The magazine, I remember, was Playboy. After I had ogled the yards of bare feminine flesh, feeling mildly guilty, I noticed an ad for Cutty Sark whisky. It had a sweepstakes coupon at the bottom: first prize, a DeLorean car, the sleek silver beauty in the news that year for reasons I no longer remember. Not unlike many others of my gender, I drooled over the women in that magazine, but damn, I wanted the DeLorean!
Not that I really expected to win. Still, I scribbled my name on the coupon and tossed it into the nearest postbox.
This was 1981, and I was in my first few weeks at Brown—my first few weeks outside my home country of India as a student in the two-year-old computer science department. So new to it all, I was still extrapolating with faultless logic from the word undergrad to tell people that I was a “new grad.” I couldn’t understand why they looked bemused.
I caught on, eventually: undergrad, but grad student.
One time I called a friend—a member of the Brown women’s squash team who regularly thumped me on the court—and burbled, “I’ve got music in my life,” because I had just bought a basic clock radio. She didn’t quite get my delight. And then there was the time I confessed to my landlady, “I really like Jews.”
Like, you know, I really like toffee. I really like redheads. I really like Jews. The prince of fresh-off-the-boat, cringe-inducing, suck-me-into-the-earth-please naïveté? That was me.
And so it was fitting that I sent in that coupon and lived, naïvely, in hope. Oh, the dreams I had! I’d drive down Thayer Street in my gleaming DeLorean with all of Brown staring as I pushed up the door, casual-like, to pick up the Sunday morning ProJo. Folks would admire the machine and when they walked up for a closer look, I’d say, cool to the max: “It’s mine! And get this, I’m a grad on a five-hundred-dollar-a-month fellowship!”
I mean, I was a student of computer science. Of all people, I should have been fully aware of the impossible odds of winning a sweepstakes. I should have known how futile the hope was. But I hoped nevertheless.
And then I did win.
Got home from the department late one evening to find my landlady waiting for me on her stoop, her teeth visibly chattering. Hopping about to keep warm in what they told me was Providence’s coldest winter in years, she was nearly beside herself with excitement. “You got a big carton in the mail!” she said, even before I could ask what she was doing outside. “Really big!”
The DeLorean arrived in a carton?
No, the Fuji arrived in a carton. Second prize in the Cutty Sark sweepstakes, a Fuji ten-speed bicycle.
I could hardly believe it. Not six months into my time in the States and I owned a handsome bike! Nearly for free (I had to take it to a store to have it assembled)! What a country!
After the first few minutes, I didn’t care that it wasn’t the car. Once I got on the Fuji, it was DeLorean enough for me. Every Sunday morning, I rode it in style—well, as much style as dropped handlebars allowed—down Thayer Street to get my ProJo.
Several months later, someone stole the front wheel, and only the front wheel. What a country. At the store, I learned that a replacement would set me back several times what I had paid to put the whole bike together. So my Fuji spent the rest of my grad experience resting (sans wheel) in the stairwell in the department. There were complaints and snide remarks, but there it stayed.
That swift machine gave me plenty of joy, yes. But when I couple that to its forlorn state in that stairwell, I know why—for me—the Fuji has always been a metaphor of sorts for my own time at Brown.
My first two semesters went astonishingly well. I threw myself into work like never before, actually enjoyed the courses and programming assignments, and met some of the warmest, keenest folks ever. My undergrad college was one of India’s best, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to my buddies from there when I say that some of these Brown kids—Alex, Jeremy, Janet, Matthew, Jeannette—were the sharpest I had ever known. How did so many congregate at Brown? And mostly because of them, I felt constantly stimulated, like I was learning every single day. Every single moment. Nothing in my twenty-plus years in India had prepared me for this heady mix of hard work and intellectual smorgasbord.
Until the wheels fell off, hard.
In my first year at Brown, I had earned six As and a B. In my second year, I registered for a total of eight courses; I actually finished just one, earning a C. I had a research assistantship in which I produced nothing; by the end, I was hunting desperately, every day, for excuses to avoid meeting my professor. What could I tell him when I had nothing to show him? I failed my PhD qualifiers. To tell the truth, I didn’t even try, because I had counted myself out before the start. I took to slinking in and out of my office, unable to face my colleagues. My best buddy in the department walked in one morning to berate me. “Do you know,” he said, “we just can’t understand what you’re doing with yourself!”
His words make me quail even now. I couldn’t understand it either. I was overwhelmed by a strange lassitude that, to this day, I cannot explain to myself. Through it all, the bike stayed in the stairwell, as forlorn as I had become.
Frantic to escape but unwilling to face what I had inexplicably become, I applied for a job halfway across the country. Somehow they made me an offer and I finally left the department. Finally moved the bike too. With my new salary in a distant city, I bought my Fuji a new wheel. Perhaps the surroundings where I didn’t know a soul helped; the lassitude slowly lifted and I felt functional again. Life was looking up.
Except for one little detail: I hadn’t actually finished my degree at Brown, and to this day, I cannot explain why I thought I might get away with that deliberate oversight. One morning, I got a call from a Brown official: “You had better return and finish, or we’ll have to revoke your immigration status.”
I flew back to Providence with minimal clothes, gritting my teeth in newfound resolve. I took along my Fuji. What followed was a brief throwback to my first year at Brown, with those pleasures and rewards I had nearly forgotten. It was three weeks of the hardest slogging I had ever done; it was how I renewed bonds with—and regained the respect of—my fellow students, because I was no longer slinking about. For three Sundays in a row, I set out on my old friend, the Flying Fuji, to collect the ProJo. To me, that bike felt like a DeLorean.
Oh yes, and I no longer needed to avoid my professor. When I was done, he shook my hand, smiled broadly, and whispered in my ear: “You did well!”
I blushed.
I had that Fuji for several years, riding it all over bike-friendly Austin, my new home. Those were good years: friends, satisfying work that I got recognized for, a handsome dog, lots of music in smoky blues bars. But something was always missing, and what started as gentle pangs grew over time into a yearning I could no longer ignore.
I had to return to India.
By the time I was ready to go, the Fuji was still serviceable, but only just. Rust had set in; the seat was falling apart. Nobody would buy it; there wasn’t much point in refurbishing it or lugging it halfway across the world, and it was too much of a family member to fling on a scrap heap. What was I to do with my bike?
Just days before I left, the decision was taken out of my hands. One morning, it disappeared. Stolen. I was despondent but also relieved. Altogether, a curiously bittersweet and wholly appropriate coda to its time in my life.
There are times, even now, especially when I’m struggling with some daunting assignment, that I remember my Fuji. I imagine the thief discovering my beat-up prize, liberating it from my garage, and, bent earnestly over the dropped handlebars, riding like the wind down a leafy Austin street.
Strangely, I wish him well.