Artwork by Iqbal Hussain. Image Courtesy: ArtChowk Gallery
by Murali Kamma
The woman who met me at the entrance of Mission Valley School, my alma mater in India, seemed to know me. But I didn’t recognize her.
“You were in the American boy’s class, weren’t you?” she said, even before I could introduce myself. “We called him AB.”
“Arun Brown?”
She giggled. “Yes. AB stood for American Boy more than Arun Brown, so I couldn’t remember his name. He was here last week, visiting from America.”
“Really? I’m sorry I missed him.”
Earlier that morning, after checking out of my hotel in the district capital, where I’d attended a wedding, I caught a taxi that took me along a winding and rising mountain road, over which hung a gently rolling canopy of mist. When we reached the town, which was crowded and traffic-clogged, the landmarks had changed so much—with new buildings everywhere in a chaotic jumble of concrete—that I got confused and we missed a turn. Then I saw Mission Valley School, perched on a hill. We swung around and went up a narrow road, now fully paved and skirted by eucalyptus and pine trees that had thinned over the years, giving the campus less seclusion. But the heady scent in the crisp air was still the same, beckoning me like a long-lost friend.
The mention of Arun Brown took me back a quarter-century.
It was on the steps of this entrance that I’d first seen him through the bay window of our classroom. Like Arun, I was 17 that year. I was thinking about dinner that evening, impatiently waiting for our study hour to end, when I heard an excited announcement in the classroom: “The American boy is here!”
We rushed to the window for a better look. Craning my neck, I saw Ahmed’s rickety taxi wheeze up the sloping driveway, trailing a cloud of red dust in the fading light. At the entrance, where the lights had just sprung to life, a sari-clad woman and a tall boy, with curly hair and sporting a navy-blue blazer, emerged from the black-and-yellow Ambassador and walked up the steps, followed by Ahmed, who carried two suitcases.
In the silence that followed, the disappointment in our classroom was palpable. Most of us had expected to see a fair-complexioned, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. Instead, here was somebody who looked like us! “He is American?” Mohan said, his voice ringing with incredulity. “This must be a different boy.”
That’s how I felt, but another student who seemed to know better insisted that it was indeed the American boy. The dinner bell rang, shifting our attention to more urgent matters.
Arun Brown wasn’t in the dining hall—apparently he and his mother had returned to their hotel for another night—but there was much talk about him. Yes, he had grown up in America. Who was his father? An African American, apparently, though we used a different label back then, unaware—until our dorm master corrected us the following morning—that the word was offensive, not just outdated. Arun’s divorced Indian mother had returned to India with Arun and was now teaching at a college. The only Americans I’d seen so far were the white tourists who passed through our town. Like the other students at my table, I could hardly wait to meet Arun the next day.
In my final term at Mission Valley, before our class scattered to tentatively begin our adulthood in various places, Arun breezed into our lives like an unexpected yet welcome guest. It was one of those years that divide your life into before and after.
When Arun joined our class that morning, it was still early in the year, with a cold snap that would last another two months, and we had little inkling of what lay ahead. It was an English class and we were reading, oddly enough, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Arun walked in with our principal, who interrupted the class with a brief introduction and asked Arun to take the empty desk between Mohan’s and mine. If the three of us hadn’t been sitting together, I’m sure we wouldn’t have become close friends.
Looking back, I realize Arun came to our school probably because the principal didn’t mind that, unlike us, Arun wouldn’t be taking the all-India board exam at the end of the term. And in fact, he did go back to America to finish high school. The months Arun spent with us might have been a sabbatical of sorts for him, but he fully immersed himself in our academic and extracurricular activities. Well built and taller than almost any other boy, he quickly made friends with his genial, outgoing personality. His American background made him exotic and popular at our school. Some people, especially the kitchen staff and dorm ayahs, simply called him American Boy. Eventually, his nickname became AB.
Mission Valley School, despite the name, wasn’t a relic of the Raj. The neo-Gothic brick buildings of our small campus did remind one of a different era, but the British missionaries—for whose children the school had been originally established—had decamped long ago, leaving behind only traces of their colonial education system. I suppose we did live in a kind of Anglo-India, though the emphasis was clearly on India, with the Anglo part influencing our lives mostly in subtle ways. We spoke English frequently, and our library was neatly stocked with books by English authors ranging from Dickens, Austen, Maugham and Greene to perennial favorites like P.G. Wodehouse and Enid Blyton. And yet, more than “bloody hell” and “bugger off,” our speech was flavored with colorful Indianisms.
Although not familiar with Indian history, Arun became an enthusiastic participant in class, and he made great progress with Hindi, our second language. His popularity soared, above all, when he excelled in cricket, which he had never played before. Arun introduced us to baseball, whose rules—like a lot about America, that distant but fascinating country—were mysterious to us. In fact, until Arun’s arrival, America had registered in our lives only in the form of movies and comic books, which we passed around and read avidly.
Arun became our interpreter of all things American. And it wasn’t just students who peppered him with questions. Once, in our world history class, we read that Mount Rushmore had sculptures of four U.S. presidents who represented the period encompassing the first 150 years of the nation. Arun then added that a place called Stone Mountain in Georgia featured the carvings of three Civil War leaders who had been heroes in the South but villains in the North. Our history teacher, I remember, was just as intrigued to hear about it. Years later, when I moved to Atlanta, one of the first things I did was to visit nearby Stone Mountain and gaze at the carvings of those Confederate leaders.
There was another side to Arun, I soon realized. But that part of his personality only emerged when he was with Mohan and me.
My favorite time of the day was before study hour. Every weekday, after classes and outdoor activities, we would either bathe or wash up and then have tea and snacks in the dining hall. What followed—before darkness fell and the lights in our school came on—was a delicious stretch of time we called free period. We lounged about, listened to music, read, chatted, and played games like caroms, ping-pong and chess. In those final months, I often hung out with Arun and Mohan. What we enjoyed most was to walk up to Top Point, the highest section of a terraced field where our staff grew vegetables, and sit near a locked shed containing gardening tools. We had a spectacular view of the town.
Students were discouraged from going up to Top Point because of its remoteness, but we went anyway, knowing that nobody else would be around, to enjoy the scenery and smoke a cigarette while chatting. Once Mohan brought a joint, mostly to impress Arun—who smiled and politely took a couple of puffs. Mohan didn’t repeat the offer.
The best moment at Top Point—the moment we all waited for before heading down—was when the evening train departed for the plains. Steam engines had been phased out on the broad gauge lines, but not here in the Hill District, where a century-old meter gauge line snaked up to our town. Three toots announced the so-called toy train’s departure every evening. As it gathered speed, with the sound echoing in the valley, we would watch the chugging engine belch smoke—which curled lazily before vanishing—and wait by the shed till the train also disappeared from sight. Then we would rush back.
One evening, while we were waiting for the train to leave, Mohan asked casually, “AB, did you have a girlfriend in America?”
“Yes,” he said. “I dated some girls, and had a girlfriend.”
To my embarrassment, I heard myself say, “So you knew her intimately?”
Arun smiled. “Yes, I knew her intimately, as you put it.”
I felt a stab of envy, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s true that Arun had been circumspect about his relationships with girls. He’d sometimes talked about his American friends, but never girlfriends. And while Mohan and I had privately wondered about his experiences with girls, we hadn’t broached the subject because we didn’t (or at least I didn’t) want to dwell on our inexperience. Being ignorant would be better, I felt, given how often I thought about girls.
The wound festered, making me uncomfortable. Until now I’d only admired Arun and thought it was cool—a word we’d recently picked up—that we could be close friends. But we belonged to different worlds, I suddenly realized. I had never even held hands with a girl.
“Do you have a girlfriend now?” Mohan asked.
Arun smiled and, without saying anything, stubbed out his cigarette. Three sharp toots punctured the silence; it was time for us to get back. We stood up to watch. A muffled clackety-clack drifted upwards from the twisting railway tracks, accompanied by plumes of smoke. Soon, the chugging train disappeared under a thick blanket of vegetation, and the reverberations stopped.
“I’m going to get a girlfriend before the term is over,” Mohan announced.
I looked at him in shock. “Where are you going to find one?” I asked.
“Well, how about right here in the school?”
Arun and I laughed. “Mohan, what are you talking about?” Arun said.
“There’s a girl here that I’m interested in,” Mohan said. “And she’s interested in me. You may not call her my girlfriend, but I promise I’ll kiss her before the term is over.”
“Who is she?” I asked. It was hard to believe him, because the school was not co-educational back then.
Without answering, Mohan continued walking down the hill. Arun and I followed him.
“He’s kidding,” Arun whispered to me. “There’s no such girl.”
Mohan heard him. “Yes, there is!” he said, spinning around. “Let’s have a bet.”
I looked at him curiously, struck by the emotion in his voice. Arun, too, was looking at him, and he laughed when Mohan said the bet would be worth 100 rupees.
“So, you’re going to kiss a girl, right?” Arun said.
“No, not just kiss a girl. It’s going to be more than that, AB.”
Before we went to bed that night, Mohan sidled up to me in the dorm and took me aside. “It’ll happen tomorrow evening when everybody is watching the Saturday movie,” he said. “Can you bring Arun to the tool shed at eight? Swati is going to meet me there. She has the key.”
“This is a bad idea,” I said, nervously looking around to see if anybody was watching us. “Does she know what it’s about?”
I was dumbfounded. As I stared at Mohan, Arun said, “What do you mean? You can’t be serious.”
“I am serious,” Mohan said calmly. “Intimacy is serious.” Then, turning around, he sprinted towards the classroom.
Later in the evening, when we were in the dining hall, it became obvious that Mohan wasn’t joking. While some of my tablemates, including Arun, were talking excitedly about an upcoming cricket match, I noticed Mohan exchanging smiles with Swati, who worked in the kitchen along with her mother. Having dropped out of school in her village not long ago, Swati, who didn’t speak English, had moved with her mother to our campus, where Sawti’s father was our maintenance man. They all lived in a ramshackle building, which housed the support staff, whom we referred to as servants in those days.
Mohan’s smile had been so fleeting that, at first, I thought I was mistaken. Swati rushed back to the kitchen after depositing a big bowl of steaming rice on one of the tables, and I didn’t see her again that evening. But when Mohan grinned at me, I knew it wasn’t my imagination. I was flabbergasted. How could he even contemplate doing such a thing?
“Are you serious about your bet?” I whispered.
“Of course,” Mohan whispered back, still grinning. “And I’m going to win it soon if everything goes right. Please don’t say anything to Arun.”
Before we went to bed that night, Mohan sidled up to me in the dorm and took me aside. “It’ll happen tomorrow evening when everybody is watching the Saturday movie,” he said. “Can you bring Arun to the tool shed at eight? Swati is going to meet me there. She has the key.”
“This is a bad idea,” I said, nervously looking around to see if anybody was watching us. “Does she know what it’s about?”
“Kind of…I said it was important, that I had something to share with her. Just do it, yaar. What’s the big deal? She’s okay with it.”
“It’s a big deal, Mohan. I don’t think you should do it.”
“Fine,” he said in a huff. “You don’t have to be involved. Be a chicken.”
I didn’t see Mohan the next day, even in the dorm, and on Sunday I was stunned to hear that he was leaving the school. I didn’t speak to him again.
“You were in the American boy’s class, weren’t you?” the woman had said.
Of course, now I remembered her. It was Swati, though I didn’t find much resemblance between this amiable woman and the quiet, wispy girl I had known. The matron in charge wouldn’t be back till late in the evening, Swati explained, but I was welcome to look around after signing my name in the visitor’s book. “It’s not a problem; I already know who you are,” she added. Again, I was struck by how quickly she’d remembered me.
In the visitor’s book, next to his name and address, Arun had included the following comment: “Nice to be back. Brought back memories, good and bad. All the best!” After signing my name, I jotted down Arun’s information, promising myself to contact him once I returned to the States.
“We didn’t see Mohan again,” Swati said. “Do you remember him, the boy who was expelled?”
Startled, I looked up and saw her frown. But then she smiled again. It was as if she’d read my mind. “Yes,” I simply replied, and waited for her to say more. She didn’t. I didn’t either, as Swati opened another door and let me enter the main campus.
Murali Kamma is an Atlanta-based editor. Having been a dreamer and loner, he still cannot believe that he’s a responsible dad with a paying job. His fiction has appeared in Rosebud, Asian Pacific American Journal, South Asian Review, AIM (America’s Intercultural Magazine), India Abroad, Muse India, Trikone Magazine, and India Currents. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and India Abroad have published his columns.
