Monsoon Diary Read online

  THERE MUST HAVE been more than 125 students in the sculpture studio when I walked in on the first day, many of them beginners like me. DeLonga, as he was called, had the habit of accepting all interested students, and the college respected him enough to give him free rein to use his unorthodox teaching methods. The first thing he told us was that we would all be given an A as long as we submitted something, be it a sweater we had knitted, a painting (“so long as it’s not for any other class”), just one sculpture or several.

  All of us were given chunks of wax and asked to create a sculpture, which would then be cast in bronze. We sat listening to music, chewing gum, talking and comparing notes as our hands molded the dark brown wax. In the middle was DeLonga, tall and broad with gray hair and a weathered face, joking, answering a question, or checking a piece of faulty equipment. He didn’t hold court during his classes; he disappeared within them.

  Two weeks later I completed my first wax sculpture, an image of a woman rooted in the earth and reaching for the stars. I liked what it looked like but wasn’t sure if it was art. So I showed it to DeLonga.

  “DeLonga, how can I make this better?” I asked, shoving my piece under his nose.

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” he replied. “You are a master artist now.”

  I had expected this. Unlike other professors, DeLonga never critiqued his students, stating that criticism impeded creativity. Instead, he taught with flair and joy, bringing exuberance, humor, and imagination into the classroom. The only thing he wanted to bequeath to us, he said, was confidence in our own aesthetic judgment. “Confidence is what made Jackson Pollock see art where others saw drips of paint,” said DeLonga during one lecture. “Confidence is what made Rothko see art where others saw horizontal stripes. Confidence is what made Georgia O’Keeffe see art where others saw mere bones.”

  Confidence. That was all I needed to be an artist? I stood still, trying to absorb the import of his words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before, but it made intuitive sense to me. My shoulders straightened; I stood a little taller.

  TUESDAY WAS casting day. We gathered at the studio at 7:00 A.M. and watched six women in leather coveralls and helmets lift containers of molten bronze through an elaborate set of pulleys and levers and pour it into plaster shells that contained our wax sculptures. The whole exercise was conducted amidst intense heat, shouted warnings, and discourses on safety. Later we broke open the plaster to retrieve our bronze sculptures.

  After a morning of bronze casting, a group of us went to Prospect Hall for lunch. With our smoke-streaked faces and paint-stained coveralls, we looked like construction workers and fell on the food. After lunch we talked—the twenty-five-odd women, each with vociferous opinions, and a few men—about art, life, love, and teaching. There was a lot of what I considered answering back. Many of DeLonga’s students rejected his opinions as “not true.” Some stuck their tongues out and called him “weird,” others ganged up and teased him mercilessly. And he teased them right back.

  Once we were discussing the aesthetic merits of the famed Sphinx sculpture when DeLonga, who had been quietly listening, said, “You know, the Sphinx actually wasn’t built by the pharaohs. It was built by the Vikings.”

  There was a momentary silence while everyone stared at DeLonga, who was suppressing a grin. Then one student burst out, “DeLonga, you’re lying.”

  “How could the pharaohs have built two forms so dramatically different?” asked DeLonga. “The pyramids are a paean to geometry and the Sphinx is so free-form. How can that be?”

  “Perhaps the pharaohs went to architecture school after building the pyramids,” said one student, and we all laughed.

  “Perhaps the Sphinx eroded into the pyramids,” said another.

  One outrageous suggestion after another came forth.

  “That story is almost as bad as his George Washington one,” someone said.

  “Well, everyone thinks George Washington was American,” said DeLonga. “He was actually Egyptian. The Washington Monument is based on Egyptian art. George Washington had written in his will that he wanted his monument erected according to his forefathers.”

  There was another explosion of laughter.

  When everyone had finished lunch, DeLonga asked, “Any questions? Ask me one question and we can leave.”

  There was a short silence. Then one student said, “I know that in these discussions we always end up talking about art or life, but what about reincarnation? Do you think that people who die young reincarnate?”

  DeLonga glanced at me but didn’t press me to speak. Relieved of the burden, I spoke up hesitantly. “Well, as far as I know, in Hinduism, a soul is supposed to live for one hundred twenty years. People who die young are supposed to reincarnate in order to fulfill their karma—at least, that’s what my grandfather said,” I ended in a rush.

  To my surprise, nobody stared at me like I was weird, as if I had said something completely removed from their worldview. Most of my fellow students merely nodded and continued eating.

  WHILE I ENJOYED the drama of bronze casting, I was more drawn to the spontaneity and immediacy of welding. There were six welding stations, each with tanks of oxygen and acetylene and two blow-torches, a welder and a cutter. I was attracted to the danger of it, of holding enough heat in my bare hands to melt metal. It was primeval, like holding fire in my hands. It was also meditative, the hissing blow-torch providing a Zen-like background for my thoughts. As I stood there in my leather apron, goggles, helmet, and boots, fashioning lava-like circles of molten metal, I felt like I had found my métier.

  Soon I was welding night and day. I would rush through dinner and return to the studio to work until midnight. I would be back at dawn to shape my dreams into sculptures. I began skipping my other classes so I could spend more time in the art studio. DeLonga watched me, smiled encouragement, but said little as I welded fanciful steel sculptures, some giant and rambling, others compact and small.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME since I entered Mount Holyoke, I felt like I belonged. Art students didn’t care whether I was from India or Botswana; they cared about Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the meaning of life. They didn’t see me as a brown-skinned foreigner; they spotted raw sienna, burnt umber, and cadmium yellow shades on my face. They didn’t stereotype me because my parents were Hindu and vegetarian; they reminded me not to blow up the studio while welding and cutting.

  It was in the art department that I met men from Hampshire and Amherst colleges who enrolled in DeLonga’s classes in droves. I developed massive crushes on dashing men with names like Thoralf and Rathcus who wore tight black clothes, grew ponytails, and drove motorbikes off rooftops. I also met the women who would soon become my closest friends. There was Sophie Constandaki, who studied Russian, quoted Pushkin, and made beautiful bronze sculptures. Celia Liu had a dancer’s gait, an actress’s persona, and a talent for charcoal drawings. Martha Nelson (“Marf”) was amiable and easygoing, always ready to laugh. Ellen Malmon was blond, fair, and friendly. And then there was Jennifer Harris.

  Loud of laugh and quick of wit, Jennifer had short, boyish hair that changed color from purple to green to red to black to anything but her natural blond. When the construction workers hooted as she walked down Main Street, she lifted her middle finger and kept it up. She spent the evenings listening to Tom Waits, smoking pot, and sketching. She was the most interesting girl I’d met on campus. She was also, I found out, in love with a long-limbed blonde named Sarah.

  Lesbians were a strong, vocal presence at Mount Holyoke, and they made me vaguely uncomfortable. I hadn’t known a lesbian or gay person growing up in India and was appalled to learn that the woman who lived next door to me in my dorm, Debbie, was a lesbian. I had to share a bathroom with her, and that made me uncomfortable too. The showers didn’t have doors, only curtains. What if Debbie walked in while I was bathing?

  Jennifer was the only lesbian I had some sort of a friendship with. The fact that she was in love wit
h Sarah made her somehow safe. Besides, I liked her. She had strength and spirit and opinions.

  One afternoon we all decided to picnic and paint landscapes off campus. Thoralf and Rathcus brought their girlfriends. Marf brought homemade pesto pasta, which we promptly devoured. Sophie brought bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 and told me that it was like wine, only better. Ellen brought a boom box and some of her Grateful Dead tapes. Celia brought her sketches, and Sarah brought herself. We all attempted to catch a vermilion sunset on canvas.

  Pretty soon, Jennifer and Sarah were kissing. As usual, I averted my eyes.

  Jennifer saw me and guffawed. “So, Shoba, are we making you uncomfortable with our lovemaking?” she asked loudly.

  Everyone stared at me. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I think she’s just worried about being jumped in the shower,” Sarah said.

  My jaw dropped. With that softly voiced sentence, Sarah had laid her finger on the one thing that I was paranoid about, even though I hadn’t even consciously articulated the thought.

  “How did you know?” I asked stupidly.

  “It’s a common enough fear around here,” Sarah said.

  It was a common fear all through the Pioneer Valley. Once, in a crowded restaurant in Northampton, we found ourselves sitting next to a group of Christian charismatics who struck up a conversation with Jennifer, then proceeded to show her underlined passages from the Bible that stated “unequivocally” that homosexuality was abnormal because it didn’t obey the Lord’s dictums about procreation. The rest of us watched, bemused, as an earnest young woman bent over backward in her chair and tried to convince Jennifer.

  “Why don’t I take you out to dinner so I can explain this further?” she said finally.

  “Sure,” drawled Jennifer. “Either you’ll save me or I’ll seduce you.”

  WINTER BLOSSOMED into spring. It became obvious to me that art was no longer a passing fancy; it had become my ruling passion. My year as a Foreign Fellow was coming to an end, and I knew only that I wanted to make art.

  Desperate, I set up a meeting with DeLonga. Half-formulated arguments swirled around my throat. I had to convince him of my seriousness. I had to make him see that art had become terribly important to me. I realized that it was sudden, I would tell him, I realized that I wasn’t as good as the other, more experienced students, but I needed a chance to get better. I needed time to make a portfolio of my work so I could apply to graduate school. Not only that, I needed a scholarship. He could see that, couldn’t he? I wasn’t being unreasonable, was I? He had to help me. He just had to.

  DeLonga’s office wasn’t exactly an office. It was more like a storage room for discarded sculptures, broken drills, and bags of cement. DeLonga sat on a bar stool waiting for me.

  “So?” he said when I walked in.

  I was speechless. What could I say? That after a free, fully funded year at Mount Holyoke, I wanted one more? That I was going to become an artiste? It was laughable, this notion of mine. Who would believe that I wanted to switch paths after a semester?

  “Mary Jacob and I have been talking,” DeLonga began. I knew that Mary Jacob, the dean of international students, and DeLonga were neighbors and personal friends. “Mary thinks that it will be possible for you to stay on at Mount Holyoke for one more year.”

  Stunned, I voiced my worries. “But I can’t,” I replied. “Foreign Fellows are only allowed to stay for a year. It’s in my contract.”

  “Well, we fudged around with that a bit,” said DeLonga. “I met with President Kennan, and she agreed to let you stay as a special student. The college will give you a tuition scholarship—it’s not as if you’re breaking the bank and using up all our oxyacetylene. Well, you are, but that’s okay. The thing is that you have to pay for the room and board yourself.” He paused. “It’s about thirty-five hundred dollars,” he said somberly. “Think you can manage to earn that much?”

  MARY AND DOUG OFFERED to put me up during the summer. I was going to work as an unpaid intern for the local PBS-affiliated TV station. I had applied for and gotten the job long before I took my first sculpture course, when journalism and writing seemed like viable options to pursue. It was too late to attempt anything else. So I worked at WGBY with five other interns my age. We accompanied producers on shoots, lugged equipment, transcribed tapes, helped tape shows, and wrote thank-you letters to on-air “talent.”

  During pledge week, when the station suspended all activities to ask viewers for money, the president of the station learned about my plight from the other interns. He called Mary Jacob, who explained the situation. This was all the substantiation Jim needed to dash off letters to the local Rotary Club, India Association, and area churches. “Young Indian student needs your support,” the letters said. I had become part of the station’s pledge drive.

  Two churches gave five hundred dollars each. The India Association gave one thousand dollars, and the Rotary Club gave five hundred. I had gained twenty-five hundred dollars through the generosity of strangers, but I still needed a thousand more.

  It was Jennifer who suggested that I throw a benefit dinner to benefit me. I didn’t know what a benefit was but was eager to embrace any ideas that would put me back in school. Jennifer was working in Boston, but we spoke frequently on the telephone.

  “Invite ten people to a benefit dinner, charge them a hundred dollars each, and you’ll have your thousand dollars,” said Jennifer.

  “Are you nuts?” I screeched. “I can’t charge a hundred dollars for food, and that too, vegetarian food.”

  “People don’t attend benefits for the food,” Jennifer explained patiently. “The food is beside the point. You could charge five hundred dollars for all they care.”

  “I don’t know any rich people, and besides, I couldn’t charge a hundred dollars as a matter of conscience,” I replied primly. “I’m going to let them pay as they like.”

  It was egalitarian and, like a good painting, didn’t push too hard— the only way to do it. I would assemble a group of people and cook a meal that was a paean to the versatility of vegetarian food. I asked Mary and Doug for permission to use their backyard for my party, then got down to the difficult task of assembling a menu and a guest list. I consulted Jennifer frequently on the phone. After racking my brains about how many people to invite, I threw in the towel and decided to invite everyone I knew, which came to about fifty people.

  Designing the actual invitation was more challenging.

  “How can I invite people to dinner and then ask them to pay?” I asked.

  “You’ll just have to call it a charity dinner,” Jennifer replied.

  “Yes, but I can’t be my own charity.”

  We went back and forth before coming up with a solution. Jennifer volunteered to officially throw the party and be the hostess. We put down her name on the invitations and didn’t mention mine at all.

  “Jennifer Harris hosts charity dinner to benefit young Indian student,” said the invitations, each of which we handwrote and hand-painted.

  “If I become famous, each of these invitations will be worth millions,” said Jennifer. “Maybe I should write a P.S. and ask them to hold on to these invitations, just in case.”

  Jennifer also decided, over my protests, to include a “Suggested Donation” line. “If we don’t, people will pay like five dollars,” she said.

  “You and I would pay five dollars,” I replied. “Not these people.”

  “Still, I think we should make it clear that they should plan to cough up at least fifty bucks, or not come at all,” said Jennifer.

  We sent out fifty invitations. Twelve people accepted.

  “It’s because you demanded that they pay fifty dollars,” I wailed accusingly over the telephone. “Otherwise, more people would have come.”

  “Oh, pish!” Jennifer said, and hung up.

  She called back a minute later and said, “Just to make sure, I’m going to be standing at the door, collecting donations before the
y actually eat your food. Who knows? They may taste your cooking and renege on their promise.”

  Her high-pitched cackle split the line.

  WHAT COULD I COOK and charge fifty dollars for with a straight face? It would have to be extravagant, exotic, tasty, and well presented. My stomach in knots, I sat down on the bed and twisted the sheets again. People would pay fifty dollars for meat, not just vegetables. I considered cooking the whole meal with meat substitutes, but the “tofu turkey” I tried tasted so horrible that I decided against it. Indian food too was out, even though I knew how to cook it well. It was too easy, too predictable. My menu had to reflect America, and my experience of it. It was Doug who suggested “world cuisine” after reading a newspaper article. I jumped at the idea. America was a nation of immigrants, after all; I was one myself. It seemed perfectly appropriate to appropriate dishes from different cultures for my benefit dinner.

  I evenhandedly chose one dish from each continent, except Antarctica, which didn’t seem to have anything vegetarian. For the main course, I decided on the cabbage dolma that Kim’s father had taught me to make. Cabbage stuffed with rice, tomatoes, onions, pine nuts, currants, herbs, and spices was vaguely reminiscent of stuffed turkey. It would remind people of Thanksgiving and its extravagance of food. It seemed poetic to offer something from Turkey in lieu of turkey. Not that stuffed turkey or anything Turkish had to be the main dish, I reminded myself, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. Dolma it would be.

  I couldn’t get the image of stuffed turkey out of my mind as I came up with accompaniments for my stuffed cabbage dolma. Instead of mashed potatoes, I would serve babaghanouj. Japanese umeboshi paste was about the same color as cranberry sauce. I would flavor it with Asian ingredients like wasabi, lemongrass, and galangal. I looked to Europe, specifically Italy, for my appetizers and salads. Aleecha was a hearty vegetable stew from Ethiopia and the only African dish I was familiar with. I also decided to make chilled avocado soup with mango-cilantro salsa from South America. From Australia came its Shiraz wines, which I loved. For dessert, I bought baklava, Chinese mooncakes, Mexican churros, and finally, in a nod to American tradition, apple pie.