There was only one African student in my class, perhaps in the entire college.
 
Issay, I was told, means a person with abundant hair, and it was a name our classmate abundantly justified. He did not have dreadlocks, but his long, dark hair flowed over his shoulders. That was not the only reason he looked different from other students. While we were moving to modern shell frames or rimless spectacles, he wore ancient granny glasses. While others wore white or pastel colors, he fancied clothes that put a rainbow to shame. Moreover, his clothes never seemed to have encountered starch or an iron; they were defiantly wrinkled and had a sleeped-in look.
 
I never saw him talking to a classmate. Rather, none of the classmates ever talked to him. Most Indians are born racists anyway. The idea of bonhomie with a jet-black African was abhorrent to them. For me, I was knee-deep in student politics and talked to every potential voter. Also, my mindset was different. My father’s work brought him in contact with foreigners. We have had Jamaicans, Nigerians and Ghanaians as dinner guests and I had greatly enjoyed an African American as a house guest. I initiated a conversation with Issay.

I might have done so partly out of a realization of his friendlessness. But minutes into the conversation I recognized his independent spirit and spirited individuality. I enjoyed talking to him. With my interest in student politics, we began by talking about political issues. When I spouted some of the leftist dogma popular at the time, he smiled broadly and said he had heard those ideas in his country, Kenya. Then he briefly raised a few questions he said my ideas left unanswered. Our discussion continued, but I knew readily what he was and wasn’t. He was a maverick and kept his own counsel. And he was no pushover; he would never be easily steamrolled into a corner.
 
I knew these about Issay, but nobody else did. The reason was Issay did not take part in class discussions. He never voluntarily raised his hand. If asked, he gave the briefest response in the fewest words. Most professors took him to be uninterested in any exchange of ideas. Most students knew nothing of him, as he didn’t participate in seminars or student exchanges. His classmates didn’t invite him to informal discussions, and he didn’t join them on his own because he felt unwanted.
 
Our friendship, however, gradually developed. I took him home, where my parents treated him with affection, and, later, as they got to know him better, with deference. Mother would sometimes ask him to stay back for dinner; when he left, she would pack a sandwich and an apple ‘for breakfast.’ Issay tried to reciprocate by inviting me for a movie and a meal at a restaurant, but, with characteristic unconcern, bought expensive tickets and chose a fancy steak house. Given his meager scholarship, I realized that he was generous to the point of imprudence, and afterward I consistently resisted what he called a night on the town. I embroidered the truth and told Issay that I preferred him to come to our home because I wanted him to be better accustomed to Indian food. The kernel of truth was that my parents thought well of him and I had grown fond of his unique ways.
 
Issay graduated comfortably, though I felt peeved that his marksheet did not reflect his remarkable capacity for unusual thinking or unique ideas. We had a tea party in his tiny room in a boarding house with no more than five friends, which included a young emergency room doctor who had once attended to Issay and the old janitor of our college, who had possibly never received a moment’s attention from any other student. Then he was gone. Not a trace was left of the unusual Kenyan student who had quietly added color and vibrancy to our lives.

​Even without the swift electronic links of today, we stayed in touch. I was delighted to hear that Issay had joined the foreign service of his country and was assigned to Canada as his first post. We wrote to each other as I worked in commerce for a multinational group and he worked on commercial policy for his country. By the time I joined the foreign service of the US, he was the minister in charge of international trade of his country. I was impressed by his reputation as an unusual and incorruptible leader, who chose, at the pinnacle of his power and fame, to walk away and become the president of a university.
 
In one of his typically brief and blunt missives, he had written to me, “I have enjoyed a modest fame as the source of new ideas and the power to get a few of those ideas implemented. I know neither the fame nor the power will last. I want to work on getting others to generate ideas and equipping others to implement new ideas.” He was always a maverick, eager to make sure new ideas spring.
 
The great pity, in my view, was that my college, my friends and my professors never recognized a man who could have contributed so much to our lives and our work, perhaps even to our country. Prejudices die hard.

My assistant said breathlessly, “A Hollywood actress has come to see you.”
 
Monday morning was the busiest day at the US Consulate, with the longest line of visa seekers.
 
We have had actresses before, and, whatever the issue, their presence attracted a lot of attention and caused some disruption. I had misgivings and wanted to act quickly. I said, “Please show her in.”

The person who entered had a modest smile, but certainly the appearance of a Hollywood celebrity. She was tall and slender, her hair swept up in an elegant pile on top of her head. She looked screen-worthy with her perfect make-up and designer jewelry. She wore a long, flowing dress, simple enough to make her look regal.
 
Her first sentence was to explode our initial assumption. After I had offered her a seat and she had thanked me, she said, “I am Jean, a technology entrepreneur in hibernation.” Ah, a tech executive, with the looks of a screen goddess. I understood my assistant’s assumption. She worked for the world’s largest technology consulting group, but, she explained, she was currently on a sabbatical in this tiny Himalayan country. She traveled often and wanted to execute a Power of Attorney in favor of a Sherpa, who had once guided her on a mountain tour and was now her employee. He could then be authorized to pay her utility bills, collect her mail and do her financial chores while she was away.
 
The work was over in ten minutes, but she stayed for a cup of tea, and invited me for dinner the ensuing week before leaving. The next day I received a card telling me the place and time for dinner. 

Since the place was a ritzy downtown restaurant, I assumed a large group. When I entered, I saw Jean nowhere. I enquired and was asked to go up the stairs to the balcony area. She was sitting in a corner, looking resplendent. Next to her was an ice bucket, with three bottles of Pinot Grigio, of her favored brand. I asked about other guests and she said I was the only invitee.
 
“I thought of inviting some other friends,” she said, “but decided against it at the end. You had seemed an interesting person, and I wanted to talk with you at length.”
 
When I wondered why there weren’t any restaurant clients on the balcony area either, she told me that she had reserved the entire floor. I knew she was well heeled, but now I was getting an idea of her style.
 
She wanted to know of my background, for, she said, I didn’t look or sound like the usual US consul. I told her briefly of my émigré antecedents, then asked about her. She told me an unexpected story.
 
She was flying to Los Angeles, for her work for the technology company, when she met on the plane the chairman of the country’s largest defense contractor. Within three weeks he had proposed to her and they were married in Hawaii in seven weeks. He was an avid collector of guns and keen that she should join him in practice shooting. Barely six months after their return from honeymoon in the Caribbean, he was proudly showing her his collection and showing the unique way each gun needed to be loaded and fired. He demonstrated excitedly his favorite, a Springfield XD-S, showed how lightweight it was and how easy to load, then handed it to Jean. She had barely taken it in her hand and turned it around to see how it works, when it went off with a loud bang. The bullet went through her husband’s neck and he was instantly killed.
 
When she recovered from her shock, the large house was teeming with police and homicide detectives. They checked the guns, took prints and searched the entire home for evidence.
Jean was asked to describe the event to the investigating detective, repeatedly. She said it was an accident, but he did not believe her. He suspected that the large property they owned was the motive. He wanted her prosecuted and got her sister-in-law to be a witness to ostensible problems in the marriage. Good Heavens, how did she manage to avoid that murder rap? Jean said, “Very simple. We owned two expensive homes in Georgetown. I gave her one. The police no longer had a witness.”
 
Of course, she featured on the front page of newspapers as a “person of interest” for several days. Her life was no longer the same. She decided to take a long sabbatical from her work and go someplace she had never been, and nobody would know her or about her. She bought a first-class ticket for Nepal.

​Jean was doubtless a charmer. She was not just beautiful, she was fascinating. We became friends. We would meet every week for dinner and sometimes we went for a hike in the mountains. The hours went by in languid chatter or animated discussion. Oftentimes we differed, but somehow we relished our differences. She was a wonderful adversary to dispute or combat. Whenever our debate reached a point of heat, she would bring her face close to mine and say, in an oblique reference to her notoriety, “Aren’t you afraid of me?”
 
I would get even closer and say, “I would love to die in your hands.”

How dated sounds Dorothy Parker’s classic couplet,
 
                        “Men do not make passes
                        at girls who wear glasses!”
 
Girls – the very word now sounds sexist – don’t have to wear glasses if they don’t want to. They can simply wear contacts. Or revert to glasslessness thanks to the affordable miracle of laser eye surgery. More interesting, though, is that female celebrities, actors and models, are increasingly appearing in public with colorful spectacles. Far from appearing dismal, male-daunting apparitions, they look downright human and attractive. Jennifer Aniston to Jennifer Lopez, Zoe Saldana to Anne Hathaway, all are turning heads with their fetching, bespectacled look.

I can still remember the time when glasses were not in vogue even for men. Those clumsy, wiry things were only for men over the hill. When glasses became more common, I even heard older people expressing suspicion that younger men were wearing them for style, not because of limited vision. Hardly. Actually, farsightedness or hyperopia affects three-fourths of men over forty; nearsightedness or myopia is also fast becoming an epidemic.
 
I was ten when I wore my first pair. The blackboard in school was blurring for months, but I resisted turning a ‘four-eyed’ geek. It would be a catastrophe on the playground, I thought. I could no longer be a wicket keeper in cricket; nor could I play the kind of rough hockey and football I played with my friends. I also remembered Oliver Wendell Holmes’s sardonic comment that revolutions are not made by people who wear glasses (only much later did I visit Leon Trotsky’s home in Mexico and began to compute in the age of Bill Gates, and knew that people who don’t see well can still see their way to a revolution).
 
Finally, father dragged me to an eye doctor, an old, grandfatherly neighborhood guy, who checked my distance vision with some stained cardboard charts and wrote out a prescription. Only a week later, I had my shiny new glasses in a coffee-colored shell frame.

It felt like a new chapter in my life. Suddenly everything seemed to have an edge, a clear definition. Every color seemed clearer and brighter. From our second-floor apartment, even the lawn appeared greener, the flowers more vivid. From the terrace, I could see the discolored buildings, an extended slum and its hovels, the shapeless yellow building at the corner where some of my friends lived, and the distant chimneys of a leather factory spitting gray columns of smoke. All of a sudden, everything was clear.
 
But nothing was more amazing than what I saw in the mirror. I barely recognized the bespectacled person I saw. My friends in the school the next morning had strong opinions: some thought I looked nerd-like, some said I looked older, while others felt the glasses added some gravitas to my lanky frame. Clearly, nobody thought that I looked the same.

​But how different I realized two weeks later. We sat for our history test, and halfway through the short guy to my left whispered, “Hey, what year was the second Battle of Panipat?” Even as I wrote, I whispered back, “1556.” Then I looked up and saw that the invigilator was looking directly at me. But he did nothing. Ten minutes later, when the head invigilator came for inspection, I heard the invigilator report that two students were conferring, against the rules. I froze. I knew I was in for trouble and could see no escape. I had a sudden idea. I took off my glasses and put it inside the desk, out of sight. The invigilator came with his supervisor to my desk, took a look at me and felt uncertain. He was unsure of identifying me now. Seeing this, the head invigilator simply issued a general warning against talking during the test and left. My danger was over.
 
For decades I wore my glasses, though the lens changed. Through college and university, I was the guy with glasses. When I took a job and started travelling, not only the lens changed, I was induced to move to fancier frames. Metal frames when they were in hip, rimless glasses when they seemed swankier. As I started travelling overseas, I carried duplicate glasses in case I lost my glasses or broke them, as I did periodically. Glasses were my ever-present companion. So much so that I occasionally walked into a shower or went to bed with the glasses on.

Then I met Jacqueline, the well-regarded eye specialist I now consult in Washington. Why do I keep wearing the complex lenses for reading as well as distance, adjusted with annoying periodicity for astigmatism? A swift surgery, Jacqueline’s firm admonition for a regime of eye drops for some weeks, and I walk into a bright, sunlit day without anything around my eyes. I hadn’t lived a day without glasses since I was ten. I feel nearly naked.
 
Friends do a double take. Acquaintances can barely recognize me on the street. My brothers, who both wear glasses now, think I look strange. But I walk, jog, read, drive and watch a movie without glasses. But, from habit rather than necessity, I still often carry a pair of glasses, the way some mothers carry a pacifier for their baby.
 
A wiseacre friend made the wisecrack that I had lost my specs appeal, but I no longer wanted to make a spectacle of myself.

In a few days there will open in Montgomery, Alabama, the Legacy Museum, devoted to slavery, segregation and equality. It includes the first memorial to lynching victims. I love the United States, the land of my adoption, as a country prepared to face, in some small measure, the blackest period in its history.

The country tortured and lynched no less than 5000 recorded African Americans, perhaps many more, after the so-called emancipation, and kept lynching as recently as 1970. The lynching ritual is well illustrated by the case of Sam Hose, a black Georgian, never charged with any crime, who was lynched on 23 April 1899. He was stripped, chained to a tree, his ears, fingers and genitals chopped, his face skinned, knives plunged into his body, kerosene-soaked wood piled around him and he was set on fire. As the flames rose, the body contorted, eyes bulged out of their sockets, his blood sizzled and veins ruptured. Later, they sliced open his heart and liver, crushed his bones, and distributed pieces to spectators as souvenirs.

Besides its entertainment value, the ritual was essentially to terrorize the black people. To tell them that, though the law said they were free, not only were they economically in hock to the whites as servants and sharecroppers, they had to be totally subservient, slavishly dominated and servile. Much has changed in the US since then, but what has not changed is the long tradition of inequality, the subservience of African Americans. It continues, in business and education, in every aspect of social affairs or the justice system.
 
I hate the United States for what it has done and keeps doing to a section of its own people.
 
When I started living in the US as an Indian emigré, what intrigued me was that the Indian community believed it to be indistinguishable from the whites. Unquestionably, the Indians have done well in the US and become the most successful community in its history, besting even the Jewish record in terms of individual affluence and community status. But, socially, they remain clearly what sociologists call an outgroup. They are a minority community and will remain one for the foreseeable future, their destiny tied with that of other minority communities like the African Americans and the Hispanics. They must do what they are loath to do: identify with the cause of the Hispanics and African Americans and fight against the pervasive evil of inequality. Nothing is more laughable than the pains of Indians arranging religious rituals for the success of Trump, who despises non-white groups with instinctive disdain, or Indians who have attained US citizenship trying to align with political groups that have historically kept minority groups at arm’s length. White America does not accept Indians as equals and will not do so in the foreseeable future. The spurning of Priyanka Chopra for a movie role because she is brown is only the latest tell-tale sign.

For Indian Americans to align themselves with the struggle for equality in the US would be particularly appropriate, for that is the supreme Indian tradition: of acceptance and assimilation. I love India, the land of my birth, for its greatest strength has been to meld a common link among diverse groups. To bring together people of different languages, religions and cultures and confer a common sense of purpose, as when the Indians combined to throw out the exploitative English occupiers.
 
I grew up in Kolkata, which still bore the trappings of a capital city, of no less than a territory of the British empire. I lived in a house that bordered on a large Hindu community with its own temple and tradition and an even larger if poorer Muslim contingent that had its own mosque. It was not far from a Buddhist temple and an important Jain hospital. Practically facing the hospital was a tall Episcopal church and an adjacent Christian compound. A large number of Indians spoke Bengali and Hindi interchangeably, some of us spoke English, but our gardener spoke Oriya, our guard spoke Bhojpuri and our father’s factotum was most comfortable in Urdu. But we were a family and a community, and we saw ourselves as of one land. We played football, hockey and badminton, and other games I have forgotten. We were happy.
 
That was the India, the land of my birth, I loved. 

​That India is now being wrecked. It is being replaced by an intolerant, hate-filled India one barely recognizes. The India I hate is the India where men in saffron break down sanctuaries in the name of religion, false gurus foment distrust of other faiths in the name of patriotism, people are murdered ostensibly for the welfare of cows, media is cowed into compliance or silence, journalists are threatened and shot down, leaders in power use crooks and criminals alongside the police to carry out their pogrom, and the glib-tongued supreme leader who promises the moon but delivers little more than moonshine, abets a regime of hate and intolerance, and uses well-honed publicity gimmicks to hold on to power he should have long forfeited. Yes, to promote hate is hateful.

Did I hear someone say that when a good Indian -- or a good Chinese for that matter -- dies, he or she is reborn in New York?
 
I would have thought that a hyperbole. No longer. Every middle-aged professional I have talked to in India recently would rather have a job or consulting assignment in the US. Every young person I encounter seems to aspire to a US life style, preferably in New York. No matter that our planet cannot sustain a billion Indians, living the American way, let alone another billion Chinese. That is still the persistent, impossible dream.
 
Along with this comes a curious view of expatriate Indians who live in Valhalla.

Many more people in India now can afford to visit the US. No surprise that some want to stay back. Like immigrants from other lands, some do well and achieve distinction. As doctors, engineers, technologists, and even as scholars, writers and artists. Many more, of course, have to struggle and struggle hard. To speak a new language, to fit into a new society, to adjust to a radically different culture. It takes them years, sometimes decades, to settle down.
 
Mukherjee worked in an ill-paid but prestigious government job in Kolkata, where I met him. His brother persuaded him to move to New York. He looked months for a job, but the only ones that he found made him feel powerless and insignificant, compared to his job in India. He had more money, a better place to live, but he felt unhappy. After sixteen months, he went back to India.
 
Kejriwal was an electric engineer, who had taken to computers and developed an interest in cybersecurity. He came to Boston to do a course, then persuaded a local software company to hire him. He sweated in entry-level jobs for some years before he got an opening, proved himself steadily and rose to head his department. He misses his relatives and an easy life in India, but he is affluent and successful in his new land.
 
Rajan, who shortened his long Tamil name, came to study in San Diego, later joined a large consulting group, became a manager and, eight years later, left the job to start his own company. It was a quick success. In hardly five years the firm was a major force, a principal government contractor, and Rajan was an acknowledged titan on the west coast.

In a way, Mukherjee, Kejriwal and Rajan represent the spectrum of immigrants from the east in quest of their destiny in the New World. Some fail; they return or quietly live out their days in a land they forever regard as alien and unfriendly. Some others, even if they don’t quite feel they ‘belong,’ labor on mightily, achieve affluence, gain reputation and become admired members of their society. Also, there are some others, who come to spectacular success, make a fortune, attain political prominence, and go on to Warhol’s fifteen-minute fame. They have realized the legendary American dream.
 
These emigrés visit their motherland from time to time, to visit friends and relatives, to perform family chores or simply to assuage their nostalgia. In talking to others, doubtless they gloss over their pains and problems and speak more of their accomplishments. Their listeners get to hear of their large houses, fancier cars, newer gadgets and holiday trips. Unintended, the emigré visits take on the semblance of victory laps.

Unintended too, they evoke a curious reaction of envy for the local boy or girl who made good, thanks to a lucky break, compared to the many who wanted but never got a visa. Neither as a student or trainee or instructor or course participant, nor, more riskily, as a tourist. Earlier, I visited India rarely, only as a part of the international jobs I held in the US; but now that I visit the country annually and write columns regularly for several publications, I am beginning to sense the reaction in interesting ways.
 
First is the skepticism that anybody in the diaspora knows enough to talk about the mother country. This is strange, given how easy it is for anybody abroad to access facts and news about the country. Then there is the resentment that anybody, who is living comfortably overseas, not enduring the ills of living in the country, should have the gumption to speak about the country’s problems. I have seen carping reference to people abroad who have dared to speak out, even though they are scrupulous scholars and visit India repeatedly. The assumption seems to be that one must always be in India to have the right to comment on Indian affairs. These critics would have been outraged by a comment I heard recently from Mario Vargas Llosa that in writing a great novel about his homeland, Peru, he prefers to sit and write it in Paris or Madrid. His point is that quality improves when spiritual proximity combines with physical distance to filter passion with objectivity.

​I have taken it for granted that some will always begrudge me the right to say anything on what happens in India, on the ground that I am often in the Middle East or North and Central America or I live comfortably in a Washington home, no matter what effort I make to explore or understand an issue. But when that grudge masquerades as patriotic fervor or doubles as an effort to protect a sacred cow, I would not really mind some fisticuffs in the media.