I met Professor Peter Daly in the April of 1982. That is not his real name. His real name has faded from my memory. He was a professor of philosophy at Temple University in Pittsburgh, visiting India for the very first time for just a few weeks. He had written to a friend in India expressing a desire to room with an Indian family. Tigger had agreed to host him for some two or three days. So there he was with a battered old suitcase, standing before her front door. 

  The scooter rickshaw that he rode in from the airport idled noisily outside Tigger's low boundary wall on the Richmond road side, while Peter made sure that he was at the right address. Tigger's little garden was alive with color. There were tadpoles in a little red kidney-shaped cement pool by the corner. And goldfish. And a mad crowd of flowers everywhere else. The Pride of India tree that burst into bloom just a few days every year was festooned with big bunches of pink blooms. It arched lazily over the terrace where I spent many happy hours on holidays and weekends, lying on my back, dreaming of love and fame. Or reading. Or fussing over my few pots of recalcitrant roses (variety: Rosa Uncooperata). Love I have since found in abundant measure. But learning, fame, wisdom, a certain repose of the spirit, and a certain minimum comprehension of the fabric of Mother Nature --- all these elude me still.

  That Pride of India was the loveliest tree on all of our little Prime Street --- even when it wasn't in bloom. Perhaps the loveliest in all of Richmond Town when it was. 

  There was also a shaggy sandalwood tree two houses from Tigger's. As with every sandalwood tree, local legend had it that a brood of cobras nested in its roots. But I never saw any sign of cobras even though I kept a sharp eye out for them. I had once seen a whole brood of baby cobras, some ten or fifteen of them, that belonged to a Bangalore Kannadiga family known far and wide for its reptilian and herpatological insanities. They tended a whole zoo of snakes, other assorted reptiles, and more rare animals in their own house, and occasionally exhibited some of their creatures to raise some money to keep going. It was a shoe-string operation. A labor of love. Can any of our Bangalore dakoos tell me if they are still at it? And would they accept a donation? And what address should that go to? Their baby cobras were fascinating. So fast and bright and alert they were. Glistening black, and full of venom already, though just a few days old, and no more than six inches long. Snakes can be so extraordinarily beautiful. 

  Peter was a young man, perhaps in his mid thirties, perhaps forty, dressed in faded jeans and a white handloom shirt without collar. He had been in Bombay a few days, and now he was here in Bangalore. Tigger had, rather suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, gone to Madras for a few days, to see her sister Ophie. There was some minor family crisis she needed to attend to I think. Or maybe it was just one of those unspecial occasions that draws two sisters together. The five Aranha sisters were thick as thieves. So I was Peter's host all on my own. 

  We went in to dinner that evening to Tigger's little Rosewood dining table that had been laid out for two with Tigger's best imported china and her very best silver. Old Ayah, our brilliant but erratic cook, her hands deformed with arthritis, had outdone herself on account of our American visitor. Old Ayah had hobbled right up close to Peter, before she went in to cook for him, and had inspected him at close quarters, much as she might have inspected a melon, looking him up and down with her old and fading eyes, grinning at him with her mouth open, populated as it was with a few stray and crooked teeth. Black and brown and yellow. Her upper frame bent forward almost always at a good twenty degrees from the vertical, and even more on cold and rainy days. Peter was amused at her curiosity, and not at all put off as I imagined he might have been. 

  N, a young lady from a small town near Bangalore, who had been abused and abandoned by her husband, and whom Tigger --- always a friend to the unfortunate --- had come across at the poultry-market and promptly taken under her wing, had arranged on the table a beautiful vase of fresh dahlias, tube-roses and greens, all flecked with little silver beads of water. The flowers were reflected in the deep and luminous surface of Rosewood below. 

  "Maryamma," the street vendors called Tigger. Mary, the Mother. And they would show up early morning with their vegetables or peanuts or whatever for the privilege of having her be their first customer of the day. There really is something holy about her --- even a confirmed old atheist like me must admit. And even though she has lost her memory almost entirely due to a series of strokes, now that she is eighty two, and will no longer recognize me on the phone, I know that she is blessed now and forever. 

  As Peter and I approached the dining table, he looked puzzled and said, "Why two?" 

  And I said, "That's it. It's just you and me." 

  "But Nalini and Old Ayah?" he asked. 

  "You've got to join us ladies," he said, "Here let's get some dishes." 

  In that moment I had a vision of America. 

  Of course I knew then, as I know now, that people are all equal. But it had never ever occurred to me to ask Old Ayah and Nalini to the table. Why was that? I make it a point now to tell my little Buramani that that knowledge is sterile and worthless which does not inform our practice. And this good and heavy paternal advice falls dully on her right ear, and flies blithely out her left. That is inevitable I suppose. We all learn by example and error. And never ever by decree. 

  How deep those lines are that separate the well-off Indian from the poor! How can we be one people when some of us are too rich, and others dirt poor? Why must some people be forever hungry, forever tired, dressed always in filthy rags, sleeping on the sidewalks, sick with everything, and shivering in the cold? Is it not fair. And it is not decent. What cause could there be that unites us as a people? Is there an end in sight? Is our nation not destined for a terrible convulsion? 

  Here in America the lines that separated the black from the white were much deeper than our Indian lines. But that was before the seventies. Then things changed, I think. And they changed I think with much less blood than I would have expected. There remains a line between the black and the white in the US, but I wonder if it is not getting shallower every year. It certainly is fainter, I think, than the lines that divide us in India. 

  Once in St. Louis, Mark, Jim, and I, went out to a steak bar for lunch. With us we had a technician from Siemens who was visiting from New Jersey to install a switch at TRI. I forget his name, but I'll call him Duke. Over immense hunks of steak Mark asked Duke what he liked to do when he wasn't working. Duke said that he liked to shoot gray squirrels. He had set up a perch in a tree in his backyard by the woods. He'd climb up there with his rifle, telescopic sight attached, and shoot any gray squirrel he could see --- as many as ten on a good weekend day. 

  This was very curious, of course, and we asked him what he had against gray squirrels. They were taking over the countryside from the brown squirrels he said. And he did not like that. That was it! I shivered. I remembered reading somewhere, and it popped into my head right away, that sometime within the next ten years the majority of the US population would be non-Caucasian. Would the gray squirrel methods apply to black and brown people too? Would the telescopic sights of Duke one day come to rest on my Buramani? On my Gobindrao? It is easy to be civilized when the times are good. It is the bad times that really tell you the truth about a people. There are more handguns in the US than there are people. I don't have the stats on rifles. 

  Peter wasn't the first American I had met. The first American I met was Matt who had come to live at my boarding school in Delhi, the son of an American diplomat who wanted Matt to mix right in with the Indians. Matt had a stack of Mad magazines secreted away under his mattress. And intermixed with them were a few stray issues of Playboy. I learnt my birds and bees from Matt, including the joys of masturbation. His bed was next to mine in the dorm. Women, he said, were very different. Did I know, for instance, that every so often they bled copiously from their private parts? 

  I didn't know that of course! And to Matt's chagrin I refused to believe him. 

  Did I know that they had teeth inside the place they peed from? That if you annoyed them while you were inside, you'd know who'd come out worse. I didn't buy a word of that, of course. The Americans may be sharp, but they couldn't fool me. 

  So it happened one afternoon that Matt and I lurked in the corridor outside the girls' bathroom, waiting for the coast to clear, to go in and fish in the trash. And, sure enough, there it was --- a piece of padded cloth soaked in blood and stinking rotten and sticky, that Matt pulled out and dangled triumphantly before my disbelieving eyes. "D'you wanna smell it?" he asked. 

  "No, thank you," I said. Strained to the utmost with curiosity and amazement, terrified of being discovered in the girls' bathroom. But it was clear to me that day that the Americans knew more about the human body than did us Indians. 

  In January this year I went to see Dr. L, my dentist, here in Austin. He had wrenched out one of my wisdom teeth with immense violence, but had "forgotten" to prescribe antibiotics. The wound got infected of course, and my head was a throbbing blazing ball of pain when I went in for my emergency appointment. Having finished with Dr. L, as I stood at the checkout window, with a bulge in my left cheek, waiting for a little Verifone black box to spit out a confirmation of my good standing with the moneybags of the world, Vicky at the counter smiled at me in sympathy. She stretched lightly and yawned with her arms up above her head. And when she did that, her diaphanous silk shirt gathered round her body, and brought forth things that one should never be permitted to see on a normal working day. Too low a shear modulus, and too high a Poisson ratio --- that is the problem with silk. It should be strictly illegal. The happy fruit of her abundant youth, girded in a lacy scalloped bra, stood revealed in a glowingly fluorescent three or four dimensional form. Time stopped dead in His tracks. My pain flew away like a happy bird in Spring. "Take me home baby," my heart sang out --- quite despite myself, if you'll allow me to add. 

  Since this letter, like everything else I write, is subject to spousal censorship and general shikayat in both the prepublication and the postpublication stages, and then on forever, into eternity, I would like to explain that I am normally deeply monogamous --- and happily and voluntarily so. Except that on occasion, as with any other man, my biology clouds over my good intentions. But that is only an ephemeral affliction, of which I am in moments cured. Even as the inconstant moon is of a fast obscuring wisp. 

  I had been reading Valmiki's Ramayana to Buramani, in English translation by William Buck (U. of California Press, 1967). Buck's command over his English is not equal to the task, but we must hand him an E for Effort. Hanuman flies across the ocean to Lanka to look for Sita, and finds himself, by and by, in Ravana's bedroom. 

  Now Hanuman is a well-known brahmachari, even though I discovered to my great astonishment that he was, for a brahmachari, rather uninhibited (in the Valmiki version --- assuming that Buck has been faithful to his source) in his admiration of Sita's celebrated physical beauty. And even more so in his subsequent description of Sita's condition, upon return, during the course of his report to Rama. Hanuman apparently thought nothing of commenting on the state of Sita's breasts to her husband! Not even the presence of other gentlemen like Lakshmana, Sugreev, Jambavant, Angada, and their unruly generals --- also present at his debriefing --- appears to have deterred him. Neither it appears did Rama turn a hair at this transgression. Tulsidas of course is much more reticent in his description. 

  I might also mention that in his essay "Three Hundred Ramayanas," the ethnographer A. K. Ramanujan (in "Many Ramayanas:  The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia" edited by Paula Richman of Oberlin College, U. of California Press, 1991) states that in some versions (as in the Indonesian) Hanuman is portrayed as quite a "ladies' man." In any case, the treatment of Hanuman is quite different in Tulsidas than it is in Valmiki, even though he is in both these versions upheld as a model of sexual rectitude. Similar variance of portrayal between Valmiki and Tulsi is found also in the case of the other principal protagonists in the story. 

  Back in Ravana's bedroom. I should also explain that stuff like this is a bit difficult to read to a little seven year old that is beginning to ask awkward questions. I have to do some heavy editing on the fly, and Buramani catches me every time. "You are skipping again Baba!" she sings out by way of admonishment. 

  "Yes, my duliya," I have to admit, "I skipped just a little. Maybe. It is getting late." 

  Ravana's bedroom, Hanuman noticed, was littered with scores of women in various stages of voluptuous undress. Like ripe half-eaten fruit they lay littered on the floor, the couches, the beds. Valmiki writes how Hanuman gaped at the sparkling stones nestled between moist breasts. And at the breasts themselves. Valmiki writes about the bites and scratches and scars of love on ripe and glowing bodies, about girdles undone, and other exciting stuff that my little words are too feeble to describe. I thought about how bloody frigged up the BJP-wallahs had gotten over M. F. Husain's pictures of naked Hindu goddesses. They would probably drop their sacred seed-pods if they could read about the scandalous situation this low-caste poet exposed Hanuman to in Ravana's bedroom! 

  In that bedroom also, if Bill and Miki's account is to be believed, some women were snuggling up rather suggestively against each other. Valmiki writes that perhaps they mistook other bodies nearby for Ravana's, drugged as they were with wine and sleep. Perhaps. Perhaps, the thought suggests itself, that, much aroused and semi-satisfied, they were looking for pleasure wherever it might be found --- like the women in a Mughal zenana. This will certainly not sit well with the Shiv Sainiks. They have lately been rioting in Mumbai and Dilli, I heard, vandalizing theaters screening Deepa Mehta's "Fire". This movie, I heard a Shiv Sena neta say yesterday on National Public Radio, is "a direct assault on Hinduism". Clearly in his view, rioting, the destruction of property, vandalism, lawlessness, thuggery, and fascism, are quite consonant with Hindu values. These scoundrels seem to have widened their web to bait not just Muslims but also lesbians now. Whose turn will it be next? 

  I was extremely surprised to learn yesterday that Shiv Sainiks are now found as far north as Dilli, where indeed they appear to have sufficient strength to indulge in their usual thuggery. I had thought they were confined to Maharashtra. It must be catching, what they have. Perhaps the BJP imported some of their Sainik pals to Delhi. As if Delhi needs more thugs! 

  Neither am I hopeful that we will not have more of this sort of thing. Both my parents and my parents-in-law, who have all visited us this year, I found are great BJP sympathizers! I guess we'll have Ram Kishan Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi visit us next. 

  Ravana was a great lover, it is said. He was handsome and erudite, as compelling to a woman as any man or god could ever be. It is said that in all his life, he took every woman he wanted, and they went gladly to lie with him, or to wed. All, but two. The first was Urvashi, the apsara, who spurned him on her way to an assignation with her lover, and who he took later by force. The second was Sita, who he would also have taken by force, I suppose, had not Urvashi's lover cursed him that if he were ever to do that again all his ten heads would explode in an instant. 

  I wonder if Ravana's other equipment also came in multiples of ten, like his heads and his arms. And how was he able to pack all that bulk under his skirts? Or did he even bother? It is a problem the like of the Banach-Tarski paradox --- the packing of two balls in a space meant for one --- that shook up the world of mathematics in the 1920s. Both Valmiki and Tulsi are silent on this issue, but I am sure that there are many like me that would like to know. 

  In his wanderings about Lanka, Hanuman was impressed with the immense wealth of the rakshasas. Their wit and energy, their remarkable technology, their formidable weaponry, and the freedom of their indulgence in every pleasure of the senses, all these impressed Hanuman much as they would any ape transported suddenly from a jungle to a western metropolis. 

  During my first few days in the US my own feelings were not unlike Hanuman's. I could never ever have imagined a society possessed of so much wealth, and so much served by her technology. I remember being particularly enamored, in those first few days, of vending machines. They gobbled up a rather disproportionate fraction of my resources. I bought everything I could from them. 

  The thing that most impresses me about the US is that this society enables ordinary people accomplish the extraordinary. In India, on the other hand, it takes an extraordinary person to do something ordinary. The American legal system works. The Indian does not. Consequently in India we have no means to seek redress for wrongs done us --- many of these done us by our own government. Many things become possible with law and order that are impossible without it. 

  Following the posting of my little essay on American slavery, and following an argument on racism with VSSP, I received a lot of very interesting mail from all sorts of people. VSSP suggested that I need to move out of the US and go to Timbuktu. "Love it or leave it," that is what the Americans often say. But what they really mean is not "Love it or leave it", but "Shut up and don't bitch. You've never had it so good." 

  Then they give you statistics on how much they make, and how much do other brown people in the US. And how Vagera Vagera is the CEO of  Fly My Way. They say, yes America was racist, but everything is hunky-dory now. This is as perfect as perfect can be! 

  Another friend of almost thirty years standing wrote me this: "On another front, I find your pronouncements on world racism amazing, shocking, and to be quite honest, disappointing.  Particularly lamentable is your unwillingness to extend a fair measure of credit to the American psyche." 

  He went on to attribute to me the following views: 

(1) "That the Western (white) mind is patently racist."
(2) "That every act of Western (white) generosity is calculated to exact a worthy return on investment."
(3) "That anyone remotely appreciative of white goodness is instantly a Fascist." 

  This was complete garbage of course. I wrote back to say: 

  "I believe that most people are good whatever color they might be. Every society passes through periods of pathology. You and I, for example, are ourselves the products of a pathological society. America was a very sick society during most of its 400 years, and some pathology remains endemic here, as it does anywhere else. Colonial Britain was an immoral and unjust entity. Would you disagree? 

  "Never have I said that 'every act of Western (white) generosity is calculated to exact a worthy return on investment.' Although that is admittedly a statement that might give me pause. 

  "I have said that racism is alive and well in America, and I stand by that. I have said that if anyone says that [the] blacks are excessively given to crime, then that is indicative of their racism ..." 

  American racism does not keep the US from being a great nation. It does keep it from being even greater.