Adventures in Babysitting
I want to bracket that question for now in order to turn to how Ghosh’s novel dramatizes an onto-epistemological shift (crossing over) that hinges upon a maturation or learning that inverts the conventional liberal narrative equating growth with the leaving behind of obligations of descent and biological dependencies of nurture and care. Here I expressly draw on a feminist framework attentive to the immaterial (unacknowledged) labor of caretaking—a caretaking disavowed in the fetishizing of autonomy. It is the disillusionment with this carved-up world of autonomous individuality that prepares the subjects—the protagonists of Ghosh’s novel as our readerly avatars—for crossing over into an onto-epistemological realization of collective and cross-species enmeshment.
As noted earlier, the narrative present of The Calcutta Chromosome takes place across a couple of hours confined to Antar’s apartment abutting New York City’s Holland Tunnel. In the opening chapters, the reader learns of Antar’s increasing isolation. Orphaned as a child, widowed, nearing his retirement, and progeny-less (his wife, in fact, having died from complications in pregnancy), Antar spends his days logged onto a computer while in a building nearly empty of tenants, the units given over to storage. He is a bleak caricature of the atomistic individual.
While one might presume digital access would provide virtual travel to other worlds—as suggested by the inaugural animated icon of a rotating globe featured in the 1990s web browser Netscape Navigator—Ghosh’s novel presents Antar as stifled by his occupational tethering to his AVA/IIe computer system. Formerly an employee in the accounting department of a small, independent public health constituency called Life Watch, the ripely middle-aged Antar has been absorbed into the behemoth IWC (International Water Council), and spends his days telecommuting, which is to say, stuck in his apartment, epitomizing in the negative the unobliged individual. His energies go toward tricking the computer into thinking he is working—tending the inventory lists scrolling down on the computer screen—when he is actually sneaking a read from his electronic book.39 Antar has no sense of how his job, helping to compile enormous catalogues of items received from the IWC’s various satellite offices (now closed), fits into the IWC’s overall mission of investigating “the depletion of the world’s water supplies;” he only “[stares] patiently at those endless inventories, wondering what it was all for.”40
Rather than expanding his human agency, the computer both surpasses and displaces human mnemonic and calculative capacities (recall that Antar was formerly in the accounting department), but nonetheless demands the servitude of Antar as a kind of gratuitous tech support in case some odd debris crosses “the system’s” path:
it was the chain [on the identity card for L. Murugan] that tripped the system […] Once it got started [on its routine inventories] it would keep them coming, hour after hour, an endless succession of documents and objects, stopping only when it stumbled on something it couldn’t file: the most trivial things usually […] a glass paperweight, of the kind that rains snowflakes if you turn them upside down; another time it was a bottle of correcting fluid. Both times the machine went into a controlled frenzy, firing off questions, one after another […] Somewhere along the line [the AVA system] had been programmed to hunt out real-time information.41
The “machine” here is placed in tension with human sociality and significance—especially in an affective register (the kitsch nostalgia of the snowflake paperweight). Having a rendezvous with friends at a donut franchise located in New York’s Penn Station, Antar wishes to leave his apartment, but cannot due to a late-breaking hiccough in the learning curve of the AVA/IIe, a learning dependent on the human organism, despite Antar’s attempt to make the machine autonomous—e.g., “routing [the AVA] to her own encyclopedias” but finding that for AVA, “that wasn’t good enough:”
Antar had met children who were like that: “why? what? when? where? how?” But children asked because they were curious; with these AVA/IIe systems it was something else—something that he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. He’d been using his Ava for a couple of years now and he was still awed by her eagerness to better herself […] She wouldn’t stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.42
More so than his information stores which surely could not compete with the capacity of a supercomputer, the AVA/IIe relies upon Antar’s social attention or affective labor. Notice, too, the way the “system” designated by the brand and model AVA/IIe acquires a gendered organismal (chain of) identity across the course of this paragraph, called “she” and “her,” compared to a curious child, and familiarized by the sobriquet Ava which replaces “AVA/IIe.” Discovered in these inaugural moments of the novel, then, are not merely the physical identity chain recovered in Calcutta that links Antar and the reader to Murugan’s investigations into the history of malaria research, but also the enmeshment of that story of malaria (the etiology of which bespeaks a three-way chain of Protista, arthropods, and humans), as it attaches to another tethered composite identity, that of Ava-Antar (and to a gendered syntax of reproduction).
While other critics have remarked on Ava as symbol of bureaucratic and corporate surveillance,43 we would do well to consider how a more domestic relation analogizes the Ava-Antar coupling: Ava appears the intelligent, high-needs child of the imperial occupier to Antar’s colored nanny. This relation is characterized by mixed combinations of aged-related and racialized power inequities, with the imperialist’s offspring not quite the boss of the nanny, but also not quite the nanny’s underling.
When in a resentful moment Antar mutters under his breath that Ava is just a “dust-counter,” her response renders him awed and speechless, as we might find ourselves, in trying to alight upon the exact term to name their relation: man-tool, colonized-imperialist, master-slave, parent-child—all of which are precise in some respects and wanting in others:
[Antar muttered under his breath in Arabic,] “That’s what you are Ava, a Dust-Counter, Addaad al-Turaab”[…]
Her “eye,” a laser-guided surveillance camera, swiveled on him […] Then Ava began to spit out translations of the Arabic phrase, going through the world’s languages in declining order of population: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali […] It was funny at first, but when it got to the dialects of the Upper Amazon Antar couldn’t bear it any longer. “Stop showing off,” he shouted […] “Iskuti; shut up.”
But it was Ava who silenced him instead, serenely spitting the phrases back at him. Antar listened awestruck as “shut up” took on the foliage of the Upper Amazon.44
If, for heuristic purposes, we were to figure the social relation here in terms of the dialectical antagonism of master and slave (or some corollary dichotomy), we would quickly realize that paradigm’s inadequacy. In this reading, Antar (the slave) verbally resists Ava’s superior calculative mastery by framing her intelligence as serving trivial ends (dust counting), a judgment only confirmed when Antar names as superfluous (“stop showing off”) Ava’s super-fluency in the world’s languages, which includes the hierarchical ordering of them according to a biopolitical calculus of population. At the same time, we can read the passage as one in which the human parental figure (Antar) admonishes the exuberant child (Ava), only to be astonished at the irrelevance of social regulation (e.g., norms of productivity) to this other lifeform’s algorithmic logics, which turn out to have a playful side.
Undocumented caretaking work—as in caretaking that is not recognized as such—which I have metatextually claimed characterizes Antar’s relation to Ava, characterizes another person in the novel’s frame story. Introduced to Antar by a coterie of fellow immigrants who gather with Antar at the donut franchise, Tara, Antar’s sole neighbor and the unpresuming “star” of the narrative (tara is Sanskrit for “star”), works as an undocumented babysitter: “[she] had been brought into the country by a Kuwaiti diplomat and his family, to care for their children. The arrangement hadn’t worked out so she’d found another babysitting job, in Greenwich village [Antar] guessed that the change of jobs had made Tara’s status illegal and that she needed to find a place [to reside] where she could pay cash without having to deal with a lot of questions.”45 Tara and her friends successfully press Antar to allow Tara to squat in the vacant apartment next door to him. When she loses her job, Antar again lends assistance, hooking her into his computer network so that she can search for the selective babysitting jobs posted online. Evoking a digitized forum for the procuring of undocumented nannies, Ghosh’s narrative highlights the racialized conditions of New York City’s urban labor stratification in the late 1990s that only extends the hierarchy of white masters and colored serving classes established under territorial colonialism.46
Through informal immigrant communities like those gathered at the donut shop, migrants from the West’s former colonies take care of each other, the newer immigrants like Tara assisted by the earlier, more established arrivals like Antar (a pecking order of pedagogical mentorship emerges, structured by years lived in the metropolitan West). Yet this hierarchy of caretakership is also inverted by the novel’s end, when Antar discovers that Tara is the coalesced assemblage of several personalities who have appeared in the time-frames set in the Calcuttas of the late-nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries: (parts of) Mrs. Aratounian and Mangala have been transported to Urmila Roy/Tara’s morphology through a bioengineered technique modeled on Plasmodium’s polymorphism. Babysitting has provided Tara with a most suitable cover story: her real interest has been to stage an intimate experiment—a cyborg, malarial connection with—Ava-Antar, the latter of whom contracted malaria as a child. Tara’s ruse of babysitting work, then, is both a ruse—she takes no jobs with rich families in New York City, and not a ruse—she takes care, helps gestate and births, a biotechnological chimera whose key component, Antar, is himself multiple: a wet vertebrate organism also comprised of (alternatively coexisting with) the intracellular malarial parasite Plasmodium and the informatics of the Ava II/e network.
While the foregoing has mapped unobvious instances of caretaking in the novel (between babysitter Antar and the imperialist offspring Ava; between the undocumented nanny Tara and her unwitting charge, Antar), let me briefly turn to a more legible instance of domestic labor in Ghosh’s narrative: Urmila Roy is expressly asked to subordinate her own career as a journalist, which provides her waged income, to act as a sororal caretaker to benefit her brother’s potential athletic recruitment to a cricket club. Urmi’s mother breathlessly tells her daughter of a call from a national team informing the family of their intention to visit and talk to her brother, Dinu, the next day. Dinu’s first thought is of Urmila—according to their mother—and how she must prepare a fish so that the family might ask Ronen Halder, the team’s owner, to stay for dinner. Exasperated, Urmila informs her mother that this request will conflict with her paid work—her press assignment to attend a morning speech by the national Communications Minister—because acting as the hostess and cook would require her going to market at daybreak for the fresh catch. For Urmi’s mother, a First Division cricket contract for Dinu means “money” and the possibility that Urmila can “give up this stupid job and stay at home […] Maybe we can even get you married before it’s too late.” For Urmila, her newswoman’s job—the household’s current sole source of income outside her father’s pension—is her service to the family: “if I didn’t have the job […] how would we get by? […] How would we feed the children?,” to which her mother counters, in contradiction to her earlier excitement at the prospect of more household income, “That’s all you think about […] Money, money, money […] You have no place in your heart for our joys and sorrows. You should have seen how happy your brother was.’”47 Staged here explicitly is the conflict between material and so-called “immaterial” labor. That is, what is to be considered the core component of caretaking work: wage-earning or emotional support? While Urmila’s work for the family will produce a product, the cooked fish, the “immateriality” of labor, here, refers to the elusiveness by which certain forms of energy expenditure—caring, pedagogic, and metabolic forms of work—are credited as productive or wealth-producing.48 Here, the novel would seem to chime in with feminist critiques of the invisibility and denigration of unwaged housekeeping—that which certainly enhances vitality, but does not count in economic assessments of GNP.
Dramatizing Urmila’s readiness to be “chosen” for the hosting of Mangala’s recombinatory experiment, Ghosh crafts a situation in which Urmila can choose an embeddedness in obligations to others—e.g., to Dinu and the family—against a countering degree of autonomy represented by her reporter’s job. For Urmila, the prospect of autonomy through waged work, a prospect fragile and illusory from the start, is pitted against her gendered obligations to her family, obligations that supersede and take precedence over her “own” desires. Confirming her embeddedness in obligations to others only requires Urmila’s “return,” so to speak, to her gendered place in the family, whereas to become embedded in obligations to the munis requires of the orphaned Antar the taking on of what looks like a new risk—becoming the animal biology (zoon/zoe) whose flesh (cellular organization, metabolism, tissue systems) feed the alien—in ways similar to the phase one (male) experimental medical subject described by Melinda Cooper, whose imbibed dosages up and through the point of toxicity in pharmaceutical trials render him the “new” neoliberal sacrificial subject bearing risk for the collective.49
Despite Murugan’s exposition informing the reader that Urmila has been chosen as the next host for Mangala/Mrs. Aratounian, in the dramatization of the terror-excitement at such merging, it is Antar’s male embodiment and Murugan’s mosquito-exposed torso (in the aforementioned dream sequence) that provide the readerly avatars for staging the visceral violence and erotics of hospitality.50 Ghosh uses the male body, less conventionally challenged in its integrity,51 to make strange, unfamiliar, and more terrifying the porousness and mutations of cross-species assemblage—a parasexual form of generation.
By the novel’s end—which is to say, in the looping back to the mise-en-scene of the novel’s opening, namely Antar’s New York City apartment in the late 1990s/early oughts—Antar’s person provides the readerly avatar for a discovery felt as the bodily risk of self-obliteration, a distributed, centrifugalized feeling (to which I will return shortly) synonymous with his coassembling with the munis. To intimately join the collective at the donut franchise, Antar (the reader’s avatar) will become akin to an experimental medical subject, his body parts undergoing a possible schizogony—a centrifugal fissioning into fragments. I say “possible” because the novel concludes at the moment of threshold.52
At the novel’s finale, Antar has fallen into malarial delirium, corresponding to the human host’s experience of the erythrocytic stage of Plasmodium’s schizogony in the human bloodstream. The feeling of this onto-epistemological shift is one of gothic haunting—the house is occupied by unknown others—and literalized in creepy coincidences such as Antar’s hearing a beep he identifies as coming from his phone headset as he talks to Tara, but also as ambient noise from the apartment next door, even though Tara claims that she is at the park. The onset of fever coincides with Antar’s donning a simulated-reality helmet (he becomes an appendage of the AVA II/e) that allows him to witness the identicalness of Urmila circa 1995 and Tara of the present. At the same time, Antar’s offline body feels a heightened sense of tactile and aural claustrophobia, as the shadows—possessed with the voices and aspects of his acquaintances at the donut shop (who are the selfsame members of Mangala’s group)—come alive and crowd in: “it was as though a crowd of people was in the room with him [murmuring] ‘we’re here, we’re all with you […] you’re not alone; we’ll help you across.’ He sat back and sighed like he hadn’t sighed in years.”53 Here, the narrative collapses the distance between organismal subject and the world: the environment and munis that Antar had imagined were at least 40 blocks away at Penn Station now close in on him, as in a centripetal action. At the same time, the novel’s concluding lines centrifugally distribute readerly cognition across Antar’s peripheral body: “a cool soft touch under his shoulder” startles him, he feels a “[restraint on] his wrist […] a voice in his ear, Tara’s voice, whispering: ‘Keep watching; we’re here; we’re all with you.’ There were voices everywhere now, in his room, in his head, in his ears.”53
By ending just here (before a portraiture of the new life to emerge—the assemblage of Antar/Ava/Tara/Urmila/Mangala/Lutchman/Ronen Haldar/ Mrs. Aratounian, etc.), Ghosh effects the reader’s dwelling in a processural, distributed feeling of something like a fragmented body or, more precisely, a cytoplasmic, non-nucleic proprioception: a “cool soft touch under his shoulder”, a “[restraint on] his wrist,” “a voice in his ear,” a somatic awareness of senses unconfined to the brain. Here I want to suggest that while we can project beyond Ghosh’s ending for the morphology that will contain the personalities preserved in the chromosomes of the historical persons who have horizontally transferred their nucleic essences, by doing so, we will have missed the distributed sensations which actualize the novel’s ending.
These centripetalizing and centrifugalizing actions of the novel’s final moments, I argue, dynamically mimic (in a kinesthetic vein) two conceptualizations of reproduction historically significant in the era of the novel’s composition and publication: one in which the centralized command and control of nucleic materials—sequences of genes—held the promise of organismal structure and development as a code book,54 and another resurgent idea in which environment (munis) or epigenetic influences were credited with coeval influence over the development and subsequent inheritance of traits (even allowing for so-called “acquired” traits).55 Ghosh’s novel, published in 1995, was itself gestated in a period of genetic euphoria, where cracking the human genome—aka the ‘book of ‘life’—was rhetorically collapsed into a kind of uber-agency over vital processes.54 Eugene Thacker notes that key developments in multipurpose computing—e.g., 1981, when IBM introduced the PC, and 1984, when Apple introduced the MAC—mark an acceleration in coding literacy (and thereby coding metaphorics), even as the watershed dates typically cited in genomic histories rehearse the Human Genome Project’s official launch in 1990, the project internationalized as the IHGSC (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium) in the late 1990s, and J. Craig Venter’s formation of the private competitor corporation Celera Genomics in 1998. Across the 1980s through 1990s, it was possible to think of the chromosome (biology collapsed into genes) as containing the key to an organism’s subsequent development.56 In the historical moment we now find ourselves in—whether we dub it epigenetic, interactionist, or developmental systemic—milieu, niche, environment, and contingent conditions, what used to be shorthanded as “nurture,” but which Murphy dubs “infrastructures of reproduction,” have been granted an ascending importance as distributed, codetermining factors shaping vital materializations.
As the foregoing account of The Calcutta Chromosome is meant to suggest, Antar’s technical means of recovering missing pieces of the past—his AVA II/e system—presents not a mere surface, beyond which lies the true story (the ongoing inequities of empire) but comprises the main drama in which a lesson regarding humanity’s (and all of biological life’s) chimeracological embeddedness unfolds: a lesson on the necessary labor of gifting one’s attention and time toward some other entity’s learning. Urmila’s filial duty to her family, Antar’s babysitting of Ava, Tara’s undocumented looking after Ava-Antar, and Mrs. Aratounian’s mentorship of Urmila in the basics of plant care57 —all these forms of caretaking appear as gateways for later alliances figured as xeno-assemblages. In a preparatory manner, these within-species practices of nurture entrain a somatic cognizance of biological life as hardly autonomous but in its pixelated (cyber)entwinement and, down to its microscopic scale, a chimeracological choreography. Ambivalently for a racial justice project, then, Ghosh’s dramatization of cross-species reproduction, alternatively parasexual coassemblage,58 features caretaking work as the novel’s most salient figure of both (resented) contemporary indenture (racialized labor filling the jobs that, as Lisa Lowe puts it, the US economy produces that “only third world workers find attractive”)59 and that which endows an openness to a chimeracological onto-epistemology lost or suppressed in modernity.
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 4. [↩]
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 5. [↩]
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 3-4. [↩]
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 4, emphasis added. [↩]
- Bishnupriya Ghosh, “On Grafting the Vernacular: The Consequences of Postcolonial Spectrology,” Boundary 2 3.2 (2004): 197-218; Christopher Shinn, “On Machines and Mosquitoes: Neuroscience, Bodies, and Cyborgs in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome,” MELUS 33.4 (2008): 145-66. [↩]
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 7. [↩]
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 18-19. [↩]
- See Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001) and Rhacel Parranes’ Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Palo Alto: Stanford, 2001). [↩]
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 132-133. [↩]
- Here I make an argument that departs slightly from Hardt and Negri who instead call caretaking immaterial not because it is not valued publically but because its product (which they identify as “social networks,” and which Gayle Rubin in her inaugural “Traffic in Women” essay called “kinship”) is immaterial: “Affective labor is better understood by beginning with what feminist analyses of ‘women’s work’ have called ‘labor in the bodily mode.’ Caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial. What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower.” Hardt and Negri 2001: 293. [↩]
- Cooper forthcoming distinguishes between the express reasons given by phase one clinical subjects in the United States (largely males from the margins of society) and phase two clinical subjects (largely white middle-class females) for their participation in these trials. Phase one subjects are expressly motivated by economics—the money to be earned by “volunteering” for testing (Cooper finds agency in their attempt to game the system by lying about washing out periods). In contrast, while the phase two female medical subjects are often looking to mitigate healthcare costs, their primary reasons for participation are altruistic: their labor, crucial to the findings of the drug trial, will help future patients. The latter motive, in other words, remains on an affective continuum with the gifts of familial/communal/caretaking sacrifices that have been called domestic labor; whereas the risk bearing work of men (who supply the predominant population of phase one clinical trial labor) appears historically “new.” [↩]
- However, there is one narration of a woman sinking into the river bed that is a dramatized, visceral account of something like somatic transformation and passage to another form AND, this passage is framed as a story retold by Urmila who first hears it from the nationally renowned author Phulboni. While Urmila frames this story as one of a woman bathing, it is of a woman sinking into damp mud of a weed-rich pond, her foot slipping and her body falling into the depthless murk, as if drowning. She literally becomes entangled in the lowest banks of the pond. What rescues her from this watery death is her grabbing hold of a seed stone and arising into the air again—see Ghosh 2001[1995]: 229. While not a high-tech portrait of cross-species assemblage, this mundane merging of the vertebrate into the ecology of the pond (with its abundant plant, mineral, aqueous mud) has affinities to the chimeracological. [↩]
- Nancy Chodorow. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UC Press, 1999); Hartsock 1983. [↩]
- Even if we were given the positive contours of Ava(n)tar’s merging with Tara—and here I allude to Ghosh’s sprinkling his narrative with wordplay and spliced entities—we would have only an AVATAR(a), rather than THE polymorphism that could stand in for the entire chimericalogical chain. [↩]
- Ghosh 2001[1995]: 311. [↩] [↩]
- Roof, Judith. The Poetics of DNA, (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2007). [↩] [↩]
- To be sure, the Lamarckian notion of inheriting acquired traits has not been revived wholesale as much as there has been a reassessment of what the abuse of Lamarck has wrought—a denial of “nongenetic contributions to biological form” and an approach to biological processes that denies or understates interactionism between entity and its surrounds or put another way “begins with inert raw materials [that] require a mindlike force [e.g. genetic codes] to fashion this matter into a functioning animal-machine. This approach is at odds with what we know about physics and chemistry.” See Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, (Durham: Duke UP, 2000). [↩]
- Of a part with the carving up of things—the localization of agency rather than the embedded view emphasizing cascades of interaction (any initiating agent of an action can be said to be reacting to a prior action)—is the fetish of genes/genomes, chromosomes, as the key to life. “Calcutta” modifies Chromosome in Ghosh’s title—it is a place name, a niche, the milieu, and epigenetic surround. As Susan Oyama wrote in 1985, “What we are moving toward is a conception of a developmental system, not as the reading off of a preexisting code, but as a complex of interacting influences, some inside the organism’s skin, some external to it, and including its ecological niche in all its spatial and temporal aspects, many of which are typically passed on in reproduction either because they are in some way tied to the organism’s (or its conspecifics’) activities or characteristics or b/c they are stable features of the general environment.” See Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, (Durham: Duke UP, 2000): 39. [↩]
- Mrs. Aratounian heads a plant nursery; in her first encounter with Urmila, she advises Urmi (rather brusquely) on the basics of horticulture (Urmila has hidden behind a bunch of chrysanthemums and knocked them over): “That’s a plant, not a dog … it doesn’t want to be petted.” Interestingly, while dogs are symbols of docile companions who’ve evolutionarily adapted to human preferences, one variety of the chrysanthemum—the plant Mrs. Aratounian warns against petting—are cultivated for their pyrethrins, contained in “the seed cases,” and used as a natural insect repellant. The pyrethrins of chrysanthemums, in other words, inhibit female mosquitoes from biting thereby allowing for the controlling of conditions in which Plasmodium parasites might transfer and coassemble in vertebrates. Ghosh 2001[1995]: 63. [↩]
- If (normative vertebrate) sex results in genetic combinations that conserve the species/race (via germinal offspring or “the child”), Ghosh has us think parasexually—that is, about intimate/incorporative relations that 1) we already have with microorganisms such as the Plasmodium and the mosquito and 2) that instead of reproducing children, extend the mature organism’s life (here I’m thinking both of Cooper’s work on regenerative medicine’s deployment of the embryonic stem cell, not to bring embryo to term but to extend already existing persons’ longevity; and of Hannah Landecker’s provocative historicization of metabolism as indistinct from reproduction, both of these part of the generativity of the organism. Metabolism, in other words, sustains and grows the organism, even as it is not a sexual but perhaps a parasexual (enterically incorporative rather than genetically incorporative) form of generativity. [↩]
- Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, (Durham: Duke UP, 1996): 21. [↩]
