A light, hesitant rain began to fall. Her forehead and arms stung by icy drops, Aloka stood there and stifled a sob. How could she leave this birthplace, her moorings, and the sacred Himalayas? Then, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a figure waiting under a juniper, its branches illuminated by the watery light of a street lamp. It was Pranab. Inside she felt the same sweet surge as on the first day they met.
Pranab stepped out toward her, reached for her arm, grasped it, and whispered, “I’m so relieved you got out okay.”
“Let’s go.”
A wind howled at their backs as they half ran, half stumbled down a steep hillside, guided by a small flashlight. When her feet slipped on a rain-slick rock, she managed to pull herself up and keep going. What a relief it was to find Uncle Govinda waiting in his Jeep at the bottom of the hill. He opened the car door, let them in the back, and handed them two shawls.
“Cover yourselves up well,” he whispered. His voice, caught up in the tension of the moment, had become hoarse. “I’ll have to drive fast. We barely have enough time to make it to the train station.”
Aloka was still panting when he revved up the engine. He negotiated the rough, hilly, twisty road, keeping a vigilant eye out for other vehicles. Aloka and Pranab slouched down in the backseat, their torsos and heads bundled in shawls. Each bump on the road gurgled through her; the zigzagging course made her feel nauseous.
After they’d passed the Darjeeling city limits, at Uncle Govinda’s insistence Aloka chewed on a potato patty and gulped down a bottle of Limca. This settled her system a bit. She appreciated his kindness, even as she worried that family loyalties had been compromised beyond repair. Uncle Govinda, a kind and sedate man, was her father’s first cousin and former classmate. She dropped that thought for now and watched with affection as a preoccupied Pranab stared listlessly out the window into the dense darkness. He was holding onto the edge of the seat with one hand. He seemed resigned to his uncertain future. Oddly enough, now that the waiting was over, she felt quietly confident. In fact, the idea of fleeing with Pranab filled her with anticipation. He was hers now, totally. She could revel in that reality.
Three hours later they reached Siliguri, a rustic town best known for its voracious mosquitoes, and pulled up at the train station. Seated on a bench at the platform, Aloka fought with the winged vermin. For every one she squished, two seemed to get through.
After a short wait they boarded a train for an overnight trip to Calcutta. By now fatigue had set in and she could barely feel her legs as they climbed into a compartment. Standing on the platform, Uncle Govinda dabbed at his eyes with a white handkerchief, then waved at them with it forlornly. Aloka held Pranab’s hand throughout the journey. If any danger awaited him, they would face it together.
The next morning they arrived at Salt Lake, a satellite city of Calcutta, where they took refuge in her friend’s home. She was struck by the flatness of the landscape, the crowding, and the sultry air thick with soot.
“We shouldn’t stay in the country much longer,” she told Pranab after a week. “It’s not safe, and in any case, since we need a new start, there’s no point in procrastinating.”
“Where can we go?”
“How does New York sound to you?”
“You used to teach a class on the States, didn’t you?”
Aloka smiled in remembrance. The research for her class had paid off. She told him about New York’s art, music, and literary scene, its lively Indian community, and job prospects. “New York has something for everybody, I’m told.”
Pranab had some initial reservations, though finally he agreed. “I’m not too optimistic, but we’ll give it a try.” He reminded her that his nephews, who lived a short train ride away in New Jersey, didn’t much care for New York City.
It took many months to complete the immigration formalities. While awaiting the arrival of their immigration papers, they private-tutored schoolchildren in the neighborhood to earn pocket money; Aloka teaching English, and Pranab, Sanskrit. Aloka maintained tenuous contact with Grandma by sending letters secretly through a friend so her father wouldn’t know her whereabouts. Grandma answered every letter, mentioning at one point that Father had fallen ill.
To hide her identity, Aloka kept her head veiled whenever she went out. Pranab grew a beard and wore sunglasses. He believed he was followed a few times, but nothing ever came of it and the days passed until their immigration papers finally came through.
On May 1, much to Aloka’s relief, they landed in New York to begin what she hoped would be an exciting new time. If the sight of the Statue of Liberty from her plane window brought a few sentimental tears to her eyes, she hid them well from Pranab.
fourteen
1993
Aloka had just slipped into a bra with lacy cups and a full skirt reaching her knees when she heard Pranab murmuring from the other side of the room, “Where are you going, priyatama?”
She turned swiftly, reveling in the soft slippery sensation of the skirt’s fabric next to her skin. Sprawled on the bed, hugging a pillow, Pranab was watching her with eyes still dark and luminous from their lovemaking. His face, open and defenseless, radiated a masculine vitality, even as the window behind him filled with mauve evening shadows. She brought the past hour back to her mind, saw it as the prolonged time and care that a fruit takes to ripen. Her skin and flesh suffused with blood, her body felt acutely alive. There came over her a sense of weightlessness, of release, as if her being were expanding to encompass a larger reality.
A yearning for closeness and affection and a desire to please seeped into her. She forced herself to finish buttoning the sleeves of her blouse and strutted to the middle of the room, where she flung her arms out and gave him a kiss.
“Where am I going, you ask?” She looked around the shabby, overpriced studio they’d leased in Manhattan. “To my baby-sitting job, amaar priya.”
He grimaced and turned over on his back. “Isn’t it awful, the kinds of jobs we have to take here?”
“But at least we’re safe and happy. And we have each other. What more could we ask?”
He fell silent, a heavy silence she couldn’t penetrate.
On the long hike to her baby-sitting job, Aloka had a chance to assess her current situation. They’d been living in New York four months now. Her optimistic outlook about immigrating here had produced results: Once again they were close. They shared the same towels, the same pillow, as well as problems and frustrations with trying to adjust to this new life. In this alien environment they were forced to depend on each other. Most importantly, they were far away from Bir’s wrath and the corporeal danger it had threatened. Pranab had grown stress-free and was back to being his old self. Lately he had even been hinting about getting married. Aloka took that as a sign of deep commitment, as well as of his settling down. She wanted to wait, however, until they both had secured permanent positions and could afford a wedding ceremony.
Although Aloka was happy within the four walls of their tiny apartment, she was baffled by the ways of the new world outside. Everyone seemed in a tremendous hurry regardless of the time of day or the nature of the activity. Long used to the elaborate politeness and sedate pace of the Bengali society, she found it difficult to fathom the undercurrent of irritation that seemed to lurk beneath the surface of even the most banal conversation. Thus it had come as a shock when, on her second day in New York, a waitress in a coffee shop snapped at her. “You want hotter coffee? Everybody wants everything right now, just the way they like it, lady!”
Aloka had thrown a few dollar bills on the counter and walked out. She waded into the concrete ocean, through the raucous traffic, the Band-Aid strip of sky above offering faint solace, realizing it would require a combination of a blind faith and a superhuman constitution to survive here.
Soon, however, she was swept up by the city’s crazy rhythm. What a mind-expanding and body-loosening experience for someone raised in a provincial town like Darjeeling, to wa
nder out of a Dale Chihuly glass exhibit and munch on a knish, while swaying to the beat of a reggae street band. She came to understand why so many people were drawn to this outwardly brusque, even rude city: If New York made them feel small, insignificant, and unloved, it also offered them a broader, more exalted sense of what was possible.
On her own she would meander for hours. The incongruities mystified her. In the shadow of gleaming skyscrapers, fetid slums with broken sidewalks festered. Many nights she went to bed disturbed, yet awoke to a cool, fresh Manhattan morning, with the aroma of brioche baking somewhere. That beckoned her to make a clean start.
In between part-time jobs as a baby-sitter, henna artist, truck accessories salesperson, and grant writer for New York University, she explored new enclaves: Soho, Washington Square, the United Nations, Little Italy. She discovered a comedy cellar, a transit museum, industrial music, chestnut vendors, and a carriage house converted into a library of books on transportation. On Sundays she would invariably end up in a bazaar set up on outdoor tables and racks along a stretch of Second Avenue, where native-born and immigrants alike gathered to gawk, haggle, gossip, and search for bargains. It overjoyed her that even though Manhattan belonged to the affluent and the glitterati, much of the city moved to the beat of the common man and the less well heeled.
Despite all the excitement and novelty, at times she longed to return to the life she’d left behind. She called this the “immigrant condition”: Never to laugh the deepest possible laugh or give oneself over to the possibilities of life in a new land without the niggling awareness of a vague dissatisfaction, doomed to find in every meal a missing course.
Meanwhile, Pranab had retreated into his Sanskrit books, declining invitations to join her on her urban safaris. “The streets all look the same, just pizza signs and ‘Going Out of Business’ notices, never a hint of anything refined,” he would sneer, ignoring her glowing descriptions of art galleries and museums. He didn’t even laugh as he attributed it all to Kaliyug, which according to Hindu mythology was the world’s fourth, current age, an age of decadence and decline. She grew weary of his negative outlook. In Manhattan, she’d found “home and the world,” to borrow a Tagore phrase from her youth, while he seemed to have lost both, along with his sense of humor.
Early in his search for employment, Pranab had typed a lengthy application for a Sanskrit professorship at a local university and waited with high hopes, only to be rejected. He learned later that a Dane—also a Sanskrit scholar—had filled the position. “Never mind. I’ll teach Bengali!” he exclaimed. The opportunities turned out to be even scantier there. Only five universities in the entire nation taught Bengali and none had a vacancy.
Pranab would trudge in with the mail and read aloud to her the occasional communiques from the tea workers. They were satisfied with their pay raise and ecstatic to have running water in their homes. They missed his inspiring talks, they insisted, though it was clear that their militancy had been diminished by management concessions. “Maharani takes care of us.” They praised Grandma. “She understands what we need to make ends meet.”
Pranab would put the dispatch aside and mumble that he needed to find some worthy cause where his talents could be put to use. Aloka made calls on his behalf and came up with a list. Pranab declined most of them as beneath his dignity, but finally agreed to volunteer with the Free Tibet movement. At first it seemed that he’d found his niche. Each evening he would stride out the door and return a few hours later full of enthusiasm for the justness of the Tibetan struggle. But gradually the energy seemed to seep out of him and he would return silent and morose.
“It’s just not the same,” he bemoaned after a month. “All I do is stuff envelopes and file petition papers like a faceless robot. In Darjeeling, I was a leader.”
Five more months passed by. Letters from the tea workers had ceased altogether and Pranab’s mood deteriorated further.
Then one snowy evening a phone call from Uncle Umesh brought the news of Father’s death, the result of a massive heart attack. The receiver still in her hand, Aloka sank to her knees, sobbing.
“Aloka, you mustn’t …” came Uncle Umesh’s tinny voice.
He reminded her of the ancient Hindu saying—death is not finality, but release from suffering—though Aloka remained inconsolable. She’d deserted her father, this an act beyond forgiveness. Her absence had caused a void in her father’s life, one that had left him with little incentive to live. The next day she went to a local Hindu temple, placed an earthen lamp brimming with oil on the altar before the deity, and made circular movements with a burning dhoop to honor her father’s spirit and purify her mind. It tormented her for weeks that they couldn’t afford to fly back for the cremation.
Over time, her grief and anger melting into compassion, Aloka reflected on how much Bir must have suffered, what a price he’d paid. As she would scrub a pot in the kitchen sink or rub the surface of the wooden dining table with furniture polish, she would ask herself, but then why had he been so vengeful toward Pranab and forced her to choose between them? What was it about Pranab that had so enraged him?
The following March, Aloka and Pranab were married in a simple civil ceremony. She had a party in their apartment for close friends, with a seven-course meal beautifully catered by the Taj Dinner Service. Shortly after, they announced the news to their relatives in Darjeeling. Gifts and congratulatory notes came pouring in. It saddened Aloka that Grandma sent a rose tussar silk sari embroidered in silver thread and an identical choli instead of the family heirloom, a sunburst-shaped gold pendant, that Aloka had been promised as a young girl.
Finally it was safe to return to Darjeeling. With Grandma running the tea estate once again, albeit with the help of a manager, the threat hanging over Pranab’s head was gone. Aloka pined for her family, her large circle of friends, and the succor of those who cared about her. She missed the pupils in her geography class. Even now she could visualize their trusting gazes and hear their adolescent chatter echoing in the halls between classes, their attempts to catch her eyes when she passed by. But most of all she hungered for their childish enthusiasm for life.
What would be the point of returning? Pranab was reluctant to pay even a short visit.
A fallen leader has no place in the territory he has lost.
fifteen
Summer 2000
Aloka left her Union Square office at six. As she stepped outside, the remains of a balmy seventy-degree Manhattan day immersed her in a buoyant mood, just as it had seven summers ago when she and Pranab first arrived in New York. Tonight she wasn’t taking work home, for a change. Instead she planned to observe May 1 by taking him out to dinner at one of her favorite bistros.
It had not always been this way. The first couple of years in this pricey town, when she had been forced to take several part-time jobs, it’d been necessary to count every dime. But now that she was well established in her position as a reporter for Manhattan, India, with a promotion on its way, the pocketbook was less of a concern.
On the street Aloka joined a throng of pedestrians, part of the five million people who poured into and out of Manhattan every day to work. How well she blended in. At five-foot-five, with ivory skin, lustrous black hair sweeping down over her shoulders, high cheekbones, and a Bloomingdale’s dress billowing about her ample thighs, she was just one of the countless transplants who called New York home. She found herself sandwiched momentarily between a blowsy woman and an elderly man who was mumbling obscenities to no one in particular. Seven years ago, this would have unsettled her; now she thought nothing of it.
Pranab’s situation, on the other hand hadn’t improved much. Like her, he was initially forced to accept a series of menial positions out of desperation, first as a tree stump remover, then as a Xerox operator at a copy shop, finally as a clerk with New York Life. Recently he’d found full-time employment as a telephone repairman. He was devastated when his mother, on hearing the news, wrote to him, “So, now
you get a decent wage and have security, but what about all those years of studying Sanskrit? Every now and then, when I get your school medals out of the trunk and look at them, I just shake my head and think ‘all that work.’”
Still, if anyone were to ask, Aloka would say that they’d been reasonably happy together the first six years here. She recalled their last wedding anniversary, when they’d taken a stroll together down a tree-lined street in Manhattan. Over the faint crunching of dry leaves underfoot, he’d hummed a Sanskrit verse in a soothing voice: “‘I can only offer you a crown of velvet leaves, you, the lovely maiden.’”
Aloka arrived now at the subway entrance. On the artificially lit platform, surrounded by strangers, she reflected on Pranab and the changes he had undergone. The once-loquacious man had grown silent. His mobile face had become an expressionless mask. The boisterous laugh that used to ripple through the entire upper half of his body had subsided into an occasional sneering chuckle. His sullen presence rendered their once-cheerful home a claustrophobic prison. Head down, face frozen in a grimace, he would alternately pace back and forth or flop down on a couch where he’d sit motionless for hours. He took to clearing his throat before he spoke; he began to wear darker colors. Lately he had even stopped drinking tea. He smoked an occasional cigarette. But worst of all was his inability to accept her devotion and belief in his potential. She had continued to cook his much-loved Bengali dinners of kumro bhate and maach bhaja, tidy his study, buy books suited to his taste, and lend him a concerned ear whenever he needed it—all out of genuine love. Yet the issue of respect, so important in the tradition they both had grown up in, hung in the air like summer smog. For a whole year she’d sensed his growing fear that she no longer respected him. She had never lost respect. “I love you, I respect you,” she’d reassured him time and again.
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