Non-Fiction
Chasing the General
art work by gupu trivedi
In some places General Gau's Chicken is better known than Colonel Sanders' KFC. Something about military men and their avian adventures remains a mystery that hopefully will reveal itself with time. But what is it about men spending their lives seeking the high of their first time? And what about when it involves chicken? For me it starts in 1989. I have reached upstate New York -- a foreign student at a small liberal arts college on the quiet banks of the Hudson. And though I am not from old Dhaka, the quiet barges that pass along each night makes me think of a Buriganga I wish I had known better. Each day begins to feel worse than the last, each morning has become a time to think about how the day can be made to pass. It is day twelve and I'm sitting at The Jade Palace (original owner). I am sponging up the new lingo of college and there are things to consider - am I, for example, more fresh or man, (this of course, long before the un-PC term of 'freshman' morphed into 'first-year student', 'fresher' and the inexplicable 'frosh'), and exactly what is a chaser, what is frottage? I sit across a sticky Formica table from a grim, but knowledgeable senior, Mohammed. There is something dutiful about how Mo has taken me under his wing, how he has shown me around and driven me here. Bespectacled, with thinning hair signaling male pattern baldness. I haven't revealed to him the depression I battle on a daily basis; perhaps he knows the meaninglessness of days when there are no friends, and gone are the familiar reference points of one's first semesters. Instead I make stupid jokes no one laughs at. He has come from a Peshawari boarding school. He has been here three years, and now has shifted off-campus; he drives an old Pontiac. He slowly chews the little crackers, dropping little cautionary tales like crumbs of the deep fried chicken dish he has ordered for us. He calls me a 'Bungla' boy, claps me on the shoulder, only to withdraw it swiftly, as if scalded. He tells me about the dish we are about to have. General Gau's Chicken. The most glorious of chicken dishes, the best he's ever had. I nod, suspicious of any bird that can change my life. But he, a thin Pathan with bulging eyes and a prominent Adam's apple, is a senior and has been in America far longer than I. Frying time for chicken has to be under ten seconds, he says. Baas, done! The outer shell has to retain the right crunch. The chicken pieces have to be chopped into exactly the right size and the broccoli just so. I nod again, innocent of what is to come. Mo's gaze pans to a table where a Chinese guy sits with a Caucasian friend. Fellow students probably, judging from the hip clothes and drive-in attitude. One of them smiles and Mo returns a nuanced smile-cum-grimace, which he soon decrypts to me in sotto voce as roughly this: Been here long enough and I am hip to your needs, you queens! Flirt all you want, but remember I carry bear-traps in my back pockets. Even as I try to suss out whether he is being genuine or joking at my expense, I note a new passion in Mo. Apropos of nothing, he says, eyes wide in a haunted way, beware of openly purchasing the Vaseline, yaar. An open invitation to them! Hooshiar! Bachke! Etc. Then he goes back to describing the chicken dish. I have known Mo for two days and have come to realize that to him The Gays are everywhere: the library, the bookstore, the laundry. They are here now, in this pre-fabricated strip mall, where next to the Jade Palace, sits a suspicious dental hygienist's office and a non-fat yogurt shop. In Mo's America, gays were constantly watching, one had to be on one's guard at all times. Everywhere, and waiting. America seems a long, tiresome road stretching ahead of me and I feel a cautious gratitude. How many kids straight from Dhaka get such practical advice? You will know them by their grease stains, Mo continues, throwing in the occasional Urdu word for emphasis. Sometimes a hole in their pants. Hooshiar, hold on tight. I am straight off the boat, and my impressions of the great US of A are still loosely constructed from issues of Mad Magazine, used Archie comics from the Zeenat Bookshop, and illicit girlie mags from Nilkhet dealers. Mo looks at me with sad eyes, so little you know, yaar, he says, so much to learn. At weaker moments in my dorm room, between bouts of homesickness, I sometimes page through a college prospectus that, in an inexplicable move, I have brought here with me. Outside, I secretly still seek the perfect girls and boys against setting suns limned in its pages, throwing Frisbees as they pirouette on their toes while misshapen hackie-sacks flounce on mid-breast. Where the hell did the mascara-lined, nihilist Goths on main campus come from? But Mo warns me. I am in America now, everyone knows that this land is crawling with homosexual men, organized like gangs with designated bandannas, hand signals and leather chaps. Everyone knows that rural New York State is a hotbed of clandestine queer activity - nothing less than a hinterland of depravity and desperation. How do I not know this, he asks. Don't they teach you anything in 'Bungla-desh', he asks? I am fleetingly awash in despair, and wonder if I still have time to retreat to Dhaka University. He is aware of all their ins and outs, Mo says, a big grin cracking his face, until he almost chokes on the bitter green tea. More info begins to flow in staccato, spittle-covered blurbs. Characteristics of this mysterious third sex emerge - habits, tastes, Depeche Mode, topics of conversation, Louis Vuitton. I am duly impressed. For someone who has avoided them so thoroughly, Mo's observations are surgically precise. He has become an anthropologist, a miner of the depths of experience, he has made a shaheed of himself to save others. What they want yaar, he says, their main target, Allah forbid, yaar, are freshmen. That is what they want. Fresh. Men. The dish finally arrives and is set down, leaving me to stare at its steaming resplendence. Golden nuggets of chicken slathered in a fragrant sauce and garnished with jade colored broccoli. Before diving in, a quick cross-cultural observation is inevitable: Chinese waiters in America, like their bearer cousins of Dhaka, also plunge their thumbs deep into the food for superior ergonomic purchase. But no matter, the semiotics fall away to something far more remarkable, and I am chewing. God, I think, Great God. Mo's grim discourse continues its relentless course. There are lists - parties I should avoid, clothing I should reject (anything James Dean, pre-Wild Ones Marlon Brando), sorts of people I should not associate with. But in Allah's name, I am chomping busily away at something so fabulous, Mo might as well be reciting Tagore. What I am thinking is, back in Dhaka, nothing in either Panda Garden or Hwang Ho (those late '80s cuisine high points of Dhaka) had ever tasted quite like this. Sure, I missed the beef with chili, the mythical Thai soup. But this was something else. As tendrils of the General's delicacy spread through my system, sumptuously reconfiguring and recalibrating everything in its path, what other way was there to articulate the unlikely epiphany? Was it chicken or tidbits of deep-fried Americana? Through a poultry-induced high lay the road ahead. Behind was the slog that had started at the headmaster's office in a Dhaka alley, pre-dawn lines at the American embassy, ignoble immigration queues at JFK. Ahead lay, who knew what? Was this what it felt like to have truly arrived? Was this what America was? In Mo's America, the gays may have had the run of the land, but no place that had chicken like this could be so bad, could it? It was a sort of coming out, or coming in into America, a welcome into the bounty of all that this strange place had to offer. I would stand before America, stare straight into its eye and (fortified by General Gau), spit in it. Though the years passed and I traveled across the country, through North American cities that no longer even faintly fazed me, I never stopped chasing the General. It seemed that he, like the bohurupi of Bangla folktales, liked to shape-shift, perhaps to up the ante in our crazy cosmic game. Usually the nom-de-guerre was General Tso, but this was not always the case. In parts of Canada, he transformed into General Tao's, and even General George. Sometimes in the south, in some twist of Faulknerian lyricism, he became General Tsao's, General Zhou's, General Tzo's, General Toe's, General Joe's, and miraculously, General Mac's. It was as though the General, uncomfortable in his own skin, was unable to resist constant re-invention. Colonel Sanders of Kentucky, in contrast, had never done more than abbreviate down to his three letters. During those years I wondered if there was something of the ever-changing General that had attracted Mo as well. It was a theory worth looking into. He lived in New York City. I drove down from Boston and we met for coffee in Union Square. He was changed in subtle ways - dressing better, at ease, talking a talk laced with jargon from some esoteric field, unmindful that the words didn't necessarily translate into daily parlance. What had I been up to? I told him about grad school, girlfriends, a job that made me travel. It was one of those conversations we both knew was unsatisfying in its lack of specificity. Without something more tactile like college, the past, and perhaps even chicken (or so I hoped), we were hopeless. Of course I was the one to bring up the General. I recalled 1989, a turbulent time in my life, when without something to stabilize it I probably would have been irretrievably lost. That set the tone. Had his worldview changed? What I wanted to know was what new form had the Pathan's old paranoia taken. Had he found peace? Had he devised some brilliant new places in his psyche to hide his repressions? Did he still feel haunted everywhere he went? In characteristic fashion, he cut right to the heart of the matter. It seemed that just as I was searching for the high of that first chicken at the Jade Palace so many years ago, Mohamed had gone on to study neurology at a medical school in Maryland. Grad school had been a time of introspection. Then the penny dropped in his second year of med school. He thought of the choices he had made in college, about his general attitude. There had been a lot of bad vibes, discomfort, envy and general insecurity. He had lived in fear. He came to realize that in eschewing the gay populace then, he had been inadvertently constructing a sort of a gay-shaped hole in himself, a gay-prime, he called it. An eigen-fag, yaar, he laughed, leaving me to presume that the term was some academic in-joke. But I got the point - it was as though he had confronted his own form of, dare I say it, the General's chicken. And it had wrenched him right out of the closet. By now I was well versed in many flavors of psychobabble, knew many theories, limitations and fictions. Foucault and Derrida had helped me associate with many a lady in the nineties. But this revelation made sense on a simpler level. It closed a loop that had dangled open for years. What a rare specimen he had become! Mo went ahead and did something that most cannot and will not. It had taken stones. Cajones. How would I have dealt, back when I first alighted on these shores, with such self-knowledge? Probably not well, I guessed. Probably would have headed for the hills back in 1989. I was in awe of Mo's courage for bucking foundations that must have been like bedrock. I told him that before I left. I promised to stay in touch. Last time I checked in, Mo was a successful, practicing neurosurgeon in New York City area, and engaged to be married to a man from Pune, India. An Indian and a Pakistani. Funny little story, that. Me, I continue to go where the General calls - every Chinese smorgasbord and greasy soya-sauce joint, in countries covered by the Monroe Doctrine. I am choosier now, knowing almost upon sight whether the dish will have that particular crunch. Along the way, I have met people, married, had children, and have tried to preach the way of Gau. Yet, what I have never shaken off is the certitude that somewhere out there, in a guise of the General's choosing, running down that American road I saw years ago, is a chicken of destiny, eluding me, calling me.
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