A Bangladeshi woman, a Nigerian childhood, an American youth, an Indian book

Every afternoon, I go to the 1920 Dining Commons, which is split into two symmetric eating sections. To the right are the blacks. To the left, the whites and everyone else. It’s a startling throwback to segregation, self-selected as it is, and has been this way for as long as I’ve been in school. Several issues of the student newspaper have addressed the divide, but it seems old habits die hard.

I usually sit in the black section because it feels more comfortable than sitting in the white section. But I sit alone, because I know no black students. Until I came to America, most of my friends were black. But my experience in Nigeria is as alien to African-Americans as theirs is to me. And now, I feel like a caricature, clutching at an American accent and Nigerian memories, my meal spiked with Bangladeshi chillies.

I sit down with my tray of food and a copy of The Daily Pennsylvanian. There’s an article about Kathy Change inside: she’s warning about doing something drastic if things don’t change soon. How would, could, should they change, I wonder. What is her Transformation Movement about? I should find out.

When I get back to my room on the 15th floor of the High Rise Dorms, there’s a colourful pile outside my door.

I nudge it with my foot, and the boom box I gave Glenn for his birthday last year falls to the bottom of the heap, damaged beyond repair. Underneath it is a grey swatch of the boxers I got for him freshman year. Cracked CD cases, ripped up letters, and other burnt, broken, torn, and mangled gifts. In a moment of madness, he has collected everything I’ve given him over three turbulent years and destroyed them for my viewing.

Glenn was the one who had wanted out. It came as a total shock to me, his proposal that we see other people, but still be friends. I protested day after day, suffering months of grovelling and heartbreak. I’m not sure he understood what he was asking. Neither of us can do without the other. We avoid each other for a few days and then find ourselves back together, talking the same brain talk we’ve honed and savoured for years.

Finally, I made myself look past him, see other people too. One date with a boy down the hall, and Glenn was back, wanting more, wanting everything. For months, I have heard variations of the same plea on my voicemail, in his wide scripted letters and prolonged emails:

Olive Witch, we were good together.

Let’s start over.

I don’t know what I was thinking.

I don’t know whether I’m ignoring him out of spite, or whether I’ve fallen out of love. Either way, I can’t compete with his loss, much less his destructive grief. I’m too tired to do anything about the pile, so I step over it and go inside.

A brown-and-gold sari drapes along the ceiling of the narrow dorm room, a billowing batik canopy.

I strip off my clothes and slide into my unmade bed. At the foot of the bed, there is a six-foot-high window facing west, streaming amber light everywhere. The sheets are warm with the late afternoon sunlight and I am asleep in seconds.

Each bright afternoon feeds a growing habit. The music I play in my room is becoming an addiction. It slows down my work a great deal, and often, instead of studying, I find myself lost in the rhythm and the mourning pop lyrics. But I can’t seem to do without it. My superstition is that the music is connected to my heart, and if it stops, so will I. This thought has become so real that my heart jumps if someone abruptly changes or stops playing a song.

The snake charmer’s song wakes me from my nap. Tanu’s thin fingers resolve in my memory, ivory keys depressing and rising beneath them. The song is playing on a mix tape that Maher gave me for my twenty-first birthday. This version has words and it sounds different in places. But the part with the black keys is exactly how I remember it from the practice room in Nsukka so many years ago. The feeling that comes over me then is such a keen and wordless thing that I am left weak, in tears.

I climb over to the window and push it open.

The wind rushes in like a herald. I stand up on the sill and lean out, gripping the inner walls. The ground falls away fifteen stories below. It feels like flying. True to its name, the song winds into itself and around me. The air is icy, but all I feel is the sun on my face and the bass in my body. A small and deadly promise forms in my mind. If the music stops, I will let go. I close my eyes, and in ecstatic terror, I listen.

A faint whirring begins in my ears. It gets louder, almost drowning out the song. The old stories from the Quran come to life. The djinns have come, beings made of fire, who have come to possess us, tell us things we cannot know. And the angels, the wind and the whirring emanating from their wings.

It’s deafening now, the music subsumed under the flying sound. I am surrounded by it, by them. On the verge of belief and fear, I open my eyes. The sunlight stabs at me. I see nothing but light. There is nothing but light.

The snake charmer’s song filters back into my waking dream. A memory presents itself, muffled but unmistakable. The music had never stopped. Shaking, I climb back down to the bed. The window is another plane, the music the unstable bridge. No less otherworldly is the batik-sari sky of my room. On the other side of my door, Glenn’s broken love sits in the shape of mountains. And outside, everywhere, buildings, falling leaves, the real world. Every second counting down.

Next year, I have decided, or perhaps my father has, that I will begin a PhD programme in business at Wharton.

The jobs I applied for after graduation were frightening to contemplate doing for long: information systems, technical support, web traffic analysis. I’m praying grad school will be better, or at least more familiar, and of course, it’s what my parents want me to do. I have a sinking feeling that either way, I’m out of my depth.

I leave the High Rises and head out to Van Pelt Library with a bag full of books. Inside the library, the dying afternoon turns grey through the dim glass windows. Outside, a giant metal peace sign stands off to the right and people are scattered on the green, lounging on the broken button sculpture.

I notice a frantic knot of people gathering around the peace sign where smoke is wafting upward. I walk over to one of the windows to get a better look. A thin black man is standing under the peace sign, waving his arms, swaying violently. Smoke is pouring off his body. Someone is holding a fire extinguisher, but no one can get close because of the smoke.

I am unable to stop watching, nor do I feel the other students crowding behind me, pushing me against the glass. The man is moaning, or shouting. I can’t hear anything he’s saying through the window.

Then someone whispers behind me, “It’s Kathy Change.”

The figure of what I thought was a black man morphs into a skeletal dancing body, and my shock turns to tears. What looked like black skin is the ashy and burnt skin of the Asian dancer. The ponytail has long since burnt off and what’s left is matted to her skull.

This is what she promised us, her uncomprehending audience – something drastic, something bold, in lieu of, in return for, change. Is she telling the truth with her molten motion? Did she tell it soon enough? Is it an act of engagement, or the opposite?

The paramedics are here now, wrapping her in blankets, strapping her still flailing body to a stretcher. A medic attempts to open her mouth to insert a breathing tube. He grabs her upper jaw and pulls upwards, and her whole face seems to stretch into a howl.

Kathy Change will not survive the trip to the hospital.

Excerpted with permission from Olive Witch, Abeer Y Hoque, HarperCollins India.