Monsoon Diary Read online

  A middle-aged woman with kindly eyes, Mary held a part-time job and was very involved in her church. Her husband, Doug, worked at a bank and drove an impressively large Cadillac. Occasionally he would pick me up on Friday evening and drive me to their house for the weekend. Their elder daughter, Margie, was away in the Peace Corps, while Kathy, lanky and reserved, was in high school.

  We would have supper together: salad, bread, rice and beans for me, chicken for them, a fruit tart of some sort, and coffee afterward. At first the conversation was stilted and awkward. They were too polite to probe, and I was intimidated by their accents. I had hundreds of questions—which came first, fork or spoon? how many dates did it take to “go steady”? which trees changed color in the fall? what subjects did Kathy study in high school?—but I concentrated merely on making sense when I did speak.

  It was at Mary and Doug’s house that I got my first glimpse of American family life, the soap and suds of it, the gentle grace of setting a table with fork and knife rather than baldly eating with our hands as we did back home; the carpet and ruffled curtains; and “my” bedroom upstairs, which smelled of linen and rose potpourri.

  I LOVED my classes. Most of the subjects I chose were fantasies come true rather than a natural progression of my studies. I signed up for music composition without knowing how to read or write Western music and having listened to it only rarely. I didn’t play an instrument. I was a music imbecile with lofty aspirations. Allen Bonde, the professor, wasn’t insulted when I told him that I had only trained in Indian classical music. He didn’t kick me out of class like I expected him to. Instead, he told me to record my compositions and offered to transcribe them for me.

  I sought out one of the piano rooms in the music building and improvised, experiencing for the first time the thrill of creation. When my piano skills didn’t keep pace with the tunes in my head, I hummed them into a tape recorder. In class, while the rest of the students demonstrated their homework compositions through flying fingers and sheet music, I simply turned on the boom box.

  Claire, a fellow student, took pity on me and transcribed my improvisations into organized sheet music with notes that moved up or down according to the rise and fall of my voice. I wandered the halls of the music department trying to decipher the various instrument sounds coming from within closed doors and figure out which one was suitable for a particular section. Occasionally, when I didn’t recognize an instrument, I barged in and asked the surprised musician what she was playing. When she gave me the name of the composition— Mozart’s Sonata in D Major or whatever—I shook my head. “No, I meant the name of the instrument,” I muttered, embarrassed by my ignorance.

  At the end of the term there was a recital of all our compositions complete with a program sheet. My piece had four instruments: piano, violin, cello, and flute. It was probably amateurish and middling, but it was mine. Gloriously, totally mine.

  MY THEATER CLASS WAS just as exciting. Something was always in production—Alan Ayckbourn, Medea, O’Neill, and Shakespeare in rapid but disconnected progression during my term.

  I was put to work on the sets. The set designer, a bearded salt-of-the-earth man named John, countered the air of high drama elsewhere in the building with his dour humor. On my first day, he handed me a chain saw with the injunction “Don’t cut your fingers off.”

  I was pleasantly surprised by his confidence in my abilities. While my parents or teachers in India had never denied me something just because I was a girl, I had to work hard to gain their trust.

  Not so at Mount Holyoke. The professors displayed their faith in our abilities without a hint of condescension. They weren’t foolhardy. John stood by me while I gingerly held the chain saw, he heard me gasp when I turned it on, my body vibrating like Morse code in reaction, and watched through narrow eyes as I aimed it on a piece of wood and slowly, deliberately, cut a jagged line. I turned off the machine, exhilarated by its power.

  The chain saw was just the beginning. I discovered that I loved power tools and was constantly at the “shop” begging John to teach me how to use the sanders and polishers, screw and staple guns, chisels, ratchets, and wrenches. I memorized the various sizes of drill bits and saw blades and learned to estimate the thickness of wood without a tape.

  A few weeks later I found myself striding into the shop and wielding a rotary hammer with careful confidence. I glanced at myself in a mirror as I stood there in my paint-streaked apron, helmet, goggles, gloves, and earmuffs, bent double over a thudding machine that was half my size and shrouded by a cloud of dust and wood chips. I looked like a space alien. I felt like Superman. Or rather, Superwoman.

  I WAS DELIRIOUSLY EXCITED by the novelty of it all, so wildly enthusiastic and eager to learn that nobody had the heart to turn me down, to say no.

  At Mount Holyoke I was offered a world without context, and I approached it like a child, unfettered by the American stereotypes that I have since learned. When a woman told me that she lived in Holly-wood and summered in Cannes, I didn’t know enough to differentiate her from the work-study student who had graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. I didn’t know that plaid skirts were preppy and batik prints bohemian. I was deprived of all the clues that I normally used to typecast people.

  I couldn’t tell if the women around me were rich, poor, or middle-class, if the clothes they wore were fashionable or gauche, if their accents were crude or sophisticated. In India I could slot a person into a stereotype within a few minutes, just by her name, the way she talked, and what she wore. At Mount Holyoke I couldn’t even tell if a girl was pretty or not. My ideas of beauty were different from theirs. When I showed my American friends some of my family photographs, they didn’t think that the “beauty” of our family—a fair cousin with an oval face and long hair—was actually beautiful. Instead, they gushed over another cousin with asymmetric dark features and cascading curly hair.

  As a result, I brought no prejudice to my interactions. I simply didn’t know enough. I couldn’t read between the lines or see beyond their smiles. While my ignorance prevented me from penetrating the façades of the American girls I met, it also prevented me from indulging in what had been the bane of my teenage existence in India: comparing myself with others. In India I was constantly comparing myself with my peers and feeling inadequate, embarrassed, or superior. At Mount Holyoke I was simply me. Not me, the middle-class Madrasi who went to the fashionable Women’s Christian College; not me, the daughter, granddaughter, sister, and niece, but just me, Shoba the student.

  I was enamored of America’s newness, eager to lose myself within its expansive embrace. I wanted to suck it all in. At dinnertime I would approach total strangers without qualms and ask to sit at their table. These women (Mount Holyoke emphasized the fact that we were women, not girls) were probably too dumbstruck to refuse, and if they threw out any hints for me to get up and leave, I didn’t recognize them. It was over these long lunches and dinners that I made friends and learned about the country.

  I met a lot of people—at Rotary lunches and campus dinners, at receptions and in the dining room. People took me into their homes, their churches, and their offices. Over roasted marshmallows at an Amherst home, I learned about Thanksgiving, Halloween, and other American holidays. In between chanting “Go, Red Sox!” at a baseball game in Boston, I eavesdropped on a discussion about Michael Dukakis, the state’s governor who was running for president. I learned that when people greeted me by saying, “Hi! How are you?” the correct response was not to elaborate on how I actually felt but to toss it right back at them with a “Fine. How are you?”

  They were a proud people, these New Englanders, and I envied their Yankee directness, unencumbered by eons of tradition. They were also curious and asked a lot of questions. As the months passed these questions took on a predictable pattern. One that popped up within five minutes of any encounter, be it at a bar, in a corridor, or at a luncheon, was “Where are you from?” I didn’t mind answering that I
was from India, but I disliked the way India became the sole topic of conversation after that. Some international students loved talking about their countries. I didn’t. I didn’t care for the caste system, I didn’t know enough to talk about Indian politics, I resented having to defend my country’s poverty, and I was insulted when people asked if Indians rode on elephants. Over time I grew to hate the well-meaning friendly question “Where are you from?”

  As long as I was in small-town America, I realized, I was no longer just a person. I was a representative of my country. It was a daunting realization and an enormous burden.

  I STARTED WORKING in the kitchen at the Rockefeller cafeteria to make some money. Tom, the head chef, was a demanding man but a good teacher. A ruddy, volatile New Yorker, he was humorous or bad-tempered depending on the time of day. When I checked in at 9:00 A.M. the whole kitchen was relaxed as we prepped for lunch. Tom taught me how to chop vegetables for the salad. He had a particular palate and insisted that we do things his way. Mashed potatoes had to be coarse rather than creamy so that you could feel a potato or two in your mouth. Clear consommé with julienned vegetables was better than blended soup with no distinguishable flavor. The salad bar had to be set up in a logical fashion. “Why do you put the celery before the croutons, huh?” Tom would bark. “It isn’t alphabetical; it’s logical. Do people pile on croutons after celery?”

  Even though he was an equal-opportunity taskmaster—everyone in the kitchen had to do everything—Tom let me stay away from the meat, knowing my aversion to the sight of blood-lined beef or fish with beady eyes. But when I mentioned that I was willing to deal with any meat item that I didn’t recognize as a particular animal, he had me flipping burgers. On burger days—always popular—Claire and I stood beside each other, flipping a dozen hamburgers at a time, spurred by Tom’s incessant shouts of “Keep ’em coming!” Claire was a musical wizard who could transcribe my hummed tunes into musical compositions, but I proved to be more adept at flipping, something that I took great pride in.

  As the clock inched toward the lunch hour, Tom’s temper mounted. Besides the salad bar, lunch included a hot entrée, a side, and a vegetarian alternative. This was not an overcooked, underspiced, never chopped clump of vegetables that masqueraded as a vegetarian dish. Mount Holyoke had hearty, flavorful fare from around the world, and I dug into the food with gusto. Pastas, pizza, enchiladas, falafel, potato pierogis, and vegetable fried rice. I tried them all.

  I couldn’t bring myself to eat meat, and the fact that Claire described a hamburger as tasting like “chewing gum” didn’t help either. I learned to love cheese and tolerate eggs, and I didn’t eat anything that moved. But I always returned to Indian food. While the foreign flavors teased my palate, I needed Indian food to ground me. When all else failed, I would sit in my dorm room late at night, mix some rice with yogurt and a dash of salt, and gobble it down.

  Yogurt rice is the classic end to an Indian feast. After eating spicy curries, Indians like to finish up with a simple, bland, soothing mixture of creamy yogurt and plain white rice. I had eaten this dish countless times growing up in India, and at Mount Holyoke it became my salvation, my weekly comfort food.

  Sometimes, I would take some chopped tomatoes, onions, and cucumber from the salad bar, ask Tom for some ginger, green chiles, and a sprinkling of curry powder, and retreat into my room with a tub of plain yogurt and cooked white rice. I would mix it up and indulge in my secret treat, sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed and thinking about Uma, trapped in the blue-lit underworld.

  On moonlit nights, my uncle took us children to the roof and told us stories. Our favorite was the Blue Light story in which the ten-year-old heroine, Uma, was trapped in a blue-lit underworld populated by goblins and gremlins. We sat in a circle, wide-eyed, jaws agape, as my uncle described how Uma made yet another desperate attempt to claw her way out of the underworld and join our world above. Halfway through the story, my grandmother would come upstairs with a large pot of yogurt rice. She would roll it into bite-sized balls, spoon a dollop of inji curry on top, and press it into our palms. We would absently pop the balls into our mouth, engrossed by the monsters, gremlins, and bad guys who foiled Uma’s escape plans. The Blue Light story never ended. We simply grew up.

  YOGURT RICE

  Rice with yogurt has got to be one of the easiest dishes in the world. You chop some vegetables (cucumber, onion, tomato, or a combination of all three), mix it with yogurt and spices, and consume. If you don’t want vegetables, you can simply mix yogurt with rice and salt.

  SERVES 4

  1/2 cup cooked jasmine or other white rice

  1 cup plain yogurt, regular, low-fat, or nonfat

  1 teaspoon olive or vegetable oil

  1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds

  1/2 teaspoon urad dal

  1 green chile, Thai or serrano, slit in half lengthwise

  Half-inch sliver of ginger, minced

  1/4 teaspoon salt

  1/4 cup finely chopped cucumber, seeded (or raw chopped onion

  or tomato)

  Chopped fresh cilantro

  Mash the cooked white rice, and set aside to cool. Whisk the yogurt to a smooth consistency, and set aside as well.

  Heat the oil and add the mustard seeds. When they start to sputter, add the urad dal. After 30 seconds add the green chili and ginger. Turn off the stove. Add the salt.

  Once the spiced oil is cool, add the chopped cucumber. Add the rice and mash well so that the flavors of the vegetables and rice blend. Add the yogurt and mix well, until it is the consistency of custard or oatmeal. Garnish with chopped cilantro.

  Put the yogurt rice in the refrigerator to cool. Eat on a hot summer day after an afternoon of Frisbee in the park for a wholesome, nutritious supper.

  ELEVEN

  Holiday Trips

  I TOOK ON other campus jobs. I baby-sat for the French professor, worked in the greenhouse for a couple of afternoons just to feel the heat of my hometown. I begged and cajoled alumni into donating money for the college during a massive fund-raising phonathon. On many nights I worked at the dorm’s reception desk, or bell desk as it was called.

  In between asking visitors to sign in and answering the telephone, I decided to finish a play that I had started writing while at WCC. I was deluded enough to send it in as an entry for the Five College Theater Workshop held at Smith College, and flabbergasted when it was accepted.

  For three days, five of us playwrights and several volunteer actors and actresses practiced our craft under the watchful eye of Kathleen Tolan, a New York playwright-in-residence. Two actors and two actresses read parts from my play, thrilling me by reciting the lines I had written—and also showing me how soppy some of them were. In a frenzy, I wrote and rewrote the play, which Kathleen ended up directing.

  At the end of the workshop the five plays were performed in a small but packed auditorium for three nights. I had written what I thought was a melodramatic tragedy, similar to the Indian movies I watched as a child. The scenes were heavy with symbolism and nostalgia, the lines full of sadness and longing. I was shocked to see the audience laughing throughout the performance. They thought the lines were over the top, the characters larger than life. They thought it was satire.

  I was beginning to realize that my critical faculties were rather underdeveloped.

  ON FRIDAYS the dorms hosted dozens of parties. Mount Holyoke is part of a five-college consortium that includes Amherst, Hampshire, and Smith Colleges and University of Massachusetts at Amherst. We could take classes in any of these schools, and their students could come to ours. This cross-pollination worked, especially on weekends.

  Friday nights found me in the room of my friend Natasha, a dance major from my modern dance class. Tall and statuesque with curly auburn hair and speckled green eyes, Natasha was popular. A succession of men came to pay homage to her, waiting in the lobby while she got dressed. I would sit in her room munching popcorn and watching her smudge gloss over her lips and lin
e her eyes carefully. After an hour of primping she would stand in front of the mirror and pout coquettishly.

  Natasha always invited me to go with her, but I refused, not wanting to be the third wheel in a couple. Then one day her date stood her up and a furious Natasha insisted that I accompany her to a frat party.

  We took the Five-College free bus to Amherst, Natasha in her short sequined skirt and me in my tight black pants. Music blared from every house on Frat Row; cars honked as people dropped off dates and angled for a parking space. Natasha and I skipped up the stairs. It was so crowded we could hardly get in. There was beer everywhere, in kegs, on the floor, in half-finished bottles. Cigarette smoke swirled lazily up to the ceiling. The music was deafening.

  Natasha confidently pushed through, shouting out hello to a Robert here, a Greg there, dodging old boyfriends and meeting new ones. From a keg in the corner she poured some beer into a plastic glass and handed it to me with the injunction “Sip.” The frothy yellow liquid tasted liked yeast and grain water. I tried some more.

  “Don’t leave me,” I said, clutching Natasha’s arm, intimidated by the ruddy faces with wide, plastered smiles.

  Suddenly, screams erupted in the backyard. Natasha and I elbowed our way to a window. A group of men were emptying kegs of beer into a large hot tub. Someone pumped up the music. Men carried women and threw them into the beer-filled tub. It felt like a mob was about to go on a rampage. I was terrified.

  Greg, Natasha’s old boyfriend, lurched toward us. Goofy and good-natured, he had endeared himself to me by his realistic imitation of an Indian accent. He was one of Natasha’s ex-boyfriends whom I actually liked.