Readers Write In #803: The Adventures of Ajay Palvayanteeswaran

By Vijaysree V

It was a nippy December evening. Festivity was in the air. From our uptown campus, we took the streetcar to go gawk at the twinkling lights and dressed up store fronts in downtown New Orleans. On Canal Street, a tall black man, dressed as Santa Claus tinkled out a steady tune with his handbell, urging passersby to deposit money in the red kettle for the Salvation Army. Ho, ho, ho! My first semester of graduate school in the U.S. had ended. I had done well in my final exams. My research grade was a definite A, though I had not produced anything publishable yet. Like most desi graduate students, I practically lived in the lab and did my professor’s bidding, which sent all the right signals. 

Finally, I was outside in the fresh air now.  The weather had turned cooler. My breath did not frost over in this subtropical clime, nor did my cheeks turn visibly pink, which would a physiological impossibility for a south Indian like me even in northernmost Alaska.  But I felt cold, despite my puffy jacket, and dug my hands into the warm pockets. Men in dark suits, from the office buildings nearby, hurried along shopping for presents, to be nicely wrapped and handed to their loved ones in person. This was like being in a nice, holiday-themed film, but I was only watching – I was not in it. 

Silver bells, silver bells It’s Christmas time in the city Ring-a-ling (ring-a-ling), Hear them ring (ting-a-ling) Soon it will be Christmas day.

Looking at shoppers who were rushing home with their treasures as the song said, I realized – I had no idea when I would see my parents next. I couldn’t even call them whenever I felt like it. It was much too expensive to call India on a weekday. Within the U.S. too, long-distance calls were cheaper in off-peak hours. After 9 PM, I could call my brother who was a graduate student in much colder Cleveland. After a while, we headed back uptown where we lived. Behind us, the songs of the season continued to spill out of the department stores with the heavy revolving doors.

Out of sheer habit, the next morning, I pedaled to campus, shackled my bright metallic green bike to the rack, and went into the near-empty building which housed the chemistry department. My Canadian research advisor would not be in; my American classmates had all gone home for the holidays. One by one, I weighed the reagents, and added them into clean, dry glassware. I assembled the equipment. Once the reaction got going, it didn’t need to be monitored for the next three hours.  I logged in to check my email. Because I had already turned in the grades for the lab section of Chem 101 lab — I was a teaching assistant – I could goof off to my heart’s content. That afternoon, surfing at leisure on the slow-speed internet, I stumbled on the writings of Ramesh Mahadevan. 

“You know the desi community is like a whirlpool, a blackhole, and it sucks everything into itself: TVs, cars, bicycles, you name it… Once it is absorbed into the community, it never escapes the desi circles. Hindu theologists would call this ‘Karma’ and history dudes would call this history repeating itself. Take this apartment for example. It has been handed down from one desi generation to the next, without a break for the past two decades and the landlord hasn’t cleaned it even once. We guys are the biggest conservationists. We cycle and cycle and cycle and if anything is left after that, we even recycle,” from Another Desi Legend.

Wait a minute, I thought! I lived in an apartment with three other desis, and the place had previously housed four other desis. How far back did that chain go? And as a matter of fact, all the furniture, including the bed I slept in, and the television set were all inherited from the previous renters. The microwaveable dinner set, and the pots and pans were hand-me-downs too. Only my clothes, and a few personal effects, were my own. I had accepted the other essentials without a moment of reflection. Imagine a newcomer having to buy, or rent, all this on her own penny in the first semester! Passing down gold is a common practice among women in desi families, but these guys seemed to pass on all their possessions. 

The author had written about the desi graduate student subculture in ethnographic detail back in the 1980s in a series of text-based posts on internet newsgroups. Some kind soul had posted the compendium on a webpage. The stories, based on facts, were exaggerated for laughs. I chortled.

A Chinese student in the lab next door peeked in to see what was happening – nothing, I said, and went right back to reading. (The Chinese graduate students should have their own Ramesh Mahadevan to chronicle their experience, I thought generously. They were a close-knit bunch and surely, they had their own weird traditions.)  The deserted department, with the thrum of analytical instruments in the background, turned into a cozy haven that winter break as I happily followed the adventures of a character, a stand in for all Indian graduate students in America – a made-up character with a made-up last name.

Ajay Palvayanteeswaran never felt so ashamed of himself in his entire life. He felt as useless as a pizza coupon that was way past its expiry date. Why, he felt exactly like a seven-layer burrito that was missing two layers. In fact, his self-esteem hadn’t reached such a rock-bottom since that fateful day when he took his departmental ‘hot chick’ on a dinner date and discovered at the end of the day that his fly had been open the entire evening. Why does he bring such things upon himself? Why do stories get written about him? 

In  Capital Gains, his IIT, Madras hostel mates – Bala and Srini – impress upon him that he is no Einstein or Feynman.  He was a slacker who would not do well in the corporate world either. But the winds of liberalization were blowing in India, and people like “Palvy” and his U.S-based classmates, were uniquely positioned to take advantage of upcoming business opportunities.  “The bottom line is that you should take an idea that is hot in the USA and sell it in India and take a desi concept and sell it in this country. Why, you could be the first person to start a National Kabaddi League in the USA and establish an avocado farm in Maharashtra,” his friends told him. 

So impressionable was Palvayanteeswaran that “he bunked work the next week and rushed straight to the library and snatched the Wall Street Journal right out of the hands of a business prof.” Imagine the cheek! He fantasized about getting out of the lab, doing well in the real world, and being magnanimous to his research advisor Prof. Ringo Rangopadhyay, who by then would surely be out of work what with Newt Gingrich’s oft-repeated threats to cutting federal funds for science research in universities. (This “cutting federal funds” is an old game.)

Who was the creator of Palvayanteeswaran, this clueless, but not entirely charmless, character? Ramesh Mahadevan was born and raised in Madras, but he was an alum of IIT-Kanpur. He earned a PhD in Applied Physics from Ohio State University, did a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Despite this string of degrees, he writes that “he ‘stopped studying’ after a few years in college, though he was a student for years and years.” Maybe true, but clearly, he has never stopped learning. Overall, he seems to have been the kind of guy who would have had a good time wherever he went. And his wanderlust took him places. (A Desi in Paris, Hanging Loose in the Himalayas, Discovering America). 

This delightful compilation of Ramesh Mahadevan’s writing, at that point, was more valuable to me than all the books in the humanities section of our campus library. When I gathered the courage to email the author, he wrote back using my first name – from the very first time – and it was like hearing back from an old friend! 

Epilogue

“These days, I have begun to call the letter z ‘zed’, I am at least half an hour late to all my appointments, and I eat gulab jamuns with my bare hand – just kidding about the last two,” he wrote. Ramesh Mahadevan moved back to India. The reverse migration process is described here.

When I met him in India in early 2006, he was only ten minutes late for our lunch appointment – I told you the man exaggerates. India was booming economically, and we had plenty to talk about. He was an adjunct professor at the SSN College of Engineering and taught Productions and Operations Management. Though he was single and had no children of his own, he had a surrogate family of underprivileged kids whose education he sponsored, and he was proud of them. “I spend a good part of my weekends teaching them Laplace’s transforms and ‘spoken’ English. It is such a pleasure to see every positive step these children take. I wish I could write more about my experience. But it is too personal,” he posted. 

Once the humorist had settled into his Chennai life, he had planned to focus on his creative writing. Sadly, his muse seemed to be on strike in India. He did write “half a script” for a Tamil movie called Achcham Thavir, starring Madhavan, Jothika, Nassar, Prakash Raj, Shobhana et al. It was abandoned “three quarters of the way through” because the producer had run out of funds. “They are all very intelligent, very nice, on top being extremely talented,” he said of the actors. He had seen the rushes and said that the actors, even in the bit roles, had interpreted their characters well. Did Kollywood come calling after this stalled effort? I don’t know and I am very embarrassed to say this: I lost touch with my long-distance mentor.

Ramesh Mahadevan passed away in 2016. His original work was never compiled into a book. For his fans – who are legion – he lives on through his words. He made us laugh and even managed to make some of us think. Now, his writing is like Rosebud, a metaphor, a reminder of those youthful, carefree days in a new country so far from home.