a murder case. Pat Boone and Rock Hudson were the girls’ heartthrobs. And then the ugly side, the frightening America: dangerous streets, sex, drugs. Blackboard jungle, cement jungle, neon jungle … and the death’s head of technology: ICBMs and MIRVs, marvellous and terrifying. As a teenager, he would wake up frightened by nightmares about the coming Third World War. Two years before, his class essay on the destruction of the world was read aloud in admiration by the teacher. But there was also the thrilling moon-landing. The fundis — tailors — outside Grandma’s house were all of the opinion that the Americans had the world fooled. “Éti, how can anyone go to the moon — it’s so small and comes out at night and roams the seven heavens.” Above all, Americans were friendly people who said things like “ain’t” and whose “can’t” was so hard to distinguish from their “can.” And they had great universities with towering columns and domes, where all the awesome modern research was done, and to one of which he, Ramji, had been admitted — the Tech. Some of the astronauts had actually studied there; and also giants like Feynman, and Gell-Mann.…Time had reported that even at the Tech and Harvard, students had come out in protest against that war in Vietnam. And now at this Youth Hostel on Harvard Square —
Suddenly, the bed heaved, tilted perilously on two legs for an instant — giving Ramji a tremendous fright — then came down safely back on all fours; the sagging weight on the upper bunk had rolled over to the edge.
“By the way, the name’s Russell.” The long-haired one to the Afro, across the aisle.
“George,” came the reply.
Are they really shaking hands now, after all this? Only in.…He smiled, relieved, his heart yet to recover from the ordeal.
“Hey, pleased to meet you,” said Russell.
“Same here.”
“I say power to the people and down with the military-industrial complex!”
“Night again …”
Wait till I tell Sona about these two characters.
Sona, his classmate, had arrived with him from Dar, and was sleeping a few bunks away. What was he thinking?
It was Sona who first brought up the idea of actually going to America, when those who could get away had always gone to England. “I’m applying to go to America — Boston,” he said excitedly one day to Ramji on their way home from school. “Why don’t you apply too, we can go together!”
“Yeah, let’s go to America!” Ramji had said. But when he thought about it, as the weeks wore on, he wasn’t really sure he wanted to go. How could he leave Grandma alone? It wasn’t such a small step, going so far away. And then, one evening —
“Mr. Kennedy …”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Kennedy, may I have the honour of shaking your hand?”
Pandemonium. Laughter. Disbelief.
“Of course, come forward and I’ll be glad to.”
And he had gone forward and shaken Bobby’s hand to great cheering. Except that it wasn’t he who’d shaken Bobby’s hand but that nutty cricket captain of the school, who’d dropped out soon afterwards. S
till, it was as if everybody present there had shaken Bobby Kennedy’s hand, at the Diamond Jubilee Hall in Dar es Salaam.
It was a thrilling, an inspiring evening. And it seemed to him that it was only for him — that slim handsome American, with the nonplussed look, the open mouth, the white teeth — that he would go to America. Everything else, all the other attractions seemed secondary, only that face which he had seen in the flesh drew him on. The casually friendly face of America.
And then Bobby was shot dead. Did you hear it, Ramji? It was Sona, late in the evening, standing at the door. What? Ramji asked, What happened? Bobby Kennedy is dead — shot! Ramji just couldn’t believe it, but the local news had said it, the BBC had said it. The two of them had tried tuning in to the Voice of America for confirmation, but they couldn’t hear anything through the static. Afterwards they sat outside Ramji’s house and chatted late into the night, discussing this and the other assassinations. First JFK and then Martin Luther King, now Bobby Kennedy. What an amazing country America was. The next morning Ramji — his departure only a few weeks away — said, I’m not going to this place that kills its own just like that. His friend Sona had begged him, Ramji, you can’t do this now! His teachers too had begged him: Go. And Grandmother, sorely tempted to keep him home beside her, now that he wanted that too, nevertheless sent him to see Mr. Darcy. That intellectual who had been a grateful patient of hers, who knew a thing or two about the world out there. Go, Mr. Darcy said, there’s nothing more important than your education. And so Mr. Darcy broke the jinx, his last-minute jitters, and here he was.
Sona, are you awake? … In the upper bunk Russell and George seemed finally to have fallen asleep. Tomorrow … he thought, tomorrow begins my first real day here …
He and Sona had been picked up at the airport by a rather nice and chatty couple from the American Host Program, called the Campbells (“a name that’s been made famous by a certain soup company!”). It was warm and drizzly outside, and as they drove into Cambridge the city lights looked glorious, reflected in the rain. The Campbells drove Ramji and Sona along Memorial Drive by the Charles River, past the breathtakingly imposing lighted dome of the Tech, before depositing them at the hostel. They were simply the “picker-uppers,” they said. Having given Ramji and Sona the separate particulars about their host families, where they would be staying for the couple of weeks before classes started, and brief instructions on how to survive in America, they disappeared into the wet night.
