chapter 16

SyracuseThe next leg of our visit was about to start. Amar had gifted me a new phone a week after we reached—my first smart phone. I had been clinging on to my ancient feature mobile that, like an old family retainer, had served me very well, notwithstanding an occasional malfunction. Smarties might dub this a dumb mobile, but being dumber, I was devoted to it. However, in the U.S., it was useless and I had to give in. Amar had been tutoring me on some phone basics, and on the day we were leaving for Syracuse, he wanted me to use my phone to book an Uber.‘You must,’ he insisted when I protested. ‘How will you learn otherwise? What would you have done without us?’‘Not come to the U.S. for one,’ I grinned.Anyway, with three pairs of eyes watching every nervous fumble, I managed to book a cab. Gary was the driver again, and we went to Appleton to take an evening flight to Minneapolis, made so familiar to the world because of the George Floyd tragedy. Amar had stayed back and would join us in a couple of days.We were soon off in a small, uncomfortable Delta regional jet, crouched on our seats. If my short legs were cramped for space, I wondered how my son, at six feet, of which four feet are legs, managed short flights. He probably emulates my fivefold umbrella.When the plane landed, I found my right ear blocked and going pop, crackle, pop in spite of the ear plugs. I found Arpitha looking distressed; her right ear was blocked too, and for her this was the first time. Experienced me decided to guide her out of it. ‘Swallow, à la Captain Haddock,’ I suggested.‘Swallow? Swallow what? How? There’s nothing to swallow. What’s the captain’s name again? I can’t hear, Aunty. Is he our pilot?’‘Forget the captain.’ I raised my voice. ‘Pretend to swallow. Use your ear muscles to unblock the ear.’‘Can’t. Do ears have muscles?’‘Two,’ I said. I’d asked this at a quiz I had conducted. ‘Vestigial.’‘West of what, Aunty?’‘Never mind. Shake your ear lobes.’‘Aunty, it’s got unblocked. With a pop.’So had mine, and I realised I had stumbled upon a new way to clear a blocked ear—just talk at cross purposes.From Minneapolis we took a flight to Syracuse. This plane was bigger and we were actually given something to eat, even if it was only a miserable, micro-mini chocolate biscuit. We went to the baggage area and my eyes popped out when I saw Deepa Ram, our host at Syracuse, waiting there. Was I seeing things? In India, no one is allowed anywhere inside the airport, but not so in the U.S., I learnt. It was her all right; I could see her steadily and she was whole. It was so good to spot her there.I had taught Deepa Ram for her BA and MA. Not only did she survive my classes, she wanted me to stay with her at Syracuse. We had re-established contact when she got in touch to ask for an autograph for her daughter, Nandika. She said that Nandika was such a huge fan of my Butterfingers’ books, she had actually told her school librarian to replace all the Roald Dahl books with the Butterfingers series. That made me her instant fan. Sorry, Roald.We met Deepa’s husband, Ram, and soon reached her spacious and beautifully kept apartment. It was late and Nandika, tired of waiting up, had gone to bed. She had left a note of welcome on the table, and all her Butterfingers books in a basket with another note—this one of warning—tucked in: ‘Too precious! Don’t touch. Because I love them. Mine!’ The best warning I’ve ever received. After dinner, Ram dropped Arpitha at her lodging.Deepa spoilt us silly with delicious south Indian food interspersed with visits to the Liverpool library and Onondaga Lake the next day. We saw a lot of people walking their dogs and Nandika went around petting some of them. I noticed that if any dog pooped, the owner used thin gloves to scoop it up with devotion and care, reversed the gloves and dropped the booty into a waste bin. If only the geese at Fond du Lac and dogs who are walked outside my gate in Thiruvananthapuram also had owners who followed them around to do the honours.What happened at the Onondaga Lake turned me into an admirer of the U.S. weather forecasters. It was a bright afternoon, blue skies, gentle breeze, great views and the rest of the trappings. We were enjoying a walk when Deepa’s phone beeped. ‘It’ll rain in ten minutes. I got an alert,’ she announced.‘Ha, you’ve got to be joking,’ I said. ‘Look at how clear the sky is. Surely even the U.S. needs the help of rain clouds for rain?’‘I don’t know, but such alerts are generally correct.’‘Then they got it wrong this time. There must always be a first time. Let’s walk further.’After we had walked a good distance, I turned to Deepa. ‘Where’s your rain?’ I lifted my face to the sky and plop! A drop of water fell into my eye. Bombed by a bird. That was my first thought but there was no feathered friend in sight; instead, I saw a few unfriendly-looking clouds. From where had they come?As if it were a stage scene obeying the director’s cue, the clouds changed colour and joined forces to form one big shapeless mass. Lights! A forked lightning flashed in the distance. Music! An obedient clap of thunder. Action! And we took to our heels as rain came pouring down with strong gusts of wind malevolently blowing against us, slowing us down. It was exactly ten minutes since Deepa got the alert. We reached the car soaking wet. Once we were home, dry and sipping cups of hot tea, Nandika giggled. What a story to tell her friends.With Arpitha not around, Deepa took over and booked a cab to Syracuse University the next morning. It was 8 and early by our standards. As Deepa and I settled in at the back, VK got ready for a cosy chat with the driver. ‘Are we your first customers of the day?’‘Naw,’ the cabbie drawled. ‘Been driving since three in the morning.’‘Three?’ VK exclaimed. ‘How come?’And we listened to another story.This gentleman had retired after more than three decades as a 911 responder. As a cab driver, he did twelve-hour shifts, starting at three in the morning.VK sat up, all ears. A 911 responder? He plied him with a volley of eager questions.‘What kind of calls did you get? How did you respond? How was it like, back in the analogue days, coping with the demands made on you? Was it stressful?’The cabbie didn’t seem to mind. ‘In the beginning, we used printed maps. Even as I ask a caller for their full address, one hand would be pulling out the correct folder from a collection near me. You had to be very quick, very alert. By the time I got the details of what the problem was, I already had the exact location identified on my map.’‘Wow.’ I couldn’t help interrupting. ‘And all without the aid of computers.’He half turned to smile. ‘Yes. And when computers came along, they transformed the job but increased the work load. When I began, Syracuse was a small university town and the emergency centre only responded to calls from within it. Now with computers to help, a huge swath of New York State has to be handled by the operators.’‘That’s the same problem everywhere,’ VK said, and Deepa and I nodded. Don’t we know how computers have helped employers tighten the electronic noose around the necks of their employees and kept them on call 24/7?He was a contented retiree and was driving to make a little extra money and to keep himself occupied. We passed rows of near identical wooden houses lining the streets of Syracuse.‘Look at the houses,’ VK observed.‘All clones,’ I nodded.‘Most of those were put up in the post-World War boom,’ the driver explained. ‘Now they are in bad shape because landlords let them out to students who rarely stay beyond two years and the landlords never bother to keep them in good repair.’By then we had reached Arpitha’s house and learnt first-hand exactly what he had meant. Waving the friendly man goodbye, we entered the house rented by Arpitha and some other students and felt we had entered another world, a strange, spooky world. It was a 121-year-old wooden house that used to be a motel. Now it had been converted by the assiduous indifference of generations of students into a ramshackle, tumbledown building. All over the world, landlords hesitate to rent their apartments to students for precisely this reason.‘How do you stay here?’ I asked Arpitha who welcomed us in. Paint was peeling off the walls and spiders lurked in dark corners. I looked around a little anxiously as if I expected ghosts to shimmy out of cracks and say ‘Boo!’ I jerked my head up, eyes to the ceiling, half expecting leering bats to be hanging upside down.Arpitha saw this and laughed. ‘Aunty, most houses here are like this. Ours is a better one. In the beginning we were quite scared, but we soon got used to it.’At this point, the wooden floorboards creaked under our feet. I jumped. Deepa merely looked startled and exclaimed, ‘What’s that?’It turned out to be no spirit, but a rather solid VK, walking up and down, testing the wooden floor which groaned, creaked and squeaked in protest with every step he took.Arpitha gurgled. ‘This is nothing. I’ll take you to the basement. We have our washing machine there.’She led us to the rickety wooden staircase and we tiptoed down, holding hands, quite certain a step would give way any time. If we stumbled, we’d tumble down together. We finally reached the bottom intact and stared at the eerie, musty basement which made the floor above seem like the last word in sophistication. The cobwebs festooning it would have made Miss Havisham burst into song. There was graffiti on the walls and thick dust everywhere—on the floor, on some abandoned pieces of art, scattered knickknacks and broken furniture, not to mention clouds of it that we had kicked up. A washing machine stood in a corner, looking like it could do with a wash. VK began to sneeze, the signal for all of us to pirouette to the stairs and race back to civilisation, pulling cobwebs off our faces. Was it student accommodation or a lesson in American history?After that unnerving experience, Arpitha took us around the neighbourhood. We met a couple of her housemates, and I secretly tipped my non-existent hat to all of them for living in that ghostly dwelling and actually completing their courses without becoming batty. Maybe they didn’t do much washing. After all, in a cold place, what would it matter? Ask Queen Elizabeth I whose bath day was rumoured to coincide with her birthday.We reached Syracuse University and got our first glimpse of a prestigious U.S. university—huge, impressive buildings, sprawling campus, immaculate lawns with sculptures scattered about, welcoming pathways, an art museum, theatres and magnificent libraries with an admirable selection of books even in the Humanities section, though Syracuse was primarily a tech university. A memorial wall dedicated to the thirty-five students killed in the horrific Pan Am Flight 103 air crash over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, tugged at our heart strings. Arpitha took us to her department where we walked along the corridors and peeped into lecture halls.Amar, who had reached Syracuse, chose to remain in the ghost house to prepare for his next interview—the Bath part of it, probably—and Arpitha went back to join him. We had lunch at a local joint before returning to Deepa’s.Nandika was beside herself with excitement when we returned; she had been waiting impatiently to tell us that her entry at the science fair in her school had won a prize. We were thrilled and VK took her, next morning, to Barnes and Noble to buy her books as a reward. We ended the day by keeping our destiny with Destiny USA, the largest shopping mall in New York where Deepa and Nandika went on a scary virtual space ride. Just watching their faces gave me vicarious fright. They came out of it, slightly disoriented and unsteady on their feet, but dinner soon set them right.The big day arrived—Arpitha’s graduation day. The programme was scheduled for 3 p.m. and Ram dropped us at Arpitha’s residence well before that. We entered the house, laden with flowers, looking and smelling like rose bushes, to find that Arpitha had already left. We were hoping to download the bouquets on her, but would have to haul them to the university. As soon as Amar was ready, he called a cab that took us to the venue.The solemn function began at exactly 3. Entering the hall from the back, the dignitaries led the ceremonious procession along the aisle to take up their places on stage. The graduating students followed and immediately there was a ripple of excitement. All of us in the hall craned our necks to spot our special person. After my neck developed a solid crick, Amar identified her, naturally. Arpitha, looking every bit the studious scholar in her gown and cap, walked majestically forward, but her eyes were darting around, looking for us. When she came close, we hailed her in a loud whisper. The moment she saw us, she flung something that Amar caught before it hit his head. Great catch.‘What’s that?’ I was intrigued. ‘Not part of the graduation ceremony, is it?’ I knew graduates threw their caps in the air after the function, but I hadn’t heard of them throwing things at their families during the march.‘House keys,’ Amar giggled, pocketing the bunch, and took off to the front to take better pictures. The speeches were very good, crisp, occasionally witty and never exceeded the time allotted for each. The degrees were awarded, and when Arpitha’s name was announced twice, since she was in two sets of subjects, the loudest applause came from our corner. By 4.30 the formal function was over and it was celebration time.The inevitable outdoor photo sessions followed. The sky had been overcast the whole day, making the weather very chilly. Fortunately, the rain limited itself to threats. The students tossed up their caps—a gesture that has become a mandatory part of any graduation ceremony—and then the girls threw off their graduation gowns to reveal the stylish outfits they wore under them.Looking at their beaming faces and happy poses in the photos they must have posted immediately on social media, who would have guessed they’d have been shivering in those off shoulder, short dresses? They deserved special Oscars for acting brave. I was feeling very cold too, in spite of being adequately covered in my saree and sweater, but the males appeared very comfortable. Men always have an advantage at formal functions for their suits are designed for warmth, while a woman’s glamour quotient is directly proportional to the skin exposed. Why formal functions, just think of all those song sequences in Indian films where the hero rolls down snow-capped hills, well protected in a sweater, muffler and cap, while the poor, skimpily clad heroine responds with a happy song from lips that tremble with cold masquerading as passion.Realising it was getting late for we were taking the train to Niagara, we rushed to Arpitha’s house, leaped out of our formal clothes, pulled on our casuals—my dependence on jeans was near total—heaved the bags up, dived into another cab and sped to the station. This was our first visit to a railway station in the U.S. But first things first—Arpitha smelt out a Subway outlet there and bought us something to appease the gnawing hunger pangs. There’s nothing like food, even that composed of mostly unidentifiable components, to raise your spirits, and, munching on the peculiar-tasting sandwiches, we were soon in the right mood for the next adventure.