The Leaving of Things (7 page)

My father smiled. “Of course, dost!
Chok-kus
.” They shook hands.

“Oh,
bhaiya
,” Rajkumar called to me and in English said, “About your French course. You must speak with Madame Varma about it. French professor. See if she will take you. She is just there in faculty room.” His elbow propped on the desk, he tilted his palm, forefinger extended, in the general direction of the way we had come. “If it is not okay, you must come back, and we must change to Sanskrit or some such.”

His words sounded ominous. I braced myself for my meeting with the French professor.

“Okay, good, at least we’ve got you signed up,” my father said once we were outside the office. He checked his wristwatch. I looked down other end of the hallway and noticed the shingle for “FACULTY LOUNGE.”

“It’s a good thing you two knew other,” I told my father. “Might never have gotten in.”

“I have no idea who that character was,” my father said.

“But you acted like you did, told him your whole life story.”

“He seemed interested,” my father said, shrugging his shoulders, “so I just went along. It got you in, didn’t it?” A quick laugh sounded in his throat. “What a character.”

“And all that about your meeting at the education ministry,” I said. “That was classic.”

“That,” my father checked his watch again, “is actually true. I need to be in Gandhinagar in half an hour. So let’s go talk to this French teacher, but then I’ll really need to rush.”

“I can talk to the teacher,” I told him. “You go on ahead.”

My father thought about this, his eyes popping behind his glasses, and he stroked his moustache. “You sure you know how to get back?”

I nodded. “Of course.” After a few brief but emphatic directives from my father to “stay alert” and “be safe,” he took the stairs, rounded the landing and disappeared into the lobby.

I was on my own now. The hallway teemed with Indian faces, talking, laughing, gossiping. I tried to avoid the stares, the curious glances at my Levis jeans or my sneakers. I took the hallway as quietly, as confidently as I could.

You entered the faculty lounge through swinging saloon doors. It was a cavernous space, with a pair of French windows swung open to the monsoon breeze and the cool gray light. On the large table in the center of the room, where books and folders lay strewn, a copy of the
Times of India
rustled under ceiling fans.

At the far end of the room, a thin man—a faculty member, I guessed—in his 50s with frog-like eyes and wearing a starched white shirt was holding court before some teachers who sat at the table or on cane chairs against the far wall, some of them sipping from cups of chai. The man’s neatly groomed, silvery hair gave him a dandified look.

The man was deep into his story, carrying on, arms fluttering: “And so,” he said, “seeing the accident, I got off my scooter and went down to see how I could help. The poor chap on the motorbike was absolutely
beh-bhaan
, you see, unconscious, and the vegetable wallah had broken his arm. So just then, one cop shows up, and I tell him, ‘Thank god you’ve arrived.’ Then he asks me if that’s my scooter parked just there. I tell him, ‘Yes, I stopped to see if I could help these chaps.’” The man spread his arms dramatically. “But that bloody cop, you know what he says? He says I’ve parked my scooter illegally … and he books me!” He slapped his hands together and grinned. Scattered laughs erupted from a few teachers as Frog Eyes shook his head, pleased with his story, and hitched his pants up. “That’s how it is,” he said. “Whole country has gone like that, yaar.”

I took a few steps into the room. A short, gaunt boy in short sleeves, gray slacks, and a pair of flip-flops went around with a wire basket that clinked with glasses of chai. He placed a glass next to a woman, her back to me, in
a green sari. She had black hair cut short and sleek. The woman didn’t look up, just raised her palm to acknowledge the boy. She seemed engrossed in a book marked up with notes on the margins.

I approached the woman. The book she was reading—a thick paperback—was in French. The words looked dense, difficult, a thicket of unpronounceable vocabulary, conjugations, and accent marks.

“Excuse me,” I said awkwardly. “I’m looking for Madame Varma.”

She straightened, turned a stern face toward me as she took off a pair of reading glasses that hung from a chain.

“What do you want?”

“I’m a new student here. I’m signed up to take French, and they told me in the office to talk to Madame Varma.”

“Sit down,” she said.

I slid into the chair beside her, and she pushed her big French book at me.

“Translate that for me. Out loud.”

I felt something give inside me. “Um, well,” I said, “I’ve taken four years of Spanish, but never French.”

“If you can translate this, I can take you. I don’t have time for beginners.”

I stared at the scramble of words. A few I could approximate the meanings of, but it was mostly a disaster, as if English and Spanish had collided on the page, and this new language was the resulting wreck.

I began: “Field … bodies … dead … steal …”

Madame Varma closed the book. “Impossible.”

A fist closed over my heart. “But I need this class.”

After a brief pause, she told me, “Best if you signed for a preparatory class at the Alliance Française. They’ve got a
six-week certificate course in starter French. You take that and come to me afterwards.”

I hauled myself up. So much for this.

“Thank you,” I said politely. “Alliance Française, I’ll do that.” I made to leave, anxious to disappear through the swinging doors and into a hole in the ground. Take refuge there, till I either died or got airlifted out of this country.

“One thing,” Madame Varma said. I spun around to face her. “I believe they’re signing up new students this week. Next session starts up in mid-July. Go straight away.”

I saw no choice but to do exactly what she said.

“Oh, um, where is the Alliance Française?”

“It’s near Ellis Bridge.”

“Ellis …?”

“You don’t know Ellis Bridge?”

“I just moved here a week ago. From the States.”

“Just tell the rickshaw wallah you want to go to Alliance Française, near Ellis Bridge.”

My folder tight in my hand, I left the lounge, took the stairs, and left the college past the echoing procession of students in the lobby. I wondered how far this Ellis Bridge was and when (or if) I’d be able to find my way back to Ghatlodiya.

Students puttered in and out of the front gate on their scooters and bicycles, crunching and dusting along the gravel lane. Where the motorbikes and Marutis were parked, I noticed a girl—slender-legged, in a black T-shirt and Calvin Kleins, with thick black hair that spilled down to her upper back—slide into the driver’s seat of her white Maruti. Two other girls in salwaar kameez, clutching folders to their chests, got in with her.

I stepped out onto the dusty edge of the road. The buzzing of rickshaws—metallic, black-hooded hornets, fierce
and angry—filled the road. Two of them were parked near the gate. I saw a pack of students pile into one of them, and the rickshaw tilted at a dangerous angle to the road. Didn’t matter—the driver revved the thing up and off they went.

I steeled myself and walked over to the other rickshaw. I trained a sure, casual stare at the rickshaw wallah—he had pudgy, red-rimmed eyes, wore a dirty-white shirt. “Ellis Bridge,” I told him firmly, “Alliance Française.”

He jerked his jowly face and rolled his red eyes toward the back seat. Before I got in, I remembered something my father did insistently each time he took a rickshaw anywhere. I took a look at the meter, fixed next to the handlebar and made a circling motion with my finger. “Zero that out,” I told him in Gujarati.

“
Haah-haah
,” the rickshaw wallah said impatiently. “Have a seat, bhai,” he said in Gujarati. He turned the dial on the meter to “0000.” So far, so good.

As we started off, I saw the girl in the white Maruti pull out of the gate. She turned onto the road and zipped away in the opposite direction. I could see her as she passed, behind the wheel of the car, wearing sunglasses, her skin a medium bronze, talking to her companions, her teeth flashing. She pushed her hair back and sped off. From around here, I thought. Yet not quite.

* *

The sun bore heavily through breaks in the clouds as we made our way to Ellis Bridge, past frantic roundabouts and the Law Garden—hidden by high hedgerows fronted by
pav-vada
and
bhajiya
stalls clamoring with noontime crowds. Ellis Bridge, the structure that gave the local
neighborhood its name, was another in the series of concrete linkups between the old and new sides of this city divided by the Sabarmati River, now robust after all the rains. Commuter buses—red-painted, rusted, with fumes chugging from their tailpipes—came growling in from the old city, packed to bursting with passengers. Passengers would clamber on or hurl themselves off before their buses even came to a stop.

Compared to all this chaos, the Alliance Française was a sanctuary—a peaceful courtyard fringed with hedges and buildings. I paid the rickshaw wallah (though, having no clue how to read his mileage counter, I took him at his word) and proceeded through an opening in the front gate of the Alliance. It was the side gate, really, propped open wide enough to let visitors in. I went along the gravel walk, under the arcade that ran the length of the Alliance’s redbrick compound.

A sign pointed me in the direction of the school, which lay at the end of a short, winding brick path on one side of the far building. There were roses, daisies, and marigolds here and a pair of eucalyptus trees that gave shade as you approached the school’s steel-mullioned glass doors. People passed politely in and out of the doors, carrying folders and forms, everything in French. A flier advertising a Chopin recital was Scotch-taped to the glass paneling. I approached the door and could hear a swell of conversation from inside.

It was as if I had entered a parallel dimension. For a suspended moment in time, I was no longer in Ahmedabad, India, but hovering in some bizarre zone between India and Europe. Here was a cool, spacious lobby with French-language travel posters and books on shelves. A wrought-iron spiral staircase ran upward from the middle of the lobby.

I stepped up to the small registration desk where sat a severe-looking white woman, her face grooved with age, sacrificed to the hardships of Indian weather. She hand-stamped a form—
tap-tap-tap!
—and thrust it back into the hands of a twentysomething student. The student made that bell-like, side-to-side swing of his head and sauntered away.

“Yes?” the woman said to me sharply. I got the feeling she was always pissed off. I felt intimidated, and that made me resent her—the irritable, high-and-mighty memsahib addressing her Indian coolies.

As calmly as I could, I explained how and why I needed to sign up for the beginner’s French course.

Automatically, she handed me the registration form, and in her French accent—an accent I’d only heard in Truffaut movies and Looney Tunes cartoons—she told me the fee would be six hundred rupees.

That caught me off guard. “Can I pay you next time?” I asked. “When the class starts up? I came here straight from college and didn’t realize about the money. I’m sorry about that.”

“Seven hundred in that case. You bring money with you on the first day.” There was that accent again, so superior and European.

First it had been that customs agent who busted our chops before taking my camera away. After that came the post-office clerks and rickshaw wallahs. Just today, it had been that ferret-faced clerk at the college office and that sourpuss lady professor. They’d all given me attitude. Now here was Madame Pissface pissing and huffing at me like I was her servant.

I signed the stupid form, pushed it in her direction, turned around, and left without giving the old biddy another look. Two can play at this game. I stomped away.

“Monsieur?”

I kept on stomping.

“Monsieur?”

“What is it?” I shot her a look.

“Yours?” She was tapping my folder with her pen. (The folder with all those second-class grades.)

“Oh, uh, yes, thank you.” I went back, snatched it, and hurried out. I hoped to God she wasn’t going to be my French teacher.

* *

It had gotten darker outside, the sky swollen and black now. As I walked back toward the front gate of the Alliance, splotches of rain began hitting the gravel path. That’s when I realized I didn’t have enough cash for a rickshaw back to Ghatlodiya. The sky rumbled as if the monsoon gods were clearing their throats, warming up before the big show.

I hurried out through the side opening in the gate and hailed down a rickshaw. But when I told him where I needed to go, he shook his head, said he wouldn’t go that far, citing the weather, and motored off. A second rickshaw wallah, though, after a pained and momentary scowl, gestured for me to get in.

Soon we were zipping along through a late June-early July downpour. I held on tight, my grade-report folder tucked under my shirt, as the rickshaw’s motor whined through rain-slashed roads, the rain swirling beneath us, the tires becoming pinwheels of rain. The rickshaw wallah, hunched low over his handlebar to peer through the blurred, wiper-less windshield. Black umbrellas mushroomed everywhere and beneath them figures were either
rushing along or clustered together at bus stands. A goods truck roared past us, blowing its shrill electric horn, splashing water across the rickshaw’s windshield, and almost throwing a man just ahead of us off his bicycle. As we passed him, I took a look at the man on the bicycle, thin-limbed, soaked through, pedaling hard. He pushed hair out of his eyes as we passed, and he squinted through the gray scrim veiling everything, the whole world around him. A cow, eyelids half-closed, hunkered beneath a vast, sagging tree in the middle of a roundabout.

In Ghatlodiya, the road got too narrow to contain the slog of bicycles, scooters, rickshaws. A bus roared black fumes past us, passengers packed together, the opened windows and doorway a riot of limbs and torsos. The mildewed apartment blocks loomed on one side, with TV antennas like charcoal etchings against the rain, and telephone wires crisscrossed like vines off their parapets. There was no drainage here, and the waters had risen quickly to make an ankle-deep lake of Ghatlodiya. Without hesitating, the rickshaw wallah weaved straight into openings in the traffic, pitching the rickshaw so sharply a couple of times that I thought we would tip over. Wildness and strangeness all around me, I wanted my video camera, some way to record all of this—the commotion of traffic, rain, floodwaters, the honking of horns. A way to contain the disarray for myself and organize it so that my own mind could make sense of it. I wanted to share this with the people who, for almost two weeks now, lived only in my mind, to share this with Shannon, Nate, Karl, so I wouldn’t feel alone in it, grasping for sense.