No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  “Sit here,” he said, pulling a straight chair up to a table. He went through a doorway into a tiny room that overflowed with books and papers, and sat down at his desk. While he worked, Agnes looked around her. The windows in the cramped sitting room-kitchen were high, narrow, and drafty. There was a sink and stove in one corner. A door led to a third room.

  Lajpat Rai returned to the table. “May I offer you tea, Miss Smedley?”

  “No. I came to learn about India.” She gestured toward the typewriter visible through the doorway. “I take shorthand and I’m a very good typist. I can do secretarial work for you.”

  The Lion of the Punjab smiled. “If you are not going to have tea, I, at least, am.” His voice was melodic. The British English, colored by his native tongue, was music itself.

  “When would you like to begin your studies?” He filled a teakettle at the sink.

  “At once,” she said. “Today.”

  Lajpat Rai threw back his turbaned head and laughed. “You are eager,” he said. He stopped laughing and lit the gas jet that went out once in the draft. “You are as fast-growing and primitive as a weed, Miss Smedley,” he said, and returned to the table.

  “We will begin with the KOMAGATA MARU as she sails into Vancouver, Canada. It is July 1914. Aboard are three-hundred forty Sikhs, twenty-four Muslims, twelve Hindus, and a handful of Chinese and Japanese. Our ship comes from Calcutta, Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokahama. It is turned back by the Canadian authorities who have orders from Great Britain to declare the passengers vagrants. The Chinese and Japanese aboard will have help from their countries who will make official protest. From England will come no help at any time for Indians.” The kettle came to a boil. Pausing, he brewed the tea, then poured it from a chipped brown teapot.

  “Today England is engaged in a great war against Germany. India awaits the outcome.” He spoke as if India were a person. He had endured prison and faced death for her, he said. When he spoke of her invasions, her empires, her rivers, jungles, purple hazes, the “cow dust” as his people called the sunset, bright saris of women, white garments of men, his gaze grew distant with longing.

  He rested the teapot on an intricate brass trivet and took the chair opposite Agnes. He studied his tea and drank in silence before he spoke again. “Are you a student?”

  Agnes told him about her night classes at the University, how ignorant she felt, yet how shallow the professors and students seemed, as if they had no experience in life. She was too unsure of herself to speak up in class. She did not know how to theorize, she said. Then she lowered her head and told him she’d been fired from San Diego Normal.

  “And your family?” he asked. “Where is your family?”

  “I have no family.” When he pressed her for information, she removed two letters and a telegram from her purse. She offered him the first letter which he held in his dark, steady hand and read with quiet comprehension. When he finished he looked up.

  “And who is this John?”

  Her brother, she said, pointing to the letter. He had stolen a horse and was put in jail. He had written Agnes for money.

  “I wrote him back,” she said. Her voice rose. “I told him we were poor but we weren’t raised to be thieves. ‘You were taught better than to steal,’ I wrote him. ‘Why can’t you be patient and wait a little longer until I can help you?’ I was hard on him.”

  “And did you send the money he asked for?”

  “Yes,” said Agnes. “I borrowed it.” Lajpat Rai put the letter down and took the telegram she held out to him. He scanned the four words: “John killed today. Sam.”

  “I was very hard on John,” Agnes said dully. Lajpat Rai said nothing, but picked up the second letter from the table.

  “John died of a broken neck,” the letter said. “Dirt caved in on him. He was digging a sewer. Mud was in his eyes and mouth. The county paid Dad $50. I can’t get ahead. I’m enlisting in the army. Sam.”

  Below his untidy signature, added in pencil, were two lines: “Don’t blame John for trying, he stole a horse, he don’t have an education like you.”

  Lajpat Rai stood and walked to the stove where he heated up the teakettle again. Agnes blew her nose.

  “Since you have no family,” said Lajpat Rai, pouring two fresh cups of tea, “you must help my country. I will prepare you to teach in India.”

  She moved out of Thorberg’s apartment and took a room on the Lower East Side to be near him, dropping out of night classes in favor of history lessons from Lajpat Rai. At the table in lamplight he sometimes looked old and tired, and when he spoke of being denied a passport by the British to return to his home, he brooded. Sometimes his dark eyes smoldered with anger, or grew cold and bitter. But when he taught Agnes, read with her, dictated his book to her, his eyes were warm and patient.

  Sometimes he let her see him with his turban off. His hair was thick and long, with much gray among the glossy black. She would have liked to stroke his hair, bury her hands in it, rest her face against his. But he always grew distant when he sensed her adoration. And perhaps, after all, he did not like her very much. He had called her primitive as a weed.

  “If America joins the war it will be hard on all of us,” he said to her one evening at the close of their lesson. “You will not be spared.”

  “Americans are for India!” she exclaimed.

  “Even sympathetic Americans will turn against us,” he continued as if he had not heard her. “If America enters the war, England will increase its pressure on your government to arrest us.”

  Night and day he waged a scholarly war on two fronts: one against the British who wanted to eradicate Indian nationalism, and one against his own people who wanted independence immediately, war or no war.

  “India will need England after the war. India must take her place in the British Commonwealth until … “ He turned away and left the sentence unfinished.

  “I’m expecting visitors soon,” he said one warm evening in May. It had been less than a month since America entered the war. Children played stick ball in the street; cabbage, curry, fish smells mingled in the tenements. “Two young men who think a world war is a minor impediment to Indian nationalism.” He lowered himself onto a straight chair. “They think of nothing but revolution. Soon you will see another side of the Indian movement.” Agnes made no reply. “They are Ghadars,” he said with distaste. “They are going to undermine my work.”

  Although Agnes had heard of the Ghadar movement on the West Coast, she was not prepared for the fierce energy, only slightly masked by courtly manners, which the two young revolutionaries, Salindranath Ghose and M.N. Roy, brought to the apartment of Lajpat Rai. They prowled restlessly about the two small rooms, their single topic independence. They were both very handsome, she thought.

  “England calls up more and more of our men,” Salindranath said, pacing between the sitting room-kitchen and study where Agnes and Lajpat Rai were trying to work.

  “Tell me, Miss Smedley,” Salindranath said from the doorway, “what has brought you to our independence movement?”

  Agnes inserted a sheet of paper between the rollers of her typewriter. “When I heard my teacher speak,” she said in a low voice, “I knew I would work for India.”

  “He has won much support for the cause,” Salindranath said half-heartedly.

  “He is a very great man.”

  “He is a very great man,” Salindranath agreed. Casting an impertinent glance toward the Lion of the Punjab writing at his desk, he added, “However, we do not all agree with his position.” He started to say more, but Agnes turned back to the typewriter and began to type at a furious speed.

  “May I walk you to your home?” he asked that evening as she placed the dust jacket over the typewriter. She did not answer but laid a stack of letters on Lajpat Rai’s desk.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  From the stove in the corner of the sitting room where he was beginning to prepare a meal, Lajpat Rai watched Salindranath open
the door for Agnes.

  She turned back. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” she said, as if there were any question.

  Lajpat Rai bowed and remained facing the door even after Salindranath closed it behind him.

  “He’s tired tonight,” Agnes said as they stepped away from the tenement and entered the stream of East Side foot traffic. It was twilight. A young man passed them carrying a bouquet of daffodils.

  “The Lion of the Punjab is old.”

  “He’s not old,” said Agnes. “He’s tired.” Salindranath started to say something but changed his mind.

  “My friend and I are going to Mexico,” he said a few minutes later.

  “Mexico! Don’t you have enough revolution in India?”

  Salindranath lowered his voice.”We were arrested the night you first heard Lajpat Rai speak.”

  Agnes shot him a glance.

  “We— I believe your American expression is ‘jumped bail.’ We are hiding. Now we must leave the country.”

  “What are you charged with?”

  “Violating neutrality laws. The British do not want Indian independence, and the Americans do not want to offend the British.”

  “The Americans offended the British in 1776,” Agnes said.

  “They were not allies then,” Salindranath pointed out. “Neither were there Asian Indians in America in 1776. And if there had been, they would not have been working with the Germans.”

  Agnes stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “The Lion of the Punjab has not told you of the Berlin Indian Revolutionary Committee?” he said, amused. Agnes began walking again. She looked straight ahead. “I see by your face you do not know of the ties between Germany and our revolutionary movement.”

  “I know all I need to know to help the Indian cause,” Agnes said. “I know nothing about—German ties.” Her sharp tone could not quite compensate for the uncertainty in her face. She resumed walking and almost fell over three raggle-taggle children who darted in front of her. They reminded her of children in the coal camps, babbling in many languages.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Smedley,” Salindranath said with a rare note of regret in his voice, as if he were tired of the great cause. “I will not trouble you with Indian matters further. Your teacher has invited us to leave and we comply.” They approached her landlady’s house. Agnes reached for the key and felt Sam’s letter in her purse.

  “My brother has enlisted,” she said. “Americans are dying in Europe because of Germany.”

  “England’s enemy is India’s friend,” Salindranath said. “Lajpat Rai does not agree. He has done great work for India, but he belongs to the past. His interests now lie with England. And with Indian landlords. He, himself, was a landlord for many years. He is too patient with England.” Salindranath’s eyes snapped. His turban was brilliant white in the dusky light of evening. “Incredibly, he believes India should remain in the Commonwealth.” He was about to say more but Agnes stepped up to her door.

  “I wish to speak to you further,” he said, leaning toward her.

  “I do not wish to speak to you further,” she said and entered the building before she could see his deep bow and folded hands at his forehead.

  Two days later he walked her home again. “You know of the arrests in San Francisco,” he stated, turning his bronze face and turbaned head toward her. She felt disloyal to Lajpat Rai. She should not walk home with this man; she should not look up at him.

  “I don’t know about any arrests in San Francisco,” she said. “What arrests?”

  “The government is arresting Indians for violating the espionage laws of the United States. Because we do not support Britain, your government calls it a Hindu-German conspiracy.”

  “That’s not Lajpat Rai’s fault,” Agnes retorted. “He doesn’t work with Germany.”

  “He does not work at all except to write speeches!” Salindranath’s full lips curled with contempt. “Meanwhile India’s sons die for England.” He bent to the sidewalk and picked up a dropped coin. “We are not all as sanguine as your teacher.”

  Agnes wondered what “sanguine” meant. The Indians she had met spoke with a courtly, old-world diction learned from British schoolmasters and Indian teachers trained by British schoolmasters. Sometimes in the middle of an ordinary sentence, a difficult, refined word would jump out at her and she would marvel at the Indians’ vocabulary, yet wonder whether they had the usage quite right.

  “Some day perhaps you will meet my friend Taraknath Das,” Salindranath said. He handed the coin to Agnes. “He is presently in Japan passing time.”

  “What’s he doing in Japan?”

  “It is confidential,” Salindranath said. “Smuggling.”

  “Smuggling what?”

  “Guns. And men. To India.”

  In spite of herself, the stories Salindranath told her about exiled young Indians in every corner of the world, waiting like coiled springs to see who won the war, excited her.

  All that summer and into the fall, Salindranath wrote her letter after letter from Mexico and she answered back. He had never kissed her, not so much as a brush against the cheek. The Indian men she met maintained a distance and treated her with respect. They were her friends, her brothers. Indian men, Lajpat Rai had told her once, perhaps as a warning, reserve love for wife and family. It weakens a man in his work if he falls in love outside of marriage. Without purity, he said, a man cannot lead. And, he added pointedly, neither can a woman.

  “Good,” Agnes had answered. Her only love was India, she said, ignoring her teacher’s smile.

  “I have left Mexico,” Salindranath wrote from San Francisco. “I am trying to escape arrest. I am working on a plan that will gain India’s freedom. I need your help.”

  Agnes did not mention the plan to Lajpat Rai. It would not interest him. Or more accurately, it would interest him but he would not favor it. It was perhaps even unworkable—but she could not forever sit typing and waiting for the war to end. The speeches she typed sounded like the books she typed that sounded like the letters she typed. She didn’t need the drafts Lajpat wrote out for her in his ornate, old-fashioned script; she knew what he would say before he said it. Lajpat, himself, began to seem ornate and old-fashioned. Agnes missed the young Ghadar activists prowling about the living room and study. What she wanted was action. Action was change, and change was what was needed.

  The revolution in Russia, for example. She was electrified by newsreels she saw, the Communist flag carried through the streets of St. Petersburg while, in the darkened theatre, the organist played thrilling music that was foreign and patriotic and very loud. Everyone she knew was electrified. Everyone but Lajpat Rai. The revolution in Russia was just one more step, he said philosophically, looking up from his books and papers, in the progress of the human race. Its impact on India must be examined.

  Wasn’t a revolution exactly what was needed in India? Were Indians less courageous than Russians? The Russians had thrown out the Czar! Couldn’t India throw out the British?

  No. Conditions in the two countries were very different, he said, returning his attention to the work table where he had begun a careful analysis of the Bolsheviks. Agnes began to think of him as old, unimaginative, ineffective. Definitely behind the times. He no longer seemed the same man she had begged to study with less than a year earlier. Elated by the revolution, by the plan Salindranath wrote of almost daily, she moved back to the West Village, to a tiny room on Waverly Place.

  But leaving her teacher proved more difficult than she had expected. Seated at the work table across from him on a cold evening near the end of the year, Agnes’ elation deserted her. Through the window she watched snow, fine as dust—was it “cow dust” he had called the sunset in India?—sift and whirl in the light from the street lamp. She forced her attention back to the lesson and her teacher. How pale and displaced he looked in wintertime. Winter did not suit him. Studying his face, she felt troubled, as if she, too, were in the wrong season.
She felt as if she had turned her back on more than Lajpat Rai and history lessons. She was turning against a parent, a lover, a cause, youth itself.

  “One must work and one must live,” he said. His eyes, dark and heavy-lidded, never left hers. He touched her hand. “Our revolution is not easy. It requires strength and endurance.”

  “Strength, I have,” she retorted, glad to fight grief with a flare of emotion. “Endurance, I have. But we cannot sit and wait for England to grant India independence. It will never be done voluntarily.”

  He released her hand. “You sound like a Ghadar,” he said.

  “My family were tenant farmers and miners!” she flared again. “If I were Indian I would be a Ghadar! If I were Russian I would be a Bolshevik!”

  “Nothing precludes you from being either a Ghadar or a Bolshevik,” he said. “I taught you to love India. Do not forget her.” They stared at each other. Together they stood up from the table. He seemed stunned. She was appalled at what she was doing, yet she could not sink into comfortable lessons again, mindless typing.

  “Good-bye,” she said, and thought she heard a tearing sound. She turned and left the apartment. Once outside she walked fast beneath black tree limbs along which a thin, crisp fall of white lay precariously. A solitary motor car moved through the streets, following the two shafts of light from its head lamps. The sound of the engine was muffled by thick night busy with snow. Far ahead the car turned a corner and all was darkness and whirling white.

  She answered a letter from Salindranath who was still in San Francisco. “I am not typing for Lajpat Rai anymore,” she wrote, trying to think of things to say in order not to admit how the young Indian revolutionary had stirred her imagination and her lust. Only rarely did she reflect on how she, a girl from a Missouri tenant farm and Colorado coal mines, had come to live in New York City to work for a foreign revolutionary cause.

  Before long, batches of blank paper began arriving through the mail, official-looking stationery stamped with the name of an invented Indian government. In the late afternoons and evenings, instead of studying history and typing Lajpat Rai’s drafts, Agnes did as Salindranath asked and composed letters to embassies, consulates, even President Wilson. She signed with the name “Pulin Behari Bose,” a fictitious officer of a fictitious Indian government in exile created by the Ghadars in San Francisco.