Who knows how things would have turned out? But both Jiang’s grandmother and Mohit’s mother, convinced of the imminent ruin of their families, sought divine intervention. The grandmother lit joss sticks at Kuan Yin’s shrine; the mother offered hibiscus garlands to the goddess at Kalighat. They both asked for the same boon: May Mohit and Jiang’s relationship break up, and may they subsequently marry someone suitable from their own communities.
Over millennia, people have bewailed with some justification the tardiness of the mills of the gods, but in this case they began grinding at once, though perhaps not quite in the way the requesters had envisioned. Three days after the petitions, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army of China attacked an Indian patrol in the Aksai Chin region of the western Himalayas, setting into motion the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The PLA advanced south past the McMahon Line into Indian territory, attacks spread to the eastern Himalayas and thus closer to Calcutta, and Chinese forces took over both banks of the Namka Chu River. Intelligence reports cited massive Chinese war preparations along the border. News of dead or captured jawans appeared in the papers. The Chinese consulate shut down, rumors of Mao’s plan to bomb Calcutta ran rampant, and panic flared in the city.
People stopped patronizing Chinese businesses. Stores were vandalized. A popular Chinese restaurant was set on fire because a group of customers got food poisoning and believed it was part of a deliberate plot to kill Indians. Chinese banks failed. Crimson slashes of graffiti denouncing Chinese spies appeared on the walls of houses where Chinese families were known to live. The government ordered individuals of Chinese origin to register themselves and present papers for identification. Jiang and her brother were lucky. They had been born in a hospital and had Indian birth certificates. But many others, whose families had been in the country for generations-like their Indian counterparts-had never thought of acquiring official papers. Jiang’s father was one of these.
“He was placed under house arrest,” Jiang said. “We had to lock up Feng’s and let the employees go. We didn’t know what would happen to our property, or to us. Our friends had similar problems. Vincent quit his practice. No one trusted a Chinese dentist anymore. We spent our time at home glued to the radio, trying to guess our fate. There were terrible rumors. Many friends abandoned their property and left the country. Every day the Calcutta port was jammed with Chinese trying to get berths on ships.
“I called Mohit again and again. He wasn’t there. Once a coworker picked up his phone and told me Mohit had taken leave because his mother’s health was worse. He asked my name. I didn’t give it, but I could tell he was suspicious. After that I was afraid to call, but I couldn’t bear not to. If someone else answered, I hung up. Then one day Mohit called me from a public phone. He told me to get out of Calcutta as soon as possible. He had heard that the Chinese were being sent to internment camps. Then he said that he couldn’t phone or see me again. Already he had received threats because people knew about me. He was afraid his family would be targeted as sympathizers. The worry was making his mother sicker. Forgive me, he said. I love you, but I can’t fight a whole country. Then he hung up.
“I felt like my world had ended. I couldn’t believe Mohit could let me down like this. I couldn’t even tell my family (who had their own problems) how much it hurt.”
Mohit’s sources had been accurate. Within a couple of days, Jiang’s family was notified that they must leave the country or relocate to an internment camp in Rajasthan, all the way across India. Those who did not obey would be forcibly deported to China. Jiang’s father knew that going back to China under the yoke of Mao’s Communist regime was out of the question. From refugees in the 1950s, he had heard stories of the labor camps rife with starvation and disease, the massacre of those labeled traitors to the Party. And he no longer trusted the government of India, this country that he had mistakenly loved as his own. He tried desperately to get his children out of the country- Vancouver or Brazil, San Francisco or Sydney or Fiji -it did not matter where. (Paperless as he and his mother were, he knew they had no hope.) But the Chinese exodus was at its peak. There were no airplane tickets, no ocean berths. Mr. Feng was willing to pay a hefty bribe, but he discovered that others had already paid equally hefty bribes.
Two days before the family was to board the train that would transport them to the hot, dry quarry town of Deoli, Vincent managed to locate a friend-an acquaintance, really-whom he had met a couple of times at the Chinese Dentists Club. Curtis Chan was the lucky possessor of a berth on a ship that was to leave for America in the morning-and he was a bachelor. That evening, unknown to Jiang, her father and brother bribed the guard posted outside their house and went to Curtis Chan’s home. They took with them Jiang’s photograph, a stack of dollars that Mr. Feng had managed to procure by calling in favors, several of his rare calligraphy scrolls, and all her mother’s jewelry.
Curtis Chan was a practical man. He had been approached by two families with unmarried daughters earlier that day, and at the very moment the Fengs rang his doorbell, he had been getting ready to phone one of them. But perhaps he had a romantic streak in him, too, or a love of art. Otherwise why would he, after examining Jiang’s photograph and one of the scrolls, agree to Mr. Feng’s proposition, even though one of the other families had offered him as many dollars, more valuable jewelry, and, additionally, a bag of gold Krugerrands? Vincent was dispatched home to fetch his sister. Mr. Feng and Mr. Chan-it is appropriate that we should address him in this manner, because as Jiang was about to discover, he was decidedly older than her brother and going bald, besides-hurried to the Buddhist temple in Tangra.
“And, just like that,” Jiang said, “I was married.”
Under normal circumstances, Jiang would have balked at the summary manner in which her father had decided her fate, yoking her to this middle-aged, stocky stranger, without even asking her opinion. But since Mohit’s phone call, she had been walking around in a numb haze that gave way periodically to fits of furious tears. One moment she wanted a bomb to obliterate all of Calcutta, or at least the Das household. The next moment she wanted time to rewind itself to that day at Feng’s so that she could leave the shop before Mohit arrived, and thus avoid the entire heartache of loving him. At other times she longed for Mohit to break down the door of the Feng mansion and carry her away to a place where her Chineseness would not matter. Buffeted by contradictions, she stood in the Buddhist temple, under the ominous shadows thrown by a single, shaky candle (Calcutta was under blackout orders), and did as the priest instructed, her motions jerky as a puppet’s. It was only the next morning, as she was about to board the Sea Luck, that she seemed to realize the enormity of what had happened. She threw her arms around her father, insisting that she would not leave him, that she would rather that they died together. It took her brother and her new husband all their strength to get her up the gangplank while her father, himself in tears, tried to console her. I’ll be fine. I’llbe back in the house once the government sorts things out. Then I’ll come to America to pay you a visit. And your brother will join you soon. We’ll get him on another ship in a few days.
None of the things he promised came to pass. Within a year, he died of a heart attack at the camp, his devastated mother following him soon after. As for Vincent, he did get on a ship, but one bound for Australia, and it was years before he and his sister found each other.