Monsoon Diary (14 page)

On Thursday nights Ayesha and I carried bags of warm buttered popcorn and mugs of hot chocolate from our dorms to the radio station at the edge of campus. We wrapped ourselves in turquoise and aquamarine Pashmina shawls, surrounded ourselves with colored beads and silken bedspreads reminiscent of an Eastern pasha, and sat within the cozy confines of the recording studio. We had many guests. Niloufer, the daughter of a Turkish diplomat, played mournful music and shared recipe secrets from the Topkapi Café, which her family owned. Carlos, who attended Hampshire College, introduced us to Mexican rhythms and taught me to make salsa
picante,
which I replicated on days when the kitchen served bland food. Reza, an Iranian consultant who took part-time courses at U. Mass. “just to meet girls,” instantly guaranteed himself repeat-guest status by bringing a gilt-wrapped box full of the most delicious Iranian pistachios, salted almonds, and dried fruits. Emilie, my next-door neighbor from Camaroon, brought her friend Elizabeth from Ethiopia; they wiggled their hips in time to the hypnotic drumbeats with a precision and speed that awed us. Todd, an English painter, drank lots of wine and denounced English cuisine. Polish professors and Russian poets engaged in fits of nostalgia. Thai scientists, Vietnamese musicians, and Indian philosophers felt bouts of homesickness as we played music from their home countries.

JUST BEFORE school reopened in late January, Claire invited me to go with her to New York City. Her parents had arranged for us to stay in the apartment of old friends of theirs who were visiting Europe. In exchange for three nights at a two-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, all we had to do was feed the three resident goldfish. Between visiting the museums, catching a Broadway show, eating at different restaurants, and seeing the sights, we were horrified to discover that the goldfish had died. There was nothing left to do but procure new goldfish to replace the dead ones. But where did one buy goldfish in New York City? I didn’t know a soul, and Claire didn’t want to call friends for fear that word would reach her parents, who had already been lecturing her about being responsible.

After calling every pet store in the yellow pages, we finally discovered one in downtown Brooklyn that claimed to have goldfish the same size and color as our dead ones. So Claire and I got off the aerial tramway that connected Roosevelt Island to Manhattan and hailed a cab. To my delight, I discovered that the driver was from Kerala and quickly lapsed into Malayalam. His name was Gopi. He had grown up near Vaikom, he said, and in fact his parents still lived there. When I told him that we were driving to Brooklyn to buy goldfish, he stared at me as if I was mad.

“You’re going to spend twenty dollars taking a cab to buy three-dollar goldfish?” he asked.

“Well, not exactly,” I stuttered. “You see, they have to be a certain size and color.”

“What color will goldfish be except gold?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. Claire had made the calls, found the shop, and negotiated the deal. She had seemed very excited about pulling off the whole thing.

“This is ridiculous,” the cabbie said in Malayalam. Before I could say a word, he screeched to a halt and made a U-turn. “I live right across the Queensboro Bridge,” he said as we drove in the opposite direction. “I have dozens of goldfish. You can come to my house and pick out any that you like.”

I jubilantly translated for Claire, proud that a fellow Indian had come to our rescue, but she squirmed. This was our first time in New York, she said, and she would much rather go to a known shop than a stranger’s home. She caught my eye and shook her head.

“Tell your friend to trust me,” Gopi said. “Guruvayur is my family temple too. On the name of the Lord, I promise that you will be safe.”

Within minutes he pulled up in front of a ramshackle house in an alley just under the bridge. Three children rushed out, surprised and delighted. A woman followed, wiping her hands in a sari. “My wife, Shanti,” Gopi said, and explained our mission to her.

In broken English and with a lot of smiles, she welcomed us into their home. Amidst the frayed carpet and the musty brown furniture was a giant aquarium filled with fish of different types.

“Kerala people can live without money, but they can’t live without plants and water,” Gopi said with a smile. “Please. Help yourself.”

Claire and I stood on tiptoe and picked out three goldfish from the tank, which Gopi briskly packed in a plastic bag filled with water.

“You have come to our home for the first time,” his wife said. “You must eat something.”

Claire and I demurred, or rather, Claire demurred and I pretended to demur. I hadn’t eaten Indian food since I came to Mount Holyoke some months ago, and the most delicious smells were wafting out of the kitchen. I would have liked nothing better than to plunk myself on the floor and eat, but I didn’t want to impose on them. We had given enough trouble already, I said. But Gopi wouldn’t take no for an answer. He would go out and try to get a local fare within Queens and come back in forty-five minutes, he said. That would give us some time to eat lunch.

Claire and I sat at the rickety brown table while Shanti set out a sumptuous
sadhya
(feast) for us. I fell on the food with the fervor of a parched desert traveler spotting an oasis. Red rice straight from Kerala, spicy onion
theeyal
with a dollop of ghee on top, and a delicate
olan
brimming with coconut milk. It was sublime, returning to me the memory of several bus trips that my parents and I had undertaken in Kerala.

I remembered attempting one such journey, when the bus arrived brimming with people and the harassed ticket collector told us that there was no room, especially not for a family of four carrying a dozen pieces of luggage. My parents glanced at each other, worried. The
ghat-
mountain road was narrow. We had to get to Cochin before dark. The cool mountain air carried the fragrance of turmeric and cloves, causing us to shiver. Desperate, my mother opened her tiffin carrier under the ticket collector’s nose. The aroma of ginger, curry leaves, and coconut milk filled the bus. “All right, get in,” the ticket collector said impatiently, eyeing the thick white
olan.
Quickly we clambered on. As the bus careened through the drizzle, my mother mixed the
olan
with rice and passed it around in cone-shaped banyan leaves. No one refused, least of all the ticket collector. We got to Cochin by midnight.

Shanti’s
olan
was just as fragrant and tasty. “If you had come after a few months, I could have served you lunch on a banana leaf,” Shanti said with a smile.

As promised, Gopi returned in forty-five minutes to give us a ride back into Manhattan. I thanked Shanti profusely for the meal, the memory of which I was sure I would hoard during the long winter months at Mount Holyoke.

Gopi dropped us near the tramway and refused to accept any money, even though Claire and I insisted on paying for the cab ride at least.

“You are from my town,” Gopi said. “You are like a sister to me. Does one take money from a sister?”

With that, he tooted his horn and took off into the zigzagging traffic.

SHANTI’S OLAN

Authentic
olan
uses milk squeezed out of fresh, grated coconut. Powdered spices are not used in making
olan—
it relies only on green chiles for heat and curry leaves for piquancy—and so it contrasts with some of the other curries.

SERVES 2

1 cup white pumpkin, cubed (available in Indian grocery stores)
1 cup orange pumpkin, cubed (available in Indian grocery stores)
1 teaspoon salt
2 green chiles, Thai or serrano, slit in half lengthwise
1 cup cooked black-eyed peas
1 teaspoon coconut or other oil
1 1/2 cups unsweetened coconut milk
10 curry leaves

Simmer the pumpkin, salt, chiles, and 1/2 cup water in a 2-quart saucepan for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the pumpkin is tender. Add the black-eyed peas, coconut oil, coconut milk, and curry leaves. Heat for a minute and remove from the heat. Serve with rice.

TWELVE

Creation of an Artist

I DECIDED TO TAKE a sculpture class for my second semester simply because Leonard DeLonga, the sculpture professor, was widely regarded as the best teacher on campus.

“Don’t leave Mount Holyoke without taking a class from DeLonga,” ordered Millie Cruz, a political science major.

“But I’ve never taken art before,” I replied. “I’m not artistic anyway. I can’t draw.”

“He doesn’t just teach you about art,” she said. “He teaches you about life. Take his class.”

Curious, I called the sculpture studio. A mellow voice identified the speaker as “DeLonga.” I said I wanted to take sculpture but had never studied art before. Not only that, only the advanced sculpture course fit into my schedule.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Enroll in whatever level fits your schedule.”

Somewhat disconcerted by his casual response, I enrolled nonetheless, and that’s how I, a person who knew nothing about art, became an advanced sculpture student.

THERE MUST HAVE been more than 125 students in the sculpture studio when I walked in on the first day, many of them beginners like me. DeLonga, as he was called, had the habit of accepting all interested students, and the college respected him enough to give him free rein to use his unorthodox teaching methods. The first thing he told us was that we would all be given an A as long as we submitted something, be it a sweater we had knitted, a painting (“so long as it’s not for any other class”), just one sculpture or several.

All of us were given chunks of wax and asked to create a sculpture, which would then be cast in bronze. We sat listening to music, chewing gum, talking and comparing notes as our hands molded the dark brown wax. In the middle was DeLonga, tall and broad with gray hair and a weathered face, joking, answering a question, or checking a piece of faulty equipment. He didn’t hold court during his classes; he disappeared within them.

Two weeks later I completed my first wax sculpture, an image of a woman rooted in the earth and reaching for the stars. I liked what it looked like but wasn’t sure if it was art. So I showed it to DeLonga.

“DeLonga, how can I make this better?” I asked, shoving my piece under his nose.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he replied. “You are a master artist now.”

I had expected this. Unlike other professors, DeLonga never critiqued his students, stating that criticism impeded creativity. Instead, he taught with flair and joy, bringing exuberance, humor, and imagination into the classroom. The only thing he wanted to bequeath to us, he said, was confidence in our own aesthetic judgment. “Confidence is what made Jackson Pollock see art where others saw drips of paint,” said DeLonga during one lecture. “Confidence is what made Rothko see art where others saw horizontal stripes. Confidence is what made Georgia O’Keeffe see art where others saw mere bones.”

Confidence. That was all I needed to be an artist? I stood still, trying to absorb the import of his words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before, but it made intuitive sense to me. My shoulders straightened; I stood a little taller.

TUESDAY WAS casting day. We gathered at the studio at 7:00 A.M. and watched six women in leather coveralls and helmets lift containers of molten bronze through an elaborate set of pulleys and levers and pour it into plaster shells that contained our wax sculptures. The whole exercise was conducted amidst intense heat, shouted warnings, and discourses on safety. Later we broke open the plaster to retrieve our bronze sculptures.

After a morning of bronze casting, a group of us went to Prospect Hall for lunch. With our smoke-streaked faces and paint-stained coveralls, we looked like construction workers and fell on the food. After lunch we talked—the twenty-five-odd women, each with vociferous opinions, and a few men—about art, life, love, and teaching. There was a lot of what I considered answering back. Many of DeLonga’s students rejected his opinions as “not true.” Some stuck their tongues out and called him “weird,” others ganged up and teased him mercilessly. And he teased them right back.

Once we were discussing the aesthetic merits of the famed Sphinx sculpture when DeLonga, who had been quietly listening, said, “You know, the Sphinx actually wasn’t built by the pharaohs. It was built by the Vikings.”

There was a momentary silence while everyone stared at DeLonga, who was suppressing a grin. Then one student burst out, “DeLonga, you’re lying.”

“How could the pharaohs have built two forms so dramatically different?” asked DeLonga. “The pyramids are a paean to geometry and the Sphinx is so free-form. How can that be?”

“Perhaps the pharaohs went to architecture school after building the pyramids,” said one student, and we all laughed.

“Perhaps the Sphinx eroded into the pyramids,” said another.

One outrageous suggestion after another came forth.

“That story is almost as bad as his George Washington one,” someone said.

“Well, everyone thinks George Washington was American,” said DeLonga. “He was actually Egyptian. The Washington Monument is based on Egyptian art. George Washington had written in his will that he wanted his monument erected according to his forefathers.”

There was another explosion of laughter.

When everyone had finished lunch, DeLonga asked, “Any questions? Ask me one question and we can leave.”

There was a short silence. Then one student said, “I know that in these discussions we always end up talking about art or life, but what about reincarnation? Do you think that people who die young reincarnate?”

DeLonga glanced at me but didn’t press me to speak. Relieved of the burden, I spoke up hesitantly. “Well, as far as I know, in Hinduism, a soul is supposed to live for one hundred twenty years. People who die young are supposed to reincarnate in order to fulfill their karma—at least, that’s what my grandfather said,” I ended in a rush.

To my surprise, nobody stared at me like I was weird, as if I had said something completely removed from their worldview. Most of my fellow students merely nodded and continued eating.

WHILE I ENJOYED the drama of bronze casting, I was more drawn to the spontaneity and immediacy of welding. There were six welding stations, each with tanks of oxygen and acetylene and two blow-torches, a welder and a cutter. I was attracted to the danger of it, of holding enough heat in my bare hands to melt metal. It was primeval, like holding fire in my hands. It was also meditative, the hissing blow-torch providing a Zen-like background for my thoughts. As I stood there in my leather apron, goggles, helmet, and boots, fashioning lava-like circles of molten metal, I felt like I had found my métier.

Soon I was welding night and day. I would rush through dinner and return to the studio to work until midnight. I would be back at dawn to shape my dreams into sculptures. I began skipping my other classes so I could spend more time in the art studio. DeLonga watched me, smiled encouragement, but said little as I welded fanciful steel sculptures, some giant and rambling, others compact and small.

FOR THE FIRST TIME since I entered Mount Holyoke, I felt like I belonged. Art students didn’t care whether I was from India or Botswana; they cared about Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the meaning of life. They didn’t see me as a brown-skinned foreigner; they spotted raw sienna, burnt umber, and cadmium yellow shades on my face. They didn’t stereotype me because my parents were Hindu and vegetarian; they reminded me not to blow up the studio while welding and cutting.

It was in the art department that I met men from Hampshire and Amherst colleges who enrolled in DeLonga’s classes in droves. I developed massive crushes on dashing men with names like Thoralf and Rathcus who wore tight black clothes, grew ponytails, and drove motorbikes off rooftops. I also met the women who would soon become my closest friends. There was Sophie Constandaki, who studied Russian, quoted Pushkin, and made beautiful bronze sculptures. Celia Liu had a dancer’s gait, an actress’s persona, and a talent for charcoal drawings. Martha Nelson (“Marf”) was amiable and easygoing, always ready to laugh. Ellen Malmon was blond, fair, and friendly. And then there was Jennifer Harris.

Loud of laugh and quick of wit, Jennifer had short, boyish hair that changed color from purple to green to red to black to anything but her natural blond. When the construction workers hooted as she walked down Main Street, she lifted her middle finger and kept it up. She spent the evenings listening to Tom Waits, smoking pot, and sketching. She was the most interesting girl I’d met on campus. She was also, I found out, in love with a long-limbed blonde named Sarah.

Lesbians were a strong, vocal presence at Mount Holyoke, and they made me vaguely uncomfortable. I hadn’t known a lesbian or gay person growing up in India and was appalled to learn that the woman who lived next door to me in my dorm, Debbie, was a lesbian. I had to share a bathroom with her, and that made me uncomfortable too. The showers didn’t have doors, only curtains. What if Debbie walked in while I was bathing?

Jennifer was the only lesbian I had some sort of a friendship with. The fact that she was in love with Sarah made her somehow safe. Besides, I liked her. She had strength and spirit and opinions.

One afternoon we all decided to picnic and paint landscapes off campus. Thoralf and Rathcus brought their girlfriends. Marf brought homemade pesto pasta, which we promptly devoured. Sophie brought bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 and told me that it was like wine, only better. Ellen brought a boom box and some of her Grateful Dead tapes. Celia brought her sketches, and Sarah brought herself. We all attempted to catch a vermilion sunset on canvas.

Pretty soon, Jennifer and Sarah were kissing. As usual, I averted my eyes.

Jennifer saw me and guffawed. “So, Shoba, are we making you uncomfortable with our lovemaking?” she asked loudly.

Everyone stared at me. I didn’t know what to say.

“I think she’s just worried about being jumped in the shower,” Sarah said.

My jaw dropped. With that softly voiced sentence, Sarah had laid her finger on the one thing that I was paranoid about, even though I hadn’t even consciously articulated the thought.

“How did you know?” I asked stupidly.

“It’s a common enough fear around here,” Sarah said.

It was a common fear all through the Pioneer Valley. Once, in a crowded restaurant in Northampton, we found ourselves sitting next to a group of Christian charismatics who struck up a conversation with Jennifer, then proceeded to show her underlined passages from the Bible that stated “unequivocally” that homosexuality was abnormal because it didn’t obey the Lord’s dictums about procreation. The rest of us watched, bemused, as an earnest young woman bent over backward in her chair and tried to convince Jennifer.

“Why don’t I take you out to dinner so I can explain this further?” she said finally.

“Sure,” drawled Jennifer. “Either you’ll save me or I’ll seduce you.”

WINTER BLOSSOMED into spring. It became obvious to me that art was no longer a passing fancy; it had become my ruling passion. My year as a Foreign Fellow was coming to an end, and I knew only that I wanted to make art.

Desperate, I set up a meeting with DeLonga. Half-formulated arguments swirled around my throat. I had to convince him of my seriousness. I had to make him see that art had become terribly important to me. I realized that it was sudden, I would tell him, I realized that I wasn’t as good as the other, more experienced students, but I needed a chance to get better. I needed time to make a portfolio of my work so I could apply to graduate school. Not only that, I needed a scholarship. He could see that, couldn’t he? I wasn’t being unreasonable, was I? He had to help me. He just had to.

DeLonga’s office wasn’t exactly an office. It was more like a storage room for discarded sculptures, broken drills, and bags of cement. DeLonga sat on a bar stool waiting for me.

“So?” he said when I walked in.

I was speechless. What could I say? That after a free, fully funded year at Mount Holyoke, I wanted one more? That I was going to become an artiste? It was laughable, this notion of mine. Who would believe that I wanted to switch paths after a semester?

“Mary Jacob and I have been talking,” DeLonga began. I knew that Mary Jacob, the dean of international students, and DeLonga were neighbors and personal friends. “Mary thinks that it will be possible for you to stay on at Mount Holyoke for one more year.”

Stunned, I voiced my worries. “But I can’t,” I replied. “Foreign Fellows are only allowed to stay for a year. It’s in my contract.”

“Well, we fudged around with that a bit,” said DeLonga. “I met with President Kennan, and she agreed to let you stay as a special student. The college will give you a tuition scholarship—it’s not as if you’re breaking the bank and using up all our oxyacetylene. Well, you are, but that’s okay. The thing is that you have to pay for the room and board yourself.” He paused. “It’s about thirty-five hundred dollars,” he said somberly. “Think you can manage to earn that much?”

MARY AND DOUG OFFERED to put me up during the summer. I was going to work as an unpaid intern for the local PBS-affiliated TV station. I had applied for and gotten the job long before I took my first sculpture course, when journalism and writing seemed like viable options to pursue. It was too late to attempt anything else. So I worked at WGBY with five other interns my age. We accompanied producers on shoots, lugged equipment, transcribed tapes, helped tape shows, and wrote thank-you letters to on-air “talent.”