by Kiran Desai
“But you have to take it from their point of view,” said Noni. “First the Neps were thrown out of Assam and then Meghalaya, then there’s the king of Bhutan growling against—”
“Illegal immigration,” said Lola. She reached for a cream horn. “Naughty girl,” she said to herself, her voice replete with gloating.
“Obviously the Nepalis are worried,” said Noni. “They’ve been here, most of them, several generations. Why shouldn’t Nepali be taught in schools?”
“Because on that basis they can start statehood demands. Separatist movement here, separatist movement there, terrorists, guerillas, insurgents, rebels, agitators, instigators, and they all learn from one another, of course—the Neps have been encouraged by the Sikhs and their Khalistan, by ULFA, NEFA, PLA; Jharkhand, Bodoland, Gorkhaland; Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Kashmir, Punjab, Assam….”
Sai thought of how she turned to water under Gyan’s hands, her skin catching the movement of his fingers up her and down, until finally she couldn’t tell the difference between her skin and his touch.
The nasal whine of the gate:
“Hello, hello,” said Mrs. Sen, hooking her beaky nose around the open door. “Hope I’m not disturbing—was just going by, heard your voices—oh look, pastries and all—” In her happiness she made small bird and mouse sounds.
Lola: “You saw that letter they sent to the queen of England? Gorbachev and Reagan? Apartheid, genocide, looking after Pakistan, forgetting us, colonial subjugation, vivisected Nepal…. When did Darjeeling and Kalimpong belong to Nepal? Darjeeling, in fact, was annexed from Sikkim and Kalimpong from Bhutan.”
Noni: “Very unskilled at drawing borders, those bloody Brits.”
Mrs. Sen, diving right into the conversation: “No practice, na, water all around them, ha ha.”
______
When they would finally attempt to rise from those indolent afternoons they spent together, Gyan and Sai would have melted into each other like pats of butter—how difficult it was to cool and compose themselves back into their individual beings.
“Pakistan! There is the problem,” said Mrs. Sen, jumping to one of her favorite topics, her thoughts and opinions ready-made, polished over the years, rolled out wherever they might be stuffed somehow into a conversation. “First heart attack to our country, no, that has never been healed—”
Lola: “It’s an issue of a porous border is what. You can’t tell one from the other, Indian Nepali from Nepali Nepali. And then, baba, the way these Neps multiply.”
Mrs. Sen: “Like Muslims.”
Lola: “Not the Muslims here.”
Mrs. Sen: “No self-control, those people. Disgusting.”
Noni: “Everyone is multiplying. Everywhere. You cannot blame one group over another.”
Lola: “Lepchas are not multiplying, they are disappearing. In fact, they have the first right to this land and nobody is even mentioning them.” Then, reconsidering her support for Lepchas, she said, “Not that they are so wonderful either, of course. Look at those government loans to Lepchas to start piggeries—”Traditional Occupation Resurrection Plan”—and not a single piggery to be seen, although, of course, they all handed in beautifully written petitions, showing trough measurements and the cost of pig feed and antibiotics—collected the money all right, smart and prompt….”
Mrs. Sen: “More Muslims in India than in Pakistan. They prefer to multiply over here. You know, that Jinnah, he ate bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning and drank whiskey every evening. What sort of Muslim nation they have? And five times a day bums up to God. Mind you,” she put her sticky ringer in her mouth and then pulled it out with a pop, “With that Koran, who can be surprised? They have no option but to be two-faced.”
The reasoning, they all knew from having heard this before, formed a central pillar of Hindu belief and it went like this: so strict was the Koran that its teachings were beyond human capability. Therefore Muslims were forced to pretend one thing, do another; they drank, smoked, ate pork, visited prostitutes, and then denied it.
Unlike Hindus, who needn’t deny.
Lola was uneasy and drank her tea too hot. This complaining about Muslim birth rates was vulgar and incorrect among the class that reads Jane Austen, and she sensed Mrs. Sen’s talk revealed her own position on Nepalis, where there was not so easy a stereotype, to be not so very different a prejudice.
“It’s quite another matter with Muslims,” she said stiffly. “They were already here. The Nepalis have come and taken over and it’s not a religious issue.”
Mrs. Sen: “Same thing with the Muslim cultural issue…. They also came from somewhere else, Babar and all…. And stayed here to breed. Not that it’s the fault of the women—poor things—it’s the men—marrying three, four wives—no shame.” She began to giggle. “They have nothing better to do, you know. Without TV and electricity, there will always be this problem—”
Lola: “Oh, Mrs. Sen, again you are derailing the conversation. We aren’t talking about that!”
Mrs. Sen: “Ah-hah-ha,” she sang airily, putting another cream horn on her plate with a flourish.
Noni: “How is Mun Mun?” But as soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t, for this would rile Lola and she would have to spend all evening undoing the harm.
Mrs. Sen: “Oh, they keep begging her and begging her to take a green card. She says, ‘No, no.’ I told her, ‘Don’t be silly, take it, what harm is there? If they’re offering it, pushing it on you….’ How many people would kill for one…. Silly goose, isn’t it so? What a bee-oo-tee-ful country and so well organized.”
The sisters had always looked down on Mrs. Sen as a low-caliber person. Her inferiority was clear to them long before her daughter settled in a country where the jam said Smuckers instead of “By appointment to Her Majesty the queen,” and before she got a job with CNN placing her in direct opposition to Pixie at BBC. This was because Mrs. Sen pronounced potato “POEtatto,” and tomato “TOEmatto,” and because of the rumor that she had once made a living going door to door in a scooter selling confiscated items from the customs at Dum Dum Airport, peddling the goods to mothers collecting dowries of black-market items, the better to increase their daughters’ chances.
Lola: “But don’t you find them very simple people?”
Mrs. Sen: “No hang-ups, na, very friendly.”
“But a fake friendliness I’ve heard, hi-bye and no meaning to it.”
“Better than England, ji, where they laugh at you behind your back—”
Perhaps England and America didn’t know they were in a fight to the death, but it was being fought on their behalf, anyway, by these two spirited widows of Kalimpong.
“Mun Mun has no hassles in America, nobody cares where you’re from—”
“Well, if you’re going to call ignorance freedom! And don’t tell me that nobody cares. Everybody knows,” Lola said bitterly as if it actually mattered to her, “how they treat the Negroes.”
“At least they believe you can be happy, baba”
“And the kind of patriotism they go in for turns monkey into donkey phata-phat—just give them a hot dog on a stick, they begin to wave it at the flag and—”
“So, what’s wrong with enjoying yourself—”
______
“Tell us your news, Sai,” pleaded Noni, desperate to change the topic again. “Come on, cheer us up, that much you young people should be good for.”
“No news,” Sai lied and went red thinking of herself and Gyan. Companionship had increased the sensation of fluidity she’d felt before the mirror, that reduction to malleable form, the endless possibility for reinvention.
The three ladies gave her a hard look. She seemed out of focus, they couldn’t read her expression clearly, and she was squirming oddly in her chair.
“So,” said Lola, redirecting her frustration with Mrs. Sen, “no boyfriends yet? Why not, why not? We used to be so adventurous in the old days. Always giving Mummy-Daddy the slip.”
/> “Let her be. She’s a good girl,” said Noni.
“Better do it now,” said Mrs. Sen, making a mysterious expression. “Wait too long and the craze will go. That’s what I told Mun Mun.”
“Perhaps you have worms,” said Lola.
Noni rummaged in a jumble-filled bowl and came up with a strip of medicine. “Here—take a deworming pill. We got some for Mustafa. Caught him rubbing his bottom on the floor. Sure sign.”
Mrs. Sen looked at the tuberoses on the table. “You know,” she said, “just put a few drops of food coloring and you can make your flowers any color you like, red, blue, orange. Years ago we used to have fun in parties like that.”
Sai stopped petting Mustafa and that spiteful cat bit her.
“Mustafa!” Lola warned, “if you don’t behave yourself, we’ll turn you into katty kebabs!”
Twenty-two
Brigitte’s, in New York’s financial district, was a restaurant all of mirrors so the diners might observe exactly how enviable they were as they ate. It was named for the owners’ dog, the tallest, flattest creature you ever saw; like paper, you could see her properly only from the side.
In the morning, as Biju and the rest of the staff began bustling about, the owners, Odessa and Baz, drank Tailors of Harrowgate darjeeling at a corner table. Colonial India, free India—the tea was the same, but the romance was gone, and it was best sold on the word of the past. They drank tea and diligently they read the New York Times together, including the international news. It was overwhelming.
Former slaves and natives. Eskimos and Hiroshima people, Amazonian Indians and Chiapas Indians and Chilean Indians and American Indians and Indian Indians. Australian aborigines, Guatemalans and Colombians and Brazilians and Argentineans, Nigerians, Burmese, Angolans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Afghans, Cambodians, Rwan-dans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Liberians, Borneoans, Papua New Guineans, South Africans, Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, Armenians, Palestinians, French Guyanese, Dutch Guyanese, Surinamese, Sierra Leonese, Malagasys, Senegalese, Maldivians, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Kenyans, Panamanians, Mexicans, Haitians, Dominicans, Costa Ricans, Congoans, Mauritanians, Marshall Islanders, Tahitians, Gabonese, Beninese, Malians, Jamaicans, Botswanans, Burundians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Uruguayans, Nicaraguans, Ugandans, Ivory Coastians, Zambians, Guinea-Bissauans, Cameroonians, Laotians, Zaireans coming at you screaming colonialism, screaming slavery, screaming mining companies screaming banana companies oil companies screaming CIA spy among the missionaries screaming it was Kissinger who killed their father and why don’t you forgive third-world debt; Lumumba, they shouted, and Allende; on the other side, Pinochet, they said, Mobutu; contaminated milk from Nestlé, they said; Agent Orange; dirty dealings by Xerox. World Bank, UN, IMF, everything run by white people. Every day in the papers another thing!
Nestlé and Xerox were fine upstanding companies, the backbone of the economy, and Kissinger was at least a patriot. The United States was a young country built on the finest principles, and how could it possibly owe so many bills?
Enough was enough.
Business was business. Your bread might as well be left unbuttered were the butter to be spread so thin. The fittest one wins and gets the butter.
______
“Rule of nature,” said Odessa to Baz. “Imagine if we were sitting around saying, ‘So-and-so-score years ago, Neanderthals came out of the woods, attacked my family with a big dinosaur bone, and now you give back.’ Two of the very first iron pots, my friend, and one toothsome toothy daughter from the first days of agriculture, when humans had larger molars, and four samples of an early version of the potato claimed, incidentally, by both Chile and Peru.”
She was very witty, Odessa. Baz was proud of her cosmopolitan style, loved the sight of her in her little wire-rimmed glasses. Once he had been shocked to overhear some of their friends say she was black-hearted, but he had put it out of his mind.
______
“These white people!” said Achootan, a fellow dishwasher, to Biju in the kitchen. “Shit! But at least this country is better than England,” he said. “At least they have some hypocrisy here. They believe they are good people and you get some relief. There they shout at you openly on the street, ‘Go back to where you came from.’” He had spent eight years in Canterbury, and he had responded by shouting a line Biju was to hear many times over, for he repeated it several times a week: “Your father came to my country and took my bread and now I have come to your country to get my bread back.”
Achootan didn’t want a green card in the same way as Saeed did. He wanted it in the way of revenge.
“Why do you want it if you hate it here?” Odessa had said angrily to Achootan when he asked for sponsorship.
Well, he wanted it. Everyone wanted it whether you liked it or you hated it. The more you hated it sometimes, the more you wanted it.
This they didn’t understand.
______
The restaurant served only one menu: steak, salad, fries. It assumed a certain pride in simplicity among the wealthy classes.
Holy cow. Unholy cow. Biju knew the reasoning he should keep by his side. At lunch and dinner the space filled with young uniformed businesspeople in their twenties and thirties.
“How would you like that, ma’am?”
“Rare.”
“And you, sir?”
“Still mooin’.”
Only the fools said, “Well done, please.” Odessa could barely conceal her scorn. “Sure about that? Well, all right, but it’s going to be tough.”
She sat at the corner table where she had her morning tea and aroused the men by tearing into her steak.
“You know, Biju,” she said, laughing, “isn’t it ironic, nobody eats beef in India and just look at it—it’s the shape of a big T-bone.”
But here there were Indians eating beef. Indian bankers. Chomp chomp. He fixed them with a concentrated look of meaning as he cleared the plates. They saw it. They knew. He knew. They knew he knew. They pretended they didn’t know he knew. They looked away. He took on a sneering look. But they could afford not to notice.
“I’ll have the steak,” they said with practiced nonchalance, with an ease like a signature that’s a thoughtless scribble that you know has been practiced page after page.
Holy cow unholy cow.
Job no job.
One should not give up one’s religion, the principles of one’s parents and their parents before them. No, no matter what.
You had to live according to something. You had to find your dignity. The meat charred on the grill, the blood beaded on the surface, and then the blood also began to bubble and boil.
Those who could see a difference between a holy cow and an unholy cow would win.
Those who couldn’t see it would lose.
______
So Biju was learning to sear steaks.
Blood, meat, salt, and the cannon directed at the plates: “Would you like freshly ground pepper on that, sir?”
“You know we may be poor in India, but there only a dog would eat meat cooked like this,” said Achootan.
“We need to get aggressive about Asia,” the businessmen said to each other. “It’s opening up, new frontier, millions of potential consumers, big buying power in the middle classes, China, India, potential for cigarettes, diapers, Kentucky Fried, life insurance, water management, cell phones—big family people, always on the phone, all those men calling their mothers, all those mothers calling all their many, many children; this country is done, Europe done, Latin America done, Africa is a basket case except for oil; Asia is the next frontier. Is there oil anywhere there? They don’t have oil, do they? They must….”
The talk was basic. If anyone dared to call them Fool! they could just point at their bank accounts and let the numbers refute the accusation.
Biju thought of Saeed Saeed who still refused to eat a pig, “They dirty, man, they messy. First I am Muslim, then I am Zanzibari, then I will BE American.” Once he’d shown
Biju his new purchase of a model of a mosque with a quartz clock set into the bottom that was programmed, at the five correct hours, to start agitating: “Allah hu Akhar, la ilhaha illullah, wal lah hu akbar….” Through the crackle of the tape from the top of the minaret came ancient sand-weathered words, that keening cry from the desert offering sustenance to create a man’s strength, his faith in an empty-bellied morning and all through the day, that he might not fall through the filthy differences between nations. The lights came on encouragingly, flashing in the mosque in disco green and white.
______
“Why do you want to leave?” Odessa was shocked. A chance like they had given him! He surely didn’t know how lucky he was.
“He’ll never make it in America with that kind of attitude,” said Baz hopefully.
______
Biju left as a new person, a man full to the brim with a wish to live within a narrow purity.
______
“Do you cook with beef?” he asked a prospective employer.
“We have a Philly steak sandwich.”
“Sorry. I can’t work here.”
“They worship the cow,” he heard the owner of the establishment tell someone in the kitchen, and he felt tribal and astonishing.
______
Smoky Joe’s.
“Beef?”
“Honey,” said the lady, “Ah don’t mean to ahffend you, but Ah’m a steak eater and Ah AAHM beef.”
______
Marilyn. Blown-up photographs of Marilyn Monroe on the wall, Indian owner at the desk!
The owner was on the speakerphone.
