Amriika (5 page)

“Which do you fancy,” said Shawn, “the window or the phone?”

The room had prominent bunk beds and two desks with chairs against the far wall that looked down from its fifth floor window onto the yard between the two parallel wings of the House. It was small and spare, and the walls were cold brick, but it had one item in it suggestive of pure luxury to Ramji: the black telephone. He was thrilled by it. In Dar, the whole street on which he lived had two or three telephones, and you had to go and beg a shopkeeper,
money in hand, to be able to use one. Ramji quickly picked for himself the desk on which the phone stood, not caring that he would lose the window view. He got to take the lower bed, to their mutual satisfaction, and use the two lowest drawers of the dresser as added compensation for the phone on his desk. Thus they rapidly apportioned the room between them.

A red-and-black poster, two feet by three, of the revolutionary Che Guevara in beret and beard was Shawn’s contribution to the decor of their room. Ramji stared at it awhile and nodded yes, he approved. It was somewhat stark but not unattractive, with a suggestion of daring and enigma. After some hesitation he brought out a khanga as his offering: it was a bright printed cotton cloth with a central motif of orange and green pineapples on a white background, surrounded by a green and brown border. A boxed message in black ran across it, saying, “Wayfarer, look back” in Swahili. It covered a good portion of the bare wall facing the beds, where he hung it with Shawn’s help. Shawn looked rather pleased with the effect. “Authentic Third World in Rutherford House,” he said, glowingly satisfied.

Having finished their decoration, they sat down in their armchairs facing each other. Through the open window came the shouts of guys playing ball downstairs, the enticing smell of a barbecue, the heady sounds of rock music playing on a stereo somewhere. Shawn launched into politics.

The War. Vietnam. What was in everybody’s mind here, it was there wherever you turned. David and Goliath. Villages destroyed, children napalmed …

“You can work against it, you know,” Shawn said, gauging him. Ramji was a little dumbfounded by the barrage of words, the articulation, the certainty. “There’s a demonstration tomorrow at noon, why don’t you come? It’s organized by the
SDS
— Students for a Democratic Society — we have thousands of members across the country, we are in schools and we are going to the factories. The young people of this country are against the war and we’re going to stop it. You should join.”

“But — aren’t they the ones — I mean —” who also demonstrate in the streets and throw stones at the police, Ramji wanted to say. “No — thanks …”

“Why not?”

They are not my idea of America, for one thing, he thought; they are not the Morrises and Runymede … if you don’t count the kids at the shopping centre. Instead of that, he declared, flatly: “I support the Americans in Vietnam.”

“Why?” Shawn leaned forward in his chair now, so Ramji had to pull back nervously. He looked intense, expectant, as though he was about to learn something important.

Ramji explained. If Vietnam goes, then Cambodia follows, and Laos, and slowly Thailand, Malaysia, and so on, until the whole of Asia becomes one massive godless communist block under China. The domino theory.

“Where did you hear that?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Even
Time
says so.” Simple as
ABC
.

Shawn emitted a not convincing laugh, then stopped. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Do you know what
Time
is?” he exclaimed, then stopped. He was stumped. “All right, all right — forget it. You going to the mixer?”

Neither was in the mood for the mixer that evening in the social lounge, so they shot some pool in the basement and then went out for a stroll on Mass Ave towards Boston.

It was a pleasant Saturday night, a little past sunset, a cooling breeze gusting along the avenue. Winter will come early, Shawn pronounced, sniffing the air a few times, and Ramji wondered whether to believe him. There were not many people around. Rush week was just over; this was carousing time. Classes began Monday. As they crossed the Harvard Bridge high over the Charles, sounds from a party came to tease them, laughter rippling merrily across the water. They could hear playful, spirited male and female voices; mouth-watering frolicking in a boathouse. They exchanged looks, and Ramji wondered why Shawn was alone with him tonight. Whatever the reason, he was thankful for the company. Straight ahead loomed the tall Prudential Building, a towering glass column glowing in the night. Across the bridge, they stopped for pepper steak subs and milkshakes. The diner was a dingy place, its walls covered entirely with autographed black and white pictures; yes, Shawn said, they most likely had all visited here — actors, politicians, and athletes. Shawn was from the Boston area, and his father owned O’Henry’s Pub in Harvard Square, known for the best hamburgers in town. But the two of them didn’t get along.

“He’s a racist and a reactionary. He’s refused to pay my fees.”

He had a younger sister, and an older brother, who was in Vietnam.

“He’s fighting in the war and you’re against it?”

“Uh-huh. I can’t wait for him to get back. You know there’s already an antiwar movement among the soldiers in Vietnam? But I guess Pat can’t write all that, the letters are censored.”

Shawn spoke earnestly but without raising his voice or losing his cool, undeterred by Ramji’s views. Spring had been just great for the antiwar campaign, he said, too bad Ramji missed it. Why do you think Johnson’s not running for president? …

Ramji said he was against the communists because they were atheists. He explained to Shawn an ancient prophecy he’d heard many times back home: Satan would arise in the east, with a massive army of millions, and proceed to conquer the forces of good in the west. Who had such power in the east except China and Russia? But ultimately, the good would win, the West would triumph …

Shawn nodded.

They had been walking heedlessly ever since leaving the diner, the foreigner in the hands of the local. Suddenly, instinctively, Ramji grew alarmed; his steps faltered, he let his voice peter out into silence. The scene around them had transformed into one of an eerie dinginess. Shawn too had observed this and began to look about nervously. They were in a grim, dilapidated area of town, marked by age, debris, and trash; the street was dimly lighted, almost deserted. The buildings were low, making the sky large and expansive. It was overcast. There was a tavern at the end of the block, with a red neon sign outside over the doorway. Ramji guessed that this was a ghetto. He must have seen scenes like this in movies, he’d read about the poverty of such neighbourhoods.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Feels frightening.”

“Don’t know …,” Shawn said, and they crossed the road, to walk back in the direction they’d come from.

Two black women waiting under a streetlamp blocked their path.

“How about a good time, boys?”

“Uh —” Shawn paused, turned to look at Ramji. “Do you —”

“What?” Ramji asked, and one of the women made a go for his crotch — “You like this?” — and he moved back with a start, and Shawn said, “Let’s go.” They started walking away hastily.

“Fags!” called the women after them.

“I don’t know, did you want to … ?” Shawn asked.

“No,” said Ramji. Should they have? He didn’t even quite realize the two women were prostitutes, he’d been so terrified.

“Let’s run,” Shawn said. “Can you run?” And they ran for several blocks until a police car stopped and gave them a ride. They were Campus Police; the Tech wasn’t going to let its foreign student disappear inside a ghetto.

In Dar, not rich ourselves, we lived next door to Africans and were not terrified. The neighbours were Grandma’s friends and gave me that khanga as a going-away present. Here even a simple street scene has an aura that frightens — why? I can’t even recall what the women looked like … I only saw a red miniskirt and black thighs. And so you remain a virgin, because that faith of yours does not tell you how to cope with that insistent sexuality. The only time he visited a prostitute he had also returned empty-handed, so to speak. It was while on a school trip to Mombasa, when an audacious fellow among them did not want to return home to Dar without screwing an Arab prostitute. And so a few of the boys had gone along. But where to find an Arab prostitute? They went around the shabbier streets, inquiring discreetly, shook off a gang of Arab youths on the way, knocked on a few doors, were chased off, and finally found an African-style shared abode where in one of the rooms surrounding the courtyard a woman provided the services. She was Arab, as required, and asked ten
shillings, which was steep. First Mehboob went, the instigator and horniest. He asked for soap and water to take with him and had also brought along a tube of antiseptic ointment. Then someone else went. Then Ramji, but he balked at seeing the woman nonchalantly naked in bed, except for a khanga covering, and somewhat piously, as he later described it, placed five shillings on the plate on the side table, murmured something, and left.

The first physics lecture was delivered by a donkey; a mechanical one. A crude-looking contraption of wood and metal, its voice coming from a tape recorder, this donkey wrote the formulas and drew diagrams on the blackboard using its tail. The writing was somewhat shaky; and the donkey could not cover the entire board, which had to be raised or lowered for it, using the electrical switch (and at times it had to be pushed closer or farther from the board). The effect, after the initial titters, was awe-inspiring, and the students sat enthralled by the contraption.

The author of this lecture was no less than Peter Bowra, who came speeding on his wheelchair to the stage area, when the donkey had finished its duty, midway into the lesson. Students loved him because he entertained as he taught; he once deduced the sizes of a marble, an apple, and the sun using the same principles, in plain English and without resorting to a single mathematical formula. As a student of Oppenheimer, he had worked on the Manhattan Project, which had made the world’s first atom bomb in Los Alamos. There, as he put it, he not only jointly gave birth to the doomsday gizmo, he was also the one who babysat it as it was being delivered to the test site. His calculations of its effects on a
typical modern city had made him famous; but they had also turned him against the bomb.

“Actually,” said the professor, pausing a moment, “actually, the prototype for this machine is much smaller, and was designed to
transport
entire lectures — to the handicapped, to other countries, and so on. But one of my graduate students, as a bet, took on the project this past summer to build a large-scale version for class lectures. Admittedly it’s crude, but it’s no worse than a professor in a wheelchair with an extreme case of Parkinson’s disease. And so: Bowra’s donkey, as my students call it.”

The class applauded wildly.

And for the coup de grâce, he related the story of Schrödinger’s cat.

Consider, he said, this
gedunken
(thought) experiment: Imagine a cat inside a closed black box together with a contraption that, when turned on, has a fifty per cent chance of giving off a radiation, which would trigger the release of a poison gas and kill the cat. We turn the contraption on through some remote means. After a given time — let’s say half an hour — would you think the cat was alive or dead? What is the state of the cat? The question was only partly rhetorical, but there were no takers: even if you knew the answer, you did not have sufficient backup to take on the challenge. Well, the answer was this: As long as you haven’t looked inside the box, the cat is a Schrödinger wave, the dead cat and the living cat smeared out in equal proportions.

“Think about that. Any questions.”

Laughter; after all, what could you ask? The story was told to impress upon you what exciting adventures in knowledge lay ahead during your stay at the Tech. But Ramji raised a timid hand.
“What does the cat think inside the box,” he asked. “I mean, what happens to its thoughts, are they fifty per cent …”

There was laughter, Bowra was happy, and he answered, “Ah, a metaphysician. Well, it depends upon whether the cat is one of Minsky’s artificial creatures or God’s.”

Did I expect an answer, Ramji thought afterwards, do I know what exactly I meant? It just seemed like the right sort of question … and anyway, I can say one day that I asked this question of the great Peter Bowra. Even though I may have made an ass of myself.

But the lecture that day had given him what he considered a more accurate, and scary, image of himself. He realized that to his grandmother back home, who could have no idea as to what exactly was happening to him, he would be very much like a Schrödinger’s cat.