Damian Mangat
Staff writer
She could blame her name, her first name. Eke.
No one in residence pronounced it properly, neither did the modern professors who bothered with attendance. Her surname was not worth claiming, another Singh. There were Singhs from all over the continent, from the Tamils in Singapore, to the Hindus in Sri Lanka, to the Buddhists in Bengal. The northern Punjabis affixed it to every boy child. Though her ancestry blended all three, Eke disliked her Northern mother’s long ropey plaits and her Southern father’s oily complexion. Thankfully, her only Indian features were the olive skin, bluish lips, and downy sideburns. She could be anybody. Italian? Persian? Native American? Despite the parrot nose, pronounced lower jaw, and pouchy eyes, she felt as multi-textured as her thoughts. But it was her name, her first name, that shunned her.
What parents would name a girl Eke, meaning “matchless” and “alone?” Did it also mean insignificant? The philomancers, necromancers, and astrologers in her parents’ village, who mapped out her destiny on the Vedic birth chart, must have misread the stars and constellations when they picked her name. And because of that rash cosmic fortunetelling, her parents had grimly determined to marry her off as young as possible like the generations preceding her, in some laughable ceremony of fire, water, wind, and earth. But there was no time to sneer at cultural norms when her parents booked Air India tickets and scrutinized snapshots of pimply boys readying immigration documents. That was why she had run away to university and locked herself up in any residence that would accept her.
Room 204B, a cramped boxy space on the second floor of the co-ed dormitory, was meant to manifest freedom—away from the Masourri silk curtains, the elephant brocaded bedspread, and the brass statues of winged monkeys. Yes, she had disowned the baby pink walls along with the matchmaker’s photographs.
From the small window bitten into the wall above her desk, she could see the grey campus, cold and dark with the metaphysical confusion of February. Students in twos and threes shuffled under the weight of their backpacks. Grad students paced the steps to the Student Centre, shivering, puffing Belmont Lights, reddening and slashed by the cyclone of dust tailing the wind. Through the smudged windows of the coffee shop across the walkway, she could make out steam rising from porcelain cups cradled between brightly-coloured finger nails, upended laptops, a couple reaching across a grimy table to peck at the crumbs on their lover’s hands. She had never felt so alone.
The campus was only a 45-minute drive from her parents’ residence, but for her, it was an exodus. She would find friends (she had not been allowed before), she would meet a boy (she had been too frightened to dial their cell numbers before), she would become a woman (she had not been permitted to shave her legs before). Someone, anyone, would single her out, recognize the truth behind her name, break through her solitary confinement, and hold her hand for the first time.
Her pen slipped between her stubby fingers, bounced off her thigh, and bled ink into her stockinged feet. The control top pantyhose bit into her stomach as she bent to retrieve it. The university logo was already half worn off. Light drifted in beneath the doorjamb stuccoed by sneakered feet. The usual Thursday night stampede of first-year students sent tremors along the floorboards. They howled, they hollered, they roared with jokes she could not understand. Boys chased screeching girls up and down the hall. Beer bottles clinked together.
She heard a rustling outside her. She felt her eyelids quiver and thought of her namesake Aunty Eenakshi, meaning “with eyes of a deer.”
“Should we invite Elka or whatever her name is?”
“No, she never goes anywhere.”
“Besides, she smells kinda funny.”
“Did you notice in English lecture…?”
Eke chewed her biro. More letters of the university logo came away between her teeth. The nib bore into her wide, gaped gums. The bearish, podgy hands, which she always hid in her pockets, slammed the books shut.
“English,” she thought wistfully. She felt a movement in her chest, as though a trapped animal had been disturbed. She glanced at the clock that hummed and buzzed and jerked the hours apart.
She blinked, and darkness fell like a second. She felt her pulse quicken as she plumped her thighs onto the chair and shifted forward until she was nose to nose with the glass. She breathed hot onto her fist and wiped the window in circular motions. Her loneliness vibrated within the walls and door frame and loped ceiling that refracted the jumpy music invading the halls with beats of hip hop. Her pupils dilated as she focused in on the third storey, fourth window from the left of the English literature department—his office. Her breathing eased. She waited for the light to flicker on and for Professor Simpson’s silhouette to frame the iridescent back splash. He would, she knew, tug at his collar, roll up his checkered shirt sleeves, remove his spectacles, polish them on his alpaca vest, and place them anew on the bridge of his nose.
During her vigils over the semester, she had memorized his patterns like a diligent Indian wife (which she would never be)—his regal procession to the podium, his measured inventory of the first three rows, his eloquent voice that boomed into her tape recorder. Discreetly, she began to chew at her stubby nails, emotion welling, rolling upon his intonation and the stimulation of his poetic discourse.
“He won the Nobel Prize for literature in ‘71,” lectured Professor Simpson. “And Neruda, in his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, captures the significance of Dante’s Tuscan poetry. Despair and passionate love are motifs in my writing. As a Chilean half-breed myself, perhaps I share the ebullience of this illustrious poet.” He cleared his throat.
“I do not love you as if you were sal-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off,” he recited. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
At six o’clock, Professor Simpson—Jack Simpson—took possession of his office on the third story of the English Literature Department. Upon unlocking, locking, and double-checking the door, he fumbled for the gooseneck desk lamp. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on his faded Harvard tie. He checked his vintage Waltham pocket watch, a decent copy from Chinatown. In 25 minutes he would swallow a glass of Aberlour Scotch from the bottle secured in the torn lining of his briefcase.
His arthritic joints cracked as he eased into his chair. He slid a Saint Luis Rey Rothchilde cigar ($2.12 at the on-campus Korean convenience store) out of its cellophane glove and fit it into the corner of his wrinkled mouth, smoothed a wisp of white hair across his balding scalp, and whistled through his nostrils. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach—all the music a doctor of English literature should know. Wind burst from his body. His stomach rumbled. He began to contemplate roast beef and then Neruda.
Eke gazed at him night after night. Last week, when Professor Simpson scrawled “GOOD” across her essay, she was determined to approach him.
Joining the line-up around the podium, she searched frantically for something clever to say. The line jerked forward. She inhaled, and inhaled, and inhaled, hoping for a whiff of his scent. Musk, oak, sandalwood, leather, milky darjeeling, and maybe scotch emanated from his tie. As her turn approached, she wobbled on her ballerina slippers, as dizzy as though she were standing at the top of the forty steps leading down into the lecture hall. Turning on her heels, she stumbled towards the exit sign and rushed through the double doors into the smack of wind.
But this night, a week later, something inside her felt different. The clock read 8:24. In another 36 minutes, Professor Simpson would adjust his tie, smooth down his tweed blazer, and stroll out to the taxi stand. Tonight she needed him to stay longer. The thought of the small room with its small desk and its small bed and her big thoughts propelled her from her chair. She dropped onto her knees, tearing a gap in her stockings, and reached under the bed for her poetry journal.
“Jack” had inspired them all. Sure, some students made fun of him, “the old bag,” “he looks like a bobble head,” “if his belly gets any bigger he’s going to topple off the podium.” And every time, with private vengeance, she narrowed her eyes and “accidentally” bumped shoulders with the offender while exiting the lecture.
With her notebook of love poems tucked under her arm, she dashed through the double doors—different ones this time leading in, not out—and raced up the steps, double quick, her fingers barely making contact with the rail. Within five minutes, she stood outside his door. The lamplight wafted outwards into the empty corridor. She ground her teeth with determination.
“Jack,” she practiced, and this time, the word tasted solid.
Her hand on the door knob, she paused for a break in the rhythm of his hum, and prayed to the deities that she might recognize the tune. Surely he would be impressed if she started with: “Jack, I heard you humming Beethoven’s fifth concerto.” She imagined his surprise. His pink eyelids would quiver, he would lift his chin, and he would gesture to the chair closest to him. She would seat herself demurely, lean foreword, and pass him the notebook. Their hands would come in contact, and finally she would experience the sensation of his skin, dry and flaky certainly, but also soft and pliable. And while he was reading “My love is the dark” and “Loneliness unbound” and “Cupid’s neglect,” she would inconspicuously hitch up her skirt to reveal the heavy but luxuriously strong and youthful thighs that were the only self-respecting part of her body.
Knock, knock. She aimed her fist at the centre of the wooden frame, knowing he was slightly deaf in one ear. The humming stopped. He cleared his throat. Silence. She knocked again. She could hear the chair shifting under his weight, then a groan, then a sort of internal rumbling.
The door opened and the light shattered the dim silence of the hallway. His eyes crinkled as he tried to adjust from light to dark, looking over the brown girl’s head as was his habit with his students.
“Jack…” her voice had lost its power again, reduced to a whisper, deafened by the creaking floorboards and the rattling of water pipes from the adjacent men’s room. “Mr. Simpson…”
“Oh…” he growled under his breath. He could not recognize the chubby brown girl that stood in his doorway. He cleared his throat, a deep rumbling sound, and the girl seemed to shrink and lose twenty pounds right before his very eyes. She spoke.
“I was wondering if you’d, umm, well, I thought you might, after today, with Neruda and everything, how inspiring your lecture was, well maybe, you could look at some I wrote, I mean poems…” She trailed off mid-sentence because of the way his eyes, even disoriented behind his spectacles, began to narrow. He thumbed at his tie. She had never noticed how threadbare it was, how the crimson had faded. She had never noticed how spidery red veins broke out on the ridge of his nose. His nostrils flared open, little white hairs trembling with each inhalation. The smell of mothballs, his pockmarked skin, his bushy eyebrows—she noticed them all. She hesitated, the notebook hovering there between them.
“Do I know you, girl?” he said.
She grinned foolishly for the first time all semester. A sudden lightness overcame her. She spun around smoothly on her ballerina slippers, caked with mud and snow, and strutted back down the hall from where she had come. She reached for the banister but then drew back. She no longer needed its support. As she burst upon it, the cold night air seemed less formidable. Her thighs prickled under her stockinged hose, but for once she did not care. She did not think to hide her podgy hands in her pocket but swung them military style. She began to whistle a sharp, high tune that was not Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart.
