chapter 11

MadisonArpitha booked a cab to take us to the Appleton bus station. We were taking the bus to Madison. Amar had left for work after handing over the reins to Arpitha. And Arpitha, the good sport, led us willingly, armed with her intelligence, cell phone and a whole lot of cards dangling from a band on her wrist, like keys that hang at the end of the saree pallu of Bengali women.The cab driver, Gary, was a very interesting and friendly guy and VK spoke with him all the way to the bus stop. Neenah was such a small place that almost whenever Arpitha tried to summon an Uber, she got Gary. Gary was a local who was polite, gentle, helpful and, apart from a greeting when he picked us up, spoke only when he was spoken to. And he was spoken to a lot by VK. Through frequent conversations, we could piece together parts of his life. Gary had retired and returned to Neenah to be with his aged mother. Uber suited him perfectly; it brought in some money and kept him occupied without tying him down.Once when he overheard VK and I wondering whether we should take a sweater with us, he told us that though the sun was shining it might be a good idea to take one along. Always. He repeated a local joke: ‘You don’t like the weather in Wisconsin? Wait five minutes. It will change.’After a short Uber ride, we were at the Greyhound station. Arpitha made enquiries, found out when and where our bus would be parked, scouted around for refreshments and located the washroom. We soon got used to this pattern. Arpitha led, we followed, like baa-lambs. But she would always ask us for our preferences and try to get what we wanted. Like front seats on the Greyhound.It was not the famous aluminium-grey Greyhound, celebrated in movies, books and songs, but a Lamers bus hired by Greyhound. Hopping on, we got ready for our first bus journey in the U.S.We exchanged extravagant, ‘Hi! Nice-to-see-you!’s with the driver. VK wanted a front seat because of the view, from behind a pane of glass that nearly covered the front of the bus. Arpitha and I chose less visually rich seats right behind VK’s.VK’s seat placed him within mouth and earshot of the driver, a medium-sized, muscular gentleman who introduced himself as Steve. VK met his match in Steve, who was a very talkative person. The two conversed non-stop through the three hours the bus took to reach Madison.Steve had spent a lifetime as a travelling sales person, had retired and was now driving for Greyhound because he liked it. He grew trees on the farmstead where he lived. No, he did not have a unionised job and anyway did not bother about the benefits it would bring because he had invested smartly and was not worried about a second retirement.What about health care, VK asked, and prudently didn’t mention Obamacare. No problem, Steve responded. He was covered. He did not seem to care much for government support. He could look after himself, he declared, with a certain amount of cockiness that sat comfortably on him. VK wasn’t wrong in his hunch, for at one point Steve declared, ‘I am a conservative.’VK cleared his doubts about the trees we passed. VK loves trees. He plans to turn our small yard at home into an orchard, a Garden of Eden; and I’ve spotted snakes in it.‘Mostly maple,’ said Steve. ‘Red, grey, oak and ashen maple.’ He was a fount of knowledge about trees. ‘Most American homes used pine for construction. Not the best quality wood, but inexpensive. And with some maintenance and a layer of paint once in a while, it would last decades.’He grew different types of pine, fir and spruce on his land. But it was oaks he really wanted to grow. ‘Not easy,’ he said. ‘The soil in Wisconsin is not terribly oak-friendly. Special care has to be taken, particularly with the acidity of the soil. But it’s worthwhile.’ He smiled. ‘Oak wood fetches a lot of money.’Before VK could introduce the dead fish into the conversation, he got sidetracked for we encountered some road restrictions. ‘Why is so much of the road under repair?’ he asked instead. The road to Madison wasn’t as good as the interstate we had taken from Chicago. There were stretches where repair work was going on and only a lane of traffic was permitted.‘Because the hard winter and the extremely low temperatures during deep freezes causes the tarmac to break up, sometimes,’ Steve said. Then he laughed and continued, ‘Also, this is Wisconsin, road repair is a year-long, life-long affair.’ He then hinted at things that an Indian, always wary of the PWD-contractor-politician nexus, could easily relate to.But even with the road restrictions, what we noticed was tidiness and discipline. The gravel and other aggregates were arranged in neat piles near where the work was taking place. Signs indicated clearly, and early enough, which way we had to take. Not like in India where the surprise element is a constant. You expect a bridge but splash-land in water instead.The vehicles moved in a steady and orderly fashion. And Steve kept chatting.I piped in to ask if he had had any hair-raising experiences while driving a bus. ‘Ah, yeah,’ he chuckled. ‘Once my bus slammed into a deer.’ Oh, dear. ‘Another time, a wheel from an SUV, two cars ahead, got loose, and came bouncing towards me.’He did not panic, he claimed, though the speed at which he was driving and the speed of the wheel combined to make it faster and more dangerous than a bullet. ‘Lucky the wheel slammed into the front bumper and ricocheted off. A foot or so higher, and it’d have hit the glass right in front of me. I’d have been a goner.’ He chuckled again, as if he was narrating a particularly humorous story.At one point he indicated the low cockpit he sat in, the gauges in front, the switches on the console, a video screen he often consulted and the mirrors that fed him information. ‘This is my world. I am not aware of my passengers or anything else behind me. My focus is here,’ he stated again, nodding at the equipment around him. ‘It’s easy to drive these big buses now. Electronics, computers and hydraulics have made it easy.’He negotiated a big turn. ‘Watch,’ he said to VK. ‘The extra set of rear wheels will lift off the surface so I can take a sharper turn. No effort at all from me.’ Though we weren’t invited, Arpitha and I watched too.‘Look.’ He pointed to a video screen as we reached the tight turn. The wheels moved up when Steve touched a small lever. Down it went at another nudge when the turn was complete. All James Bond style.‘I drive regularly to Chicago and Madison, and sometimes stay over in Chicago. Greyhound is very caring. My work schedule suits me. I’d quit if it didn’t.’ He was one happy driver.It would be tragic if, in the not-too-distant future, Steve and others like him were made redundant by AI with driverless buses, lorries and cars, guided by remote or machine control taking over the roads. The best we can hope for is that some humans would be required to maintain the necessary software from California or Bangalore.We got off at the University of Madison, bidding a warm goodbye to Steve. From there we went food hunting. Arpitha took us to a nearby fast-food outlet for sandwiches. Now, if you think buying a sandwich is the easiest task on earth, you have another think coming, for in the U.S. it is not a simple choice, but a multi-layered decision-making process that challenges the highest intelligence.‘You have to choose, Aunty,’ said Arpitha, going ahead.I looked at the menu stuck on the wall and chose. ‘I want a meat sandwich.’ And that started the elaborate gastronomical inquisition.‘That’s perfect.’ The woman behind the counter gave a plastic smile. ‘What kind of bread? Regular, brown, wheat, multigrain? Toasted or plain?’‘Plain grain,’ I stammered, giving the two words I could recall, as nervous as I had been when I faced the PG viva board.‘What kind of cheese do you prefer? Soft, hard, semi-hard, blue, processed?’‘And the filling. What vegetables? Lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber…?’I felt dizzy.‘What meat? Some eggs too?’‘And sauce, ma’am? Tomato ketchup, chilly, mayonnaise, white, blond?’By then I had a headache. ‘An aspirin, that’s what I want,’ I wished to tell her. ‘And pink bread with green cheese, cauliflower filling, kangaroo meat and auburn sauce. Let me see you get me that.’I don’t even remember what I finally got, but I was grateful for something edible. It was giant-sized, so I shared it with VK who had been watching me with some amusement and had smartly decided to give the whole exercise a miss.We headed to Olbrich Botanical Gardens, the stunning realisation of the democratic vision of Michael Olbrich, an enlightened Madison attorney who wanted to bring the grace and beauty of nature into the lives of everyone—‘No greater mistake can be made than the belief that taste and aesthetic sense is a monopoly of the merely well-to-do or purely a product of formal schooling,’ he said during his speech in 1921, proposing a garden site near Lake Monona. Bravo.A series of ‘wow’s escaped our lips. The beauty of the sprawling 16-acre grounds stretched out before us, and we halted in our tracks. For VK had tripped over his shoe laces with a ‘Wow! Awo!’ He would have stretched out before us too, but Arpitha and I brought him back to base like a recoiling rubber band. The inviting pathways, the colourful gardens, the lush trees beckoned. We didn’t know where to gaze, but we did know where to go—Arpitha and I to the reception and VK to a bench to tie his shoelaces.A friendly woman ‘Hi!-ed’ us. ‘Entrance to the garden is free,’ she said. We grinned.‘But not to the Botz Conservatory.’ Now it was her turn to grin, pleased she had fooled us. The egalitarian approach to the enjoyment of nature stopped at the entrance to the simulated tropical world inside Botz.I watched as Arpitha held up her wrist to choose a card for the tickets. The volunteer opened her eyes wide. ‘Cool,’ she exclaimed. Had this been India, by now the woman would have got details of the wrist band, where it was available, its price and where she could get it at half its price. This woman swallowed her curiosity and turned to greet the next visitor.‘To Botz,’ Arpitha announced.‘Aye, aye.’ VK had joined us and we picked up some pamphlets and bought a few magnetic souvenirs before following her to the Botz Conservatory.We got a warm reception. The glass pyramid housed tropical trees and plants at a temperature that was warm enough for these and the tropical birds to survive, and thrive. It was welcome warmth. We sighed in ecstasy, peeling off our sweaters.‘Yee, a coconut tree,’ I screeched. The trees that hardly attracted a second glance from me at home—unless my self-preservation instincts made me look up whenever I stood directly under a heavily laden one—now became the ticket to a nostalgia trip. ‘And coconuts. Real ones.’‘A jack tree.’ That was VK. ‘And actual jack fruit.’‘And pineapple. Look, a pepper vine too.’Arpitha looked amused at our excitement, until VK’s shout, ‘A fishtail palm, and colocasia,’ roused her interest.‘What are those?’ she asked, bit her tongue and braced herself for the lecture that was bound to follow.At a pool created by the stream that a smallish waterfall gushed into, I noticed a woman tossing a coin into it. A closer look showed that she wasn’t the first to display this quirky generosity—there was quite a fortune in coins scattered at the bottom.‘A wishing pool.’ I drew Arpitha’s attention to it and rescued her from furthering her horticultural education. ‘Let’s throw a coin in.’‘Yes, let’s. But I don’t have change.’‘Ha, I do. Cards don’t always do the trick. Any particular denomination?’‘One cent should do,’ she said. As I fished out three coins, VK stopped me.‘Not for me,’ he looked insulted. ‘How can you believe in all this?’‘I don’t, but whether you believe in it or not, it’s supposed to work,’ I quipped, adapting the reply attributed to the Nobel laureate Niels Bohr. When the famous physicist was asked by a journalist, who noticed a horseshoe hanging over the door of his house, ‘How can you, a man of science, believe in this?’ Bohr is said to have responded, ‘Whether you believe in it or not, it’s supposed to bring luck.’Arpitha and I threw the coins and she asked me if I made a wish.‘Yes. I wished Amar gets that job.’Arpitha looked dismayed. ‘Oh, Aunty, you shouldn’t say that out aloud; it won’t come true.’‘Oh.’ Now I was dismayed, but recovered quickly. ‘Never mind, let’s prove that superstition wrong.’‘Maybe you could try re-phrasing it and throw another coin in,’ VK laughed. I rephrased my retort. ‘Funny, very,’ I said and threw him an exasperated glance.One quick dekko at the birds, the fish, the orchids and what have you at the conservatory and we came out. The change in temperature was striking. We re-established close contact with our sweaters and moved to the innumerable gardens—sunken, rock, rose and the rest that the place boasted. In the sunken garden, I noticed yellow flowers—daffodils, said the label.‘Daffodils! An actual host of golden daffodils, at last.’ I was thrilled. I had studied and taught Wordsworth’s worthy words about the flower for all they were worth, without ever having seen one.The rock garden was next, but what chance did a rock garden have when a golden pagoda-like structure beckoned? All that glitters might not be gold, but this one was.In minutes we were inside that lustrous structure. It was a sala Thai—a typical Thai pavilion that provides shelter to people. There are only four such salas outside Thailand, and we were privileged to be inside one of them. This was a gift of gratitude from the government of Thailand to the University of Madison for having provided education to the maximum number of Thai students in the U.S. The University of Kerala gets gifts of court notices for delay of results.‘This sala had been assembled by Thai workers without the use of a single nail,’ VK said, looking alternately into a pamphlet and his phone.I gazed uncertainly up. ‘Really? But how? The ceiling could fall on our heads.’ I sounded like a poor man’s Chief Vitalstatistix.‘Nonsense, this is as sturdy as sturdy can be. Solid tiles for the roof. And these gold leaves were painstakingly painted on the pillars. Great craftsmanship.’ VK was admiring, though he was no fan of gold.I grinned. ‘The authorities ought to know whom to contact for marketing if they wish to sell off the sala.’A couple who looked Thai but sounded very American approached VK to photograph them and he obliged, looking as pleased as if he had assisted in a runaway marriage.VK continued to shine as a photographer, for, a little later, while we walked among trees that were in glorious bloom, a beautiful Black girl came to him with a dazzling smile, her hand holding out a small camera. She was beside a gorgeous tree completely covered with white blossoms, no leaves at all. A young White guy, ‘smitten’ written all over him, was hanging about her. He was too busy clicking mental shots of his beloved from various angles to take her photos.‘Could you take my picture, please?’ She handed VK the camera. ‘Just get me in the frame and shoot.’She took her position in front of the tree, with the white flowers making a striking backdrop. As he took the camera from her, VK’s eyes twinkled and he remarked gallantly, ‘A flower among flowers.’The startled boyfriend stopped mooning and started staring at the amateur photographer. The girl smiled; the compliment pleased her. Arpitha looked aghast. She said later she wondered if the chap would bash her father-in-law to pulp, and then how would she explain the metamorphosis to Amar?I watched, heart in mouth, as the chap’s right hand went to his bulging jeans pocket. A gun? VK, blissfully ignorant of the emotions of the people around, clicked the pic. ‘One more,’ he said, ‘just in case the main flower was out of focus.’‘That’s done it.’ I closed my eyes.‘Here, shoot,’ I heard a new voice. My eyes flew open. I saw the chap handing VK his phone. ‘One of both of us, please.’ Phew.Pushing our eyes back into their sockets after a few more rounds of the bewitching gardens, we came out. Arpitha booked a cab to go to Wisconsin State Capitol. We went there in comparative silence, VK not going beyond asking the driver for his name and nationality. Either he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the gardens or the beauty of the girl he had photographed, or he was plain hungry. American cabbie James’s life story remained a secret.We learnt later that the aerial view of the geometrically precise and meticulously planned State Capitol shows the shape of a saltire or a diagonal cross with the domed white granite structure standing tall in the centre and white buildings making up the four protruding diagonals. Since we were not hovering over the Capitol, we had no idea about the design, and could only gaze at the Capitol’s frontage in wonder.The massive granite dome that topped the central building would catch anyone’s eye, just as it captured ours. It was super—topped by a gilded bronze statue of an elegant woman who was perfectly placed to keep an eye on Madison. And well she might, for a state law prevents any other neighbouring building from being taller.‘Someone is carrying a heavy load,’ I commented, for her left hand held a globe with an eagle perched on it, while the right arm was stretched out to symbolise the state motto, ‘Forward’. No respite for her head either, for she wore a helmet to signify Wisconsin’s lead mining industry, on which a badger, the state animal, sat in state. The Golden Lady, wearing the air of a Greek goddess and the letter ‘W’ for, what else, Wisconsin, on her chest, is aptly named, ‘Wisconsin’. I bet the naming committee spent sleepless nights and several months in serious discussions before coming up with that.‘Weighs more than three tons,’ VK observed.‘They must have weighed her before yanking her up there,’ I nodded wisely.We now entered the Capitol through one of the intersections. Entry was free. There were arrows and helpful boards telling us where to go, but bar a few closed rooms, marked ‘Private’, we generally had the run of the place. It was truly admirable. Here was the building housing the state’s most important public office, thrown open to the public. No one came breathing down our necks asking for papers or cautioning us. We had to leave the place at 6 p.m.; that was the only condition. What a symbol of trust.I can’t imagine going into the Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram or visiting the governor’s office without frustrating rounds of handing in applications, proving our bonafides, being sent from section to section, table to table, before getting permission to go into a particular section for a set purpose. And, of course, being asked to come another day.The dignity and exclusiveness of the interior deepened our sense of awe. You have to hand it to the Americans to build and maintain structures impeccably. Forty-three stones from different parts of the world have been used to build this splendid structure, with the interior of the dome, a mural titled ‘Resources of Wisconsin’, being another class act. And we felt deeply satisfied as we made our way out at 6 p.m. It’s true we hadn’t seen the Capitol in Washington DC, but ask any Wisconsinite and they’ll tell you that we saw the better Capitol.It was pouring. Amar had said he would drive down to join us, and since there wasn’t really any shelter in a Capitol that had closed, we walked to Starbucks, my broken umbrella protecting us. Yes, VK’s prophesy had come true, the fivefold had now become sixfold, with a rib broken. The spoke hung low, catching my hair whenever it pleased. The handle wobbled and the runner behaved true to its name, running down so that the canopy sat like a floppy hat on Arpitha’s and my combined heads. By virtue of being a centimetre taller than Arpitha, I was given the privilege of holding it. After VK got a couple of sharp jabs on his head, he said he preferred getting wet to being scalped, and moved out of the ‘protected’ space.We took refuge at Starbucks, ordering muffins first—the cheapest item on offer. American hospitality doesn’t run to a Starbucks coffeehouse offering drenched tourists shelter without making them shell out a few precious bucks. Munching on a muffin, Arpitha co-ordinated with Amar who had reached, but couldn’t park anywhere. Obviously, parking is not just a Third World problem. When he finally found some space, he gave directions and we took off under the same umbrella on a long walk along the streets of Madison until we finally sighted him.Since the rain was too heavy for us to even consider further sight-seeing, we turned back and returned home. The rain came hammering down—sheets and sheets of water. Coming from the tropics, the land of monsoons, we thought we had seen rain in all its forms. But this was impressive. It was quite a challenge for Amar, driving in a haze, with only blurry headlights of other cars visible. Poor chap. In effect, he performed the duty of a cabbie, driving a hundred miles to Madison from Neenah just to take us back. The only difference was, VK didn’t ask him about his life story or the dead fish in Lake Winnebago.