Amriika Read Online Free PDF Page A

there was an engineer and a doctor, and a divorced woman with a child. Sona had obtained permission from the Humanities department to use the music library; and so every Friday in a dense, carpeted area of the library he produced from his royal blue airline bag a white sheet, a bottle of holy water, a port glass, a small bowl, incense sticks, and matches, and conjured up a mosque for his congregation. They called it their “musical mosque.”
    Outside in the courtyard the trees swish in the wind that blows up from the Charles River, through the corridor between the Humanities building and Rogers Dining Hall, and creates — say the experts — a Bernoulli effect. A tall black iron sculpture, called “Futile” and looking like a scarecrow in agony, its arms and legs curving off in four directions, supposedly checks the force of thatwind, though if you walk by it you couldn’t tell it was doing its job. Bernoulli, eh?
    It was a marketplace of ideas they were in, a veritable souk, this city of colleges, Cambridge, Mass., founded by another persecuted people three hundred years before. It was a home for heresies, where the intellect found a place to be and become, find its rhythm from a multitude of beats, sample from dozens of tastes. Flyers everywhere — on public walls, on lampposts, on notice boards, or handed out enthusiastically in the corridors, on sidewalks, at building entrances — shrieked out their messages like hawkers peddling their wares. What have we here? What do
you
bring with you? Weigh in your truth against ours, try our truth, and see its glory; or, if you happen to be lost, bring us your homeless tortured spirit, let us comfort your loneliness and doubts, choose this path already picked by a thousand others just like you. Everywhere, gurus, pirs, psychologists, zealots of every stripe were fishing for disciples.
    And there were those who, Krishna-like, offered you the path of action. The activists, the radicals. Do your duty, look into your conscience, and act: Strike, teach, come out for the Movement, for the People, for Peace; sit in, join a rally, occupy a building; raise your voice and your fist. Bring the war home from Indochina. Bring the
wars
home from the Third World. Expose the Mammon behind the friendly mask — sponsor of the war in Vietnam and investor in apartheid, supplier to Salazar in Angola and Mozambique and to tyrants and torturers the world over: the Military-Industrial Complex. And its brains: the Dr. Strangelovesin the burrows of this hallowed university that’s given you your treasured scholarship …
    And you, Ramji, ask yourself, Where do
I
come in, dare I show this little secret I’ve brought with me — shabby and incomplete, like the sculpture I gave Ginnie, unsophisticated — this little truth that does not possess even a proper educated tongue to talk about it? And a little voice inside you says, Fear not, you don’t have to show it yet, but you have the truth, as you have been taught; one day your truth will be known and appreciated.
    The truth? God? The greatest achievement of evolution is that matter in the form of mankind begins to understand itself, as we sit here, you and I, discussing. So said the great Peter Bowra in his introductory lecture to freshmen. You have come to this institution with dreams — to demolish the theories of Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac — and to build new edifices of understanding; but most — all? — of you will settle for more modest goals. What God, then? The equation of the universe, that’s the new God, it explains everything, including you and me as we sit here. The Schrödinger equation of everything there is. There would be many debates those Fridays after the ceremonies at the “musical mosque” on that equation of state: who wrote it, and what was
his
equation, and so on ad infinitum. But before that, Sona presides: the hymn is sung, the prayers are said; then, gravely, he pours the holy water from the bottle into some tap