by Kiran Desai
If Jemu succeeded in his endeavor, she would be the wife of one of the most powerful men in India.
______
The wedding party lasted a week and was so opulent that nobody in Piphit could doubt but the family lived a life awash in ghee and gold, so when Bomanbhai bent over with a namaste and begged his guests to eat and drink, they knew his modesty was false—and of the best kind, therefore. The bride was a polished light-reflecting hillock of jewels, barely able to walk under the gem and metal weight she carried. The dowry included cash, gold, emeralds from Venezuela, rubies from Burma, uncut kundun diamonds, a watch on a watch chain, lengths of woolen cloth for her new husband to make into suits in which to travel to England, and in a crisp envelope, a ticket for passage on the SS Strathnaver from Bombay to Liverpool.
When she married, her name was changed into the one chosen by Jemubhai’s family, and in a few hours, Bela became Nimi Patel.
______
Jemubhai, made brave by alcohol and the thought of his ticket, attempted to pull off his wife’s sari, as much gold as silk, as she sat on the edge of the bed, just as his younger uncles had advised him, smacking him on the back.
He was almost surprised to discover a face beneath the gilded lump. It was strung with baubles, but even they could not entirely disguise the fourteen-year-old crying in terror: “Save me,” she wept.
He himself was immediately terrified, frightened by her fright. The spell of arrogance broken, he retreated to his meek self. “Don’t cry,” he said in a panic, trying to undo the damage. “Listen, I’m not looking, I’m not even looking at you.” He returned the heavy fabric to her, bundled it back over her head, but she continued to sob.
______
Next morning, the uncles laughed. “What happened? Nothing?” They gestured at the bed.
More laughter the next day.
The third day, worry.
“Force her,” the uncles urged him. “Insist. Don’t let her behave badly.”
“Other families would not be so patient,” they warned Nimi.
“Chase her and pin her down,” the uncles ordered Jemubhai.
Though he felt provoked, and sometimes recognized a focused and defined urge in himself, in front of his wife, the desire vanished.
“Spoiled,” they said to Nimi. “Putting on airs.”
How could she not be happy with their brainy Jemu, the first boy from their community to go to England?
But Jemubhai began to feel sorry for her, as well as for himself, as they shared this ordeal of inaction through one night and another.
While the family was out selling the jewels for extra money, he offered her a ride on his father’s Hercules cycle. She shook her head, but when he rode up, a child’s curiosity conquered her commitment to tears and she climbed on sideways. “Stick your legs out,” he instructed and worked away at the pedals. They went faster and faster, between the trees and cows, whizzing through the cow pats.
Jemubhai turned, caught quick sight of her eyes—oh, no man had eyes like these or looked out on the world this way….
He pedaled harder. The ground sloped, and as they flew down the incline, their hearts were left behind for an instant, levitating amid green leaves, blue sky.
______
The judge looked up from his chess. Sai had climbed up a tree at the garden’s edge. From its branches you could look onto the road curving down below and she would be able to catch Gyan’s approach.
Each succeeding week of mathematics tutoring, the suspense was growing until they could barely sit in the same room without desiring to flee. She had a headache. He had to leave early. They made excuses, but the minute they left each other’s company, they were restless and curiously angry, and they waited again for the following Tuesday, anticipation rising unbearably.
The judge walked over.
“Get down.”
“Why?”
“It’s making Mutt nervous to see you up there.”
Mutt looked up at Sai, wagged, not a shadow crossed her eyes.
“Really?” said Sai.
“I hope that tutor of yours doesn’t get any funny ideas,” said the judge, then.
“What funny ideas?”
“Get down at once.”
Sai got down and went indoors and shut herself up in her room. One day she would leave this place.
“Time should move,” Noni had told her. “Don’t go in for a life where time doesn’t pass, the way I did. That is the single biggest bit of advice I can give you.”
Seventeen
Saeed Saeed caught a mouse at the Queen of Tarts, kicked it up with his shoe, dribbled it, tried to exchange it with Biju, who ran away, tossed it up, and as it came down, kicked it squeaking up again, laughing, “So it is you who has been eating eating the bread, eh, it is you eating the sugar?” It went hysterically up until it came down dead. Fun over. Back to work.
______
In Kalimpong, the cook was writing on an airmail form. He wrote in Hindi and then copied out the address in awkward English letters.
He was being besieged by requests for help. The more they asked the more they came the more they asked—Lamsang, Mr. Lobsang Phuntsok, Oni, Mr. Shezoon of the Lepcha Quarterly, Kesang, the hospital cleaner, the lab technician responsible for the tapeworm in formaldehyde, the man who plugged the holes in rusting pots, everyone with sons in the queue ready to be sent. They brought him chickens as gifts, little packets of nuts or raisins, offered him a drink at Ex-Army Thapa’s Canteen, and he was beginning to feel as if he were a politician, a bestower of favors, a receiver of thanks.
The more pampered you are the more pampered you will be the more presents you receive the more presents you will get the more presents you receive the more you are admired the more you will be admired the more you are admired the more presents you will get the more pampered you will be—
“Bhai, dekko, aesa hai…” he would begin to lecture them. “Look, you have to have some luck, it is almost impossible to get a visa….” It was superhumanly difficult, but he would write to his son. “Let’s see, let’s see, perhaps you will get lucky….”
“Biju beta,” he wrote, “you have been fortunate enough to get there, please do something for the others….”
Then he applied a homemade mucilage of flour and water to glue down the sides of the airmail forms, sent them finning their way over the Atlantic, a whole shoal of letters….
______
They would never know how many of them went astray in all the rickety connections made along the way, between the temperamental postman in the pouring rain, the temperamental van across the landslides on the way to Siliguri, the lightning and thunder, the befogged airport, the journey from Calcutta all the way to the post office on 125th street in Harlem that was barricaded like an Israeli army outpost in Gaza. The mailman abandoned the letters atop the boxes of legal residents, and sometimes the letters fell, were trampled, and tracked back outdoors.
But enough came through that Biju felt he might drown.
“Very bright boy, family very poor, please look after him, he already has a visa, will be arriving…. Please find a job for Poresh. In fact, even his brother is ready to go. Help them. Sanjeeb Thorn Karma Ponchu, and remember Budhoo, watchman at Mon Ami, his son….”
______
“I know, man, I know how you feel,” Saeed said.
Saeed Saeed’s mother was dispensing his phone number and address freely to half of Stone Town. They arrived at the airport with one dollar in their pocket and his phone number, seeking admittance to an apartment that was bursting with men already, every scrap rented out: Rashid Ahmed Jaffer Abdullah Hassan Musa Lutfi Ali and a whole lot of others sharing beds in shifts.
“More tribes, more tribes. I wake up, go to the window, and there—MORE TRIBES. Every time I look—ANOTHER TRIBE. Everybody saying,’Oh, no visas anymore, they are getting very strict, it so hard,’ and in the meantime everybody who apply, EVERYBODY is getting a visa. Why they do this to me? T
hat American Embassy in Dar—WHY??!! Nobody would give that Dooli a visa. Nobody. One look and you would say OK, something wrong here—but they give it to him!”
Saeed cooked cow peas and kingfish from the Price Chopper to cheer himself up, and plantains in sugar and coconut milk. This goo mixture smelling of hope so ripe he slathered on French bread and offered to the others.
______
The sweetest fruit in all of Stone Town grew in the graveyard, and the finest bananas grew from the grandfather’s grave of that same wayward Dooli whom the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam had so severely misjudged as to give him a visa—so Saeed was telling them when he glanced out of the window—
And in a second he was under the counter.
“Oh myeeee God!” Whispering. “Tribes, man, it’s the tribes. Please God. Tell them I don’t work here. How they get this address! My mother! I told her, ‘No more!’ Please! Omar, Go! Go! Go tell them to leave.”
Outside the bakery stood a group of men, looking weary as if they’d been traveling several lifetimes, scratching their heads and staring at the Queen of Tarts.
“Why do you help?” asked Omar. “I stopped helping and now they all know I won’t help and nobody comes to me.”
“This is not the time to give a lecture.”
Omar went out. “Who? Saaeed? No, no. What name? Soyad? No, no one of that name. Just me, Kavafya, and Biju.”
“But he work here. His mother tell us.”
“No. No. You all get moving. Nobody here who you want to see and if you make trouble WE get into trouble so now I ask you nicely, GO.”
______
“Very good,” said Saeed, “thank you. They have gone?”
“No.”
“What are they doing?”
“They are still standing and looking,” said Biju feeling brave and excited by someone else’s misfortune. He was almost hopping.
The men were shaking their heads unwilling to believe what they’d heard.
Biju went out and came back in. “They say they will try your home address now.” He felt a measure of pride in delivering this vital news. Realized he missed playing this sort of role that was common in India. One’s involvement in other peoples’ lives gave one numerous small opportunities for importance.
“They will come back. I know them. They will try many more times, or one will stay and the others will go. Close the door, close the window….”
“We can’t close the shop. Too hot, can’t close the window.”
“Close it!”
“No. What if Mr. Bocher visit us?” He was the owner who dropped by at odd moments hoping to surprise them doing something against the rules.
“No sweati, bossi,” Saeed would tell him. “We do everything you tell us just like you tell us….”
But now….
“It’s my life we’re talking about, man, not little hot here and little hot there, boss or no boss….”
They closed the window and the door, and from the floor he telephoned his apartment. “Hey Ahmed, don’t answer the phone, man, that Dooli and all them boys have come from the airport! Lock up, stay down, don’t stand, and don’t go near the window.”
“Hah! Why they give them a visa? How they buy the ticket!” They could hear the voice at the other end. Then it vanished into Swahili in a potent dungform, a rich, steaming animal evacuation.
______
The phone rang in the bakery.
“Don’t answer,” he said to Biju who was reaching for it.
When the answering machine came on, it went off.
“The tribes! They always scared of the answering machine!”
It rang again and then again. Tring tring tring tring. Answering machine. Phone down.
Again: tring tring.
“Saeed, you have to talk to them.” Biju’s heart was suddenly pulsing with the anguish of the ringing. It could be the boss, it could be India on the line, his father his father—
Dead? Dying? Diseased?
Kavafya picked it up and a voice projected into the room raw and insistent with panic. “Emergency! Emergency! We are coming from airport. Emergency! Emergency! Saaeed S-aa-eed?”
He put it down and unplugged it.
Saeed: “Those boys, let them in, they will never leave. They are desperate. Desperate. Once you let them in, once you hear their story, you can’t say no, you know their aunty, you know their cousin, you have to help the whole family, and once they begin, they will take everything. You can’t say this is my food, like Americans, and only I will eat it. Ask Thea”—she was the latest pooky pooky interest in the bakery—”Where she live with three friends, everyone go shopping separately, separately they cook their dinner, together they eat their separate food. The fridge they divide up, and into their own place—their own place!—they put what is left in a separate box. One of the roommates, she put her name on the box so it say who it belong to!” His finger went up in uncharacteristic sternness. “In Zanzibar what one person have he have to share with everyone, that is good, that is the right way—
“But then everyone have nothing, man! That is why Heave Zanzibar.” Silence.
Biju’s sympathy for Saeed leaked into sympathy for himself, then Saeed’s shame into his own shame that he would never help all those people praying for his help, waiting daily, hourly, for his response. He, too, had arrived at the airport with a few dollar bills bought on the Kathmandu black market in his pocket and an address for his father’s friend, Nandu, who lived with twenty-two taxi drivers in Queens. Nandu had also not answered the phone and had tried to hide when Biju arrived on his doorstep, and then when he thought Biju had left, had opened the door and to his distress found Biju still standing there two hours later.
“No jobs here anymore,” he said. “If I were a young man I would go back to India, more opportunities there now, too late for me to make a change, but you should listen to what I’m saying. Everyone says you have to stay, this is where you’ll make a good life, but much better for you to go back.”
Nandu met someone at his work who told him of the basement in Harlem and ever since he had deposited Biju there, Biju had never seen him again.
He had been abandoned among foreigners: Jacinto the superintendent, the homeless man, a stiff bow-legged coke runner, who walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking, with his stiff yellow bow-legged dog, who also walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking. In the summer, families moved out of cramped quarters and sat on the sidewalk with boom boxes; women of great weight and heft appeared in shorts with shaven legs, stippled with tiny black dots, and groups of deflated men sat at cards on boards balanced atop garbage cans, swigged their beer from bottles held in brown paper bags. They nodded kindly at him, sometimes they even offered him a beer, but Biju did not know what to say to them, even his tiny brief “Hello” came out wrong: too softly, so they did not hear, or just as they had turned away.
______
The green card the green card. The….
Without it he couldn’t leave. To leave he wanted a green card. This was the absurdity. How he desired the triumphant After The Green Card Return Home, thirsted for it—to be able to buy a ticket with the air of someone who could return if he wished, or not, if he didn’t wish…. He watched the legalized foreigners with envy as they shopped at discount baggage stores for the miraculous, expandable third-world suitcase, accordion-pleated, filled with pockets and zippers to unhook further crannies, the whole structure unfolding into a giant space that could fit in enough to set up an entire life in another country.
Then, of course, there were those who lived and died illegal in America and never saw their families, not for ten years, twenty, thirty, never again.
How did one do it? At the Queen of Tarts, they watched the TV shows on Sunday mornings on the Indian channel that showcased an immigration lawyer fielding questions.
A taxi driver appeared on the screen: watching bootleg copies of American movies he had been inspired to come to
America, but how to move into the mainstream? He was illegal, his taxi was illegal, the yellow paint was illegal, his whole family was here, and all the men in his village were here, perfectly infiltrated and working within the cab system of the city. But how to get their papers? Would any viewer out there wish to marry him? Even a disabled or mentally retarded green card holder would be fine—
______
It was, of course, Saeed Saeed who found out about the van and took Omar, Kavafya, and Biju to Washington Heights, and there they waited on a street corner. All the shops had grills, even the little chewing gum and cigarette places. The pharmacies and liquor stores had buzzers; he saw people ringing, gaining admittance into a cage set into the shop from where you could survey the shelves and point to what you wanted, and after money had been placed in the revolving tray set into a little hole carved out of the grill and the bullet proof glass, purchased objects would be sent grudgingly around. Even in the Jamaican patty place, the lady, the patties, the callaloo and rotis, the Drinks Nice Every Time—sat behind a high-security barricade.
Still, it was jolly. Many people thronged by. Outside the Church of Zion, a preacher baptized a whole line of people in the spray of a fire hydrant. A man emerged in a Florida hibiscus shorts-and-shirt combo, thin knobby knees, crinkly pomaded hair, little square Charlie Chaplin—Hitler mustache, carrying a tape player, “Guantanamera… guajira Guantanamera.…” A pair of saucy women hailed him from the windows: “Oooo BABY! Look at them legs! Ooooooooo weeeef You free tonight?”
Another lady was giving advice to a younger woman who accompanied her: “Life is short, sweetheart—Put him out with the garbage! You are young, you should be happy! Poot! heem! out! weeth! de! gar-baje!”
Saeed was at home here. He lived two streets up and many people hailed him on the street.
