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by Sameer Pandya

  “Let’s hope things are mellow,” I said, giving Eva a kiss on the cheek and heading toward the door. “Here and in the world.”

  “I’ll pick up the kids this afternoon,” Eva said, turning to their sandwiches.

  I lingered at the edge of the kitchen. “I had a little disagreement with the committee last night,” I said. Though I wanted to tell her, I also didn’t want to relive the moment. Every time I’d replayed it in my mind, I felt a full-body cringe. “I’m sure you’ll see Leslie or Suzanne at drop-off this morning. Please don’t listen to them. I’ll explain later.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, with concern in her voice. “What happened?” But then she added, matter-of-factly, “What did you say?”

  “Why do you assume I said something?” I hated that I had become so predictable.

  Eva cocked her head slightly. She didn’t need to remind me of my habit of saying things that I shouldn’t. “Can you just tell me what happened?”

  “It’s not that big of a deal. But I have to go get some stuff done before class. I’ll call you later.”

  Before Eva could object, Arun walked into the kitchen, wearing a pair of tight red underwear. His body was still burnt brown from the summer, his long hair lighter from days in the sun and water. Our little California-bred Mowgli.

  “Going to work?” he asked.

  “Yep. Wanna come and teach my classes?”

  His face disappeared into Eva’s belly. Sometimes I think both boys longed to be back in there.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” I said, winking at Eva.

  For a moment, as I drove away, I felt the sanctity of the early morning again, the coolness and the possibility of a day that had not yet been misspent. I might have liked the life of a monk—or at least the part where they woke up early, prayed, and then maintained uncluttered minds for the rest of the day.

  I drove through our neighborhood and then got on the freeway. Much of my twenty-minute commute went along the Pacific Ocean. The first sight of water, running onto a strip of beach where we often went on the weekends to swim and tide-pool, grabbed hold of me every morning. It was so beautiful, now and at dusk when the deep orange of the setting sun blanketed the water. Every day the splendor stunned me anew, then left me feeling empty. Sadness at the heart of unrelenting beauty? There has to be a German word for that.

  There were some solid five-foot waves out there, and several wet-suited bodies. I envied the seeming simplicity of surfing: arriving on the shore, putting on a thick layer of protection, pushing out against the waves, and gliding on the sea, over and over again until you hit the point of exhaustion. Every surfer I knew seemed cleansed from the water and the salt.

  I’d tried it once myself, while I was courting Eva; her father had taken me out to give it a go. He’d lent me one of his wet suits.

  “This should fit fine,” he’d said.

  I was excited to see myself in it and started putting it on, but it was so tight I could barely move my leg. Eva’s father had come to take a look, and in the kindest tone said, “I think you put your leg where the arm’s supposed to go.”

  That was that with surfing.

  I’d had this feeling so many times in my life: the sense that I didn’t know how to manage a situation that everyone around me seemed to inhabit so effortlessly. Even in the ocean, this frothy source of all life, I never felt truly comfortable. It was too vast, threatening, and unpredictable. Whenever we went to the beach, Eva was the one who took the boys out. She had grown up swimming in the ocean and knew the contours of the waves as they came in, how to challenge some and respect others.

  Turning away from the water, I switched on the radio and quickly changed stations. I landed on the classic rock station: Springsteen and his hungry heart. I’ve always loved Bruce’s handsome brooding, how addicted he is to attention, how he shies away from it all the same. But even as he gives voice to my inner wants and fears, I’ve always sensed that I’m not the kind of outsider he’s singing for. And yet I listen, over and over again. Bruce and then Tom Petty, followed by Neil Young—who always manages to make me nostalgic for a life I’ve never had—got me to my exit.

  The university where I teach also overlooks the ocean. At first, I’d been disappointed with the clean lines of the campus’s form-follows-function architecture, the buildings a bunch of mismatched matchboxes. But eventually I realized their genius. The natural beauty of the ocean was so stunning, ornate buildings would have gotten in the way. Of course Oxford is spectacular and impressive; it’s in the middle of dreary, rainy England.

  Since it was so early, I got a parking spot right next to the six-story building that housed my office. Nearly every time I walked from my car to the building, I was thankful to work in such a beautiful place, and yet felt an ache of sorrow, leaning toward resignation, about how my career had stalled. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I arrived very early, well before the department secretary, did all my class prep, taught my three classes through the day, and did my best to avoid my colleagues. I had learned that having a very small footprint was my key to survival. But that had not always been the case. When I finished graduate school and went off to my first job, I’d felt so ascendant, confident that there would always be a correlation between hard work and success. All these years later, I’d realized that luck, good fortune, and the ability to translate hard work into usable currency can be just as, if not more, significant in professional advancement. And somewhere along the way, I’d struck out.

  By the time I’d started that job, I’d lived in New York for several years. I knew that September hung in the long, humid shadow of August. And yet, on a Tuesday morning after Labor Day, in the safety of our air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment—filled with unopened gifts, even though a year had passed since our wedding—I’d showered and put on my new slacks, a button-down shirt, and a blazer, all new from Brooks Brothers.

  “You’ll melt,” Eva had said.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll keep the jacket off.”

  “It’s the wool of those pants that’s worrying me.”

  I should have changed into khakis and a half-sleeved shirt, but for as long as I could remember, I’d had this vision of myself, stepping into the classroom for the first time, with a newly minted degree—the wrong kind of doctor, but a doctor nevertheless—wearing a properly fitted blazer instead of the oversized ones I’d borrowed from my father’s closet for years. That image of a well-dressed Edward Said had stuck in my head.

  “It’s supposed to be cooler today,” I offered.

  “Well, you look sharp,” Eva said, tugging at my blazer’s lapel.

  “Don’t I?” I said. The heat hit me as soon as I left the building. By the time I’d made it to the subway station, my shirt was soaked in sweat. It was too late to take my jacket off. There were plenty of men walking on the street wearing suits and ties, all of them far fresher and more put together than me. I just couldn’t understand it.

  On the station platform, with sweat trickling down my legs, my wool slacks seemed to be growing fangs. But even through the endless wait for the train, as the crowd grew thicker and more agitated, I was happy to be there, with hundreds of strangers around me. So many of my friends complained about the subway, but it was one of my favorite things about living in New York. It reminded me of being a kid, going on shopping trips with my mother in Bombay. She’d stuff me onto a crowded double-decker just as the bus started moving, knowing that the adults would make room for a six-year-old, that she’d somehow find space for herself. I’d look at the Parsi women in their skirts, the Muslim men in their beards, professional men in lean suits, and the occasional Western tourist dressed in an Indian kurta with beads around his neck. My mother and I developed a deep trust in each other on those rides; no matter the crowds, we always knew we would find our way together on the other end. As I took the C train to the E, which started out sardined, the crowd gradually thinning as I made my way deeper and deeper into Queens, I felt that same wonder I had o
n the bus as it bounced through Bombay, strangers jostling all around.

  I’d been to the college before, for my interview and then later to move into my office. But this arrival was the official one—and, I’d thought, a permanent one. I went to the department secretary, who showed me around, gave me the keys that I needed. I went into the mailroom and saw a little box with my name on it, nestled in among the rest of the faculty. I was in there alone for a minute, and then someone walked in.

  “You the new guy?” an older faculty member asked, charmingly, as if I had arrived with a lunch pail and we were waiting for our shift to start at an auto plant.

  He, too, was wearing slacks, a jacket, anda tie. I watched as he noticed my jacket, which had wrinkled a little.

  “I am.”

  “John Williams,” he said, offering his hand, warm and surprisingly large.

  Of course I knew exactly who John Williams was. He’d been away when I’d come to interview on campus, so I hadn’t met him then, but he was one of the reasons I’d wanted to come and teach at the college. He’d written an oft-cited book on time and memory in everyday Moroccan life.

  “Raj Bhatt.”

  He moved past me to get his mail. “Well, Raj, if you need anything, let me know. And we should have lunch soon.”

  Excited about the prospect of that meal, I headed to my first class, located in a building that had remained essentially untouched since 1974. I peeked in through the glass square on the closed classroom door before I opened it. All the seats were taken. As I walked in, the fifty or so students turned their heads to me.

  “Hi, all,” I said. “I’m Professor Bhatt.”

  The chairs the students sat on were old. I was about to write my name on the chalkboard, but there was no chalk. The college had once been a distinguished place, but lately had fallen on hard financial times. It seemed that the only thing that worked in the classroom was the air conditioning. Thank the gods.

  “You the new guy?” a young woman in the front row asked.

  Amused by the echo of John Williams, I asked, “Were you just in the department mailroom?”

  She was confused. Of course.

  “Never mind,” I said, smiling. “Yes, I am the new guy.” I set my bag on a table and removed my notes. “I hope you’re all here for Intro to Cultural Anthropology.”

  When I had interviewed for the job, I’d immediately been attracted to the makeup of the student body: lots of immigrants, mostly the first in their families to go to college. It seemed that half of the faculty, devoted to helping the students and aware of how much their own research and thinking had benefited from engaging with diverse classrooms, shared my enthusiasm about this. The other half were conspicuously silent when the topic came up, reflecting their disappointment that their best teaching days were behind them.

  The students I had taught at Columbia knew the culture of college well—they had been training for it their whole lives. Now in front of this class, I sensed that there was something different about them. I stood there for a few long seconds, my shirt having gone from wet to dry to wet again. I was finally doing what I’d been training to do for years—to have the authority to speak and teach. I’d spent so much of my time looking ahead, assuring myself that when thishappened and thatwent through, I would find some sense of peace. Now it felt that I had arrived at the place I’d wanted to be—an immigrant helping other immigrants navigate the new world.

  I took out my notes, and as I was about to take attendance, a hand shot up in the back.

  “Before you start, can I ask you something?” a young man asked.

  “What’s up?”

  “Why anthropology? Why do we have to take this class?”

  “You don’t have to take this class.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it’s a class we can take to fulfill some of our requirements. I just want to know why I should take this one.”

  I had been asked to justify why I did what I did plenty of times, mainly by my parents’ friends who couldn’t understand why I hadn’t just gone to business school. But this student was asking me something more profound, more inquisitive—or at least I wanted to believe he was. So I put my prepared notes aside, kept my jacket on, and for the next hour talked to the students about why I thought anthropology was important. I mentioned Malinowski, Evan-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss: canonical men of the discipline who went out to the southern parts of the globe and came back with grand theories about how the world worked. The idea that there were deep structures that shaped societies across the globe, that we were more similar than different, had once kept me up at night. There are limits to such theories, of course. Still, though he’s no longer in vogue, Lévi-Strauss has remained my secret, optimistic gospel. I had studied anthropology for all sorts of complex, high-minded, theoretical reasons, but at the core, I had done it because I loved the idea of talking to people and trying to understand them, to see how different they were. And perhaps, if I dug far enough into their lives and histories, I could discover how similar they were too.

  At the end of the period, the student who’d asked the question walked by on his way out.

  “You going to take the class?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said, smiling.

  I knew he’d be back.

  I didn’t take off the jacket until I returned to our apartment that evening.

  “What happened?” Eva asked, breaking into a huge smile. “Not the right day for wool?”

  I glanced down. My shirt looked like my fingertips did after I had been in a pool for two hours straight. No matter.

  “I just had a perfect day.”

  The road to that day had not been quite as I had planned when I started college. I’d assumed I would go to law school. Until that dread eventuality, I took a lot of English and anthropology classes. I would sit in the library for hours, barreling through Walker Percy one day, Lévi-Strauss the next. But I became truly obsessed with two writers, the subject of my only published essay, “The Impossibility of Second Acts.” I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the novelists Ralph Ellison and G. V. Desani, both of whom had written brilliant first novels but never published a second one, at least not in their lifetimes. Why not? I reasoned that both had formulated an entire world—and an entire worldview—in their books the first time out, so there was nothing else for them to write, even though Ellison in particular had tried and tried.

  I had worked so hard on that essay. It had won the English department prize and a college-wide undergraduate award. And my thesis advisor had helped me get it into print just as I was graduating. It had appeared in a highly reputable journal next to work by scholars who were deep into successful careers. All this didn’t mean much in terms of guaranteeing me a stable career, but it did give me a window to see a life for myself beyond law school. I turned my attention fully to anthropology because I’d loved those classes the most. And by the time I was done with graduate school, and in my first job, I thought I was ready for my first act.

  But it never came. The excitement of that first day never amounted to anything more than that. I had trouble turning my dissertation into a book. John Williams, who I thought would be my mentor, spent most of his time patronizing me. The phrase “Let me put it more simply” seemed to slip out of his mouth without fail during our conversations, and I was sure that as he spoke to me, he slowed down and enunciated his sentences more carefully, as if he thought I had gained fluency in English only recently. I entertained the hope that all this was in my head, until he asked to see the syllabi for my classes and recommended easier readings for the students, for their sake, but also because he thought I’d have difficulty with some of the more complicated articles.

  I never complained to anyone about this, partly because I had a job and some of my friends from graduate school didn’t. It seemed bad form to be upset when so many people I knew didn’t even have health insurance. But also, I knew that there would be a cost to crossing John Williams. His books had given him a sembl
ance of fame, which had translated into power, in the department and the discipline at large.

  So throughout the years I was in the job, the resentments piled up between us, until eventually we had a disagreement in a department meeting. He didn’t like me contradicting him in front of everybody. Afterward, in the mailroom, he got in my face. “Do you know how long I’ve been doing this work?” he asked. “Since before you were born.” Nervous, I let out a squeal of laughter—perhaps another instance of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time—and that enraged him more. I can still smell his staleness. I then stepped away from him, and as I tried to squeeze my way out of the small mailroom, I accidentally bumped his shoulder with mine. That was it. A tap. And he flopped and fell to the ground. Since no one else was around, his seniority was all the proof he needed to say that I had attacked him.

  Not long after that, the chair of the department called me in and said, without bothering with euphemisms, that the rigors of research and publishing were not for me. It was true, I hadn’t been publishing. But what he was also telling me, without saying it, was that I didn’t quite fit with the culture of the place. I fit in with the students, with the changes they were bringing to campus. But John and his older generation of colleagues still made the decisions, and they had no interest in fostering a new energy within the university.

  Eva had wanted to return to California for a while at that point, and so I’d left the job. We headed west, and I ended up with the much lesser job I now held, taking a serious drop in rank. There were certainly aspects of it that I liked: the two-day-a-week teaching schedule; the after-lunch strolls to the ocean; the freedom to teach what I wanted; smart, engaged students.

  And yet, the place was filled with lecturers like me, many of whom had fancy PhDs, but by happenstance, bad luck, lack of skill, and a shrinking supply of positions had not gotten or kept the plum tenured jobs that offered lifetime employment and the freedom to write and say whatever you wanted. We were the contingent labor that made this university—and most universities around the country—run these days. We did most of the teaching, packing more and more students into our classrooms, and wrote letter after letter of recommendation so that our students could go on to better careers than ours. But if budget cuts started, we’d be the first out the door. And thus the dull, constant ache of stress and anxiety that I felt now, that circulated through my chest every time I arrived on campus.