Young, undecided and quiet, Mark represented an America that was antithesis to the hysteria of the wounded American psyche of the late 1970 and early 1980. I grew up with the events of America’s involvement in Vietnam and I followed it intimately till the day the last American helicopter flew out of that country. The fall of Shah in Iran, leading to the Americans being held hostage in Tehran only accentuated the crushing pride of American invincibility. It is in this background that I arrived in America. But down in our little dig on Lake Boulevard, we several youngsters were busy with our studies and homework and everyday household chores. One day Mark invited me to see a baseball game with them: “Its very American game.” Steve, who mentioned that he had visited India, gave us the ride. He told me that he saw the disheveled crowd from the Howrah station and the slums along the rail trucks. I felt a reserved and succinct distance in his approach. After the ball game, from the visitor’s gallery we had hot dogs, corn chips and coke, all very American foods.
I have never been very fond of sports. The world of the books had shut me out from many other vocations of life. But Mark wanted to show me a piece of the Americana that he knew. He was interested about my life back home. He knew that Hindus don’t eat beef and he asked me if I had ever tasted it before. I told him that I did not. Once he brought beef briskets that his mother had cooked at their home. And he wanted me to try it if I would like. I tried a tiny piece. And I liked it. To me it tasted like one of the favorite Bengali fish dishes; that of the Hilsa fish.
Like all people traveling to a foreign land from India, food was an issue when I first came in this country. In fact, I had difficulty choosing food from the fast food restaurants, the only kind that we students got to know and could afford. For many years I chose only fish fillet and French fry. Fish is like a staple in Bengali diet, and I thought that fish fillet at a well known restaurant chain would be a nice replacement. But its taste was so different and with a distinct flavor of the tarter sauce I found no similarities with my favorite staple. Chicken sandwich was not available at that time or I did not know if it did.
It did not take my housemates long to figure out that I was a book worm, unable to manage my daily affairs and careless about my look and clothing. I could feel that they were sympathetic to me that they go home practically every weekend and for over a year I never went anywhere but the school and my room. But I could also sense that they had very different opinions about India than they were expressing to me. And those were not very appetizing.
Just like Mark was showing me his country, he wanted to know about things he had heard about my country. As naïve as we were, Mark wanted to know if I have ever seen any tiger in India roaming around. He took care not to belittle my feelings.
“In the zoo,” I replied. “Sometimes in a circus.”
“How about elephants,” he enquired. Initially I could not get him well. I knew he was sincere. And looking back, I know he was cautious not to sound racial. But then I realized where he was coming from. Based on what he had heard, Mark thought that tigers and elephants roam about in the streets in India.
“Where did you hear about these?” I asked him once. And he mentioned that some of his church friends who were in India in missionary work told them all the stories. It appeared that many of my American friends had gathered information about India from their missionary friends and people discussed about it in religious gatherings. My friends at Lake Boulevard knew more ill things of India: sati, holy cows roaming on the streets and the grinding poverty. They knew about the huge population. Mark offered me a nice reason for that too! He told me that couples have many children so even if some of them die of poverty and disease, there would be some left to rely on during their old age. It sounded patently solid a reason in a country where there was no social security for old people. Issues he mentioned were the ones I never quite knew or thought seriously. May be I did not learn these facts from my very short social studies class. I was rediscovering India through the eyes of Mark and Robert, Dwayne and Steven.
That first spring in America was so memorable. Life seemed to have sprung from the death bed of winter. Never before I saw the amazing vigor of a naked dogwood tree that displayed its pretty flowers out from the morose of the snow. There was a distinct feel of life all around. The birds twittered and the daffodils peeked. The sun had warmth and the icicles in the eves started to melt. Young college girls could barely wait for little warmer days for sun bathing in their bikini costumes.
On a summer evening that year one day, coming home from the grocery store, carrying two bags full of groceries, as I stepped up the stairs from the street, I was startled by a moving naked pair lying on the lawn, strung in embrace; visible but hardy discernible. I could figure them out as Tim and Lisa making love on the green grass of the front yard, the soft darkness of the young night barely showing their glistening white bodies. Shocked, I hurriedly went inside our apartment through the side door. The pair appeared to be less concerned of my presence than I was of them. From her looks and taste, Lisa appeared to have come from a well-off background and her red BMW convertible, parked next to Richards Volkswagen in the backyard lot, indicated that she was fond of fancy things of life. To my eastern upbringing, her living with Tim was just a western phenomena that we newbie’s were slowly getting accustomed to. And sometimes I joined my housemates in their juicy discussion about her and Tim.
In the following winter, in a cold and snowy night, at around three o’clock in the morning, there was a loud altercation in front of the house and a man was knocking hard on the front and then on the side door loudly asking someone to open it. And I heard a baby crying nearby. Most of us got awakened by the noise and some of us jostled in the kitchen area, not knowing how to respond. But not knowing who it might have been at such late night, we did not dare opening the door. After some time the man appeared to have left. Next day, after we came back from school, Dwayne was in the kitchen talking secretively to Clark about the incident last night.
“Manik,” Dwayne called me. “Did you hear the bang on the door?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I could not sleep after that.”
“It was Lisa’s ex,” Dwayne smiled wearily. His voice lacked the usual buoyancy that he showed when talking about Lisa. It became apparent to us that Lisa was married and that she had a baby with that relation. For reason that was beyond any of us, she left them and came to live with Tim. Living a carefree life of a young unattached woman, she would drive her red convertible; her dark hair would fly in the summer wind. That was the picture of Lisa we knew and we commented about. In that January night, as the baby was crying for the mother, her husband wanted to bring the baby to Lisa and was knocking hard upon her door to open. That was the altercation. But no one, I learned later, opened the door.
Several days later, while returning from school, I saw Lisa sitting on the stairs in the backyard, staring blank. She had a beer bottle in her hand; her puffy eyes were red, there was deep black smear below her eyes and her hair was all messed up. I had never seen Lisa that way before. The pain of a mother in her, it seemed, has brought down the sexy swinger down to the earth. After that incidence, we never felt the urge to discuss about Lisa anymore. The image we cultivated of her lost its seductive sheen. Somehow the cries of a little baby in the dead of that chilly night had left a bitter taste in our imagination! And we seemed to have grown mature and wiser about life!
That spring Clark and Damien graduated and left the college town. Richard had left earlier – I did not know where. Steve left even earlier; his mother, unwed and single, could no longer support him; and Steve never knew his father to ask for any help. And before long, the house was sold to a new owner. One day soon after, Tim and Lisa moved out. I did not know if they moved out together or not. And the new owner brought a lot of changes. I decided to move to a single room in the second floor. Not the place where I initially wanted to move: the room that Richard vacated; the one with the attached balcony, from where I once touched the maple leaves dancing in the summer breeze. That room was already rented out to David. I moved to the room next to the bathroom; it was where Damien used to live. And the room next to mine was rented out to a girl named Pauline. In the upstairs attic, the whole attic, came a senior lady. The house thus became a coeducational place, where I started the next phase of my life in this country.
Pauline was medium built with a thin malnourished frame and had a full head of thick brown hair. Shy and quiet, Pauline was a part time student. In the evenings, she worked as a receptionist at a local restaurant and would return home late. Except on some weekends I never remember meeting her in the mornings. In the early evenings, when I used to return home, I would often come across her at the door. She would be leaving for work in her work uniform: a white frock with red ribbon checks; beneath which some loose crinkly threads of her silky white legging would shine. And would be visible a white soft leather shoe that she wore. Passing each other, we would smile and I would smell the perfume Pauline applied; mixed with the pungent tobacco smell. She was a smoker. I often thought why so tender a girl of her age would smoke. Did her family ever ask her to stop?
Dave was in his mid thirties; medium built, with salt and pepper French cut beard. He was from Toledo, the industrial town on Lake Erie; in an area called Vienna Junction. “It’s close to the Michigan boarder,” I remembered him mentioning that to someone. Dave was born and brought up there till he finished high school and spent few years in the college. But he did not finish the degree. Dave moved to Central America with a church group to work for the under privileged native people. Back in the USA, and still single, David came back to the school and ended up with us on Lake Boulevard. He rented the room Richard vacated; in between the kitchen and the stairs. David was instrumental in my buying a camera, a new Nikon model.
“It’s a good camera,” David said. “I wish I could get one.”
“Why don’t you buy one?”
Dave pushed his right thumb with his forefinger and threw it up as if flipping a coin.
“Money,” he said. “I need a job.”
Photography became my new hobby and a healthy distraction from the monotony of my student life far away from home. I experimented with the technicalities of the camera: its focus, the shutter speed and the lens aperture. I played with the aesthetics of photography, delving into the nuances of light and shadow. The bone jarring chill of the autumn wind mellowed as I got up in the morning to catch the sublimity of a dew drop on a rose petal. And the yellow and the crimson of the mid-western Fall took a new hue. Even at minus twenty five degrees, the white glow of the winter snow felt warmer through my view finder as I went outside to immortalize the gray barren day. I wanted to capture the history of my time through my photography. And in some freak unknown turns of events, Pauline ended up being my unintended model. I took her pictures in the kitchen and next to the study table in her room. Playfully, she would pose for my camera, her arms stretched out like a ballerina. The shy quiet girl bloomed into a beautiful butterfly in front my lenses. She seemed titillated and warm and I became the photographer of an undiscovered beauty. Immersed in the emotion of our youthful game, I didn’t know when, I found myself one evening slowly caressing her lips with mine on her stretched warm body in her bed, as she nibbled with her nails on my back. The door remained open and the time passed by as her warm embrace kept me lost in her silky soft body. Drunk in the nectar of sensuality, I forgot the passage of time, till she slowly pushed me up. “I got to go,” she murmured softly. “I have the evening shift.”
But as the fog of the moment cleared up, I was to a new realization. And it was not all that sweet and happy. I had this guilty feeling that was chewing me inside. I learned soon that Pauline had her own issues as well. Next morning when I was frying an egg for my breakfast, she quietly entered the kitchen: clad in a long pink night gown, her feet bare. “Manik,” she drew my attention, “it was not good what happened yesterday,” she took a breather, her head down and her eyes riveted to the floor. “I feel that we should not touch each other anymore.” I looked at her; I felt an overpowering control over her like I never felt before. But I remained silent. Once she composed herself, she quietly walked away and gently closed the door of her room.
‘Did she feel that I wanted to take advantage of her?’ my male pride kicked in. “I am not that small!’ I said to myself. And I had to prove it. “Khurosso dhara,” the Upanishad had not left me yet, “nishita durotyoa, durgomo pothostota…” Even before I started my breakfast, I brought out my camera, opened the film bay and tore apart the film. It was an ASA400 film, the costliest kind that I could afford at that time and it was supposed to snap even the delicate quiver of a dying candle flame. For I wanted to use it to capture the glow of a luminescing fireflies against the pitch black darkness of night – as they used to be under the banyan tree beside the river in my childhood days in East Bengal. Not happy with only exposing the film to destroy its content for good, I sliced it to pieces with a scissor. I wanted to show it to her that I was not a creepy character. I packed the pieces in an envelope and slid it under Pauline’s door. When she found it out, she was angry; she came back and opened my door without even knocking it. “Those pictures did not do any harm,” she stared at me. “Then why did you destroy those?” I looked at her without any word. I just shrugged. “You have lost your mind, Manik,” she went hysterical. “Those were perfectly fine pictures.” She threw the envelope on my floor, dashed out and closed the door behind her with a bang.
From then on, I tried to be as unknown to her again as we used to be before all those happened. Sometimes returning from school I would meet her outside the door at the stairs as she would leave for her work: the aroma of the perfume she applied, her red and white checkered frock, her shiny legging with a crinkly thread sticking out disobediently and the soft white shoe that she wore. And I would try to smile at her as two unknown passersby would do. But even though I sincerely tried it, it did not quite work out the way it was before. And the reality soon sank in me that once the tide has rolled away, it does not come back again the same way ever. Life is just that!