Free Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru Page A

old-country memory of tax collectors, landlord’s thugs.
    Jaz could never understand why his mom and dad were so scared. He lived his life in B-more, not the Punjab. He went to a school ruled by black kids, Americans, not the other blacks, the Somalis and French speakers who came from families as adrift in the country as his own. He spoke English, recited the pledge, knew the capitals of the fifty states. He met plenty of white kids, Americans and new immigrants from Slovakia and Poland and the Ukraine. He met Latinos. He and the other “Asians,” Vietnamese and Pakistanis and Iranians and Tamils, none numerous enough to form their own clique, counted for little in the school hierarchy, but even as a skinny brown kid with freakishly long hair, he felt American. He played baseball, not cricket. He listened to the top forty on his Walkman. He’d go to the park with his family and the big world would parade before them, the Frisbee throwers and joggers and sunbathers, the crazy old ladies and baggy-shirted skateboarders, all seeming so free and easy, sharing the open space. Meanwhile his mom and dad would be delineating their boundaries by laying down blankets, huddling with the children over tiffin carriers and Tupperware containers of food, too timid even to bring a radio.
    But, Mom, why can’t I go? It’s just a rock concert, just music
.
    You have your studies, beta
.
    His studies. Always that. Luckily he was clever. Math and science were his subjects. He could make numbers do the things he wanted. And just as he could see the patterns in an exponential or a logarithm, he could see there were other kinds of life to be led than his, lives that involved going on foreign vacations, having piercings, keeping a pet dog or a garden or a boat in the marina, playing with your band on MTV, locking your bike outside the vegan coffee shop and necking with your dreadlocked girlfriend. In such a life you could meet gora girls with short skirts and long legs, who’d talk to you instead of holding their noses and pretending to be disgusted by the phantom odor of curry. For a while, these girls were the sole focus of his life, girls in his class, in the neighborhood. Becky and Cathy and Carrie and Leigh … There were insuperable barriers to becoming their friend, let alone sleeping with them. His geeky Asian-ness. His hair. Above all, his hair. By fifteen he’dswapped the topknot for a turban, but even then he had a carpet of soft down on his chin and long black wisps snaking along his jaw, a mess of unruly and undeniably childish growth that made the hormonal chaos of his adolescent skin look even worse. He was a monster, a pariah.
    Some of the other Sikh boys did the unthinkable. They went to the barber. They endured their dads’ beatings, their moms’ tears. As if to taunt their more compliant brothers and cousins they began to spend hours in front of the mirror, shaving complicated fades and pencil-thin beards, teasing out fierce patterns of gelled spikes. They dressed like gangsters, smoked dope, drove their pimped-out rice-burner cars down to bhangra dances in D.C. They were the real Punjabi shers, the brave-hearts, always ready to go after the dirty black bandars walking on their block, the sick slut who dated white boys. Jaz couldn’t have copied them if he’d dared. He was a nerd, a mathlete. On the fridge in his parents’ kitchen was a yellowing photo of him, aged sixteen, standing behind his prizewinning statistics exhibit at the city science fair. He always noticed his eyes in that picture. Glazed, fixed on escape.
    Everyone had heard of MIT. Uncle Daljit had even visited the campus on some kind of tour. It was A-number-one, the best. Of course Jaz would need a scholarship, but his teachers said that wasn’t impossible. He was an exceptional student, gifted. How good that sounded in his parents’ ears.
Our gifted son
. So it was decided: Jaz would try for MIT. The household organized itself round the mission.