Chapter 7: Fergusson — 1979

Pune arrived like a sentence in a language I didn't speak but wanted to learn.

The train from Amritsar had taken thirty-six hours — a journey that crossed four states, three time zones of cultural change, and the particular geography of a country that was simultaneously one nation and several civilizations stacked on top of each other like geological strata. I had boarded in Punjab, where the landscape was flat and golden and the language was my own. I had passed through Rajasthan, where the landscape turned to sand and the accents shifted. I had crossed into Maharashtra, where the Western Ghats rose like a wall between the India I knew and the India I was about to meet, and the language changed entirely — Marathi, which I did not speak, written in a script I could not read, the words round and musical where Punjabi was sharp and percussive.

Pune Junction at seven in the morning. The platform was crowded — not with the particular chaos of a North Indian railway station, where crowds were a competitive sport and personal space was a rumour, but with a different energy: purposeful, quieter, the crowd of a city that moved with the particular efficiency of a place that valued education and considered itself, with the quiet confidence of old money, intellectually superior to everywhere else.

Balli was not with me. Balli had stayed in Amritsar — Khalsa College, commerce stream, his father's hardware store waiting for him like a destiny that had been laid out before he was born and that he accepted with the particular grace of a man who understood that his life's work would be in the store and his life's joy would be elsewhere. He had come to the station to see me off. Had pressed a packet of Amma's mathri into my hands — the mathri wrapped in newspaper, the grease already soaking through, the smell of ajwain and fried dough the smell of home being carried away from home.

"Write to me," Balli had said. "Not just to Esha. To me. I want to know if Pune is as boring as I imagine."

"Pune is not boring."

"Pune has no Golden Temple, no Pushpa's Dhaba, and no Esha Sharma. By my calculations, Pune is missing three of the four essential elements of civilization. The fourth being cricket, which Pune presumably has."

Fergusson College was — and I say this as a man who has spent forty years in Pune and has developed the particular fondness for the city that comes from choosing a place rather than being born in it — magnificent. Not in the way that the Golden Temple was magnificent — not with gold and light and the particular splendour of faith made physical. Fergusson's magnificence was quieter: stone buildings that had been standing since 1885, Gothic arches that looked like they'd been borrowed from an English university and adapted for Indian heat, a campus that was green and shaded and crossed by paths that connected lecture halls to libraries to the particular civilization of a college that had been producing thinkers for nearly a century.

My hostel room was on the second floor of New Men's Hostel — "new" being a relative term, as the building had been constructed in the 1940s and had acquired, in the intervening decades, the particular patina of institutional neglect: peeling paint, windows that stuck, a bathroom that served twelve rooms and operated on a first-come-first-served basis that rewarded early risers and punished everyone else with cold water and waiting.

My roommate was Prakash Kulkarni — a Marathi boy from Satara who was studying Political Science and who spoke English with the particular accent of a Maharashtrian who had learned the language from textbooks rather than from conversation: precise, grammatically perfect, and delivered with a rhythm that was Marathi wearing English clothes. Prakash was thin, bespectacled, serious in the way that Political Science students were serious — as if the weight of the nation's governance rested on their shoulders and they had accepted the burden with a sigh and a subscription to the Economic and Political Weekly.

"You're from Punjab," Prakash said, when I arrived with my trunk and my bedroll and the particular bewilderment of a person who had never lived away from home. It was a statement, not a question. My turban — which I still wore in 1979, which I would stop wearing two years later for reasons that had everything to do with what happened in 1984 and nothing to do with faith — had apparently communicated my geography.

"Amritsar."

"Amritsar." He nodded, as if this confirmed a hypothesis he had been developing. "The Golden Temple. Jallianwala Bagh. Good food. Violence." He paused. "I don't mean that last one as a criticism. Maharashtra has its own violence. But Punjab's is — more visible. In the newspapers."

"At the moment, it's mostly in the newspapers," I said. "Not on the streets. Not yet."

"Not yet." He adjusted his glasses. "You study English Literature?"

"Yes."

"Good. We need more people studying literature. Political Science without literature is just data. Literature without Political Science is just feelings. Together, they might produce something useful." He extended his hand. "Prakash. Call me Prakash. Not Kulkarni. Kulkarni is my father, and my father is in Satara, where he belongs."

Prakash would become — over the next three years — my second-best friend, my guide to Maharashtrian culture, my translator when Marathi defeated me, and the person who would, in 1984, drive me to the railway station and put me on a train back to Amritsar when the news arrived and the world broke.

But that was later. In 1979, everything was beginning.

The English Literature department at Fergusson was housed in a building that smelled of old books and chalk dust and the particular mustiness of rooms where ideas had been discussed for so long that the ideas had soaked into the walls. Professor Joshi — the head of department, a woman in her fifties who wore starched cotton saris and spoke English with the particular authority of a person who had read everything and remembered all of it — looked at my application on the first day and said: "Oberoi. Amritsar. Sikh. English Literature. Interesting combination."

"Is it, ma'am?"

"Most interesting people are interesting combinations. The straightforward ones are rarely worth teaching." She handed me a reading list that was two pages long and included names I knew (Shakespeare, Tagore, Premchand) and names I didn't (Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, Eunice de Souza). "Read everything on this list. Then read everything that isn't on this list. A literature student who reads only the syllabus is a clerk, not a scholar."

I read. God, I read. I read the way Madan drank — compulsively, excessively, with the particular hunger of a person who had discovered that the world contained more than he'd imagined and wanted to consume all of it before the supply ran out. I read in the library — the Ferguson library, with its high ceilings and wooden tables and the particular silence of a room where concentration was the default setting and noise was an act of violence. I read in the hostel, by the light of a desk lamp that I'd bought from the second-hand market in Tulsi Baug, a lamp whose bulb flickered with the irregular rhythm of a heart that wasn't sure it wanted to keep beating. I read on the campus lawns, where the banyan trees provided shade and the squirrels provided company and the particular peace of an afternoon in a college campus was the closest thing to paradise that an eighteen-year-old who loved books could imagine.

And I painted. This was not part of the curriculum — Fergusson had no art department, no painting classes, no institutional acknowledgement that visual art existed as a serious pursuit. But the campus was beautiful, and beauty demanded response, and my response was paint. I set up my easel on the campus lawns — a second-hand easel, bought from the same Tulsi Baug market that had provided the lamp, its legs uneven, its joints loose, the equipment of a student-painter who could not afford better and who had learned that limitations were not obstacles but creative constraints.

I painted the Gothic arches. The banyan trees. The particular light of a Pune afternoon — different from Amritsar's light, softer, more diffused, the light of a city that sat in a valley between hills and received its illumination filtered through geography. I painted badly, but I painted consistently, and consistency — Professor Joshi told me, when she found me painting on the lawn one afternoon and stopped to look — was the difference between a hobby and a practice.

"You paint," she said.

"I try."

"Trying is painting. Not-trying is decoration." She studied the canvas — a study of the college's main building, the Gothic facade rendered in watercolours that were slightly too watery. "Your colours are timid. You're afraid of them. Don't be. Colour is not an enemy. It's a collaborator."

"You know about painting, ma'am?"

"I know about fear. Fear in painting looks the same as fear in writing. The person holds back. Uses pale words. Avoids the vivid. You — " she tapped the canvas " — are using the watercolour equivalent of passive voice. Active voice, Oberoi. Active colour. The building is not grey. It is — what? Look at it. What colour is it really?"

I looked. The building was — she was right — not grey. It was stone-coloured, which was a dozen colours simultaneously: the brown of laterite, the white of lime wash fading, the green of moss in the crevices, the gold where the afternoon sun hit the carved stonework and turned it into something that was not architecture but light trapped in mineral.

"It's everything," I said.

"Then paint everything. Don't paint what you think you see. Paint what you actually see."

She walked away, her starched sari rustling with the particular crispness of a woman who had just delivered a lesson and expected it to be learned. I looked at the canvas. Squeezed out more paint. Mixed colours I wouldn't normally mix — the brown and the green and the gold and the white — and began again.

The letters from Amritsar came weekly. Amma's letters were in Punjabi, written in Gurmukhi script, the handwriting neat and small, the content a catalogue of domestic events (the sabziwala had raised his prices again, Shobha's husband had been promoted, Madan had failed his exams but was "planning to retake them," which Amma wrote with the particular optimism of a mother who knew her son would not retake them but who had not yet surrendered the hope).

Balli's letters were in English — a concession to my new life, written with the particular effort of a man whose English was functional rather than fluent. He reported on Khalsa College ("boring, as predicted"), the hardware store ("more boring"), and Amritsar ("exactly the same, which is either comforting or depressing depending on your perspective"). He asked about Pune. He asked about the painting. He did not ask about girls, which meant he was asking about girls.

Esha's letters were — I kept them. All of them. In a tin box that I still have, in my studio in Pune, forty years later, the letters faded and the paper soft with handling but the words still sharp, still vivid, still carrying the particular electricity of a young woman who wrote the way she lived: with intensity, with intelligence, with the furious energy of a person who was staying in Amritsar not because she wanted to but because the world had not yet given her permission to leave.

She wrote about Khalsa College. About her father's increasing involvement in politics — local politics, the Akali Dal, the particular tensions that were building in Punjab between Sikh nationalists and the central government, tensions that she described with the clarity of a person who could see the trajectory and the danger. She wrote about missing me, which she expressed not in sentiment but in specifics: "I miss arguing with you about Premchand. Nobody here argues about Premchand. They just accept him. Acceptance without argument is not reading — it is worship."

She wrote: "Come home for Diwali. I'll be at Pushpa's. 6 PM. Don't be late."

I was not late. I was never late for Esha.