Curious American

humour

Phelix Boatwright the third found Indians fascinating. Which was the first thing he told us while exchanging visiting cards on an August afternoon in 1995, when we arrived at Dulles Airport in Washington DC for a three-week International Visitors study-tour of intellectual property rights.

“Almost every Indian I know in New York is a taxi driver, and every Indian taxi driver is a poet,” he said. And we — a group of five from India — likewise found Phelix, who is an African-American, fascinating.

He was the first person I met, who could have made it to the Guinness Book of Records, going by his claim that he had become a father on two consecutive days in two cities at opposite ends of the US.

“Man, I was on a roll those days,” he told us, once we had reached the stage of exchanging confidences over a beer. However, after sowing his wild oats, Phelix subsequently sobered down enough to work for a while and finance his college education. And after a few years of doing this and that, he became a guide for visitors who were chosen for study tours of the US.

Our curious Phelix got the taste of Indianness on our first evening in a Washington DC hotel. He rang us up in our room to say that one of our group members was groaning in the lobby with a terrible stomach ache. We rushed down only to find that our dear friend was singing a sad Hindi song about missing home. “On the very first day, he’s homesick?” Phelix asked incredulously. “Yup,” I said, “It happens to the best of us.” Exasperated, he rolled his eyes and went back to his room, muttering to himself that it was going to be a very long stay.

For some reason, Phelix found it easy to talk to me. It could have been my taking off my shoes in the balcony of Washington DC’s Folger Theatre and falling asleep during a performance of the Gilbert & Sullivan opera, H M S Pinafore.

“This one sleeps as if he’s never slept before,” he said repeatedly. And then, there were movies like Apollo 13, which we saw at Concord, and where he was taken aback when I shed a tear during the scene where Jim Lovell’s mother proudly says, “My son could fly a washing-machine home,” on being told that the astronaut is marooned in a crippled spaceship — the scene reminded me of my ailing mom back home in Bangalore.

It was after I lost a bet to Phelix, and paid up instantly, that we really got along. So much so that when I expressed a desire to see Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen in San Francisco, since the movie had been banned in India at the time, he drove me all the way from LA for the evening show.

An early dinner before the movie was at the house of Phelix’s current girlfriend’s mother. The mother told me about how she had just visited Cuba, taking a detour since there were no direct flights from the US, and been impressed with how the families she met in Havana shared everything equally when there was a shortage. Sometimes, when the family had only one potato for dinner, it was divided into as many equal parts as the number of people at the table.

After dinner, we left for the movie. Phelix’s girlfriend was thoroughly shocked by what she saw in the film and kept saying, “Poor thing, poor thing”, as the saga of Phoolan Devi unfolded on screen. The movie was being screened for just a handful of spectators in a theatre near the Pacific Ocean, which separated us from Phoolan’s India.

When the time came to say goodbye at New York’s JFK International Airport, Phelix embraced me and said, “Ragwho, one day I’ll come to India to catch up with you and to have a close look at tigers. I’ve never seen a tiger before.” Hopefully, the tigers will still be around when Phelix finally gets here.