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Instead, I want to stay right where I am,
protected by the presence of those who I love more than life itself,
sandwiched between these two, beloved bodies, warm from the frequent
affectionate glances they throw my away. Yes, I want to stay in this
car and watch my father's beautiful hands as he grips the
steering wheel—the rich blue veins, the dark hair against
yellow skin, the clean fingernails; I want to sit here forever,
holding Roshan's delicate white hands in my callused ones,
while the crowds in front of our car part as we approach and the
grey-brown Arabian sea sprays its foam on our faces and the Bombay
sun bites our skin, leaving rivers of sweat in its wake.

The news gets around the neighbourhood. I tell
Jesse myself and watch while the familiar theatre of emotions plays
out on her face—her eyes get teary, she bites her lower lip,
she swallows hard and finally she grins. ‘Well, hooray,'
she says, thumping me hard on the back. ‘This is what you
wanted.'

Neighbours stop by to offer their congratulations.
The older ones bring me gifts, write down names of their relatives
living in the US whom I should call if I need
anything
, and
give me unsolicited advice. (‘Now, America is a sick society. I
once saw a movie where even grandmothers were carrying big-long
rifles. My cousin says that people in New York will shoot you over
ten-paise, only. You're not going to New York? Okay, but Ohio
is probably no better. Just be careful, hah?' and ‘Stay
away from those Negroes. All those darkies are liars and cheaters,'
and ‘Women in America smoke and drink and look and talk just
like the men. But you are a nice Parsi girl from a good family. Never
forget that. Just say one Ashem Vahu and you will find the strength
to face all temptations.') The younger ones whisper to me how
envious they are about my good fortune, confide in me their own
dreams of studying in America and ask me for advice. They have the
same sad look of longing that Ronnie gets in his eyes when he's
begging us to share our tandoori chicken with him. I feel embarrassed
and depressed around them.

Everyone at home is treating me carefully, as if I
am precious cargo, as if I am as delicate as the bone china teaset
that my father had brought home from Japan in 1970. Mummy is nice to
me the way she usually is only when I'm sick. A few times, her
eyes brim with tears. ‘Who will look after me with you gone?'
she cries and I feel my heart thaw before her obvious grief.

But if everyone else is tiptoeing around me,
Mehroo is more fierce than I've ever seen her. Each chance she
gets, she pulls me towards her and hugs me. Everyday she extracts a
new promise from me—that I will write to her at least once a
week, that I will return home as soon as I receive my degree and that
if, God forbid, there should be a war or something while I am away, I
will return home immediately. I agree to all her requests because I
am in an expansive, generous mood these days and I feel softer and
more solicitous towards everybody.

Also, I am honestly not sure what my intentions
are, whether I myself believe what I'm telling everyone—that
I'm going to America to earn a degree that will improve my
prospects of getting a good journalism job in India. I think this is
what I want but sometimes I ask myself whether an absence of two
years will be long enough to accomplish all my other goals, the ones
I do not speak out loud to anyone else. Occasionally a thought flits
through my mind that says, ‘Look at all this clearly, take it
all in because you will never return home again,'

and then I feel a sadness that is so sharp, that I
immediately turn my mind to other, more pleasant things.

Two weeks before I am to set off for America,
Jesse puts a copy of Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's
Children
into my hands. There is so much to do, so many people to
visit and say goodbye to, so much last-minute shopping to do, that
I'm not sure I'll have time to read the book before I
leave. But I open it to the first page later that evening and read
the first intoxicatingly manic opening paragraph and that is my
mistake. The children of midnight sing their crazy, seductive hymns,
they tug at me with their thousand and one sets of hands, they pull
me into their subterranean world. I fall upon the book like a hungry
wild beast, unable to tear my eyes away from it.

And while I'm reading, the city that I'm
about to leave comes to life before my eyes. But this isn't the
filthy, paan-and-piss-covered, inefficient, corrupt city that I have
always been taught to be ashamed of. Rushdie's Bombay is grand,
operatic, melo-dramatic, multi-coloured and tethering between magic
and madness. It is a mythic city, no less mythic than the places in
the Mahabharata but somehow it convinces me that it is through this
mythic lens that one sees the real Bombay. How else to explain a city
where an old woman earns a living selling four sorry-looking heads of
cauliflower a day, than through the lens of surrealism? How else to
describe a place where a man makes his living squatting on the
sidewalk and removing wax from the ears of his customers? Could even
Chagal have painted a street scene where a brown cow leans against a
milk booth selling pasteurized milk from the Aaray Milk Colony?

Can even Dylan's madcap lyrics capture the
bewildering dance of skyscraper and slum, of BMWs and bullock carts,
of discos and VD clinics?

Midnight's Children
introduces me to a
Bombay that I grew up in but never lived in. By the simple act of
naming the names of familiar streets—Warden Road, Marine
Drive—Rushdie rescues me from a lifetime of reading about
streets in cities I have never visited and presents to me, like a
bouquet of fresh flowers, the city of my birth. And the inexpressible
joy of reading a novel full of characters with Indian names liberates
me from the dilemma I have unconsciously struggled with ever since
that cataclysmic day in fourth grade. And what lovely names they are.
Mary Pereria. Saleem Sinai. Homi Catarak. In one glorious moment all
my questions about what constitutes an Indian name, and how to create
characters without blond hair, are answered.

But the greatest part is the way Rushdie's
people talk. Why, they could be any one of us on the school
playground or at the market. For the first time in my life, I see
myself and the people I love reflected in a book. There is nothing
stiff and formal about this English. Rather, this language is as
supple and flexible as the cobras the local snakecharmers keep coiled
in their wicker baskets. And that wonderful thing that we all
do—starting a sentence in English, continuing it in Gujarati
and sprinkling a few Hindi words into it—well, I never saw
Ernest Hemingway pull
that
off.

Midnight's Children
makes me want to
never leave Bombay.

I lament the irony that fate has waited until it
is time for me to leave my hometown, for me to see it with loving
eyes for the first time. Like meeting your soulmate after you've
been told you're only going to live for another three days. I
see now that the valour that lies beneath everyday survival in this
tough city is no less than the valour that took Robert Jordon to
Spain.

I realize that caught up as I was in the story of
the Oakies' migration to the American West, I never noticed the
daily migration from the surrounding villages into the city of Bombay
and the millions of stories of individual hope and desperation that
accompany each migrant. Caught up as I was in Gatsby's dream of
America, I never stopped to ask myself if there was any such thing as
an Indian Dream and if so, what it was made up of? Even my notions of
India itself were framed by writers such as Foster and Kipling, I
realized, and their racist, colonial attitudes infected my blood with
the disease of self-hatred.

How ironic that I had read Ralph Ellison and
Richard Wright without understanding that their journey from out of
the shadow of cultural colonialism and into an informed identity, was
also my own.

I reluctantly returned Jesse's copy
of
Midnight's Children
, feeling as though I was giving
away a part of my body. But I should have known better. The day
before I leave for America, Jesse presents me with my own copy.
Inside, she has written:

‘Soar as high as you feel you can and want
to.'

And so I soar. I am flying away from a city that I
have recently come to love from the pages of a book. It strikes me
that the country that I am about to fly to, I also love only because
of what I have read in the pages of a book. Perhaps the reality will
be completely different.

But at this moment, I do not care.
Midnight's
Children
has heralded in a new dawn. It has given me sight, a new
way of seeing an old world. A door had been pushed ajar, never to be
shut again. Even as I am packing to leave for the New World, the Old
World had reclaimed its place in my heart.

The days pass quickly. There is so much to
do—visiting people to say goodbye, shopping for suitcases,
buying new clothes, converting money for foreign exchange. A kindly
family friend stops by to drop off a heavy, furry, brown winter coat
that I immediately know I will never wear. She asks me to try it on
for size and I do and she looks so happy when it fits me that I
refrain from pointing out that I look like an oversized bear.
Visitors have taken to giving me strange things that they think I may
somehow put to use—key-chains, hair-bands, antique postcards,
frayed woollen scarves. Some of the gifts are practical, others
sentimental: Mummy gives me an old, worn British pound that she has
saved for God knows how many years, Freny gives me Babu's
harmonica, Mehroo hands me a faded picture of my grandfather, dressed
in his customary outfit of beige pants, dark brown jacket and a
bowler hat.

This is the perfect time to confide in my father,
to let him in on my secret. But I am too scared of his reaction.

Five days before I was to apply for my visa, I had
received a letter from the chair of the journalism school at Ohio
State.

It was a reply to my query of whether I could
count on receiving a graduate assistantship once I got to Columbus.

The letter contained bad news. All assistantships
for the year had been assigned months earlier, it said…I may
qualify for one the following year but it is much too late for this
year. And then, the death knell: ‘Please do not arrive without
securing adequate funding for the entire year.'

Adequate funding for a whole year? After adding up
every last loan, scholarship, and every penny that my father can
spare, I am leaving for the US with less than four thousand dollars.
My out-of-country tuition for fall semester alone will eat up more
than half of that amount. I have no idea how much rent, food and
other expenses will cost.

So this is where it all ends—with the lack
of money. Dad was right after all—within reason, money
is
important. I have been a fool to laugh at him. I remember a ditty
Mehroo had made up when I was a kid: No mon, no fun, my son. My face
burns with embarrassment at the thought of facing neighbours,
friends, relatives, all of whom think I am to leave for America in
less than a month's time. I feel bitter, as if life has played
this terrible joke on me. To bring me so close to freedom and then to
trap me again…I wonder if I'll ever get over this
disappointment, whether I will someday rise above it or whether I
will let it sour me, so that I'll end up a frustrated, bitter
woman, angry at her fate, distrusting of happiness. Bombay is filled
with people like this.

The worst part is knowing that this setback will
crush my father because he will blame himself for it. Already, he has
told me repeatedly about how bad he feels about my having to apply to
strangers for loans and scholarships. ‘It was always my dream
that I would pay for your entire education,' he says.

‘I am so sorry that I have failed you this
time.' Nothing I say to the contrary makes him feel better. He
will be inconsolable once I make the contents of this letter public.
He will curse his misfortune, remember every failed business
opportunity, apologize to me every chance he gets. He will see
himself as the killer of his daughter's dreams.

To hell with it. I will go to America regardless
of the letter.

The alternative is much too terrible. I will
arrive in Columbus and pretend that I never received Prof Decker's
letter, blame the irregularities of the Indian mail system. I will go
to Columbus and talk my way into an assistantship, make something out
of nothing, create opportunity out of thin air. I am my father's
daughter, after all. I can do this. I can do this.

I must be very careful now. If mummy comes across
this letter during one of her regular snooping-around sessions, that
will be the end of this. I mustn't let slip any comment that
will arouse suspicion. My family is worried enough about my being
this far away. All along, I have assured them that I will find my way
once I get there, told them that assistantships are there for the
asking at American universities. They must not sense any wavering,
any doubts on my part, at this late date.

Best to destroy the letter. I read Dr Decker's
brief remarks a few times, committing them to memory. Then, I tear it
into tiny pieces. But I can't risk putting the pieces in the
garbage.

I open the window to my study. The room overlooks
a court-yard which the ground floor neighbour gets swept every
morning. Making sure that none of the other neighbours are looking, I
throw the letter out the window.

I watch until every last piece of my secret flies
down two storeys and kisses the ground.