My nationality also came into play when I discovered that two of our weekly meetings fell on French national holidays and I scheduled a make-up session of the Indian Lit class at my apartment combined with a potluck supper. One of the colleagues I lunched with was highly disapproving. “We are workers, and these are our holidays,” she told me. “You are introducing dangerous capitalist ideas.” But I persisted with the make-up idea, and the students seemed grateful to participate. They had never been invited into a professor’s home before. A Polish young woman brought pizza; a French young woman a casserole. We sat together for hours over some bottles of red wine, while Hussein from Morocco told us what it was like driving a cab around the city. I was especially fond of Leila, the Berber from Algeria who was also auditing the memoir class, and her friend Kossaila, a soft-spoken young man from a small Algerian village who was probably my most sophisticated student of English literature. These two went together to the Paris Salon du livre, which that year featured Indian authors, and came back to class full of their excitement at having heard Vikram Seth. When I left to return to the States, Kossaila, who was also an artist, presented me with an oil painting he had done of a brightly plumed parrot. “Flaubert’s Parrot, Madame,” he said as he handed me the canvas. He hoped to go to England. I wonder where he is now.
Kossaila’s painting now hangs in my house in East Hampton, New York, a reminder of this gentle talented person and of my four months teaching in Paris. Soon enough it came time to say goodbye to the bookcases and piano in the Montmartre apartment, turn in my perhaps overly generous grades at Paris VIII, make a final trip south to my family in the Ardèche, and then fly home to New York City and to Brooklyn College. I felt sad to be again on the other side of an ocean from my son but relieved, nonetheless, to be back with the friends and known routines of home. Paris, strangely more than India, had made me aware of cultural differences. I can’t say to what extent this was my own state of mind, to what extent the maddening arrogance of the French. But I know that experiencing myself often as the outsider, I had drawn closer to my immigrant students and understood, in ways I hadn’t done at home, their struggles to advance their lives in a foreign culture. My sympathies were unequivocally with them. I hoped it really could be their turn now.
ii
THERE WERE MOMENTS ON that first trip to India when, looking about me at all that was strange and wonderful, I worried it would fade from memory, that I wouldn’t properly retain what I had seen and understood. I’d never been much of a photographer, but I fretted that I should have been taking more pictures as an aid to retention. “Can’t you just let it pass through you?” asked my friend. Her words acted on me as a kind of release. Yes, I could do that, I thought—let the experience pass through me in a way that would keep me free and clear and open to whatever came next, which, in turn, would pass through as well. I have always thought of myself as a staunchly secular person. But that being said, there is a way in which I see India as encouraging an aspect of self I might venture to call spiritual. I was encouraged to relax caution and control, be less tied to the fixed and the familiar, more willing to follow the path of surprising transmutations and transfigurations, feel safer in a state of flux. The Indian gods are shape shifters. There are ten incarnations of Vishnu. All seem different yet are essentially one. If this is a core reality, then the wanderer will never lose her way. At least that seemed an appealing philosophy.
This leads to my saying that my course on Indian English Literature was shape-shifting as well, and eventually it shifted into something quite different from its original incarnation. Somewhere I read Arundhati Roy’s rather acerbic comment that she was the only writer of current Indian English fiction who actually lived in India (in Delhi). I thought about this and made a list. There was Michael Ondaatje in Toronto, Bapsi Sidhwa in Houston, Vikram Seth in London, and Salman Rushdie in New York. Manil Suri taught at George Mason in Virginia, Bharati Mukherjee at Berkeley. And so on. And in addition to the Indian writers who had started life in India before moving abroad, there were those born abroad in diasporic families: Jhumpa Lahiri in the US, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Hari Kunzru in England, among others. Some of these writers turned back to India in their work, as Rushdie did reclaiming his “imaginary homeland” in Midnight’s Children. Others wrote of the diasporic experience, the straddling
