Julia was wrong about love, but right about my needing to see more of America. I’ve been driving across the country for seven days now, to this cafe in Tehachapi, with its row of photos recording its earlier destruction by earthquake. The hills to the east, where I just came from, are covered by wind farms, whole landscapes inhabited by gatherings of tall white windmills that stop and start according to their own intelligence. They seem like quiet settlers from a more advanced world. Friendly aliens like me. Wind farms: an expression so strange that it fills me with the pleasure of possibility. I strive to think of the similarly unexpected. Factories of solitude. Earthquake gardens. Homes for tired thoughts. For some reason I think of monsoon winds and the unpriced scent of cloves on Zanzibar.
I have discovered that it is possible to travel across the United States and stay only at motels owned by Indian families. Not American Indians, but Indians like me, like my father. Like Mummy. Sometimes in small, emptied towns in the middle of America, they own the only motel, and are the only Asians. Often they have come from East Africa like me, usually propelled here from Uganda by my friend Idi. This was a gift from the sky.
On my first day from Vermont I stopped, exhausted, at a small-town Pennsylvania motel that looked inexpensive and approachable. My first motel. As I walked up to the office, my anxiety was all about what they would make of me, this dark-skinned foreign woman travelling alone to their town with no good excuse, and whether I would be safe. I opened the door and was inexplicably surrounded by the scent of curry. From the room behind the neglected office came the sound of an Indian family eating in full voice: the clattering of plates, the broken voice of an old lady laying down the law—Gujerati, I thought—children chattering, mainly in English, a mother distributing dishes here and there, the low, complaining tones of a man trying to establish family order. I listened for a minute, then rang the desk bell, feeling tearfully hopeful that a greeting in Swahili might be a common language.
I’ve been passed on from town to town across America, Indian motel to Indian motel, a spider’s web of Indian-ness spanning all of the USA. The theories all say that immigrants huddle together for security, but these families seem determined to spread themselves thin. I’ve talked to them, my journey westward becoming slower as it has progressed. I’ve asked how they found their motels, who helped them, how they raised the money from other Indians, what they will do to help their relatives find their motels, the businesses they would like to move on to when they can free themselves from living behind the shop in hopeless towns and contending with the vile, violent, oversexed, drug-crazed habits of their customers. I’ve asked the parents what they miss most, what they need, and the children what they plan to do, which rarely includes motels. We have talked together about their stays in England, and the relatives still there. Sometimes they know Zanzibar. Last night the grandfather at the motel in Tehachapi—a slow, poor mountain town—lit up with his recollections of Zanzibar City when the Arab Sultan still ran it under the protection of the British. He and his friends visited there from Kenya, he said, for the wild good times of those days, the bars and nightclubs and the beautiful, famously sinful, women.
I’ve been signing a new name to keep me safe: Stella Souza. Stella for Mrs F; Souza because the phone books here will lose me among the dozens of Souzas, thanks to Spain and Mexico. No more gorgeous, trisyllabic names. I’m talking business with my new acquaintances, having a few ideas. They like me. My mind is picking itself up to march a little. I’m not dead, only lonely and sad from loss. I recognise this as a sort of hope, an expression of capacity. It’s not the sort of hope that grabs at happiness the way I did in Bayswater. Nor is it the sort of hope that tries to fit me into a place already made for me, like Vermont. It’s a sort of simple faith that, if I am patient, and if I am busy, and if I am kind, the space within me will someday be filled, that the world has created a woman from everywhere, belonging nowhere, because it has some use for her.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Helen Marx is a brave and gracious publisher. Grateful thanks also go to Jeannette Watson at Books & Co., my editor Ruth Greenstein, and Lisa DeSpain at Helen Marx Books, all of whom have conspired with Helen Marx to make publication a delight. Jonathan Rabinowitz of Turtle Point went out of his way to help the process along.
A special thanks goes to Grace de Almeida in Tanzania, without whom the book would not exist. Andrea Barrett was the novel’s first reader, and a good friend to it and me. Liz Benedict, Mordicai Gerstein, Tony Giardina, Molly Giles, Betsy Hartmann, Joann Kobin, Marisa La- bozzetta, Peter Matlon, Karen Osborn and, importantly, Amy Rowland each contributed something good and nothing bad. Dominique Simon shared the ups and downs and should
