Karma Gone Bad

by Jenny Feldon

  Everywhere, men were peeing on the side of the road. A row of eight of them, like suspects in a lineup only facing the wrong way, aimed their streams at a wall painted with four-foot-high letters stating DO NOT PASS URINE HERE. Two dogs fornicated next to a traffic signal no one was paying any attention to. A cow bore down on us from the left lane. This one, I was pretty sure, really was a cow.

  Was there no such thing as animal control? Was this because cows were holy? As uncomfortable as I’d been with the idea of Jay behind the wheel, I was beginning to regret letting him talk me into Mr. Toad’s Wild Rickshaw Ride. The only way I liked cow was in the form of a nonfat latte with extra foam. Or on a bun with lettuce, tomato, and extra ketchup.

  The cow was getting closer and closer. We were stopped in traffic. I could see flies buzzing around its ears.

  Its tail flicked into the open side of our rickshaw. I saw horns.

  Even distribution of weight be damned. I was about to be eaten by a cow. I dove onto Jay’s side. The auto tipped dangerously to the right. The driver looked back and shouted something in Telugu, waving his arms. I ignored him.

  Jay was still enjoying the ride.

  Finally, the light changed. The cow decided to sit down for a while; our puttering little vehicle managed to outrun him. I said a quick prayer of thanks for not being eaten.

  We pulled up to an intersection and the driver started speaking in rapid-fire Telugu, gesturing with his arms, neither of which were on the steering handlebars even though the rickshaw was still moving. Finally we got it—he wanted to know which way to turn.

  We hadn’t the faintest idea.

  The driver got frustrated. The engine stalled.

  Was there a string in the back somewhere, like on a lawnmower? I imagined being stuck in the sea of cars forever, stalled, too afraid to get out without a police escort or a waiting helicopter.

  Some grunting noises, a revving sound, and the engine jerked to life. Jay and I were thrown forward as the driver vroomed up to meet another auto and ask for directions. After a brief conversation with the other driver (four hands gesturing wildly, not a single one on handlebars), our driver bobbled his head and took off, making a right turn from the left-hand lane and cutting off four lanes of traffic.

  I couldn’t take any more. I closed my eyes and prayed harder.

  The auto slammed to a stop. I opened my eyes.

  Jay dusted himself off and helped me onto the pavement in front of Ginger Court. He gave the driver one hundred rupees and told him to keep the change. The driver, dumbfounded, tried to thrust money back at us. The exchange went on for several awkward minute, neither party understanding the perplexing actions of the other. Finally we walked away, leaving him holding the money and shaking his head in confusion.

  “See?” Jay said. “We made it. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  I felt like throwing up.

  ***

  The inside of Ginger Court looked remarkably…unremarkable. Ordinary tables set with ordinary white table cloths, simple flower arrangements in green glass vases. I wasn’t sure if this was comforting or disappointing. Lately I’d felt trapped between wanting things to feel exotic and wanting them to be just like home.

  The maître d’ beckoned us forward with a deep bow. “Welcome to Ginger Court, Sir and Ma’am. Would you like to be smoking or nonsmoking?”

  We chose nonsmoking and were escorted to a cozy back table directly below the air conditioner. A purple electric bug zapper, the kind we’d had in the backyard when I was small, sat sentry in the corner, waiting to deliver mosquitoes to the next realm. Jay grabbed both of my hands and held them across the table, bumping the green vase with its single plastic lily. Water seeped onto the tablecloth. A waiter hurried over with a cloth, dabbing at the spill, apologizing like he’d knocked the flower over himself.

  “Let’s make this the first night of our adventure, OK, Wife?” Jay said, running his thumb along my wrist. “I know it’s been a tough first week and we didn’t exactly get started on the right foot. But now we’re together, and we’re out, so let’s start all over.” He lifted his water glass. “To India.”

  “To India,” I echoed. “To holy cows and rickshaws with fuzzy dice. And to no more chicken fevers.”

  “No more chicken fevers.”

  “I think we should promise each other something,” I said, spinning my water in the glass. I thought back to the night of his fever, how scared I’d been. How he’d needed me.

  “What’s that?”

  “We both know it’s going to get really hard sometimes, right? So I think we should make a deal that only one of us gets down at a time. That way it won’t ever be too bad. The other one can stay positive. You know, balance each other out.”

  Jay smiled at me, lopsided, in a way that made my pulse race. I remembered why I’d followed him halfway around the world in the first place.

  “Yeah, OK. I promise. It’s a deal.”

  We shook on it across the table.

  I was starving. In New York, there had been this great Indian restaurant, Sapphire, in Columbus Circle. On special occasions, we’d walk there and stuff ourselves full of saag and chicken tikka masala. But for some reason, none of those things were on the Ginger Court menu. Half the menu was for Chinese food, with dishes I’d never heard of, like “chili-fried American corn” and “veg Manchow soup.” The other half was Indian, but there were no samosas, no deep-fried pakoras. The word “curry” was nowhere to be found.

  The maître d’ appeared again, this time with a tray of drinks…grass green, pineapple garnish, pink-and-purple paper umbrellas. The main ingredient was either Midori liqueur or dishwashing liquid. It was hard to be sure.

  “Forgive me for intruding, but it is looking to me like you are celebrating, no?” he asked, presenting the tray with a flourish. “Please allow me to offering you specialty drinks on the house and inquiring what is the occasion?”

  “It’s our first night in India,” Jay said. “Sort of.”

  “Ah, I see. How long will your visit be?”

  “We aren’t visiting; we moved. We’ll be here for two years.”

  The maître d’ looked delighted. “Well, then allow me to be making your acquaintance as your first official friend in India, Sir and Sir Ma’am. My name is Jena. It is my pleasure to be at your service. My wife and I, we are residing in Hyderabad seven years now. We have shifted from Chennai.”

  Seeing our menus still open on the table, Jena looked concerned. “Have you made your selections already? Or can I be of helping to determine your choices?”

  Jay cleared his throat. “Uh, we were having a hard time finding some things on the menu. Do you have chicken curry? Or chicken tikka masala? Or samosas?”

  Jena shook his head sadly. “Ah. Those are being delicacies from Northern India only. We at Ginger Court are specializing in Southern Indian cuisine, Sir,” he said. “Hyderabadi food is being like no other food in all of India. Much flavor, much spice. May I be of suggesting a murgh biryani? Or some palak paneer?”

  “What’s ‘murgh’?” I asked.

  “Murgh is as you are calling chicken,” Jena said. “We are proudly serving non-veg delicacies here.” He paused, looking at our confused faces, perhaps noticing our celebratory mood had faded. “I am having idea. What are your good names, Sir and Sir Ma’am?”

  “Our good names?” Jay asked.

  “Yes, yes, your good names. Like my good name is being Jena. Your good names, the names by which people call you?”

  “I’m Jay. This is my wife, Jenny.”

  Jena nodded and bowed his head at each of us in turn, rubbing his hands together in excitement. “Jay and Jenny, Jenny is like my own good name, Jena. Is good fortune, Sir and Ma’am. As your first official friend in Hyderabad and maître d’ at the finest cuisine restaurant in our city, I am making extra special arrange
ment with you. Allow me to be choosing your foods. Will you say yes?”

  It didn’t appear there was any other acceptable answer. Jena scurried back toward the kitchen. In moments, he was back with a fragrant bowl and two sets of forks and knives. “I am thinking you would prefer eating with utensils like our many Western patrons, no?” I looked around and noticed for the first time that everyone near us was eating with his or her hands.

  Jena heaped a pile of corn kernels on each of our plates. “Is traditional American chili corn, Jay Sir and Jenny Ma’am! Specialty of Ginger Court House. Taste and find delicious, no?”

  I took a bite. Deep-fried, spiced with chili flakes and dusted with a sweet, sticky sauce, the corn was one of the strangest things I’d ever tasted—but it was delicious. Jena watched my expression carefully. When he realized I liked it, his mouth broke into a big grin beneath his carefully groomed mustache.

  “More delicacies to come,” he crowed, dashing back toward the kitchen. “Next course being for authentic India!”

  Jay and I looked at our green umbrella drinks, neither of us actually brave enough to taste the liquid. I took another bite of chili corn instead. It wasn’t the chicken tikka masala I’d been expecting, but it was something. It was a start.

  Chapter 5

  Jena’s benevolent, mustached face flickered before me like a mirage as I bent over the toilet bowl again, and again, and again. He’d looked so sweet. He’d treated us so kindly. The food had tasted so good. Nothing about Ginger Court’s innocuous décor suggested it was secretly a breeding ground for gastrointestinal torture and doom. I curled into a ball on the shower floor, clinging to the toilet bowl for dear life. Was this why Indian toilets were installed in the middle of the shower? To make washing off easier when you were finished throwing up? I’d consumed half a bottle of sticky pink Pepto-Bismol (another gift from the ever-wise Alexis) and I still felt like death. This was food poisoning on a whole other level—the kind that made me think consuming actual poison was the only reasonable way out. When the waves of nausea finally subsided, I crawled back into bed, exhaustion forcing my eyes closed the instant my body collapsed against the unyielding wooden mattress.

  “Are you alive under there?” Jay asked several hours later, his voice slicing through the electric hum of the air conditioner and my lovely dream about lattes in Central Park. He rubbed my back through the sheets. “I was getting worried about you. You sounded awful last night. I think this is what they meant when they warned us about ‘Delhi Belly.’”

  “I can’t believe you’re not sick,” I moaned. “It isn’t fair. We ate exactly the same things.”

  “My immune system is just better than yours,” he said smugly. “I feel great. In fact, I’m hungry. Is there anything for breakfast?”

  Sitting up in bed, I paused to assess my stomach’s state of unrest. I felt mildly nauseated, but human. The worst appeared to be over. I stumbled to my feet, jostling a still-sleeping Tucker, and headed for the bathroom. I reached for the toilet paper, still barely awake, and shrieked in surprise. The roll was soaked through.

  “JAY. Bring me new toilet paper. It’s soaking wet AGAIN,” I yelled. The door opened a crack and a new roll, the consistency of gift-bag tissue paper but blessedly dry, flew in.

  “Oh good, you’re out of bed. Any thoughts on breakfast?” Jay called back.

  He appeared in the kitchen as I was putting the finishing touches on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. His Armani suit looked strange against the backdrop of the idol-filled puja prayer room behind him.

  “Again? We can’t eat this forever, you know.” He took the sandwich anyway, careful to keep the crumbs from falling on his jacket.

  “We don’t have any other food.”

  “Find some. You could at least toast the bread.”

  “There’s no toaster.”

  “Find one of those too.”

  He left. I chugged the remaining Pepto-Bismol for my own breakfast and sat down on the elephant swing, Tucker on my lap, tracing the links of the swing’s heavy chains with my fingertips. The metal felt cool even in the sweltering heat of the room. We swayed there idly, the tips of my toes making intricate paths through the grime on the marble floor.

  Though I hated to admit it, Jay was right. The initial shock-and-awe phase couldn’t last forever. We were going to be living here for two whole years. I didn’t want to spend the entire time stumbling around with a Made in America bag over my head. We needed to settle in, to start making the expat life in India our life. And that meant buying groceries.

  In Manhattan, groceries were a non-issue. We simply didn’t need them. We ate our meals at work or in restaurants or had them delivered. Who needed a supermarket when there was a Thai place on the corner? Other people, non-New Yorkers, kept flour and sugar in ceramic canisters on their kitchen counters. We kept a stack of takeout menus in a special holder we’d gotten for our wedding.

  Cooking wasn’t a life skill; it was a hobby. Something to do on weekends, like visiting a museum or going for a walk along the river. We’d search for a recipe online, walk to Whole Foods, and buy exactly what we needed. Then we’d make an adventure out of making a meal. Weeks later, I’d throw away the leftover ingredients: moldy packages of tarragon, jars of tomato paste with one tablespoon missing.

  I eyed the container of Skippy. It was almost empty. Ditto for the Costco-sized jar of strawberry Smucker’s. Subu’s weekly delivery of white bread and Amul brand (Utterly, Butterly Delicious!) imitation butter weren’t much use by themselves. After the horrors of last night, I was ready to swear off Indian food altogether. But while avoiding Indian food might protect me from another round of “Delhi Belly,” the way things were going, we might die of malnutrition instead.

  I dialed Venkat’s mobile. He answered, startled, like I’d woken him.

  “Ten minutes, Madam. I be there ten minutes.”

  Venkat and I had an arrangement: if I needed him to drive me somewhere, I’d text him: Come home. Otherwise, I let him hang out at Jay’s office building with the other drivers who didn’t have accompanying spouses to ferry around. They whiled away the hours in BKC’s cool underground parking garage, playing poker and smoking hand-rolled beedi cigarettes, escaping the heat of the day. It had to be more fun than being here, dozing behind the wheel of the Scorpio in the empty Matwala Shayar parking lot, waiting for me to muster the courage to actually leave the house.

  The worst part of having a driver was the pressure to drive somewhere. I wasn’t used to having someone—even someone as endearing as Venkat, with his hipster beanie and his ever-so-slight Reddy swagger—bear silent witness to my every move. Or lack of them.

  “Where do I go for groceries, Venkat?” I asked, climbing across the backseat. Already, the air conditioning in the brand-new Scorpio wasn’t working. I was beginning to think it was my fault, that my very presence in India was having some bizarre Mercury-retrograde effect on every appliance designed to lower the temperature. Venkat had been looking in the rearview mirror, adjusting his part. He stuffed the comb in his pocket, embarrassed, when he saw me approach. The smell of his Axe hair cream was overpowering in the hot car.

  “Groceries, Madam?”

  “Food? Supplies?”

  “Ah. Some expat peoples be going Food World, Madam. But maybe for you, Q-Mart.”

  “Q-Mart?” I remembered Alexis mentioning an imported food store on the night of the aspirin run.

  “Yes, Madam. Madhapur Road. Much American foods.” The Scorpio’s wheels spun as he swerved out of the Matwala Shayar lot, spraying the sleeping street dogs with mud.

  “Venkat!”

  “Madam?”

  “The dogs!”

  “Only dogs, Madam. No thinking. No mind.”

  “I mind.”

  “Sorry, Madam.”

  The ride, like every ride, felt endless. I looked out the window.
Female construction workers in saris and those yellow plastic hard hats knelt along the side of the road, digging rocks from the earth with bare, blistered hands. I looked down at my own hands, cuticles ragged where I’d been gnawing them. Yesterday, I’d been complaining to Jay about how badly I needed a manicure.

  The air was stifling. I stared at the back of Venkat’s head and silently cursed him for his obsession with styling products. Outside the window, a herd of buffalo ambled along, oblivious to the chorus of honking horns that tried to scare them out of the way.

  “Where are being buffalo U.S., Madam?” Venkat asked, observing my fascination.

  “There aren’t any.”

  “NO buffalo, Madam?!”

  “Well, maybe there are some. In the zoo. Or maybe Montana. But they don’t look like this. They’re…fuzzy. And they don’t walk in the road.”

  “But what about city buffalo, Madam?” Venkat asked. “Where living city buffalo?”

  I told him our cities don’t have buffalo. Venkat frowned pityingly, like he thought it was a shame.

  We came to a stop at the Jubilee Hills check post, the only landmark in Hyderabad I’d learned to recognize. There was no actual post, which was perplexing. I cracked my window to get some air.

  “NO, Madam!” Venkat shouted. At the same time, a set of brown fingers slithered into the car, pressing against the window glass, trying to gain more access. I leapt across the backseat to the other side.

  “Please! Hungry! Rupees! Ma’am! Look at me!”

  The Scorpio was crawling with ragged Indian boys. Screaming and laughing, they leapt onto the car, fearless, brazen with common purpose. They were everywhere—clinging to the sides, dangling from the roof, hammering the doors with practiced fists. A grinning boy, no more than five years old with stick-out ears and dressed in shredded jean cut-offs, pressed his naked belly against the window. He pointed back and forth between his mouth and his stomach, urging me, through the tinted glass, to help him. Venkat opened his door and leaned out, screaming at the urchins in Telugu. They laughed and ignored him.