Read Online Amriika by M. G. Vassanji - Free Book Online Page B

just there,” he indicated.
    She ran in, and when she came out she insisted on a tour of the house, at least the main floor.
    “So this is how the rich live,” she said later, archly eyeing him from John’s wingback chair, a can of Fresca in one hand.
    “Didn’t Sam come?” he asked as they drove out of Runymede.
    “No, the jerk. You know what? He says he has to go home to visit, and guess what he’ll bring back with him when he returns — a nice little Pakistani wife. Are you also like that — like to screw white women but end up marrying a nice little obedient Indian wife?”
    He ignored the question. And she went on and on about Sam. “The asshole, didn’t let on he was a Muslim — a fucking Muslim — and he came with me to meet Guru Maharaj-ji —”
    “Who?”
    “Guru Maharaj-ji —”
    “Oh … oh, the —”
    “Yes, the fourteen-year-old, but don’t be fooled by that, it’s only his physical age in
this
birth. We’re all thousands of years old, don’t you know — you’re an Indian. You should come to Guru Maharaj-ji Center — it’s on Boylston Street. Nothing will matter about this … this … material world any more …”
    She was not a bad sort, just angry, mostly at Sam, whose realname she told him was Shamsul. The sweater, she admitted, was a present from her folks.
    It was not an unpleasant drive. As they approached Boston that night, she asked him if he wanted to come home with her, she could take him to the Center the next morning. He said no, he’d rather be back in his room. She dropped him off at the front steps of the Tech, on Mass Ave, and drove away.

5

    S
pring brings forth protests on campus — loud reckless rebellion against that war in Vietnam, daredevil bone-risking defiance of authority and its policemen — as stereos blare out rock ’n’ roll’s homages to the sun; and for the new student, with a nagging conscience and in search of a cause, there is no more effective and poignant a call to the plight of the world’s wretched than the movie
The Battle of Algiers
.
    For many, their first viewing of the gripping tale (pitting coloured natives against a powerful European army) in a heady political climate is a first step towards radicalism, before they too come out shrieking slogans against colonialism and imperialism, chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong is gonna win!” in the streets against their own government’s policies.
    Algiers a decade ago: on one side the native quarter, the casbah, the jumble of dusty, narrow, close-packed streets and mud houses and barefoot Arabs; on the other side, the spick-and-span whites-only European quarter where even children come out wearing socks and shoes, women shop in supermarkets, and teenagers dance gaily in cafés. It does not take much more to remind you where
you
came from, your Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam was the casbah. In the movie, a colonel of the French paratroopers, fresh from the campaign in Indo-China — tall, handsome, commanding, wearing crisp army camouflage, shades, and a beret — gives the order, and a guerilla hideout in the casbah, including women and children, is blown up. As the colonel says to the newspaper reporters, today an insurgency in Algeria, tomorrow where? And you realize the answer is probably: Vietnam.
    And you, Ramji, are coming to realize that there
is
a different way to view the world than the one you were used to.
    Of course, it’s not just the movie that’s told you this, it’s the whole political scene around you, the flyers and protests, the special lectures, the debates on television, your peers, your roommate Shawn Hennessy. And it seems impossible now, it seems crass, to come from a country small like Vietnam, and also a colony of Europe once, and not feel a tug of sympathy for it. You wish you could turn away from the issue — but it’s all around you — and think of the generous people and the scholarship, the wonderful things and great opportunities in this land