Monsoon Diary (13 page)

They were a proud people, these New Englanders, and I envied their Yankee directness, unencumbered by eons of tradition. They were also curious and asked a lot of questions. As the months passed these questions took on a predictable pattern. One that popped up within five minutes of any encounter, be it at a bar, in a corridor, or at a luncheon, was “Where are you from?” I didn’t mind answering that I was from India, but I disliked the way India became the sole topic of conversation after that. Some international students loved talking about their countries. I didn’t. I didn’t care for the caste system, I didn’t know enough to talk about Indian politics, I resented having to defend my country’s poverty, and I was insulted when people asked if Indians rode on elephants. Over time I grew to hate the well-meaning friendly question “Where are you from?”

As long as I was in small-town America, I realized, I was no longer just a person. I was a representative of my country. It was a daunting realization and an enormous burden.

I STARTED WORKING in the kitchen at the Rockefeller cafeteria to make some money. Tom, the head chef, was a demanding man but a good teacher. A ruddy, volatile New Yorker, he was humorous or bad-tempered depending on the time of day. When I checked in at 9:00 A.M. the whole kitchen was relaxed as we prepped for lunch. Tom taught me how to chop vegetables for the salad. He had a particular palate and insisted that we do things his way. Mashed potatoes had to be coarse rather than creamy so that you could feel a potato or two in your mouth. Clear consommé with julienned vegetables was better than blended soup with no distinguishable flavor. The salad bar had to be set up in a logical fashion. “Why do you put the celery before the croutons, huh?” Tom would bark. “It isn’t alphabetical; it’s logical. Do people pile on croutons after celery?”

Even though he was an equal-opportunity taskmaster—everyone in the kitchen had to do everything—Tom let me stay away from the meat, knowing my aversion to the sight of blood-lined beef or fish with beady eyes. But when I mentioned that I was willing to deal with any meat item that I didn’t recognize as a particular animal, he had me flipping burgers. On burger days—always popular—Claire and I stood beside each other, flipping a dozen hamburgers at a time, spurred by Tom’s incessant shouts of “Keep ’em coming!” Claire was a musical wizard who could transcribe my hummed tunes into musical compositions, but I proved to be more adept at flipping, something that I took great pride in.

As the clock inched toward the lunch hour, Tom’s temper mounted. Besides the salad bar, lunch included a hot entrée, a side, and a vegetarian alternative. This was not an overcooked, underspiced, never chopped clump of vegetables that masqueraded as a vegetarian dish. Mount Holyoke had hearty, flavorful fare from around the world, and I dug into the food with gusto. Pastas, pizza, enchiladas, falafel, potato pierogis, and vegetable fried rice. I tried them all.

I couldn’t bring myself to eat meat, and the fact that Claire described a hamburger as tasting like “chewing gum” didn’t help either. I learned to love cheese and tolerate eggs, and I didn’t eat anything that moved. But I always returned to Indian food. While the foreign flavors teased my palate, I needed Indian food to ground me. When all else failed, I would sit in my dorm room late at night, mix some rice with yogurt and a dash of salt, and gobble it down.

Yogurt rice is the classic end to an Indian feast. After eating spicy curries, Indians like to finish up with a simple, bland, soothing mixture of creamy yogurt and plain white rice. I had eaten this dish countless times growing up in India, and at Mount Holyoke it became my salvation, my weekly comfort food.

Sometimes, I would take some chopped tomatoes, onions, and cucumber from the salad bar, ask Tom for some ginger, green chiles, and a sprinkling of curry powder, and retreat into my room with a tub of plain yogurt and cooked white rice. I would mix it up and indulge in my secret treat, sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed and thinking about Uma, trapped in the blue-lit underworld.

On moonlit nights, my uncle took us children to the roof and told us stories. Our favorite was the Blue Light story in which the ten-year-old heroine, Uma, was trapped in a blue-lit underworld populated by goblins and gremlins. We sat in a circle, wide-eyed, jaws agape, as my uncle described how Uma made yet another desperate attempt to claw her way out of the underworld and join our world above. Halfway through the story, my grandmother would come upstairs with a large pot of yogurt rice. She would roll it into bite-sized balls, spoon a dollop of
inji
curry on top, and press it into our palms. We would absently pop the balls into our mouth, engrossed by the monsters, gremlins, and bad guys who foiled Uma’s escape plans. The Blue Light story never ended. We simply grew up.

YOGURT RICE

Rice with yogurt has got to be one of the easiest dishes in the world. You chop some vegetables (cucumber, onion, tomato, or a combination of all three), mix it with yogurt and spices, and consume. If you don’t want vegetables, you can simply mix yogurt with rice and salt.

SERVES 4

1/2 cup cooked jasmine or other white rice
1 cup plain yogurt, regular, low-fat, or nonfat
1 teaspoon olive or vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon
urad
dal
1 green chile, Thai or serrano, slit in half lengthwise
Half-inch sliver of ginger, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup finely chopped cucumber, seeded (or raw chopped onion
or tomato)
Chopped fresh cilantro

Mash the cooked white rice, and set aside to cool. Whisk the yogurt to a smooth consistency, and set aside as well.

Heat the oil and add the mustard seeds. When they start to sputter, add the
urad
dal. After 30 seconds add the green chili and ginger. Turn off the stove. Add the salt.

Once the spiced oil is cool, add the chopped cucumber. Add the rice and mash well so that the flavors of the vegetables and rice blend. Add the yogurt and mix well, until it is the consistency of custard or oatmeal. Garnish with chopped cilantro.

Put the yogurt rice in the refrigerator to cool. Eat on a hot
summer day after an afternoon of Frisbee in the park for a wholesome, nutritious supper.

ELEVEN

Holiday Trips

I TOOK ON other campus jobs. I baby-sat for the French professor, worked in the greenhouse for a couple of afternoons just to feel the heat of my hometown. I begged and cajoled alumni into donating money for the college during a massive fund-raising phonathon. On many nights I worked at the dorm’s reception desk, or bell desk as it was called.

In between asking visitors to sign in and answering the telephone, I decided to finish a play that I had started writing while at WCC. I was deluded enough to send it in as an entry for the Five College Theater Workshop held at Smith College, and flabbergasted when it was accepted.

For three days, five of us playwrights and several volunteer actors and actresses practiced our craft under the watchful eye of Kathleen Tolan, a New York playwright-in-residence. Two actors and two actresses read parts from my play, thrilling me by reciting the lines I had written—and also showing me how soppy some of them were. In a frenzy, I wrote and rewrote the play, which Kathleen ended up directing.

At the end of the workshop the five plays were performed in a small but packed auditorium for three nights. I had written what I thought was a melodramatic tragedy, similar to the Indian movies I watched as a child. The scenes were heavy with symbolism and nostalgia, the lines full of sadness and longing. I was shocked to see the audience laughing throughout the performance. They thought the lines were over the top, the characters larger than life. They thought it was satire.

I was beginning to realize that my critical faculties were rather underdeveloped.

ON FRIDAYS the dorms hosted dozens of parties. Mount Holyoke is part of a five-college consortium that includes Amherst, Hampshire, and Smith Colleges and University of Massachusetts at Amherst. We could take classes in any of these schools, and their students could come to ours. This cross-pollination worked, especially on weekends.

Friday nights found me in the room of my friend Natasha, a dance major from my modern dance class. Tall and statuesque with curly auburn hair and speckled green eyes, Natasha was popular. A succession of men came to pay homage to her, waiting in the lobby while she got dressed. I would sit in her room munching popcorn and watching her smudge gloss over her lips and line her eyes carefully. After an hour of primping she would stand in front of the mirror and pout coquettishly.

Natasha always invited me to go with her, but I refused, not wanting to be the third wheel in a couple. Then one day her date stood her up and a furious Natasha insisted that I accompany her to a frat party.

We took the Five-College free bus to Amherst, Natasha in her short sequined skirt and me in my tight black pants. Music blared from every house on Frat Row; cars honked as people dropped off dates and angled for a parking space. Natasha and I skipped up the stairs. It was so crowded we could hardly get in. There was beer everywhere, in kegs, on the floor, in half-finished bottles. Cigarette smoke swirled lazily up to the ceiling. The music was deafening.

Natasha confidently pushed through, shouting out hello to a Robert here, a Greg there, dodging old boyfriends and meeting new ones. From a keg in the corner she poured some beer into a plastic glass and handed it to me with the injunction “Sip.” The frothy yellow liquid tasted liked yeast and grain water. I tried some more.

“Don’t leave me,” I said, clutching Natasha’s arm, intimidated by the ruddy faces with wide, plastered smiles.

Suddenly, screams erupted in the backyard. Natasha and I elbowed our way to a window. A group of men were emptying kegs of beer into a large hot tub. Someone pumped up the music. Men carried women and threw them into the beer-filled tub. It felt like a mob was about to go on a rampage. I was terrified.

Greg, Natasha’s old boyfriend, lurched toward us. Goofy and good-natured, he had endeared himself to me by his realistic imitation of an Indian accent. He was one of Natasha’s ex-boyfriends whom I actually liked.

“Ladies! Your turn,” he said, grinning.

As we screamed in protest, Greg dragged us toward the hot tub and pushed us in. I sat there, shaking my head like a spaniel, surrounded by strange men and women, all of whom were laughing like banshees. Somebody retched; everyone scampered out. Shivering, I stood in a corner, looking for Natasha. She had disappeared.

There were more screams, this time from inside the house. Curiosity overcoming caution, I elbowed my way back in and stood mesmerized at the sight of a long line of freshmen swallowing dead goldfish as an initiation rite into the fraternity, while their “brothers” thumped fists and shouted words that were Greek to me. Once I realized that I wouldn’t get assaulted, I exhaled and let my shoulders down. I looked at an attractive man standing nearby and smiled. The night was getting interesting.

IT WAS AT Mount Holyoke that I encountered feminism for the first time. I remember clearing my throat one evening after dinner and asking the others around the cafeteria table what I thought was a naive, innocuous question: “So what exactly is this feminism that everyone talks about?”

I was not prepared for the torrential response from the Frances Perkins Scholars—older women who’d come back to finish their education. Feminism was about inequality, they said. It was about women getting paid sixty cents for every dollar that a man made. Feminism was about choices and freedom. It was not having to play games, not having to defer to a man even though you were smarter than he was.

The ideas and concepts were new to me, but they made sense. I came from a society in which women deferred to men in public but ruled the roost in private. This was the first time I was hearing that described as a “game” that women should not have to play. However, what stayed with me long after that evening ended was the anger I felt coming from these older women. I couldn’t help comparing Beverly, Anne, and Ellen with the women in my family.

While my mother didn’t have the anger and resentment that was simmering in these women, she wasn’t as free as they were either. She was tethered by rules and tradition, and limited by her own vision of herself. She wouldn’t dream of wearing the stylish, tight clothes that Beverly wore, even though they were the same age. She would sniff at Anne’s enthusiasm and Ellen’s loud laugh. She would say that they ought to act their age.

But my mother had done many things in her life, just like these women. She had my father’s support, for sure, but she also had the confidence to undertake new ventures. Would she have opened a beauty parlor against my father’s wishes? Probably not. Did that mean that she was suppressed? Was it better to question and overthrow the system as these women did or to navigate within its confines like my mother had done? Which made a woman happier, being single and independent or being married and confined? I didn’t have an answer. Indeed, it was the first time I was even asking those questions.

The contradictions between my two cultures—one that I was born into and one that I adopted—were enormous. India’s fatalism was in direct contrast to the flux I felt in America. Everyone was moving, searching, asking for more. People were changing spouses, changing jobs, changing homes, changing sexes. It seemed like the more choices people had, the more they searched for something else, something new, something different.

I WENT MANY PLACES on weekends. Kim Kusterlak, who was in my theater class, drove me to her home just outside Boston. When Kim announced that I was vegetarian, her father, bald, jolly, and Turkish, rubbed his hands with glee. “I will make you my favorite dish,” he said. “Cabbage dolma.” I helped him mince carrots, onions, and other vegetables and watched him stuff the dolma. Kim’s mother, a fashion designer, sat at the kitchen table, sketching designs and smoking a cigarette. “Don’t tuck your shirt into your pants, dear,” she told me in a husky voice laden with drink and smoke. “You are short-waisted and it doesn’t suit you.”

Susan Smith, my kitchen coworker, took me to her home, set amidst a sprawling wooded estate. Susan informed me that it was owned by the Whitney family, her voice suggesting that they were somehow very important. Susan’s father was the groundskeeper and manager. We ice-skated on the lake on the property, or rather, Susan ice-skated and I careened, mostly on all fours. We built a fire and drank port, while her father, a ribald Englishman, regaled us with stories of his youth. Susan took me to tea at the owner’s mansion. We wore skirts and sat side by side eating thin finger sandwiches off dainty china, while the matriarch quizzed Susan about her studies, which the family was funding.

My Greek dorm mate took me to her home in Cape Cod one weekend, where her large, boisterous family feasted on a buffet dinner. Maria’s brothers boasted about the size of the fish they had caught and suggestively eyed me through dark eyes rimmed with thick lashes. I tasted rice wrapped in grape leaves, eggplant moussaka, and a fragrant, fresh Greek salad with crumbly feta, juicy olives, and crisp romaine lettuce. It was the first time I tasted Greek salad, and I loved the combination of flavors immediately.

Claire Wilson, who transcribed my music, invited me to her home in Woodstock, Connecticut, for Thanksgiving. Her father picked us up on Thanksgiving Day and drove us to their large Colonial house. Relatives with names like Winthrop and Muffy asked me polite questions about India. Crystal decanters tinkled by the fireplace as the men helped themselves to drinks and discussed golf, politics, taxes, and horses but never one another. In spite of their welcoming warmth, I was acutely aware that I was the only nonwhite person in the whole house and ended up in the warm, spacious kitchen, trying to make myself useful.

“Here, my dear,” said Mrs. Wilson, handing me a brush. “You dip the brush into this paste and baste the turkey like so.”

I watched her baste the bird with practiced strokes, trying not to turn away or wrinkle my nose. Being Hindu and vegetarian, I had never touched a turkey before. But Mrs. Wilson’s kind face and eager smile prevented me from demurring. She was trying so hard to include me, to make me feel part of her family and the Thanksgiving holiday, that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I felt queasy, not thankful, at the opportunity to baste. So baste I did, taking care not to touch any part of the dead turkey with my fingers.

Perfectly coiffed women wearing smart, sensible clothes bustled around, laying out the crystal, china, and silver on the antique cherry dining table that seated fifteen. Silver swans held place cards, and a large silver rabbit in the center of the table displayed the menu that had never changed since the “Pilgrims landed in Boston,” according to Claire. Classical music played in the background. Everything was so refined compared with my family’s feasts in India, where a hot, chaotic kitchen with sweaty, harassed cooks turned out vast quantities of food; where relatives insulted one another, abused the servants, or went off in a huff never to return.

By the time we sat down to dinner at three o’clock, the men were tipsy, the women were piqued, and I was famished. I devoured the mashed potatoes, stuffing, and wild rice that Mrs. Wilson had set aside for me, and ate generous slices of every pie on the table.

THE DAYS SPED BY, each bringing a new discovery. November turned to December. The dorms served roasted marshmallows by the fire along with hot chocolate for the nightly “Milk and Cookies” ritual. The Vespers Choir gave their annual concert in the chapel followed by a reception with warm chestnuts and spicy apple cider.

As Ellen and I walked back to Dickinson House, it began snowing. Plump, feathery flakes lightened the gray sky and frosted the earth. It was the first time I had seen snow. Ellen and I held out our hands and twirled around. We lifted our faces and laughed out loud. I slid a snowflake to the tip of my fingers and tasted it. It tasted like iced cotton candy. It tasted like winter in a puff. It tasted like magic.

“This is why New Englanders come home for the holidays,” said Ellen. “Because you can’t duplicate a white Christmas anywhere else in America.”

NATASHA AND I TOOK the train to her home in Madison, Wisconsin, for Christmas. Her father was a soft-spoken college professor who reminded me of my own dad. Her mother, tall and statuesque, looked like Natasha a few decades older. On Christmas Eve we stood in her warm kitchen, brushed melted butter on phyllo sheets for a rich cheese strudel, and mixed noodles, eggs, and raisins into a fragrant kugel, scented with vanilla essence and cinnamon.

Mary and Doug had me over several times during the course of the semester and gave me a sweater for Christmas. I gave them a cassette tape I had made of all my music compositions.

For New Year’s, I was back in South Hadley, where icy needles bristled off the trees. Mary Jacob, the dean of international students, whose reassuring voice I sought many a time during my early days at Mount Holyoke, invited several international students to her house for a party. Ayesha, a girl from Pakistan, and I hatched a plan to do a radio show each week, with music and guests from different countries. Since WMHC 91.5 FM was a very local radio station, we had no problems convincing the station manager that such a show was necessary, given the burgeoning international population.