by Kiran Desai
“Rajnibhai, Kem chho?”
“What?”
“Rajnibhai?”
“Who aez thees?” Very Indian-trying-to-be-American accent.
“Kem chho? Saaru chho? Teme samjo chho?”
“WHAAT?”
“Don’t speak Gujerati, sir?”
“No.”
“You are Gujerati, no?”
“No.”
“But your name is Gujerati??”
“Who are you??!!”
“You are not Gujerati?”
“Who are you??!!”
“AT&T, sir, offering special rates to India.”
“Don’t know anyone in India.”
“Don’t know anyone???? You must have some relative?”
“Yeah,” American accent growing more pronounced, “but I don’ taaalk to my relateev….”
Shocked silence.
“Don’t talk to your relative?”
Then, “We are offering forty-seven cents per minute.”
“Vhaat deeference does that make? I haeve aalready taaald you,” he spoke s 1 o w as if to an idiot, “no taleephone caalls to Eeendya.”
“But you are from Gujerat?” Anxious voice.
“Veea Kampala, Uganda, Teepton, England, and Roanoke state of Vaergeenia! One time I went to Eeendya and, laet me tell you, you canaat pay me to go to that caantreey agaen!”
______
Slipping out and back on the street. It was horrible what happened to Indians abroad and nobody knew but other Indians abroad. It was a dirty little rodent secret. But, no, Biju wasn’t done. His country called him again. He smelled his fate. Drawn, despite himself, by his nose, around a corner, he saw the first letter of the sign, G, then an AN. His soul anticipated the rest: DHI As he approached the Gandhi Café, the air gradually grew solid. It was always unbudgeable here, with the smell of a thousand and one meals accumulated, no matter the winter storms that howled around the corner, the rain, the melting heat. Though the restaurant was dark, when Biju tested the door, it swung open.
______
There in the dim space, at the back, amid lentils splattered about and spreading grease transparencies on the cloths of abandoned tables yet uncleared, sat Harish-Harry, who, with his brothers Gaurish-Gary and Dhansukh-Danny, ran a triplet of Gandhi Cafés in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He didn’t look up as Biju entered. He had his pen hovering over a request for a donation sent by a cow shelter outside Edison, New Jersey.
If you gave a hundred dollars, in addition to such bonus miles as would be totted up to your balance sheet for lives to come, “We will send you a free gift; please check the box to indicate your preference”:
1. A preframed decorative painting of Krishna-Lila: “She longs for her lord and laments.”
2. A copy of the Bhagavad Gita accompanied by commentary by Pandit so-and-so (B.A., MPhil., Ph.D., President of the Hindu Heritage Center), who has just completed a lecture tour in sixty-six countries.
3. A CD of devotional music beloved by Mahatma Gandhi.
4. A gift-coupon to the Indiagiftmart: “Surprise the special lady in your life with our special choli in the colors of onion and tender pink, coupled with a butter lehnga. For the woman who makes your house a home, a set of twenty-five spice jars with vacuum lids. Stock up on Haldiram’s Premium Nagpur Chana Nuts that you must have been missing….”
His pen hovered. Pounced.
To Biju he said: “Beef? Are you crazy? We are an all-Hindu establishment. No Pakistanis, no Bangladeshis, those people don’t know how to cook, have you been to those restaurants on Sixth Street? Bilkul bekaar….”
One week later, Biju was in the kitchen and Gandhi’s favorite tunes were being sung over the sound system.
Twenty-three
Gyan and Sai’s romance was flourishing and the political trouble continued to remain in the background for them.
Eating momos dipped in chutney, Gyan said: “You’re my momo.”
Sai said: “No you’re mine.”
Ah, dumpling stage of love—it had set them off on a tumble of endearments and nicknames. They thought of them in quiet moments and placed them before each other like gifts. The momo, mutton in dough, one thing plump and cozy within the other—it connoted protection, affection.
But during the time they ate together at Gompu’s, Gyan had used his hands without a thought and Sai ate with the only implement on the table—a tablespoon, rolling up her roti on the side and nudging the food onto the spoon with it. Noticing this difference, they had become embarrassed and put the observation aside.
“Kishmish,” he called her to cover it up, and “Kaju” she called him, raisin and cashew, sweet, nutty, and expensive. Because new love makes sightseers out of couples even in their own town, they went on excursions to the Mong Pong Nature Reserve, to Delo Lake; they picnicked by the Teesta and the Relli. They went to the sericulture institute from which came a smell of boiling worms. The manager gave them a tour of the piles of yellowy cocoons moving subtly in a corner, machines that tested waterproofing, flexibility; and he shared his dream of the future, of the waterproof and drip-dry sari, stain-proof, prepleated, zippable, reversible, super duper new millennium sari, named for timeless Bollywood hits like Disco Dancer. They took the toy train and went to the Darjeeling zoo and viewed in their free, self-righteous, modern love, the unfree and ancient bars, behind which lived a red panda, ridiculously solemn for being such a madly beautiful thing, chewing his bamboo leaves as carefully as a bank clerk doing numbers. They visited the Zang Dog Palri Fo Brang Monastery on Durpin Dara, where little monks were being entertained by the gray-haired ones, running up and down pulling the children on rice sacks, sailing them over the polished monastery floor, before the murals of demons and Guru Padmasambhava with his wrathful smile ensconced in a curly mustache, his carmine cloak, diamond scepter, lotus hat with a vulture feather; before a ghost riding a snow lion and a green Tara on a yak; sailing the children before the doors that opened like bird wings onto the scene of mountains all around.
From Durpin Dara, where you could see so far and high, the world resembled a map from a divine perspective. One could see the landscape stretching below and beyond, rivers and plateaus. Gyan asked Sai about her family, but she felt uncertain about what she should say, because she thought if she told him about the space program, he might feel inferior and ashamed. “My parents eloped and nobody spoke to them again. They died in Russia where my father was a scientist.”
But his own family story also led overseas, he told Sai, quite proudly. They had more in common than they thought.
______
The story went like this:
In the 1800s his ancestors had left their village in Nepal and arrived in Darjeeling, lured by promises of work on a tea plantation. There, in a small hamlet bordering one of the remoter tea estates, they had owned a buffalo renowned for its astonishingly creamy milk. By and by along came the Imperial Army, measuring potential soldiers in villages all over the hills with a measuring tape and ruler, and they had happened upon the impressive shoulders of Gyan’s great-grandfather, who had grown so strong on the milk of their buffalo that he had beaten the village sweet-seller’s son in a wrestling match, an exceptionally glossy and healthy boy. An earlier recruit from their village reported soldiers were kept in ladylike comfort—warm and dry with blankets and socks, butter and ghee, mutton twice a week, an egg each day, water always in the taps, medicine for every ailment, every whim and scuff. You could solicit help for an itch on the bottom or a bee sting without shame, all for no more work than to march up and down the Grand Trunk Road. The army offered far more money to this boy grown strong on buffalo milk than his father had ever earned, for his father labored as a runner for the plantation; left before dawn with a big conical basket divided into sections on his back and strove to return by sundown, struggling uphill. The basket would now be filled with a vegetable layer and a live chicken pecking at the weave; eggs, toilet paper, soap, hairpins, and letter paper on top for the mem
sahib to write: “My darling daughter, it is wildly beautiful here and the beauty almost, almost makes up for the loneliness….”
So he swore allegiance to the Crown, and off he went, the beginning of over a hundred years of family commitment to the wars of the English.
At the beginning, the promise had held true—all Gyan’s great-grandfather did was march for many prosperous years, and he acquired a wife and three sons. But then they sent him to Mesopotamia where Turkish bullets made a sieve of his heart and he leaked to death on the battlefield. As a kindness to the family, that they might not lose their income, the army employed his eldest son, although the famous buffalo, by now, was dead, and the new recruit was spindly. Indian soldiers fought in Burma, in Gibraltar, in Egypt, in Italy.
Two months short of his twenty-third birthday, in 1943, the spindly soldier was killed in Burma, shakily defending the British against the Japanese. His brother was offered a job and this boy died, too, in Italy, outside Florence, not fighting at all, but making jam from apricots for the major of the battalion in a villa housing British troops. Six lemons, he had been instructed, and four cups of sugar. He stirred the pot in the un-threatening Italian countryside, pheasants whirring over the olives and the vines, the resistance army unearthing truffles in the woods. It was a particularly bountiful spring, and then, they were bombed—
When Gyan was quite small, the last family recruit had one day climbed off the bus in Kalimpong’s bus station and arrived missing a toe. There was nobody who could remember him, but finally, their father’s childhood memories were resurrected and the man was recognized as an uncle. He had lived with Gyan’s family until he died, but they never discovered where he traveled to, or which countries he had fought against. He came of a generation, all over the world, for whom it was easier to forget than to remember, and the more their children pressed, the more their memory dissipated. Once Gyan had asked: “Uncle, but what is England like?”
And he said: “I don’t know….”
“How can you not know???”
“But I have never been.”
All these years in the British army and he had never been to England! How could this be? They thought he had prospered and forgotten them, living like a London lord….
Where had he been, then?
The uncle wouldn’t say. Once every four weeks he went to the post office to collect his seven-pound-a-month pension. Mostly he sat on a folding chair, silently moving an expressionless face like a sunflower, a blank handicapped insistence following the sun, the only goal left in his life to match the two, the orb of his face and the orb of light.
The family had since invested their fortunes in schoolteaching and Gyan’s father taught in a tea plantation school beyond Darjeeling.
______
Then the story stopped. “What about your father? What is he like?” Sai asked, but she didn’t press him. After all, she knew about stories having to stop.
______
The nights were turning chilly already, and it grew dark earlier. Sai, returning late and fumbling for the road beneath her feet, stopped at Uncle Potty’s for a torch. “Where’s that handsome fellow…?” Uncle Potty and Father Booty teased her. “Goodness. Those Nepali boys, high cheekbones, arm muscles, broad shoulders. Men who can do things, Sai, cut down trees, build fences, carry heavy boxes… mmm mmm.”
The cook was waiting at the gate with a lantern when she finally reached Cho Oyu. His bad-tempered wrinkled face peered from an assortment of mufflers and sweaters. “I’ve been waiting, waiting…. In this darkness you have not come home!” he complained, waddling in front of her along the path from gate to house, looking round and womanish.
“Why don’t you leave me alone?” she said, conscious for the first time of the unbearable stickiness of family and friends when she had found freedom and space in love.
The cook felt hurt to his chutney core. “I’ll give you one smack,” he shouted. “From childhood I have brought you up! With so much love! Is this any way to talk? Soon I’ll die and then who will you turn to? Yes, yes, soon I’ll be dead. Maybe then you’ll be happy. Here I am, so worried, and there you are, having fun, don’t care….”
“Ohhoho.” As usual she ended by attempting to placate him. He wouldn’t be placated and then he was, just a little.
Twenty-four
In the Gandhi Café, the lights were kept low, the better to hide the stains. It was a long journey from here to the fusion trend, the goat cheese and basil samosa, the mango margarita. This was the real thing, generic Indian, and it could be ordered complete, one stop on the subway line or even on the phone: gilt and red chairs, plastic roses on the table with synthetic dewdrops, cloth paintings portraying—
Oh no, not again—
Yes again—
Krishna and the gopis, village belle at the well….
And the menu—
Oh no, not again—
Yes, again—
Tikka masala, tandoori grill, navrattan vegetable curry, dal makhni, pappadum. Said Harish-Harry: “Find your market. Study your market. Cater to your market.” Demand-supply. Indian-American point of agreement. This is why we make good immigrants. Perfect match. (In fact, dear sirs, madams, we were practicing a highly evolved form of capitalism long before America was America; yes, you may think it’s your success, but all civilization comes from India, yes).
But was he underestimating his market? He didn’t care.
The customers—poor students, untenured professors—filled up at the lunch buffet, “ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $5.99,” tottered out overcome by the tipsy snake charmer music and the heaviness of the meal.
______
To add up the new numbers that came clinking in, Harish-Harry’s wife arrived on Sunday mornings after she had washed her hair. A horsetail of sopping tresses, bound loosely in a gold ribbon from a Diwali fruit-and-nut box, dripped onto the floor behind.
“Arre, Biju… to sunao kahani,” she always said, “batao… what’s the story?”
But it didn’t matter that he had no story to tell, because she went immediately to the ledgers kept under a row of gods and incense sticks.
“Hae hae,” her husband laughed with pleasure, diamond and gold glints coming forth on the black velvet of his pupils, “You can’t make a fool of Malini. She get on the phone, she get the best deal of anybody.”
______
It had been Malini who had suggested the staff live down below in the kitchen.
“Free housing,” Harish-Harry told Biju.
By offering a reprieve from NYC rents, they could cut the pay to a quarter of the minimum wage, reclaim the tips for the establishment, keep an eye on the workers, and drive them to work fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-hour donkey days. Saran, Jeev, Rishi, Mr. Lalkaka, and now Biju. All illegal. “We are a happy family here,” she said, energetically slapping vegetable oil on her arms and face, “no need for lotions-potions, baba, this works just as well.”
Biju had left the basement in Harlem one early morning when the leaves of the scraggly tree outside were an orange surprise, supple and luminous. He had one bag with him and his mattress—a rectangle of foam with egg crate marking rolled into a bundle and tied with string. Before he packed, he took one more look at his parents’ wedding photo that he had brought from India, the color leaching out; it was, by now, a picture of two serious ghosts. Just as he was about to go, Jacinto, who always appeared for his rent at the right moment, came around the corner: “Adios adios,” gold tooth flashing a miner’s delight.
Biju looked back for the last time at that facade of former respectability deteriorating. In the distance stood Grant’s tomb like a round gray funeral cake with barbarous trim. Closer, the projects were a dense series of bar graphs against the horizon.
At the Gandhi Café, amid oversized pots and sawdusty sacks of masalas, he set up his new existence. The men washed their faces and rinsed their mouths over the kitchen sink, combed their hair in the postage stamp mirror tacked above, hung their tro
users on a rope strung across the room, along with the dishtowels. At night they unrolled their bedding wherever there was room.
The rats of his earlier jobs had not forsaken Biju. They were here, too, exulting in the garbage, clawing through wood, making holes that Harish-Harry stuffed with steel wool and covered with bricks, but they moved such petty obstructions aside. They were drinking milk just like the billboards told them, eating protein; vitamins and minerals spilled out of their invincible ears and claws, their gums and fur. Kwarshikov, beri beri, goiter (that in Kalimpong had caused a population of mad toad throated dwarves to roam the hillside), such deficiency disorders were unknown to such a population.
One chewed Biju’s hair at night.
“For its nest,” said Jeev. “It’s expecting, I think.”
They took to creeping up and sleeping on the tables. At daybreak they shuffled back down before Harish arrived, “Chalo, ckalo, another day, another dollar.”
______
Toward his staff Harish-Harry was avuncular, jocular, but he could suddenly become angry and disciplinary. “Shuddap, keep shut,” he’d say, and he wasn’t above smacking their heads. But when an American patron walked through the door, his manner changed instantly and drastically into another thing and a panic seemed to overcome him.
“Hallo Hallo,” he said to a pink satin child smearing food all over the chair legs, “Ya givin your mom too much trouble, ha ha? But one day ya make her feel proud, right? Gointa be a beeeg man, reech man, vhat you say? Ya vanna nice cheekan karry?” He smiled and genuflected.
Harish-Harry—the two names, Biju was learning, indicated a deep rift that he hadn’t suspected when he first walked in and found him, a manifestation of that clarity of principle which Biju was seeking. That support for a cow shelter was in case the Hindu version of the afterlife turned out to be true and that, when he died, he was put through the Hindu machinations of the beyond. What, though, if other gods sat upon the throne? He tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any.
