The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (58 page)

Yours truly

Emily

January 23, 1942

My dear Emily,

Why are you so angry? Believe me when I tell you I did not mean to get you vexed. If I upset you, I am sorry, but you must understand that I, too, was very upset. I did not mean to imply that you did not have emotional reasons for leaving. I just do not AGREE with your reasons. Obviously, we have very different views of our relationship (and that itself, I suppose, constitutes a problem). I never knew you felt that way, apart from being jealous of Vashti, which was naturally inevitable. You seem to remember only the negatives about our relationship and about me whereas I, on the other hand, remember us having long discussions about literature, philosophy, religion, politics, your back garden. I also remember us sitting still for hours watching pimpla hogs play in the trees. I remember us drinking red wine while lying on cushions on the floor of your house. I remember both of us teaching Adaku how to pronounce her letters. Most especially, I remember us making love for hours.

I remember running away from the office just so I could see you for fifteen minutes. I remember sneaking by in the night so I could drop a red rose on your doorstep. I remember searching the bazaar for hours just so I could find you that perfect jewelled pin for your birthday. Most of all, I remember how you push out your lower lip when you're puzzled, that little flick-wrist gesture you make when you're talking, and the way your smile lights your eyes. I remember your voice, low and calm, and the smoothness of your back under my palm.

This, Emily, is what I remember. It is those memories which get me through the long days and longer nights here. To me, when you left, that is what you left behind. This is why I could not understand why you left, and when I do not understand I become upset. No, I did not consider the future. You are right in that. To me, given the complications of my situation, all I could do was live for the moment. I admit that that was unfair to you but, Emily, do not ever doubt that I treasured every moment I had with you. Do not doubt that I tried every day to get as much time as I could to spend with you. Do NOT doubt that I loved you!

Always,

Krishna

April 1, 1942

Krishna,

The fact that we are still upsetting each other even though our relationship is now over shows that we are both better off not being involved. You can get back to your wife after the war and I can get on with my life. (Cedric is working with the Americans and sometimes weeks go by without me seeing him.) Part of what you're upset about is me wanting to have it all (i.e. not being satisfied just to have a convenient relationship with you). Why don't you have some appreciation of MY situation? I want financial security. I want a husband at my side in my old age, perhaps more children. Eventually, I want grandchildren. I can get all these things with Cedric. Could I have got them with you?

It is quite ironic, I think, that you who place so much value on ambition and family should be upset because I embrace exactly those values.

Krishna, I have truly enjoyed knowing you. Save for the last year, it was a time of great joy and enlightenment and intensity in my life. But I am not the naive young woman of 22 with whom you first became involved. I have grown and changed in the past five years, and part of the problem was that you did not seem to notice. (Besides that, you did not change and grow with me – but how could you? Your life was already established.)

I remember all the good times. I remember all those things you did. I also remember that you stopped doing them three years ago, not very long after you first bedded me. As for love, well, I would like to believe that you did, in some fashion, love me. But I think we also have very different ideas of what love is because, in my concept, if you truly loved me you'd have left your wife, whom you have always said you don't really love. But I suppose all married men tell the outside woman that.

All this is the past, however. I DO still feel affection for you, although I no longer love you. Please, please take care until this stupid war is over.

Sincerely yours,

Emily

May 25, 1942

Dear Emily,

Love, I am afraid, is not the simple affair you make it out to be. If there is one thing you ought to have learned from our relationship, it was that. Yes, we have somewhat different ideas of what love is. You accuse me of being opposed to change. In a sense, you are right. It is part of my nature. Indian people value tradition and stability above all else. I would not give you wrong if you described Indians as hidebound, yet I would make bold to say that it was in part that very hideboundedness (is that a word?) which attracted you to me. In similar fashion, what first attracted me to you was the opposite quality of what you liked in me. I was drawn by your sense of freedom, and your adventurous soul (qualities difficult, if not impossible, to find among women of my own race). Perhaps, in different ways, we were both searching for what we could not find within our own traditions. I do not love Vashti but, for Hindus, love is only an aspect of the marital relationship – and not a necessary aspect, either. When a man and a woman get married, their entire families get married, in a very real sense. Did you know there are words in Hindi for every type of relation? We do not, for example, just say ‘grandfather' or ‘grandmother'. ‘
Aja
' is the paternal grandfather, and ‘
aji
' is paternal grandmother. ‘
Nana
' and ‘
nani
' are the maternal equivalents. There are even words for one's brother's wife (
bhowgi
), one's father's sister (
pupu
) and one's mother's brother (
mamu
). So you see what an upheaval I would cause if I left Vashti? It would be even harder on her, since we have no children because that is a source of great shame to her (though she says nothing). All she can boast about is having a husband who treats her well and is a good provider. (Yet, after fifteen years of marriage, do you know that she still calls me ‘Singh'?) Of course, if we had children, that would make it harder for me to leave her.

I do not think we have different ideas about love - we just have different ideas about duty. (Would you abandon Adaku for any man?) As for our ‘upsetting each other even though our relationship is now over showing that we are both better off not being involved', that is nonsense! The fact that we can still upset each other shows only how powerful this thing between us is. I am in the middle of death and suffering and degradation every day now, and I understand the power of love better than ever. It is the only thing that ennobles our sorry species. Your denying our love does not change the truth in your heart.

Truly yours,

Krishna

June 11, 1942

Dear Emily,

How are you? I hope very well. It is SO frustrating not knowing if my letters are reaching you (I have written about five already) or whether you have written back or not. But I know this one will for sure, since I have given it to a good buddy who's passing through the West Indies. This also allows me to write things that would not pass the censor.

War is very strange. I cannot get over the fact that, although the British soldiers are fighting for their homelands and families, they still cannot overcome their own bigotry enough to fight alongside coloured men. That is why we have been put into own own battalion. Did your father have the same experience in the WWI? The further irony is that, except for the last war, this is the first major conflict between the European powers in the past four centuries that has not been caused, in one way or another, by West Indian interests. I do not think the distance between Germans and British is that great – in fact, one of my buddies was telling me that Churchill is not too enamoured of non-whites, particularly Indians. But no, I am being unfair. The British would never stoop to genocide. But I do not put this down to any inherent moral superiority. I think it is simply because the British play cricket and the Germans do not.

Experiencing this petty barbarism, I often wonder if the human race is worth saving. But then I think of you, and Adaku, and I know I am doing the right thing.

Yours always,

Krishna

August 20, 1942

Dear Krishna,

You sound very different. I'm not quite sure how – more thoughtful (as distinct from intellectual) more mature, somehow.

Yes, Daddy faced the same kind of thing from the British when he went to fight. I was only seven years old when he left and, frankly, I have never quite forgiven him. Mom has, but only because she was so happy he returned alive and whole. He was sent to Egypt with the four battalions of West Indians. All officers had to be either white (or only one-sixteenth or one-thirty-second black – such fine distinctions!) he told me. West Indian whites didn't want to serve with their black countrymen – as you say, never mind that they were fighting on the same side. The black soldiers weren't given proper housing, food, or medical treatment – more of them died from disease than from fighting. But Daddy tells me they fought well when the time came – in fact, one general even said that, outside his own division, there were no troops he more preferred than the West Indians. Daddy has a medal for bravery.

However, from what you say, white people haven't changed much. I suppose that's why they're having another war. And, for all your rationalization of why you've gone over there, I think your real reason is the same one as my father's: you men just love to fight.

Please, Krishna, DO try and return safely. My thoughts are with you.

Always,

Em

June 4, 1942

Dear Em,

I have written you nearly every week, as promised. I have received none from you since the one dated March 10. But the more often we write, the better the chance of some letters reaching.

I dreamed of my father, no doubt because of reading your letter. My surname actually means ‘tiger' and represents the kshatriya, or warrior, caste for Hindus. You must be born into your caste, and I'm not sure if my father was actually born a kshatriya. He was a thin man with a black moustache, spiky hair falling over his brow and fierce brown eyes. In my mind, he is always in an old short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned, and khaki trousers rolled up over his hairy calves. I do not recall him ever speaking to me, save to tell me to bring him something or to do a chore. Not that I expected otherwise. He spoke to my brothers, all seven to eight years older than me, as men. My sisters were deferent to him, as befitted the head of the home, but they were much older than me also and I barely got to know them before they got married and left our home. Only my mother paid special attention to me, because I was her baby and I was a quiet, thoughtful child. She always looked much older than my father, although she was ten years younger. I think my birth caused trouble between my mother and father. There have always been too few Indian women in Guiana, and Indian men were constantly afraid of their wives being unfaithful. (Did you know there's actually a law against enticing an Indian woman away from her husband?) So when I was born, so late in life and with green eyes, my father became suspicious of my mother and I remember many nights when he would come home drunk and cuss her and, sometimes, beat her. Interestingly, the pundit who came at my birth to tell my future said I had reincarnated many times and, with the right teaching, I would in this life become an evolved soul. My mother told me this but, though I was only a newborn babe, I have a clear memory of the pundit's sparkling white dhoti, the large beads around his neck, and the musty smell of his astrological almanac. The pages of this almanac were large and brown, I remember, and spattered with red. At any rate, the pundit's favourable judgment did not affect my father. Only when I turned four, and he saw that I resembled him, did the beatings lessen. Not stop. But my father grew to like my green eyes – he had hopes of me marrying a Brahmin. But he died before a marriage could be arranged.

This is what I came from. It is far removed from what I have come to.

Yours,

Krishna

June 19, 1942

Dearest Em,

We got extra paper – probably supplies intended for a white battalion got misdirected. Anyway, I am taking advantage to write you a long letter.

I miss you a lot, and I miss Guiana. In war, with death lurking constantly at one's shoulder, one's scale of priorities becomes entirely reordered. I find myself thinking of my family's past far more than I ever have. My grandfather came to Guiana in 1838 from a part of India named Chota Nagpur. There were other people from places in India called Burdwan and Bancoorah on the ship. The name of the ship was the
Hesperus
. All these details I have known since I was a child. They are part of our family lore, a way of always remembering Mother India. And yet at the core of this history was a lie, because our family name is not really Singh.

I have never told anyone this. And my family would disown me if they knew I was not only telling you this, but writing it down! I told you in my last letter that my father was not born a kshatriya. My grandfather had belonged to the sudra, or worker, caste. Knowing that he was going across the
kala pani
(the black water), he gave the immigration agent a false name so as to elevate his status. He did not call himself Maharaj, which is a Brahmin name (the ruling caste), perhaps because had he done so he would have been called upon to perform religious duties. But, as a kshatriya, he was safe from challenge. He was not very dark in complexion, and he could even read a little Sanskrit. (Yes, Em – Indians, too, judge people's worth by how fair-complexioned they are.)

I do not remember how I know all this. My grandfather died in 1878, twenty-three years before I was born. I believe, when I was still an infant, there was some scandal when someone who had known my grandfather's family in Chota Nagpur came to Guiana to find his sons calling themselves Singh. I do not really know. I do remember, when I was a boy, asking my father what our ancestral name really was; and I remember him twisting his black moustache furiously and telling me to stop asking foolish questions. I want to write the truth of this, and to have you know it.