Somewhere in the South

artwork by amina

I hum the tune from an old Shuchitra-Uttam movie, as the onions in the frying pan crackle and make my eyes water.

Here I am beyond seven seas and thirteen rivers, and there are no princesses here. This is the backyard of America, not New York, not Las Vegas, not the glamorous America we see on TV as we sit in our dimly lit rooms in some obscure part of the 'Third World.'

This is a small university town in the south that becomes all orange and purple when there is a football game. Downtown is twenty minutes walk from my apartment. The first bar you pass as you walk down the cobbled street is Bad Apple. It has a dark red door and small red tables, and it looks expensive from the outside. There is a Hallmark across from Bad Apple, with a bell at the door that tinkles when someone enters.

On a side street there is a white church and a bank. Occasionally cars pass by, but the roads are clean and the air smells of grass and fall leaves. It's an intimate town, and people smile as you pass them, but I feel no intimacy.

Is it the onions that make my eyes water, or are they tears?

WEATHER
I can sit in the amphitheater with my back to the sun for hours. This sun is not like our tropical sun that frizzles anything in its path. The fall sun in the South is lukewarm, and it warms my shoulders as I walk to the biology department every morning. Through the windows in the lab I see the sun brightening up in the afternoons, making the leaves look greener and the sky bluer.

Today, I must get out of my dark apartment and spend some time outside. Soon the winter will come and the sun will lose its zeal, and I will have to hide inside the huge jacket that I bought from the thrift store.

But for now, the breeze coming through the window is warm and fragrant.

MY HOUSE
My American room-mate is away for the weekend, visiting his girlfriend. So I have opened up the windows, the front and the back doors, and I am cooking. The smell from the masala might stick to my shirt and the cover of the sofa, the lone furniture in the living room, but I am craving some "real" food. The breeze is blowing in dry leaves into the kitchen through the back door. The small porch in the backyard has dirt and dust, and while the rice cooker cooks the rice, I take the old broom and brush the leaves off. Not that we ever have time to sit out here, but still.

POLITICS
The student lounge, opposite to our dorms, houses the washing machines, a kitchen that is never used, a table tennis table, the resident director's office, and a few computers. I have gotten three new emails. One is from The Times telling me they want me back as a subscriber. I've been getting this for the past few months, ever since I signed up for their four free issues. I see now that the offer was just to get our email address in a legal way.

The other two emails are from the frisbee folks. Every Thursday they meet near the baseball field to play frisbee, and hold an inter-departmental frisbee competition at the end of each year. I went to a couple of the "Ultimate Frisbee Meets," as they call it, but stopped going after a few weeks. One of the emails is from a Physics department student describing how the Biology students play frisbee as if they were playing with their mother's best china. The next one is from an alumna who graduated five years ago and wants to be taken off the mailing list.

A PERSON
Last weekend an old woman was waiting at the bus stand with me. She was wearing a blue shirt, black pants, and sneakers, and her name tag said "Wal-Mart" and "JUDY" below it. She stood holding on to a bicycle, which had a placard at the back that said "For Sell $50"

MY BAR
Somewhere down the road from the Bad Apple is another bar, Keith Street, with cheap beer and pool tables and TVs mounted on the wall. Here doors are always open, and people sit around the counters and at the tables and talk, as smoke swirls above their heads. Around the pool tables, loud Southern guys sometimes pause from their games to look up at the TVs, holding their pool cues as if there are resting their rifles on the ground.

THE LIBRARY
It's almost ten at night, and I head towards the library to prepare for next day's classes. The library is a six-, maybe seven-storied building, with tall glass windows in the front. Opposite to the main entrance there is a fountain surrounded by a shallow water body, and the water is reflected in the glass windows. But you can also see the glitter of lights and students sitting at tables inside the building, together it is as if you are watching them through a screen over which water is flowing.

I pick up the newspaper at the front counter and consciously sit away from the window. The Tigers ate the Chickens...the home team has won, new professors have joined, one dining hall has a new chef. I look in the classifieds for cheap apartments. Old lady renting out a room...young women renting out bodies. It stays in my head for a while, then I dismiss it.

Munjulika Rahman is a graduate student in the United States.