(Translated from Tamil by Govardhanan)

As M S Subbulakshmi's Venkatesa Suprabhatham filled the room, the missiles of Doom-II were blasting the army personnel (who resembled none I've seen in the real world) as well as the monsters (who resembled some I've seen) on my computer monitor. With fingers jabbing at the keyboard, eyes hovering on the video, and ears relishing the melody (not necessarily that of MS), the pleasure was all mine – a student in his mid thirties.

You should not, however, take it that I am one of those crazy guys you've come across, who soaks bread slices in soda for his dinner. The situation is such, my friend, what else I can say! If only you knew that I happened to be from a society, where girls have either to carry the rifles because their fathers and brothers have failed to protect them, or to wait for the faceless grooms or the heartless agents that help them escape to Canada – no matter if it means weeks of confinement within the cargo area of an oil tanker in the choking vicinity of sweaty strangers; no matter if the ship zigzags its way through Moscow and Lesotho; no matter if such escapades run the risk of ending up in explosions – you would not laugh at me. Actually, you could not.

As I was saying, I, Sugunan Chellathurai (had watched Die Another Day last evening), after graduation from the Hindu college in Triconamalee (for eight years with alternating university closures, openings, and jobs), post-graduation in Singapore (listened for two years, and researched for another – "Showing around Little India and booking return tickets to Colombo for those transit passengers abandoned by their agents on their way to Germany from Srilanka"), had ended up about twelve months ago in St Louis, Missouri, doing similar, if not more, claptrap!

Staying in my room is kind of difficult. For, mainly, the untimely phone calls I receive – twice a week on an average – be it from some acquaintance, or from my family back home – and those calls would usually prompt me to respond, "how would you expect me to go to Seattle all the way from St Louis carrying a pair of scissors!" (The question, of course, for the uninitiated, would have been, "the wife of the cousin of my nephew's brother-in-law is about to shred her passport and raise her hands at the Vancouver-Seattle border; could you help her please?"). Considering such disturbances could also create doubts in the mind of my Singhalese roommate, I would rather end up, like now, spending my nights in the university lab. An added advantage is that I could actually listen to the Canadian Tamil broadcast over the Net here, without any trace of guilt.

I don't even know if I have faith in God or not. Such "faith" shows up when and if necessary. That's not important, however, since I listen to Suprabhatham essentially because MS transports me to those mornings I had spent at my home about ten years ago. And the games like Doom-II, I have to admit, make me pleased when I see that I, who can't possibly distinguish a revolver from a pistol, could kill dozens of military personnel at my will. Especially when the camouflaged Doom's monster creatures remind me of those Srilankan and Indian forces that had beaten me up. Beaten me up, for I had possessed some "dangerous weapon" – a razor that I had earlier bought for my morning shave. Otherwise, it has been over ten years since I pondered the merits and demerits of an armed revolt versus a non-violent struggle. Not only that, for a person that had chosen to come here in the interest of his own life and career, it would be nothing short of hypocrisy if I were to talk about things like freedom, revolution, and humankind.

You need no further introduction about me, right? But I love to talk about myself. So, let me round it off, please! While people were dying en-masse back home, I have been busy here with one or more of the following: Crossing the Canadian border on the pretext of seeing Niagara, yet returning without destroying my Srilankan passport (for the amateur reader again: declaring yourself a refugee requires no passport on person); arguing that all pieces of the so called literature of (Tamil) diaspora are nothing but loads of gripes, yet considering a jump into the fray myself so that others can have a chance to grind my head; and adoring Gautam Buddha and Ernesto "Che" Guevara as the only human beings to have ever graced this earth. Coming to my tangible aspects, I'm lean and tall, and I like dark colors for trousers, and pale ones for shirts; never drank nor smoked. And I am not married (isn't it enough that I ain't dead yet?) and I frequently sport a stubbly cheek.

Just a minute, I'll be right back. Water for tea could be boiling by now in the next room. Talking about tea, I invariably think about the airlines I had chosen to fly here: Singapore Airlines and United Airlines. That is to say, I have deliberately avoided the Srilankan Airlines, and it was easy to deny any revenue from my part to the Srilankan Government. When it came to tea, however, it was easier said than done. With the Midwest chilly weather, the tea has become but an essential part of my life here. And in view of the financial conditions that I am in, Srilankan Lipton is the only choice I have. Come now, a pauper has no right to choose, does he?

So, let me take a break here. Why, you could take a break too, and also register a complaint with your spouse, who might be busy cooking, that the smoke from the kitchen is interrupting your literary sojourn. That way you could possibly annul any guilt that you might otherwise be harboring.

***

Oh, there you are. Thanks for coming back, by the way. I was already here, and I thought I would resume my narration once you arrived. It wasn't long though. Besides, I was listening, with the usual blank expressions and predictable nods, to Abdul's commentary on the LA Lakers game from last evening. Oops, I didn't introduce Abdul to you, did I? Sorry about that. Iftu Abdul Christy Woodfire, 42, per his claim, has been cleaning our laboratory for the past fifteen years. A proud follower of Farrakhan (since 2000). While Abdul knew about the meeting Farrakhan had had with General Quaddaffi recently, he isn't aware, somehow, of the attempts that the daughter of Malcolm X took to get Farrakhan killed. Leave alone her motives. Why him, we aren't exception either; are we? We know the politicians that had argued so vociferously against each other on the rights of Singhalese and Tamil people during the 70's in the Srilankan parliament. But, how many of us know that, immediately after such heated debates, the same politicians meet in the parliamentary cafeteria, savor salmon sandwiches, and ask one another grinning, "How was my speech against you this morning?" Likewise, Abdul too, an ordinary pet-loving soul embarrassed by his wife's faith in the yet-another-resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even now, he is saying something about whites not liking friendship with blacks like us.

You know him now. But he doesn't know you. I didn't tell him anything about you yet. Maybe it is the smoke from your kitchen (or is it from your cigarette?), he didn't inquire me yet (this is a smoke free zone, you know that, right?). Besides, he won't even recognize your face from mine, except for the fact that you and I speak and understand the same language. Again, aren't we in the same boat when we couldn't differentiate between the Prime Minister of China and the chef of the Chinese Café in Colombo? Just like Hitler had named us sharp-nosed Aryans, don't we call Chinese flat-nosed?

The very first day when Abdul met me, he asked me how many black brothers lived in our country. I wasn't aware back then exactly what he had meant by 'black brothers.' "As far as I know, Abdul," I ventured anyway, "there were a few diplomatic staff in the African embassies." Because, by that time, I had no detail, much less any opinion, on Mangala Samaraveera the Srilankan minister, or on Susantika the sprinter. My response had disappointed Abdul. Obviously. I had to show him a group photograph of our family and friends for evidence. But then, Abdul had Sukumar and Sivam positively identified as members of his own black-brotherhood clan. When I told Abdul that Sivam was my own brother, he had promoted me too, from being a Red Indian to a black-brother. And he didn't stop there. He tried to teach me the blacks' traditional way of greeting one another using one's forearm. Hey, I could see you smiling – much like Gary Oldman smiled in Francis Ford Coppala's Dracula, or is it a Mona Lisa one? Maybe a combination of both, eh? Save your sarcasm, would you? I do hear your question too: 'Is Abdul such an idiot to call you a black-brother?'

But, well, that was the truth. He was not an idiot, however. But then he didn't have anything to gain by knowing about our country or about the difficulties we face there, did he? Why, unlike his Government, stationing their Naval forces in the Srilankan port of Triconamalee was not his concern; nor was the arms sale. He wasn't even aware of the two faces that the terrorism in the island put on, the Buddhist one or the Hinduist one – much less did he have to support or oppose one of them. He didn't have any pressure, you see, depending on whether or not the BJP had won the elections for the Indian parliament, to color the terrorism in Srilanka as the Hindu terrorism or an 'ordinary' one. Let's talk about us now. Did you ever have any interest in learning that all American blacks are just not singers of history, nor basket ball players that earn in millions, nor a bunch of persons around the street corners selling stuff for ten bucks a milligram?

When you don't even know that, how could you be aware that there is some level of hierarchies, and that tensions exist within their community too? It isn't your fault nevertheless. In spite of your conditions, you did learn about Gypsies. Since I didn't have any such opportunity, when Ki. Pi. Aravindan had narrated a story last year, I was totally lost. In the fear that I could be writing senseless stories about them with my half-baked knowledge unless he did it first, the Holy Pope had written a story glorifying a Gypsy that had, a full fifty years ago, lost his life in the second world war [Such fear may be justified; Didn't I write that he (the Holy Pope that is), in collaboration with Reagan and Walesa, was the cause for the split in Warsaw-Pact countries?] So, you will know about these people, only if I tell you. Don't just go by the media of this country – Isn't this the same country that justified their refusal to sign the Mine Ban Treaty on the grounds that Cuba was a terrorist state? Hope my reasoning here, nor my holier-than-thou lecture, hasn't put you off. Yet.

Abdul didn't know what this tradition meant. Nor did he express any desire to learn that. Yet he was proud in that it was something that belonged to him, to his race. If an act of tradition pleases someone with no side effects to any third party, I don't see any fault in doing it. Whenever we meet, therefore, it has become my normal way of greeting too. Sometimes, friends (from Hariyana, Poland, or China) watching us would smirk, letting their amusement show through. They wouldn't say anything aloud though. Don't want to be 'politically incorrect,' what else? Otherwise, no one entertains any doubt if this country suppresses one's right to speech. Neither they nor I – especially when they expect to be 'naturalized' in this country very soon.

Abdul says that he has to go. He, along with his walkman (listening to Puff Daddy's call for having sex with virtually everyone in town in the name of rap), has to broom, vacuum, dust, and mop this building of sixty-three rooms, ten toilets, four corridors, eight and a hundred stairs, four floors, and other numerous gullies where no one would otherwise venture out to (It is, however, a different matter altogether if he actually does a clean job of it!).

He would come at ten – Look at him, don't you see? I'm sorry that you can't see. I could actually narrate this story with pictures, but it would make my narration even longer. Even if I did, would it not offend you that had long left reading Muthu comics or Tintin? So, imagine for yourself, many cartons that carried computers once, together now, holding Abdul as he takes a nap (unbeknownst to his African-American supervisor of course!). He would come and, in one swift stroke, clean my table (just the way I would have cleaned it earlier) and the adjacent one (which Wang Lee would never have cleaned), flash a smile at me, and disappear as quickly, with the usual parting words, "have a good one, chief!"

Most of the times, I leave work at around seven in the morning and come back at two or thereabouts in the afternoon. Such meetings with Abdul are, therefore, very rare indeed. If at all I happen to be here, and if I see that his supervisor is around when Abdul is asleep, I would run up to him, tap him, wait until he casually takes off his walkman from his ears, and alert him about his foreman's presence. Don't think for a moment that this is my only job! In addition to refining SimuLink (we also call it debugging – much like what the Water and Sewerage Board of St Louis does to our water here) I respond to Lee's telephone calls in his absence by replying, "Tha Boo Sai," in his native Se Chuan.

Since this foreman of his has the habit of presenting himself in unexpected moments (just as God would, to an unsuspecting devotee – Have you read Puthumaip Piththan lately, eh?), Abdul tends to call him an inverse-Dalmatian (a black dog with white spots, actually!). He wouldn't stop at that. He would go one step further, and call the boss of his boss – a white lady in her early fifties – as a former member of Ku Klux Klan. Proof? She used to live in Montana. (I must admit here – lest I risk being branded a liar – that, at times, I fail to see any connection between the incidents that Abdul narrates, and the conclusions that he quite easily draws from them). Once, having been caught sleeping in his duty hours, Abdul was fired from the job. He then somehow proved that his dismissal was a direct result of racial discrimination, and managed to get reinstated in his job within weeks.

I am always reminded, in such circumstances, about Raghunathan Master during the late seventies (maybe you know him from before by some other name, think about it), who would never be seen in the school where he purported to have taught. One would rather see him in the market streets, trading the tobacco and the onion that he cultivated in his vast fields. He was once caught too, and was let go on suspension. But it was a "Northerner" that happened to be the principal of the school. Not only that, the CEO (Chief Education Officer), was a Singhalese. Does one need any further proof that Raghunathan Master was a victim of the racism? Convincing the local people that he indeed was one, Raghunathan Master eventually became a secretary for the branch of a Tamil political party (Once reinstated in his job, he went back to the school to serve the backwards by asking their children to take care of his potatoes in the fields, but I don't want to stretch this further. Hope you don't want to hear it either, do you?).

Abdul has gone. He was looking forward to watching his younger son's basket ball game at his school. Abdul's eldest son, by the way, is a third year medical student at a neighboring state university. According to Abdul, those who had come here as slaves about four hundred years back could not, forever, go on playing ball, singing songs, and begging brothers for dollars to dope themselves. His eldest son does not live with him though. I could still visualize Abdul as he was, using a wet towel, wiping the glass windows that had layers of mist (or the exhaust from the cars?) that had my name and 'Eazham' written all over (with my finger tips of course), when he said this: His son, living with his girlfriend ("you know what," Abdul interrupted himself with a grin, "she is a white!") would visit them once a week during the weekends. With his job as the cleaner, and his wife's as the Pick 'n Save counter clerk, Abdul couldn't expect much from his son though. If he ever fails to show up on a Saturday morning, the next visit would only be on the following Saturday morning. Because, Abdul says, for everyone – irrespective of caste, creed or race – a Saturday evening is meant for forgetting all about the surroundings (leave alone kith and kin), and enjoying his or her individual time-off. Nightclubs, dating, a walk in the park, etc., etc. anything will do. As long as you are amidst unknown faces.

On Sunday mornings, on the other hand, Abdul's wife would be busy with her secretarial duties at the Church of the Savior for the Blacks at the 25^th North. Abdul would make use of those times by taking his two dogs with him on his truck (that stand and lick his neck from behind), listening to (and occasionally singing with) Notorious Big and Tupak Sakoor on FM 104 MHz, driving for half-an-hour on I-64 West, taking innumerous twists and turns afterwards for another fifteen minutes, going in and coming out of gullies à la the monkey in a street corner circus jumping through the ring, and finally parking before a building that had surely seen better days. That six-story building, Arthur Munroe Home for the Aged, is where Abdul's mother lives – a lady that had participated in the rallies with Martin Luther King Jr., and in the struggle against the racial discrimination in the streets of Cairo, Illinois – all during the sixties. Though he would have to knock heavily before she lets him in (his mother has turned deaf by now. "Ma…ma, it's me, Ponchaa!"), and keep shouting in the name of a conversation, Abdul enjoys those couple of hours he spends with his mother since it helps him take a nostalgic trip to his childhood days.

I asked him once – it was around 5 - 5:30 in the morning, with humidity measuring at 100%, and the mercury at 17 degree centigrade; there was light wind from between east and north-east, with air pressure standing at 30.05 psi (sorry, I couldn't still get rid of British measurement standards); and while I was reading Srilankan Tamil News on the Net; it indeed was a dull winter day – what he had thought about his son living with a white.

Abdul, turning off the vacuum cleaner that he had been tinkering with so far, looked at me, and said casually, "It's a mutual aid. If indeed he marries her, my son will have children that are less black. For her, the advantage from the relationship is …" Abdul paused here, flashing a mischievous smile at me, before continuing, "that she … Chief, don't you know why white ladies like black brothers? Hmm?"

Ignoring the hint, I, a bachelor in every sense of the word, I asked him, "So, even you feel that your skin color is something cheap, something to get rid of; don't you? Then, why do you need all this struggle against discrimination?" Any sign that Abdul had been smiling a while ago was gone now. He said, in a deep voice, "Chief, I'm a man walking on the earth; not a bird scaling the skies. Maybe I like to dream, yet my feet are firmly on the ground. I hope our next generation goes that way too. Anything – any damn thing – is fair, isn't it, as long as it's not upsetting anyone else's applecart." Without expecting any response from me, Abdul disappeared into the next room with his cleaner. I, too dumbfounded to respond, kept looking at the vacuum resulted by his departure.

Yet, I couldn't fail to notice the contradiction in his stands. I recalled a leading figure among our backwards during the 60's, who declared from the stages, "I'm proud that my father was a hardworking peasant!" and who, in the same breath, struck a marriage alliance for his son with a so-called forward caste family. I notice the same smile on your face again. I hear you too: 'Brother, why this twisted look? It was just a marriage, and don't you interpolate any such crooked reasoning.' Hold on, just because you are in a hurry for your next cigarette, or because you are looking for your next opportunity to prove your supremacy over your wife and thus satisfy your ego (that takes a special shape in this alien land, ain't it?), don't draw any such hasty conclusion and, worse, don't expect me to toe your line. You know what, it's only five-thirty now. I'll be here for another hour or so at the minimum. You could therefore excuse yourself from listening to my Hamlet-style monologue for a while, do anything that I have just mentioned, or even read any other interesting story or poem in this collection. I would certainly not mind. In fact, the forth-level play of my Doom-II is still at pause. I have some more scores to settle with these Kamosokies too – in response to the entire ordeal I was put though, when I visited home last in 89, by the Srilankan military forces that controlled our area then, just for keeping two AA batteries in my transistor radio.

***

Oh you? Waiting for long? Must be more than three months since we met last! How are you doing? Is your daughter still struggling to pick up the new language? How about your son …why, he must be into something similar to what I'm doing here – killing computer-generated Kamosokies in revenge for all that he and other Ealam teenagers had received in the hands of Srilankan army. The other day, after you had left, I was here till seven, killing the Kamosokies, and waiting for you in vain. It's my turn to be late today; sorry about that. It got way past 11 O' clock last night by the time I went to bed. I had earlier gone to theatre to watch Steven Spielberg's Amistad, and, after the movie, I had also to cook and eat my dinner of boiled potatoes with salt, pepper, and lemon along with a slice of bread. You're asking about the movie? It was okay. You can watch it once. But then, some black youth in the rows behind me (must be students from the university!), in between their discussion on the betrayal of one of their girlfriends, commented that why it always was necessary for a white to come to the rescue of their folks. "Even Mississippi Burning had a white," quipped one. I, quite unconnectedly I should say, saw flashes before my eyes in which Eddie Murphy rescued a Tibetan boy in a movie, and Denzel Washington miraculously saved an auburn-haired Meg Ryan just before the end of another. I didn't ask them about those scenes, of course. I was confused a bit though. Be it small or big, every issue has at least two sides. When you consider the eyes that scrutinize them, and if you also include the spectacles such eyes wear, the dimensions would only multiply.

You are asking who this is, behind me, with a Bob Marley's Rastafarian beard, cleaning Wang Lee's table, aren't you? He is James Leopard Onununga; Abdul's young friend and his substitute for the past two months. A black Latino. I heard that Abdul has taken up his new position as the Joint Secretary for the St Louis Association of Black Muslims. I also heard that Abdul, on a cue from the association's high command in New York, had asked his son to get rid of his white girlfriend, but, much to his dismay, his son didn't. As a result – again, according to James – the father and son are not in talking terms now. James adds that further information is only sketchy, for Abdul no longer lives in the neighborhood. Since Abdul has moved up the ladder, he has shifted his residence too, to some place where black writers and insurance agents live. You are asking me something else, aren't you? Oh, my reasons for the allegation I had leveled the other day against our backward caste hometown leader? Not a significant one; anyway, here it is: If at all the marriage alliance with the upper caste family had happened in the normal course, I'd have had no objection (Aren't you asking me, 'who is bothered about your objection?' I hear it loud and clear!) But we, the engineering college students, had all along known that the son, three years senior to us, was in serious love with another girl, and that girl happened to be from a lower stratum of the caste structure. Even lower than that of our 'leader!' That's why … why, it seems you are no longer interested in listening to my explanation. What? Want to know more about James? There you go. I was just wondering how come you lacked the inquisitive mind – the same in-born quality that the Tamils possessed right from their inception before the stone age – to learn about other's affairs. Even James, probably because he's still in his twenties, is quite different. Like, I was checking out this Tamil Cinema web page last evening; when I was immersed in the ups and downs of Ramba's struggle to save the country by holding a tricolor flag, James approached silently from behind. With his eyes fixated at the same place where my eyes were, he whistled softly. "Man, your Indian chicks are too hot!" (For him every place in south Asia belongs to India. When I told him I was from 'Srilanka,' he said it sounded like the name of the beer from some east European country whose name was another tongue-twister (no less!). I figured out I would be better off if I indeed was an Indian as far as James was concerned. He continued his commentary on the Indian girls. "Stunning, man! The size of those …" I would rather not continue this. Not because of any aversion from my end (Otherwise why would I be looking at Ramba?). Nor is it that you would object, would you? It's just that the editors of the magazines that publish works from the Tamil diaspora should not, on my account, suffer in the hands of press censorship. So, you may fill up the rest of James' commentary by letting your imagination go wild. This way, I'm letting my reader participate in the narration of a story, and I have a chance to prove that 'good' stories are always the result of successful collaboration between the reader and the writer. Hope you will, therefore, hail this story as a milestone in such an effort (and help it get buried in the process).

As his parting words, James remarked, "Wait and see. When I have enough money, I'll go to Trinidad or Tobago, get married to a girl of Indian descent (Another chance for creating an off-beat literature on diaspora, you see), and live the rest of my life!" Don't, for even a second, take James seriously. If it was Wang Lee instead of me that was sitting here, and if Wang Lee was ogling at some of those Chinese damsels, James would have undoubtedly substituted China for India, and British Colombia for Trinidad. For he also likes to live the rest of his life with a Chinese girl. And Lee too, like me, would have managed to smile, but unlike me, would have kept at a safe distance from James, and would have gone back to checking his stock at Shanghai Stock Exchange (Money comes first; Education would then follow. Next would be the love for Christ, discovered suddenly on landing in the US. If we have time, we could further discuss the topic – generally avoided while in China, but brought out at the top of ones voice while in the US – on how the US government supports the struggle for human rights in China. Of course we shall do this when Wang Lee or any of his fellow-countrymen is not around).

Okay, ignore all that I've said here. You know, I'm not an experienced storyteller. I just blabbered, trying simply to meet the deadline that my editor had set. Maybe Abdul and James never became dirty while cleaning these rooms, but, in this story, I have made sure they did. At least in your opinion. Also, I was following your expressions when I touched upon Tamils' modus operandi for getting the refugee-status at the US Canadian border. I sensed that you didn't like my tone when I talked about Raghunathan Master either. Surely, the episode on our backwards' leader must have put you off too. So, before you call me a Tamil traitor, or an upper caste hater, I should better stop here. Isn't it often the case when a peaceful rally of Muslims passes by a lane where Lord Ganesha is resting, the whole thing ends up in chaos? I intended to say something, but you might have understood something totally different. So, I should explain my … Oops, are you already asleep? Sorry. Okay, I don't want to wake you up. Still, it's not customary to take one's leave without informing. Hence this written note, just for you: