The nephew’s story comes out slowly, over fish chops and mutton croquettes. He is in love with a student from Ghana.
“Everything was A-Okay until the Christmas break. Grades, assistantship for next semester, everything.”
“I blame the college. The office for foreign students arranged a Christmas party. And now, baapre baap! Our poor Poltoo wants to marry a Negro Muslim.”
Maya is known for her nasty, ironic one-liners. It has taken her friends weeks to overlook her malicious, un-American pleasure in others’ misfortunes. Maya would like to finish Dr. Chatterji off quickly. He is pompous; he is reactionary; he wants to live and work in America but give back nothing except taxes. The confused world of the immigrant — the lostness that Maya and Poltoo feel — that’s what Dr. Chatterji wants to avoid. She hates him. But.
Dr. Chatterji’s horror is real. A good Brahmin boy in Iowa is in love with an African Muslim. It shouldn’t be a big deal. But the more she watches the physicist, the more she realizes that “Brahmin” isn’t a caste; it’s a metaphor. You break one small rule, and the constellation collapses. She thinks suddenly that John Cheever — she is teaching him as a “world writer” in her classes, cheek-by-jowl with Africans and West Indians — would have understood Dr. Chatter ji’s dread. Cheever had been on her mind, ever since the late afternoon light slanted over Mrs. Chatterji’s drying saris. She remembers now how full of a soft, Cheeverian light Durham had been the summer she had slept with John Hadwen; and how after that, her tidy graduate-student world became monstrous, lawless. All men became John Hadwen; John became all men. Outwardly, she retained her poise, her Brahminical breeding. She treated her crisis as a literary event; she lost her moral sense, her judgment, her power to distinguish. Her parents had behaved magnanimously. They had cabled from Calcutta: WHAT’S DONE IS DONE. WE ARE CONFIDENT YOU WILL HANDLE NEW SITUATIONS WELL. ALL LOVE. But she knows more than do her parents. Love is anarchy.
Poltoo is Mrs. Chatterji’s favorite nephew. She looks as though it is her fault that the Sunday has turned unpleasant. She stacks the empty platters methodically. To Maya she says, “It is the goddess who pulls the strings. We are puppets. I know the goddess will fix it. Poltoo will not marry that African woman.” Then she goes to the coat closet in the hall and staggers back with a harmonium, the kind sold in music stores in Calcutta, and sets it down on the carpeted floor. “We’re nothing but puppets,” she says again. She sits at Maya’s feet, her pudgy hands on the harmonium’s shiny, black bellows. She sings, beautifully, in a virgin’s high voice, “Come, goddess, come, muse, come to us hapless peoples’ rescue.”
Maya is astonished. She has taken singing lessons at Dakshini Academy in Calcutta. She plays the sitar and the tanpur, well enough to please Bengalis, to astonish Americans. But stout Mrs. Chatterji is a devotee, talking to God.
A little after eight, Dr. Chatterji drops her off. It’s been an odd evening and they are both subdued.
“I want to say one thing,” he says. He stops her from undoing her seat belt. The plastic sacks of pruned branches are still at the corner.
“You don’t have to get out,” she says.
“Please. Give me one more minute of your time.”
“Sure.”
“Maya is my favorite name.”
She says nothing. She turns away from him without making her embarrassment obvious.
“Truly speaking, it is my favorite. You are sometimes lonely, no? But you are lucky. Divorced women can date, they can go to bars and discos. They can see mens, many mens. But inside marriage there is so much loneliness.” A groan, low, horrible, comes out of him.
She turns back toward him, to unlatch the seat belt and run out of the car. She sees that Dr. Chatterji’s pants are unzipped. One hand works hard under his Jockey shorts; the other rests, limp, penitential, on the steering wheel.
“Dr. Chatterji—really!” she cries.
The next day, Monday, instead of getting a ride home with Fran — Fran says she likes to give rides, she needs the chance to talk, and she won’t share gas expenses, absolutely not — Maya goes to the periodicals room of the library. There are newspapers from everywhere, even from Madagascar and New Caledonia. She thinks of the periodicals room as an asylum for homesick aliens. There are two aliens already in the room, both Orientals, both absorbed in the politics and gossip of their far off homes.
She goes straight to the newspapers from India. She bunches her raincoat like a bolster to make herself more comfortable. There’s so much to catch up on. A village headman, a known Congress-Indira party worker, has been shot at by scooterriding snipers. An Indian pugilist has won an international medal — in Nepal. A child drawing well water — the reporter calls the child “a neo-Buddhist, a convert from the now-outlawed untouchable caste”—has been stoned. An editorial explains that the story about stoning is not a story about caste but about failed idealism; a story about promises of green fields and clean, potable water broken, a story about bribes paid and wells not dug. But no, thinks Maya, it’s about caste.
Out here, in the heartland of the new world, the India of serious newspapers unsettles. Maya longs again to feel what she had felt in the Chatterjis’ living room: virtues made physical. It is a familiar feeling, a longing. Had a suitable man presented himself in the reading room at that instant, she would have seduced him. She goes on to the stack of India Abroads, reads through matrimonial columns, and steals an issue to take home.
Indian men want Indian brides. Married Indian men want Indian mistresses. All over America, “handsome, tall, fair” engineers, doctors, data processors — the new pioneers — cry their eerie love calls.
Maya runs a finger down the first column; her fingertip, dark with newsprint, stops at random.
Hello! Hi! Yes, you are the one I’m looking for. You are the new emancipated Indo-American woman. You have a zest for life. You are at ease in USA and yet your ethics are rooted in Indian tradition. The man of your dreams has come. Yours truly is handsome, ear-nose-throat specialist, well-settled in Connecticut. Age is 41 but never married, physically fit, sportsmanly, and strong. I adore idealism, poetry, beauty. I abhor smugness, passivity, caste system. Write with recent photo. Better still, call!!!
Maya calls. Hullo, hullo, hullo! She hears immigrant lovers cry in crowded shopping malls. Yes, you who are at ease in both worlds, you are the one. She feels she has a fair chance.
A man answers. “Ashoke Mehta speaking.”
She speaks quickly into the bright-red mouthpiece of her telephone. He will be in Chicago, in transit, passing through O’Hare. United counter, Saturday, two p.m. As easy as that.
“Good,” Ashoke Mehta says. “For these encounters I, too, prefer a neutral zone.”
On Saturday at exactly two o’clock the man of Maya’s dreams floats toward her as lovers used to in shampoo commercials. The United counter is a loud, harassed place but passengers and piled-up luggage fall away from him. Full-cheeked and fleshy-lipped, he is handsome. He hasn’t lied. He is serene, assured, a Hindu god touching down in Illinois.
She can’t move. She feels ugly and unworthy. Her adult life no longer seems miraculously rebellious; it is grim, it is perverse. She has accomplished nothing. She has changed her citizenship but she hasn’t broken through into the light, the vigor, the hustle of the New World. She is stuck in dead space.
“Hullo, hullo!” Their fingers touch.
Oh, the excitement! Ashoke Mehta’s palm feels so right in the small of her back. Hullo, hullo, hullo. He pushes her out of the reach of anti-Khomeini Iranians, Hare Krishnas, American Fascists, men with fierce wants, and guides her to an empty gate. They have less than an hour.