As if seeds were blown out of a dried poppy pod and shook roughly, dispersed, flying; or as if the insides of a silk cotton pod had broken and the tiny dark life within had blown out, removed itself, and fallen a great distance from the upswept branches of the tree. Trembling in the long fall the delicate hairs around the seed, embedded then for a while in moist particles of soil. Life like that, driven by anxiety, excitement, the structures of the world out there into which one falls.
In 1969, when appa and amma left Khartoum to return to India, to Pune from where they had left in 1956 for the Sudan, I knew I was ready to leave too. I was exhilarated at the thought of what might come, but also felt I had no option but to move on. I did not see how I could continue to live in the Sudan where I had grown up, come to consciousness, where my dearest friends lived. Many were fleeing already from the increasingly repressive regime of the new government.
Sarra left for Edinburgh University where she was to study for an M.A. and from there she traveled with her husband to Kuwait to find work. My friend Isabelle Raoul, who was a Sephardic Jew and had never had a real Sudanese passport, only traveling papers, fled in the middle of the night, just the month before I left. She fled with all her family to Geneva, then on to Brighton. When I visited her a few years later, she was living with Bertrand—her parents had arranged a marriage for her—in a luxurious penthouse, with gold wallpaper, and an entire library filled with fake books. Bertrand insisted she stay home, as befit the wife of the proprietor of numerous garages that catered to Jaguars and Bentleys. He would not permit her go to the university to complete her studies. Isabelle sat upright in a leather armchair. She had grown lighter in color, put on weight. She had a large number of photographs from Khartoum carefully pasted into her albums. Look, she pointed. There was one of her pale, and me dark, arms entwined, dancing our version of the sixties twist. “Remember ‘Twist and Shout’?” she whispered. “How we used to dance those late summer nights in Khartoum.”
Our friend Ernest Solomon left from Birmingham, where he had gone to study, to work in Israel. He used to write me long letters, imploring me not to tell our other close friends where he was. “How unhappy I am,” he wrote, “they treat us dark-skinned Jews so badly. But what life was there in Khartoum for us?” His mother escaped from the Sudan and joined him. Then he married Riva, a young woman in the Israeli army and he sent me a proud picture, of him in his checked shirt and Riva with a rifle by her side, her army beret cocked on her head. I never heard from Ernest after that. George Constantinides went off to Cyprus to work in a hotel, as a manager. He had to do a stint for a while in the Cypriote army. Samir, whom his cousins had wanted me to marry, joined the Egyptian air force. How tall and straight he was, his face taut with the pleasure of his new job. He used to take me out for ice creams and sit there quite silent, looking into my eyes, smiling at my odd words. He was quite content to let me talk, and I took a great pleasure in his trust. When his cousins Madiha and Samira, both tennis players—Madiha had even reached Junior Wimbledon—wanted me to marry him—“That way you’ll stay in Khartoum forever”—I was touched to the core and even considered the possibility seriously for a day or two. Perhaps married to Samir, and there were a number of Indian women married to Sudanese, I could give up the burden of what I was, be driven around in a car, live in the large house in Khartoum North where his family, Turkish relatives included, all gathered. I could indulge with them in shopping trips to Alexandria and Beirut for slippers and cosmetics, even Rome or Paris every now and then; I could have the sweet-scented halava run over my legs and arms ripping off the small hairs, so my skin felt as smooth as a newborn baby; I could place cotton balls with rose attar or Chanel No. 5 on my skin. But what would become of me, my mind, myself?
And always the longing to return to India haunted me. In the end, in one of those choices that help define the shape, the texture of a life, I took the long route back. At the age of eighteen, I went to England, to Nottingham University to study for my Ph.D. Initially, amma had had other thoughts in mind. She was keen that I join Madras University where she had studied and where grandmother Kunju had studied and taught. Her fond hope was that I could be drawn back into the web of traditional life as if the fabric which had been stretched, even battered, by our life abroad, might be woven afresh and I wrapped up in it again, a fresh generation entering adulthood. An M.A. from Madras University was not wholly inappropriate for an intelligent young woman. It should certainly be possible to find a good husband after that. And then would follow a life in a comfortable home, with servants and children, somewhere in India. But to amma’s shock, for she had started all the investigations herself, through her many cousins who lived in or near Tambaram and Chinglepet, Madras University refused to accept a degree from Khartoum University, which must have seemed in its eyes a poor, postcolonial cousin. London University would accept the Khartoum degree, but not Madras. So I was left with the old colonial route seemingly the one credible possibility: go to England, young woman, they all said. Then you can return to India.
The external examiner at Khartoum University had come from Nottingham University. Jim Boulton, a handsome man, shortish with a shock of white hair and piercing blue eyes. He had been a fighter pilot during World War II and, landing his plane in Madras, had been billeted in Pune. He met us at the cathedral where appa and amma in a renewed spirit of Anglicanism took us each Sunday. “I will meet you after the service and then come home for dinner,” he said. After dinner, sitting on the lawn, under the desert stars, he spoke to appa privately. “You have a very talented daughter. I have just marked her papers, and she would have got a first anywhere. I would like her to study further, to do her Ph.D. in England. She can certainly come to Nottingham, but perhaps she would like to try for Cambridge, where I am sure she would get in.” This is the conversation that appa, in fullsome manner, relayed to me a few days later.
I did not go to Cambridge. When one of my professors who had studied there wrote to Girton College, Miss Bradbrook, on learning that I was just eighteen, wanted me to fulfill the second half of the Tripos exam. I was dead set against it. The thought of ever doing exams again filled me with irritation: I did not see how reading a set text had any connection with the learning requisite to the composition of poetry, which was what my heart was set on.
My poetry professor, Alasdair Macrae, also counseled against it. “Don’t go there, Meena. People who go to Oxford or Cambridge always think of themselves as superior, as set apart for the rest of their lives.” Alasdair, who had read us the words of Hugh MacDiarmid and sung ballads in Gaelic to illustrate the music of poetry, had grown up as a proud Scotsman and had studied at Edinburgh. He was a great influence on me. I took his words very seriously, for, apart from my poet friends at Khartoum University, it was he who first nurtured in me the specific music of poetry, and taught me to value the condition akin to a waking dream in which the rhythms of a poem first enter the conscious mind.
At night I used to lie awake and wonder what the high tower of Trent Building was like—I had seen a photo in the brochure that the university sent me. I used to wonder if the whole city was filled with Raleigh factories and what was left of Lawrence’s coal mining town, and the poverty he had written of in Sons and Lovers, a book that had moved me greatly.
Khartoum airport, August 1969: the travelers waited by the concrete wall with their relatives, just by the runway. Amma was fighting back tears, then let them spill. She turned her face all puffy with weeping. Anna and Elsa stood arms linked, a little to her side. Appa, stepping forward to hug me, seemed tired, his eyes slightly red with the glare off the metal airplanes lined up on the concrete. My suitcase, the blue one with the expanding frame that we had taken on all our trips to India, had gone already into the metal hold of the plane. I think I was calm, ready to move on. I had already cut my bonds, I would fly loose.
“Meena, don’t forget our people, go to church too,” amma had begged me. Now her arms were wide open and empty as I stepped away.
I will never forget that plane ride: the temperature dropping precipitously at each stop—Khartoum, 110; Cairo, 90; Rome, 70; London, 60 with frozen fog—so that in the little semidetached outside Heathrow the body trembled in its thin covers, then trembled all through the next day, entering another life.
At Heathrow, Prashant and his sister Mamta met me. I had only seen him once before in Khartoum. There he stood in his cheap shirt, the lower button loose over his potbelly, his head balding prematurely. He waved at me forlornly and I walked as quickly as I could towards him, my bulging suitcase in hand. He was one of the Indians tossed out of Kenya by Idi Amin’s edicts. He had fled with his British passport to London. Now relocated in a newly purchased semidetached not far from the airport, he was trying to get his laundry cum grocery store off to a good start.
His eldest sister Rani was one of amma’s friends in Khartoum. Rani was married to Prakash Mehta, a South African of Indian origin who taught in the zoology department at the University. They lived a two-minute walk away from us in Hai el Matar. With Prashant so close to Heathrow, Rani thought he would be the perfect person to meet me.
That night I sat in the bare kitchen with the yellow linoleum floor, the single metal sink, and stared out through the window frame at a yellowing peach tree. Its leaves were minimal, three or four at the most, and the ones that hung there were a dull ocher color, twisting sullenly in the slight autumn breeze. I could not reconcile that tree to anything but the shivering that took hold of my body. Mamta was solicitous, running forward with her bright green cardigan, insisting I lie down. All that night on the small metal bed in the bare room, in the bare house that told so clearly the tale of dislocation, a calendar, a telephone, a television, suitcases open on the floor, a few oddments in the cupboard, none of the detailed densities, circlings of dust and books and fallen flower petals that tell of a house lived in, I struggled to figure out where I was and what I was doing.
Nothing made sense. All that night, as if bitten by a low fever, I shivered in my skin. I hugged my arms around me as if that might afford a minimal protection. The thin blanket Mamta brought in did very little.
I do not recall how I passed the next day in Prashant’s house. Everything blurred in the peculiar English weather I was to learn so well in the years that followed, the threat of rain, but the heavens never opening, the ground and air sucked into the innards of an immense wet cheek, light filtered through a porous grayness.
After the dazzling heat of Khartoum, the roads, the edges of the desert lit by the white light that distills all objects into their edges, date palms, cars, stones, passing feet, camel hooves, the partial darkness that frequently washes over an English afternoon was hard to take. I kept gazing out of the window at the peach tree, hearing Prashant behind me. He had drawn up a metal chair in the kitchen and was going over the details of some business transaction on the phone.
As a student in Nottingham, I had a room in an old house, national trust property, so no one could tear it down though the wood was falling apart in the basement with the pressure of water that seeped in from underground. On the ground floor lived an old lady, delicately featured, partial to long lace gowns. She had gone to kindergarten with Bertie Lawrence and was filled with wonder at the goodness of his heart, his brilliant blue eyes, and the machinations of the German she-devil who had robbed him of grace. Below her lived old man Carver who stored his beer bottles in the mess of black water that coursed through the cellar. Once, hearing the cry of birds from the cellar, I ventured down and stepping over the bottles found a whole nest of swallows that had made their way down through a broken window and taken shelter in darkness.
At Nottingham, Jim and Margaret Boulton took the place of a second set of parents, and I grew to depend on them greatly. I appreciated their rose garden and the delicate herbs Margaret placed on her roast beef, the Yorkshire pudding they cooked up. Jim gardened for hours and often, spending Sunday at their house in Beeston, I would talk to him of the difficulties I was facing. For instance, trying to make sense of the fitful audience in the old marketplace, as a small group of artists and writers whom I had joined worked on a performance piece complete with animal blood and the head of a dead pig—all to smash the notion of aesthetic space and awaken the populace. Or in a somewhat different vein, my difficulties in figuring out the symbolic structures of poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” or “Anecdote of the Jar” (I was fascinated with how minimal a text could get). I also shared with him troubles caused by various young men who kept asking me out, one even going so far as to say he would kill himself if I did not marry him. I felt quite helpless in the matter. I did not know what to do. Shovel in hand, or trimming a rosebush, Jim would listen patiently, and his acute intelligence when he responded always clarified my confusions.
In all these narratives, without consciously intending to do so I kept my sexuality carefully out of the picture. I painted myself as the passive recipient of male desire. I was not touched deep inside; they wanted me, I told myself, and told others: such percipience seemed the feminine part. It was with a shock, a year later, still in England, when I realized that the world I had so carefully constructed, of intensive study, of a few late night parties that I attended more out of a sense of duty than anything else, beers, cigarettes, heady intellectual talk of the sixties, all the accoutrements of a young student’s life, could all blow apart. I wanted a man, and I had not wanted anyone so much since the friend I had met in Khartoum when I was seventeen. The intensity of sexual passion forced me back into my bodily self, made me turn against the “reason” of the world. Though all the Romantic texts I was studying seemed to work against the sorts of Cartesianism that split mind from body, I could not move from those intense visualizations of personal space into my own ravaged history.
I felt I had nothing to hold onto and was falling and falling through empty air. I felt I had transgressed in some unspeakable way and the arms of the father could not hold me. That is how I couched it in my journals: “father” or alternately “Father,” as if I had fallen through the arms of God or as if my own father, in lifting me high in the glittering air as I ran off the ship at Port Sudan, had suddenly vanished and I had dropped through hot air. I struggled for familiar sensory attachments that might hold me, but there was little my eye or ear could attach to, little to revive a web of memory that might connect me to my past. The whole world had caved into the apocalypse of the mind.
Even when I could not read, I held tight to my well-thumbed copy of Fear and Trembling, often tucking it in under the bedcovers, where it would get lost in the pale pink blankets the University Health Centre favored. For that was where I found myself, heavily sedated, so I would sleep. Indeed I was grateful for sleep when it came and willing to give up my nervous pain for the pacification the sleeping tablets provided. Awake, I was acutely conscious, my mind trembling with knowledge it could not piece together. My research into the structures of Romantic self-consciousness, into the refined articulations of internal time-consciousness, had led me here. I did not know who I was. I felt as if I were paying with my life.
Tormented by a sense of having transgressed a boundary, a code, an edict—something in the law as it stood—I was aware at the same time that what had befallen me had nothing to do with my own actions, and everything to do with my being, what I was in and of myself. I felt the force of passion buffeting me and wondered if the heights I was falling from were not precisely measurable in terms of the physical distance from the hands, the lips, of the beloved. I think there was a truth in that intense, even numbing sensation, thought turned wholly to bodily knowledge, that it has taken me till now to spell out.
Walter Benjamin writes of how raising up the truth of the past means seizing a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. I believe this to be true. Perhaps the long fall that has haunted me is a symptom of crisis, of a time of convulsion, where everything still is to be worked out, elaborated, survived. My migration to Britain, and with it the sense that the future was not really comprehensible, had fused with my well-concealed fear of God the Father; the theology of my Christian upbringing forcing a terrible fragility into the self, rendering it groundless.
I cannot forget here the great guilt that has remained with me: when Ilya was dying I could not bear to see his terrible pain—heart pain—and called upon what God there was to make him die. In his last days when Ilya, laid flat against his pillows, hardly able to raise his head, asked me to give him some water to drink, I turned away, hardening every inch of me, filled with fury that he should suffer so. It was my little sister Anna, just four, who in her innocence ran forward with a glass of water. I did not weep at Ilya’s death; I went forward in the throng of other mourners at home and laid a single red rose on his chest and I looked at the face I had loved so, the chin wiped clean with the mortician’s blade of all its white stubble, the proud, regal forehead, the long nostrils stuffed with cotton wool, and I lost all remaining faith in God—in that deity whom I had called upon to put an end to Ilya’s suffering. Sometimes, at night, I feel I can hear him cry out in pain, as the bands tighten around his chest, and he gasps for breath. I toss and turn on this old futon in Manhattan and put out my hands, and reach into the night air as if by reaching out, I might touch his hands again, for the last time.
Somehow, in my mind’s eye, the crossing of borders is bound up with the loss of substances, with the distinct pain of substantial loss: with the body that is bound over into death, with the body that splits open to give birth.
In my Nottingham journal I had jotted down “Si le grain ne meurt . . .” over and over again, though I did not know when that falling to the ground, of the small dark seed, might come. The entry into the future seemed irrefutable but, at the very same time, shorn of all possible images. My terror was that I felt I had no history. It was precisely to discover, to make up my history, that I had to return to India. But this was not something I was aware of when I was going through my spiritual difficulties, my “nervous breakdown.” Indeed, much was unraveled from me in those years in Britain, and what coiled up again threatened to destroy the quick of my feeling self. I could not accept my own body and my desires and what those desires might lead me to. The world was already too fractured, and when I went to England as an eighteen-year-old, I clung to the clarities of a realm marked out by male poets, even though in abstract terms I was thinking about the body and how it permitted a place through which internal time could sway.
There was nothing in the refined notions I set about to elaborate (drawing on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the notions of intentionality and corps vecu) that might be inclusive of what I was—no color there, no female flesh, no postcolonial burden. In those days in England, in ways I would not even acknowledge to myself, I longed to cut free of what I actually was, a female creature from the Third World with no discernible history.
Sexual passion then became an extreme danger, for it threatened to let loose all the emotions I was struggling so hard to cut away from my person. The summer I turned nineteen I had what was termed “a nervous breakdown.” I could not read. I could see in a hazy sort of way, but near books my sight twisted, firing the alphabets of English till they became utterly Other. Some letters even took on the swirling syllabic forms of the Malayalam I had left so far behind. I could not sleep. I was afflicted by nervous headaches. Perhaps I was working too hard, trying to finish my thesis. But it wasn’t just that. I had formed a passionate relationship with a man and it tormented me. I had no idea, or so it seemed to me at the time, how obsessive passion could be. I could not give myself, as I phrased it then, to him, nor could I turn away. I felt as if my body were taking vengeance on me. All my thoughts of “the intentional inexistence of the object”—a good Husserlian phrase—were swept away in unfulfilled desire. There was also the brute fact of the academic discourse I had chosen: no way could be found within it to acknowledge anything of what I was. My study of Romantic identity was predicated on the erasure of my own. It was many years later that I wrote a book on women in Romanticism, choosing as my beginning Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical questioning of woman’s place: “We fearfully ask,” she wrote in her novel Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, “on what ground we ourselves stand.” Marginalized, considered mad by the illogic of the world, her protagonist struggles on, mind intact, fighting fiercely. A banned creature, she questions the laws of the world that render her such.
Returning to India after my studies in Britain, as a grown adult in 1973, I had to unlearn my tortuous academic knowledge, remake myself, learn how to read and write again as if for the first time. Thinking this out, I take courage from Rassundara Devi, who in 1876 published the first autobiography in Bengali, Amar Jiban (My Life). As a married woman, held within the confines of domesticity, she taught herself to read and write in secret, hiding a page from the Chaitanya Bhagavatha in the kitchen and scratching out the letters on the sooty wall. It took me many years to get where she got, many years to find my own sooty wall on which to scratch these alphabets.
To help me recover my strength I went away from Nottingham for three months, into the countryside outside Basingstoke, to Pamber to live with an old bricklayer and his wife. I had never seen such poverty, such plainness of living close at hand: a small cottage, no books, just the beds and chairs and table and a small pile of vegetables, a few cheap cuts of meat. Old Mr. Long still slept with newspapers tucked into his bed to keep him warm, a habit he had picked up in wartime, his wife told me.
I took The Prelude with me. “When I am able to read I want to read this first,” I told my friend Robert, whose sister-in-law’s parents had so kindly taken me in. One afternoon, as I lay on my back at the edge of the delicate woods of oak and birch that rose by the Longs’ house, I opened a page of The Prelude—this was after two months of being unable to read—and miraculously found my eyesight clarified, sharpened to the syllables of the poem. Somewhere towards the end of Book One of the 1805 text is where my gaze fell, but quickly, with shaking fingers I turned to the eleventh book, lines I had long loved, and I repeated them over to myself: “So feeling comes in aid / Of feeling, and diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong.” I wondered at the sudden infusion of vigor I felt, and a trembling pleasure, as if it were my own past that was on the brink of being restored. Slowly, but certainly, my eyes gained strength. For another couple of weeks I continued to work in the Longs’ garden, picked plums, took walks in the woods, painted, wrote long letters to the Boultons, who all the while had treated me with great kindness. “You needed a change, that’s all,” Margaret comforted me. “Very soon you’ll come back to your studies.” I did return. I did finish my thesis on Romanticism and the structures of self-identity, pondering how memory was opened up by the complications of lived space, how the “now” of recollection permitted internal time to unfold, a moment, constantly shifting, constantly returned to, much as the opening note of a piece of music is held always at the brink of consciousness, guaranteed by the fragile, living body.
That last year in Nottingham I grew close to a poet from Amsterdam, a scholar of Gaelic who was doing his research on translation theory. Maxim and I traveled through Ireland, living in Galway where his mother was. We spent several months in Amsterdam where I poured myself into the art galleries, studying the Dutch masters and the fierce works of Van Gogh that I had learnt to love. Time and again I would return to a series of early paintings done around the time when Van Gogh had very little money, the allowance from Theo only trickling in, the paints spread out so thin the canvas almost poked through. The paintings I particularly loved had to do with a garden with forking paths. The back of a figure was visible, but ahead, the road split into two and one of the paths would have to be picked out, traveled. The brooding grays and greens of those early paintings remained with me, and looking out into Wollaton Park, or in the Arboretum, when Maxim and I returned to Britain, I seemed to see them replicated. Then, though I was happy with him in so many ways, I left Maxim to return to India. The thought of living as the wife of a man in Brussels or Luxembourg, bringing up young children, cooking Dutch soup even as I struggled to write poetry, sat hard with me. If I had stayed with Maxim, I felt I would have lost India. The grief at parting tore me apart, but I knew I had to go.
In 1973 I returned to Pune where appa and amma were living. The city was recovering from a bad flood that, coming after a season of drought, had devastated life. I saw women picking up shards of glass, bits of broken bottle, wire, paper, anything but stones, to recycle them for a few paise, and this with the right hand while the left scrounged around for scraps of food that might have been thrown out of the houses nearby: rice, dal, chapatis, half-cooked vegetables. Seeing all this, I could not eat and grew very thin.
I needed a job, so I could live my own life, but it was several months before I finally found one, in Miranda House in Delhi, in 1974. I had just turned twenty-three. Delhi made me. I cannot conceive of myself without those years, 1974 and 1975, when I threw myself into the life of the city. I was young enough to be taken for a student and enjoyed the life of the hostel and cafes. I used to attend the meetings of the Philosophy Society at Saint Stephen’s College, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Gupta. Old Bose Saab, the elegant philosopher, used to attend regularly and we would sit in silence and hear him speak of Spinoza and the intellectual love of God, this very old man whose bones seemed to be shining through his frail skin.
It was at these gatherings in 1974 that I met Ramu Gandhi. It is hard for me to conceive of what I would have been in my thinking, feeling, being, had we never met. Through him I learnt to see India for myself, started to glimpse the deep troubling truths about the land of my origins. Through our conversations, I sensed afresh something of the pain and pity of what it meant to feel one’s self spiritually cast out. He taught philosophy in those days in Delhi University and we would sit and talk under the trees in the campus gardens or in the coffeehouse. He came from a distinguished family, his father’s father was Gandhiji, his mother’s father was Rajagopalachari and he might have considered himself part of the most privileged in a new India. But Ramu, with his intensity of soul, had a true empathy in those days for those who were truly cast out, considered polluted. And knowing how new I was in Delhi, indeed in India, at least where adult life was concerned, he pointed out all sorts of people to me: the poor children picking rags by the truck stops, the beggar squatting by the pile of garbage outside Saint Stephen’s College, the mother with three naked infants clinging to her back. His brilliance broke loose from the language of the Oxford philosophers—he had studied with Strawson—and turned to the concrete, vivid landscape around him.
It was in Delhi that I met my dear friend Svati Joshi. We first greeted each other in the English department at Miranda House where I had my first job. The English department in those days was filled with talk of kanjeevram saris and chiffon saris; where to get the best quality rasmallai; how to arrange a sumptuous tea party after the fifth viewing of Gone with the Wind, a movie that had reduced many of the English teachers to tears. Those who were not involved in this sort of chitchat sat on the edges, in some visible discomfort. While indeed there were serious, gifted people teaching in the college in those days, in the English department the noise of socializing dominated. I was the proud possessor of two cotton saris, which I wore on alternate days; two pairs of jeans and three tee shirts. Having come out of the late sixties in Britain, to possess little seemed to me the mark of a fine mind: clearly I was set on a collision course with the givers of tea parties. But there were fine compassionate women there too, political women who were involved with the teachers’ union and the strike plans. I joined them in Boat Club Road, in a protest march against Mrs. Gandhi’s government, my first experience of courting arrest.
Svati and I became fast friends. I remember when I caught sight of her first, her fine brown hair flying into her face, her string of amber beads glistening on her neck. She had recently returned from Harvard and initially it was the love of poetry that bound us together. When I lost my job at Miranda House—it was a leave vacancy and the woman who had gone away had returned, her husband’s dairy farm having failed in some fashion I could not quite grasp, something to do with the cows, their feed and the rising cost of both—Svati and I took to the streets to see if I could find another job: as a journalist, working for a magazine, an art gallery, anything that seemed suitable. The world was wide open in those days and we were filled with excitement at the protests against the repressive measures of the government. I had to move out of the Miranda House flat and for some time I stayed with Svati, in her flat in VP House: we would sit in the cool room and listen to Joan Baez or read Neruda, and then walk the streets, drinking in the sights and sounds of Delhi, attending poetry readings, theater festivals, showings of recent Indian movies.
I met her father, the poet Uma Shankar Joshi, whom I too called Bapuji. And I met her sister, the Harvard-trained economist Nandini, who was filled with thoughts on how an economy appropriate to India might develop, how the spinning of khadi might help alleviate the terrible poverty in the villages. From Uma Shankar I learnt of the fine pleasures of poetry, of a life bound to the creation of literature. As he cut vegetables to make kichdi or stirred the rice and dal, we spoke of poems and the political world. A follower of Gandhi even as a young man, he had lived and worked in the Sabermati ashram, I sensed that Bapuji belonged to the same world as Ilya had, filled with a shining belief in how India could be made anew. It was a world I appeciated deeply, though I did not see how I could be a part of it. There was an amazing quality of light about Uma Shankar, a true refinement of soul that touched all those around. It was clear that poetry for him was part of the illumination that came from the shared world. It was inconceivable that it should be something cut apart.
With Svati I went on the great march that J. P. Narayan led in 1974, in Delhi, and we watched in wonder as very old ladies clad in khadi came out of their seclusion and climbed onto jeeps that moved them in slow motion, through the hot air, towards India Gate. When my little daughter was born in the summer of 1986, Svati and Bapuji were visiting the United States and they came and stayed with us and Svati held out her lovely arms and picked up her little namesake and sang songs to her, and walked with me, the week after the baby was born, in the summer heat of Broadway.
Why did I leave India? Why did I feel as if there still were a part of my story that had to be forged through departure? I am tormented by the question. All I knew was that something had broken loose from inside me, was all molten. And what was molten and broken loose had to do with India as I saw the land, and to write I had to flee into a colder climate. Else I would burn up and all my words with me.
“I am falling,” I said to David when we first met. “I keep dreaming I am falling.” It was a long time ago, 1979. We were sitting at Manju’s, the new bar on Abid Road in Hyderabad. It had a dull orange light and excitable men who had left their wives behind to come and drink. It had a bar lady with a cleavage and fish that swam sullenly in a neon-lit aquarium with water two feet deep and enough artificial pearls to smother even a fictive Nizam of Hyderabad.
“I am falling. I keep seeing that, falling off the edge of a cliff. I am holding on with two fingers, wrapped around a bit of rough grass.” He was very tender. “I’ll hold you,” he said. “I’ll be a safety net for you.” And he told me about the extreme cold of Minneapolis where he worked, where breath froze, and the car froze, where just for the heck of it bearded men went out on the ice when the temperature was minus forty, punched holes in the ice with metal picks, and sat and fished for pike, all red with cold, never trembling, never falling.
I was fascinated by those tales and by his own gift of narrative. David loved telling stories, and wrapped me in his voice and held me there. We had met at the home of a mutual friend in Hyderabad and very quickly, in three weeks, had fallen in love and decided to marry. We used to meet in his high room with a balcony in the Taj Mahal Hotel. He was retracing all the steps that he had traveled ten years earlier and had gone from Athens to Jerusalem and now was in India. On his old Hermes typewriter he set up pages of the Jerusalem journal he was writing. I was fascinated by the sense that through narrative he was making up his life, his autobiography.
There was a neem tree outside his balcony and the quiet shadows of a garden of marigolds and roses. I felt a peace, a great pleasure in that room with him and knew I could be there forever. But when we reached Minneapolis a year later, where he had his teaching job at the university, I felt chilled by this strange new world: baby food in jars and shopping malls and at home books stacked high in piles with no time to read them. When my cigarette dropped into a wastebasket in the attic room of the house David shared with a colleague in the history department, and the basket started smoldering, the thought sprang to mind: I am this basket, this burning thing, how shall I bear my life here? And I tossed the basket out of the high window to put out the flames and to cool off, pushed my little Adam—who was born in New York just two months earlier—around and around the sidewalks of the neat suburban area and watched other wives lay out the washing and roll out their carpets and thought, I am a wife like that, I am, I am. And I saw the mailman come with the mail, and lay it down in a neat pile under the laurel tree and heard my son cry out with delight. But in my mind’s eye I kept seeing that basket burning, filled with waste paper from writings that never had time or space to come to anything, torn pages of a Sears catalog, fourth-rate junk mail, bits of soiled tissue paper. Where was the life I had led? Who was I?
Later that summer, Trish Hampl spoke to me of a place where she used to go to write, a little cabin by the North Shore. “Why don’t I find you a cabin there?” she suggested. So I found my way to the small cabin by the quiet waters, ringed with massive green of fir trees, rocks, solitude. I had tea with Trish and she spoke to me of her life, her writing. I can see her large eyes, her face, as we sat hearing the waters move against the rocks and I understood how haunted she was by the sense of beauty. But when I returned to my own cabin, what came out onto paper was all the confusion of my crossing, and before David and little Adam came up to meet me, for I missed them so, I sat in the little cabin on the North Shore of Minnesota and started making notes on the rocks of Banjara in Hyderabad, the dried-out river bed where I was attacked, the police station where Rameeza Be was raped, where in rage the people had risen up and set the place on fire, so that it stood in the midday heat, the whitewashed station the British had built, all its rafters burning.
“I feel as if my soul had collapsed, as if there were no distance there.”
I was speaking on the phone to Erica. We had first met ten years earlier when I was newly arrived in America and she lived in West-beth and ran the Woman’s Salon. When I first visited Erica I told her my adventures: crossing the streets of Manhattan, finding the right subway stop. We sat over coffee and shared our thoughts on writing as the sun set over the Hudson River, over the old rotting piers where Melville had strolled years ago and where still the gulls wheeled.
“I cannot bear to write this part, let alone breathe, think about appa’s illness. Why?”
“Because you cannot let it go—the pain, but also it’s yours, nothing can touch it. Let it out into words and then you have lost it in a sense, and you must grow through it, beyond it.”
As she spoke I thought of a snakeskin, sloughed off so the new skin could emerge. Her words cut in, “Its a liminal stage, a flux in creation, when you look at the pain.”
“And if you don’t, it destroys you?”
“Exactly. . .” and she spoke on in her moving way of what it meant to draw something out of the psyche and look at it, and set it to words, and how what was not set into words would remain literally unspeakable. Listening to her speak, I drew courage to go on.
*
The phone call came in the middle of the night. I tremble thinking about it. I try to make it all blur and vanish. Thinking of it, I feel as if I were falling, falling through empty air.
“Your father’s in the hospital. He had a heart attack killing a snake. It was threatening your mother and sisters. There was no one else around. He picked up the big bamboo stick that lies behind the almirah and hit it. Once, twice and then fell down as the snake writhed and died. Your father collapsed. He could not breathe and cried out in pain; stumbled to the dining room and fell unconscious. He had to be carried out to the car, taken to Pushpagiri Hospital. A few minutes later and he would have been dead. He’s there now, in a critical condition.”
“He’s still in intensive care.”
“Yes, he was killing a snake that was threatening your mother. He had to kill it. There was no other man there.”
I pieced the story together, through the nightly phone calls, my chest hurting, for I felt as if iron bands were ringing it around, tightening as the phone rang so I could not really breathe as I picked up the receiver and heard the phone line swaying as I imagined it, across several oceans. Other times I felt as if my body were a piece of transparent fabric and I could hear within it my father, thousands of miles away, crying out in pain, struggling for breath. And sometimes, in those weeks, when he was very sick and my small child cried out in her bed, in the room next to where I slept, I felt as if the two cries, at opposite corners of the transparency that my soul had turned into, were all that was, that there was nothing else left.
Appa was very ill that summer, but he did not die. When I got there two months later with both children, he was well enough to sit up for a while at the edge of the bed or lie against the pillows and talk to me. He spoke to me about his life, about history, about the battle of Tessenei.
“Did you know about that battle?” he asked me. “Ten thousand Indian soldiers laid down their lives. They fought Mussolini and his soldiers. Else the Fascists would have advanced. I went near that place.”
“Went there, you traveled there to see the monument?”
“Flew over it on the way to Asmara.”
He was half sitting up now, propped against the pillows, his lean face haggard with exhaustion. He put an Isordil tablet in his mouth. Then he relaxed and I saw the wonderful bones in his face, resting quietly in the light that shone in from the window and I thought, this is my father, he is speaking to me, giving me his life in words, letting me into history.
He sat up and the oxygen cylinder strapped to his bed shook a little.
“It was an old connection between Sudan and India. Mussolini had taken Ethiopia and wanted to march into the Sudan, so the British army went in; and the Indian army came too. It was a pitched battle. Ten thousand Indian soldiers were killed. In recognition of that fact, after India became independent, the British gave ten thousand pounds to build the main administrative block in the National Defence Academy in Khadakvasla. It’s called Sudan Block, or Sudan House, I think.”
“I think I’ve seen it,” I said softly, my mind casting back to our visits to the NDA after I had returned from England, the large gray stones of the military training quarters, cold, crepuscular as the night winds rose. “I’d forgotten though that it was Sudan Block.”
His energy rose a little in him, an old impatience, though the lack of oxygen in his body that the polycythemia caused made it hard for him to go on.
“Sudanese officers used to be sent there for training. I met President Abboud on the plane when he was returning from India and Europe. I even considered going to him for help when they wouldn’t let you into the university because you were too young. But you had done excellently in the exams.”
“To Abboud?”
“Yes, indeed. He always used to ask our ambassador about us.”
“Appa, you know he was thrown out.”
“Of course. In any case there was no need for me to call on him. You got in without too much difficulty.”
I sat up, embarrassed, confused. This was something I had known nothing about. At the same time I was deeply touched by how seriously appa had taken my studies. He had understood that my mind needed to grow, sharpen itself. In the early days, when I was twelve and thirteen and used to write my poems in the toilet, it was always appa who encouraged me to send them out, get them published, allow my work to find a place in the world. And he had encouraged me to go to England to study. Returning to India, I had shared with him all my difficulties in landing a job.
His voice was coming more softly now, a little blurred with the difficulties of breathing. “It was because of the Bandung Conference that we went to the Sudan. Azhari and Nehru met there, and became friends and India sent technical assistance to the newly independent Sudan. Even our Election Commissioner, Mr. Sen, went out to help with the first Sudanese elections.”
He was tired and lay back against the pillows and I sat watching him, his body so thinned by the ravages it had survived. Ten years earlier, when appa was working for the United Nations in Somalia, he had suddenly collapsed. Elsa, my little sister, only nineteen at the time, was visiting him there. They scooped him up, put him in a little plane, and flew him to Nairobi Hospital. Elsa was all alone in the city, stranded, till Fauzi’s sister Rehana took her in. It was a miracle appa survived, with acute hepatitis, kidney trouble, and the polycythemia that had already taken hold of him. And now another brush with death.
I seemed to hear his voice as I watched him lie there, his eyes closed. His voice came to me from almost thirty years earlier:
“He makes us put our foot on the head of the adder; He will not let us fall.” We were sitting on wicker chairs, in the lawn in Khartoum and appa with great gusto, a glass of beer in his hand, was telling the story of how, in the Pink Palace, where he stayed when he first arrived in Khartoum—it was Emperor Haile Selassie’s old quarters—he had walked out to the bathroom, felt something squirming underfoot, and realized that the heel of his sandal had struck the head of a poisonous desert snake.
“If it had been anywhere but the head, we would have been bitten. And there was no cure for that poison.” I had laughed in relief, the story of my father’s strength filling me with new life. And I had clutched my friend Mala’s hand, for she too was listening to the tale enthralled.
Now in Tiruvella, he was lying breathing gently, arms by his sides, almost dead after beating a poisonous snake to death. He had killed it so it should not bite my mother, and had almost paid with his life. Lifting up his stick to strike the snake a second time, as it rose in the pile of coconut husks that were stored at the side of the veranda, appa, almost sixty-eight now, did not know if it was the snake he was seeing again, that brown thing thrashing, or his eyes were doubling, shimmering in the blood clot that rose.
As I watched him rest against the pillows, I straightened myself in the chair, shut my eyes only to feel the tears hot against my eyelids. I opened my eyes and let the tears fall. Above appa’s head, to the right of the desk, to the right of the window that gave onto the incense tree in the garden, was a portrait of grandmother Kunju. I had grown up with that portrait: her large dark eyes, the clear cheekbones, the perfectly formed chin, the pearls in her ears casting a slight shadow, it seemed, onto the image, all gathered into the composure that marked the whole, as a slight uptilt of her lips, a half-smile drew the viewer’s gaze in.
A week earlier, entering the room, exhausted after the long journey from New York, little Svati in my arms, I had embraced my parents and then sat in silence against the far wall. Amma was reading Psalm Twenty-three for the night’s prayer, and appa, tired like this, had sat up in bed. I felt I could not bear it any longer, this near death, this slow wasting away of appa’s body. My eyes moved to that portrait. I felt a radiance come down to me, something from her dark eyes, captured on thin, perishable paper, falling on me like grace. I sat there, worn out, unable to move. “Put yourself in the way of radiance.” I heard those words as if a voice had spoken them. Past and present vanished for me and I felt the release, the absolution of having fallen a great way.
In New York, in the weeks before I was able to leave with the children, in weeks when appa hung between life and death, I had tried to go on with my life. Rashida invited me to lunch one afternoon, a week before I left for India. She called me up quite early in the morning.
“Come to Zula Restaurant, Chinua will be there and Nurredin. You know Nurredin lived in India in his student days.” So we walked down to the Ethiopian restaurant on 123rd Street and greeted Chinua Achebe, who was teaching at City College, Chinwezu, who was visiting, and Rashida’s friend, Nurredin Farrah.
I sat next to Nurredin who kept heaping food on my plate. “Eat, eat. We both come from countries that we don’t know when we’ll next see, my friend.” The talk turned to snakes. I spoke of how appa had had a heart attack killing the snake. “Was it a relative?” Nurredin asked. “No, I hope not,” I replied. Chinua was listening intently, large, dignified, one could almost hear his mind working in that silence. The talk of snakes seemed to please him. Rashida entered into a tale of how growing up in Dahomey she had crossed the path to get the sweetest mangoes and come upon a snake. Chinwezu nodded. Over Mexican beer and Ethiopian flat bread the talk was of snakes that wove into our memories, live snakes that might help or hurt, and then the conversation turned to dictators, students gunned down in Africa during demonstrations, repression in India, poverty in New York City, our speech crisscrossing continents.
“Appa.” I turned to my father.
He was sitting up in bed. Outside some visitors had arrived. We could hear them climb up the stone steps, greeting amma. “It’s all part of colonialism, isn’t it? Its aftermath, I mean. Your going to Sudan. Otherwise it seems so arbitrary.”
He nodded, understanding perfectly what I meant. After all, he had spent thirteen years of his adult life working in North Africa.
“But don’t forget there was trade between India and the Arab world for hundreds of years. And the British took Indians with them, wherever they went, as clerks, as railway workers. We of course went to the Sudan after independence. Do you know that the neem and the mango went to Sudan from India?” I nodded.
“And your mother’s family. There was Syrian blood, wasn’t there?”
“Even quite recently. My grandfather Wilson Master, veliammechi’s father.’
“Yes?”
“His brother Kurien had a Syrian wife.”
“Why?” I gulped out.
“He married her and brought her back. Just like Sudanese men going to Egypt to get a fair wife. We have that too.” He smiled. “Of course she learnt Malayalam.”
“And your cousins?”
But the visitors burst into the room in a flurry of good wishes, and hot tea borne in by the young Regina. Appa tried to rise, but quickly, almost without thinking, I pushed him back against the white pillows, the wooden bed, and felt my elbow knock against the oxygen cylinder, cold metal painted maroon, perhaps the very one they had wheeled in for Ilya so many years ago.
After tea and sweetmeats, after leave taking, the house was quiet. I was all alone for a little while and pondered the curious ways of history: my grandfather Kuruvilla who saw an Englishman whip an Indian in Bangalore, in 1917 or 1918, and knew so clearly his work was cut out for him. The problem of evil tormented him. He used to visit prisoners, in particular a murderer in prison in Kerala. Why does evil exist? What is it? Why does God exist, he had once asked me as a child, and broken into telling me how he and grandmother Kunju used to invite the beggars into the Tiruvella house, to sit around the dining table, once a week, to break bread with them. The plasticity of their lives in the early decades of the century, the sense that the future could be remade in the image of justice, fascinated me.
Appa, chosen as a husband for Ilya’s only daughter, decided that, after the political activities of 1937, his intermediate year in Al-waye College, protest marches, meetings, demonstrations against the British presence, he needed to study hard, do well in college. My father’s fascination with the British, with their sense of order, but also his distance from it, his awareness of the sense of racial superiority that underlay their claims to Indian territory, came back to me. He was describing his passage to Britain as a student, just after independence, on the passenger liner, The Empress of Scotland. “It was difficult for us Indian students. We ate with the British officers, but of course they never mixed with us, never.” And then laughingly he spoke of how as a gazetted officer in the civil service in Madras, working during World War II, he had walked in the heat of midsummer to the office, dressed in full suit and tie including a solar topi, the uniform the British required of all Indian officers. The thought of walking dressed in that fashion in the Madras heat amused me and I laughed. I spoke out loud of how fanciful it would be to dress like that in Manhattan, or Brooklyn, and go into work.
“Those were the days when the war-time operations were being conducted in the Bay of Bengal and the German U-Boats were active there. Know something?” he mused. “Professor Boulton must have passed through Madras at the time. He did in fact land there, didn’t he? I remember how Mountbatten used to fly in, he had two whole planes for his use,” and my father’s voice rose a little in memory of the grandeur of that whole affair, and he described the medals Mountbatten had pinned to his military garments. Then, tired out, he lay back against the pillows to rest.
I walked out through the drawing room onto the veranda that skirted the back courtyard. I felt my father’s words falling, ever so gently dissolving in the great imaginary silence that constitutes all that we know of the soul. I looked up and saw the brown arms of the silk cotton tree, rising beyond the red tiled roof of the house, sixty feet tall, and from the topmost branches, the thick pods had broken open and delicate silk parachutes that encircled dark seeds were dropping, down towards the ground.