The Leaving of Things (16 page)

“Top 40?” I said teasingly. “I was afraid of that.”

“What’s wrong with Top 40?”

“Nah,” I countered, “you want the good shit, not Whitney Houston and Madonna. I’ll make you a mix.”

We were quiet for a few minutes after that, turning to our studies. I looked up from my notebook and watched her lips as she read the French sentences from
Les Misérables
. She paused and looked up to ask if I felt ready for the exam.

“I’ve no clue,” I said. “French has been kind of a crash course. I still don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

She glanced at me and shrugged lightly.
“Mais vous pouvez parler en Francais tres bien, je pense.”

“No, no,” I said, flipping through the magazine.
“C’est un situation tragique.”

That got a quick laugh out of her before she asked, “So this is what you do between classes? Sit in here with your
Time
magazines and get your dose of America?”

I nodded vaguely, mentally scanning for sarcasm in her tone. Regardless, it was true. I couldn’t deny it. My company consisted mostly of myself and occasionally Devasia and Pradeep. In fact, for Pradeep, I had begun dictating class notes into a tape recorder. After Sridharan’s lectures, I would join Pradeep in his hostel room and read out the notes I had just taken, point by point, into his tape recorder. Devasia and I were his main sources for these audio notes, and Pradeep used them to study for the exams. Besides those guys, I didn’t mingle with anyone else.

And for whatever reason, I’d been oblivious to Priya. She kept to her group, Manju, Hannah, Ashok, and their clique: Ahmedabad’s moneyed. The reverse-expatriates. Hers seemed a rarefied class that existed somewhere above the soot and misery and smoke of the rest of the city. Priya was out of bounds to me, in principle anyway.

In America, I had always felt hopelessly out of place, unaccepted by the popular kids in school. I felt classless and outcast, and I came to despise the snobby and rich kids—Indian, American, didn’t matter. But here—the place of my roots, where my father suddenly had a steady and high-ranking job, where I was in social proximity to Priya—I could, theoretically, mix with those of her social
class. I belonged to it. But the thought made me queasy. Mingling with Priya’s friends, her too-cool-for-school clique, would’ve felt like a betrayal—to myself, my past, to everything I’d gone through. So, yes, I chose to sit here, in the library, a social and cultural neutral zone, and get my dose of America.

“And it’s quiet in here,” I said. “No one bothers you.”

Priya said she felt even less ready for the exam than I did. She glanced through her notes, her attention flitting hummingbird-like up and down the pages. I kidded her about her nervousness; it had to be a put-on. In class, whenever Priya would read from the text, her pronunciation was flawless. It transfixed me. And her answers to Varma’s questions, so easy, natural, I felt like she could teach this stuff herself. How could she
not
be ready?

Finally, her eyes lifted from her notes, and she said, “You know how we have to prepare essays for all these
possible
questions?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said groaning.

“I’ve never gotten used to that,” she said. “Makes me feel like the cows out on the street.”

I gave her a questioning smirk.

“We’re graded on how well we chew all this up, and”—she mimicked throwing up—“regurgitate it all. It’s sick.” I was surprised to hear her then bring up how much happier she was studying in America. She remembered school being fun, more imaginative, where it didn’t feel like you were cattle forced up and down the chute, you were made to think for yourself.

“Let’s go,” I said, my heart leaping. “Chuck all this, and let’s go there right now.”

“Shhh.” The mousy-looking librarian glared at us.

We went back to our notes, but a minute later Priya leaned toward me. “Are you going to the Diwali show?” she asked.

I shrugged maybe. The show was tonight. Pradeep was competing in the talent contest. He’d been preparing for weeks. Sometimes when I would show up at his hostel door with my notes, ready to dictate them, I would hear him in his room practicing an Indian
ghazal
, his voice rising and falling gracefully to the sitar and
tabla
playing on the tape recorder. I knew nothing of Indian music, but I had to admit Pradeep had a beautiful singing voice. “I suppose I should go for Pradeep,” I replied, but Priya’s attentions had turned to her beat-up
Les Misérables
paperback.

“There are, like, pages missing from this,” she said, pursing her lips. “I mean, we haven’t gotten to these chapters yet, but …” She shut the book and slid out of her chair. “I’m going to go downstairs and see if I can replace this. Maybe they have another copy. Be right back.”

“What do you mean downstairs?” I asked.

She jerked a finger toward the floor. “That’s where all the books are.”

That’s when I realized that all I had seen of this library was this room: the tables, the reading stands, the large cabinets along the walls housing musty volumes of literary essays. I’d assumed this was all there was to the Xavier’s library.

“Wish I’d known that before I spent two hundred fifty rupees on this.” I waved my brand-new copy of
Les Misérables
in my hand, a French-language version I’d chanced on at the Alliance Française.

“At least yours is in one piece,” Priya said, turning my book over in her hands, her lovely hands.

“Shh!” It was that librarian again.

“Sorry,” I said. Then I got up to follow Priya, in her Boston College T-shirt and Calvin Kleins, past the checkout desk and through a door at the far end.

We descended two short flights of stairs lit by a naked hanging bulb. At the foot of the stairs, an open doorway led into a kind of cellar. Visible in the dim incandescence, a musty, low-ceilinged room was filled with bookcases divided by a central aisle. I scanned the rows and rows of shelves, each receding into the dark. History, philosophy, physics, botany—the names of various fields were scrawled on yellowing labels on the sides of the shelves. It was as if Priya had led me to an ancient burial chamber, and except for us, it was empty. And it smelled of the slow attrition of termites and dust. But to me the place was thriving with life: the bookshelves were bursting with a mysterious, longed-for harvest.

I saw a shelf labeled “VISUAL ARTS.” The books there, for the most part, were moldy textbooks on Indian miniature painting. I rifled through them for images of Hindu erotica, found none, just words like millions of dead ants on the page. Then, on the tattered spine of one hardcover, I saw
American Photography to 1970
. The year I was born. I grabbed it, and the instant I opened it, it fell apart in a dozen pieces: pages fell from the binding, scattered on the floor, leaving fibers like nerve endings dangling from the spine.

“What happened?” It was Priya in the aisle. She had managed to find another copy of
Les Misérables
.

I gathered up the pages and shoved them back into the book.

“Looks like you found a dud,” she said. “Be careful with the books down here. They’re barely held together.”

“Might be a dud,” I said, tucking the book under my arm, “or it might not.”

“Let’s get this over with,” she sighed, and we walked toward the stairs.

“And where are you off to for your Diwali holiday?” I asked her, teasingly. “Don’t tell me. Is it some fancy-pants hill station in Rajasthan? Or is it London this year?”

Priya shooked her head, smiling. “What do you think we are? The leisure class?”

“Yes, actually,” I smiled.

“I’ll be right here in Ahmedabad the whole break.” We took the stairs. “No hill stations, no London. Been there, done that. What about you?”

“Visiting my uncle in lovely and scenic Baroda,” I said with a touch of sarcasm.

We got to the landing where she paused. She began penning something down on the cover page of her
Les Misérables
. “If you get bored, here is my phone.” She tore away a strip of paper and handed it to me. “I’m sure me and Manju and Ashok and all will be hanging out somewhere, sometime.”

I said I’d do that—though I had no intention of mingling with the others she’d mentioned—and pocketed the number. Then I thought of how there, in the privacy of that tiny landing, we’d shared an intimate thing, this surreptitious passing of a phone number. A moment all our own, finally, outside the boundaries of life at St. Xavier’s.

* *

I found a camera sitting on my bed. A still camera. I found it as I entered my room after my last midterm,
burned-out and ready for the Diwali holiday. A month’s break from insufferable Xavier’s. All I could think of till then was lounging the afternoon away, looking at the Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans photographs in the book I had checked out. But here was a camera. Three rolls of film lay next to it.

I unsnapped the carrying case—“MINOLTA” studded across the front—and looked the camera over. I peered through the viewfinder; it beat framing shots by joining my palms at right angles, something I caught myself doing all the time here, standing out in the balcony. A fixed lens, a focus ring, a frame-advance lever, and a tiny handle you turned to wind up the film. Very simple. But I had no recollection of this camera.

“Whose is this?” I asked my mother. She was in the kitchen, preparing rotis for lunch.

“Don’t you remember?” Just as she said it, I did: Indian potluck parties in Ithaca when I was in sixth grade, the Grand Canyon on our drive out to Los Angeles, Anand’s birthday party at the Chuck E. Cheese. The camera was present on all these occasions, but it had fallen out of use after we’d moved to Madison. “Your father was sure he had that camera, and he was right. He found it while he was packing this morning.”

As I was taking my last midterm, my father had left for his conference in Bombay, a day’s train ride away.

“So we’ll see him in Baroda?” I asked.

“That’s the plan,” my mother replied, using pincers to flip the roti over the flames so that it puffed up, a transformation I always thought magical. “Your Hemant Uncle expects us there in two days. Your father will come to Baroda after his conference.”

“Let’s hope he comes with the video camera,” I said.

After lunch, I loaded the Minolta to test it out. The shutter release clicked just as surely as if the camera were brand new. I began by snapping photos from the balcony, of all the things I’d been craving to capture: the sprawling peepul at the center of the crossroads, its upward-outward nimbus of green that could itself be a landscape against the blue-silver sky; the farmers reclining on their carts in the peepul’s shade; the hard, soot-eaten angles of the shopping complex whose boxy corners fought with the sinuousness of the trees and telephone wires foregrounding it. The camera gave me the containment I’d craved ever since arriving in India. It gave me a way of trapping the world in a tiny box, impressing order where there was no order at all. Looking through the viewfinder, pressing the shutter release, hearing the click did something to my bloodstream, and it felt a bit like a junkie getting his fix after a long dry spell.

12

I
brought along the camera to the Diwali show that night. A soft October breeze carried the tempting sweet-and-savory aromas from the
bhelpuri
and
meethai
stalls that vendors had lined up outside the college grounds. The stalls’ kerosene lamps speckled the road and illuminated the crowds of customers happily packed around them. I walked through the front gate under trees now strung up with Diwali lights, creating a constellation all their own. Tiny clay lamps placed on ledges here and there gave the place a magical, mysterious illumination.

It seemed like every student and teacher from Xavier’s was here and had brought their families tonight—the place was jam-packed, giddy with the anticipation of the holiday, more socially at ease than I’d yet known Xavier’s to be. People milled together along the drive and the front entrance of the college or strolled the athletic grounds, sipping from bottles of Thums Up Cola or eating bhelpuri from newspaper wrapping. A cacophony of cheering and of
garba
music from loudspeakers radiated from the athletic
field—I saw a stage had been set up there overhung with a battery of lights, and a garba was in progress before an audience of maybe three hundred, clapping along to the
dandiya
rhythm.

Dancers swirled together in a circle onstage—the women in brilliant red and gold saris, the men in orange turbans wore matching, Gujarati-style tunics and white leggings—all striking their dandiya sticks together. They struck in time with the music being sung and played by a row of musicians seated on cushions behind the dancers. A male and female singer performed at microphones, each chiming cymbals along with the harmonium player and two tabla players. The music bursting through the loudspeakers rose in pitch, quickened in tempo, and the dancers kept pace, bowing, whirling, dandiyas clashing, as the audience whooped, clapped, whistled more and more energetically as the music rose. The music and dancers churned up together into a fury, till everything dropped in a final note, and a clash struck simultaneously on stage. The singers, musicians, dancers, everyone bowed with joined hands, and the crowd got to its feet in a fever pitch of applause. I found myself swept up too, breathless, clapping and cheering, and I hoped I hadn’t missed Pradeep’s performance. I looked around but couldn’t find Devasia and decided to head over to the hostel.

Devasia was still in his room, and I was glad to have found a friend on a night teeming with strangers. He invited me in, said he was almost ready. He was dressed in his typical kurta pyjama, neatly pressed, and stood in front of a mirror, combing his glossy hair. He shared this room with another South Indian student either already gone for the Diwali holiday or at the festivities outside.

“Quite the big fiesta outside,” I said. We could hear the crowds, an announcer through the loudspeaker introducing the next act.