The college was about three quarters of a mile south from my new place. That was if I walked straight along Lake Boulevard and took a turn on College Avenue. At the corner, there were several single and double story buildings, all old and dilapidated. Brick built and colorless, the two-story buildings had outside wooden stairs with chipped railings and faded paints. There was overgrowth all around the buildings and grey green moss lining along the brick joints. Students rented the rooms there on quarterly lease. Left under the supervision of a student manager, who could stay there free in exchange for maintaining the building, a duty that no student manager seemed to know or cared to know, the buildings sorely needed some tender care. Along the way, there was also a mini mart and a bar. Around summer that year, I found some short-cut inside roads and that saved me about quarter of a mile. The grocery was about three quarters of a mile further down the Avenue and it was the only large store within the reach of the students living in the school campus. Costly, we later realized, it provided the basic sustenance for students like us.
I also discovered that during week-ends a large department store, unit of a national chain, operated a free bus service for the students. The bus took us to the other side of the campus, over a small river bridge, to a shopping mall. To get to the bus, though, I had to walk close to a mile from my place. Besides an opportunity to go to the shopping mall, it provided a brief outlet from the monotony of a foreign students’ drab existence.
The winter felt particularly harsh – probably because we grew up in tropical weather. I enjoyed the snow for the first several months; the fancy that I had had from picture of falling snow in colored Christmas cards helped thaw the first few blizzards. The snow might not have been that bad, had the endless cloudy days did not create a silent damper. I did not realize at first, but the seemingly endless cloudy days seemed to have effects on me. I seemed to have lost a great deal of my attention capacity to studies. I could not do many things that seemed to have been easy to me before. Shopping from the grocery store was a chore, carrying the heavy bags through ice covered slippery road was a painful back breaking job. Cooking was tedious and cleaning so boring. The winter did not end even in April. Snow started melting only in May. Long icicles hang from the eves, melting slowly. During that winter one day news spread that no one can locate an Indian student in the campus. Police went to his room, a room just like mine in another rooming-house unit, couple of blocks away from mine. Before that incidence, some students had seen him walking alone aimlessly through snowy roads in odd hours. Several days later, the news spread, the police pulled his dead body from under a heap of snow. People speculated that he had committed suicide. But no one knew for sure and the police could not find any definitive answer either. He was from Kolkata and went to a prestigious school there before coming to this country.
There was, however, a subtle rumor humming around the small community of Indian students that he was rejected by a girl, another Indian student, who was with him in the same department. She came from Delhi. And because of her habit of always wearing a sari and sandals, even in the thick of those mid western blizzards, we all knew her. Quiet and pretty, she garnered admiration from many of us for that routine. But love? Who knew? That death and the rumor surrounding it, however, helped reinforce the notion among our Indian friends that we Bengali boys are impractical romantics, an aura I unwittingly savored for a while afterwards. I only wished that the white Americans in this mid-western town had some inkling of that sweet fact. It did not take long for my foolish balloon to burst in misery. And in the rigor of student life, we all seemed to forget the death.
That, however, makes me to think about the Indian girls who come to this country to study and the cultural cross hair that they walk through. It is not only the studies that they have to complete; they have to do that within the old social framework of our distant land, a sad situation to which I myself, out of my naivety and inexperience, miserably and unconsciously subscribed. Till one day my complacency was crushed, my glass house shattered and I woke up to a visceral reality – searing and tumultuous.
Richard, my housemate, occupied the room next to the kitchen in the second floor and his room had an attached balcony. Right under my third floor window, it was above the back yard. The rent for this room was seventy five dollars a month, the highest of all the others in this house. Tall, lean and quiet, Richard owned an old Volkswagen convertible; a red Karmanghia, which he parked in the tiny lot behind the backyard. On many afternoons, while coming from the college, I saw Richard working on his car. His hands thick with black oil, he meticulously cleaned the outside of the car. Its engine was in the back, inside the trunk, unlike other cars I knew at that time. As I expressed surprise at the unusual configuration of his car, Richard enjoyed my compliment and took time to show me around it: how he just changed the engine oil and how he planned to replace the timing belt. It did not make any sense to me; I knew very little about a car, much less its engine. Later that week, Richard gave me a ride in his car to a large department store like K-mart, the first such shop I came to know in the states. He invited me to his room afterwards. It was sparse, but clean and tastefully arranged. An orange guitar hung from the wall; Richard played a soft tune. We went out to his balcony; he had placed a plastic chair on one end and he carefully arranged colorful potted plants near the edges. On the other end stood a small barbecue grill, which he used in some summer evenings. The large elm and maple trees in the backyard was then lush and green, its branches slowly swaying in the summer wind and I could touch the leaves from the balcony. It was a nice room to like and I expressed my wish to move in that room someday.
Every Friday afternoon, Mark would go home carrying his dirty laundry stuffed in a pillow case and his books packed in his large backpack that had an aluminum frame with a padded hip-belt. He was from a small town in the middle of the state and he lived there with his parents and a brother. Mark was not sure what he wanted to do in his future. “May be a priest,” he once mentioned. “May be in the Foreign Service.” Then one day he went to interview the CIA, which was in the college campus.
“You want to be in the CIA?” I asked him gingerly.
“I just went to talk with the recruiter,” Clark told.
New from India, I had only negative opinion about the agency. The government of my home state and the general public opinion at that time was strongly against the purported evil activities of the CIA. In fact, it was a general perception in our thinking at that time that everything bad that was happening in our country was the result of the dirty handiwork of the CIA. Many years later, I heard of a similar comment from a friend of mine, who was living in a neighboring country. But it was not the CIA that he was blaming. According to my friend, the RAW, the Indian spy agency, was behind all the evils in his home land at that time.