My son has a new alarm clock. His mother's mother gave it to him for Christmas. It chirps! I borrowed it from him to make sure I was not late in the morning. Then, before going to bed, I stuffed my ears with cotton against the elephantine neighbour upstairs. As it turned out, I need not have bothered. I was awake at five, an hour before the clock chirped or the neighbour started banging his way around his apartment. I removed the cotton and lay there gazing at the flaking ceiling, wondering if I still wanted to go through with it.

The it, the focus of my meditative angst, was the event scheduled for that morning in the ceremonial courtroom in the Federal Building downtown: I was to be sworn in as a citizen of the United States. No, my entire life did not pass before my eyes. It wasn't quite that fatal an occasion. But I was anxious. And I was cold. There was a chill around me -- the radiators were still mute -- reminding me of the crushing winter that lay over Chicago. Who wanted that? Who wanted to say to this frigid whore of a city yes, yes I do, through sickness or in health, through joy or in pain? My feet were indeed cold.

I was nine years old when I first saw an American. I saw a train full of them. The school I went to was at the edge of the city and the farthest side of its playground bordered a railway track. One afternoon a whole bunch of us boys were playing there when we heard the rumble of a train. Some of us ran up the incline to put copper coins on the rails, to flatten them for a game. We then scurried back to safety and watched with uncomprehending eyes as flatcar after flatcar went hurtling by. Each was loaded with a tank or an armoured car, and each had a complement of soldiers wearing shorts and naked from the waist up. Their pale pink bodies shone in the sun, and their loud voices and laughter rose above the din of the wheels.

"Amreekan, amreekan," shouted a few of the more knowledgeable boys and ran closer to the tracks, waving their arms and shouting meaningless words. They knew what they were doing, and their expectations were not denied. Some of those incongruously big men shouted or waved back, and quite a few of them threw to us pieces of candy, little chocolate bars, packets of chewing gum. We ran around and pushed and pulled and broke into brief fights over those foil-wrapped delights thrown to us by the giants from the land of skyscrapers. For days we talked about them. Now we knew why they had to build those tall building in New York, and why so many cattle were daily slaughtered in Chicago. There had to be veins of gold in the mountains of California, for had we not partaken of their tasteful bounty?

Several years went by. I was fifteen or so when I saw another American in the flesh. A friend of mine lived next door to a mission. One hot summer night, while playing some game in the garden of his house, he discovered that by standing in a clump of banana trees he could look into the bedroom of the missionary lady. He had a hard time describing to me the wonders that he saw. I joined him in his vigil that evening and was soon convinced of the truth of his remarks. The Americans had to be a shameless people. Why else would a woman of that age go to bed half-naked?

But these memories didn't come to me that morning. They force themselves on me only now. Like the memory of the day when, as college students, we shouted: "Down with US Imperialism! Yankee, go home! Stop the witch-hunt! Long live the Rosenbergs!" Slogans raised under a big blue banner in front of the USIS building in Lucknow where, at other times, I would go to drink refrigerated water and read Time and Life and the old Saturday Evening Post with its covers by Norman Rockwell. Like the memories of the months in Poona when I actually met a few Americans, white and friendly and terribly sure of the things they were there to teach us.

As I lay in my bed that morning, I was loath to leave its warmth and comfort. I dreaded the thought of facing the piles of snow on the ground and the grim-faced people on the bus. I was bitterly conscious of the empty half of my double bed and resentful of my children for not wanting to come downtown with me. I was more than willing to let myself be haunted by remorse and doubts, by self-pity, by anger. The very negativeness of those feelings was consoling. Why the hell did I come here? Why was I still here? And with these questions came the memory of my first few hours in America, an America that still basked in its assumed aura of security and innocence: Ike was in the White House, and Rock & Roll was seen as the worst threat yet to public morality.

It was a damp morning, may have been foggy too, when my plane reached San Francisco. There was no one to meet me at the airport; the professor who had invited me to work with him was in the hospital, recovering from something he had picked up in India. But I had my instructions. From the airport I was to take a bus into the city, then two other buses to get to Berkeley, then a fourth one to get to the International House, where more instructions and a room awaited me. I was bone-tired, not only from the long journey from Calcutta but also from the three months of uncertainly, humiliation and just plain illness that had preceded my departure. The perversity of Indian bureaucracy and an appendectomy that became unnecessarily complicated had left me totally drained, physically as well as in spirit. I arrived on the sixteenth of September; I was to start teaching on the seventeenth and not until the thirteenth could I be sure that I was actually leaving.

I don't remember how I got through the customs or how I found the bus. I have no memory of the airport, or of the ride to the downtown terminal. All I can recall now is the utter horror I felt when I discovered inside the terminal that my airbag was missing. In those days, the terminal was just a large room on a side street in front of which buses gorged and disgorged shoals of baggage and passengers. Stumbling around in the crowd, I had managed to grab my unwieldy suitcase but couldn't find my blue PanAm bag. It contained my degrees, my passport, the instructions from my professor, an assortment of papers from the University of California, and all my American money, a grand sum of twenty-five dollars! I was too horrified to be numb. I rushed around the hall, looking into every corner. I ran out to the sidewalk, ran back in, ran out again, dragging my suitcase with me. If I collided with people, I didn't notice it. If they spoke to me, I didn't hear them. I didn't know what to do. I had no experience with telephones, and even if I had known how to use one I did not know anyone to call to for help. It was easier for me to sit down on a bench in the hall and cry, my senses closed to the sights and sounds around me. It was therefore some time before I noticed him, even though he stood right in front of me.

He was an elderly black man -- the porter at the terminal -- who helped people with their bags and taxis. He was talking to me. I had never heard anyone talk like that before. I couldn't be sure if it was actually English. But his voice was reassuring, and gradually the strange sounds he was making took on the shape and meaning of familiar words. He wanted to know why I was crying. He wanted to know if he could be of any help. Between sobs I explained to him my loss, my lack of friends and experience, my not knowing what to do. (Now I wonder how my English sounded to him.) He registered no surprise. My dilemma seemed to him like an everyday problem. He told me that he had been on duty all morning, that my airbag must have gotten mixed with the baggage of some other passenger, that in fact he was quite sure who that passenger was.

According to him, the bus that had brought me had also brought a woman who had a vast assortment of bags and parcels with her. He was sure she had unknowingly gone off with my bag too. He assured me that that was not a big problem since he knew all the cabs that had come to the terminal that morning, and that he was going to send out a radio call for a particular cab to come back. I heard him, but, for the life of me, I couldn't understand what he was talking about. Some crazy woman with dozens of suitcases went off with my airbag; that was conceivable, even certain. But all that talk of cabs and radio calls made no sense. I had nothing to say to him in response; I continued to stare at him with blank eyes. He brought me something to drink, and then went away to do his magic in which I had no reason to believe.

After a while he came back and said that the cab that had taken the woman was a private one and not equipped with a radio. He had, therefore, asked all Yellow Cab drivers to be on the lookout for the cab and, when located, to send it back to the terminal. What could I say? If I nodded my head it was more in disbelief.

I sat there on that bench for close to an hour, maybe more, and much of my life must have passed before my moist eyes. Then the old black man came back, and this time there was another man, a white man, with him. The porter explained to me that this was the cab driver who had taken that crazy woman to a hotel not far away, and who was now going to take me to her to recover my bag. Did I believe him? No. I am quite certain I did not believe a word he said, but I did get up and go out with the cab driver, carrying my suitcase myself and insisting on holding on to it even in the cab. Away we went, and soon were there. He parked the cab and made me put my suitcase in the trunk; then we marched through the lobby of the hotel to the clerk at the desk, to an elevator that kept going up and up, and then down a corridor of carpet and muffled lights to a door on which he knocked briskly. The door opened and a woman let us in. The driver began to explain to her the quest that had brought us to her, but I had already espied my precious bag in the midst of all the big and small cases scattered over the floor. Without even an "Excuse me," I rushed forward and grabbed it, and zipped it open to show the contents to the driver and the woman. I didn't know English well enough to properly express my wrath, but my looks could have killed her. She was flustered. She apologised many times. I don't think I said a word until the driver and I were back in the cab; I then asked him to please take me to the International House in Berkeley. He told me it was quite a distance away, that we would have to go across the bay, and that he would have to pay the toll twice. I showed him my twenty-five dollars and asked him if they would suffice. He nodded yes and swung the cab into the traffic. Gradually, as moments went by, I felt my senses creep back into my body. I began to hear the noises, see the sights, feel the air. And then suddenly the whole world around me opened up.

There we were, on the upper level of that amazing bridge, the sun pouring down through the web of cables above me, vast stretches of blue water spread underneath us, and powerful man-made machine speeding me ever so smoothly to a destination that now seemed so certain. I am sure the cab had a roof, but I can also swear that I felt as if there were no barriers of any kind around me. An openness prevailed, the like of which I had not felt before and have not felt since. Gone were all my fears. I even smiled whenever I understood any remark of the driver, who kept talking all the way. The new world held no terror for me any more. I had witnessed what seemed like a miracle, wrought by total strangers who had come to my help when I had lost all hope. I gained that day a kind of confidence and trust that has come to my rescue many a time in these twenty-one years. It's not that I haven't felt despair since that day, or that I haven't hit the bottom ever. That has happened many times. I have been lonely and angry and terrified. I have been discriminated against and exploited. But after that day I have never been able to put the blame on some anonymous America. If ever I did, I quickly corrected myself.

The cab driver deposited me on the wide steps of the International House. I put my money in his hands. He took twenty dollars, leaving me five. I went in and registered at the desk. When they learnt that I had come in a cab, they were horrified. By cab, from San Francisco! What did the driver charge? Twenty! They shook their heads and felt sorry for me. How terrible, I had been cheated on my very first day! I didn't tell them my story. I said that I had given the driver a big tip and went upstairs to my room. After unpacking, I went into the common bathroom on my floor. Two men, totally naked, stood drying themselves and talking. I wasn't surprised.

And I did get up and go downtown that recent winter morning. 

N O T E S

/*/ Originally published in The Toronto South Asian Review 1,1 (1982).