On being an immigrant in heartland of America

Humorous bio-fictional tale explores an outsider’s life as he navigates his new home

SPECIAL TO THE STAR In 1995, eight grey wolves were loaded onto a truck leaving Jasper, Alta., on a journey to their new home in Montana’s Yellowstone National Park. Wolves had roamed the American park until the 1920s, when the last packs were killed by nearby ranchers. Biologists believed reintroducing the animals would help control the burgeoning elk population and rebalance the ecosystem.

Close to a decade later, Indian-born writer and journalist Amitava Kumar was listening to National Public Radio (NPR) when a news item caught his attention. “Wolf Number Three,” who had developed a taste for sheep, had been shot by federal officers at a ranch north of Yellowstone, in a place called “Immigrant, Montana.” Kumar discovered later the small outpost was actually called Emigrant, but “my misunderstanding seemed more interesting, and spoke to my identity,” he says from his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he’s a professor at Vassar College. The incorrect name, to Kumar, conjured a mysterious juxtaposition in the heartland. Little of Kumar’s humorous new book,

Immigrant, Montana, is set in the fictional locale, though his protagonist, Kailash, visits Yellowstone — joined by his intellectual, sexually open girlfriend, Nina — in hopes of witnessing the wolves in action. In reality, Kumar journeyed to the park alone after covering Barack Obama’s 2008 Democratic Party nomination in Denver. He recalls the magical experience of opening his window and first hearing the wolves howling. Then, just as dawn broke, he witnessed bodies in motion as a pack ran by. Similar to the way Vladimir Nabokov travelled across the country, documenting species of butterflies and descriptions of motels while he wrote Lolita, this was Kumar’s way of “discovering this little bit of Americana.”

Immigrant, Montana reflects back on Kumar’s life as an immigrant who arrived in the U.S. as a student at Syracuse University in the late 1980s. The biofictional novel plays out like an emotional composition, layered with news clippings, diary notations, photographs, historical essays, literary quotes and popculture references as outsider Kailash tries to navigate his new home.

When Kailash moves to New York as a grad student, he is introduced to the stupidity of Beavis and Butt-Head, the auteur filmmaking of Jim Jarmusch, the feminist writings of Angela Carter and the political ballads of Billy Bragg. He discovers the charged thrill of the Fword and books by sex expert Dr. Ruth, whose advice Kailash poorly executes in his journey to get laid.

When he loses his virginity to Jennifer, an earnest bookstore co-worker who takes him ice-skating, Kailash laments the fact that he already sent a postcard to a friend in India suggesting the deed had been done. Months after Jennifer breaks up with him because of how he silently handled her unexpected pregnancy and abortion, Kailash hooks up with Nina, his reluctant Yellowstone companion.

Although Kumar does not condone Kailash’s consuming approach to women or the darker side of male desire, he writes his character with empathy, having witnessed the messy lives of his own students. “I have somewhat of a compassionate take because of what I see around me,” Kumar says. “The lives of the young are so tumultuous. I don’t want to judge them, or my own narrator too hard. I wanted to present desire — and celebrate it — but I didn’t want to absolve any feelings of guilt either.”

While Kailash’s physical needs are met by a sequence of girlfriends, his intellectual journey is led by charismatic professor Ehsaan Ali, whom Kumar modelled after Eqbal Ahmad, an anti-war protester and academic who was acquitted in 1972 under the false charge of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s security adviser. Ahmad never gained the public prominence of his friend, Noam Chomsky, but to Kumar, his global citizenry and cosmopolitanism is aspiring. “Even though I never met the man, I made him the moral centre of the book,” says Kumar.

Throughout Immigrant, Montana, an imaginary judge puts Kailash on trial for “false pretenses and indecent acts.” The young man is impelled to justify his existence, a need which mirrors Kumar’s own whenever he, as an immigrant, waits in line at an airport, scanning the faces around him. “Do they see me as someone who wants to be in love? Or only ‘Why does he want to be here? Does he want my job?’ ”

Kumar hopes his novel provokes readers to think less about citizenry, and more about the intangibles that make up people’s lives.

“How do we understand desire? To not make it criminal to want to be in love or to desire someone.”