Immigrant, Montana: A novel

Author: Amitava Kumar

• To those who welcomed me to America, I wanted to say, without even being asked, that E.T. ought to have won the Oscar over Gandhi. I had found the latter insufficiently authentic but more crucially I felt insufficiently authentic myself. Not so much fake as insubstantial.

• To those who welcomed me to America, I wanted to say, without even being asked, that E.T. ought to have won the Oscar over Gandhi. I had found the latter insufficiently authentic but more crucially

• To those who welcomed me to America, I wanted to say, without even being asked, that E.T. ought to have won the Oscar over Gandhi. I had found the latter insufficiently authentic but more crucially I felt insufficiently authentic myself.

• There was only contempt in my heart for my fellow Indian students who repeated stories about trying to educate ignorant Americans in barbershops who had asked how come they spoke such good English or if they belonged to tribes or grew up among tigers.

• One winter morning, while everyone on the balcony sat listening to the radio, following the cricket commentary from Eden Gardens, a monkey stole into Mamaji’s room. He climbed on the huge white bed and finding Mamaji’s pistol brandished it—they say—at my cousin who was born two months after me and still in her crib. No one moved. Then, turning the pistol around, the primate mind prompting the opposable thumb to grasp the trigger, the monkey blew his brains out.

• If and when I imagine an audience for my writing, it is also a divided one. But the two places are connected, not only by those histories that cultural organizations celebrate through endlessly dull annual gatherings but by millions of individual yearnings, all those stories of consummated or thwarted desire.

• —There is nothing purer than the love for your landlord’s daughter, said Bheem. —No, said Santosh, after an appropriate pause. If you are looking for innocence, the purest gangajal, you have to be in love with your teacher’s wife. As if to sort out the matter, we looked at Noni, a Sikh from Patiala. He was the only one among us who wasn’t a virgin. Noni took off his turban and his long hair fell over his shoulders. —You bastards should stop pretending. The only true love, true first love, is the love for your maidservant. This was duly appreciated. But Noni was not done yet. —She has to be older than you, though not by too much, and while it’s not necessary for you to have fucked her, it is important that she take your hand in hers and put it on her breast.

• —There is nothing purer than the love for your landlord’s daughter, said Bheem. —No, said Santosh, after an appropriate pause. If you are looking for innocence, the purest gangajal, you have to be in love with your teacher’s wife.

• Three of us were sprawled next to each other on the bed, our heads pillowed against the wall. Dark, oily smudges behind us indicated where other heads had pressed in the past.

• Noni was my Dr. Ruth before Dr. Ruth. My naïveté was the price of admission I paid for his tutorials.

• —Scene dikha, baccha ro raha hai, a man shouted from a further seat, wanting us to return to the bedroom. “Show a breast. Because if you don’t, the baby will cry.”

• The rough remark, bewildering at that time, soon lost its confusing aspect: glinting like mica in a piece of granite, it sat for a while in the nostalgic narrative about my late teenage years.

• In 2014, The New York Times ran a story on the Sexpert, introducing Dr. Mahinder Watsa to the United States. Watsa’s editor said the doctor had received more than forty thousand letters seeking advice. He had tried to promote sex education but many of his own colleagues said it was pornography.

• Dr. Watsa was the first to use words like penis and vagina in the newspapers. A reader filed an obscenity suit against the doctor, charging that the editors fabricated letters to increase readership. In response, the editor delivered a sack of unopened letters at the judge’s table. He read them over the lunch hour and dismissed the case.

• After arriving in New York, I would have a constant conversation in my head with a judge who was asking me questions. I had been called an impostor; I was told that what I wanted was not mine.

• I am telling you all this in Immigration Court, Your Honor, because I want to assert that I knew about sex, or at least discoursed about sex, prior to my arrival on these shores. I have chosen to speak in personal terms, the most intimate terms, Your Honor, because it seems to me that it is this crucial part of humanity that is denied to the immigrant. You look at a dark immigrant in that long line at JFK, the new clothes crumpled from a long flight, a ripe smell accompanying him, his eyes haunted, and you wonder whether he can speak English. It is far from your thoughts and your assumptions to ask whether he has ever spoken soft phrases filled with yearning or what hot, dirty words he utters in his wife’s ear as she laughs and embraces him in bed. You look at him and think that he wants your job and not that he just wants to get laid.

• I told Jennifer, with only the slightest trace of uncertainty in my voice, that I was a poet.

• The film confirmed what I was already discovering about America. Poverty or homelessness wasn’t something I needed to associate only with India.

• Only a hundred yards from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where people with cameras stood in line to gain entry, I saw an old white woman walking along slowly with shit running down her swollen legs. A middle-aged woman passed me with her little girl. As she came close to the old woman, the mother covered her daughter’s eyes.

• I aspired to be a witty raconteur, open about wanting to seduce Jennifer with sparkling essays about ordinary people dropped in the maw of late capitalism.

• My German friend Peter had begun calling me Kalashnikov instead of Kailash. It was a mouthful, but people were sufficiently amused and so he never gave up on the joke. Then someone shortened Kalashnikov to AK-47. On occasion, people called me AK or, sometimes, just 47.

• While I was writing the letter, my worries receded. Even my loneliness acquired a pleasant hue, the way objects appear to glow in the light of the setting sun.

• As we were coming out of the subway station at Lincoln Center, Jennifer caught sight of a sign that said: GANDHI WAS A GREAT AND CHARITABLE MAN. Beneath, in smaller type, were the words HOWEVER, HE COULD HAVE USED SOME WORK ON HIS TRICEPS. It was an advertisement for a gym.

• A poster with the arrow pointing down to the exhibition space had a quote from Raghu Rai: A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.

• In this air-conditioned space in New York, you didn’t feel the heat in which the photos had been snapped; perhaps because Rai had made expert use of the flash, the pictures were so evenly lit, you seemed to have stepped into a land without shadows.

• The day felt a little like those days in India when the exams were over and you could sit out in the sun peeling an orange.

• The rickshaw appeared defeated, skeletal, because it was now missing both a rider and a driver.

• With a gurgle, the water supply from the municipality would resume at three each afternoon.

• If this were a movie, I imagine a montage of scenes, like this one, that introduced me to America—a discussion about Bach, the first taste of Mexican food, the first rock concert, lectures by the teachers I came to admire.

• If I were living in Patna, I’d have immediately thought of marriage, but not here. Here, just a few months into my stay in America, I was finally leading a fuller existence. I understood that this newness couldn’t be shared with those I had left behind.

• Was there any way of introducing my friends from Delhi into my conversations with Jennifer without turning them into sex-obsessed hooligans?

• I was moving away from my parents; their world now seemed so different from mine. I wrote them fewer letters. My classes, everything I was learning, made up my new reality.

• The wind made the sound a kite makes when struggling to get off the ground. When I looked outside through the grimy bathroom window I saw that the few leaves left on the branches of the trees outside were in danger of being swept away. I was safe in my apartment, and there was no immediate peril of any sort, but I was overcome by a feeling that took root then and has never left me, the feeling that in this land that was someone else’s country, I did not have a place to stand.

• Our eyes met. She didn’t acknowledge me but her upper lip curled up over her teeth in such distress that I was transported to the room in the clinic where I had seen her lying on the bed with the sheet drawn up to her neck.

• The subjects of discussion that day were issues of displacement and exile, focused on the writings of Edward Said (“Reflections on Exile”), Assia Djebar (“There Is No Exile”), and Anton Shammas (“Amérka, Amérka”).

• —Are you celebrating Diwali? —No fireworks in the house this year, she said. My sister, older than me, was telling me that our grandmother had died. This clear thought came to me only after I had hung up the phone.

• The discussion at Ehsaan’s house that day began with Said’s line that exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.

• When no one else offered a response, Ehsaan said that Palestinians who left their homeland and were never able to return still keep the keys to the houses they had been forced to abandon. The keys are useless now because the locks are gone. But those keys are the portals to homeland.

• I had left home willingly but was still struck by how little I had brought with me. It was as if I imagined I was going to discover a new self.

• There was alternative energy for everything in normal, comfortable American life—television, air conditioners, light, heat, cars. There was only

• The reality was even worse, she said. There was alternative energy for everything in normal, comfortable American life—television, air conditioners, light, heat, cars. There was only one enterprise that needed such a colossal infusion of energy that no alternative to oil would work—and that was war. A tank could move only seventeen feet on a gallon of gasoline. This war was a war to ensure that America could continue to make war.

• Siobhan quoted a line from a short story she had read in an American lit class: To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. I hadn’t heard the writer’s name before—and what was he really saying? Siobhan was mocking the politics embedded in such desire. The people around her agreed with the analysis.

• Siobhan quoted a line from a short story she had read in an American lit class: To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. I hadn’t heard the writer’s name before—and what was he really saying? Siobhan was mocking the politics embedded in such desire.

• Even if we had made our love public I wouldn’t have acted like Maya. I would not have rubbed our noses

• Even if we had made our love public I wouldn’t have acted like Maya. I would not have rubbed our noses together and smiled at one another while our friends pretended not to notice.

• He gave me the title of a book by a British historian named David Omissi; in that book, I found other letters by Indian soldiers serving in the First World War, most of them in France.

• A letter sent to Peshawar—I have been in Hodson’s Horse for the whole thirty-three years. During a railway journey when two people sit side by side for a couple of hours, one of them feels the absence of the other when he alights: how great then must be the anguish which I feel at the thought of having to sever myself from the regiment! Such fine feeling! When I read the old soldier’s letter I found myself thinking that this intense vibration of sentiment, the sense that the sender had about the sorrow of attachment, could only have been the result of a long experience with separation and loneliness.

• It was addressed to the headmaster of the soldier’s village in Punjab, and though it concerned a matter that was intimate, the language of the letter

• Your Honor, is there an immigrant from India or Jamaica or Kenya who isn’t thrilled to see the first daffodils of spring? The honest person forced to memorize Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils without having a clue about what those flowers looked like can celebrate spring with the kind of joy that the native born can never know. This is how we know we have arrived!

• I told myself that I could read later, when darkness had fallen, and that right now, given how bright and warm it was outside, I should perhaps find a friend to have a beer with.

• Lamb had once said at a party that whenever he suffered from insomnia he read Derrida: Not because he makes me go to sleep but because he makes staying up a pleasure.

• My father had grown up in a hut. I knew in my heart that I was closer to a family of peasants than I was to a couple of intellectuals sitting in a restaurant in New York. Our dinner of skirt steak and jumbo shrimp was nearly over, and now because I was uncertain why we had been laughing only a minute ago, a sense of fatalism began to overtake me. The fickle human heart, prone to despair. How quickly the boredom sets in.

• In Ehsaan’s class the previous semester I had read Stuart Hall, who had been born in Jamaica and spent most of his life in England, where he gained a following as an enormously influential cultural theorist. In his essay, Hall said that people like him who came to England in the fifties had actually been there for centuries. He was talking about slavery and sugar plantations. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.*1

• On Twitter, the refugees fleeing war compete for my attention with other images of meals people have eaten in restaurants, their pets, or the stunning sunsets seen during beach vacations.

• Just the other day someone sent me a photograph of a CNG yellow-and-green auto-rickshaw in Delhi. At the back, on its yellow canopy, were the words ASLI JAT in Hindi. That was understandable. But below the words in Hindi, were the words in English: NOBODY REMAINS VIRGIN LIFE FUCKS EVERYONE

• Osho spoke with what in this country was called a pronounced accent. For me, his voice was like the voices of my relatives and friends, even the word English uttered with a sibilant hiss.

• Before Manmohan Singh and other political leaders engineered a liberal reform of the Indian economy, at least twenty years earlier than them, Rajneesh was preaching that socialism would only socialize poverty. What India needed was not more Gandhis but more capitalists. —But your Osho is a Jain.

• Before Manmohan Singh and other political leaders engineered a liberal reform of the Indian economy, at least twenty years earlier than them, Rajneesh was preaching that socialism would only socialize poverty. What India needed was not more Gandhis but more capitalists.

• “There are only three things to be done with a woman,” said Clea once. “You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.” I was experiencing a failure in all these domains of feeling. —LAWRENCE DURRELL, Justine

• The flight attendant was asking, as she came down the aisle, “Veal or chicken?”

• Often in the trains going past Ara, there would be motley crowds of young men and older folk who would sing songs about the social change about to come with the blessings of Mao.

• Hanif Kureishi’s book The Buddha of Suburbia was published the same year that I came to the United States, and I discovered it a year later when I read the novel for one of my courses, the one called Black Britain. The book presented an England strung out on what one character in Buddha called race, class, fucking, and farce.

• Nina gave me a book of poems by radical Latin American poets. Pablo Neruda had written odes to ordinary things like the tomato and the onion; I composed rapturous lines about Nina’s mirror, her favorite scarf, and a pair of spoons in her kitchen drawer.

• In the cabinet where I store my passport there is a yellow ticket from Billy Bragg’s Rumours of War concert. The ticket was stapled by Nina to a card on which she had copied down a line that Antonio Gramsci

• The ticket was stapled by Nina to a card on which she had copied down a line that Antonio Gramsci had written in a letter to his future wife: How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures?

• The narrow beam of the light that had climbed up the stairs, three or four steps at a time, has now jumped across twenty-odd years.

• The biggest challenge to love is not when you pretend you are in a porn film: no, no, it’s when you believe that you are in a bad Hindi film, delivering reassuring saccharine platitudes to each other.

• —Will you marry me? I asked her this impulsively, as I watched her exercising. I laughed when I said that, but the words still hurt in my throat.

• Maybe it was something said on the news, Nina turned to me and asked whether the Immigration and Naturalization Service had a uniform. —Yes, I said. —Do you ever imagine having sex with the Border Patrol? You know, the way porn in Israel has sometimes much to do with the Nazis.

• It’s come to be that I can’t imagine anyone really likes to go to work. The Great Depression was such a fertile period, you know. The things that were invented in that decade include the TV, the helicopter, nylon stockings, the jet plane, and that thing that is a jet plane in nylon tights, Superman.

• (I checked Nina’s horoscope in Mirabella when I was at a hair salon. This is what I read and, naturally, I tore the page out to take home with me and stick in my journal:

• I always complained to Nina that she didn’t love me enough, and I didn’t realize for a long time that in doing this I had already lost the game.

• I had been blind to the fact that Nina was still in a relationship with Jonathan when I stepped into the picture, and then I treated the discovery of this fact as a revolutionary breakthrough in the way in which knowledge was to be forever organized.

• Why do couples fight, or where do such fights have their origin? A minor irritation or a misheard remark is linked to a barely articulated but long-established hurt or resentment. It is as if a closet with a secret trapdoor opened into a dark tunnel that allowed you to crawl to a distant hiding place.

• She was always gracious, of course, but whenever she praised me I felt she was lying.

• Nina was standing at the door, smiling her smile of smiles.

• And then the literal translated into the metaphorical: in the expression in her eyes, I saw a door closing. When I turned to leave, I was certain she wasn’t going to tolerate any more of this unpleasantness, and as I went down the stairs of

• And then the literal translated into the metaphorical: in the expression in her eyes, I saw a door closing. When I turned to leave, I was certain she wasn’t going to tolerate any more of this unpleasantness, and as I went down the stairs of Nina’s building, the taste of food turned to ash in my mouth.

• There is no love more real than the kind experienced after a breakup.

• No one I had seen in my life, except maybe two half-naked men once beside a village road near Hajipur, bathing next to a water pump after a day’s labor in the fields, rubbed soap on their limbs more vigorously than Nina.

• I liked the idea of the drive with the ocean outside but all I had seen of this country were cities on the East and the West Coasts. What would I have known of India if I had visited only Bombay and Calcutta?

• We were graduate students; we used words like research. So, on our second day in Yellowstone, we found ourselves using that word. When we discovered that even though it was still summer, there was snow in some of the park, and that we should have brought jackets and sweaters, we began to tell each other that we hadn’t done the right research.

• There wasn’t then, nor would there be in the future, any real intimacy between us. What did we know of love? No one in my family had married outside our caste.

• Gallatin National Forest. Our cabin had a heater but the cold seemed to seep through invisible cracks and pool near our feet.

• Calls used to be expensive, and it could take an hour to get a connection. When I called the neighbor’s number, someone would run out to get my father. I usually hung up and then called AT&T to complain that the line had been disconnected. The operator would apologize and then call for me without charge. As far as I was concerned, immigration was the original sin. Someone owed me something.

• In a self-pitying way I told myself that I had come so far from my roots: there was nothing of my day-to-day affairs that I could share with my parents.

• Immigrant, Montana. Those were the words I suddenly heard on the radio. The name of a place. NPR’s Liane Hansen said that federal officers had killed a wolf at a ranch near Immigrant, Montana.

• That was the last note I received from Nina after she told me that she no longer had the stomach for any more fights. When she said she was going to just walk away, I began to apologize.

• A graduate student in art history, who had had beers with me, saw our serious faces and kept walking. Nina looked sad but she had made up her mind. She left me admiring the strength of her decision. I had nothing to support my despair. So many times I had complained to Nina about our relationship, and not once had she been the one to say it was over; now it was she who was walking away and it was clear that nothing I said would make a difference.

• Nina looked sad but she had made up her mind. She left me admiring the strength of her decision. I had nothing to support my despair. So many times I had complained to Nina about our

• The sun and the infinite blue sky, everything was beautiful, and yet this place could well have been a ghost town. It was a name that I had long carried in my imagination; it now belonged to the past. For all these years it was a name that brought together, like the two hands of a clock meeting at the right hour, the two most deeply felt needs of mine, the desire for love and the hankering for home. But there was nothing here for me.

• I had once known a man named Prabhunath whose father had been a minister in the Charan Singh cabinet. This fellow Prabhunath was a landlord in Palamu, and he had said to me that the low-caste people would always remain under the upper castes. —You see, balls. He was pointing at his crotch. Balls will always hang under the cock, he said.

• Unlike Prabhunath, Pushkin was a member of the new India. He was a Brahmin, and his place in the world owed a lot to his past, but he had disavowed his origins and was now at home anywhere in the world.

• That night, when Imran brought me back to my apartment, I was aware that I hadn’t even asked him enough questions to be able to write a newspaper report about the strike. Instead, I had visited a nightclub. Anyone wanting to become a writer couldn’t say no to experience. As I was falling asleep it occurred to me that I, unlike Pushkin, was doing no writing.

• I hadn’t heard of Agnes Smedley. She had died in 1950, and although I didn’t know this then, she would change the course of my life.

• Ehsaan wanted me to study Agnes Smedley’s literary outpourings and conduct research on the trials of the Indian radicals on both coasts.

• The lives I was reading about quickly seized my interest. The accounts of the early Indian revolutionaries in New York and California

• Assured of German support, they traveled to Weimar Berlin to escape British spies. Berlin was staggering under inflation. Smedley found out to her dismay that six weeks’ wages could get a working person only a pair of boots.

• I began working on my master’s thesis for Ehsaan. For a few pages, I would see the world with Smedley’s eyes, and then, with a feeling of uneasy identification, with Chatto’s. That sexual tension, born out of jealousy, was so vivid. Your Honor, I saw myself as if in a mirror, my face night-lit with jealous rage, standing beside Nina’s bed. I was asking her about Jonathan. So many times I had contemplated her past.

• All his home ties had long been severed and it is quite certain that if he came to India he would feel unhappy and out of joint. But in spite of the passage of time the home pull remains. No exile can escape the malady of his tribe, that consumption of the soul, as Mazzini called it.”

• I could tell no one of its contents, for I feared that none of the people I lived with would understand. They idealized the working class, and I feared they might not understand the things that grew in poverty and ignorance. They would say my brother would have been justified had he stolen bread, when hungry, but he should not have stolen a horse.

• These words had come from a great distance and found a place close to my heart. What Smedley had written about the unfeeling hypocrisy of those who idealized the working class also applied to the people sitting around me at the seminar table in Ehsaan’s classes. But, more than that, her words took me back to my own relatives in Bihar. Their small worlds, their plain poverty, and the ordinary complications of their difficult lives.

• Ehsaan told me to read a short story by Somerset Maugham called “Giulia Lazzari” because it had a connection to Agnes Smedley.

• The fourth place he wanted to visit was the site of the Haymarket riot in 1886 Chicago. Ehsaan wanted to go there because, as a boy, he had been taken to May Day celebrations in India. He wanted to lay flowers at the Haymarket monument to honor the striking workers who had marched in the first May Day parade.

• —They first asked me if I was a citizen of the United States. I said, No. They said, Don’t you feel that as a guest in this country you should not be going about criticizing the host country’s government? I said, I hear your point, but I do want you to know that while I am not a citizen, I am a taxpayer. And I thought it was a fundamental principle of American democracy that there is no taxation without representation.

• But what was to remain with me after all those years was the example of Ehsaan seeking Marx and Sherlock Holmes together in London. It was as if someone from my town had expressed the ambition to read everything by Mahatma Gandhi and watch every Dilip Kumar film!

• From Ehsaan we wanted narrative. We didn’t always care how much of it was nonfiction or fiction. Ehsaan lived—and narrated—his life along the blurry Line of Control between the two genres.

• He was pondering this when Abdul Ghafoor pointed to the bright moon. —Look at that, he said. It looks like a freshly made roti. You reach for it and find that it is burned black on the other side. That is the freedom we have been given.

• She spoke of Ehsaan as if he was still alive and living in America. I didn’t correct her. Her son-in-law told her that I was a journalist. Sadrunissa nodded her head and asked if I was from The Searchlight or The Indian Nation. These had been the two Patna newspapers from my childhood; they’d ceased publication decades ago.

• The son-in-law was a journalist for a small Hindi paper with its headquarters in Punjab. He had stopped asking Sadrunissa the questions I wanted to ask and would try to give replies himself.

• It is a quote from “Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers” (1799) by Friedrich Schleiermacher: “What seizes you when you find the holy most intimately mixed with the profane, the sublime with the lowly and transitory? And what do you call the mood that sometimes forces you to presuppose the universality of this mixture and to search for it everywhere?”

• To make conversation, I said that I was ashamed that I had done so little work all week. This is the kind of thing all graduate students say. But Cai Yan paused. She wanted to know if I had ever felt shame. Real shame?

• The PBS station was showing a documentary on Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who died in the Challenger disaster.

• The story of the monkey’s suicide. It was a story from my infancy in Ara. In later years, of course, I had spun that personal story into a broader narrative. Monkeys as metaphors for migration. The poor monkeys found electrocuted near the Hanuman Mandir in Connaught Place had lost their natural habitat.

• The modern-day menace of marauding monkeys, reported by Indian newspapers fond of alliteration, had to do with urban expansion and destruction of forests. That’s what I had originally thought. Then came the discovery that another important reason was the massive annual export of young male monkeys right up to the 1980s. The monkeys from Indian forests were living and dying in American labs.

• An adult monkey has the intelligence of a two-year-old human, and when zipped into its suit, locked in a metal case, its confusion and, if I can use this word, its courage must have been extraordinary.

• Was there a link between Indians and monkeys? The Republicans think so. In 2006 a Virginia senator named George Allen called an Indian-American youth a macaca. Allen was on the campaign trail and the teen he called macaca

• Was there a link between Indians and monkeys? The Republicans think so. In 2006 a Virginia senator named George Allen called an Indian-American

• Was there a link between Indians and monkeys? The Republicans think so. In 2006 a Virginia senator named George Allen called an Indian-American youth a macaca.

• The village had no electricity, but a loud fuel-powered generator had been hired and brought from Ara. It lit three large bulbs, which attracted millions of moths and more than two hundred villagers.

• If I wanted I could perhaps have used terms we bandied about in our seminars: about the unfulfilled lives or futile deaths of people—because of their class or upbringing—caught between an older feudal order and an emergent capitalist society. There was some pathos but it was better to be clear-eyed about the harsh judgment of history. As grad students we showed ourselves eager to understand contemporary life, but in reality, we were proclaiming our place in the future.

• A painted sign to my right said PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE and, on the left, outside the door, on an iron frame, hung two red buckets with the word FIRE stenciled on them in white. I would pass those buckets each day of the fortnight I spent in Delhi: there was sand in them, presumably to be used to douse a fire, but there were also cigarette butts, crumpled paper, torn bus tickets, and clumps of dried paan juice.

• I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick. —JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body

• —There’s a famous ghazal of Javed Qureshi’s that begins Dil jalaane ki baat karte ho…The relevant lines for you are Hum ko apni khabar nahin yaaron / Tum zamaane ki baat karte ho.

• But here I felt stranded in language. I had become a translated man, no longer able to connect with my own past. What else had I forgotten? The sorrow of the world, but sorrow also for myself, gripped my throat. Without warning, I began to cry.

• Cai was looking at me, with a slightly worried expression, and I explained to her that I had been moved by what I was reading. It reminded me of what one poet had called the gentle poverty of my homeland.

• Cai had expertly linked the savagery of the attack, which read like a parable, to the relentless depredations of a system that had ruined farmers. The child’s parents had lost their meager farm and become migrant workers. The much-vaunted liberalization of the Indian market hadn’t brought wealth to the poor; on the contrary, it had made them more vulnerable and left them helpless and alone. —

• Cai had expertly linked the savagery of the attack, which read like a parable, to the relentless depredations of a system that had ruined farmers. The child’s parents had lost their meager farm and become migrant workers. The much-vaunted liberalization of the Indian market hadn’t brought wealth to the poor; on the contrary, it had made them more vulnerable and left them helpless and alone.

• A netua is a man who puts on women’s clothes and dances during weddings and festivals in the villages of Bihar.

• —Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to a woman in the form of a dialogue between his head and heart. Do you know it? I shook my head. The love letter was addressed to a married woman named Maria Cosway, an artist. He wrote the letter after meeting her in 1786. Jefferson was the U.S. ambassador to France at that time.

• Deng Xiaoping was going to die soon but he was the model that the Indians were perhaps following. Deng had said that he wasn’t interested in a socialism of shared poverty; he wanted capitalist growth. How were literature and art going to respond to these vast changes?

• Sitting in my room, an electric heater in the corner, I sipped pots of Da Hong Pao tea and began writing a comparative study of Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” and Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.”

• This solitude in an alien land, as well as the work I was doing, helped me; it made me think more deeply about what I wanted to say about literature.

• A few years ago, a white American writer described another writer, one whose ancestors had migrated from India to the Caribbean, as looking less like a Nobel Prize candidate than a shopkeeper. A malicious remark, but capturing a fear I have long held in my heart, about being a prisoner in the museum of someone else’s imagination.

• ANANDABAI JOSHEE, M.D., 1865–1887 FIRST BRAHMIN WOMAN TO LEAVE INDIA TO OBTAIN AN EDUCATION, reads the inscription on the tombstone. Joshee was aged nine when she was married to a twenty-nine-year-old postal clerk in Maharashtra, and twenty-one when she received a doctor’s degree in Pennsylvania.

• Her ashes were sent to the woman who had been her benefactor in the United States, and that is how Joshee’s remains are now buried in a plot overlooking the Hudson. All the craters on Venus are named after women and I read in an Indian newspaper that one of the craters now bears Joshee’s name.

• I wanted very badly to go back to what I had ignored in my thesis. I wanted to write about love. Not just the story of one love, its beginning or its end, but the story of love and how it is haunted by loss. I thought of the time I had first gone to pick apples. On the sound system on the plane, I listened to Jimmy Cliff singing “You Can Get It If You Really Want.” With my earphones on, I played the song over and over again.

• A reproduction of some of Satyajit Ray’s sketches when he was making his first film, Pather Panchali. This is the storyboard for the scene in which Apu and his sister Durga catch sight of a train for the first time. It is a scene celebrated in the history of cinema. As in all of Ray’s work, simple scenes, elegantly framed, producing a cumulative emotional effect that is shattering.

• Like everyone else, I held my right hand up. Once that was done, the judge said, Congratulations, you are now citizens of the United States. You have forsaken the country of your birth in exchange for the rights and privileges of this country. He repeated the word privilege, saying, You are not entitled to be in the United States. Instead, it is a privilege. There is no better country in the world.

• But I only felt like a man without a country and tears came to my eyes. I was crying perhaps only because the judge, in a poor, inaccurate choice of words, had used the word forsaken. The man next to me, a native of Guadalajara, thought these were tears of happiness and began to congratulate me.

• In the car, certificate in hand, I wished I had eaten lunch before coming. I hadn’t driven farther than two miles on I-84 when I saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser behind me. The cop was an elderly man with a thin mustache. When he asked for my license and registration, I picked up the U.S. flag and the certificate and showed them to him. —Officer, I’ve just become a citizen. Only ten minutes ago. I was rushing home to tell my wife. —Did you also get your license today? —No sir, I’ve been driving—no, I didn’t get it today. —Then I won’t be needing these. Your license and registration, please. The ticket he wrote was for $165. I thought he had behaved fairly and hadn’t questioned the lie about my having a wife—but I was also suspicious that I had been punished for having become a citizen.

• I was talking in Hindi to the Punjabi woman who was the owner, and Jennifer joked that after I had had my fill of white women I would return to India to live there and enter an arranged marriage. She imitated a head wobble and began to laugh loudly. She shut her eyes and her mouth formed a rictus. Her face had turned red. I had no idea where this sudden bitterness was coming from—her behavior was unusual but it probably made me think that this was the real Jennifer. It is possible that that was the moment when I began to move away.

• If the U.S. was going to be undemocratic elsewhere, peace was also unlikely at home. In one video of a teach-in from the late seventies, you can see Ehsaan explaining this contradiction by telling his audience: A man cannot be violent and sadistic to his mistress and be gentle to his wife.

• When a critic called the writer Richard Stern almost famous for being not famous I thought of my old professor.

• It’s also possible that, just a generation removed from rural life, I am dazzled by the trappings of urban civilization. In our mentor’s class, a line from Trotsky: Yet every time a peasant’s horse shies in terror before the blinding lights of an automobile on the Russian road at night, a conflict of two cultures is reflected in the episode. I am and I am not the peasant; I am never not the horse. I marvel at the fact that there is one phone number, the right numbers in the right combination given to the phone operator, which will make the phone ring in the room of the one person in the world who is waiting for me.

• But first a question: aren’t we condemned to repeat our stories and write the same book over and over again? Or, to put it differently, don’t we fall in love every time with the same person and make the same mistakes?

• I sometimes feel that all my life I’ve been faithful only to the fact of this experience—so that all my nostalgia is for my familiar struggles and my all-too-familiar failings. An account of what is familiar becomes the story of one’s life. It is life.

• Immigrant, Montana, doesn’t exist. Although I visited the town of Emigrant, Montana, in August 2008, immediately after Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, I wish to state that the map presented here is faulty.

• After Barack Obama was elected president I read about his courting Michelle. She was his boss, assigned to advise him during a summer job, but Obama began to ask her if she would go on a date.

• Before the end of the summer, she agreed to go out for a movie—Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing—and an ice-cream cone at Baskin-Robbins. The clipping in my notebook includes these lines: Vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard in 2004, Barack met Spike Lee at a reception. As Michelle has recalled, he told Lee, “I owe you a lot,” because, during the movie, Michelle had allowed him to touch her knee. Here is a partial list of those to whom I owe a lot:

• Ehsaan Ali is a fictional character, but parts of him are based on my interviews with family, friends, and former students of Eqbal Ahmad;

• This is a work of fiction as well as nonfiction, an in-between novel by an in-between writer.