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At the appointed hour, I sit in the living room,
clutching a picture of Babu and await the tears. Nothing happens. I
force myself to remember details of Babu's face and hands. I
can feel the muscles in his forearms as clearly as on that day a
month before his death when he and I had walked home from the
factory, with me holding his arm all the way home. Still no tears.
Not crying has become a habit, a reflex. This calls for drastic
action, I realize. I look through my record collection and pull out
every sad song that I can find. Terry Jacks'
Seasonsin the
Sun
. Neil Diamond singing
If You Go Away
. I am very aware
of time slipping away, knowing that my time alone at home is limited.
Any minute now there could be a knock on the door that could end this
private time.

It may be months before such an opportunity arises
again. But my tear ducts remain unconvinced. I cannot shed tears for
the man who had literally given me the last ten-rupee note in his
wallet, a man whose face was one of the first ones I'd seen
after being born. I am a freak, a cruel, heartless bitch, a frigid,
emotionally constipated piece of shit. I had finished my dinner when
the rest of the family had left their plates untouched upon learning
that Babu was ill. I had been mean to him, had looked down on him
once I'd gotten myself some intellectual friends.

I sit in the living room thinking evil thoughts
about myself, knowing that I am berating myself at least in part out
of clear-eyed calculation. Because I want to feel something and if I
can't cry for Babu perhaps I can shed tears of self-pity. But
the ruse doesn't work.

The tears didn't come that day and they
didn't come until years later on a cold winter's day in
Columbus, Ohio, about eight thousand miles away from the hot, foetid
city in which Babu had spent most of his life. The tears finally came
that day because I was homesick and I suddenly thought of Babu, all
alone in the England of the early 1950s, studying for his Merchant
Navy exams and failing. And suddenly I was weeping for that
disappointed young man who came back to Bombay having labelled
himself a failure and for how lonely and scared and alone he must've
been in England. I was crying because I realized that Babu never
talked about his year in England because the stench of failure was
too strong. And I wondered what he would've thought of me, the
second member of the family to venture out in the big wide world.
Would he have been proud? Nervous? Even a little jealous? And then it
hits me that I'll never know because Babu stopped knowing me at
the age of fifteen and I remember how his death changed my family
forever, made us all grow up and grow old before our time and then
I'm crying, crying, crying for the years that Babu never had
with his beloved Freny and crying for my father whose youth ended
that day in April 1977 and above all, I'm crying for me,
finally, I'm crying for me, for that frightened, lost kid who
tried her best to hold her unravelling family together, for that
poor, miserable fifteen-year-old who was charged with fighting with
the moon, and for that ugly, awkward, skinny girl who would never be
anyone's first darling of the morning any more.

I
T'S BEGINNING TO UNRAVEL. I can tell
by the way they won't look me in the eye.

It begins as a trickle and at first they have the
decency to look away, their faces pinched with embarrassment, but
after awhile the trickle grows into a regular stream and now they are
simply looking through me, ignoring me as if I am a pebble in their
way.

I look around frantically for Vinny but he has
gone to fetch us some battatawadas and bread for lunch. I have been
on my feet in the hallway outside the college admission office for
four hours and I am tired.

This is my second year of college. After years of
mouthing empty platitudes about youth revolution while in high
school, I finally have a chance to make it happen.

We had launched the fee boycott campaign six weeks
ago to protest Bombay University's plan to hike tuition by
twenty per cent, thereby making a university education inaccessible
to thousands of low-income students.

For weeks now, I have been standing at the same
spot each day begging, pleading, and arguing with my fellow students
to return home without paying their fees for the upcoming semester.
And Vinny and I have been successful beyond all wildest dreams. Many
of the students have travelled to college from their faraway homes in
the suburbs during the summer-break to enrol for the following term.
But I have looked them in the eye, slapped their backs, read them
statistics about how many students would have to

drop out if the fee hike goes through, beseeched
them, appealed to their sense of justice, laughingly told them that I
would pay their return bus fare home, and amazingly, miraculously, I
have succeeded in getting most of them to turn back.

The clerk at the office window scowls at me each
time I am victorious, each time I convince another student to
continue the fee boycott. I smile at him on occasion, an appeasing
smile as if to say, We're really on the same side, brother, but
he looks away. Principal Singha frequently walks by the ground floor
office where Vinny and I have stood guard for the last six weeks.
Most of the time he ignores us, simply sweeps past us, but sometimes
he shakes his head and stops to talk to us, as if his curiosity is
greater than his contempt for us. ‘What do think you're
achieving with this, Red?' he says to me in his gravel-like
voice, using his favourite moniker for me. ‘Wasting both your
time and the college's time. You think the chancellor of Bombay
University is going to be scared of your little tactics?'

In his usual earnest way Vinny steps forward to
argue with Mr Singha. He pulls out his little fact sheet about the
number of students affected by the hike but the principal shakes his
head impatiently, grunts, and resumes walking.

I go home each day shaking with fatigue and
excitement.

Although we are on summer-break, I am working
eight-hour days. I get to college a few minutes before the tuition
window opens, stay on through lunch and leave only after I make sure
that the fee clerk has left for the day. But after the ambitionless
years spent with Jenny and Patty, after years of self-absorption and
navel-gazing, after all the high-school talk of youth power and youth
revolution, I feel as if I have discovered my life's work. Each
evening I knock on the door that connects our apartment to Jesse's
and give her the day's report. ‘You know what's
really great about this?' I say to her one day. ‘I feel
as if I am using my very body in the service of people I do not even
know. I mean, it's one thing to sit in endless political
meetings at Elphinstone College or somewhere, smoking cigarettes and
sipping glass after glass of chai, but this is something else. This
is like actually using your body, standing when you are dying to sit
down, talking when you don't feel like saying another word,
looking and touching and talking to people. I don't know—this
feels more real to me, I guess.'

Jesse nods. I can see a look of almost maternal
pride in her eyes.

But now it is just a few days before the term
starts again and the kids are panicking. The first few ones mumble
their apologies to me, explain that their parents will skin them
alive if they miss any classes, brush aside my explanations of how we
could win this thing if we only stuck together, and go ahead and pay
their fees. ‘C'mon, yaar,' Anand says. ‘God
only knows how many classes I've bunked last term. You know
that Mr Singha is just waiting for a chance to kick me out of here. I
just can't risk that, yaar.'

Once a few of them pay, the others follow, until
Vinny and I are floundering like fish on the shore. They are not
listening to us now, the mesmerizing, magical hold that we had on
them until a few days ago, has been broken.

I glance at the face of the clerk. He is grinning
at me, a victorious, gleeful smile. I look away. Weeks of fatigue are
catching up with me, making me teary. We had been so close.

A few more days of unity and we could have
defeated the system. For a split-second I ask myself if I was wrong
to have refused Pranab's offer from a week ago and then I hate
myself for my moment of weakness.

Pranab is an overweight, burly guy whom we
jokingly refer to as a professional student. At twenty-six, he is
considerably older than the rest of us but seems to have no intention
of graduating from college, content to spend his time cruising down
the streets of South Bombay on his

Yamaha motorcycle. Pranab belonged to the youth
division of the Congress Party and I knew that he and his ilk looked
upon student activists like Vinny and me as idealistic idiots. So I
was reluctant to go when I heard that Pranab wanted to meet with us
in the college cafeteria for a chat. But Vinny convinced me
otherwise.

‘Arré, Vishnu, bring two more glasses
of tea, fatta-faat,' he yelled to the young server when we
showed up. I was irritated by his presumption at ordering tea for me
without even a cursory inquiry, but I didn't show it. After
all, Pranab had many other qualities, which irritated me even more
greatly.

He smiled at us, and I noticed that his teeth were
beginning to yellow from the constant cigarette smoking. ‘Hey,
yaar, thanks for coming,' he said, shaking hands with Vinny and
nodding at me. ‘I've been watching both of you for days,
keeping the students from paying their fees and all. Not a bad job,
yaar, considering and all. Most days you get what? Ten-twenty
students to turn back? And maybe two-three cowards go ahead and pay
anyway? If I had my way, I'd kill those bleddy bastards.'

We listened to him cautiously, silently, unsure of
where this was heading. Pranab kept talking. ‘Yah, men, two of
you are giving all of us student activists a good name.' I
bristled at that, at his presumption at equating his thuggery with
the kind of work we were doing but Vinny kicked me gently under the
table and I held my silence.

‘So here's what I have to offer,'
Pranab was saying. ‘Me and my boys can get this whole college
shut down in two hours flat. Nobody will dare set foot in it to pay
any tuition-fuition.

You two can go home, relax, or take in a flick or
two. In exchange, all I ask is that you don't challenge me in
the next student election.'

Vinny and I exchanged a quick look, unsure of
whether to laugh or be offended. This bloody idiot with his bristly
moustache and shifty eyes actually thought that we would waste our
time running for a meaningless college election.

‘What, you mean you can shut down the
college in two hours?' Vinny asked, although we both knew what
Pranab meant.

‘Oh, come off it, yaar,' Pranab said.
‘You know I have good contacts. A few stones thrown, a few
windows broken, maybe one or two beatings and this college won't
open until we want it to.'

We were wasting our time. I got up. ‘That's
not how we operate,' I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as
he did. ‘Any goonda can close something down with violence. We
are trying to appeal to student's sense of justice and
solidarity.'

Pranab raised his right eyebrow. ‘Sense of
justice?' he repeated, snickering a bit. ‘Sister, just
wait till it's time for college to start. Then you'll see
them all lining up at the front office, baaing like sheep. Even your
best friends won't know your name when they're in that
queue, paying their fees.'

Well, he was right. As I watch them lining up
behind the open window and averting their faces from where we stand,
Pranab suddenly seems to be a genius in human psychology.

‘Sheep,' I mutter to myself.
‘Disgusting, fucking sheep.'

So much has happened since I impulsively
participated in my first demonstration. The Emergency ended on March
20, 1977 with Indira Gandhi's ignoble defeat. I received the
final grades for my high school board exams the next day. (When Greta
Duke saw that despite all predictions, I had actually done well in my
exams, she shook her head and said, ‘You have the devil's
luck, Umrigar. The devil's luck. Never forget that.')
Indira's nemesis, the doddering Morarji Desai, became Prime
Minister at the age of eighty-one. Babu died in April of that year.
Three years later, a repentant, desperate India brought back Indira
Gandhi in a landslide. By then, I had finished three years of
college.

College: Steam and smoke rise from endless cups of
tea and cigarettes while we sit in cafeterias discussing how to build
a student movement; afternoons spent sitting cross-legged on the
grass at the Bombay University campus, debating politics and ‘the
Indian condition', with members of opposing civil liberties
organizations; counting the money from selling mimeographed booklets
to the rush of sweaty factory workers that pours out of the textile
mills after twelve-hour shifts; looking over my shoulder constantly
to make sure I don't run into any of my father's business
friends who might let slip that they spotted me half-way across the
city from where I'm supposed to be.

College: Requesting the office clerk to fix up the
attendance rolls to masquerade the fact that I have not attended
classes in months; mornings spent gossiping and eating tomato-chutney
sandwiches on the marble steps outside of college; writing and
directing plays for the All-Bombay Intercollegiate competition; going
to Jehangir Art Gallery to take in the latest art shows and then
stopping at nearby Rhythm House; skipping class to sit in the rain at
Nariman Point, gazing out at the sea while Vinny lights cigarette
after cigarette and lets me take deep drags off them.