Amriika (11 page)

“No,” he said. “Not this time.” Just tell me, and I’ll come running, he prayed, pleaded in his mind.

“It’s going to be a quiet Christmas,” she said, “but the doctor has ordered rest. Junior’s spending it with his girlfriend, and Chris has got plans of his own, I’m not sure what.”

“Won’t you be lonely,” he asked.

She changed the subject.

You couldn’t forget that several hundred people died each day in that terrible war far away in a poor country; you could not but be confronted by that fact in the corridors and streets, over loudspeakers, in flyers and newspapers, on
TV
; you could not but form an opinion about it. And once you did?

Do you believe America should be in Southeast Asia? Do you
believe America should decide the future of Vietnam — and the rest of the world? No. Then why don’t you join us?

America, this land of multiple choice, where ice cream came in thirty-one different flavours, and every city had a colourful baseball team, and there were a dozen television channels to flick through (and Johnny Carson or Dick Cavett for the late show), had yet another choice on offer: to join or not to join the protest. On one side Chomsky, Dr. Spock and Peter Bowra, Mailer and Lowell; on the other, Nixon and Agnew, John Wayne and the store owner on Central Square who said on
TV
, Send these kids to concentration camp.

Every day the picketers begged, beseeched, argued, and leafleted on the front steps of the Tech on Mass Ave, and, holding hands, they walked around in circles and in between the fluted columns — massive, intimidating, and as cold as the immoveable enemy — and they chanted.

If you’re against the war, say it! If you oppose university investments in South Africa, say it! If you denounce
CIA
-sponsored assassinations, say it! Don’t wait for McGovern — the next election is three years away — force the hand of that bum in the White House! Join the protest!

One morning he did not just walk by the picketers with a smile of sympathy but joined their line.

Sona was one of those who couldn’t be sure, who couldn’t take sides, to whom this war didn’t matter so much. He was possessed by his twin manias: the running of the music mosque, which he did with devoted care and theatricality Friday evenings, and his pursuit
of the study of their sect of Indian Muslims, founded a long time ago by an elusive Sufi saint called Shamas Pir. In his quest for their origins, Sona had found an ally and sponsor, Marie Lundgren, formerly of the Sorbonne and currently at Harvard, Professor of All Things Mystical, especially Islamic, who, in a rose, a stone, a brook, saw the manifestation of God …

“It’s not all like that, Ramji — not all mushy and mystical love — though I admit Marie’s a little like that.”

“Oh, so now it’s Marie, is it?”

“In America everyone calls profs by their first names.”

“I’ll be damned if I call any professor of mine merely Noam or Victor —”

“And yet you demonstrate against the mighty American government!”

Yes, Sona was immersed in the past, reconstructing, as he put it, all the byways taken by a small community of Indians over four or five centuries, who simply, and seeing no contradiction, had extended their customs and beliefs and love for their gods to embrace Islam. His excitement would get feverish, catchy, as he explained his arcane discoveries — “Look, Ramji … this word … there’s no dictionary in
existence
that has the meaning even close to what we had.…It’s a fossil, it’s
our very own
, a clue to our past!” He was the scholar, the easy chair in his room surrounded by a wall of books, half-read, unread, read-but-still-needed, books bought cheaply from the religion-and-mysticism basement of the Harvard Bookstore. And in his exciting world of Sufi and Hindu mendicants walking the busy highways from Punjab to Maharashtra in the medieval India of small rajas and Mogul emperors … Vietnam? It was a little remote.

The scholarly mind is like that of a shopkeeper’s: Leave me
to my business, and you can go about your own. I will ask no questions, to each his own. What the scholarly mind needs is stable government, peace and order, and a certain sense of well-being, in which ambience it can peruse the faded manuscript, reflect upon historical confluences, scan the odd poem … enter some flight of fancy that is as absorbing as an average
LSD
trip but with yourself at the controls.

Sona of course resented being compared to the tribe of shopkeepers (which is what his family were). The two of them were returning from Friday mosque, having detached themselves from the others. The reason why their people were having trouble in East Africa, Ramji said, was precisely this attitude — ducking issues while going on with their trade. This was a time in America when you simply had to speak out, there was no neutral ground when lives were at stake, silence meant collusion …

“Look, you’re proselytizing! You’ve picked up the Christian ethic, you want to save the world — you’ve become an American!”

The taunt was meant to suggest he was changing. It could, once, have hurt to the quick. But the instrument was blunted, if not entirely without effect.

Ramji had to concede that an opinion regarding the war was ultimately a personal call, a very private choice. Only, the temptation was too great to act the missionary, to share one’s new conviction, to convert. War was a matter of life and death, of urgency. And what the heck, it had just been Moratorium Week, five full days of preaching peace — even the Tech’s Ronnie McDonald had stood up to speak for it. Every college campus in the country had rung out with nothing but cries for peace.

The long tunnel that was the main corridor connecting the
outside world to the inside of the campus was deserted, except for the few solitary souls like themselves caught in its dim transitory emptiness, feet crunching its grimy floor, voices rendered hollow and diffuse. On one side of the corridor lay the dark, cloistered world of the mind, and on the other the bright and real world that called and demanded meaning. The pamphlets announcing the Vietnam Moratorium activities of the past week lay scattered about, having served their purpose in mobilizing the Tech community into thinking about peace. All week long there had been speeches and seminars, loud rallies on Mass Ave, emotional exhortations in the corridors. Wednesday had been the Moratorium Day itself, a day of your life you could never ever forget. At twelve-thirty in the afternoon a solitary trumpet began playing “The Star-spangled Banner,” at which signal suddenly there was all around the campus a moment’s stillness, an awe-filled heeding of this call from a distance. Ramji was in Fletcher Lounge, on a break from a morning of leafleting. As soon as the trumpet finished, everyone — or so it seemed — stopped what they were doing and converged in one motion upon the green across Mass Ave, accepting blue armbands from volunteers, and gathered outside Henley Auditorium. Over loudspeakers they heard the president, Ronald McDonald, and members of the faculty make speeches endorsing peace. Finally, after a minute’s silence for the war dead, the Tech contingent set off eight abreast, behind the faculty, along Mass Ave, packing the entire Harvard Bridge from end to end, onto Comm Ave and Boston Common to join the tens of thousands gathered there. Senator McGovern addressed the rally. It was the day the Mets won their World Series game.

They had arrived on Mass Ave, Sona and Ramji, without
saying too much for a while, and several options presented themselves, one of which was to part ways, with this new sourness between them unhappily unresolved. A Dudley bus, carrying the Marlboro Man on its side, was gearing up speed and headed Boston way, having discharged the passenger now waiting for the walk sign to come on. Except for this brief spasm of life, the scene in front of them looked strangely depleted. But the night was crisp and clear; a return bus would approach soon.

“Listen,” Sona said, offering the olive branch, “how about we go to the Square — sit at Pewter Pot and talk awhile.”

And appear intellectual and do nothing.…But, “All right,” Ramji said, grabbing at the chance to make up.

“Listen to this idea. Have you ever wondered if you could be deported for taking part in a demonstration? What exactly are your rights as a foreign student?”

“I don’t think you can be deported for expressing an opinion …”

“But what
exactly
can you do freely? My Moratorium idea is to produce a pamphlet with that information, for the foreign students. I have already been to the Dean’s Office and gotten all the information. It may be obvious, but a lot of the foreign students are too frightened to say what they think. They need to be informed.”

By the time they’d caught the bus and arrived at Pewter Pot they’d discussed Sona’s project. He would do the dogwork, prepare and mimeograph the flyers. And Ramji would assist in stuffing them in the foreign students’ mailboxes the following evening.

And so they lingered in the crowded restaurant over tea and muffins, discussing home.

There’s a game I sometimes play with myself, Ramji said. I try to imagine what it’s like back at home, now. But which “now” — nine o’clock Friday night or, taking the time difference into account, Saturday morning at five? Depending on my mood, I imagine either … Friday night at nine, Uhuru Street is empty, people have come back from mosque, the shops are closed …

Upanga being suburban, Sona said, talking of the area his family had moved to recently, people linger outside the mosque, they go home in groups, chattering all the way, and the kids play in the lanes between the row houses …

They sat quietly for a while, drank more tea; all around them chatter and bustle, smoke, frantic waitresses trying to cope. Outside, Harvard Square, brilliant and busy as at midday.

“You know,” Sona said, “you couldn’t demonstrate like that back home.”

“No. I’d be in detention somewhere and my family would be desperate over my whereabouts.”

They recalled the friends they had left behind, whom they’d known, it seemed, since time began. What would
they
be up to? Having fun, now that they were in university, going out in large and loud groups with all those
sondis
from Girls School they had previously (and longingly) watched from afar. Ultimately, they would get paired off and married.

“Do you regret coming to America?”

“No. And you?”

“No.”

There was no going back to one’s previous state of being. The longer one stayed here, the more altered one became. The odd thing was that part of one’s new consciousness was to become
more devoted to the country one came from, and to appreciate more its problems. There was no doubt in their minds that they would return as soon as possible to their young nation and participate in its development.

Sona, feeling isolated during Moratorium Week, had gone and spoken to his friend and adviser Marie Lundgren. I think I should do something, he said, but I have no convictions in this matter — it simply confuses me.

Marie, an ancient, diminutive woman with silver hair, looked at him across her large desk in her book-filled and paper-strewn office, with twinkling, kindly eyes. Among her past students, it was said, were (besides illustrious scholars) one of Henry Kissinger’s advisers, a Mossad agent, and a
PLO
official.

You could do something useful, Marie said to Sona. We scholars are not meant to demonstrate in the streets. What we are good at is sorting and presenting information. Sona thought that was an excellent idea — he would obtain information on foreign students’ rights to demonstrate and distribute it. This was not quite what Marie had in mind, but she smiled and said, Go ahead, it can’t hurt. And so Sona produced his pamphlet, entitled, “The Foreign Student and Free Speech: Your Rights.” You are free to express your opinions, it said, after a rhetorical preamble; it warned against silly things like getting caught in the possession of drugs or attacking policemen, and it gave a list of phone numbers to call in case of arrest.

On Saturday night, at about nine o’clock, while he was stuffing
the mailboxes at Rutherford House with his flyers, Sona overheard something that sent a chill up his spine:
someone was discussing him and Ramji
.