Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Jammu,” she said.

He welcomed her stiffly and, by example, led the group to ignore her for the duration of his lecture. When the meeting broke up she slipped out of the bungalow like a shrug embodied, like a self containable in one small word. He followed her, with a glance over his shoulder to make sure no comrades saw.

She said she came from Bombay. She said she was sixteen. She was studying in Srinagar against her will. She told Singh it wasn’t a good university. Her mother wanted her to marry a certain forty-three-year-old Kashmiri landowner because she was a bastard and the landowner had asked. She was studying electrical science. She spoke no Kashmiri. Her mother wanted to manufacture transistor radios in Ahmadabad and wanted her to run the company. She wanted to go to London or Paris and be a writer and not marry. She’d seen one of the Reading Group’s handbills. Her mother had told her her religion was neosocialism. In the cellar of their house, in Bombay, she had watched a cat in a window well push five wet babies out of its body. The cat became angry and tried to escape but was too weak to climb out of the window well. The kittens were squirming like living excrement on the dead leaves. The cat lay down again and ate the sac. She asked Singh who Trotsky was.

She would have fallen to the first man unscrupulous enough to claim her, would have become, at someone’s arbitrary urging, a fascist or an industrialist or a criminal, would have put out for the most tertiary member of the Reading Group. (And then would have included him in a biting roman à clef and left it unfinished in a footlocker.) She was preternaturally innocent, like the simple brain of a time bomb. She was incapable of love but acted wed, directing Singh’s life (“You can’t afford those boots”) and viewing other men with airtight indifference. She went where no women had gone, did what few girls were doing, and so it didn’t matter what she said. If you were Jammu, it didn’t matter. The Reading Group, soon recast as the Kashmiri Alternative Socialist Front and thence as the People’s Reading Group, believed her to be doctrinaire. So did Singh. He promoted her to a position of command. He forsook all others in bed. He and she dressed identically.

When she went to Chicago (under a false impression of that city’s political climate; it was 1968 and she thought it was a hotbed; hers was, Singh came to see, a peculiarly Indian blunder) he departed for Moscow to study mechanical engineering. He had a room in the largest freestanding structure in all of Eurasia, the MGU on the Lenin Hills, a monument to Stalin’s conviction that More Is More. One day he went to the thirty-fifth floor and found a neglected rock collection and a door to a tiny elevator, an elevator with space for only two people squeezed tightly together, so that when he’d ridden it up as far as it went and the door had opened, his face was a matter of inches from a steel fence and a sign which commanded in Russian DO NOT TOUCH and which was marked with a skull and crossbones and a bolt of lightning piercing the skull’s eyesockets. He took the elevator back down to the rock collection. He had a fling with a young engineering student named Grigor who worked part-time in the Soviet patent office and who claimed, when drunk on vodka, to have the task of copying patents from Western nations into Russian and dating them to appear to have been issued in Moscow several years before the originals. Then he would weep and claim he was lying. From Chicago Jammu sent Singh a postcard that read in its entirety, “Miss you.” Back in Bombay he found that, out of his sight, she had entered the Indian Police Service. He didn’t mind. She was still his favorite, his first and only woman to date, and in reminding him that he could go both ways she made him feel universal and powerful. He performed his historical function religiously — if religion implies the submission of the autonomous mind to ritual. As the most erudite Catholic theologians take communion and are confessed, in Bombay Singh never stopped recruiting, inciting, discussing. For several years he lived in Mahul, in the shadow of the Burmah Shell refinery. Every morning he would leave his rooms to ply the streets or wait tables at the Lady Naik Hotel or burn time in a tea room with his leftist pals, and on the steps of his building he would stop in front of a deformed little cigarette seller and drop coins on his outspread scarf and take a package of genuine Pall Malls. For arms the man had two ebony hemispheres protruding from his shoulders, arrested in utero thirty years earlier, shining in the red morning light as though varnished. The deformity wanted to shame the concept of arms, or perhaps reproduced in Singh the man’s longing to have them. The man was an avatar of Jammu.

Frequently in those early years Singh visited her mother’s house on Mount Pleasant Road. Shanti Jammu hosted nightly showings of the creations of her Pathan chef and of her own conversational effulgence. Shanti fancied herself a marxist of the gradualist school. “Ours is a country of caste divisions, Balwan,” she would twinkle, as if this were news to him. “Not class divisions. The Petits against the Patels. The tinkers and the tailors. Sikhs and Hindus, and vice versa of course. How can this be changed? Who’s to break the traditions? Who’s to build the slums and run them on the Western model? A very wise man I once knew spoke of dehumanizing this generation in order to humanize the next one. So I’m a capitalist roader. A ruling-class dog. Just fulfilling…my historical telos!”

“Your dharma.”

“Come, come, let’s be modern.”

“That’s my point. You aren’t transcending the superstructure. You’re still a Brahman squeezing Harijans in the name of wisdom and racial privilege.”

“And you’re still a superior Sikh. That’s my point. You and your Russians! They were nothing but Frenchmen in sable. Germans with samovars. We’re still Indians. We won’t shed our Oriental souls overnight. If we look west, it’s to England. Dignified, class-conscious sentimental old England.”

“Home of Marx and still the only Labour government in postwar Western Europe.”

“Do have some beef, Essie. You too, Balwan. You’re looking peaked. Where is the working class in ‘socialist’ India? Where is the Industrial Revolution? It’s a generation down the line.”

“Not in Bombay, Poona, Delhi, Bhopal. And it’s the urban centers that matter, because that’s where the organs of repression are concentrated. Russia itself was a feudalistic agrarian state in 1917.”

“Well goodness gracious, then be my guest. Foment! Ignite the slums! Only drop me a line on the eve of your revolution.” She touched his arm, and winked at her daughter. “I’ll want to pack. I’m sure the canaille won’t grasp that I’ve been working in their best interest. Will they?”

“Does a chicken have lips?”

“But it will all be in the family. Essie keeps you out of jail. You’ll keep us off the guillotine.”

Jammu kept him civil. She said she shared his contempt for her mother, saw the egregiousness, knew all about it, so why bring it up? She had no other family in the world. So Singh held off, and by and by Shanti banned him from the house. Both he and she made believe, for Essie’s sake, that their enmity was rooted in politics. It wouldn’t have done to let Jammu know that there was simply bad blood between her only two loved ones, that their antipathy could not be rationalized. It was a measure of her dictatorial potential that people close to her felt compelled to shield her from unpleasant facts.

In Bombay Singh gained a reputation for irresponsibility because he was forever dropping out of sight, abandoning his cohorts. In thirteen years they never even trusted him enough to make him a section leader. The truth was that he was responsible to Jammu, the rising star of the Bombay police. He made sure he stayed available in case she needed a job done. He made sure she believed the nights they spent alone together meant a great deal to him. Perhaps they did. And perhaps her career would mean more to the future of India than any amount of marxist agitation. It was this possibility that kept him in her service. The margin of hope in Bombay ran very thin. Jammu was an anomaly, foreign to the culture, and Singh knew that change had always been forced on India from outside, by the Aryans, the Moguls, the British. Even Gandhi had come from across the ocean. If you were Indian and socially responsible, it was your obligation to leave India, literally, intellectually, or both.