Amriika (4 page)

He quickly said his prayers, sitting up in bed. And then as he lay down to sleep, he thought the bed was so soft, and the linen so wonderfully crisp and fresh, he had never smelt anything as sweet before.

Sona loved writing letters.

“… Have they shown off their automatic garage doors, and can opener and fancy phone with push buttons and the garbage disposal,
and car windows that go up and down with the push of a switch?! Have they taught you the arcane secrets of their football, and that game of rounders that’s as awkward as an itch and called baseball? …”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Ramji wrote back. “They have shown me all those things you mention, and more — I have seen the gadgets and the gizmos (how I love that word!). And I’m
immersed
in television. Gomer Pyle has me in stitches, and I
love
Lucy and Dick Van Dyke, and Jeannie and McHale — and I could sing you the Gilligan theme song … and much more. I know about baseball now, but this is not the football season, you should know that! But no hippies here. No ‘radicals.’ Once, while watching the ‘tube’ with the family, there appeared a really offensive wild-haired man on it, wearing an Indian kurta and muttering ‘Om, Om.’ And he was all for drugs and free sex! ‘Let me assure you he doesn’t represent even one per cent of America,’ Mr. Morris assured me. Mr. Morris was in the Second World War and he has a letter from President Truman, which he has framed and hung in his study.

“Next week Mr. Morris and I go to Washington. It will be Arlington
Cemetery
this time. (Yes, sir!)”

He could have said they patronized him, he had prescience enough for that. Yet there was a kindness and generosity, though they could undoubtedly afford what they gave him. There was a little bit of flaunting, too, as when he had accompanied Ginnie on a shopping trip, and a two-inch-thick meat sandwich was put before him and she watched him first gape then have a go at it. “We don’t always eat like this, of course,” she told him with a smile, “and I simply
have to watch what I eat, so I’m afraid I can’t help you finish it.”

“You’re so good,” she said, still watching him, “so contented.”

“I would say it’s you who are good,” he said, deeply moved, and thinking, After all, you hardly know me, and here I am sitting with you, your cherished guest.

In the three weeks he stayed with the Morrises, the boys were away visiting friends and relatives. Ramji would come down late in the morning, having stayed up to watch the late show on television, then to read, and he would often find her at the kitchen table sipping coffee, perusing a magazine or the newspaper. She asked him many questions about his life and once she wrote a letter to his grandmother. And so he grew quite fond of her.

One weekend John drove him to Baltimore and Washington. They stopped at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, over which a lawyer named Francis Scott Key had seen the Star-spangled Banner still flying, after bombardment by the British from Chesapeake Bay and the burning of Washington, and was moved to write the famous words that became the national anthem. “It’s not that I fancy my own voice or anything like that,” said John apologetically, singing a few lines for Ramji, “it’s only to show you the tune.”

They were at the parking lot viewing the flag atop the fort. A few people stopped to watch them, and John, after hesitating, was compelled to finish the anthem. The bystanders clapped.

“Well, I haven’t sung for an audience in a long time,” John said, his face cherry red.

“You sang very well,” Ramji said. “And thank you.”

“Tell you what — let’s keep this little episode between ourselves, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

As he prepared to leave Runymede to go to Boston and begin university, he realized that now he had crossed a threshold. He was simmering with excitement and was impatient to start his new life, yet he felt apprehensive about what lay ahead. He did not know what would become of him, what he would turn into. But he had come with a vow of constancy against temptation, a promise to uphold his identity and faith. That was the promise all the young people left with, when they departed for Europe or America: to return intact. John took him to Newark Airport to dispatch him on the Boston shuttle; before that, as Ramji said goodbye to her at the house, Ginnie gave him a peck on the lips and he blushed.

A
mid the clamorous modernist echoes of Hindemith and Buxtehude and Berg from
LP
s around us, we sit cross-legged on the floor of the music library singing hymns to the Indian god Vishnu — whose other name is Allah, so our ancestors were taught several hundred years ago. Fearing persecution, they were secret worshippers, “guptis,” who met in private with members of their new sect, the Shamsis. One of them would act as a sentry at the door; they even had a password. Where did
they
meet? Some shopfront perhaps, with grain and spices and all sorts of smells instead of a library with records and music. There’s no persecution here, but still we feel a sense of oddness, of smallness, of … insignificance? We too are guptis, then; no one except the librarian and janitor knows we are here, every Friday night when the campus is so quiet and deserted that even the most diligent nerd is relaxing somewhere in the Student Center over root beer and a Reuben grill.

We come endowed with a key to that inner truth, the secret answer to all questions and desires. Humbly worshipping our God,
following the path of our ancestors, we will obtain salvation, escape the endless cycle of rebirth; so we’ve been taught. Let the others outside hustle and bustle around, wasting their precious births, pursuing illusion, maya.

In front, facing everyone else — ten people on a good day — sits Sona, the mukhi: presider. It’s a family tradition, he says, his grandfather was a mukhi too. There is a mukhi in every town, village, and city in the world where there is a Shamsi; he is an honorary consul, so to speak, an American Express office, traveller’s aid, keeper of the flame.

Within a week of his arrival from Connecticut, at the beginning of the term, Sona had managed to contact community members at two nearby universities, Smith and Brandeis, and in Worcester, Amherst, even Hartford and Nashua: there’s a mosque in New England, come when you can. And they came, lonely souls, grateful someone had taken the initiative. Besides students, there was an engineer and a doctor, and a divorced woman with a child. Sona had obtained permission from the Humanities department to use the music library; and so every Friday in a dense, carpeted area of the library he produced from his royal blue airline bag a white sheet, a bottle of holy water, a port glass, a small bowl, incense sticks, and matches, and conjured up a mosque for his congregation. They called it their “musical mosque.”

Outside in the courtyard the trees swish in the wind that blows up from the Charles River, through the corridor between the Humanities building and Rogers Dining Hall, and creates — say the experts — a Bernoulli effect. A tall black iron sculpture, called “Futile” and looking like a scarecrow in agony, its arms and legs curving off in four directions, supposedly checks the force of that
wind, though if you walk by it you couldn’t tell it was doing its job. Bernoulli, eh?

It was a marketplace of ideas they were in, a veritable souk, this city of colleges, Cambridge, Mass., founded by another persecuted people three hundred years before. It was a home for heresies, where the intellect found a place to be and become, find its rhythm from a multitude of beats, sample from dozens of tastes. Flyers everywhere — on public walls, on lampposts, on notice boards, or handed out enthusiastically in the corridors, on sidewalks, at building entrances — shrieked out their messages like hawkers peddling their wares. What have we here? What do
you
bring with you? Weigh in your truth against ours, try our truth, and see its glory; or, if you happen to be lost, bring us your homeless tortured spirit, let us comfort your loneliness and doubts, choose this path already picked by a thousand others just like you. Everywhere, gurus, pirs, psychologists, zealots of every stripe were fishing for disciples.

And there were those who, Krishna-like, offered you the path of action. The activists, the radicals. Do your duty, look into your conscience, and act: Strike, teach, come out for the Movement, for the People, for Peace; sit in, join a rally, occupy a building; raise your voice and your fist. Bring the war home from Indochina. Bring the
wars
home from the Third World. Expose the Mammon behind the friendly mask — sponsor of the war in Vietnam and investor in apartheid, supplier to Salazar in Angola and Mozambique and to tyrants and torturers the world over: the Military-Industrial Complex. And its brains: the Dr. Strangeloves
in the burrows of this hallowed university that’s given you your treasured scholarship …

And you, Ramji, ask yourself, Where do
I
come in, dare I show this little secret I’ve brought with me — shabby and incomplete, like the sculpture I gave Ginnie, unsophisticated — this little truth that does not possess even a proper educated tongue to talk about it? And a little voice inside you says, Fear not, you don’t have to show it yet, but you have the truth, as you have been taught; one day your truth will be known and appreciated.

The truth? God? The greatest achievement of evolution is that matter in the form of mankind begins to understand itself, as we sit here, you and I, discussing. So said the great Peter Bowra in his introductory lecture to freshmen. You have come to this institution with dreams — to demolish the theories of Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac — and to build new edifices of understanding; but most — all? — of you will settle for more modest goals. What God, then? The equation of the universe, that’s the new God, it explains everything, including you and me as we sit here. The Schrödinger equation of everything there is. There would be many debates those Fridays after the ceremonies at the “musical mosque” on that equation of state: who wrote it, and what was
his
equation, and so on ad infinitum. But before that, Sona presides: the hymn is sung, the prayers are said; then, gravely, he pours the holy water from the bottle into some tap water in the bowl, and each one present, in turn, takes with both hands the little port glass he hands them, and swallows a shot of the diluted holy water. Sona replenishes his bottle with the remainder from the bowl, and screws on the cap. We have brought the holy Ganges with us.

There must be some truth preserved in this ritual, a deep universal truth contained in its simple form, for didn’t even Einstein
say that beauty lay in simplicity, and that simplicity was a prerequisite of truth?

His roommate in Rutherford House was Shawn Hennessy, tireless worker in the radical cause, the first sight of whom had sunk all Ramji’s enthusiasm at moving into a place of his own for the first time in his life. Ramji had just fitted his newly acquired key into the door and swung it open. The song to Mrs. Robinson, on his lips, picked up from somewhere during the day’s registration travails, froze in an instant, for there stood in the middle of the room, somewhat startled, what could only be the co-owner of the room, looking back at Ramji’s curious, anxious stare. What have I got myself into, Ramji thought, is this a student at Tech or a bum? The guy could only be described as slovenly, in dirty, worn-out denim cut-offs, unbuttoned red and black checkered shirt, and old sneakers. He was broad, perhaps an inch or two shorter than the gaunt Ramji, with curly overgrown brown hair and a light, virgin beard on his angular face. He grinned, came forward, and the two shook hands.