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ENGLISH, AUGUST
An Indian Story
By UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
Copyright © 2006 Akhil Sharma
All right reserved. ISBN: 1-59017-179-9
Chapter One
Through the windshield they watched the wide silent road, so well-lit and dead. New Delhi, one in the morning, a stray dog flashed across the road, sensing prey. "So when shall we meet again?" asked Dhrubo for the eighth time in one hour. Not that parting was too agonizing and that he couldn't bear to leave the car, but that marijuana caused acute lethargy.
"Uh ..." said Agastya and paused, for the same reason. Dhrubo put the day's forty-third cigarette to his lips and seemed to take very long to find his matchbox. His languorous attempts to light a match became frenzied before he succeeded. Watching him Agastya laughed silently.
Dhrubo exhaled richly out of the window, and said, "I've a feeling, August, you're going to get hazaar fucked in Madna." Agastya had just joined the Indian Administrative Service and was going for a year's training in district administration to a small district town called Madna.
"Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American," Agastya laughed, "a thousand fucked, really fucked. I'm sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease." The slurred sounds of the comfortable tiredness of intoxication, "'You look hazaar fucked, Marmaduke dear.' 'YesDorothea, I'm afraid I do feel hazaar fucked'-see, doesn't work. And our accents are Indian, but we prefer August to Agastya. When I say our accents, I, of course, exclude yours, which is unique in its fucked mongrelness-you even say 'Have a nice day' to those horny women at your telephones when you pass by with your briefcase, and when you agree with your horrendous boss, which is all the time, you say 'yeah, great' and 'uh-uh.'"
"Don't talk shit," Dhrubo said and then added in Bengali, "You're hurt about your mother tongue," and started laughing, an exhilarated volley. That was a ten-year-old joke from their school-days in Darjeeling, when they had been envious of some of the Anglo-Indian boys who spoke and behaved differently, and did alarmingly badly in exams and didn't seem to mind, they were the ones who were always with the Tibetan girls and claimed to know all about sex. On an early summer afternoon, in the small football field among the hills, with an immaculate sky and the cakelike white-and-brownness of Kanchanjanga, Agastya and Prashant had been watching (Agastya disliked football and Prashant disliked games) the usual showing off with the ball. Shouts in the air from the Anglos (which increased whenever any Tibetan female groups passed the field, echoing like a distant memory, "Pass it here, men!" "This way, men!" "You can't shoot, your foot's made of turd or what men!" (Agastya had never heard any Anglo say "man"). He and Prashant had been lazily cynical about those who shouted the most and whose faces also contorted with a secret panic in the rare moments when the ball did reach them. Then some Tibetan girls had come together and taken out a fucking guitar. "The Tibs and the Anglos always have guitars," Prashant had said. Football had been abandoned. Then laughter and twanging. "It's the colour of the Anglo and Tib thighs," Prashant had said, "not like us." Agastya's envy had then blurted out, he wished he had been Anglo-Indian, that he had Keith or Alan for a name, that he spoke English with their accent. From that day his friends had more new names for him, he became the school's "last Englishman," or just "hey English" (his friends meant "hey Anglo" but didn't dare), and sometimes even "hello Mother Tongue"-illogical and whimsical, but winsome choices, like most names selected by contemporaries. And like most names, they had paled with the passage of time and place, all but August, but they yet retained with them the knack of bobbing up out of some abyss on the unexpected occasion, and nudging a chunk or two of his past.
A truck roared by, shattering the dark. "Out there in Madna quite a few people are going to ask you what you're doing in the Administrative Service. Because you don't look the role. You look like a porn film actor, thin and kinky, the kind who wears a bra. And a bureaucrat ought to be soft and cleanshaven, bespectacled, and if a Tamil Brahmin, given to rapid quoting of rules. I really think you're going to get hazaar fucked."
"I'd much rather act in a porn film than be a bureaucrat. But I suppose one has to live."
"Let's smoke a last one, shall we," said Dhrubo, picking up the polythene bag from the car seat. "In Yale a Ph.D wasn't a joke. It meant something. It was significant. Students thought before they enrolled. But here in Delhi, all over India," Dhrubo threw some loose tobacco out of the window, "education is biding time, a meaningless accumulation of degrees, BA, MA, then an M.Phil. while you join the millions in trying your luck at the Civil Services exam. So many people every year seem to find government service so interesting," he paused to scratch his elbow, "I wonder how many people think about where their education is leading them."
"Yet you returned from Yale," Agastya yawned.
"But mine is not the typical Indian story. That ends with the Indian living somewhere in the First World, comfortably or uncomfortably. Or perhaps coming back to join the Indian Administrative Service, if lucky."
"You're wrong about education, though. Most must be like me, with no special aptitude for anything, not even wondering how to manage, not even really thinking. Try your luck with everything, something hopefully will click. There aren't unlimited opportunities in the world."
They smoked. Dhrubo leaned forward to drop loose tobacco from his shirt. "Madna was the hottest place in India last year, wasn't it. It will be another world, completely different. Should be quite educative." Dhrubo handed the smoke to Agastya. "Excellent stuff. What'll you do for sex and marijuana in Madna?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ENGLISH, AUGUST by UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE Copyright © 2006 by Akhil Sharma. Excerpted by permission.
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