The Revolutionary did not look like a ‘Revolutionary’. Didn’t possess Che Guevara’s patchy beard. Fidel Castro’s lion eyes. Brother was shaped like a cricket player. Very slender. Very strong. Brother spoke in Aristotelian paragraphs, his voice calm, even at its crescendo. How did he manage this, this balance of sense and sensibility? This Walter Rodney. This ‘Brother Wally’. This Comrade Stargazer. The Revolutionary didn’t wear bell bottoms. He wore an economics professor’s spring semester khakis, John-the-Baptist sandals, and a white shirt jac stained beneath the armpits. His too-serious face was framed by horn-rimmed spectacles. His Afro was substantial enough to make its point, yet too tame for 1978. Style, his Afro suggested, was secondary to something else. But what? Tulsi turned to Anand, his best friend his whole life, and wanted to whisper in his ears that the two of them – the Sweetboy and the Revolutionary – shared the same two values, the latter admittedly ineffable, but in reverse. Anand was listening too hard; his listening was a performance. Tulsi could tell. This is love: knowing when your friend is putting on and growing frustrated by all that pretense. The unnecessary carnival. Quarter to nine. Tulsi tapped his toes. Bit his thumbnail. Begged Lord Ganesha to bring this meeting – and all its causes – to a swift, Aristotelian denouement.
