SPAN: January/February 2002

OPENING THE GATES OF HOPE

SPAN

The Gates of Hope

By Lea Terhune

Stopping the Traffic An Interview with Pamela Shifman

Publisher Callahan

New Gems in America's Architectural Mosaic By Oma,. Khalidi

J ames

Editor-in-Chief Angela Aggeler Editor Lea TerhW1e Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager FlakeshAgravval

Islam in America: The Beginning in Sharon By Diana L. Eck Giving Life to New Ideas

By Radhika Jha

City of Brotherly Love

By Nachammai Raman

Special Literary Section Reading in the Fractured Landscape An Entire Semester of Knowledge

in One Day

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Way We Read Now

By William Germano

Indian Writers In English

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

By Valerie Miner

Writing A Trip

By ManjuKapur

By Manju Kapur

A Dream of Fair Women

By Gina Berriault

Front cover: Teenage girls veil themselves as they leave the courtyard of their school.

It takes time to become accustomed to new freedoms. Washington Post photo by Lucian Perkins. See stOly on page 3.

Note: SPA does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, ew Delhi 11000 I (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor.

Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

The Elusive Art of 'Mindfulness'

By Charles Johnson

Consular Focus

By Kamana M Romero

Dead Waters Resurrected

By Dipesh Satapathy

A LETTER

W

FROM

e enter the new year more solemnly than usual after the holiday season.

Many people, not only Americans, are still coming to terms with the events of the past few months, beginning with the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the subsequent military action in Afghanistan. More recently, Indians were shocked by a terrorist incursion into their own Parliament which took 14 lives, including the five terrorists. Tension is high around the world. The United States is committed to mitigating that tension where possible, and taking whatever measures that are appropriate to assist reconstruction of Afghanistan. Our cover story, "The Gates of Hope," deals with one vital aspect of Afghanistan's transition to normality, the reinstatement and empowerment of women. Afghans, especially women, have faced two decades of vicissitudes, culminating in five years of unspeakable repression. Now they may be themselves again, and the United States is doing what it can to help. America has hosted Afghans for decades as visitors and citizens. We are happy that the head of the interim government, Hamid Karzai, and several of his key people have old relationships with the United States and have been U.S. Government grantees.

The ethnic diversity within America has been under greater scrutiny lately, and SPAN takes this opportunity to celebrate it. Three articles relate to this subject. "New Gems in America's Architectural Mosaic," by Omar Khalidi, discusses the many new temples, gurdwaras and mosques that have sprung up all over the United States in recent years. The process through which a conservative Massachusetts community came to embrace its Muslim minority and their new Islamic center is described in "The Beginning in Sharon," an excerpt from Diana Eck's new book about religious diversity in Amelica. And in "City of Brotherly Love," Nachammai Raman traces the history of Philadelphia, one of America's earliest cities, and one explicitly founded upon principles of religious tolerance. It preserves them to this day.

Few gifts are more valuable than the ability to reach out constructively to the poor and underprivi-

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PUBLISHER

leged. "Giving Life to New Ideas," by Radhika Jha, profiles Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a catalyst for matelializing useful ideas in developing countlies. The inspiration of American William Drayton, Ashoka seeks energetiC innovators for development, and helps them translate their visions into reality and-most importantimplementation.

Still in the realm of innovation is "Dead Waters Resurrected," by Dipesh Satapathy. Clean-Flo is a U.S.-based company that performs miracles by bringing dead lakes and rivers back to life. Robert Laing, its founder, is the man whose ideas have rescued water bodies in many countries, including India, from certain extinction. His work can only grow in importance as water becomes scarcer.

The centerpiece of the issue is a treat that was a long time in the making: ten short works by Indian and American writers. One of the highlights of the collection is an excerpt from acclaimed novelist Manju Kapur's forthcoming novel. This specialljterary issue was preempted by our November/December memolial, "Freedom Attacked."

We have had many letters and even phone calls in response to that memorial issue, expressing sympathy and solidarity. Indeed, such letters have come in steadily since September 11. One came from Harkirtan Kaur, a young class Xl student at Sacred Heart Convent School in Ludhiana, who wrote thoughtfully and from her heart about the war against terrorism: "I express my full faith in justness of the mission 'Enduring Freedom.' No expostulations, no speeches and no 'religious' explanations can justify these attacks or turn these knaves to heroes. We, as a world, must muster enough courage to take every possible step to see these terrorists vanquished."

She concludes with a prayer that humanity may live in peace and harmony, "walking hand in hand." Thank you, Harkirtan, and thank all of you who offered your sympathy, solidarity-and your prayers.

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of Hope The Taliban choke hold may be broken, but the people of Afghanistan still teeter on the edge of survival. Tormented by a succession of repressive regimes, Afghan women could be the key to restoring normalcy in their country. Can a complex mix of democratic aspirations, conservative Islamic beliefs and ancient tribal law constructively come together? And what will be women's role?

Theface of suffering: an Afghan woman at old Jalozai "efugee camp in Pakistan.

irst Lady Laura Bush did something surprising last November. Taking the President's usual weekly radio spot, she underscored the plight of Afghan women in a broadcast from her Crawford, Texas, home. It was the first time in recent memory a U.S. President's wife has gone on record with her concern about an international human rights issue in this way. "Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture," she said, "It is the acceptance of our common humanity-a commitment shared by people of good will on every continent." She cataloged the harsh strictures, now so well known, that the Taliban imposed upon women, and although the main point of her five minutes on air was to support U.S. military actions in Afghanistan, it was clear that the "rights and dignity of women" are issues uppermost in her mind. It was a significant statement.

Concern in the U.S. about the plight of Afghan women is not new. For several years Mavis Leno, wife of nighttime talk-show

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host Jay Leno, has energetically campaigned for relief of their misery. She doesn't mince words when speaking about Afghan women under the Taliban: "These people have nothing to do with the Taliban. They are exactly, literally, in the same position as those people on the hijacked airliners. These SOBs have hijacked their country and taken them on a nightmare ride," she recently told USA Today. A few groups, notably Feminist Majority, Human Rights Watch, and several dynamic Afghan women's organizations, joined this chorus, but prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, they were voices crying in the vast wilderness of American apathy.

Since then millions of Americans have deepened their knowledge considerably about conditions in the world beyond U.S. borders.

Names of distant Central and South Asian regions and obscure towns are now household words. Americans have seen Saira Shah's clandestinely-shot documentary Beneath the Veil depicting the horrors of life under the Taliban, a film compiled with the

Above: Afghan women line up for bags of wheat at a World Food Program distribution center in Kabul.

Right: Masses of shabby, makeshift tents at the Jalozai refugee camp.

Thousands of people are camped there with minimal facilities for sanitation.

help of a courageous Afghan women's group, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). For the first time in decades, Americans are getting a good dose of international news on television networks and cable channels.

Much of that news concerns women.

Afghan women and girls are romantically photogenic, in and out of their confining burqas, and the tales of gender apartheid, beatings, torture, rape and murder are too riveting to ignore. But what next, after the six o'clock news and award-winning documentaries? E-mail petitions ("sign and send to fifty of your friends"), like the one that snarled Brandeis University's server and has since figured on the Urban Legends Website as "well meaning but misguided," are idealistic but ineffective. Such efforts illustrate a point that some Afghan women

activists are making. First worlders must get acquainted with reality outside the bubble of affluence, a reality where imposing an American-style democratic system imbued with Western concepts of a women's place in society upon profoundly tribal, Muslim Afghanistan is neither welcome nor advisable. As Sunita Mehta, co-founder of Women for Afghan Women, asked at the group's recent conference in New York, "How do American women's groups support Afghan women without being a mouthpiece for them? One of the many answers to that question is by recognizing, accepting and respecting that the majority of Afghan women live their life and do their work within an Islamic context."

Kashmiri political leader Mehbooba Mufti elaborated on this in Delhi recently: "The way Islam regards women is differ-

ent from the way it is being projected in the world." She continues, "I think Islam is the first religion that gave rights to women," citing the Prophet Mohammed's ban on female infanticide, the fact that propeliy rights are given to women, and the right to choose a husband. "You can see the emancipation. She has a right to choose a patiner. That's a very big thing."

Unlike the Taliban's twisted version, "The real Islam has given women a position of strength, power and Islam has asked men to treat women with softness. Not that just because she doesn't wear a burqa he starts thrashing her." Wearing hijab, Mufti says, is a voluntary thing. She criticizes Islamic revolutions that habitually start out by abusing women, and blames the international community for forgetting Afghanistan after the Soviet war. "There were thousands and thousands of orphans to be taken care of, thousands of women who were widowed. All these orphans were deprived of the love of their parents, their homes, their security. So when they entered the madrassas, all kinds of hatred was imbibed into their system. They became, you could say, the victims and at the same time the perpetrators of violence."

To Mufti the best thing international agencies can do now is help introduce broad, balanced, modern education, to the madrassas, to supplement Koranic education. The madrassas have after all been providing shelter to orphans. "We do not want the madrassas to go the wrong way, as has happened."

This issue of fundamentalism also concerns Brinda Karat, general secretary of the All India Democratic Women's Association. She notes that the oppression of women in Afghanistan differs from abuses in other palis of South Asia, "because that was institutionalized and sanctioned violence" and a "completely distorted view and interpretation of religion and 1 don't think we have experienced that kind of thing in this region, ever." But she adds, "Having said that, there are different fundamentalisms which have been operating in the Indian subcontinent in particular."

She mentions latwas and attempts to enforce, with violence, traditional dress codes for schoolgirls. "This whole thing

of identity politics which is being played out in the subcontinent, misusing religious belief, is something which is extremely detrimental to women. It is an uphill battle, because what they do is misuse genuine rei igious belief to strengthen narrow identities." Karat concludes, "Fundamentalist forces are really anathema and inimical to women's struggles for equality and to advance their status." Indian women's groups have shown solidarity with Afghan women, she says, and would like to help them rebuild.

Equality Now, a New York-based international human rights advocacy group that works for the rights of women and girls worldwide, has done much to publicize the abuses of the Taliban. It sponsored a recent Afghan women's "summit" in Brussels. Pamela Shifman, associate director of Equality Now, was in india in December and observed, "We need to keep pushing so that women are involved in every stage of reconstruction, development and political life in Afghanistan.

There can never be a situation where women are completely left out of the

political process, that's one thing. The second thing is, in terms of reconstruction, we should make women's equality a prerequisite for aid." She emphasizes, "Groups who do not support and promote women's equality should not be getting aid to develop Afghanistan. Women need to be at the center of any development programs or reconstruction programs in Afghanistan. And local women's groups in Afghanistan should be recipients of aid money to reconstruct their country."

Many Afghan women activists agree with this assessment, and take a positive view, like Sara Amiryar, an Afghan American activist and administrator at Georgetown University: "Afghan women should not be underestimated," she says. "Despite the fact that Afghan women were the primary victims oftwo decades of conflict and atrocities, they were the ones who kept Afghan culture alive." She says Afghan women must be included "in the political process, in security, in humanitarian aid, and in the future reconstruction of Afghanistan, and at all levels." This argument has weight simply because

Afghan women outnumber men by almost two to one, and many of the educated women who survived Taliban oppression are essential service providers, chiefly in health care and education. That they will be the ones who will nurture and repair the rent social fabric is undeniable, if they are given the latitude to do so.

Women such as Sabar Saba, a RAWA activist and teacher, are cautiously skeptical, saying that first things must be taken care of first. She points out that the Taliban were not the only ones to torment the Afghan population; some warlords of the Northern Alliance were equally bad: "When they are armed, when they still move with guns, then you cannot hope for peace and security. We would not even talk about women's rights or about democracy or freedom in Afghanistan if simple peace and security is not possible." She added, "Now it's (Continued on page 8) Kamela Yaftaly, 44, and her assistant teach several classes in one large room in the Or/aan private school in Kabul. She held secret classes after the Taliban told her she couldn't teach.

~ Pamela Shifman is associate director of New York-based Equality Now, an international ~ human rights advocacy organization that works for the rights of women and girls worldwide. Equality Now sponsored the Afghan women:S "summit" that was held in ;0:. ~ Brussels in early December. It has more than 25,000 members in over 100 countries~ including many in India-who advocate on behalf of women:S and girl:S ~ rights. Shifman stopped off in several Indian cities during her rounds as a Public Affairs speaker sponsored by the Us. Embassy. Her mission was to discuss trafficking in women and children, one of the chief issues raised by Equality Now. Shifman is its antitrafficking campaign director. She spoke to SPAN while she was in New Delhi.

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SPAN: To begin with Afghanistan, what are your concerns about Afghan women now?

PAMELA SHIFMAN: Women's groups have been raising this issue about women in Afghanistan for a long time, and it took September 11 for the rest of the world to pay attention to the human rights violations that were happening against women and children in Afghanistan. If anything, September 11 shows us that women in Afghanistan knew the Taliban were terrorists for a long time. They'd been terrorized by them. So I think we need to take the cue and listen and watch when women are being oppressed that much. Governments that oppress women that much are capable of oppressing many, many people. It's not only women they will oppress, and we need to pay attention.

And post- Taliban? Besides giving women a place in reconstruction, what else must be monitored?

In general, trafficking increases in times of war and confl ict.

We've seen this happen a lot in Kosovo. We have also seen that UN peacekeeping forces can contribute to trafficking by creating a demand for prostitution, so as we think about peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan we need to be very careful that women and children will not be victimized by the peacekeeping forces that are meant to protect them. We've seen it in Cambodia-a big problem. When the peacekeeping forces came to Cambodia, brothels sprang up everywhere. So we need to be cautious about that.

Whatfactors make women so vulnerable?

I've met with a lot of women's groups since I've been here, and what Indian women are saying is very similar to what women around the world are saying, the biggest issues facing women are violence and povelty. I think that is overwhelmingly the root of so many problems that Indian women are facing-the whole range of violence, from rape, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, trafficking in women, sex tourism, to grinding poverty and the discrimination they face as girls.

Advertisements have lately appeared in Asian-audience publications abroad placed by American companies pushing various gender-selection procedures. What is your response to this?

I think it's hideous. I think it's an American company making money off of sex discrimination, explicitly, because we all know why it's happening. We all know there is a bias against girl children and this will help perpetuate that bias.

You have helped develop, with members of the Us. Congress, the International Crime Protocol on Trafficking of Women. Will it work?

Yes, but so far only three countries have ratified it. I think that it provides a very good blueprint for countries to address the issue of trafficking in women and children, but they need to ratify it and they need to implement it. I am hopeful that both the United States and India will ratify the protocol, because that would be helpful to both countries.

Trafficking is both a demand and a supply-driven problem, and if you don't address both of those areas, it won't stop trafficking. If you don't address the grinding poverty and discrimination that makes women and children vulnerable to the lure of traffickers and on the flip side, if you don't address the demand for trafficked women and children, and that includes the demand on the side of the traffickers who exploit women, as well as the brothel keepers and the madams and the sweatshop companies and the commercial sex users, the customers ofprostitution ...unless you address all of them and develop programs and laws to stop the demand side, you won't be able to stop trafficking. Both those things need to happen simultaneously.

What is the trafficking situation in the United States?

It is estimated that 50,000 women and children are trafficked each year into the United States, mostly from Southeast Asia, Mexico, Latin America and the former Soviet Union.

What is the United States doing to stop it?

It does a number of things. One is that it criminalizes traffick-

women and children are trafficked we should be having more than one prosecution per year.

ing. It sets a punishment up to 20 years or even life, if there are extenuating circumstances, for trafficking. it also provides a special visa for trafficked people to stay in the country so they can testify against their traffickers. It allows them to get work permits and things like that. It establishes an interagency task force on trafficking. It provides funding for foreign assistance to governments throughout the world to address trafficking of women and it requires an annual reporting mechanism on whether countries are meeting minimum standards to eliminate trafficking in women. Countries who are not meeting minimum standards by 2003 will not be able to receive non-humanitarian aid.

Anti-trafficking has bipartisan support in the United States, and very strong support. The legislation that was enacted, the Trafficking Victim Protection Act of2000, was totally bipartisan and only one U.S. representative voted against it. I think there is a lot of energy and momentum in the United States to oppose trafficking of women, so I think there is a good possibility that we will ratify this protocol.

So far there has been only one prosecution under the new law.

So we need to make sure the law is implemented. Passage is only the first step. Implementation is the; most important part. So we need to make sure that women who are trafficked are given these visas to be allowed to stay in the country and we need to make sure that traffickers are actually prosecuted for their crimes. And make it a priority crime.

What does Equality Now do?

We've been monitoring legislation to make sure it's implemented, testified before Congress. We are concerned that the regulations haven't been issued and that there have not been more prosecutions.

Because we know that if 50,000

Another area Equality Now has grappled with is sex tourism.

What results have you had?

Equality Now has been working against sex tourism for a long time and what we have been trying to do is focus on the demand side of the problem. We've been targeting a big American sex tour company called Big Apple Oriental Tours that runs sex tours to the Philippines and Thailand. And we have been trying to get them shut down, as well as other sex tour companies operating from the United States because we believe it's our problem. You know women in the United States, especially, have to address the fact that it's men from the United States who are going on these sex tours as well as men from Europe and Japan. Thailand and the Philippines have been traditional destinations, but in Goa I met with many groups who talked about the growing problem of sex tourism there. I think sex tourism operates wherever it's comfortable for sex tourists to go. So until there is a real crackdown on sex tourists, then they will gravitate toward countries where it's easy to operate. There's a very strong women's movement in India working against all of these problems.

When you compare notes with the Indian women s groups, what do they have to say about trafficking?

There is a problem of poor and innocent victims of trafficking being arrested and prosecuted and not the criminals. In other words, women are arrested under the trafficking law for soliciting for prostitution instead of the traffickers and pimps and brothel keepers being arrested for exploiting women and children. The Indian Govermnent estimates that four times as many women and children are arrested under the Immoral Trade Prevention Act (ITPA) as men, which is a huge problem. Another problem is law enforcement. The biggest problem is the root cause, the fact that there is so much discrimination against women, that women are the poorest of the poor, and women are the most vulnerable to traffickers.

The HIV epidemic has increased the trafficking of younger and younger girls because of myths that you won't catch AIDS from a young girl, or having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. That increases the demand for children.

What are the most effective ways to address these serious social problems?

There are two things: enforcing laws against traffickers and providing women and children real options so that they aren't vulnerable to trafficking. And the third piece of it is addressing the demand side of the problem, addressing the demand for cheap sex, the demand for cheap labor, because those customers are the people who perpetuate this industry.

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The Gates of Hope continuedji-om

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time for the United Nations to play its vety important and vital role, and not give these groups a chance to rule Afghanistan again with guns. With guns we don't have any hope." In the spectrum of Afghan aspirations, RAWA represents emphatic egalitarianism. They want a "free, democratic, secular Afghanistan," where women have equal rights to vote, work and be educated.

RAWA has been actively engaged in delivering health care and education to Afghan women throughout the years of the Taliban scourge, its workers risking their lives in secrecy. Lack of funds, which to date have come from private individuals and organizations rather than governments, forced RAWA to close vital clinics, despite their development of income-generating cottage industries. Now that there is to be a new government in Afghanistan-indeed, if the ruling tribal council, the Loya Jirga, is to reserve 100 out of 700 seats for womengroups like RAWA want a place at the political table, and a chance to shape policy.

Saba, who grew up in the old Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet conflict, expressed doubts about some Afghan women in the government lineup who spent the past 25 years living outside Afghanistan. Apart from the fact that they are women, she observed sardonically, they are not necessarily representatives of grassroots Afghans.

While joining in popular condemnation of the Taliban, she says, "They never had a firm and clear position against any of these fundamentalist groups. They have never tried to expose their crimes, never tried to condemn their atrocities." She worries about old patterns resurfacing: "Our people cannot forget these things. Maybe the West can, when they see Dr. Abdullah with a tie, talking about women's rights and democracy, they can think everything is perfect in Afghanistan, but we cannot." She adds, "We still need moral and financial support in our very hard struggle. Our struggle is still ahead of us."

Support is coming in now from international government and nongovernment aid agencies. The tricky part is to sustain it until Afghan women are truly on their feet in a secure environment. When word emerged about Taliban abuses, the U.S. condemned them, and as early as 1997 $26.5 million were contributed by the U.S. Government through United Nations programs, International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Program to run a variety of programs to benefit Afghan women and girls.

An additional $1.7 million were fwmeled through CARE and the International Rescue Committee for health and education programs. Food for drought relief has been sent to Afghanistan since June of 2001.

USAlD is providing winter gear, cooking

supplies, medical kits and radios. The total amount of aid since the warfare in Afghanistan began has increased to nearly $400 million annually. Some ofthis is emmarked for women.

Not long after Laura Bush's radio address, America's Fund for Afghan Children was launched by President Bush "to encourage children and their families to contribute to relief efforts." He asked children to donate a dollar to the fund. It is a program modeled on the Roosevelt administration's March of Dimes campaign, which raised funds for the eradication of polio in the 1940s and '50s. The March of Dimes funded the successful research for polio vaccines and has since focused on preventing birth defects and funds some international programs. Such a funds drive, if sustained and administered well, could provide wherewithal for the women and children of Afghanistan to restore their human dignity.

On December 12, President Bush signed into law the Afghan Women and Children's Act of 2001, promising, "We will work with international institutions on the longterm development of Afghanistan. We will provide immediate humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan."

The United States is committing up to $2.5 million in new funds for women's grass roots organ izations for vocational training of Afghan women in the refugee camps. The training focuses on health care and supports women's participation in rural rehabilitation: to have a say, for example, where the well should go, since they carry the water.

The resilience of Afghan women, sriII picking through the rubble of their homes and their lives, was evident at once. One of the first voices of freedom Afghans heard upon the liberation of Kabul was that of a young woman reading news on Radio Afghanistan. Women doctors and nurses quickly went back to work at the hospitals beside their male colleagues. Days after the new interim government led by Hamid Karzai was sworn in, Seerat (Attitude) hit the stands. The first women's magazine to appear in 10 years, its main headline celebrated the reopening of a school for girls: "The Gates of Hope Are Opening."

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New Gems •

America's Archi tectural Mosaic lthough the Indian presence in North America dates back at least two centuries, the large-scale migration did not begin until the landmark immigration reforms of 1965. Today there are more than a million Indian Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Muslims. The majority ofIndian immigrants are Hindus and Sikhs, not surprising due to the overwhelming Hindu majority in India and the long-standing Sikh tradition of immigration to foreign lands.

Since most Indians were and remain economic migrants, their first and foremost concern remains obtaining professional education and employment, rather than attending to religious requirements of their respective faiths. However, as numbers grew, they began to pay attention to their religious needs. Soon, abandoned churches, warehouses, Masonic lodges, even unused theaters were purchased and converted into Hindu temples, gurdwaras, and mosques after appropriate changes to fit the liturgical functions. A further wave of affluent immigrants ushered in an era of purpose-built temples, gurdwaras, and mosques, adding new stones in the ever-rich American architectural mosaic. Now there is no major North American urban area without these religious buildings or plans to erect one. Exact numbers of temples, gurdwaras and mosques are impossible to compute given the fluid situation. However, estimates of temples are in the hundreds; there are scores of gurdwaras and some 2,000 mosques throughout the United States.

It is commonly recognized that architecture is site-bound. It must respond to the climate, the local building material, changes in building technology and the like. Ideally, it should also be sensitive to the existing environment. Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam have several centuries of religious architectural tradition. Especially in the case of Hinduism and Islam, religious architecture in their native lands took varying forms depending upon regional and historical architectural style. But all three religious traditions are new to the soil of America as far as architecture is concerned. How then have the temples, gurdwaras, and mosques responded to the North American environment while adhering to religious requirements?

All three have elected in varying degrees to import, adapt or innovate in their institutional roles as well as architecturally, as we shall see in each case.

Temples In the United States, only a few richly-endowed temples can afford most of the architectural features of a traditional temple as found in India. The most famous American Hindu temple is the Ganesh Temple, Flushing, New York. Built in 1977, it is one of the oldest in New York. Made of gray stone, it is one of the most imposing. It is designed closely on the pattern of traditional South Indian temples. The main gopuram leads into the hall where the sanctum housing the presiding deity Mahavallabha Ganapati is located. Four smaller gopurams house Shiva-Parvati, Goddess Durga, Goddess Maha Lakshmi, and the Navagrahas (nine planets). The walls are adorned with images of Shiva's cosmic dance; Vishnu reclining on a coiled Adisesha (the seven-headed God of serpents), and scenes from the Bhagwad Gita.

There are then a series of Sri Venkateshwara temples, for example, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dedicated in 1976; in Malibu, California, on the west side of Los Angeles, dedicated in 1984; and in Bridgewater, New Jersey, dedicated in 1998.

The one in Pittsburgh is probably the most famous in the coun-

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try. It is popularly known as a small version of the original in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh. Completed in 1976, its three white multistoried towers house the deities. Its structure is meant to represent the human body. While the top reflects the head, the two sides of the temple represent the hands. Like the custom at its prototype, devotees can offer their hair during puja at this temple. The Bridgewater temple is similar to its counterpart in Pittsburgh, except that it is of more recent origin. It has a huge rajagopuram with a commanding presence. Besides Sri Venkateshwara, there are shrines dedicated to Ganesha, ShivaParvati, Lakshmi-Narayana, the Rama parivar, Durga, Sridevi, Bhudevi, Saraswati, and Hanuman. These idols, made in Tirupati and Rajasthan, have been carved in black granite in the Dravidian style as well as in marble, in the North Indian style. The most renowned architect who designed the Sri Venkateshwara temples is Padma Shri Muthiah Stapathy from Chennai. Ravi Verma designed the Sri Laxminarayan Temple in Riverside, California, and the Sri Venkateshwara Temple in Malibu. Other famous temples are the Meenakshi Temple near Houston, Texas, dedicated in 1982; Sri Lakshmi Temple in Ashland, Massachusetts, in the greater Boston area; and the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center in Wappingers Falls, New York, built 1995. Barun Basu of New London, Connecticut, designed the Wappingers Falls temple. Basu, a progressive architect, believes that once the essential religious requirements are met, an architect should have the freedom to design according to the demands of the site. But often the community leaders desire a traditional style disregarding the particulars of the site, the available building materials, and advances in building technology, social mores, and the general environment. The more recent the immigrants, the more likely that they would insist on

traditional architecture. The new generation of U.S.-born Hindus is likely to have somewhat different ideas of what a temple ought to look like. Temple architects and sculptors, called shilpis, playa major role in carving the images of various deities. Often the pre-carved deities are shipped directly from India to be assembled on site by experienced shilpis.

In the American setting, the two traditional features of the basic temple design have been retained and at least two added. The American temples tend to contain elements of both the northern and southern styles to accommodate the highly heterogeneous Hindu communities. The first is the east-west orientation of the main sanctum and the second is the circumambulatory around it.

Unlike in India, where there is a general absence of congregational religious service or prayers, the interior spaces of the American Hindu temples are designed to be more group oriented as compared to the more intimate Indian temple spaces. The shrine or garbhagriha is often an adjunct space to the mandapa in a single large structure. This change reflects the changing ritual practices among the American Hindus. Most shrines in India are windowless, but many Hindu temples in the United States have large skylights and windows that open to the auspicious eastern direction. The Ganesh Temple of Flushing has an expansion project, which includes the introduction of skylights.

The large internal congregational space can be interpreted as a rational response to climate and the need for sheltered space in inclement weather. It is also related to addressing Western perceptions ofthe dark, lamp-lit, and intimate spaces of a traditional Hindu temple, where communion with God is an individual experience. The changing ritual and social needs of an expatriate community also reflect the need to express itself in a different cultural milieu.

1. Sri Lakshmi Temple in Ashland, near Boston, Massachusetts.

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Center of San Francisco, California.

3. Islamic Center of Tempe, Arizona.

Gurdwaras The Sikh place of worship is a gurdwara, which means "doorway to the guru" in Punjabi. According to the Sikh faith, while prayers to God can be offered any time and at any place, a gurdwara is built for congregational prayer.

Unlike the temples and mosques, the design scheme of the gurdwara is fairly simple and can be any roofed structure.

The building could be as simple as a temporary shack, or a small room in a house, depending on the resources of the community. The basic gurdwara contains-on a cot under a canopy-a copy of the Adi Granth, sometimes called Granth Sahib, or the old book, the sacred scripture of Sikhism. No special space requirements are needed in the gurdwara design. Grand gurdwaras may have a deorhi, an entrance or gateway, through which one has to pass before reaching the shrine. When the Sikhs enter the main gate of the gurdwara, they wash their hands and feet if water is available. Both men and women cover their head and proceed into the main hall in a reverential manner. Upon entering the main hall, they kneel down before the Granth Sahib.

They also make an offering in cash or kind. The prototype of the gurdwaras is the famous Golden Temple in Amritsar built in the 16th century. It is built in the style of a fortified Mughal palace. However, no conscious attempt seems to have been made to imitate the prototype. Sikhs have been present in North America for more than a century, beginning in 19th century California and British Columbia in Canada. Today there are scores of gurdwaras. The most famous are those in San Francisco, Stockton and Los Angeles in the west coast and those in Flushing and Fairfax, Virginia, on the east coast.

Mosques Like the Hindu temples and the Sikh gurdwaras, the mosque as an architectural type, despite centuries of evolution, is a novelty in North America. The archetype is the Prophet Mohammad's mosque in Madina. It was a simple structure with flat-rectangular space for worshippers to pray in the order of standing, kneeling, and bowing to God facing Mecca. Thus the essential requirement for a mosque regardless of time and space is its direction facing Mecca. Inside the mosque, a niche called mihrab orients the worshippers toward Mecca. Barring luxuries like the carpets, mosaic tiles, Arabic calligraphic panels-all mosques in the interior are the same everywhere. The exterior design elements that have come to be associated-but not religiously required-with mosques generally are the dome, minaret, and the arched entrance or an arcade. The dome is ofpre-Islamic origin, and Muslims learnt it from previous civilizations ofthe Near East. The minaret, or the stepped tower was often-but not always-used by the muazzin, the caller to prayer-to summon the faithful to prayers five times every day.

All adult Muslims-men and women-are required to pray every day. However, women may pray at home. Adult male Muslims are required to pray in congregation, particularly on Fridays. Since electronic public address systems cannot be used in public spaces in America, the minaret has become obsolete in the American context both due to municipal laws as well as the fact that there are few Muslim-concentrated neighborhoods-yet-large enough to justifY the use of a public address system to summon the faithful.

However, for sentimental reasons, many large mosques do install minarets to evoke a sense of mosque as known to the immigrant Muslims from practically all parts of the world. Another architectural change in the American mosque design is the designated space for women and girls. Most mosques in India and the Middle

East do not have large spaces for women to join the prayers in congregation. A handful do reserve a symbolic small portion of the mosque for women. Since the American Muslim family is nuc1ear--eonsisting for the most part of parents and two children, they tend to worship, visit, and picnic together. Thus when the Muslim family goes to worship at the mosque, there is a designated space for women-generally on the mezzanine level.

Though certainly not an architectural innovation per se, it certainly is when found in a mosque.

Since there are no set criteria for mosque designother than direction-mosques have come in various external forms. These range from highly traditional implantations-like the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., to designs that adapt traditional forms to American context such as the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. Other architects have decided to completely break from the tradition and adaptation in favor of innovation, as exemplified by the case of a mosque in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The highly acclaimed Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., was designed by an Egyptian engineer and built with donations from around the Muslim world, including the handsome $50,000 donation, a large amount in the 1950s, from the Nizam ofHyderabad.

Its Mamluk facade, Andalusia metaphors, Persian carpets, and Turkish tiles are highly evocative and give the impression that it was a straight implantation of a foreign building typology onto an American site. In contrast, the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, designed by Mike McCarthy of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, seeks to adapt and reinterpret traditional design elements-dome and minaret-to fit in with the Manhattan skyline. Thus its well-proportioned dome and an Americanized minaret blend effortlessly with the rest of the built environment. The Albuquerque mosque is conspicuous by the absence of outward symbols. From a distance it looks like a giant bleachers reaching skyward in tiers topped by towers that contain tall, narrow windows. Inside, the mosque is essentially one large hall divided at prayer times by a temporary partition to separate men from women. The ceiling steps up with the tiers, supported by thick wooden beams and rafters made of bronze-colored pipe.

Daylight pours through the narrow windows. It is a simple, elegant building, functional, and completely at home in its environment.

What does the religious architecture of the Indian communities in the United States tell us? It tells us that the first generation of immigrants prefered the traditional style of religious architecture-whether the immigrants were Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. A few temples, mosques and gurdwaras have taken some halting steps toward accommodating to the new environment. However, the children of immigrant parents are likely to be more at home in a temple, mosque or gurdwara with an architecture that is more responsive to the American environment, while fully meeting the religious injunctions.

D About the Author: Omar Khalidi is an independent scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Cambridge.

Islalll in Alllerica

The Beginning in Sharon he history of the Muslim community in Sharon, Massachusetts, is in some ways typical of a wide range of Muslim experience in America. This new facility is a branch, an expansion really, of the Islamic Center of New England in Quincy, located just south of downtown Boston and not far from the bilthplace of America's sixth president, John Quincy Adams.

The community dates back to the early 1900s when immigrants came from Syria and Lebanon to work in the Quincy shipyards.

There were more Christians than Muslims at first and more men than women. Before long, the Muslims came together for prayers and special observances. Seven families, in all, lived in the area of the shipyards. Mohammad Omar Awad volunteered as the imam, the leader of the prayers. In 1934 they formed a cultural, social, and charitable organization called the Arab American Balmer Society.

They met in a house on South Street in Quincy, organizing infonnal

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From the book A NEW RELIGIOUS AMERlCA by Diana L. Eck, which is published by HarperSanFrancisco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., and available wherever books are sold. Copyright Š 2001 by Diana L. Eck. All rights reserved.

religious lessons for their children, gathering for Friday prayers, and celebrating the two big Muslim feast days, Eid al-Fitr at the end of the month of Ramadan and Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice during the time of pilgrimage to Makkah. In 1962, after three decades of temporary housing, the leaders of this Muslim community decided to build a mosque on South Street. Almost as soon as the new building was dedicated in 1964, the community began to experience the impact of the new immigration. The small group of Muslims suddenly tripled in the decade between 1964 and 1974.

By the early 1980s the community took a giant step by hiring its first full-time imam, Talal Eid, who came from Lebanon and had been educated at the al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was jointly sponsored by the Quincy mosque community and the Muslim World League. Eid, along with his wife and two small daughters, arrived in New York with another Lebanese imam and his family.

They had thought they would be neighbors in America, until they suddenly discovered that New England and New Orleans were more than a thousand miles apart.

Muslims offering namaaz on 41st Street in New York City before the start of the United American Muslim Day Parade in 1997.

Talal Eid has led the community now for over twenty years, somehow finding time for graduate work at Harvard Divinity School in the midst of an increasingly busy life.

"Being an imam in America is totally different from being an imam in Lebanon," he said in an interview with the Pluralism Project. "There my role was limited to the mosque and dealing with the community, but here it is a combination: I lead the prayer, do the education, do the counseling, and deal with people of different backgrounds, cultures, nationalities, and languages.

The Islamic Center of New England is a small replica of the United Nations, with more than twenty-five different nationalities." Today, Imam Eid has more than three hundred children enrolled in weekend education programs and two congregations in Quincy and Sharon.

Imam Eid's role has grown not only because of the expanding expectations of his own community, but also because ofthe expectations of clergy in America generally. This means taking on new roles such as hospital visitation and participation in interfaith clergy meetings and interfaith dialogue. "It's not only about educating the Muslims," he says, "but I also have to do my share in educating non-Muslims, because living in a pluralistic society you have to establish friendly relations with people who believe differently than you." As one of Boston's most prominent and visible Muslim leaders, Imam Eid pmiicipates in three or four interfaith Thanksgiving services and is called upon constantly to speak in chmches, synagogues, civic organizations. He answers questions at Cambridge City Hall, rushes to the Quincy mosque for Friday prayers, then leads a session on Islam with nurses from the Children's Hospital. Imam Eid's daily rounds are as exhausting as those of the most harried of urban ministers.

Like many other Muslim communities in the U.S., the Muslim community of New England has experienced fear and pain along with growth. In March of 1990 a three-alarm fire swept through the Quincy mosque, causing an estimated $500,000 wOlih of damages.

The fire was attributed to arson, but the investigation was inconclusive and no one was arrested. The experience was unsettling for the community. Imam Eid recalls, "In the past, whenever a sad incident involving Muslims would take place in the Middle East or in any part of the world, people would focus on us. We received harassing calls and threatening letters. Angry people came over to demonstrate in front of the Islamic Center. And then there was the arson. If it's cloudy anywhere in the world it will rain on us here." For a year after the arson, Muslims pulled together and poured their resources and energies into rebuilding what had been destroyed-the dome, much of the prayer hall, and the education wing.

Even before the fire, however, the Quincy community was bulging at the seams in the South Street mosque and had been looking for a larger home. In 1991 the group found a large building for sale in Milton-an estate that had housed a Jesuit center with more than seven acres of surrounding land. It seemed perfect for a new Islamic center. Before long voices of resistance, apprehension, even suspicion were heard in Milton. Would there be too much traffic? Would there be enough parking? Would this be in

keeping with the character of Milton? Dr. Mian Ashraf, a Boston surgeon and a prominent leader of the Muslim community, remembers the meeting with Milton neighbors. "They were worried we were going to destroy their neighborhood by bringing in a lot of people. A man from the newspaper asked me, 'Doctor, how many people are you expecting to come here to pray?' I said, 'Well, you know, on our great holy days, we will probably have thousands.'

But of course there are only two such holy days a year. So the next day, the headline in the paper was 'Thousands of Muslims Coming for Prayers to Milton.' I was so upset."

Negotiations to buy the property went forward, but while the Islamic community was finalizing its mOligage arrangements, a group of Milton buyers purchased the propelty out from under them for one and a quarter million dollars in cash. "That was a bitter pill to swallow," said Ashraf. "I questioned in my own mind, why did people do this to us? Is it true that they are discriminating against us? I didn't want to believe that because all my life nobody discriminated against me." Some in the Muslim community were determined to take the issue to court and fight for the right to be good neighbors. Others did not want to settle in a community that had already expressed such hostility. This is a difficult question, and it has been faced by one immigrant community after another in cities and towns across America as they negotiate to buy property and find themselves confronting the opposition of new neighbors.

The community decided not to raise an uproar over the lost opportunity but to look toward the future and seek another propelty.

Happily, the opportunity soon came to purchase a former horse farm in Sharon, a small town of l5,500 that is more than half Jewish. "I got a telephone call," said Dr. Ashraf, "The man said, 'Doctor, I have just the place for your Islamic center. I've been reading in the newspaper what they've been trying to do to you.

You want to build a house for worship, and I think I can help you.'

He took me out to Sharon. He had fifty-five acres of peaceful land for sale. I fell in love with the place right away."

"Suppose the neighbors give us the same problem again?" asked Ashraf "What will we do?" This time, the community came up with a plan to introduce themselves to the town of Sharon. To begin with, they gave an educational videotape on Islam to every neighbor on the road. "We told them, 'If you have any questions, come talk to us. We'J! have a meeting. We'J! sit down. We'll answer your questions.'" Their proactive energy seemed to work, and the town of Sharon began to open its doors to the new Muslims. The rabbi of Temple Israel, Barry Starr, told Ashraf, "I think you are going to enrich our town. You're going to bring new things here." Starr called a meeting of the Sharon Clergy Association, and all of them had the opportunity to meet representatives of the Muslim community. The clergy voted a unanimous welcome to the Islamic Center. They printed their endorsement in the local paper, under the headline "Sharon Welcomes Islamic Center."

I found my way to the propelty in Sharon for the first time on the day of the groundbreaking, a rainy spring day in 1993.

Appropriately, it was an interfaith groundbreaking, with rabbis, bishops, pastors, and priests-all in hard hats-joining the mem-

The Dar alislam mosque near Abiquiu, New Mexico, is built in North AjNcan style which blends well with surrounding countryside. Like the New England islamic Center in Sharon, its twojold purpose is to educate nonMuslims about islam and to bring Muslims togethel:

bel's of the Muslim community. As they turned their shovels of earth that day, many commented that they were breaking new ground for all of their religious communities. The Muslims had erected a great striped tent for the occasion, and we all crowded inside to hear the greetings and words of congratulations. I remember especially a young Muslim woman, a teenager representing the Muslim youth group, who stood on a folding chair and said the words American Muslims have said thousands of times in explaining their religious tradition to their new neighbors. "Islam means peace," she said. "I hope there will be a day here in New England, which has always been the birthplace of new ideas and great movements, when religious beliefs will not be held against anyone but will be a tribute to that person's moral strength."

Two years later the new center was open for its first ever Eid al-Fitr, the feast day at the end of Ramadan. It was a few days after the Night of Power, a sparkling late-winter day after an ice and snow storm. The frozen field of the former horse farm was a vast parking lot for the thousands who had come to pray. Dr. Ashraf anno'unced with a sense of pride, "Today Eid is a formal holiday in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Because of our efforts, Eid is a paid holiday for Muslim workers and a religious holiday for our schoolchildren too. We need to let people know that Eid is our holiday." He shared with pleasure a letter to the American Muslim community from President Clinton.

"Greetings to all those who are observing the holy month of Ramadan. As dialogue replaces confrontation .... Hillary and I of-

fer our greetings to Muslims everywhere."

After the Eid prayers, the crowd streamed down the hill, dressed in their holiday best-bright sa/war kamizes, sequined and mirrored velvet jackets, bright pink parkas, brilliant African cottons-a festive and colorful congregation delighted and dazzled with the winter wonderland. "I have never seen an icy Eid like this!" grinned a young man from the Gambia in Africa.

Juice, coffee, and doughnuts were served in the common room of the school at the base of the hill. "Eid Mubarak!" "Happy Eid!" greetings were exchanged in this growing congregation of Muslims, born in over thirty countries and forging now an American Muslim tradition.

The Islamic Center of New England is really a microcosm of Islam in America today, with its generations of history, its 路growing pains, its efforts to establish Islamic practice in a culturally diverse Islamic community, and its efforts to create Islamic institutions on American soil. Its saga of relations with non-Muslim neighbors is also a mirror of wider experiencefrom the threats and arson attack to the zoning battles and finally the successful effort to build new bridges of relations with other communities offaith.

D About the Author: Diana L. Eck is a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Committee on the Study of Religion in the faculty of arts and sciences.

She is also a member of the department of Sanskrit and indian studies as well as the faculty of divinity.

ASHOKA INNOVATORS FOR THE PUBLIC

Giving Life 10 New Ideas or 20 years, with no fanfare, a small organization based in Arlington, Virginia, has been changing the face of large parts of India-not only India, but also the globe. The organization, "Ashoka: Innovators for the Public," is doing this by investing in people with innovative ideas for solving social problems and giving them the support they need to路 make their ideas have the greatest possible social impact.

Since 1995 Javed Abidi has been fighting for the rights of the disabled in India through lobbying, rallies, conferences, workshops, public interest litigation, public interest advertisements and the press.

When he began work, the disabled were an unseen minority-voiceless, hidden away in backrooms, brushed under the carpet. No Indian airport had motorized ramps for wheelchair users. Government buildings were not wheelchair accessible. Himself a wheelchair user, Abidi quickly saw that the apathy of the society and the government toward the needs of the disabled was so great that building awareness would not be enough. Only a comprehensive set of laws specifically for the disabled, he felt, could force the government to act.

In the last five years Abidi has created an active, visible all-India cross-disability coalition. He has been a force behind the drafting and passage of the Indian Disability Act (1995), the National Trust for Welfare of Persons with Autism, Cerebral

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Palsy, Mental Retardation, and Multiple Disabilities Act (1999), and persuaded the government to include the disabled in the 2001 Census, India's first census of the millennium. He also works with industry to convince them to hire more disabled people. His vision of how the disability movement can be instrumental in the creation of a just and humane society is what has sustained him in his long and lonely fight.

In 1997, he got a call from a representa-

Javed Abidi with Ashoka Foundation originator William Drayton.

tive of Ashoka. At first he was skeptical, as he had never heard of the organization. But the concept appealed to him and he agreed to meet with the representative and hear her out. After a grueling set of interviews, during which he was forced to think more deeply than he had ever done before, about what he was doing and why, and how he

A uniquefellowship that helps developmental innovators succeed was going to achieve his goals, he was made an Ashoka fellow. "Usually awards are given to those who have already enjoyed a lifetime's recognition for their work and therefore don't need them.

Ashoka awards people because they believe in their capacity to contribute to society. Ashoka showed me how I was a part of a community of people who married change with new ideas. I haven't felt alone or unselfconfident since."

In the last decade RaviAgarwal has created a revolution in hospital and neighborhood waste disposal. The secret of his success is his understanding of how to structure incentives to get people to "get the dirty work done." Trained as an engineer and with a degree in business management, Agarwal soon realized that he wasn't terribly interested in business-it wasn't creati ve enough. In 1994 there was a plague scare in Delhi and Agarwal wrote an article in The Hindustan Times on what neighborhoods could do to manage their waste. The article led to his being invited by residential communities in Delhi to create neighborhood waste management systems. The model he evolved forged a partnership between the creators of waste and ragpickers. The ragpickers collected and sorted the waste and the community put up and managed the small waste disposal units. Incentives were built into the program to ensure that the individuals responsible for managing the units did their job. So, for example, in Dakshinpuri, an old lady got an hour's worth offree gas in exchange for running the gasification unit. And gardening enthusiasts got free manure from vermicomposting their community's garbage.

In 1996, the Supreme Court, in response to pressure from environmental groups, ordered hospitals to put in incinerators to get rid of their waste. Agarwal opposed this, pointing out that it would only create another kind of pollution. So he began to work with hospitals in order to create a non-burn, technology-based waste system.

The model he came up with one-and-a-half years later had at its core a very simple idea-if one wants to get rid of waste in hospitals, the waste generators have to be made responsible for doing it. So he targeted nurses, explaining just how dangerous the used needles were to their health, which was why it was in their best interests to dispose of them properly. Once the hospital staff was on his side, he says, the rest fell in place.

In 1997, Agarwal got a call from an Ashoka representative and later that year, after a grueling set of interviews, he was made an Ashoka fellow. Since then, Agarwal has concentrated on taking his model to national and international levels.

In 1998, the "Biomedical Waste Management and Handling Rules" were promulgated based upon Agarwal's model. Not content with the new regulation, he persuaded private enterprises to get involved in hospital waste management. In the last two years in Delhi and Chennai, private companies have invested in centralized facilities for recycling hospital waste, greatly reducing the burden on hospitals. At the intemational level, Agarwal has helped hospitals in the Middle East, Cuba and Russia to organize their waste management systems. He has also helped frame the guidelines on hospital waste management for the Basel Convention and the United Nations Environmental Protection Convention. Last year Agarwal started another organization, Toxics Link, which provides information, guidelines and expertise to thousands of consumers and citizens groups on toxicity-related issues and works with lawyers to stop the dumping of toxic wastes in India.

Ravi Agarwal and Javed Abidi are only two of the 170 Ashoka fellows in India.

Named after Emperor Ashoka, who unified India in the 3rd century B.C. and publicly gave up war, the Ashoka Foundation searches the world for people with new ideas, ideas that can change their particular field of action irrevocably, ideas that are

"so well thought out that they will succeed at the national level and beyond." Operating from a slender budget of around $17 million, Ashoka invests in these people, rather than their projects, giving them a three-year monthly stipend pegged to the countries' standard of living and back-up services so the fellows will be free to carry their ideas forward. Since 1981, it has selected more than 1 ,200 entrepreneurs in 41 countries spread over five continents. The first fellows were from India and Brazil.

Funding for Ashoka comes from a host of individuals, major foundations, and business entrepreneurs from around the world.

It accepts no governn1ent funding.

Ashoka was the idea of one man, William Drayton. His key insight was that there exist people in all countries who, like business entrepreneurs, have vision, creativity and tenacity, but who are possessed with a need to make a difference, to change society. He dubbed these people "social entrepreneurs." Social entrepreneurs, he explained, were "rare men and women who possess the vision, creativity and extraordinary determination of the business entrepreneur-but who devote these qualities to introducing new solutions to societal problems." He also realized that a little investment in such people would go farther in terms of their social impact than simply giving money for projects would. "It is arrogant to think that well-meaning outsiders can make a dent in the horrendous social problems besetting every country in the world .... We empower social entrepreneurs from the communities and get out of their way. It is amazing how effective they become in finding their own solutions."

The son of a placer miner and a cellist, from early adolescence Drayton was fascinated by organizations and by how thjngs were "really" done. So, for example, as an undergraduate at Harvard, he created the Ashoka table, bringing in prominent govemment, union and church leaders for offthe-record dinners at which students could

Drqyton)s key insight was that there are people in all countries who have vision) creativiry and tenacity, possessed with a need to make a difference. ask "how things really worked." At Yale Law School in 1967 he started Yale Legislative Services, which mobilized students to provide first-rate analytical and drafting services to legislators that lacked their own staff support. In return, students were privy to all meetings and experienced first hand how laws really got made amidst the noise of politics. As assistant administrator for planning and management at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the 1970s, he came up with the idea oftradable pollution rights-which soon became one of the EPA's most successful methods of controlling noxious emissions. He also worked for nine years with the international management consulting film, McKinsey & Co., and taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

In 1980, his fascination with "how things really get done" bore fruit. In the late 1970s while he was still with the EPA, he and his friends had begun traveling to other countries over their Christmas holidays, hunting for nominators and candidates.

Initially they began in India, Indonesia and Venezuela. Over a two-week period, they would meet 60 or 70 people and ask those they met to talk about a private citizen who had made a difference. Then they'd go and see that person and ask the same questions.

Each name was turned into a card and as the weeks went by, they began to get multiple cards on certain people and by the time they left they had a fairly clear idea of who was doing what in the different fields.

Drayton then formed Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, which he was convinced would be the most "highly leveraged" approach to change possible, intervening at "the most critical moment in the life cycle" of the "most critical ingredient in the development process"-people.

Over the years, Ashoka has built a global web of friends, nominators and volunteers who help identify prospective fellows. But on an average only one in a hundred make it through the grueling selection process.

Candidates are evaluated on the basis of

one "knock out" initial test and five criteria: a new idea, social impact of the idea, creativity, entrepreneurial quality, and ethical fiber. After a member of Ashoka's staff has prepared an evaluation of the candidate on the basis of the five points, a second opinion reviewer who is usually a senior staff member of Ashoka from another country goes through the material and interviews the candidate intensively. Then the candidate is invited to appear before a selection panel made up of social entrepreneurs from the candidate's country and an Ashoka board or staff member from another continent. Decisions are made by consensus and sent to the International Board of Directors who review the cases from the point of view of global standards and consistency.

Once elected, Ashoka fellows gain a supportive network of like-minded individuals with whom they can share ideas and develop collaborations. For example, when Abidi decided to launch his campaign to get the disabled included in the 2001 Census, he sent messages to all Ashoka fellows in India. He was immediately flooded with offers for help from fellows in Calcutta, Bangalore, Bombay and Chennai.

Through them and their networks he was able to organize four regional workshops for training census takers, civil rights NGOs and disability activists in the do's and don'ts of the census. This year Abidi is collaborating with another Ashoka fellow, Colin Gonsalves, a lawyer, to organize workshops across India to educate lawyers and families of the disabled on their rights under the new disability act. Ravi Agarwal, together with three other Ashoka fellows, Colin Gonsalves, Raghunath Munawwar, a thermal power plant worker, and Anil Singh, is organizing a workshop on the environmental health of thermal power plants. The aim of the workshop is to frame a new law on the health and safety of thermal power plants by the end of the year.

Matching funds for the workshop was provided by the Ashoka Foundation's

"Local Challenge Fund."

Apart from launching collaborations between fellows, the foundation encourages tie-ups between social and business entrepreneurs. Tn 1996 the foundation began a joint venture with McKinsey & Co. in which consultants work with Ashoka fellows on a pro bono basis to help them structure future growth. Two Ashoka fellows-leroo Billimoria, who runs a helpline for street children in Bombay and who has now franchised her idea to several Indian cities, and laved Abidi in Delhi-are working with McKinsey consultants in India. Ashoka/McKinsey Centers for Social Entrepreneurship exist in Sao Paulo, Mexico and Argentina and will soon be in South Africa as well. Explains Sushmita Ghosh, the new president ofthe foundation, "India and Brazil were the two places where Ashoka's early experimentation took place.

We quickly understood from our experiences that while individual Fellows have a lot of power, our job was to figure out the power that they could have if complementaty pieces of ideas were brought together."

Like the Ashoka tree, which is famous for its capacity to spread and give shade, the Ashoka foundation recently, launched two major initiatives to facilitate the spread of ideas at a regional and global level.

Based on the experiences of over 200 fellows working across the globe in the field of environment, Ashoka's Environmental Innovations Initiative identified four key principles which when implemented can help redress the balance between people and nature. A similar initiative has been launched in the field of education and effol1s are being made to disseminate these principles to a wider audience through workshops, publications, the Internet, and the provision of seed money for projects that apply these principles in different parts of the globe.

D About the Author: Radhika Jha is a novelist and Feelance writer based in Delhi. Her debut novel was Smell and she is currently working on a collection of short stories.

City of Brotherly Love Religious freedom was cherished by Philadelphia's founder William Penn, and the noteworthy tolerance of the city led to its designation as the "City of Brotherly Love." Now Philadelphia reflects global diversity in the religions practiced there. ift weren't for the yarmulke on his smooth round head, the tallis, or prayer shawl, draped over his shoulders, and the Hebrew Bible in his hand, the personable rabbi in his black suit could pass for any banker on the Avenue of the Americas. Rabbi Albert E. Gabbai, a Sephardic Jew of Egyptian origin who has come to this Philadelphia synagogue from France, sits at the raised reader's desk and looks at his watch, waiting for his tardy flock who are under the impression that Shabbat services don't start until the sun sets on Friday. But this is the summer and the sun doesn't set on Philadelphia until after eight. The Rabbi explains that if he started the service after eight, it would be 10 o'clock by the time the congregation got to dinner, one of the most impOt1ant elements in the Jewish observance of the weekly holy day of Shabbat. When a minyan, quorum of ten, turns up at the synagogue, he stal1s the service. It's not only the religious Jews who have come for the service; a few visitors are present too.

This is because the synagogue is of his torical importance. Established in 1740, the Mikveh Israel is the oldest continuous Orthodox Jewish congregation in the United States.

While the Jewish congregation gathers Fridays and Saturdays, just around the corner, the Arch Street Friends (Quaker) Society meets Wednesdays and Sundays.

As worshipers enter, they are handed a leaflet: "We welcome you to this meeting for worship. We gather in silence, endeavoring to submit ourselves wholly to the

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Here Muslim women worship in the Bawa Fellowship mosque, Philadelphia.

Mikveh Israel, "The Hope of Israel" in Hebrew, was founded in 1740 and is the oldest continuously operated synagogue in the United States.

It preserves the Sephardic Spanish and Portuguese Jewish traditions.

Divine Spirit, which we believe is accessible to every attentive mind. There is no human leader and no planned program. We are all learners, trying to live by the example of Christ."

Some four or five blocks away is St. Joseph's Church, the only place in the British Empire where the Catholic Mass was celebrated publicly between 1733 and 1734. Originally, it was a 5.5 by 6-meter house-chapel, with an organ, attached to the residence of Rev. Joseph Greaton, an English Jesuit. In 1838, it was rebuilt into the structure that stands today. Mass is still said here every day by Jesuit priests.

These three congregations are not disparate tableaux. Rather, for centuries, they have been interwoven threads in the fabric of Philadelphia, fondly called the City of Brotherly Love. When anti-Catholic rioters threatened Old St. Joseph's during the British war against the French, supposing Catholic sympathies for the French, a group of Quakers intervened and the chapel was spared. Before separate meetinghouses were built for different congregations, Quakers, Lutherans and Anglicans all shared the same buildings for religious services in this British colony of Pennsylvania, named after William Penn, its founder.

Penn, the son of an admiral of the British Navy, became a Quaker in 1667, much to the consternation of his father. Nevertheless, his father was kind enough to give him some land the British Navy had awarded him for his services. Penn crossed the Atlantic to claim his new land and founded the British colony of Pennsylvania as a "holy experiment." He wanted this colony to be an "example to the nations." In his 1701 Charter of Privileges, Penn guaranteed religious freedom to all. He wrote, "We must give the libelty we seek."

Owing to Penn's tolerant vision, Philadelphia became a haven for reformist religious movements such as the Methodist, German Reformed, Episcopal and African Methodist churches, which took birth here. it was also in Philadelphia that the first ever African American bishop was named, the Hebrew Bible first translated into English and the General Assembly ofthe Presbyterian Church first held in America.

Even the older religions have a history unique to Philadelphia.

Organized Jewish worship took root in Philadelphia through the agency of Nathan Levy, the owner of the ship Myrtilla, which brought the Liberty Bell from England. Levy's young son died in 1738 and there was no Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia to bwy the

child. The Governor at the time, Thomas Penn, William's son, sold him a small plot of land. Although the Jewish community of predominantly Dutch stock was velY small then, Levy recognized that it would multiply soon with the influx of migrants. In 1740, a bigger plot was purchased and used as a meetinghouse for the burgeoning Jewish congregation in the city. As the community expanded, bigger meeting places were required until the Mikveh Israel finally moved into its fifth and present building in 1976. It shares the site with the National Musewn of American Jewish HistOly. Christ Church, known as the Nation's Church because many of the early American personages were its parishioners, was established in 1695 on its present site. The building was completed in 1754. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, an American statesman considered the father ofthe nation, is said to have organized three lotteries to finance the church's bell and 6O-meter steeple. The steeple, often referred to as the "200-foot steeple," remains to this day a visible landmark from many parts of the city, particularly on the bank of the Delaware River, where the city of Philadelphia is located. Christ Church still houses the 600-year-old font that was used to baptize Penn. It was shipped to the American colonies from England.

Franklin's daughter Sarah's wedding took place at this church. As the candles in the church's chandeliers were lit that day, so they are today for any wedding that takes place inside this church.

Right: An interior view of Old St. Joseph:S Church, the oldest Catholic church in Philadelphia, established in Colonial times by English Jesuits. It thrived in Feedom while Catholics in England endured severe persecution. Below: Exterior of Old St. Joseph:S Church. The current structure dates Fom 1883. Jesuit priests still offer daily Mass here. The church was established in 1695.

Whereas the steeple of Christ Church was raised tall to proclaim the presence of the church to the city, the exterior of St. Joseph's was built to be unobtrusive so as not to attract the wrath of the British. Actually, the church is so meekly tucked away through an arch in an alley that if one weren't looking for it in particular, one would not spot it easily. The exterior, of course, belies the stunning interior. Splendid stained glass windows filter the light coming into the church, imbuing it with an ethereal, misty quality. An impressive painting, The Exaltation of Saint Joseph into Heaven, by Philippo Costaggini ofItaly hangs on the church wall. The interior also has a curving balcony.

The Arch Street Friends' (Quaker) Meetinghouse has neither interior nor exterior to boast. The meeting room itself is nothing more than rows of benches whose wood is warped and worn.

After all, ostentation is the antithesis of the breakaway Quaker creed. When the Quakers first came to Philadelphia in 1681, they met for worship in private homes. Later on, they shared buildings with Anglicans and Lutherans until the meetinghouse on Arch Street was built in 1804 on a land bequeathed by Penn. early two centuries after Penn wrote in his 170 I Charter of Privileges, "Because noe people can be truly happy though under the Greatest Enjoyments of Civil Liberties if Abridged of the Freedom of theire Conscience as to theire Religious Profession and Worship," the city of brotherly love moved beyond the Western monotheisms to embrace new ethnicities and their corollary religions.

In 1870, settler Lee Fong opened a laundry on 913 Race Street, thus heralding the advent of Chinatown. Until the end of World

War ll, Chinatown was largely a bachelor society because the womenfolk stayed behind in the mother country while the men went to make their fortune in faraway gim sa, the gold mountain.

As families started joining their male relatives, Chinatown grew into a full-fledged community which included Buddhist temples.

Farther up, west of the Italian Market area, on 13th and Washington Streets, Chua Bo-De, a Vietnamese Buddhist temple, serves the Theravadin in Buddhist community. In recent years, as populations, particularly immigrant ones, gravitate toward the suburbs, places of religious worship have followed suit.

The Tibetan Buddhist Center, founded in 1989 by Lobsang Samten, a Tibetan once associated with the Dalai Lama, nestles just beyond 69th Street in the suburb of Upper Darby. It's clear that Buddhism has gained a strong footing in Philadelphia. On July 16, 1999, a Wheel of Life sand mandala made by Samten was dispersed into the Schuylkill River after a symbolic procession from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the past decade, Hinduism has also settled in the religious landscape here. Going outside of Philadelphia toward Lancaster, on Cays Road in Stroudsburg, is the Shringeri Vidya Bharati Foundation temple. The quiet Dutch Country architecture of the house the temple is contained in belies its colorful Hindu character. Nevertheless, its interior unlocks the grandeur of Hindu deities and rituals. At this temple, which has a form of the Goddess Parvati as its presiding deity, Vedic pujas are performed every day. The temple's in-house facilities and space may be rented for small functions. Hindu priests, trained at Sringeri Vidya Bharati, India, are also available to officiate at rites held in

Far left: The 60-meter steeple of Christ Church is a city landmark. Left: The main aisle and altar at Christ Church. Many of America'sfounders, such as Benjamin Franklin, worshipped here. Its 600-year-old baptismal font, in which William Penn was baptized, was shippedfrom England. Right: The Friend's Meeting House was built in 1804 on land bequeathed by William Penn, a Quaka When the Quakers first came to Philadelphia in 1631, they met in private homes for worship. Below: The simplicity of the Meeting House reflects the unprententiousness of Quaker belieft.

sis on fixing the "ills" within society, a principle that is pertinent to the African American community because a significant section of it still lives in disadvantaged inner city neighborhoods.

South Asian immigrants have played a role in the practice of Islam in Philadelphia also. The Makkah ~ Masjid, operated by the nonprofit 01'~ ganization Hyderabad House, is 10« ~ cated on Susquehanna Avenue. All « § five daily prayers-the Fajar, Zuhur, Z Asr, Maghreb, and Isha-at'e said at this mosque in addition to the weekly Friday salat. Among the many other services this mosque offers are a Quranic school, weekend classes for Islamic Studies and an Islamic reference library.

Besides opening up Eastern religions to Philadelphia, the wave of new immigrants has put a different complexion on religions that have been entrenched in the city for the past two centuries. The San Augustine Roman Catholic Church on 4th ~ Street at the foot ofthe Ben Franklin ~ Bridge conducts a morning mass every Sunday primarily for the ~ Filipino community. The mass is said ~ in Tagalog when a Filipino priest is ~ available. ~ Perhaps as a forerunner of the reli~ gious trend to come, a non-sectarian o meditation center was set up in Havertown, 16 kilometers from Center City Philadelphia, in 1998.

The Philadelphia Meditation Center adheres to a corpus of teachings derived ftom the Buddha that it likes to refer to as "Buddhayana." The basic tenet of this organization is "looking within," which in practice translates into silent meditation. The sitting meditation sessions at'e separated by 15 minutes of walking meditation. This fonnat is followed in the weekday meditations.

On Saturdays, the sitting meditation sessions are a little shorter.

Also, those who attend on Saturday are encouraged to stay on for lunch and help with the administrative and housecleaning aspects of the center if they wish.

Although it's difficult to second-guess what Philadelphia's founders would say about the way their vision has evolved over the centuries since their passing, it would probably be safe to conjecture that they would be pleased with this holy experiment.

D

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devotees' homes. While the Sringeri temple follows South Indian conventions, the Samarpan temple on Bustleton Avenue, a few miles outside Center City Philadelphia, is oriented toward North Indian conventions. The temple is often labeled a "Jain temple" because it houses a statue of Mahavira. Both Hindu and Jain festivals are celebrated at the temple.

Asian immigration isn't all that has added to the multiplicity of religions in Philadelphia. Some African Americans have been active in reestablishing their connection to their pre-American heritage: Islam. A number of African Americans have converted to Islam since the Civil Rights Movement and are very observant Muslims. It is interesting that many Muslim African American women in Philadelphia have adopted the practice of veiling. The Association ofTslamic Charitable Projects (AICP), which runs a mosque on 44th and Walnut Streets, has a strong African American Muslim base. The AICP states as its objective the teaching of "the authentic knowledge of the religion as taught by Prophet Muhammad." The organization places a special empha-

About the Author: Nachammai in Chennai.

Raman is a ji'eelance

writer based

very thing changed after September 11. This now oftrepeated axiom applies as much to literature as anything else. It has influenced what we read and most certainly will influence what we write for a long time to come. This issue of SPAN-with its special feature on literature-was in the middle of production when the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington took place. It was meant to coincide with the festival of letters sponsored by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. After September 11, which changed everything, we shelved what we were doing and compiled a memorial issue instead. Here, at last, is our special literary issue.

The first two articles under the heading "Reading in the Fractured Landscape," by Siva Vaidhyanathan and William Germano, attempt to refocus life for the bibliophile after the jarring events of the past few months. Our short story offerings, from Indian and American writers, are sometimes heartwarming and sometimes thought -provoking. We are very pleased to give you a sneak preview of author Manju Kapur's new novel, along with some of her personal reflections about writing. Novelist Valerie Miner reviews some of her favorite Indian writers in English. Charles Johnson, writer, academic, Sanskrit scholar and Buddhist, gives the contemplative view of why and how literature affects us the way it does in "The Elusive Art of 'Mindfulness.'''

A short story by the late Toni Cade Bambara, "Raymond's Run," tells of a young Harlem girl's tough love for her disabled brother, and her dedication to excellence. In "Family Portrait," native American writer Sherman Alexie weaves images of growing up in the hard realities of an Indian reservation.

"A Dream of Fair Women," from Gina Berriault's award-winning collection of short stories Women in Their Beds, is a look at the Indian diaspora from the point of view of an American waitress in an Indian restaurant.

"Newton's Law," by William Maxwell, is a distinctly human rendition of the law of gravity.

Reading in the Fractured landscape An Entire Semester of Knowledge in One Day

hat would you die for, and what would you kill for?" I asked the first class of a new semester, a class about globalization. That was the Thursday before September 11, I thought my question merely academic.

I ask this question every semester that I teach about globalization, as a way to get my gifted, privileged students to see that other people have made sacrifices-for better or worse, good or evil-that have enabled Americans to attain an unbelievably high standard of living.

We live so well in this nation because others (not just Americans) have died. And we live so well because others have killed.

From that starting point, I hope to get my students to know the price of everything,

while seeing the value of everything as well: the labor that went into their sneakers, the fossil fuels that brought them to campus, and the credit system that keeps their closets and cupboards full. That is the only way I know to teach a class on globalization. You are part ofthe globe, snared in the World Wide Web of humanity, whether you acknowledge it or not.

It's been my deep suspicion, and my concern, that Americans-especially Americans on the liberal side of thingstake their privileges for granted, imagining them to be natural rights. Conflicts in the recent past, justified or not, involved minimal or no sacrifice from the American people at large.

And for most Americans, for most of my short life, warfare has been like sports.

At least in American sports, we get to see the damage we do to each other's bodies.

War has occurred at a distance. Those few, proud American families with members in the military have felt the real threat of combat. But most of us have just moved on with our days while our planes drop smart bombs on cities we can't quite find on a map.

By the second class session, the following Thursday after that dark Tuesday, I sensed I did not need to make my case any more. My students understood. It was as if an entire semester of knowledge had come spewing out oftheir television sets in one day.

We had read two excerpts of books that many people will revisit in the coming weeks: Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld. Huntington argues that the world is divided into stable, self-contained, and distinct "civilizations" -I ike Confucian, Judeo-Christian, or Muslim-that differ so much in vocabulary and worldview that "clashes" are inevitable. Barber posits dialectic ideological flows-one hypermodern and commercially powered, the other traditional and fearful-that feed off each other. Not only do most nations contain elements of both processes simultaneously, he argues, but even groups and people can exhibit aspects of Jihad and McWorld without contradiction. For instance, a fundamentalist religious group or antiglobalization campaign might use the Internet to organize and communicate across increasingly permeable borders.

In previous years, I had had to prod students, generally reluctant to challenge the

professoriate or the printed word, to see that both of those explanatory models of the world are attractive yet insufficientand that Huntington's is dangerously wrong. This time, the students showed no mercy to the texts.

Once someone is forced to recognize the essential interconnectedness of all human beings, one finds it harder to see "clashes" or oppositions as given or necessary. The world of my students was suddenly, painfully, in flux. At least Barber spoke to them of fluidity and change. But my students demanded more contingency.

No model of world affairs conjured before September 11 will fit well afterward. We are now on our own. We have to remake our intellectual worlds from scratch. To mistake today's conditions for yesterday's is to tempt failure. That's the sober realization my students were facing.

One of the issues in flux today, for example, is patriotism. People who would not have been caught waving a flag in 1968, 1974, or 1991 now proudly display

You are part of the globe, snared in the World Wide Web of humanity, whether you acknowledge it or not. them. So I asked the class: What manner of patriotism are we forging this time?

It could be a patriotism of love, embedded in a sense of humanity, one that sees the United States as a democratic beacon, an imperfect process with an articulated ideal. Patriotism of love springs from openness and pluralism, and stretches far beyond the shores of the United States. It could glow with the best energy of the American people and inspire others.

Or patriotic fervor could be a patriotism of lust. The class was concerned about the attacks on Arab Americans in the wake of September 11. About the harassment of U.S. mosques and Arab students, cab drivers, and women wearing traditional Muslim veils.

I proposed that there are signs that American passions could flower into a

patriotism of solidarity and duty. Americans have lined up by the thousands to give blood and donate work gloves for the efforts in New York. While we prepare for war, the spirit of the heroes of this conflict is already rising from the dust and smoke of the World Trade Center.

Finally, I asked my students to think about the differences between patriotism and therapy. Sometimes, we wave a flag or wear a ribbon to feel better about ourselves while others are risking their lives and doing the hard work. There is no duty, no sacrifice attached to therapy. It's all about "healing," so we can get back to our little lives. No patriotism with an explicit goal of some illusive condition called "closure" can lead a nation through troubled times.

Most of my students were wary of any kind of patriotism, having grown up seeing the flag as the virtual property ofthose who could express their belligerent political will no other way. But this trauma has left us all inarticulate, so waving a flag seems all we can do. It can mean much more than provincial jingoism: It can stand for solidarity, fortitude, unity, hope, and sorrow.

I usually try to disguise my opinions in the classroom, preferring to ask disquieting questions from multiple points of view. But this time, I was too moved, too shocked, too numb for that.

For two of the best years of my life, I lived in a downtown Manhattan apartment with a panoramic view of the skyline. The Twin Towers were my nightlight, my southward compass point, my constant companions. Their given name embodies New York City and its place in the United States: World. Trade. Center.

Monuments like that have ways of keeping good people humble.

Just weeks ago, I packed up my belongings and left Manhattan for good. Now I live in a quiet, beautiful, safe place called Madison, Wisconsin. 1 still wear my Yankees cap around town, but I am glad to be here. This lovely town is now my safe Midwestern home. In the days following September 11, though, we were all New Yorkers.

D About the Author: Siva Vaidhyanathan is an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Reading in the Fractured Landscape

The Way

O

n September 11, when the world changed, I tried to do the simplest things I knew how to. I counted family members and friends as a parent counts a newborn's fingers and toes. Whatever else might happen, they were all here. I went home. There were the television and the endless footage, the radio reports, the cellphone conversations, and later the newspapers. But sitting in the park on that beautiful and horrible afternoon, I wanted something else. I wanted to read a book.

Narratives were out of the question.

Bleak House might be right for a summer cottage or a stay in the hospital, but my mind couldn't wrap itself around anything that big, not now, not yet. My hand reached instead for a battered red paperback I'd slogged through before: an introductory Latin grammar. I don't know why, exactly, I was a terrible student of classical languages, but this worn manual offered immersion in another world. Here be complicate rules, the discrete objectives of conjugation, a cast of characters long gone from the stage.

I still read the papers, still followed the news. But for days, the grammar was in my hand, offering me difficult labor in tiny units, and I relished the mental exhaustion. It wasn't exactly like reading-it was more like a focalization exercise, the kind of thing some people do to shake off migraines. Then, somewhere around the imperfect subjunctive for deponent verbs, my Latin self-study began to fail me. The exercises had become eerily familiar: "When the wicked plots against the republic had

We Read Now been discovered, the citizens of bad character were driven out by the force of the very powerful guardians." Or: "Had you studied better books, you would not have attempted to destroy the city." The spell broke. My son Christian and I read Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants, a favorite among his classmates (and everywhere else kid is spoken). But I couldn't touch real books, not yet.

Wondering if others were managing to read, I asked some friends in the academy-or, like myself, near neighbors in publishing-what books they had picked up since the disaster. Nobody confessed to Germs or Twin Towers or Body for Life or The Prayer of Jabez. (These are all on Amazon.com 's best-seller list.) Here instead is what I heard in the days following September I I: • Many could not read. Amy-Lynn Fischer, sales manager at the University of California Press and a transplanted New Yorker, hasn't been able to read anything at all. Days of nonstop television had contaminated her dreams. "I found I wasn't sleeping," she said, "having terrible nightmares with all the images being replayed in my dreams, only in my dreams I was in the rubble, the debris, clawing to get out."

She switched to a strict diet of ational Public Radio, and her sleeping improved.

No books, though. I didn't suggest Cicero.

• Willis Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press, has been "following the common wisdom that it was best to do what we normally do," which meant working on manuscripts and reading about publishing. Patt of his week was spent with Jason Epstein's The Book Business and Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books. "In the wake of last

By WILLIAM

GERMANO

week's events," he said, "Epstein's book reads like a soothing reminiscence, Schiffrin's like an alarm."

• The writer Wayne Koestenbaum, who teaches in Manhattan at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, has been reading a biography of the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger and studying some of Seeger's work at the keyboard, which is a different kind of reading. Koestenbaum writes that "this week I've been thinking about the fact that much of the music in the concert repertoire, or even on its margins (like Seeger's music), was composed in or around war or historical calamity." (Seeger's difficult life ended at 52. Only connoisseurs know her work, while everyone knows about her stepson, Pete.) Koestenbaum, who can read fast, then picked up Virgil Thomson's American Music Since 19l0. "Thomson's sensible just-folks tone seemed the sort of voice I wish 1 could hear on the airwaves, telling me what to feel and what to do," he said. After all that American music, he read a Buddhist self-help book.

• Some people have been able to reach out to the bookshelf and touch a pulse.

The philosopher Alihur Danto, another New Yorker, told me: "I had read As You Like It recently, and it made me laugh. So I decided to read it again, before going on to some of Shakespeare's other comedies .

This morning I woke up from a dream in which I was acting in one of these plays, with cowslips (which I could not identify in waking life), brooks, and clowns. I felt velY happy, but then with a crash the present world hit me, and I am back where I have been since it happened, housing this terrible cloud in my chest."

• The aIi historian James Elkins, who

hails from upstate New York and teaches at the School of the Att Institute of Chicago, is an intrepid traveler. His plans included Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, at least until September 11. Now he found himself reading books that had nothing at all to do with politics. I'd known him for years as a man of boundless curiosity, so I wasn't surprised when he told me he'd just bought books on "the habits of chickadees and one on the species of the amoeba. I don't mean this to sound flippant," he said, adding, "ever since the Romantics, natural history has been a refuge from politics."

• Robert Orsi is a New Yorker and a professor of religious studies who has just moved from Indiana University to Harvard. "Long before this horrible moment," he said, "I'd assigned my students Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address for this week in a survey course on American religious histOly since the Civil War. Many of them now report that they found it comforting, and many have also said that they thought the comparison between Lincoln's religious reflectionand in particular his care not to claim to know God's ways, and his sense of the endless mystery of pain and sufferingand Bush's sermon (what else can it be called?) at the memorial service in Washington was instructive."

As for his own book list, Orsi has been rereading the spiritual writings of Frederick Buechner. "And then when the world becomes too much to bear," he added, "I've dusted off some old comfort readings from my childhood-Guareschi's stories of Don Camillo and Peppone, the priest and the communist." Like other people I talked to, he pointed to the need

to read more widely in the literature of terrorism, about the Taliban, about geopolitics. But I wasn't looking for what people knew they should be reading, just what they were able to embrace, or be embraced by, this week.

• Mary Beard, who teaches classics at the University of Cambridge, found herself reading Lord of the Flies. I asked her why that merry romp, of all things. "I have all kinds of other reasons for doing so," she said. "Both my kids are reading it at school, and I never have (culpably), so was feeling left out. And I've just written a paragraph about Golding's notorious visit to the Parthenon and felt I owned it to him to read the chefd'oeuvre."

Being

If every rereading re-creates its text and alters its reader, how much more different are these rereadings. How different are we ourselves.

asked what she was reading had called her up short. "I think, God, I"ve chosen to read that during this week. ..a total rule of the unconscious. Suffice it to say that it's a horribly acute tale of the breakdown of civilization after disaster."

• Over at the Library of America, the publisher Max Rudin reported that he had become addicted to his Palm Pilot, compulsively devouring headlines and news stories even as he walked through New York City streets on the way to an appointment. As for books, fiction has felt too thin. "I've been finding Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon the most satisfyingly intelligent escapist reading," he said. "Basking in an appreciation of a real city that in the face of war and disaster has remained committed to civilization and urbanity provides a sort of comfort, and at least a temporary antidote to the new reality we wake up to every morning."

• The University of California professor Paul Rabinow, a specialist in French

thought, has been keeping up with views from Paris. His mornings include Le Monde and Liberation on the Web. Some of the day's remainder has gone to a new translation of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and to Pascal.

• Like most people I know, Catharine Stimpson, a dean at New York University (NYU), has been reading The New York Times and her e-mail. ("Are you OK?" must be the most often-read sentence in Manhattan messages this week.) But she's been reading other things, too. "Given how close my job and home are to ground zero, I have been looking at the plumes of smoke and ash, at the walls and fences that now post fliers about the missing.

Heartbreaking fliers." Stimpson's reading this week includes one book, "because of its beauty and mingled compassion and anger": Psalms.

• Michael Taussig, a professor of anthropology at Columbia, has been reading Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari, although he confessed these were classroom readings. But he'd also found a video of John Houston's film The Man Who Would Be King, "because it's a story of imperialism and Afghanistan." I credited him with reading Kipling by proxy.

• At Dartmouth, the New Yorker Lawrence Kritzman was also reading Derrida-" 'Faith and Knowledge,' which helped me transcend the absolutism of the reflective media." Out of this complex text he could draw solace from Derrida's analysis of religious fundamentalism, Western or Muslim, and the philosopher's optimism.

Kritzman writes that Derrida "imagines a place that is not one, a geophysical abstraction where religion is practiced as a messianic universal without messianism, capable of displacing violence and enabling us to dream of a justice yet to come." Dreams of justice, dreams and justice, turned up in what many had to say.

• Michael Flamini, a vice president at Palgrave, works here in New York in the Flatiron Building. I can see it from my office's corner, and from his-until last week-he had a good view of the World Trade Center. "I've been reading Auden," he told me, "specifically the poems 'How History Will Judge Me,' 'The Chimeras,'

'Elegy for the City,' and one about hate that I can't remember the exact name of."

He thought Eliot's "The Waste Land" would be next up. But music-music with words-helped patch his week together, too. "I found great comfort in listening to Verdi's Requiem and reading the text."

This was a week of bad dreams and endless news coverage, and in between, when the clouds parted just enough, philosophy and fiction, everyday business and treasured comedy, politics and sacred texts.

Many of these books are, of course, being reread. It struck me that if every rereading re-creates its text and alters its reader, how much more different are these rereadings.

How different are we ourselves.

1 guess that reading about what others are reading is a bit like looking at other people's plates in a restaurant. A week has passed, and I'm hungry for books.

For music, too. I will listen to the Verdi Requiem, and this time, at least I will understand the Latin a bit better. I began this week away from books, unable to read even one, and I haven't had a good feeling about it. We need our books. We need them for solace and connection, for escape and comfort. We need them for political and historical facts that can help us make sense out of a world resisting our effort. Books will teach us the new language spoken here. We read, too, so we might find that part of ourselves forever wandering away, distracted, from the tasks we hope to undertake. We read to call ourselves back.

I've got my newspaper and newsmagazine reading to get through. The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian. But I'm ready now for the writers who can call me back.

I might start with Tocqueville, or maybe Donne's Sermons. And in between everything else, New Yorkers. Whitman, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Auden even.

Most of all, I want to spend time with writers who knew what moved and moves my beloved city.

0 About the Author: William Germano is vice president and publishing director at Routledge, world's leading publishers of academic books, particularly on social sciences and humanities.

Indian Writers in English Review by VALERIE MINER

Literature about India and Indians is enjoying great popularity in the United States these days. This current enthusiasm among American readers can be traced to increasing numbers of new neighbors from South Asia, to a growing understanding about post-colonial identity and to the fact that Americans are a traditionally mobile population with deep fascination about the definition of home. Indians were prohibited from becoming naturalized Us. citizens until 1946 because of the Barred Zone Act and the Asian Exclusion Act. In 1960, only 391 Indians immigrated here. According to Mira Kamdar, "In 1965, there were still only 20,000 immigrantsfrom India .... By 1980, there were almost 400,000. Since then, the number has tripled. " Dislocation, trespassing and settlement are prominent themes in these five books recently published in the Us.: Amit Chaudhuri S fourth novel, A New World, Anita Rau Badami s second novel, The Hero's Walk, Radhika Jha s debut novel, Smell, Manil Suri S debut novel, The Death of Vishnu and Mira Kamdar sfamily chronicle, Motiba's Tattoos. Each author raises fascinating questions about the relationship of self to family, culture and national identity. In several of the books characters balance precariously between honoring and breaking tradition while constructing expatriate lives.

A

mit Chaudhuri's A New World, the most provocative of these narratives, is a painstaking portrait of a man dislocated from himself.

While the novel sensitively renders three generations in transit, it is most powerfully a sonata of grief performed by a man losing his country, his culture, his language, his parents, his wife, his son, his very body in the pursuit of postcolonial success.

Deep in the wet heat of April, 37-year-old Jayojit Chatterjee visits his parents' small Calcutta flat, on vacation from his teaching post at a midwestern U.S. campus. He brings his eight-year-old, very American, son Vikram, whose custody he shares with his former wife Amala.

Early on, Admiral and Mrs. Chatteljee had marked Jayojit as the more promising of their two sons, sending him to good boarding schools as they traveled around the countly insulated by the relative privilege of high military rank. Now, the dour, failing Admiral and his doting wife live modestly in retirement. They are puzzled and hurt by Jayojit's divorce, but grateful for his visit.

The two months pass slowly as Jayojit acclimates to the heat and noise of his homeplace. He chats laconically with his stiff, ill father. Motherlove is communicated awkwardly through the preparation of fattening dishes which Jayojit resists because he is horrified by the weight he has gained eating junk food since the divorce. Young Vikram speaks minimal Bengali and is at first frightened by the "foreign" local kids. He retreats to dinosaur games and eventually walks the Calcutta streets with his depressed father.

On the surface, Jayojit did everything right-earning impressive degrees, marrying into a prominent Bengali family, securing a tenured job as an economics professor in the new world, raising a lovely son, maintaining a dutiful affection (and financial support) for his aging parents. His life is both gifted and blighted by opportunities of history.

On closer glance, Jayojit suffers profound grief. He is angty about his wife's departure, although they hadn't shared love or attraction for years. He is haunted by his own choice of the U.S. over

Britain for professional work. Reading the novel is like living inside someone afflicted with clinical depression. One numbingly, unsatisfactory day opens into the next as the increasing heat and humidity predict monsoon. Even the vocabularly descends into a dull vagueness about "someones" and "somewheres."

The troublesome incongruity of Jayojit's two worlds is apparent on arrival. "The heat had just begun to become intolerable-it was the middle of April. Outside, birds cried continuously, sharp, clear, obstinate cries." Soon he unpacks his survival kit from another continent, "Next he ... retrieved his shaving things, and his and Vikram's toilet accessories, Aquafresh toothpaste, Head and Shoulders shampoo, Bodyline deodorant, a cylinder of Old Spice shaving foam, a Backwood insect cutter which he'd brought in case of mosquitoes; these things gleamed the most and looked the most foreign and desirable, even the toothbrushes were different and curving, oddly, seemed to belong to the future and some fragile, opulent culture." Neither Western goods nor Western status can insulate him from Calcutta. "Ever since evening, the sound of television music and the voices of television characters had begun to come from other flats, like a form of public dreaming."

Chaudhuri is at his best describing the pulse and color and noise of complicated Calcutta through the eyes of a native once removed. Jayojit is annoyed by the loud Marwari wedding festivities nearby. He insults his mother by asking for bottled water, plagued by memories of gastroenteritis.

He waits anxiously, impotently, for the imminent monsoon.

"Again and again, but with no obvious regularity in the intervals, the chik stirred, creaked, with the sigh of a southeasterly breeze; and beyond, the guttural murmurs of idle drivers, the punctilious beating of metal, hovered with an air of expectancy."

Although A New World is heavy with anticipation, overt insight and change are elusive. Turning the almost soggy pages, we learn about the perks and disadvantages of Jayojit's fancy education, about the growing estrangement between husband and wife in a once hopeful malTiage and his currently lonely, lucky life in his town's second poshest neighborhood, where he has made hearty, superficial friendships with upwardly mobile neighbors.

Jayojit's finds relief in friendly conversations with Dr. Sen, his parents' physician. The cheerful, enigmatic Dr. Sen maintains his health by vigorous walking and seems happily married to his publicly invisible wife. Jayojit envies this balanced Indian existence that he can never achieve now that he has crossed the great waters.

Life insists on small movements. At the vacation's beginning, Jayojit does all he can to shut out the drone and clank of Calcutta.

However, on the way back to the U.S., he is unable to concentrate on his reading until he has taken in the voices of nearby passengers. Just before leaving, he recalls the Spirit from The Upanishads: "He moves, and he moves not.. ..He is near, and yet he is far."

telephone rings and rings one morning in the Rao household at the beginning of The Hero s Walk, by Anita Rau Badami. No one answers because all members of this multi-generational family are lost in personal preoccupations. ~ Perhaps some sense the ominous news on - the other end of the line.

Badami has created a cracking-at-theseams portrait of a downwardly mobile Brahmin family. She is pal1icularly adept at evoking every day existence in the town of Toturpuram on the Bay of Bengal-the noises of neighbors' radios and traffic congestion; the scents of food and perfumes and sewers; the hues of saris and jewelry and Southeast Indian landscape; the rituals of religious practice and family diplomacy.

The embattled protagonist, Sripathi Rao, a 57-year-old advertising copywriter, is the diffident patriarch in a crumbling house, which was once a Brahmin Street landmark. An intelligent, pensive, self-critical man, Sripathi has shattered his mother's dreams by not becoming a wealthy doctor. Meanwhile, he has abandoned his own aspirations of becoming a New Delhi journalist in order to remain a dutiful son in Toturpuram.

Sripathi is blessed in his marriage to Nirmala, who usually maintains a graceful equanimity despite exasperation with her tyrannical mother-in-law, her anxiety about dwindling family income and her loneliness for a daughter who has moved to Canada. Son Arun, a political activist and graduate student, spars with Sripathi about his joblessness. Sister Putti has almost lost marital eligibility at age 42 because her mother rejects every suitor. Putti's and Sripathi's mother, Ammayya, now in her eighties, is twisted with vengeance toward a husband who marred her life with sexual infidelity and financial insolvency and then died young, leaving her with two children. Her rancor infects the whole family as she harangues Sripathi, steals from Nirmala and imprisons Putti in involuntary spinsterhood. The only family member who seems happy is Sripathi's and Nirmala's daughter, Maya, who has a satisfying career and family in Vancouver.

Badami, who moved from India to Canada in 1991, is a provocative, compassionate writer, whose fiction recalls the work of another Indian-Canadian novelist, Rohinton Mistry, in her broad social sweep and close attention to emotional nuance. " ... Brahmin Street had changed so much in the past decade that people returning to it after several years could barely recognize it. Instead of the tender smell of fresh jasmine, incense sticks and vil1ue, instead of the chanting of sacred hymns, the street had become loud with the haggling of cloth merchants and vegetable vendors, the strident strains of the latest film music from video parlors whose windows flaunted gaudy posters of busy, thickthighed heroines, and beefy heroes with hair rising like puffs of smoke from their heads."

The annoying telephone continues to ring. When Sripathi finally answers it, he hears impossible news from a Canadian

A

stranger: Maya and her husband have been killed in an auto accident. Their will entrusts the care of seven-year-old andana to the Rao family.

Shock. Disbelief. Guilt. Grief. Sripathi wends his way through thick webs of heavy, terrifYing emotions as he recalls the singular love he once had for his first-born, the sweet, precocious, affectionate Maya. How proud he was of the scholarship girl with her auspicious engagement to the successful Prakash and his noble family. How hopeful he was for Maya's future when she flew off to university in North America. How betrayed he felt several years later when she broke her engagement to marry a Ph.D. student named Alan Baker. Angry and humiliated, Sripathi, who had sacrificed so many passions to family obligations, refused to allow Maya to return for an Indian wedding and then severed all communication.

Years of silence and now this. Of course as family head, Sripathi is the one who must travel to Canada to collect the reluctant, confused little girl. "How can I face my grandchild when I am responsible for her mother's death? Sripathi asked himself.

The more he thought about his actions eight years ago, the more convinced he was that his anger had somehow brought about Maya's demise. He had cursed her for her refusal to marry Prakash, for humiliating him ... for blackening the family name in the entire town. And the curse had killed her."

Sripathi's palpable remorse makes the child even more distressed about leaving her home and flying across the globe. The plane and train journey from the Pacific shore to the coast of the Bay of Bengal is a wretched trial for each of them. Like the rest of her newly discovered-and seemingly bizarre-foreign family, Nandana retreats to fantasy, a daydream she has harbored since she learned about her parents' deaths. "If she concentrated really hard, she thought-if she didn't speak, if she sat absolutely still-she could see her blue house and her parents and her room with its Minnie Mouse lampshade .... She could see her mother moving around in \ the kitchen, making supper, and her father hunched over his computer, typing away."

Nandana finds life in Toturpuram uncomfortable and scary. She runs away several times, planning to fly to her parents and their orderly, safe Canadian life. When the child is returned to the house on Brahmin Street, she maintains a protest of muteness, as if speaking to the Raos or her teachers and classmates would break the spell of her parents' survival.

Family dramas unfold around her. Arun persists in attempts to prevent environmental apocalypse, even after being badly beaten at a demonstration. Ammayya revels in the bitter conviction that others plot to steal her jewelry. Putti develops a secret flirtation with a non-Brahmin neighbor. Although much of the story is experienced from Sripathi's perspective, Badami's judicious, omniscient narrator portrays each relative with a full score of strengths, vulnerabilities, superstitions and tentative hopes.

The trope of hero-ancient and contemporary, mythical and mundane-echoes in everyone's consciousness. Sripathi has

worn a heavy mantle from a young age. "His grandmother told him gallant tales of heroism and cunning and wit and honor; of Aljuna the great archer, of King Harishchandra, whose honesty shook even the heavens .... At the end of every story, she would gather him in her jowly arms, pinch his sharp little chin (which, in adulthood, would give him the look of a prim bird), and say creakily, "now you, my darling Sri, my raja, my beautiful boy, you will grow up and become like Prince Arjuna, won't you? You will conquer every obstacle ...."

One day Sripathi argues to Nirmala that Ravana, not Rama, is the real hero of ancient times. Nirmala disagrees. "A hero is humble," she declares. Even and ana is described as a heroine after she boldly accepts the dare of her new little "friends" and enters a dark tunnel. Ultimately Badami's novel celebrates daily heroism: Nirmala's tolerance; Putti's optimism about a late marriage; Arun's political commitment; Ammayya's cranky survival and Sripathi's spiritual growth as he accepts his own and other people's foibles.

Little Nandana becomes an agent of light and incremental change in this shadowed household. When she disappears for a very long period, each person is forced to examine her/his role in the family. They do not want to lose Nandana as they have lost Maya, but how can they aveti tragedy?

Badami draws her characters together in a series of believable climaxes and concludes with a delicately crafted epilogue. Hereand throughout the novel-her writing is lively, honest, psychologically astute. The Hero:S Walk is sustained by clear-eyed hopefulness born of a generous spirit and seasoned common sense.

L

eela Patel represents a hero of another sort as she crosses treacherous cultural and emotional borders in Radhika Jha's picaresque, highly metaphorical first novel, Smell. A refugee from Kenya's anti-Asian uprisings, 18-year-old Leela is dispatched to live with a very unsympathetic uncle and aunt in the Paris suburbs. Unable to "?-. speak French and with no material re• 't.sources, she copes by exploring this peculiar new world through her preternatural ability to smell.

"When the wind blew hard, as it did very often that spring, the smell of fresh baguette would fight its way into the Epicerie Madras to do battle with the prickly smell of pickles and masalas ... .It would enter the store confidently, making light of the heavy-breasted, sari-wrapped mannequins, Chinese prayer wheels, and Indian video cassettes that were on display in the large window still facing the street. Before the shelves of cooked foods-banana chips fried in coconut oil, samosas, gulab jamuns and papads-it would pause, some of its strength diminished by the pungent foreign odors."

Jha skillfully examines the intersections between the exotic and the alien. A comely young woman, Leela becomes a focus of

sexual fascination as well as a target of racist revulsion in urbane Paris. She grows ashamed of her background, imagining she exudes a fierce, feral scent. " ... the smell haunted me, surfacing when I least expected. Sometimes, when we were dining en famille, at the table I would smell it, hidden amongst the coq au vin and quiche, nestling in the leaves of the spicy Alsacienne Choucroute. Sometimes as I rose to go to the bathroom, it would creep out of the sheets with me. Or when [ went to the supermarket, it would whistle past me in the aisles filled with people.

Sometimes, even in the Metro it would be right there behind me, as I stood face to face with a beautiful stranger."

As Leela suffers estrangement from her own body and blocks memories of the lovely country that raised her and then banished her, she gradually develops a sensual appreciation for the colors and fashions and music and language of France. She discovers her own blossoming beauty and learns that for many French men, her attractiveness stems from a complicated lust for "the other."

After a long and tortuous stay with her exploitative relatives, Leela escapes to the flat ofa friend's friend and then gets hired as a live-in au pair. Her employers turn out to be a sexually experimental husband and wife who draw her into their fantasies. One threatening situation leads to another and her lonely dislocation is masked by a growing shame and self-disgust. lha's narrative style is studied, sometimes elegant, sometimes precious, interestingly reflecting Leela's self-consciousness.

The increasingly glamorous and outwardly poised Leela has a series of sexual liaisons. The most intense affair is with Philippe Lavalle, a caterer and grocer extraordinnaire, whom she seduces through her own uncommon appreciation for eating. "I cooked magenta turnip greens with spinach and tossed them with a creamy sauce of almonds and fresh goats' cheese, slightly sweetened with honey. The chicken had the dark earthy flavor ofthe olives and a lovely terracotta color. I cooked the grated carrots lightly with lemon, olive oil, ginger and mustard seeds. And finally, as the night came, I cut up raw papaya and oranges and white radish and garnished them with olive oil, lemon, honey and coriander."

The canny reader will jot down a few recipes while reading the book. lha triumphs in her evocation of food, whether she's showing Leela cooking fusion delights or eating in fancy restaurants or visiting Lavalle's over-priced sybaritic food emporium, the Bon Marche. "It was warm inside, and the air was heavy with a complex cocktail of the smells of exotic fruits and flowers. Hanging from the trees and from driftwood stands were baskets of colorful fruit. Tiny yellow bananas fanned out around a bottle-green pineapple, and huge orange mangoes from South India sat beside passionfruit from East Africa, mangosteens from Indonesia, and tiny mandarin oranges from China. There were bougainvillea bushes, a riot of crimson, magenta, and white, amidst which were little white wrought-iron tables bearing hors d'oeuvres or candied tropical fruit and marzipan."

Leela's affair with Lavalle soon festers in sado-masochism.

Leela is trapped by her economic poverty, social insecurity and paralyzing self-hatred. When she eventually leaves Lavalle, she hangs out with immigrants and other marginal people, always anxious about the missing carte de sejour, which will legally and figuratively absolve her of her foreignness. lust as Nandana offers a new eye to life on Brahmin Street in The Hero:S Walk, Leela's fresh responses to Paris are enlightening and comprise some of the novel's best moments. "Another world. Separated from me by a thin sheet of glass. My head is pressed against the glass. On the other side of it, an elderly couple stare at me. They look frightened. They whisper to the waiter and point. He turns and stares at me too. His eyes are empty and hard ... .I turn and start walking. The street is awash with people, Africans, Indians, Arabs, Chinese, French, Tamils. It looks disorderly, the forms and colors and shapes of the foreign people wildly at variance with the old graceful buildings and the secret courtyards. The bourgeoisie who still live in those courtyards have retreated behind fortified, wrought-iron doors. The streets belong now to the jobless, the hungry, the smelly, who fill them with their ceaseless, wordless needs. I don't belong with them. I belong inside, in a restaurant or a well-ordered apmtment, where everything is arranged to evoke desire."

Smell introduces Radhika lha as a promising writer, deeply aware of internal struggle as well as of physical gratification.

Her Iiterary inexperience is revealed in an episodic looseness and a fairy tale ending. But lha's bold evocation of Leela's enjoyment of sensual pleasures and her heroic survival of racist abuse make this a notable debut novel.

M

anil Suri's The Death of Vishnu explores multiple dislocations among residents in a Bombay apartment block. Suri's novel opens as Vishnu, an alcoholic handyman, is dying in the stairwell. Sprawled across the steps, stinking up the building with his vomit and defecation, Vishnu causes as much trouble in death as he did in life. In particular, he frustrates Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak, whose long-time feud over their shared kitchen now extends to an acrimonious fight over caretaking Vishnu.

This first novel by Manil Suri, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is a lively pastiche of Victorian saga, Bollywood soap opera and Vedic parable. All the building residents experience psychological Diaspora, desiring more material comfort, more social prominence or more spiritual transcendence.

Vishnu becomes the novel's star in a series of memories, dreams and fantasies. Suri's other successful characters are a middle-aged Muslim couple, Arifa lalal, a devoted, olthodox wife, fearful that

her husband's ecumenical religious quest is blasphemous, and Ahmed Jalal, an energetic man, embarrassed by his wife's nan'owmindedness. Vishnu is introduced in short scenes, which, like the inter-chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, set the story's spiritual geography. Indifferent to passersby, a sheet tossed over him to conceal corporeal leaks, Vishnu revisits his childhood with a loving mother, who reminds him to carty his god name carefully, and with a drunken father, who forces alcohol down his throat. He recalls a deluded romance with Padmini, a prostitute, who ekes small gifts from his almost empty pockets. He remembers the kindness and insults of the apartment residents. And he begins to evolve into his next incarnation.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Asrani's snooty friends almost trip over him as they ascend for their card game. The Asranis and Pathaks argue over who will pay for Vishnu's ambulance. Young Kavita Asrani is being courted by the Jalals' son, Salim, creating tensions far greater than any mustered by the Montagues or the Capulets. At the top of the building lives Vinod Taneja, still mourning the long ago death of his young wife.

Anyone with spiritual ken would understand that things are about to fall apart. In Hindu scripture, Vishnu is the Preserver, a member of the Trimurti with Shiva, the Destroyer, and Brahma, the Creator. But most of Vishnu's neighbors are too busy striving for posher, deeper, more romantic lives to imagine him as anything more than a nuisance and to confront the implications of his death.

One night Kavita and Salim slip away and while the young couple suffer the indignities of a second-class train to "nowhere," suspicions brew about their disappearance. Soon almost everyone, except the absent-minded Taneja and the immobile Vishnu, are battering down the Jalals' door, claiming the Muslim parents have stolen the innocent Kavita, who was just about to make a good Hindu marriage to a promising engineer. For Mrs. Jalal the attack has terrifying resonance. "She remembered all those nights in Dongri during Partition, cowering under the bed with afeesa as Hindu gangs roamed the streets outside."

Suri writes with strong images and dramatic pacing. His short sections-clips of Vishnu's consciousness and a portrait of Radiowalla, a poor man who spends all his money on a portable radio-are palticularly effective. The one page scene of sectarian rumor-mongering is a tour de force. "The news traveled fast down the core of the building, raging through the ground floor like an out-of control conflagration. ShOlt Ganga told the cigarettewalla who told the paanwalla, who told the electrician. Mr. Jalal had been found sleeping on the steps, and when he awoke, had tried to molest Mrs. Pathak in front of her husband. Man Who Slept on Lowest Step heard about it from the cigarettewalla, who added his own fictitious update .... " Despite the nuanced pOttraits of Vishnu and the Jalals, Suri resorts to caricature with the Asranis and the Pathaks, featuring hysterical superficial women overpowering their passive, bumbling husbands. Kavita's movie-brain is a clever symbol for the celluloid commodification of imagination, but deprives us of an authentic younger figure. In shOtt, Suri infantalizes characters, echoing the complaint of so many Indian readers that expatriate

writers exoticize life on the subcontinent for the pleasure and prejudice of Western audiences. A gentler remonstration is that this promising author writes too quickly for the multi-dimensionality which can be earned from thoughtful critique and revision. otiba s Tattoos, Mira Kamdar's socio-political memoir about her far-flung family, depicts the Indian Diaspora in its most traditional sense as her relatives travel from a small Gujarati village to Burma to Bombay to the U.S., while maintaining ties to homeland culture, to their Jain religious principles and to Motiba, Kamdar's exemplary grandmother.

Born in 1957 to a Danish American mother and an Indian immigrant father, Kamdar grows up proud of her Indian identity. She is especially drawn to Motiba, who always represents resilience, love and dignity. After Motiba's death, Kamdar, a senior fellow at New York's World Policy Institute, sets out to study this grandmother and her offspring. "An ancient nomadic tribe, the Kathiawars who spawned my family were always, in the words of my father, 'people from somewhere else.' " Kamdar's family moves to Burma, becoming successful Rangoon merchants in the 1920s and '30s. During World War II, the family makes a harrowing flight from the promised land.

Eventually they settle in Bombay. Here Kamdar's father, entranced by American movies, decides to immigrate to the U.S. in 1947. He is followed by three siblings. Motiba makes several long visits to the land where her grandchildren are born.

Kamdar's documentation of her family's adventurous fortunemaking and losing is impressive. While her criticism of British Colonialism is apt, she fails to draw the parallel between that and Indian neo-colonialism in Burma, abashed that the Burmese never return her family's property. In the last two chapters, Kamdar deals with Indian American communities and cultures.

Throughout the book, she laces family stories with photos and with Motiba's recipes for mango pickle, ratio, chickpea dumplings and other dishes-precious documents she doesn't want lost on the long, continuing trai I. " ... this devotion to family, community and moneymaking over place is what has given the Gujarati bania community-and other Diaspora communitiesits ability to survive."

D

M

About the Author: Valerie Miner is a novelist and essayist. Her tenth book, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir, was recently published by Michigan State University Press. She first visited South Asia in 1988. In 2000, she was in India on a six-month Fulbright Fellowship. Currently she is professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Sections of this essay were previously

published in the Chicago Tribune.

28 January. 2001, and The Women> Review o/Books.

July, 2001.

Writing Manju Kapur, author of Difficult Daughters, reflects on how she became a writer

I

was brought up with all the trappings of a modern, emancipated woman, with a covert traditional agenda. Work and be independent, but also get married and have children. If there were contradictions in this message I never discovered them till much later.

All around me girls were being given the same general injunctions. This was post Independence India-we were a new nation-women had fought in the freedom struggle.

Education was given great importance.

I was never taught the traditional female arts, no cooking, no sewing, no housekeeping skills-all that will come when it has to, my mother would say, and I was left alone to read, study, and do well in school and college, because that was my duty.

I performed my duties adequately, adequately enough to get a scholarship to go abroad and do an M.A. My mother looked at me anxiously as I left, don't do anything I won't do. We both knew what she was talking about-my virginity, although I pretended not to understand what she was referring to.

How do I know what you won't do, I demanded. I am me, you are you.

My mother looked unhappy, I looked hopeful and left.

Eventually I found myself in Delhi teaching English at a college in Delhi University. This was something my education fitted me for, a woman's job, not much status and

certainly very little money.

It also fitted in with the kind of upbringing I had had.

I had been taught that women should be something, they should have independence to earn them some moneynot too much, because after all a woman'a place is primarily in her house. If the home is neglected, [by the woman-it was all up to her] the family suffered, and that would never do.

For 15 years I taught, had children, and kept house.

While I love teaching, it was quite clear that I was never going to be a hot shot academic. I was not going to attend seminars, write papers, publish them, argue with learned colleagues. A lot of my fellow teachers in Miranda House College were making exciting connections between English literature and post-colonial studies, but I lacked that intellectual rigor and discipline.

By the time I was 40, dissatisfaction had set in. I wanted something more, but where or what could I do? Leaving the house was out of the question, I left it enough as a teacher. House, husband, children took all my other time.

And yet, because so much of me was connected to other people, a sense of unreality oppressed me-was 1 going to live and die like this, my only achievement my children, the girls I had taught, the meals I had presided over, the corners of the house I had cleaned.

I started writing. Very tentatively. I started with poetry, because in between domestic and professional duties, a poem of 12 or 15 lines was quite manageable.

For two years I wrote in this mode and eventually I had over 200 poems. I tried sending them to a few journals, some were rejected, some were published, but as is the fate of much poetly they went largely unnoticed. I moved on to plays. Longer, but still manageable. After two more years I discovered that plays shared a problem similar to poems-they were hard to publish. My hemt sank, my spirit failed, there seemed to be no place else to go but toward a long prose piece-I dared not use the word novel till much much later.

heard. I learned to time my writing when the room would be quiet, early in the morning, late at night, about 45 minutes between six and seven in the evening.

By this time I was part of a women's writers' group. It was true that we were never more than five or six, but still it was a community of writers, of all ages, dealing with the difficulties of writing. I was witness to the slow and painstaking work that went into drafts, I saw how often writing was dull, grouping, uninspiring, repetitive and obscure. How stupid of me not to see writing as a process, but I hadn't-I had only had exposure to the finished products, and was very hazy as to what went into their creation. I taught novels, dissected them minutely, related text to context, but this somehow threw little light on my own writing.

I found being pmt of a group very supportive. I nerved myself to read out my "piece" to them [still not using the word novel] after I had written about 50 pages. As I read, they flattered me by wanting to know what would happen. If nothing else for almost three years there were five other women in the world that I was entertaining on a monthly basis.

All this was painfully gradual. Two years stretched to three-three years to finish a first draft of a novel. [ must be the slowest writer in the world I thoughtif I was a writer at all which was constantly open to question. Nobody believed I was a writer, not me, not my family, and of course the world was out of the question. All this time with nothing to show for it.

The years stretched to five. Then six. Still nothing to show for it. Sitting at the computer, going through sheaves of paper, was just something I did-like not drinking water while eating, or reading books in the bathroom.

I was nearing 50. Viltually all my forties had been spent on this one book. Often I wondered if the time spent was wOlth it-but I had no other options.

Whether or not I was successful I had grown to feel quite passionately about writing, and the days I couldn't do it were days I felt half myself. I could not afford to think that perhaps all my efforts might be doomed to fail. I kept on.

When Difficult Daughters finally appeared in June 1998, almost eight years had passed.

Initially I decided that for two years I will not question myself, I will not say what I have written is bad, dull, uninteresting, and why am I doing this. I will write calmly and serenely, with confidence and pleasure. After all what do I lose?

And every day I broke my vow. Every day I said this is horrible, dull-who in the world will want to read this garbage. There was no name I did not call myself-there was no epithet I did not use for daring to write a novel. I showed it to no one in the familyit was unimportant to everyone but me. I did not even have a separate place to write. I wrote in our family cum drawing room, where our computer was. The children played there, the servants passed through, the phone rang, the TV was on, loud music could be

I had had no idea of what I was going to write before 1 began, my stOly grew in fits and starts. I knew what I was interested in-family, marriage, women and education, but I had no notion of how to weave a story around this. Interviews, research, field trips-the tools of an academic-these are what I used. I researched as I wrote, often not knowing what incident I was going to base the next chapter on.

Sometimes I am asked what do you advise writers?

[That's easy-read a lot, and write every day.] But sometimes I am asked what is your message for women? This is more difficult. Establishing an identity through writing may not be everybody's cup of tea.

I usually give some vague answer-look for ways in which to express themselves, grow, be strong, but the truth is I don't really know. It is difficult for women, and there are no general solutions.

D About the Author: Manju Kapur is a professor of English at Miranda House College in Delhi. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters, received the Commonwealth Award for the Eurasian region.

A Trip An excerpt from a forthcoming novel by Manju Kapur

T

he anticipated U.S.A. trip split Astha more decisively than anything else since she had got to know Pipee. There was her lover, and her lover's feelings, the need to spend as much time with her as she could before she went away. But there was also the visas, the foreign exchange, the getting ready, the packing, the shopping for presents, the shopping for suitable clothes, shoes, deciding what to take, changing their minds, then deciding all over again.

With their holiday abroad Hemant and Astha joined the havegone-abroad club, whose denizens created envy and ill concealed curiosity about how much money they were going to spend, where had they got it from, even with the factory in trouble they can afford to go, they must have kept it away all these years.

Many people took their proposed trip badly. The most immediate was Sangeeta who was there as usual for the summer holidays. She insisted on being part of the discussion and planning that revolved around itineraries, addresses of friends of friends, cheap fares, cheap central hotels, foreign exchange. Astha had to brace herself against her flow of enthusiasm.

"One day r too will go abroad, Seema, is always inviting me," she said.

It has nothing to do with me, thought Astha, if she is angling for a trip let her angle directly. Sangeeta sighed, announced Poison was her favourite perfume and disappeared upstairs for the day.

Anuradha said now her friends would not be able to act so superior, she too could tell stories of abroad, and Himanshu said

now he could have the latest in Nintendo and Sega, and could they please go to Hamleys.

"Hamleys? What is Hamleys?" asked Astha.

"A shop in London," said Himanshu. "Everybody goes there."

"He is so retarded," said Anuradha.

Astha hoped the trip wasn't feeding into her children's materialist desires.

Astha's mother was delighted. She wrote from her ashram: God bless you my little one, and your family. Poor Hemant needs a break. You do not give him enough attention, remember home is the refuge from the world. 1am sure the children will have nice time.

Pipee retreated further into herself, getting ready for her summer, Shahjehanpur and Ayodhya, we'll compare notes when I get back, bye, no need to drop me to the station, Sadiq is doing that, have a nice time, call me on our return.

Astha felt Pipee's abandonment, but maybe she thinks I have left her, she brooded in the middle ofthe night, when the electricity went, and the couple lay sweating.

"1 will be glad to leave this fucking country," muttered Hemant.

"So will I," muttered his wife.

Delhi, the trap in summer, with power cuts, water shortages, heat waves, dusty winds, and pollution emanating from all its pores. Not the garden city of their youths, but fourth, third, creeping up to second, now coughing and wheezing its way to first, yes, almost there, almost the first most polluted city in the world.

A trip abroad would be nice, no matter whom one loved and whom one left behind.

Finally the family took off on their cheap flight to Virginia, with a stopover at London on the way back.

Hour after hour into the dark night they flew. Four abreast, in the cental section of the plane, father, mother, daughter, son going to holiday on Western shores.

"Are you all right?" Hemant would ask from time to time.

Astha nodded, her eyes closed. She wondered at the great silence concerning the discomfort of planes, the torture one had to undergo to get to the lands of milk and honey. Her knees were hurting in the small cramped space, her shoulders and back were aching, a headache was coming on, would she make it to the bathroom to throw up if she had to. Excuse me, I am sick, I have to throw up, madam use the bag in the pocket in front of your seat, yes, there it is, sorry, not at all, it is placed there for your convenience, thank you, not at all.

The rest were enjoying themselves. Himanshu was absorbed in the child kit the airline had given him, Anuradha had her headset glued to her ears, and fiddled with the dials constantly. Hemant was nursing his drink, chewing with relish on the peanuts that came with it, tinkling the ice and the alcohol in his glass, twitching his toes in the airline socks, his shoes neatly stowed away under the seat before him, already looking more relaxed than he had in months.

They stayed for three weeks in Virginia. Hemant talked incessantly of his life as a student, and how he had slummed it, how he had worked to gain a little extra money, how he had slept two hours a night, how the great American tradition encouraged selfreliance from babyhood, how you had to sink or swim, how the whole society was geared towards meritocracy, not towards blackmailing people by going on strike. Loafers wanting something for nothing were not tolerated here.

Seema and Suresh sympathised completely, never mind, you have family, family still means something, and they talked ofhere and there, there and here till Astha felt her ears would fall off.

Three weeks crammed in their guest room, three weeks of Anuradha feeling jealous of everything that Sushma [the daughter] had to show her.

"School in the USA is paradise," she announced to her mother.

"They get hardly any homework, they chose what they want to study. And her maths, I can do it with my eyes shut."

"I am sorry, darling," said Astha looking at her daughter's angry face.

"Why should you be sony?" said Anuradha turning upon her mother, the easiest person in the world for her to turn upon.

"The system here is easier, that's aliI meant."

"She thinks she is so clever, but she is not Mama, I know much more than she does. Her handwriting and spelling is so bad, you wouldn't believe, but she doesn't care, and neither do her teachers. She says in the computer her writing and spelling come out

OK, so what is the point? Imagine she can't even write."

"You are better off beti, you can write, you can spell, you can do maths, when you come here for higher studies, you will be at an advantage."

Anuradha looked mollified. "I'll show her," she muttered.

"Quite," said Astha, "and while you are about it, do remember that we are guests in their house, and that she is your cousin."

"She has an American accent."

"That is not something she can help, she only knows this countlY, poor thing."

Mother and daughter smiled slightly at one another. Nothing is so much a bond as criticising relatives.

The marriage of Seema and Suresh was a source of great amazement to the brother and sister-in-law. Seema and Suresh constantly deferred to each other. Suresh cleared up after meals, ran the dishwasher, did the grocery shopping, mowed the lawn on weekends, and went to the park with his son to kick a few balls in the evening, almost as a duty.

"What has happened to Suresh," wondered Hemant. "He was never like this at home."

"This is not home," replied Astha.

"Poor chap," went on Hemant. "Vou should have seen him when he was just married. Boozing and smoking with the rest of us. Now he doesn't even touch a cigarette." Hemant fumbled for his own packet, and lit one, to further express his disgust.

"He doesn't look so unhappy to me," said Astha.

"He is ashamed to look me in the eye," declared Hemant, surrounding those very eyes with smoke.

"It's built on 27,000 acres, acres and acres of fun," said Suresh, while Seema sketched the delights of the fairy tale park, water park, animal park, future park, past park, spOlis park. She spoke with all the pride of ownership.

"Nothing like this is available in your India," concluded Suresh, slapping Hemant on the shoulder.

They planned to drive to Orlando and spend three days there.

The hotels were expensive, but to absorb such wonders money was necessary.

Hemant offered to participate in the driving, but Suresh did some more back slapping, this was America, not your India, where you could drive without an International Driving Licence or indeed without any kind oflicence at all, just a bribe.

Disney World, Orlando, Florida, USA. Is such a thing possible in your India? There was no end to this question, as Hemant was forced time and again, to say no, such a thing was not possible in their India.

So organised, such crowds, such a money making machine, such technological marvels, such fantasy, such going through tunnels, haunted houses and castles, such an onslaught of souvenirs, such marvelling, such eating of hamburgers, hot dogs,

So organised, such crowds, such a money making machine, such technological marvels, such fantasy, such going through tunnels, haunted houses and castles, such an onslaught of souvenirs ....

Kentucky Fried Chicken, tacos, and thick milkshakes. Around they wandered with those milkshakes which never seemed to end, sipping the cold sweet stuff through giant straws. Was there anything in this country that wasn't big?

Anuradha and Himanshu loved it, Hemant loved it, Suresh, Seema plus two kids, their millionth visit with Indian tourist and wonder seeker in tow, they loved it all over again. Even Astha managed to be caught up in what she saw and experienced. They were all children together, all Mickey Mousers in a Disney World.

Besides families everywhere there were couples embracing, couples walking with their hands in each others pockets, kissing, eating, conversing, laughing.

Suresh and Seema became even more of a couple here. They were walking, holding hands. For our benefit, or because they are on holiday, or because they have lived in America so long, or because they love each so much? It was the last possibility that Astha could bear the least. Anything but that. Anything but that Hemant's sister should live in bliss while she lived in misery.

"I thought Disney World was for children," she remarked to Seema.

Seema and Suresh both grinned at her.

"Arre, people come here to have a good time," said Suresh.

Astha didn't ask what touching had to do with that, the words sounded jealous.

"Well wife," said Hemant, the first night at the hotel, his most affectionate, swept by emotion at having seen Disney World, and recorded it on a thousand pictures taken for the benefit of back home, "that was quite an experience, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was."

It was late, the children had fallen asleep, exhausted by so much pleasure and walking around. Hemant sat next to Astha, and put his arm around her.

"How's your head?" he enquired tenderly.

"OK" They sat on in silence. After a while Astha dislodged herself.

"I have to pee," she said.

"OK," said Hemant, getting up as well.

"What are you doing?"

"Coming with you."

"Don't be silly."

"What's so silly about it?"

It was easier to let him come, and Astha sat on the toilet seat, feeling a bit strange.

"Go away," she said, "I can't pee."

He ran the tap.

"Now?" A small trickle. Hemant tore a piece of toilet paper and advanced his hand towards her legs. The trickle stopped. Her legs tightened. "Please leave the bathroom," she stammered.

"Why? I'm your husband."

"So what?"

"I want my conjugal rights."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Do I have to spell it out?"

"No you don't. But why all ofa sudden?"

"We are on holiday. This is what people do on holiday."

"I don't want to. I am out of practice."

"Well, let's get into practice," said Hemant stretching out his hand again towards her legs.

"I am not able to switch on and off like you," said Astha.

"Nothing in Delhi, and now suddenly you want sex."

"It is not as though you were the most willing creature. Oflate each time 1try and come near you, you say you have a headache.

A man is tired, he can't be doing the chasing all the time."

"Is that what you call it, chasing? Because you don't have sex on demand? There has to be something more between us. I have to feel it is me you want."

Hemant looked baffled. "Of course it's you I want. You are my wife."

"That's the problem. Anybody could be your wife."

"What rubbish. I picked you, didn't I?" "Picking is not the same as knowing."

"Why do you always make things so complicated? You are my wife, that is enough for me, 1would have thought it is enough for you. Or is it someone else?"

"Don't be silly," said Astha flushing.

"Come on darling. We are on holiday. 1 want this to bring us closer, as a family, and a couple."

He had felt her distance, he wanted her back. There seemed to be no way out, unless she decided to leave the marriage there and then. Slowly she moved towards him. With sleeping children in the room they would of course have sex in the bathroom. He spread a towel on the mat and waited for her to undress.

D

ADrealll of Fair WOlllen ike a night sentry on the border between India and dream country, Singh, the restaurateur, watched her from the little lamplit bar, his post. Over six feet tall, he was made even taller by his emerald green turban, and his Nehru jacket was as white as Himalayan snow. Alma was the last waitress to arrive, and even though she was on time the near-miss must seem to him a portent of ruin. The most famous of roving gourmets was to be his guest this night, a man who would either place the restaurant on the map of the world or obliterate it with a few cruelly chosen words or no words at all.

The tiled cubicle restroom was still fi'agrant with the colognes of the other waitresses who, by arriving early and lighting the candles on all the tables, were like angels promising a celestial ending to this night. She slipped her costume on, drawing up the long cotton underskirt, smoothing the snug silk vest over her breasts, draping the red silk sari around her waist and over one shoulder, her hands weak with fear over her own night apart fi'om the restaurant's night. While she was at work this night, her lover would take away his possessions-a simple task, there were so few. They had agreed that the most bearable time for both was when she was not there. All afternoon she had raged against the woman he was going to, and now she could not even clear her ravaged throat to see if she still had a voice. And he had held her, he had caressed her, his face confounded. He was like someone dispatched to the ends of the earth, with no idea of what was to happen to him there.

The sitar music began its nightlong spiraling from the stereo in the alcove next to the restroom. She folded her clothes into her canvas bag, carried her coat and bag to the employees' closet, and emerged into the opulent dark of the dining area.

Early diners waited at the bar, and over their heads he signaled her to escort them to their tables. His wife, Lila, the hostess, was in the kitchen, overseeing the preparation of the dishes to be set before the honored guest. A feast was in the making, created by the three silent Indian cooks, women of the same birdlike smallness, the same dark skin, their dark gray hair drawn back into a knot at the nape of their thin necks, their heads always bowed over their tasks.

The restaurant this night was more than ever like a stage, and, to Alma's eyes, unforgivably deceptive. Light from the candles within the faceted glass globes on the tables glided up and down

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the waitresses' saris and shimmered along their necklaces, turned ivory the waiters' white turbans, and glinted off the engraved brass trays, large as giants' shields, hanging on the walls. The candles set aglow the faces of the women at the tables, and she saw-more sharply than ever-how, tables apart, a room apart, women glanced at one another as if by mistake, as if indifferently, to see who was the most beautiful ofall.

At the bar, Singh appeared more Indian than ever, drawn up to his full height by the advent of the famous gourmet. But only Singh and the two waiters and just one of the three waitresses were authentic. None of the patrons-she was sure-suspected that he was born on a dirt farm in the San Joaquin Valley and had never set foot in India, nor that both waiters, flawless as a maharaja's servants, were students enrolled in business administration classes, nor that the one Indian waitress-Kamala, aloof, remote-spoke street language in the kitchen, ridiculing the diners, and was a fervent belly dancer. The rest were impostors. She was one herself, her parents Chilean. Lila was from the Detroit ghetto, but Indian ancestry could easily be imagined for her large eyes, her prematuryly white hair and dark skin, her thin little hands. Marlie was ghetto-born, too, but her silky, gold-flecked, flitting presence so mesmerized the patrons that two or three or four men dining together would loudly declare, for all to hear, that Indian women were the most beautiful in the world.

When Alma came to the bar with her little brass tray to order drinks, Singh was gazing out over the tables, losing his way by candlelight, his soft, dark face plump with desire.

"That woman at the corner table," he said. "What a face! Right out of those old movies where they come down those long, curving stairs to breakfast. Who is she? She looks familiar."

Every beautiful woman is always someone waited for and always recognized as someone seen before. Alma had never told him this notion of hers. For one reason, he wouldn't know what she was talking about, and, for another reason, she'd be confessing a bewilderment of her own.

"Remind me," he said, pouring drinks. "Remind me to tell you about a woman I knew in Texas. She looked like that. She almost died when I left. Why I ran out on her I don't know. I was just a dumb kid, knocking around. I thought I had my destiny to look after. She would've left her husband for me. A filthy rich oilman,

but she would've left him. In my life nothing synchronizes."

On quiet nights, when his wife wasn't there, and when all the diners had left, then how many intimate things he told her about the women of his past, about what pleased them in bed, what subtle artistry of his. On busy nights when his wife was there, and after the restaurant doors were closed, then the departing waiters and waitresses would pretend not to see what was going on at the bar. Lila, on a stool, was bent low over the counter, fiercely accusing him of present affairs, past ones, and those to come, while he ranged within his small space like a tiger tormented by its keeper.

At the top of the stairs, Lila was welcoming the celebrated columnist, her face endowed by that guest with a brief flare oftendel', pleading beauty. Alma, waiting at the bar for a glass to be filled, saw closely how affected Singh was by the famous gourmet-a man unexpectedly brisk, trim and gray, like an executive with no time or talent for savoring-and by his companion, another familiar beauty. Their presence stole away Singh's natural suavity, his air of reserve. He stepped out from behind the bar and, towering over the couple, shook hands with the man and bowed his head quickly to the woman, then gave them back to his wife, who led them to their table, her head high, her silk garments floating.

"What's her name?" he asked Alma. "She's an actress. I've seen her, but I can't remember which movie." With unusually hasty hands he concocted the third Pimm's Cup for her tray, fumbling the long slice of cucumber.

It was in those moments of their arrival that he first appeared to have lost his wits. Alma blamed the loss on the woman of shocking beauty and on the man who could either make or break the restaurant, but, as the evening wore on, the reason for his odd behavior began to seem not so simple. On other evenings he would wander among the diners, shaking hands with steadfast patrons and with celebrities he recognized-a violinist, a comedian, an opera singer-his eyes darkening to a degree in accord with the patron's significance out in the world, and he would chat for only the graceful length of time, longer for the lesser ones, shorter for the greater ones. But this night he remained behind the bar, gazing out to the couple at their table apart.

Hovering over the couple, Lila confided to them the ingredients of each dish as it was set down by their waiter, and the number of seconds, the number of minutes required for two and more ingredients to fuse perfectly.

"He won't talk to them," she complained to Alma in the kitchen, appealingly, as though Alma could persuade him, and resignedly, because the pain of this frustration was hers alone, and out she went through the swinging doors, followed by the waiter, bearing on his tray the evening's most elaborate offering, roast pheasant glazed with gold leaf, a bird of molten gold.

This hours-long homage to the famous guest recalled to Alma the Shah of Iran's great feast for select hundreds of the world's celebrities and dignitaries. The magazine had shown luxurious tents where they slept, and the banquet like no other, and the long parade of waiters bearing peacocks on trays, their fantastic plumage adorning again their roasted bodies. She felt scorn for

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this guest who was mesmerized by the food set before him and who seemed unaware of time and how it steals away every morsel, like a cunning beggar. ventually, Singh gave in. It was at the vety end of the meal, which had become a celebration of the lives of the two guests, with gifts from the sea, from earth's black loam, from vine, from tree, from the perfumed air. He stood above them, gazing at the face ofthe gourmet, a face soothed by the many gifts but tantalizingly withholding gratitude, patches of lacy capillaries like a clown's rouge on cheeks and nose; and gazing, in turn, at the woman's lifted face and at her throat, that lovely channel down which all the bites had slipped, and at her body, languidly sloping under the weight of so much adoration. To Alma, glancing by, all the gifts seemed given to the woman in exchange for just the sight of her. Singh leaned toward them to catch their words of praise, but his face was mournful, as though he had come to confess the failure of his own attempts at a plenteous life.

At his nod, Alma brought out the woman's fur coat from the employees' closet where diners' priceless coats were hung. The woman had come prepared for San Francisco's cold, whipping fogs that often swept in on summer nights. It was customary, when diners were leaving, for Singh or Lila, or both, to signal Alma, if she were free, and she would come to help them put on their coats. The departing guests would stand with their backs to her, and if they were unfamiliar with the courtesy, their shoulders would stiffen; others would slip into their coats with affected ease as if their wraps were held up for them by someone invisible or by the world's esteem. But this extravagant night roused her

E

resistance to this act that humbled her, and her arms refused to hold up the woman's coat. When Singh saw that she was in trouble, he took the coat from her and lifted it to the woman's bare shoulders. The woman turned her head toward him, kno}yJrgAlma was sure-how pristine a profile of beauty appears, like a very brief and partial view granted to mortals. So close was that profile, he seemed to tire instantly.

They were the last to leave, Alma watched them go as she went among her tables, blowing out the candles. On his way out, the goul1llet was introduced to the three Indian gentlemen, the restaurant's financial backers, all in dark suits. They stood up at their table, and unsmiling, shook his hand, afraid perhaps that if they were to smile he might deceive them later. At the bar he was introduced to the restaurant's publicist, Patricia, who had induced him to come, but when she stood up from her stool she began to sway. She had drunk too much, celebrating his presence, and from a distance she appeared to be swaying with religious awe. Then they were gone.

Ajostling wave of relief rose up in their wake, doing away with everyone's roles and with all glittering. The only light left was from the brass carriage lamps at the bar and the candles on the table where the three backers sat over their vegetarian delicacies.

In this intimate dimness they gathered together for a little party.

Lila poured drinks and carried them to whoever wanted one, while Singh wandered among them, empty-handed, uncritical, uncommending, voiceless. Kamala unwound her green sari, pushed the elastic band of the long underskirt down below her belly, and began her dance. From the stereo rose her delirious music. She danced barefoot, her hands, her arms gliding desirously, her belly moving with many little leaps and undulations.

Her husband, who often accompanied her home, came up the stairs and paused at the top, watching her, pleased and uncomfortable. The two waiters, now in their leather jackets, heads bare, feigned indifference. Marlie, a faux fur jacket over her sari, sat at the low cocktail table, restlessly peeling her nail polish, lifting her eyes only to see if her lover had arrived-a young doctor who would take her to his apartment. Alma, her costume again in the canvas bag, stood close to the stairs. When the dance was over she would leave, and no one would know that she had left and that she had left alone.

"Where is your friend tonight?"

There was so much that was intimidating about Kamala's husband, a high school mathematics teacher-his precise words, his eyes demanding correct answers. He and Alma's lover had often sat together at the bar, waiting to escort their women home. If he were able to understand the garbled language of loss, she might be able to say to him, J don't know where he is, he's with someone else but J don't know who she is and J don't know who he is anymore and J don't know who J am anymore, either, if J ever knew.

"A sculpture class at the art school. They stay late," she said.

The three thin women from the kitchen slipped by, passing close to her, their work done, cheap sweaters, old coats over their faded saris. They said good night to no one and were noticed by no one as they went down the stairs and into the night.

Then Singh, among the few who were gazing at the dancer, toppled to the floor, striking against his wife, who fell with him. At once the waiters lifted her, and Marlie ran to the alcove to turn off the music. The three financial backers bent over the man on the floor, and one, still clutching his large white napkin, shouted Singh's name warningly, hoping to alarm him back to life and his responsibilities. When they stepped away, the waiters then knelt by him, softly calling to him, and one laid an ear to his chest and felt for a pulse at his wrist. Nothing. A napkin wet with ice water was passed fi'om hand to hand and spread over his brow, a jigger of brandy was touched to his lips, and when it was seen that he was far, far beyond these clumsy persuasions, they stepped away from him.

He lay on his side, his turban tipped, his white jacket twisted.

Someone had removed his shoes, thinking that would relax him.

His trouser legs had slipped up, and narrow shins were exposed above his black silk socks. On some nights after the restaurant closed, he had worn his turban, his Nehru jacket, out into the nightlife, a short walk away, visiting the bars and the amateur strip show, a presence so statiling and impressive that people made way for him.

Wailing, Lila roamed among the tables, flinging her arms out and crossing them against her breasts, over and over, a ritual of grief and disbelief. The publicist was sobbing, head down on a table. Alma, along with Marlie and Kamala, wept quietly in the kitchen. They had been fond of him, they had exchanged little jokes about him and he hadn't known why they were laughing.

No one left until he had been taken away, and then they left together, down the steps carpeted in persimmon. The cold of early morning broke the group apart. They went off to their cars, Lila to be driven home in her car by one of the Indian backers, the other two to follow in their car. Alma watched her walk away, a very slender woman in a long pale coat, her sari stirring around her ankles, losing its color to distance.

Alma was driven home by the waiter who had served the famous gourmet. At the restaurant he seldom spoke. Now in the car he said, "Terrible, terrible. I think he was only forty." The rest ofthe way he was silent.

When she entered the dark apatiment she did not switch on a light, seeing well enough that her lover's possessions were gone and the apatiment empty despite her own things solidly there. She lay down in her clothes, calling on sleep to postpone her confrontation with her own unsolvable loss. An hour later or a minute later she was wide awake, already sitting up. It was not loss lifting her from sleep, it was gratefulness that her lover, no longer there, was taken from her only by the dream, only by that.

D Californian

Gina Berriault

received

the

u.s.

National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/ Faulkner Award in 1997 for Women in Their Beds, as well as the Rea Award for her lifetime achievement as a fiction writer. Her other works include The Descent (l960), The Mistress, and Other Stories (1965), and The lnfinite Passion of Expectation (1982) .

"This is a story about 'Snow White and the Seven Vertically Challenged Older Gentlemen. ' " © The New Yorker Collection 200 I Christopher Weyant lrom Cartoonbank.com.

All rights reserved.

Cartoon by Rockwell. Reprinted by permission

from the Saturday Evening Post.

All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

© The New Yorker Collection 200 I Frank Cotham from Cartoon bank. com.

All rights reserved.

Reprinted by permission

from the Saturday Evening Post. Copyright © 200 I

The Saturday Evening Post Company. All rights reserved.

don't have much work to do around the house like some girls. My mother does that. And I don't have to earn my pocket money by hustling; George runs errands for the big boys and sells Christmas cards. And anything else that's got to get done, my father does. All I have to do in life is mind my brother Raymond, which is enough.

Sometimes I slip and say my little brother Raymond. But as any fool can see he's much bigger and he's older too. But a lot of people call him my little brother cause he needs looking after cause he's not quite right. And a lot of smart mouths got lots to say about that too, especially when George was minding him. But now, if anybody has anything to say to Raymond, anything to say about his big head, they have to come by me. And I don't play the dozens or believe in standing around with somebody in my face doing a lot of talking. I much rather just knock you down and take my chances even if I am a little girl with skinny arms and a squeaky voice, which is how I got the name Squeaky. And if things get too rough, I run. And as anybody can tell you, I'm the fastest thing on two feet.

There is no track meet that I don't win the first place medal. I used to win the twenty-yard dash when I was a little kid in kindergarten. Nowadays, it's the fiftyyard dash. And tomorrow I'm subject to run the quarter-meter relay all by myself and come in first, second, and third. The

I

big kids call me Mercury cause I'm the swiftest thing in the neighborhood.

Everybody knows that-except two people who know better, my father and me.

Re can beat me to Amsterdam Avenue with me having a two fire-hydrant headstart and him running with his hands in his pockets and whistling. But that's private information. Cause can you imagine some thirty-five-year-old man stuffing himself into PAL shorts to race little kids? So as far as everyone's concerned, I'm the fastest and that goes for Gretchen, too, who has put out the tale that she is going to win the first-place medal this year.

Ridiculous. In the second place, she's got short legs. In the third place, she's got freckles. In the first place, no one can beat me and that's all there is to it.

I'm standing on the corner admiring the weather and about to take a stroll down Broadway so I can practice my breathing exercises, and I've got Raymond walking on the inside close to the buildings, cause he's subject to fits of fantasy and starts thinking he's a circus performer and that the curb is a tightrope strung high in the air. And sometimes after a rain he likes to step down off his tightrope right into the gutter and slosh around getting his shoes and cuffs wet. Then I get hit when I get home. Or sometimes if you don't watch him, he'll dash across traffic to the island in the middle of Broadway and give the pigeons a fit. Then I have to go behind him apologizing to all the old people sit-

Copyright Š 1971 by Toni Cade Bambara, from GORILLA, MY LOVE by Toni Cade Bambara.

Used by permission of Random I-Iollse, Inc.

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ting around trying to get some sun and getting all upset with the pigeons fluttering around them, scattering their newspapers and upsetting the waxpaper lunches in their laps. So I keep Raymond on the inside of me, and he plays like he's driving a stage coach which is O.K. by me so long as he doesn't run me over or interrupt my breathing exercises, which I have to do on account of I'm serious about my running, and I don't care who knows it.

Now some people like to act like things come easy to them, won't let on that they practice. Not me. I'll high-prance down 34th Street like a rodeo pony to keep my knees strong even if it does get my mother uptight so that she walks ahead like she's not with me, don't know me, is all by herself on a shopping trip, and I am somebody else's crazy child. Now you take Cynthia Procter for instance. She's just the opposite. If there's a test tomorrow, she'll say something like, "Oh, I guess I'll play handball this afternoon and watch television tonight," just to let you know she ain't thinking about the test. Or like last week when she won the spelling bee for the millionth time, "A good thing you got 'receive,' Squeaky, cause I would have got it wrong. I completely forgot about the spelling bee." And she'll clutch the lace on her blouse like it was a narrow escape. Oh, brother. But of course when I pass her house on my early morning trots around the block, she is practicing the scales on the piano over and over and over and over.

Then in music class she always lets herself get bumped around so she falls accidently on purpose onto the piano stool and is so surprised to find herself sitting there that she decides just for fun to tryout the ole keys. And what do you know-Chopin's waltzes just spring out of her fingertips and she's the most surprised thing in the world. A regular prodigy. I could kill people like that. I stay up all night studying the words for the spelling bee. And you can see me any time of day practicing running. I never walk iff can trot, and shame on Raymond if he can't keep up. But of course he does, cause if he hangs back someone's liable to walk up to him and get smart, or take his allowance from him, or ask him where he got that great big pump-

kin head. People are so stupid sometimes.

So I'm strolling down Broadway breathing out and breathing in on counts of seven, which is my lucky number, and here comes Gretchen and her sidekicks: Mary Louise, who used to be a friend of mine when she first moved to Harlem from Baltimore and got beat up by everybody till T took up for her on account of her mother and my mother used to sing in the same choir when they were young girls, but people ain't grateful, so now she hangs out with the new girl Gretchen and talks about me like a dog; and Rosie, who is as fat as I am skinny and has a big mouth where Raymond is concerned and is too stupid to know that there is not a big deal of difference between herself and Raymond and that she can't afford to throw stones. So they are steady coming up Broadway and I see right away that it's going to be one of those Dodge City scenes cause the street ain't that big and they're close to the buildings just as we are. First I think I'll step into the candy store and look over the new comics and let them pass. But that's chicken and I've got a reputation to consider. So then I think I'll just walk straight on through them or even over them if necessary. But as they get to me, they slow down. I'm ready to fight, cause like T said I don't feature a whole lot of chit-chat, I much prefer to just knock you down right from the jump and save everybody a lotta precious time.

"You signing up for the May Day races?" smiles Mary Louise, only it's not a smile at all. A dumb question like that doesn't deserve an answer. Besides, there's just me and Gretchen standing there really, so no use wasting my breath talking to shadows.

"I don't think you're going to win this time," says Rosie, trying to signify with her hands on her hips all salty, completely forgetting that I have whupped her behind many times for less salt than that. "[ always win cause ['m the best," I say straight at Gretchen who is, as far as I'm concerned, the only one talking in this ventriloquist-dummy routine. Gretchen smiles, but it's not a smile, and I'm thinking that girls never really smile at each other because they don't know how and

don't want to know how and there's probably no one to teach us Mr. Pearson, who pins the numbers on. I'm really looking for how, cause grown-up girls don't know either. Then they all look Gretchen if you want to know the truth, but she's not around. The park is jam-packed. Parents in hats and corsages and breast-pocket at Raymond who has just brought his mule team to a standstill. handkerchiefs peeking up. Kids in white dresses and light-blue And they're about to see what trouble they can get into through suits. The parkees unfolding chairs and chasing the rowdy kids him. from Lenox as if they had no right to be there. The big guys with "What grade you in now, Raymond?" their caps on backwards, leaning against the fence swirling the bas"You got anything to say to my brother, you say it to me, Mary ketballs on the tips of their fingers, waiting for all these crazy peoLouise Williams of Raggedy Town, Baltimore." ple to clear out the park so they can play. Most of the kids in my "What are you, his mother?" sasses Rosie.

"That's right, Fatso. And the next word out of anybody and class are carrying bass drums and glockenspiels and flutes. You'd think they'd put in a few bongos or something for real like that.

I'll be their mother too." So they just stand there and Gretchen Then here comes Mr. Pearson with his clipboard and his cards shifts from one leg to the other and so do they. Then Gretchen and pencils and whistles and safety pins and fifty million other puts her hands on her hips and is about to say something with her freckle-face self but doesn't. Then she walks around me things he's always dropping allover the place with his clumsy self. He sticks out in a crowd because looking me up and down but keeps he's on stilts. We used to call him Jack walking up Broadway, and her sideand the Beanstalk to get him mad. But kicks follow her. So me and Raymond I'm the only one that can outrun him smile at each other and he says, and get away, and I'm too grown for "Gidyap" to his team and [ continue Gretchen smiles, but it's not a that silliness now. with my breathing exercises, strolling smile, and I'm thinking that girls "Well, Squeaky," he says, checking down Broadway toward the ice man my name off the list and handing me on l45th with not a care in the world never really smile at each other number seven and two pins. And I'm cause I am Miss Quicksilver herself. because they don't know how thinking he's got no right to call me [ take my time getting to the park on Squeaky, if! can't call him Beanstalk.

May Day because the track meet is the and don't want to know how and "Hazel Elizabeth Deborah Parker," last thing on the program. The biggest there's probably no one to teach I correct him and tell him to write thing on the program is the May Pole it down on his board. dancing, which 1 can do without, thank us how, cause grown-up girls "Well, Hazel Elizabeth Deborah you, even if my mother thinks it's a don't know either.

Parker, going to give someone else a shame I don't take part and act like a break this year?" [ squint at him real girl for a change. You'd think my hard to see if he is seriously thinking [ mother'd be grateful not to have to should lose the race on purpose just to make me a white organdy dress with a give someone else a break. "Only six big satin sash and buy me new white baby-doll shoes that can't be taken out of the box till the big day. girls running this time," he continues, shaking his head sadly like it's my fault all of New York didn't turn out in sneakers. "That You'd think she'd be glad her daughter ain't out there prancing new girl should give you a run for your money." He looks around around a May Pole getting the new clothes all dirty and sweaty and trying to act like a fairy or a flower or whatever you're sup- the park for Gretchen like a periscope in a submarine movie.

"Wouldn't it be a nice gesture if you were ... to ahhh ... " posed to be when you should be trying to be yourself, whatever I give him such a look he couldn't finish putting that idea into that is, which is, as far as I am concerned, a poor Black girl who words. Grownups got a lot of nerve sometimes. J pin number really can't afford to buy shoes and a new dress you only wear seven to myself and stomp away, ['m so burnt. And I go straight once a lifetime cause it won't fit next year.

I was once a strawberry in a Hansel and Gretel pageant when [ for the track and stretch out on the grass whi Ie the band winds up was in nursery school and didn't have no better sense than to with "Oh, the Monkey Wrapped His Tail Around the Flag Pole," dance on tiptoe with my arms in a circle over my head doing um- which my teacher calls by some other name. The man on the loudspeaker is calling everyone over to the track and I'm on my brella steps and being a perfect fool just so my mother and f~ther back looking at the sky, trying to pretend I'm in the country, but I could come dressed up and clap. You'd think they'd know better than to encourage that kind of nonsense. I am not a strawberry. [ can't, because even grass in the city feels hard as sidewalk, and do not dance on my toes. 1 run. That is what I am all about. So [ there's just no pretending you are anywhere but in a "concrete always come late to the May Day program, just in time to get my jungle" as my grandfather says.

The twenty-yard dash takes all of two minutes cause most of number pinned on and lay in the grass till they announce the the little kids don't know no better than to run off the track or fifty-yard dash.

1 put Raymond in the little swings, which is a tight squeeze this run the wrong way or run smack into the fence and fall down year and will be impossible next year. Then I look around for and cry. One Iittle kid, though, has got the good sense to run

straight for the white ribbon up ahead so he wins. Then the second-graders Iine up for the thirty-yard dash and I don't even bother to turn my head to watch cause Raphael Perez always wins. He wins before he even begins by psyching the runners, telling them they're going to trip on their shoelaces and fallon their faces or lose their shorts or something, which he doesn't really have to do since he is very fast, almost as fast as I am.

After that is the forty-yard dash which I use to run when I was in first grade. Raymond is hollering from the swings cause he knows I'm about to do my thing cause the man on the loudspeaker has just announced the fifty-yard dash, although he might just as well be giving a recipe for angel food cake cause you can hardly make out what he's sayin for the static. I get up and slip off my sweat pants and then I see Gretchen standing at the starting line, kicking her legs out like a pro. Then as I get into place 1 see that ole Raymond is on line on the other side of the fence, bending down with his fingers on the ground just like he knew what he was doing. I was going to yell at him but then I didn't. It burns up your energy to holler.

Every time, just before I take off in a race, I always feel like I'm in a dream, the kind of dream you have when you're sick with fever and feel all hot and weightless. I dream I'm flying over a sandy beach in the early morning sun, kissing the leaves of the trees as I fly by. And there's always the smell of apples, just like in the country when I was little and used to think I was a choo-choo train, running through the fields of corn and chugging up the hi II to the orchard. And all the time I'm dreaming this, 1get lighter and lighter until I'm flying over the beach again, getting blown through the sky like a feather that weighs nothing at all.

But once I spread my fingers in the dirt and crouch over for the Get on Your Mark, the dream goes and I am solid again and am telling myself, Squeaky you must win, you must win, you are the fastest thing in the world, you can even beat your father up Amsterdam if you really try. And then I feel my weight coming back just behind my knees then down to my feet then into the earth and the pistol shot explodes in my blood and 1 am off and weightless again, flying past the other runners, my arms pumping up and down and the whole world is quiet except for the crunch as I zoom over the gravel in the track. I glance to my left and there is no one. To the right, a blurred Gretchen, who's got her chinjutting out as if it would win the race all by itself. And on the other side of the fence is Raymond with his arms down to his side and the palms tucked up behind him, running in his very own style, and it's the first time I ever saw that and I almost stop to watch my brother Raymond on his first run. But the white ribbon is bouncing toward me and I tear past it, racing into the distance till my feet with a mind of their own start digging up footfuls of dirt and brake me short. Then all the kids standing on the side pile on me, banging me on the back and slapping my head with their May Day programs, for I have won again and everybody on 151st Street can walk tall for another year.

"In first place ... " the man on the loudspeaker is clear as a bell now. But then he pauses and the loudspeaker starts to whine.

Then static. And 1 lean down to catch my breath and here comes

Gretchen walking back, for she's overshot the finish line too, huffing and puffing with her hands on her hips taking it slow, breathing in steady time like a real pro and I sort of like her a little for the first time. "In first place ...." and then three or four voices get all mixed up on the loudspeaker and I dig my sneaker into the grass and stare at Gretchen who's staring back, we both wondering just who did win. I can hear old Beanstalk arguing with the man on the loudspeaker and then a few others running their mouths about what the stopwatches say. Then I hear Raymond yanking at the fence to call me and I wave to shush him, but he keeps rattling the fence like a gorilla in a cage like in them gorilla movies, but then like a dancer or something he starts climbing up nice and easy but very fast. And it occurs to me, watching how smoothly he climbs hand over hand and remembering how he looked running with his arms down to his side and with the wind pulling his mouth back and his teeth showing and all, it occurred to me that Raymond would make a very fine runner. Doesn't he always keep up with me on my trots? And he surely knows how to breathe in counts of seven cause he's always doing it at the dinner table, which drives my brother George up the wall. And I'm smiling to beat the band cause if I've lost this race, or if me and Gretchen tied, or even if I've won, I can always retire as a runner and begin a whole new career as a coach with Raymond as my champion. After all, with a little more study I can beat Cynthia and her phony self at the spelling bee. And if! bugged my mother, I could get piano lessons and become a star.

And I have a big rep as the baddest thing around. And I've got a roomful of ribbons and medals and awards. But what has Raymond got to call his own?

So 1 stand there with my new plans, laughing out loud by this time as Raymond jumps down from the fence and runs over with his teeth showing and his arms down to the side, which no one before him has quite mastered as a running style. And by the time he comes over I'm jumping up and down so glad to see him-my brother Raymond, a great runner in the family tradition. But of course everyone thinks I'm jumping up and down because the men on the loudspeaker have finally gotten themselves together and compared notes and are announcing "In first place-Miss Hazel Elizabeth Deborah Parker." (Dig that.) "In second placeMiss Gretchen P. Lewis." And I look over at Gretchen wondering what the "P" stands for. And I smile. Cause she's good, no doubt about it. Maybe she'd like to help me coach Raymond; she obviously is serious about running, as any fool can see. And she nods to congratulate me and then she smiles. And I smile. We stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It's about as real a smile as girls can do for each other, considering we don't practice real smiling every day, you know, cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect. .. you know ... Iike being people.

D About the Author: American write;; editor and teacher Toni Cade Bambara was instrumental in initiating the Southern Collective of AFican American Writers. Her works include shorf stories collected in Gorilla, My Love and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, and her novel The Salt Eaters. She died of cancer in Philadelphia in 1995.

nce upon a time there was an old woman who was much troubled by the pull of gravity. She would start to get up out of her chair and fall back twice and make it only on the third try. "I don't know what's the matter with me," she said. "Everything is so much heavier than it used to be," and she went and weighed herself on the bathroom scale, and to her surprise she weighed less than her normal weight, and so she knew the scale was wrong, and would have thrown it out and got a new scale except that she had had it for a very long time and was attached to it, the way people are to objects they are used to.

In the morning, when she woke, her mind was ready to begin the day, but the weight of her head on the pillow was so great that she continued to Iie there with her eyel ids closed~they, too, felt the pull of gravity, slight as they were~for sometimes twenty minutes. And when her daughter took to bringing her tea to her in bed, she tried to resist, because her daughter had small children that required a great deal of attention and she wanted to be a help to her instead of an additional burden, but the tea was a comfort to her and for a short while gave her the strength she needed to overcome the earth's pull.

She started to pick up something, some heavy object that in the old days she would have thought nothing at all of lifting, and her daughter said, "Here, Mother, let me do that, you'll strain your back." And it was true, she would have. Because that particular object and all other objects were heavier than they used to be.

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Copyright Š 1999 by William Maxwell.

All rights reserved.

Reprinted by permission from the Wylie Agency.

And she said to herself, "1 marvel that nobody notices it; though perhaps they do notice it and just don't think it is worth commenting on."

Walking had always been a pleasure to her, especially walking in the woods, but she gradually gave it up. Her shoes were too heavy, and spoiled her pleasure, and she found that if she sat in a chair by the window-Granny's chair, it was referred to by the children, and nobody else ever sat in it, lest she would want to-and looked out of the window and let her mind roam wherever it wanted to, she got much the same pleasure she used to when she was an active young woman and would say, "Come, children, let's go for a nice long walk in the woods."

Words, too, had become heavier, causing her to speak more slowly. But that was, she knew, partly because of the weight of what she had to say. Her mind was full of comparisons, mostly of how things used to be with the way they were nowthe clothes people used to wear, the food they used to eat, the things they used to enjoy, and what they cared about; all was so very different, and interesting to consider, for those who could remember what she was talking about. However, she couldn't help noticing that when her daughter had a party, the guests would take turns coming and sitting with her and drawing her out in conversation, and at first she enjoyed it and thought they were genuinely interested in what she could tell them of the past, until a heavy thought occurred to her: they were perhaps just being nice, and not really interested in her stories. Or perhaps had heard them before, since her memory was failing and she knew she repeated herself. So she tried not to hold them in conversation longer than they had any desire to be talking to her, and that in turn made her appear somewhat withdrawn.

The truth is, she was withdrawn. She was preoccupied with her own comparisons, and when something took her away from her thoughts it was likely to be something her grandchildren did or said. She loved to watch them playing outdoors. How they ran! As if they had no more weight than an autumn leaf! They had so much energy that they needed to work off, and they seldom simply walked but instead hopped and skipped or threw themselves on their bicycles and raced down the drive and out of sight, leaving her with a smile of pleasure on her face. For it was a kind of miracle, one ofa whole host ofmiracles that people were so used to that they didn't

think anything about them. Like getting into bed at night and falling fast asleep the minute your head touched the pillow. And not knowing anything more until daylight.

The only way she could go to sleep now was to read, sitting up in bed until the words became all mixed up and she could not remember the sentence she had just finished reading, and then she would turn the light out and slip down under the covers and drift off, only to waken between two and.three in the morning and lie there for an hour or more, courting sleep. How many times she had heard Old people need less sleep? And other things like it, all of them perfectly true.

Such as, When you are young the days seem so long, and when you are old they race by. For there was no lack of descriptions of what it is like to be old, and even, alas, of what it is like to feel that you are a burden to the earth.

As a young woman she had had a beautiful straight back, and when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror she saw that it was bent, as if she was holding two pails of water and pulled down by the weight. And though she straightened herself, and meant to continue to hold herself erectly, a minute later she was holding the pails of water again.

You cannot go around holding two heavy pails of water all day without feeling tired, and she was, and in fact did less and less because there was less and less that she could do. And when at last her legs gave out and she took to her bed, it was with a certain pleasure in giving up the struggle. She died in her sleep, leaving forever and dead weight of her body. The creature itself, light as an autumn leaf, lighter even, light as a wisp of smoke, as sunshine, as air, went to join the eternal lightness that makes all the rest possible.

0 About the Author: William Maxwell was an editor with The New Yorker for 40 years starting 1937. He died on July 31 last year at 91. His first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, was published in 1934.

Subsequent books included the story collections, Billie Dyer and Over by the River, and the 1980 novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, which won the American Book Award.

The Elusive Art of

'Mindfulness ~ "As a student wrote: If one is trying to do something really well one becomes, first of all interested in it, and later absorbed in it, which means that one forgets oneself in concentrating on what one is doing. But when one forgets oneself, oneself ceases to exist, since oneself is the only thing which causes oneself to exist. "

in it; when he gets the gossamer-thin illusion of the self out of the way and, in a delightful modulation of consciousness and temporality, experiences only the "here" and the "now," with no concern at all for the unrecoverable past or a future that never comes.

But, sadly, for most Americans, that kind of concentration and nonattachment (vairagya) is elusive, particularly in a TVoriented and movie-drenched carnival culture that produces a short attention span in a population relentlessly bombarded by trivial distractions and weighted down by ego-baggage-elusive, that is, until one learns to carefully observe the behavior of the mind and make it one's servant.

No one knows better than those who regularly practice or more than 20 years I've kept this intriguing some form of meditation that we are seldom, if ever, the comstatement about the r~l~tionship. between self and plete master of our mind's operations, thoughts, and cravings. work pasted to the wntmg desk m my study to re- - For that reason, early in the canonical Buddhist text, The mind me-as a Buddhist and creator, husband and Dhammapada, we find this observation: father, teacher and citizen-that concentration (dharana) not only is traditionally the first stage in the ancient Hard to hold down, practice of formal meditation (dhyana), but also expresses itnimble, selfin the one-pointedness of mind required for the doing well alighting wherever it likes: of any worldly activity, including the lifelong labor of writing. the mind.

Its taming is good.

In fact, as someone who has been publishing stories for 36 The mind well-tamed years, practicing meditation for 21, and studying Eastern philosophy for 30, I cannot help but marvel sometimes at the brings ease. striking analogues between meditation and moments of intense creative inspiration, and how both overlap in my life and At first glance, one thinks: What a preposterous challenge! literary offerings.

You might as well try to tame the wind. In Raja-Yoga, the Yet it matters not at all if the activity we're talking about is 19th-century philosopher-teacher Vivekananda employed a writing a novel, preparing dinner, teaching a class, serving tea, popular, East Indian metaphor for the mind's contumacy, one or simply walking, the spiritual point is everywhere and al- found sprinkled throughout Hindu and Buddhist literature, to describe this very quotidian dilemma: ways the same: Any action is performed best and most beautifully, especially unpleasant tasks, when the actor practices what Buddhists call "mindfulness"; when he is wholly and There was a monkey, restless by its own nature, as all selflessly aware of every nuance in the activity and immersed monkeys are. As if that were not enough someone made him

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Reprinted by permission. Originally appeared in The Chronicle a/Higher Copyright Š 200 I by Charles Johnson. A II rights reserved.

Ed"cariol1.

drinkfi-eely of wine, so that the monkey became still more restless. Then a scorpion stung him. When a man is stung by a scorpion he jumps about for a whole day; so the poor monkey found his condition worse than ever. To complete his misely a demon entered into him. What language can describe the uncontrollable restlessness of that monkey? The human mind is like that monkey, incessantly active by its own nature; then it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence. After desire takes possession comes the sting of the scorpion of jealousy of the success of others, and last of all the demon of pride enters the mind, making it think itself of all importance. How hard to control such a mind. ivekananda,s humorous yet horrifyingly recognizable "monkey mind" is, obviously-unclear.

(As cartoonist David Bergman put it, "A mind is a terrible thing to watch.") It is a mind clouded by its p.assions and self-doubts, deluded by its own ideas, its distOlied perceptions, its belief in an enduring personal identity, and its countless presuppositions and highly provisional explanations about the world and others. Such an undisciplined, chaotic mind will perpetually be in a state of suffering and turmoil, and cause pain to all in its vicinity until it is quieted, then tamed by the meditation practices (abhyasa) outlines in the magnificent Mahasatipatthana Sutra (Great Mindfulness Discourse), where one learns to "abide contemplating feelings as feelings ...mind as mind ... [and] mind-objects as mind-objects."

There are, of course, numerous meditation traditions, but common to them all are exercises that provide a practitioner with but a single object for the mind's attention (ekagrata). For beginners, the simplest exercise is offered by the body itself: one's own breath. Try, if you can, to observe for 15 minutes only the rising-falling movement of your' abdomen as you breathe. Soon enough, as you attempt to focus on each inhalation and exhalation, you discover your mind drifting after a few seconds away from the breath-into memories, imaginings, daydreams, and perceptions of physical discomfort (an itch, a stiff back, and so on) as you try to sit perfectly still.

(Another cartoonist, Frank Modell, captures this wonderfully when he asks, "It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your mind is?") In Vipassana "insight meditation," for example, you do not ignore these fugitive wanderings of the mind, its tendency to go AWOL at the first opportunity, but instead carefully observe and identify each erumpent mental act as it appears, like clouds passing across the sky or waves on water-"reflecting," "planning," "feeling pain," "feeling pleasure," "feeling lazy," "feeling bored," "hearing a sound nearby"-and then you let them go, making no effort to hold on as you turn back to your breathing.

Over time this deceptively simple yet daunting exercise of just quietly tracking the labile mind's movements reveals, first, that each evanescent eruption of desire or emotion, each "imagining" or "feeling lazy" melts away like a mirage after it is vetted once or twice. Each is impermanent, with its own "arising and falling away" trajectory and, at bottom, is empty (sunyata). Second, one realizes the unicity of what we call subject and object (the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl's terms were noesis and noema), which arise simultaneously in each flicker-flash instant of perception; they are onto logically twinned and inseparable, nondualistic, the one incapable of existing without the other. Put another way, the subject does not exist independent of an object, as David Hume noted two-and-a-half centuries ago in his Treatise of Human Nature, where he pointed out that, "For my part, when 1 enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, and can never observe anything but the perception."

From this elementary task of holding the mind to one's breathing, the beginner advances to attempting the same uninterrupted awareness not only when quietly sitting, but when engaged in other activities. The point of such concentration, which

V

eventually flows seemlessly into meditation, is to attend with all one's heart and mind to the business at hand. Different schools of meditation employ a range of phenomenal "objects"-some physical, some mental-to achieve both that end and the spiritual goal of satori, or moksha (enlightenment). One might contemplate a symbolic image such as a mandala; a mental or physical picture of a beloved saint or savior, ~s practitioners of bhakti (devotion) prefer; or the visualizations characteristic of tantric yoga. Or one might repeat a single sound, or mantra, over and over, like the Nam-myoho-renge-kyo of the Nichiren Buddhists.

Clearly, spiritual practice is nothing if it is not about attention. (The Sanskrit word for attention, ekagrata, can be translated as "one," eka, and "to seize," grah.) The same is true of reading and writing. Like a memory, a mathematical entity (numbers), or the visualizations in tantra, the aesthetic object experienced in any literary work is ontologically, as Jean-Paul Sartre points out in What Is Literature?, transcendent.

Open any novel. What is there? Black marks-signs-on white paper. First they are silent. They are lifeless, lacking signification until the consciousness of the reader imbues them with meaning, allowing a fictitious character like the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, say, to emerge powerfully from the monotonous rows of ebony type.

This magical act is, of course, achieved through a concentration, as one reads, and an act of self-surrender that allows an entire fictional world to appear, redivivus, in the reader's mind: "a vivid and continuous dream," as the novelist John Gardner once called it. As readers, our focused awareness invests the cold signs on the pages of Invisible Man with our emotions, our understanding of oppression and fear. Then, in what is almost an act of thaumaturgy, the electrifying figures and situations Ellison has created reward us richly by returning our subjective feelings to us transformed, refined, and alchemized by language into a new vision with the capacity to change our lives forever.

That same ekagrata is at work on the writer's side of the creative equation, too, for the sustained and continuous fictional "dream" that the reader discovers was initially experienced by the author, who, to create an imaginary world, first had to visualize with vivid specificity each and everyone of the thousands of detai Is in his novel or short story.

For example, if a dramatic scene is richly evoked, placing us so thoroughly within its ambience that we forget the room we're sitting in or fail to hear the telephone ring; ifin it we can "see" the haecceitas ("thisness") of every carefully described object on the fictional stage; if our senses imaginatively respond to, say, the quality oflate-afternoon light as it falls upon the characters, and to imagery for evoking smells, sounds, and taste; if each revealing, moment-by-moment action, feeling, utterance, pause, and sigh of the characters are microscopically tracked and reverentially recorded by the writer who, like an actor, must psychologically inhabit all the players at every moment in that scene; if every significant nuance of that

scene is present with almost a palpable feel on the page, then it is because the radical attentiveness to detail, here and now in the mind's eye, demanded of the writer (who, knowing no division of creative labor, must in a single work of fiction play each principal role, be the set designer, director, costumer, hairstylist, makeup artist, lighting technician, prop master, casting director, dialogue and sound editor, location manager, and post-production editor) is a species ofthe ekagrata (attention) practiced in meditation.

No story or novel I've been privileged to write came to me "whole." Rather, what I was initially given was a situation, dilemma, or character that intrigued me and caught my attention throughout the day, so that my curiosity compelled me to sit down to explore it further. What was-and always is-required for the seed of the story to flower was greater attention to all the prismatic possibilities of the imagined object, the story, plus the tossing aside of my own presuppositions concerning what the tale and its characters should be (I like to call this "beginner's mind"), until over time I've managed to strip away the interesting but inappropriate details and plot misdirections that do not lead to a complete, coherent, and consistent vision-never willing or forcing the fiction into existence, mind you, but instead scrupulously watching its manifestations from one draft to the next, then nurturing the moments that brought me the greatest sense of discovery. (My ratio of throwaway to keep pages is usually 20 to 1.) In other words, when I'm writing welJ, 1 am merely the servant ofthe story, its midwife.

And always this process, at least for me, involves letting go of the numerous ideas that arise during intense periods of creativity (ideas I might love and feel attached to) if they do not contribute to what John Barth once called a story's "ground situation"; and yes, like a bhikshu (Buddhist monk) dutifully counting his breaths or contemplating impermanence or compassion, I must repeatedly return my wandering mind again and again and yet again to the original spark for the tale: an especially demanding task for philosophical novels like Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage, and Dreamer that had fiveand six-year gestation periods.

Yet for all its surface and subtle similarities to meditation, the sustained periods of ekagrata required for crafting finely wrought fiction do not in themselves lead to spiritual liberation. So much more is required for that. However, I'd like to believe that for a few literary artists, a lifetime spent harnessing the mind to the labor of creating transcendent objects can prepare them for the first, tentative steps on the Way. And I'm convinced, as I am of nothing else, that when mindfulness-so reverential toward all being-is brought to any task, irrespective of how humble, it transforms work into an opportunity to practice a form of worship that, as The Dhammapada puts it, "brings ease."

D About the Author: Charles Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Washington.

His most recent book is Soulcatcher, a collection of short stories.

Family Portrait Life on an Indian reservation is the focus of much of Sherman Alexie's fiction.

Himself a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, he grew up on the Spokane Reservation in Washington state. He underwent brain surgery as an infant, and the after effects colored his childhood. This story, based on his early years, is from Alexie's first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which garnered the PEN/ Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction in 1993.

He is widely acknowledged as one of the top young American writers.

he television was always loud, too loud, until every conversation was distorted, fragmented.

"Dinner" sounded like "Leave me alone."

"I love you" sounded like "Inertia."

"Please" sounded like "Sacrifice."

Believe me, the television was always too loud. At three in the morning T woke from ordinary nightmares to hear the television pounding the ceiling above my bed.

Sometimes it was just white noise, the end of another broadcasting day. Other times it was a bad movie made worse by the late hour and interrupted sleep.

"Drop your weapons and come out with your hands above your head" sounded too much like "Trust me, the world is yours."

"The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming!" sounded too much like "Just one more beer, sweetheal1, and then we'll go home."

"Junior, I lost the money" sounded too much like "You'll never have a dream come true."

T don't know where all the years went. 1 remember only the television in detail. All the other moments worth remembering became stories that changed with each telling, until nothing was aboriginal or recognizable.

For instance, in the summer of 1972 or 1973 or only in our minds, the reservation disappeared. I remember standing on the front porch of our HUD (Housing and Urban Development) house, practicing on my plastic saxophone, when the reservation disappeared.

Finally, I remember thinking, but I was six years old, or seven. T don't know for sure how old; I was Indian.

Just like that, there was nothing there beyond the bottom step. My older brother

T

told me he'd give me a quarter ifljumped into the unknown. My twin sisters cried equal tears; their bicycles had been parked out by the pine trees, all of it vanished.

My mother came out to investigate the noise. She stared out past the bottom step for a long time, but there was no expression on her face when she went back to wash the potatoes.

My father was happily drunk and he stumbled off the bottom step before any of us could stop him. He came back years later with diabetes and a pocketful of quarters. The seeds in the cuffs of his pants dropped to the floor of our house and grew into orange trees.

"Nothing is possible without Vitamin e," my mother told us, but I knew she meant to say, "Don't want everything so much."

Often the stories contain people who never existed before our collective imaginations created them.

My brother and T remember our sisters scraped all the food that dropped off our plates during dinner into a pile in the center of the table. Then they placed their teeth against the edge of the table and scraped all the food into thei r open mouths.

Our parents don't remember that happening, and our sisters cry out, "No, no, we were never that hungry!"

Still, my brother and I cannot deny the truth of our story. We were there. Maybe hunger informs our lives.

My family tells me stories of myself, small events and catastrophic diseases 1 don't remember but accept as the beginning of my story.

After surgery to relieve fluid pressure

on my brain, I started to dance.

"No," my mother tells me. "You had epileptic seizures."

"No," my father tells her. "He was dancing."

During "The Tonight Show" I pretended sleep on the couch while my father sat in his chair and watched the television.

"It was Doc's trumpet that made you dance," my father told me.

"No, it was grand mal seizures punctuated by moments of extreme perception,"

my mother told him.

She wanted to believe I could see the future. She secretly knew the doctors had inserted another organ into my skull, transplanted a twentieth-century vision.

One winter she threw me outside in my underwear and refused to let me back into the house until I answered her questions.

"Will my children love me when I'm old?" she asked, but I knew she wanted to ask me, "Will I regret my life?"

Then there was music, scratched 45's and eight-track tapes. We turned the vol-

ume too high for the speakers, until the music was tinny and distorted. But we danced, until my oldest sister tore her only pair of nylons and wept violently. But we danced, until we shook dust down from the ceiling and chased bats out ofthe attic into the daylight. But we danced, in our mismatched clothes and broken shoes. I wrote my name in Magic Marker on my shoes, my first name on the left toe and my last name on the right toe, with my true name somewhere in between. But we danced, with empty stomachs and nothing for din-

ner except sleep. All night we lay awake with sweat on our backs and blisters on om soles. All night we fought waking nightmares until sleep came with nightmares of its own. I remember the nightmare about the thin man in a big hat who took the Indian children away from their parents.

He came with scissors to cut hair and a locked box to hide all the amputated braids. But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.

It was a dance.

Still, we can be surprised.

My sister told me she could recognize me by the smell of my clothes. She said she could close her eyes and pick me out of a crowd by just the smell of my shirt.

I knew she meant to say I love you.

With all the systems of measurements we had available, I remember the degree of sunlight most. It was there continuously, winter or summer. The cold came by accident, the sun by design.

Then there was the summer of sniffing gas. My sisters bent their heads at impossible angles to reach the gas tanks of BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) vehicles.

Everything so bright and precise, it hurt the brain. Eardrums pounded by the slightest noise; a dog barking could change the shape of the earth.

I remember my brother stretched out over the lawnmower, his mouth pressed tightly to the mouth of the gas tank. It was a strange kiss, the first kiss, his lips burnt and clothes flammable. He tried to dance away, he named every blade of grass he crushed when he fell on his ass.

Everything under water, like walking across the bottom of Benjamin Lake, past dead horses and abandoned tires. Legs tangled in seaweed, dance, dance again, kick the feet until you break free. Stare up at the surface, sunlight filtered through water like fingers, like a hand filled with the promise oflove and oxygen.

WARNING: Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents can be harmfitl or fatal.

How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I've been thinking about

pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding. Let's say I remember sunlight as a measurement of this story, how it changed the shape of the family pOltrait. My father shields his eyes and makes his face a shadow. He could be anyone then, but my eyes are closed in the photo. I cannot remember what I was thinking. Maybe T wanted to stand, stretch my legs, raise my arms above my head, open my mouth wide, and fiII my lungs. Breathe, breathe. Maybe my hair is so black it collects all the available light.

Suddenly it is winter and I'm trying to start th e car.

"Give it more gas," my father shouts from the house.

I put my foot to the fire wall, feel the engine shudder in response. My hands grip the steering wheel tightly. They are not mine this morning. These hands are too strong, too necessary for even the smallest gestures. I can make fists and throw my anger into walls and plasterboard. I can pick up a toothbrush or a pistol, touch the face of a woman r love. Years ago, these hands might have held the spear that held the salmon that held the dream of the tribe.

Years ago, these hands might have touched the hands of the dark-skinned men who touched medicine and the magic of ordinary gods. Now, I put my hand to gearshift, my heart to the cold wind.

"Give it more gas," my father yells.

I put the car into Drive and then I am gone, down the road, carefully, touching the brake like I touch my dreams. Once, my father and I drove this same road and he told the story of the first television he ever saw.

"The television was in the window of a store in Coeur d'Alene. Me and all the guys would walk down there and watch it.

Just one channel and all it showed was a woman sitting on top of a television that showed the same woman sitting on top of the same television. Over and over until it hurt your eyes and head. That's the way I remember it. And she was always singing some song. I think it was 'A Girl on Top of the World.'''

This is how we find our history, how we sketch our family pOltrait, how we snap the photograph at the precise moment when someone's mouth is open and ready to ask a question. How? There is a girl on top of the world. She is owldancing with my father. That is the story by which we measure all our stories, until we understand that one story can never be all.

There is a girl on top of the world. She is singing the blues. That is the story by which we measure heartbreak. Maybe she is my sister or my other sister or my oldest sister dead in the house fire. Maybe she is my mother with her hands in the fry bread.

Maybe she is my brother.

There is a girl on top of the world. She is telling us her story. That is the story by which we measure the beginning of all of our lives. Listen, listen, what can be calling? She is why we hold each other tight; she is why our fear refuses naming. She is the fancydancer; she is forgi veness.

The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution. We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer.

Jesus, we all want to survive.

0 Sherman Alexie has published 14 books to date, including his most recent collection of short stories, The Toughest Indian in the World, and his new poetry collection, One Stick Song. He collaborated on the award-winning 1998 film Smoke Signals, and is a pelformance artist who does litermy readings and stand-up comedy.

Consular Focus Non-Immigrant Visa Appointment System Cuts Waiting Time for Applicants

O

n November 1, the U.S. Em- reviews from visa applicants. Neha bassy in New Delhi launched a Goswami, applying for an F2 visa to pilot appointment program for join her husband at State University of non-immigrant visa applicants. Using New York, was one of our first applithis system, visa applicants were able cants using the new system. Her husto appear for a visa interview with band made the appointment for her virtually no waiting. Effective Dec- from the U.S. She said the system was "absolutely wonderful." Even those ember 3, the Embassy fully implemented this program, and appointments who are not granted visas are happy are now being scheduled for all non- to have been spared the long queues. immigrant visa (N1V) interviews. Visa This system also helps the consular appointments for an interview in section plan ahead to meet its workNew Delhi may be made from any- load. Consular officers now know in where in the world as much as three advance how many applicants will months in advance using the Website: appear for an interview on any given www.ttsvisas.com. day. The new system has been a blessNIV applicants are happy with this ing for everyone involved.

The appointment system for nonnew measure, which is part of a continuing effort to streamline the visa immigrant visas is already in operaapplication process. To cope with 800- tion in many countries of the world, 1,000 NIV applications daily, the Em- including high volume consulates bassy took measures to reduce visa such as Mexico City. In India, the lines by offering drop box and courier Consulate General in Mumbai has an passback services for certain cate- appointment system for most appliin Mumbai who gories of visa applicants in June 2001. cants. Applicants need an interview must make an This enabled individuals with previous appointment.

Applicants from surU.S. travel, certain business travelers, and the elderly to apply for and obtain rounding areas are still able to appear a visa without having to appear in per- on a walk-in basis. Mumbai plans to son for an interview. switch to an appointment-only system Although this helped reduce visa in the near future. The consulates in lines and the waiting time for visa Kolkata and Chennai are also planning system interviews, the U.S. Embassy has made to initiate an appointment it a priority to eliminate lengthy visa before the summer peak season.

Kolkata sees significantly fewer visa lines. The NIV appointment system is applicants than does Delhi. The part of the effort to do this.

After more than a month in opera- Consulate has been using a "modified" tion, the system is receiving rave appointment system with some success,

whereby walk-in applicants are given appointments for set times during the day and asked to return at the allotted time.

This way, they do not have to wait in line for an interview. Kolkata currently does not use the courier passback First in queue: system to return pass- Neha Goswami ports, nor do they smiles at new, have offsite collection easier visa of dropbox applica- procedures. tions, so there are large numbers of applicants waiting to drop off or pick up their applications.

The Kolkata Consulate plans to implement both measures, and the appointment system, in the coming months.

The Chennai Consulate is unique in the sense that it sees more "high-tech" visa applicants than any other consulate.

For this reason, Chennai processes 80 percent of its visas through the dropbox without conducting an interview. Only those applicants who don't qualify under the broad dropbox criteria are interviewed. On an average, Chennai consular officers interview 300 applicants a day. They also plan to start the appointment system to further streamline the visa application process.

D About the Author: Kamana M Romero is a consular officer at the us. Embassy in New Delhi.

Dead Waters W

en a young electronics engineer running a computer design and electron ballistics consulting firm in the late 1960s decided to venture into a lake cleaning business, it was one of the most unusual career decisions.

That was the time when the United States discovered that hundreds of its water bodies were polluted and scores of students started joining courses in lake restoration. The techniques they were taught were all conventional. These included dredging, nutrient diversion and weed harvesting. But Robert L. Laing thought of introducing newer approaches that imitate natural processes and minimize use of harmful chemicals.

Why did Laing shift from electronics to water pollution? While developing a high voltage thermionic energy converter, which converts heat to electricity, Laing stumbled upon a process to solve water pollution problems. "So it was natural to move on to the next step: water pollution control," he explained, during a recent visit to India.

He started his career in 1958 as an aerospace systems design engineer with General Dynamics, Fott Worth, where he designed the bombing/navigation test computer for the B-58 Hustler airplane.

Unfazed by criticism, he founded CleanFlo Laboratories, Inc. in 1970, two years before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began. But business was hard to come by initially. Clean-Flo's methods were difficult to accept for the scientific community at that time, though it does endorse them now. "Although there was a lot of money in lake cleaning business then, it was tough for us because what we did was not taught in schools," said Laing. Moreover, big money went to consultants and professors who worked

for civil engineering companies and municipalities that built bridges and highways. Lake cleaning was a second priority.

Business volume and clients rose gradually and the company, to date, has treated more than 2,000 water bodies in and outside the U.S. In 1987, it started expanding its international business. Three-fifths of its business now comes from abroad. "It was much easier to be accepted outside the United States because of what the consultants knew in the U.S., what they were programmed to do like dredging, nutrient diversion, et cetera," Laing said. Today Clean-Flo has projects running in India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, -Malaysia, France, the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka.

Clean-Flo's non-toxic lake, river and reservoir restoration process employs a combination of mechanical, microbial and non-toxic chemical methods developed over the years by the company: the continuous laminar flow inversion/oxygenation system; Clean-Flo lake cleanser, a nontoxic phosphate precipitant; Lake Care, a non-toxic water clarifier; Sky Blue Lake Dye; and microbes to feed on organic sediment, oils, pesticides, human sewage,

phosphorus and nitrogen.

All water bodies restore themselves using natural processes. In cool climates, lakes turn over twice a year due to temperature variations while in the tropics, hurricanes, typhoons and other adverse weather conditions turn lakes over multiple times a year. This natural inversion has a lot to offer. Clean-Flo duplicates these "Spring and Fall" turnover and accelerates it to keep up with today's pollutants.

When the lake runs out of oxygen at the bottom, there is a massive release of phosphorus and nitrogen that breed weeds and algae, from the bottom sediment. Exposure to sunlight and oxygen in the atmosphere kills disease bacteria and toxic gases accumulated at the bottom are released. Putting oxygenated surface water on the bottom of lakes binds phosphorus and nitrogen to inorganic sediments like clay. This reduces the content of these two compounds in water by up to 97 percent and neutralizes acids so that the lake can begin its recovery.

Equipment is set up on the shore and at the bottom of the water body. The entire lake is artificially filled with oxygen starting from the bottom. Oxygenation kills

CLEAN-FLO compressor cabinet Oxygen --enables benthic organisms and fish to live on bottom. are healthier

Fish feed on organisms; from natural foods, abundant oxygen,

lack of toxins,

lack of disease organisms.

Resurrected anaerobic bacteria which live in the absence of oxygen, and are the source of toxic hydrogen sulphide, sulphuric acid and ammonia gas. The sulphate in sulph uric acid already in the lake is absorbed by microbes, plants and aquatic animals.

Low-oxygen microbes convert nitric acid to inelt nitrogen gas. Carbon in the sediment is used as an energy source, so carbon dioxide is another end-product.

A diffuser, which blows oxygen, is set up at the bottom. Oxygen bubbles, while moving upward, drag bottom water to the surface. This initiates a flow called continuous laminar flow inversion. This releases toxic carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas.

The bacteria are also weakened and killed when exposed to ultraviolet rays in sunlight. Reduction in phosphorus/nitrogen starves the bacteria.

The key to the process is a special formulation, termed C-FLO by the company.

Beneficial microbes, that feed on organic sediment, ooze and peat at the bottom, are introduced. These microbes convert this muck into carbon dioxide and water.

C-FLO also adds organisms that are natural food for aquatic insects.

C-FLO multiplies as it feeds on muck, Kachrali Lake in Thane covered with hyacinth before (below) and after Clean-Flo treatment (right).

and insects grow and multiply as they feed on C-FLO. Fish then feed on insects and grow rapidly. This results in deepening of the pond, makes a better environment for fish and makes it difficult for weeds to grow. Cattails and lilies gradually disappear. The microbial culture is generally added after three weeks of installing the aeration equipment, once the bottom water is suitable for its survival. Natural enzymes are used to speed up the work of the bacteria. Natural chemicals such as calcium tie up phosphates so the weeds and algae cannot grow. Sky-blue Lake Dye may be added to shade the weeds and algae from sunlight and impalt artificial color to the surface.

The initial dominance of these beneficial microbes in the lake environment gives way to natural competition between organisms that regains a healthy balance.

"The conventional method of dredging the muck can deepen a lake, making it more difficult for submerged vegetation to grow, but does nothing for water quality, algae and fish," Laing said.

Nutrient diversion involves channeling of all possible sources of sewage into a single zone where it is treated and then redirected into the water body. The process reduces pollutants in the lake by 5 to 35 percent, but does nothing for the 01'-

ganic sediments at the bottom. The problem with nutrient diversion is non-point source pollutants, which cannot be avoided. One cannot stop people from throwing flowers into the river, and when it rains water comes in from the watershed, Laing said. "That is one of the primary reasons for poor performance of earlier methods. As you cannot stop pollutants from entering the river, they should be treated internally and worked into the food web so that they become food for fish or biodegrade, and convelt to carbon dioxide," he explained.

Weed harvesting removes weeds, but if it is done without improving water quality, there is algae bloom, because nutrients are there in the lake and they have to go some place. Wetlanding is another conventional method. Take, for example, a stream flowing into a lake. It is kept shallow and weeds are planted that absorb phosphorus and nitrogen before the water enters the lake. Again that does not take care of nonpoint sources.

Working with French engineers in 1992, Clean-Flo restored the Helpe Minuere river in Fourmies, France, for which the city won two prestigious environmental awards from the French Government.

There was a 19-kilometer stretch of the river in an industrial region with no fish or

Shank Pond in Minnesota before (top) and after treatment (above).

insects for 43 kilometers. The Feng-Shang drinking water reservoir with hundreds of pig farms upstream was restored in Taiwan. Other notable projects include Silver Springs Lake in Wisconsin, Lake Yononnoka in North Carolina, Lake Weston in Florida, Upper Marlboro Lakes in Maryland, Sweeney Lake in Minnesota, St. James Park near Buckingham Palace in.

London, and Olympic Park in Seoul.

But do rivers pose a difficult task to treat? No. A lake, that has inflow and an outflow, is a slow moving river, Laing said. What is looked at is the volume of water and parameters like content of phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, and biological and chemical oxygen demands (BOD and COD, which are measures of oxygen consumed in the decomposition of various organic matter). The bottom of a river does not flow; the surface flows and going downwards, it is a parabolic curvezero water speed at the bottom and as you go up, the velocity increases. The lake process is duplicated in a river. The speed of moving water does not hamper the treatment process. Inside a polluted town, if a river is shallow, it will restore itself through the same process.

Clean-Flo operates in India through its representative based in Mumbai, who

hires Indian labor to install the equipment. He supervises '" the installation of the equipment, imported from the U.S., and its maintenance, which is done every three months-some filters need replacement. "We have some installations operating for the last 20 years. For the first few projects in any country, we send one of our supervisors over," Laing said.

No human intervention is required to operate the equipment. Once started, they run all day. In five to six years, a few parts in the air compressor, and in 7-10 years, bearings may wear out. Turning off the equipment for five days results in an algae bloom.

It requires minimal maintenance-annual maintenance costs typically range between 10 and 20 percent of the equipment cost.

Two finished projects in India are the Kachrali Lake cleaning project in Thane, Maharashtra, and a few lagoons for the Leela Group of Hotels in Goa, which was done about three years ago. "We installed Clean-Flo aerators in the lagoons in late 1996 and they have been functioning well since then. There has been a marked improvement in the clarity of water as well as adequate oxygen levels," said Col. U.c.

Thakur, general manager (projects) of the Leela Group. "We would definitely be using Clean-Flo treatment system, for water treatment in any of our future projects," he said.

Laing said although hyacinth seeds are present in the four-hectare Kachrali Lake, where Clean-Flo systems were installed in January 1999, they won't germinate due to lack of nutrients inside water. But the results for the lake could have been better had Clean-Flo taken up the responsibility of post-installation management, he said.

The lake does not have the water transparency that meets Clean-Flo's standards as some substances not recommended by the company were added to the lake afterwards, he said.

The company is eyeing several other Indian projects that include the Yamuna River near Delhi, which has extremely high levels of fecal and other pathogenic bacteria; Dal Lake in Srinagar; Kerala Inland Waterways; Rabindra Sagar Lake in Kolkata; Powai Lake in Mumbai; Hebel Lake in Bangalore, that is totally covered with hyacinth; and a polluted reservoir in Chennai.

The time required for installation depends on the size of the project. The Kachrali Lake project took about ten weeks in all: three weeks to put the equipment together, five weeks shipping time and a week or two for installation. Periodic assessment and monitoring is done.

The company relies on its database of 31 years of case reports. When a fresh query is entered, the computer replies with options for any particular project.

The cost is not at all high, according to Laing, and the larger the water body, the cheaper it is. The cost is one-tenth the cost incurred in dredging or nutrient diversion.

"For a single typical small river, conventional methods of treatment could require around $100 million whereas our process could cost about $20 million," Laing said.

For a small lake, it could be roughly $25,000 per hectare.

He said there have been several proposals made over the years for cleaning the Yamuna River, but nothing has been done.

"We can do it [clean the Yamuna] and I promise you it will be a small fraction of any other thing that is being proposed. But it might still be expensive," he said. The World Bank has agreed to fund projects in India that would use the Clean-Flo process, he said. But nothing concrete has been finalized yet.

The major problem associated with Clean-Flo systems is improper maintenance by the customers when they take charge after installation. As a result the water quality goes down gradually and the company is blamed. Change of staff is another serious problem. "New staff does not understand Clean-Flo systems and turns them off. When the algae bloom occurs within a week, they do not relate that to the equipment. And this happens even in the United States," Laing added.

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1. Architect Joseph Allen Stein in his office in New Delhi. Blueprint of the National Trade Centre and Exhibition Building in Pragati Maidan (i993), New Delhi, is in the background. 2. Stein:S typical singlefamily house in Mill Valley, California (i947). built in a garden setting. 3. The American Embassy School (1962) utilizes natural features of the boulderstrewn site, New Delhi.

4. India international Centre (1962), New Delhi.

5. Model of the india Habitar Centre (1993), New Delhi.

merican architect Joseph Allen Stein, who became an icon of modem Indian architecture, died at the age of 89 in Raleigh, North Carolina, on October 6. After his arrival in India in 1952 as head of the newly-formed department of architecture, town and regional planning at the Bengal Engineering College in Calcutta, he showed no inclination to return to his native country. He made India his permanent home and dedicated his long professional life to building wonderful edifices all over the country.

His contribution to Indian architecture during the past five decades was astounding. The General Education Centre at the Aligarh Muslim University, the India International Centre, the Australian High Commission, the American Embassy School, all in New Delhi, the Kashmiri Conference Centre on Dallake in Srinagar and ICRlSAT in Hyderabad are among the landmarks which Stein designed. He did the town planning for India's two giant public sector steel plants at Rourkela and Bhilai. A recent and most idealistic architectural project was the India Habitat Centre in New Delhj where he explored a new means of bringing living beauty to a crowded urban setting tlu'ough the integration of buildings with vertical gardens.

Stein's contribution to architecture in India should also be seen in the context of heritage. A salient aspect of Stein's work was his continuing concern for the environment. His ideas of "sustainable ecology" in an urban context and of micro-climate modification as a means to save energy and resources were implemented in his designs, which continue to be models for young architects.

Biographer Stephen White's very aptly titled book, Building in the Garden: The Architecture of Joseph Allen Stein in india and California, documents the work and philosophy of Stein, and hjs z efforts in planning and conservation, particularly in the Himalayan and ~ other mountainous regions. A visit to any Stein building conveys to the a: observer his philosophy: better life for all might be attainable and 8 sustainable in surroundings that incorporate nature's bounty.