By the time I’d started that job, I’d lived in New York for several years. I knew that September hung in the long, humid shadow of August. And yet, on a Tuesday morning after Labor Day, in the safety of our air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment—filled with unopened gifts, even though a year had passed since our wedding—I’d showered and put on my new slacks, a button-down shirt, and a blazer, all new from Brooks Brothers.
“You’ll melt,” Eva had said.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll keep the jacket off.”
“It’s the wool of those pants that’s worrying me.”
I should have changed into khakis and a half-sleeved shirt, but for as long as I could remember, I’d had this vision of myself, stepping into the classroom for the first time, with a newly minted degree—the wrong kind of doctor, but a doctor nevertheless—wearing a properly fitted blazer instead of the oversized ones I’d borrowed from my father’s closet for years. That image of a well-dressed Edward Said had stuck in my head.
“It’s supposed to be cooler today,” I offered.
“Well, you look sharp,” Eva said, tugging at my blazer’s lapel.
“Don’t I?” I said. The heat hit me as soon as I left the building. By the time I’d made it to the subway station, my shirt was soaked in sweat. It was too late to take my jacket off. There were plenty of men walking on the street wearing suits and ties, all of them far fresher and more put together than me. I just couldn’t understand it.
On the station platform, with sweat trickling down my legs, my wool slacks seemed to be growing fangs. But even through the endless wait for the train, as the crowd grew thicker and more agitated, I was happy to be there, with hundreds of strangers around me. So many of my friends complained about the subway, but it was one of my favorite things about living in New York. It reminded me of being a kid, going on shopping trips with my mother in Bombay. She’d stuff me onto a crowded double-decker just as the bus started moving, knowing that the adults would make room for a six-year-old, that she’d somehow find space for herself. I’d look at the Parsi women in their skirts, the Muslim men in their beards, professional men in lean suits, and the occasional Western tourist dressed in an Indian kurta with beads around his neck. My mother and I developed a deep trust in each other on those rides; no matter the crowds, we always knew we would find our way together on the other end. As I took the C train to the E, which started out sardined, the crowd gradually thinning as I made my way deeper and deeper into Queens, I felt that same wonder I had on the bus as it bounced through Bombay, strangers jostling all around.
I’d been to the college before, for my interview and then later to move into my office. But this arrival was the official one—and, I’d thought, a permanent one. I went to the department secretary, who showed me around, gave me the keys that I needed. I went into the mailroom and saw a little box with my name on it, nestled in among the rest of the faculty. I was in there alone for a minute, and then someone walked in.
“You the new guy?” an older faculty member asked, charmingly, as if I had arrived with a lunch pail and we were waiting for our shift to start at an auto plant.
He, too, was wearing slacks, a jacket, anda tie. I watched as he noticed my jacket, which had wrinkled a little.
“I am.”
“John Williams,” he said, offering his hand, warm and surprisingly large.
Of course I knew exactly who John Williams was. He’d been away when I’d come to interview on campus, so I hadn’t met him then, but he was one of the reasons I’d wanted to come and teach at the college. He’d written an oft-cited book on time and memory in everyday Moroccan life.
“Raj Bhatt.”
He moved past me to get his mail. “Well, Raj, if you need anything, let me know. And we should have lunch soon.”
Excited about the prospect of that meal, I headed to my first class, located in a building that had remained essentially untouched since 1974. I peeked in through the glass square on the closed classroom door before I opened it. All the seats were taken. As I walked in, the fifty or so students turned their heads to me.
“Hi, all,” I said. “I’m Professor Bhatt.”
The chairs the students sat on were old. I was about to write my name on the chalkboard, but there was no chalk. The college had once been a distinguished place, but lately had fallen on hard financial times. It seemed that the only thing that worked in the classroom was the air conditioning. Thank the gods.
“You the new guy?” a young woman in the front row asked.
Amused by the echo of John Williams, I asked, “Were you just in the department mailroom?”
She was confused. Of course.
“Never mind,” I said, smiling. “Yes, I am the new guy.” I set my bag on a table and removed my notes. “I hope you’re all here for Intro to Cultural Anthropology.”
When I had interviewed for the job, I’d immediately been attracted to the makeup of the student body: lots of immigrants, mostly the first in their families to go to college. It seemed that half of the faculty, devoted to helping the students and aware of how much their own research and thinking had benefited from engaging with diverse classrooms, shared my enthusiasm about this. The other half were conspicuously silent when the topic came up, reflecting their disappointment that their best teaching days were behind them.
The students I had taught at Columbia knew the culture of college well—they had been training for it their whole lives. Now in front of this class, I sensed that there was something different about them. I stood there for a few long seconds, my shirt having gone from wet to dry to wet again. I was finally doing what I’d been training to do for years—to have the authority to speak and teach. I’d spent so much of my time looking ahead, assuring myself that when thishappened and thatwent through, I would find some sense of peace. Now it felt that I had arrived at the place I’d wanted to be—an immigrant helping other immigrants navigate the new world.
I took out my notes, and as I was about to take attendance, a hand shot up in the back.
“Before you start, can I ask you something?” a young man asked.
“What’s up?”
“Why anthropology? Why do we have to take this class?”
“You don’t have to take this class.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s a class we can take to fulfill some of our requirements. I just want to know why I should take this one.”
I had been asked to justify why I did what I did plenty of times, mainly by my parents’ friends who couldn’t understand why I hadn’t just gone to business school. But this student was asking me something more profound, more inquisitive—or at least I wanted to believe he was. So I put my prepared notes aside, kept my jacket on, and for the next hour talked to the students about why I thought anthropology was important. I mentioned Malinowski, Evan-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss: canonical men of the discipline who went out to the southern parts of the globe and came back with grand theories about how the world worked. The idea that there were deep structures that shaped societies across the globe, that we were more similar than different, had once kept me up at night. There are limits to such theories, of course. Still, though he’s no longer in vogue, Lévi-Strauss has remained my secret, optimistic gospel. I had studied anthropology for all sorts of complex, high-minded, theoretical reasons, but at the core, I had done it because I loved the idea of talking to people and trying to understand them, to see how different they were. And perhaps, if I dug far enough into their lives and histories, I could discover how similar they were too.