1Almost forty years ago, Ismith Khan taught a creative writing class at the University of California at Berkeley. He was from Trinidad, born in 1925 and dying in 2002. He was a Caribbean writer, now claimed by the diaspora. I use my memories of that class as a departure point for this paper. The dynamics of the class, the material discussed, the interactions between the students and the writer, and Mr. Khan’s teachings raise larger issues about his own work and about Indian diasporic writings before the term was in use. In particular, Mr. Khan’s sense of place, his desire to move away from writing that connected solely with his own ethnic identity, and his distrust of exotic locales were issues that arose in the class.

2We will now go to the class. Ismith Khan was 45 years old. The class took place in the Winter Quarter of 1971. We would study creative writing with Mr. Khan for ten weeks. The course was given by the English Department and was held in Dwinelle Hall. Many of the humanity courses were taught there now, since Wheeler Hall was still being renovated after a bomb blast connected to protesting the Vietnam War. The class was over-subscribed. One needed to pre-enroll. And there was not enough space in the large, old classroom.

3First, those who were English majors were allowed to sign up and take the class. Then juniors who might need credits for graduation were allowed to enroll. Then a waiting list was compiled. We hung on, Mr. Khan not seeming to know how to get rid of those still standing in the back. So the seats on the worn, heavy wooden chairs, with the one large armrest on which to write, were filled. More chairs were brought in.

4The Vietnam War was still going on. Though a raffle system had been introduced to change the rules of the compulsory draft the year before, colleges, universities and medical schools had been over-filled for years now with young men. If you could, you stayed in school. That was why the class was so crowded.

5Mr. Khan introduced himself. I think it is fair to say that probably no one had heard of him except his own Teaching Assistant, who happened to be British, and was assigned to him for the duration of the class. But we had faith. Cselaw Milosz was teaching Slavic literature over in the Slavic Department, and no one had heard of him, either. He later won a Nobel prize. Berkeley was full of famous people we knew nothing about.

6When Mr. Khan faced the class, he had already made a real mark with his first two novels, The Jumbie Bird, in 1961, and The Obeah Man, published in 1964. The year before, in 1970, the BBC had put on a television play based on The Obeah Man. The novels had not been published in the United States, but the idea of writers working in English who were from outside of the United States, Canada and Britain, was beginning to take hold. We knew, maybe, some of us, about R.K. Narayan, or Kamala Markandaya and her A Handful of Rice (1966). Of course, they lived in India. Anita Desai had written a couple of things, like Cry the Peacock (1963) and Voices in the City (1965). Maybe some of us had read one or two books like these.

7But it is important to remember what this class was before. It was before Said’s Orientalism (1978), before Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980) and before Gayatri Spivak. Homi Bhabha was a college student in Bombay that year. More particularly, the class was before Indian neighborhoods sprang up in American cities. Immigration laws had changed recently, in 1965. So the oldest child of that first wave of those 1965 immigrants, the first child born in the United States, was just entering first grade. At first glance, no one in the writing class looked particularly foreign—it was a class that was pretty white-bread California. But as our stories would reveal, we were not unaware of foreignness or displacement and the politics that might lie behind these conditions.

8Back to Mr. Khan, as he faces us, with his two slim novels, critical successes. Who is he, and where is he, really, at that moment? He is smoking a pipe. He is wearing a tweed jacket. He has luxuriant gray hair. A moustache, salt and pepper. Glasses when he reads. The perfect professor. It has been a long time since his last novel appeared. We, the class, do not know this. He is, after all, a writer, hired by the University. It is not our business to know. Yet if Mr. Khan had been counting, it had been six years since his The Obeah Man was published. V.S. Naipaul, seven years his junior, born in 1932, had come out with the monumental A House for Mr. Biswas, the very same year that Mr. Khan’s first novel, The Jumbie Bird, had appeared. They had both attended the best preparatory school in Port of Spain, Trinidad: Queen’s Royal College, and both were now publishing their novels in England. They were part of the ‘Commonwealth Writers’. They had many links. They had mutual friends in Trinidad. Thinking about it now, though, we can see that Mr. Khan did not publish his first novel until he was 37.

9Mr. Khan proceeded to organize the group to write short paragraphs, and later to write complete stories. He chose the stories for the student authors to read out loud. Each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon we listened to one of these stories and critiqued it. Mr. Khan pointed out strengths and weaknesses. One of the first things he did was read from his own work. He read from The Jumbie Bird, which is set in 1940s and 1950s Trinidad:

‘Rajah Rani, ’ the old man said as he cornered Mongroo’s queen, and the boy’s hand slipped from his chin, causing him to fall sideways into the lap of the old man, and a break in the dead silence livened the group again.
Kale Khan took out a red clay pipe from his pocket, and from the inside breast-pocket, a creased envelope, almost cream-colored with age, from which he shook, little by little, some black and brown herbs into the cup of his palm, tapping the envelope with his index finger. (15)

10Mr. Khan continued to read, the class in a kind of reverie. The tropical setting, the strange names, chess, the hint of drugs, had propelled us all from our California classroom and the rainy winter day outside. Mr. Khan read in the voices of his characters:

‘Khan Sahib, ’ [Mr. Khan had slipped into a sing song Trinidadian accent] Mongroo said, ‘even if we ain’t go back to Hindustan, these children should go. I does feel too bad when I watch them and see they is Indian. I does say, “But what right these children and them have to stop here? We old people was foolish, man, but the children an’ them shouldn’t have to suffer for we wrongs.”
[Kale Khan answers, Mr. Khan altering his voice to an old man’s growl] ‘This boy have to go back, mus’ go back to learn what kind of people he born from… one day…’ Kale Khan’s voice trailed off as he passed some of the herbs to the other two men. (16)

11Mr. Khan read with real beauty. He savored his words. He listened to himself. He was proud of what he wrote.

12Then we took turns reading our own work. A young man, just returned from being a soldier in Vietnam, read his story out loud about attacking a hill that had only a number. They fought, comrades died, and then they abandoned the hill. The class listened, wary, attentive to this tale of war and carnage. We had marched in the war protests, but here was a classmate who had suffered in a real battle. Mr. Khan told the young man how to make the scenes more vivid.

13In another reading, a pale man with shiny brown eyes and a moustache read a story about hunting wild boar near a castle in Yugoslavia. He read with a slight accent. He sounded like a caricature of Dracula, but it lent the story a strange legitimacy. The story was obviously from personal, Yugoslavian experience, though not any experience shared by the nineteen-year-olds, sitting in the class, listening politely. The castle was either his, or had been his family’s. We could see the thick, dark forest and hear the boar. They were hunting on horseback.

14Mr. Khan then read an unpublished story he had written. This is the scene that has remained with me for forty years. What he read had nothing at all to do with Trinidad, and the languorous tropical boyhood had disappeared. The story he read left me full of questions. First, the questions were about Mr. Khan’s material as a writer. Later, I realized a bit more about his own problems as someone identified as ‘ethnic’. Gradually, as literary criticism embraced more writers and more possibilities, the questions about Mr. Khan and his rejected story expanded in my own mind. I would remember the class and then I would wonder about an author’s choice of subject matter and about how an author is marginalized or not. I would think about who an author’s audience is, and about how far a subject should be tailored to be marketable. ‘Luncheon at Longchamps’, that was the title of Mr. Khan’s unpublished story. No, no jumbie bird here. Now, the first person narrator was in New York. Well, New York was where, after all Mr. Khan had lived, on and off since the Fifties. New York was where he had come from, to California, here, to this class. But still…

15In the story our handsome professor is in a fancy bar in a fancy restaurant: Longchamps. And he, the narrator, is breaking up with a woman. There is some issue. Infidelity? The story was not too long. Mr. Khan read very well, his voice savoring his own phrases. He finished reading. ‘Now’, Mr. Khan said. ‘I have sent this story to The New Yorker and they have rejected it’. He looked at the class. He smoked his pipe. We looked back, some smoking our cigarettes. One of the dogs in the back of the class whimpered in his sleep. Mr. Khan was waiting for some kind of response. No one said anything. We were as out of our element as if he had asked for tips for a scene in Trinidad at carnival time. A bar? New York? This was 1970s Berkeley. Breaking up with a woman? Over an issue like fidelity? She was probably wearing a hat! Who had ever seen people like this?

16Mr. Khan asked again, ‘What’s wrong with this? Why won’t they take it’? Really, what could we say? What did we know then?

17In the few but respectful essays on Khan’s oeuvre, critics speculate about the overshadowing of the author’s work and its relegation to the footnotes of Caribbean writers. His output was indeed quite slim. After the two first novels appeared and were much-praised, the last novel, The Crucifixion, a reworking of his thesis at Johns Hopkins, would only be published years later, in 1987. Then a collection of previously-published short stories was anthologized as A Day in the Country (1994). But producing just a few novels and short stories does not mean an author will be forgotten. Rhonda Cobham writes in her essay on The Jumbie Bird:

Ismith Khan’s two novels The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man have all too often been relegated to the footnotes of West Indian literature. Perhaps Khan, a Trinidadian of East Indian descent, with a Muslim, urban background, has been overshadowed by the prestige and success of his better-known landsman, V.S. Naipaul, through whose work the Trinidadian East Indian experience has become synonymous with a Hindu, largely pastoral context. Perhaps Khan’s work has also suffered because, unlike the majority of West Indian novelists, his path of exile has taken him to North America, rather than England, leaving him outside the range of the somewhat myopic Commonwealth or Caribbean scholars. There seems however, to be no valid critical reason for his neglect. Khan’s handling of such familiar Caribbean themes as ’the experience of childhood’ or the ’search for identity’ places his work directly within the traditional thematic concerns of West Indian writing. In addition, his successful experiments with different language registers adds an important dimension to the language debate implicit in the work of Trinidadian writers like Samuel Selvon and Earl Lovelace, and Jamaican writers like Louis Bennett and V.S. Reid. (240)

18Cobham suggests part of the neglect might be that Khan’s exile from Trinidad took place in New York, rather than London. Indeed, the expatriate Caribbean writers’ scene was built around a group in London, and Caribbean writers were published in England, not in the United States. Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul gives a good picture of how reliant on each other these writers were, and how much the BBC program, ‘Caribbean Voices’ contributed to their identities and growing prestige. Those London-based Caribbean writers had a circle of friends, a shared ethnic identity and a shared desire, as well as the means—publishers—to make it as writers (French 2008: 144-147). Khan existed without this kind of support and camaraderie.

19The rejection of Mr. Khan’s story set in Longchamps in New York, rather than set in his usual environs around Woodford Square in Port of Spain, became a recurring theme in the class. He did not drop the subject, but returned to it over and over again. And looking back, whether or not he could get a story published in The New Yorker seems now to have had nothing to do with whether he lived in London or in New York, as Cobham might suggest. Maybe the problem was not where he lived, but who he was. Mr. Khan had seen himself, as the narrator, in the very restaurant we know from Billy Wilder’s film, The Apartment (1963). Longchamps is where Fred McMurray’s secretary tells Fred’s wife that her husband is having an affair (with the elevator operator Shirley McLaine). The setting is chic—the restaurant was part of a chain popular with Ladies Who Lunch in the post-World War II years in New York. There were a number of branches, mostly around Madison and Fifth. The places were elegant, smart and very Deco. In the movie scene set in Longchamps, there are mirrors everywhere, and the crowd bustles with Manhattan lunchtime business.

20In Mr. Khan’s story, there is also that chic, urban bustle. As I remember it, the narrator meets the woman in the story first at a crowded long bar, and waits for a table. Then comes the scene in which the pair break off their relationship. Just as in the movie scene in The Apartment, two people have an intimate, sexually-charged conversation against a backdrop of urban sophistication. When thinking about the rejection of Mr. Khan’s story, one wonders: did the editors at The New Yorker catch the slight second-hand nature of the scene involving sexual infidelity set in Mr. Khan’s Longchamps? Was his story too much of an echo of the film—or an echo of many similar scenes? Did Mr. Khan’s story seem derivative? Did the editors decide that Mr. Khan was unable to write for an audience like The New Yorker’s for very specific cultural reasons? In other words, perhaps what he found new and chic and interesting was already part of movies and innumerable other scenes in books. Mr. Khan had made nothing of his Caribbean-ness in the Longchamps scene. No, in that scene he occupied the territory of a New Yorker: he was a drinker, and a smoker and breaking up with a woman in a smart hat. Trinidad was abandoned —but was his New York novel enough for New Yorkers? Was Longchamps too novel for him?

21We know The New Yorker audience was not ready for him in his Trinidadian identity and his stories set in the West Indies. Trinidadian authors, working in Trinidadian settings, did not publish in The New Yorker in those years. It was not until 1984 that the magazine ventured into this territory with Shiva Naipaul’s ‘A Trinidad Childhood’ and an essay by V.S. Naipaul. Maybe when Mr. Khan the writer assumed his personae as a New Yorker, the audience was not interested in his experiences either. Without Trinidad, he was of little significance. In ‘Luncheon at Longchamps’, he did not use his immigrant diasporic experience in any way with which readers could connect. He did not use it at all. Was he just too early for interest in the diasporic experience and too late for a drink at a New York bar?

22If we look at a successful Trinidadian writer of that time, like V.S. Naipaul, we see in his work how he mined these Caribbean connections and associations and then moved outwards to a larger world. Besides the experience of exile, the failed writer is a major theme of Naipaul’s. Naipaul’s father and Mr. Biswas share the struggle to say something important in print. Khan’s narrators also appear as academics and writers—and in the case of this particular story about Longchamps—Mr. Khan himself is the rejected writer. Right in front of the class stood that hopeful and rejected writer of the Caribbean experience. Just like Mr. Biswas, I later thought.

23When Naipaul’s Area of Darkness appeared in 1965, Khan must have thought about its content—instead of sticking with Trinidad, Naipaul had done something different. He had taken the whole show out of the West Indian circuit. Naipaul travels and moves and reports—relocating himself in Africa, in India and in England. Naipaul’s work, for a time, becomes a series of enhanced travelogues and observations, moving away from the imagined to report something more immediate, and without the prism of fiction. At the same time, Naipaul eventually explores the various branches of the Caribbean experience— South Asian, Black African, and English. This was an approach that Khan did not take—reporting on his experiences as a traveler. Both in his Trinidadian stories, and in his story set in Longchamps, he asserts his experience as authentic and local. He is not having a traveler’s or a foreigner’s experience.

24Interestingly, Mr. Khan critiqued another student’s story, set in Iran, as ‘just a travelogue’. We can wonder now why he might say that or think that. Perhaps he thought the presence of the American protagonist in the student’s story was just incidental to the setting in Iran. But what if the student’s experiences happened in Iran? Perhaps Mr. Khan thought that Iran did not belong to the American as material. When the American reported on it, the report was flawed because the narrator was not ‘of the place’. Perhaps. Did Mr. Khan see the world outside of New York and Trinidad as not his material?

25And why the vehemence against what he termed travelogues? Was he in fact reacting to Naipaul’s turning away from writing about Trinidad and his going off to the lost Garden of Eden (as it was remembered by Indians in Trinidad) of India? An Area of Darkness was so negative in its portrayal of India as to be unforgettable—but it would have been doubly upsetting to South Asians who looked to India as a lost homeland from places of exile like the Caribbean.

26Khan traveled, in his writings, back and forth between the United States and Trinidad. He used that dislocation he experienced in his stories—but his dislocation is never the distance or dislocation of the uninitiated tourist. Khan’s dislocation is that of the exile. In one story, the first-person narrator, from the vantage point of a New Yorker, talks about Trinidad’s weather, and then about both its cultural isolation and its culture of relationships:

The heat was unbearable. I had become spoilt by a temperate climate, air-conditioned movies where you could escape the worst of summer. And at least the water in the taps of the most wretched tenements in New York was cold if you needed a drink. Everything died fast in the tropics, not just human bodies, but plants and insects and woodlice and mosquitoes. They all had their glorious colourful fling for a day, but the heat never let up and the water in the tap never cooled off and the frenzy of life was like a wound-up toy; it flirted, flitted and paraded in its glorious colours and then it died fast, and whether it was the weather or the rum, I thought how simple it would be to go to the New York Public Library, look up something like a Writers Directory, find the man who wrote She, call him up on the phone and say, ‘Look… I’ve just come back from Trinidad and I ran into this uncle of mine who leads one of the most isolated and curious kinds of lives, and he has read your book and he wanted me simply to get in touch with you and tell you what a wonderful book you’ve written and how much it has done for his life.’ (‘Uncle Zoltan ‘ in A Day in the Country, 128)

27In the narrator’s dilemma lies Khan’s own paradox. When he is in Trinidad, the source of his creative, writing life, he longs for New York. New York is simpler. In New York, there is no Uncle Zoltan to pester him about ‘asking around’ to find the author of She. The narrator imagines himself trying to bridge the link between his uncle and the British author with a telephone conversation. Of course, the narrator knows the writer of She is really long dead. Nonetheless, here is an opportunity to tell a British author how important he was to someone in Trinidad, someone—Uncle Zoltan—who could not even be imagined by the Englishman. Khan holds in that paragraph all the links between these improbable places and times and people.

28In another story, ‘Shaving’, the narrator again documents dislocation, this time using an electric razor as a device. His father, in Trinidad, scorns the American razor as a gift. But the father keeps the razor so the narrator can use it when he visits.

I know he would laugh like hell, if that is where he wind up (Why nobody laugh like heaven?) if he could see me now sitting in a draughty Brooklyn basement in winter going over all that wonderful Yankee education he work so hard to pay for, wondering why it have some men who like to shave and it have other men who like to have others shave them. (131)

29If the father could see the narrator using his knowledge to speculate on something so silly and trivial after all the sacrifices to get him to America, it would be funny, of course, but sad. Beyond that, the writer contrasts the physicality of the act of shaving in Trinidad, with its talcum powder, bay rum and blood with the electric simplicity of New York.

30Indeed, Mr. Khan’s novels and short stories were not travelogues. They did not use Trinidad as a landscape for its own sake, nor as an exotic backdrop. On the contrary, his characters are compelled to work out their place in Trinidad and that ‘working out’ is part of a cultural and political struggle that cuts much more deeply than mere physical surroundings. The grandfather’s intense longing to reconcile traditions with current situations is no traveler’s experience. Mr. Khan’s use of indigenous symbols and icons like the jumbie bird, or the Obeah man, to magically transform matters bespeaks knowledge far beyond a tour of some ethnic locale.

31We had watched Mr. Khan for weeks. He had described himself as a Pathan. That was how he located himself ethnically within Trinidad, but it meant nothing to us. If you looked at his face, he was dark and broad-featured. The grandfather character Kale Khan was based on his own grandfather. Later, I learned ‘Kala’ meant black. Did Mr. Khan look like his grandfather? Much later, I learned how fair most Pathans are, so this became another question. Where had his mother come from, and who was the grandfather, really? In The Jumbie Bird, Mr. Khan wrote about an orphan girl whom the boy, Jamini, likes. Jamini’s mother says to him about the orphan: ‘You must never ill-treat a motherless child. The Prophet was a motherless child, and the Koran warn that you should always be good to people who ain’t have no mother, Jam.’ (43)

32And a bit later, when he talks with the orphan girl who obviously does not have the family connections he has, Jamini has this discussion about place in India, and place in Trinidad:

‘When I grow up, I’m going to India, to look for my mother, ’ she said.
‘Me too, only I’m going back with my grandfather. He says that is where we all belong.’
‘You don’t have to go back to India, your mother and father and everyone of your family are here.’
‘Yes, but we don’t like it here, and we have some of our family in India still, ’ he said, wondering about the story he had heard of Kale Khan giving away his daughter at the Cawnpore Railway Station. (44)

33Mr. Khan read these lines, but the deeper history of it all was lost on the class. We had taken the class before any Indian diaspora, if that is what we are calling it, had a name. The vast nineteenth-century movement of Indian citizens to distant plantations was unknown to us. Lost mothers, abandoned sisters and a grandfather’s reliving a colonial past were just stories read to us by our teacher. Those stories had no deeper political or historical significance in the minds of us students that winter in Dwinelle Hall than any other story might have. Indeed, we too had written stories impenetrable to each other. A soldier’s tale in a roomful of young Californians, the intricacies of a hunting trip in Tito’s Yugoslavia, or the nuances of an American teenager’s fight with an Iranian policeman: those were some of our stories. Their subjects linger and cast long shadows over the decades, foretelling other senseless wars, killings in Yugoslavia, and the strange relationship between the United States and Iran.

34The shadow of Mr. Khan’s sad and intelligent face also lingers over the decades: Muslim, Black, Indian, Pathan, Male, American, Trinidadian. There he was, breaking up with a woman in a bar in New York with little to show for all his efforts. Years later, Mr. Khan would be celebrated in an obituary in the West Indies Sunday Express (May 12, 2002; 36-37) as an ‘affable, distinguished and caring man who like his good friend Sam Selvon prided himself on his culinary skill and connoisseurship’. And when by chance one day in May 2002, I read his obituary in The New York Times, I thought about that class again, and all that his face had contained, and how different a class it would have been now, and how little we could understand it then.