Teranesia

By the end of their third month in Toronto there was a perceptible change in the household, as if it had been decided that their settling-in period was over. Amita began hosting dinner parties, and introducing her foster-children to her friends. The guests made goo-goo noises over Madhusree, and handed Prabir calling cards with Dior web sites embedded in the chips.

Keith and Amita’s acquaintances were drawn from almost every profession, but remarkably they all had one thing in common. Arun was a lecturer, writer, editor, social commentator, and poet. Bernice was a sculptor, performance artist, political activist, and poet. Denys was a multimedia consultant, advertising copywriter, film producer … and poet. Prabir flipped through all the cards one night, to be sure he hadn’t left someone out, but there were no exceptions. Dentist, and poet. Actor, and poet. Architect, and poet. Accountant, and poet.

Thankfully, none of these visitors ever raised the subject of the war with him, but that left them with little choice but to ask about school. To Prabir’s dismay, confessing that his best subjects were science and mathematics almost invariably triggered a baffling stream of non sequiturs comparing him with the famous Indian mathematician Ramanujan. Could they really not tell that he was too old for this kind of growup-to-be-an-astronaut flattery? And why did they always invoke Ramanujan? Why not Bose or Chandrasekhar, why not Salam or Ashtekar, why not even (perish the thought) someone Chinese or European or American? Prabir eventually discovered the reason: an Oliver Stone biopic that had been released in 2010. Amita rented it for him. The story was punctuated with sitar-drenched hallucinatory visits from Hindu deities, dispensing cheat notes to the struggling young mathematician. In the end, Ramanujan steps from his deathbed into a desert strewn with snakes, all biting their tails to form the symbol for infinity.

There were worse things in the world than being patronised by the And Poets. Prabir knew that he was a thousand times better off than most of the war’s orphans – and if this fact had ever slipped his mind, the TV was full of harrowing footage from Aceh and Irian Jaya to rub his face in it. The fighting was over, the leaders of the coup had been overthrown, and five provinces had gained independence, but ten million people were starving across the archipelago. He’d been deprived of nothing – save the one thing that no one could restore. Amita not only fed, clothed and sheltered them, she bestowed endless physical affection on Madhusree, and she would have done the same for him if he hadn’t recoiled from her touch.

Prabir found himself growing almost ashamed of his lack of respect for her, and he began to wonder if his fears for Madhusree were unfounded. Amita hadn’t tried to brainwash him with her bizarre theories; maybe Madhusree would be left to make up her own mind.

Maybe Amita really was harmless.

In the summer of 2014, Amita asked Prabir if he’d come to a rally, organised in response to a recent spate of racially motivated bashings, at which she’d been invited to speak. Prabir said yes, happily surprised to learn that Amita wasn’t as detached from reality as he’d imagined, locked away in the university battling colonialism with Nostromo comics and undermining the patriarchy by pointlessly flipping computer bits. At last, here she was doing something of which he could be unequivocally proud.

The rally took place on a Sunday; they marched through the streets beneath a cloudless sky. Prabir liked summer in Toronto; the sun only climbed two-thirds of the way to the zenith, but it made the trip last. Keith seemed to think that thirty-two degrees was sweltering; when they reached the park and sat down on the grass, he opened the picnic hamper they’d brought and consumed several cans of beer.

In front of two thousand people, Amita took her place at the lectern. Prabir pointed her out to Madhusree. ‘Look! There’s Amita! She’s famous!’

Amita began, ‘We’re gathered here today to deplore and denounce racism, and that’s all well and good, but I believe the time is long overdue for a more sophisticated analysis of this phenomenon to reach the public sphere. My research has shown that antipathy towards people of other cultures is in fact nothing but a redirection of a far more basic form of oppression. A careful study of the language used in Germany in the 1930s to describe the Jews reveals something quite striking, and yet, to me, deeply unsurprising: every term of racial abuse that was employed was also a form of feminisation. To be weak, to be shiftless, to be untrustworthy – to be the Other at all, under patriarchy – what else can this possibly mean, but to be female?’