America for Beginners

by Leah Franqui

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. It was as if Jake had been an imaginary friend that Bhim had played with for a while but no longer needed. Jake tried not to care, he tried to remember that Bhim was from a different culture, that he was closeted and racked with self-hatred, and that they hadn’t been dating, they hadn’t been anything, really. But it hurt. It hurt everywhere, like sleeping on a sunburn. Jake started agreeing to dates with anyone who even thought about asking. After one, a brunch in downtown Los Angeles, Jake was driving home, cursing the traffic, when he got a call from Bhim, who was at the airport, waiting for Jake to pick him up.

  When Jake saw Bhim on the sidewalk by Arrivals, Bhim’s face was as stiff as a mask. Jake looked at him for a moment, waiting for his eyes to flicker with affection, recognition, anything. It was like watching a statue come to life, the way expression poured into Bhim’s face as he saw Jake. Jake wondered if this was why he liked Bhim so much, the way he felt like maybe Bhim was coming to life just for him.

  They didn’t say much to each other in the car. There were many smiles, tentative and deeply aware. There were no apologies or explanations. Bhim had a small bag, and he informed Jake that he would be spending the weekend with him. There was nothing more to say. Instead, Bhim sang along with the radio. It was the second time they’d met in person, and Jake knew it was love.

  Bhim had never had sex with anyone before, man or woman, which he confessed once they had survived the Los Angeles traffic and were standing in Jake’s immaculate bedroom, with its coordinating shades of blue and gray. Jake had lowered the blinds and curtained the windows, but Bhim still looked at them like they might let the whole world in to see him. Jake thought of his first times, his drunken nights in college dorms and his pain afterward, and he vowed to himself that he would make this good for Bhim, that they would go slow and enjoy everything. Bhim lasted all of five minutes into their naked foreplay before he spent himself on Jake’s coverlet. They spent the rest of the evening doing laundry and eating Chinese food and trying again, and again, until it was good, for both of them, better than good, it was perfect. Jake bit back the words he wanted to say and enjoyed sleeping next to someone, but he couldn’t help but think about the way Bhim had looked at the airport before he had seen Jake, like a dead person, like someone who was already gone.

  5

  Pival always blamed herself for her marriage, for the way it became and the way it began. Pival had been the first one to say hello, in a fashion. Ram Sengupta had been sitting in the canteen, reading her university newspaper. It was very much her university newspaper, as Pival was the editor, a fact that her delighted father would recount to anyone he could force to listen. Ram Sengupta, then thirty years old and somehow, to the grave distress of his family, unmarried, had picked up a copy of the Calcutta College Courier with amusement as he waited for his friend Charlie Roy, a professor teaching at the school, who was always late.

  Pival, young and alive with purpose, watched this tall, slim, yet commanding stranger sneer at her paper and saw red. Who was this man? What did he know of journalism? She could not stand by and watch him scorn her hard work, her long nights of setting type and editing articles. A closer look revealed that this stranger, handsome as he was, was laughing at her own article, a piece she’d been quite proud of, detailing the city’s architecture as a troubling metaphor for the continued influence of British colonialism on Indian mentality and cultural consciousness. Her article was cautiously tinged with Naxalite rigor, coated in intellectual argument, and she was deeply proud of it. Pival was not one to stand by while her work was being impugned in such a cavalier manner. She marched up to this strange man and asked him in polite and careful English:

  “What, exactly, is so very funny?”

  Ram Sengupta looked up at this serious young woman, with her dark eyes glinting, and asked her to join him for tea. Pival was so flustered that she sat down without another word. When Charlie Roy finally showed up some thirty minutes later, he found his friend, a confirmed bachelor, assessing his future wife.

  The two fused into a unit almost immediately. Ram’s authority destroyed Pival’s own sense of herself and replaced it with a version that Ram created, a version she liked better, for a time. For Pival’s part she had never met a man who looked at her with such a mix of calculation and interest, and she mistook his manipulative speculation for a deep true love. So, for that matter, did he. They were engaged within a month.

  Looking back on her excitement at the time, Pival cursed herself for being ten times a fool. She had thought Ram would be the antidote to the loneliness and longing she had begun to feel. Instead, he became the cause of both. She had thought for a while that her marriage was normal, no worse than many, better than most. But it had proved weak, and in the end, rotten to the core.

  But Ram was gone now. And she could have her son back, just as soon as she could wrench him from the grasp of the man in California. They could be together. And if he was really gone, if it hadn’t been, as she hoped, a kindly meant act that pierced her heart with its cruelty, she could die with Rahi. Even if she couldn’t live with him.

  6

  The morning after Jake and Bhim had slept together for the first time, Jake, as he had done every morning for the last twelve years, took a run. His lifetime of waiting in traffic had bred in him a need for movement. He had run through college, through his early twenties, and even now, curled up in the arms of a man he wanted and hadn’t known he could have, his muscles still tensed and prepared themselves. He shifted carefully in Bhim’s embrace, inching out of it in slow degrees, and then, grabbing his shorts and his phone, he escaped the room and was gone, his feet pounding the pavement as he moved with tireless joy through the morning haze of the city.

  On his daily runs, Jake would often see remnants of the Los Angeles nightlife haunting the city and wincing in the harsh light of the sunrise. What hurt their eyes made his glow; he loved the mornings. Jake worked for a large architecture firm located in downtown L.A., which catered to the elite and the effete, as his bosses liked to joke. The firm included both landscape architecture and residential and commercial work, and often attracted clients interested in combined design, updating or creating new spaces that integrated natural design as well as buildings. Jake worked in the landscape department. He enjoyed any work that took him outside, that had him under the sun for hours on end. He loved the smell of dirt and the way plants anchored into it.

  After college, Jake had floated for a bit, uncertain what he wanted to do next. He had enjoyed working on Brown’s organic farm so he got a job at the New York Botanical Garden as a researcher. But he soon realized that biology wasn’t as interesting to him as space, and the way plants and buildings could fill it. He enrolled in architecture school the following fall. Within two years he had his master’s and, weary of the East Coast winters, chose a job in Los Angeles, to the delight of his parents, and started working at Space Solutions. Once he settled into that it seemed that he settled into everything. Life became pleasant, compartmentalized, and predictable. The job was good, the people were nice, the high school friends who like him had come back were happy to reconnect, the guys he met were fit and a little dim, but open and friendly and never hard to catch or lose. His apartment was spacious, his world was small.

  Now someone had joined him, and the apartment no longer was empty. Suddenly he wondered why he was running away from home, not toward it. What would Bhim say, when he woke up? Would he regret this? Jake’s breath caught in his chest. This had been one of the best moments of his life, the first time he had felt truly with someone else, in sync with him. What if Bhim hated what they had done, what if he woke up horrified with Jake and with himself? He tried to shake off these thoughts, to run again, but his feet had turned to lead. He walked home, dragging his body the few blocks back to his apartment, and opened the door with dread.

  Bhim was still in the bed, sleeping. His lashes formed spiky uneven crescents on his cheeks and Jak
e felt a sense of relief that there was something in Bhim’s face that wasn’t perfect. He watched him sleep deeply and got into the shower. Jake washed himself off briskly, trying to ignore the fear that had struck his heart. What if, what if, what if resounded in his brain and he wished he could drown out the noise of his worries. He almost wanted to wake Bhim up, to face his judgment and his disgust sooner rather than later, but each moment gave him more time to feel like they were together.

  He struggled to clean his back, working to reach the space where his hand refused to reach, right underneath his shoulder blades and above his tailbone. Suddenly he felt a hand joining his, washing that area for him, spreading the soap gently up and down his spine. He held his body perfectly still, not wanting the moment to end. He felt a handful of water spill down his back, washing away the soap.

  “Feeling dirty?” he asked, his voice a strange croaking sound. He closed his eyes, regretting the stupid innuendo of the question, although he wanted a genuine answer. He wanted to know if Bhim felt unclean after what they had done but had sheepishly used a line from a teen drama.

  “Maybe.” Bhim’s voice whispered the response in his ear. “Help me wash?” Jake turned to see Bhim’s face, earnest, smiling, cautious, and amused. Hopeful. He kissed him, and fell in love all over again.

  Later, he tried to get Bhim to run with him, but Bhim hated it. Bhim could manage only a few blocks at a panting, halting stride before giving up, claiming that his heart would explode. It was a relief to find something Bhim was so bad at, something that ruffled his serenity. Still, it was disappointing. Jake knew that with Bhim he would have a future of running alone. He tried to accept that, he did, but he realized that his routes became circles, wider and wider, but always pulling him back to the same place. Whenever Bhim came to stay with him his runs were short and left him with that same fear, that if he went too far or stayed away too long Bhim would be gone, that he would return home to an empty house and a vacant life. Jake could run well only when Bhim returned to Berkeley and he was alone. He ignored that, though, refusing to examine the fact that the two things that made him feel best were mutually exclusive. He tried to stop feeling afraid whenever Bhim left, but he couldn’t hide it from his dreams. In his dreams Bhim ran, and he outpaced Jake, even, getting farther and farther away forever.

  7

  The last time Satya Roy had been able to look himself in the eye it was in the small cracked mirror that hung in the communal bathroom of his old Sunset Park apartment. He did not know it was his last time, although if he had been asked, he would not have said he minded. Before moving to the United States he hadn’t seen his own face very much. The bathroom in the apartment in which he had grown up in Bangladesh, in the city of Sylhet, was a tiny one, with a squatting toilet. He had always bathed outside near the waterspout, rubbing his body with mustard oil, when he could afford it, and rinsing it off with a bucket while the others in his apartment complex waited nearby, eager to use the facilities. These did not include a mirror. His grandmother, with whom he had grown up, had a small hand mirror, which she had used to let him check his hair from the back when she had cut it on the second Sunday of every third month. Otherwise, he saw mirrors only in shops. Once he moved to America, he looked at himself in a mirror every day. He showered in a ceramic tub, and the water was always there in the pipes, waiting for him. The toilet had been difficult to manage but he had figured it out, eventually, by perching awkwardly over it in a spindly squat. In his first two months in America, Satya had realized that his favorite thing about the country was his own bathroom.

  There had been a repeated knocking at the door. Satya didn’t realize it at first; he thought that this was just the throbbing of his head.

  “Just a minute!” He heard a muffled response in a language he didn’t understand. Satya shrugged and looked at himself again, patting his cheeks and wondering when he would have enough hair to shave.

  The apartment was his because he paid four hundred dollars a month, an amount he couldn’t afford, to live there, but it also belonged to the four other immigrants who called the minuscule two-bedroom home. Two of them were Mexican, Juan and Ernesto, and after they returned home from their job at a restaurant, they split their bounty of leftovers with each other over beers and hushed conversation in Spanish. All of the sounds seemed to Satya at once nasal and soft, like a sweet-sour pudding of a language. They stuck together, mostly, always quietly speaking with each other, but when they had extra food they always shared it with everyone, meticulously dividing each dish with almost surgical precision to ensure fairness in distribution.

  One of the other residents, Kosi, was from Ghana, and though he had been an engineer in Africa, now he worked at an auto parts shop in the neighborhood. His voice reminded Satya of a thick stew with chunks of meat and bone in it. Satya, who prided himself on his fluid command of English, both the proper construction as taught to him in school and the slang he’d learned from the MTV videos he viewed in electronics stores, couldn’t understand a word his African housemate said. Satya decided that the poor man must be struggling to learn, and he generously tried to teach Kosi in between his own searches for work. Thus far these lessons had not progressed well. At times it seemed that Kosi thought that he was teaching Satya instead.

  The last roommate was Satya’s only real friend, in America and in the world, Ravi Hafiz, his fellow immigrant from Bangladesh, the man who slept near him nightly on the floor of the kitchen and shared his dreams. They had been friends since they were six years old. They had snuck into America together. They had made a pact to help each other survive. And that morning, Satya was going to steal Ravi’s job.

  Ravi and Satya had grown up together in Sylhet, which sat on the northeast corner of Bangladesh, very near the Indian border. They were not friends because of a shared religion, or even a shared language. Satya was Hindu, one of the small population still left in Bangladesh, and Ravi was Muslim, one of the overwhelming majority. They had gone to different schools and lived in different neighborhoods, and they had very little in common in background or family life. And yet, they had been thick as thieves—and sometimes they were thieves—since the day they met. They were friends because they were a part of the same club, and it was a terrible club indeed. They were both the sons of Bangladeshi war babies, inadvertent heirs of their country’s shame.

  As Satya had learned in school, along with every other Bangladeshi child, the revolution of 1971 had been met with an immediate Pakistani invasion and the wide-scale systematic rape of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women. Those rapes had, approximately nine months or so after the army came through, led to the emergence of pale-skinned babies from the bodies of their darker mothers. Though fairer had always been lovelier in Bangladesh, these butter-skinned children were a visible reminder of the revolution and the generation of women who should, as they were so often told, have fought harder. Despite the departure of the Pakistani army, the seeds they had spread were already growing into people.

  Ravi and Satya knew on the day that they met that no matter how different they were, they had both come from the same place. Both boys had become used to being targeted on account of their paler faces. Satya had run, as was his habit, and hidden behind a row of parked rickshaws until the bigger boys got tired of calling him a whore’s cur and throwing stones at him and left him alone. He was settling into a corner formed by the wheels of several vehicles when a pair of running feet flashed in front of his eyes. He reached out and grabbed the back of the running boy’s neck and pulled him down, furious that this idiot might give away his spot. Ravi was panting loudly and Satya had to throw his hand over Ravi’s mouth to stop his unseemly noise. It turned out that Ravi was not as accustomed to this treatment as Satya, and had in fact run almost a mile from his own schoolyard before being pulled into Satya’s hiding hole. Satya, all of nine, surveyed the Muslim boy and sighed, figuring that it was just his luck to be saddled with this idiot. Although he could not have explained why
, Satya knew as he walked Ravi home that their time together would stretch on because they knew each other, as few others ever had. They shared something that made them disgusting to the people around them. They would have to be friends. They already had too many enemies.

  They started teaming up in small ways, stealing coins from beggars and using them at the local cinemas, coaxing extra rotis out of Satya’s grandmother, who raised him, or candies from Ravi’s father’s store. But their world was changing; it seemed that it had never stopped changing, never staying in one place for long. No sooner did India become East Pakistan become Bangladesh than it became something else entirely. As Satya and Ravi grew up, images of American pop stars and British singers emerged on walls of shops and buildings, hung side by side with Bollywood vixens and images of Lord Shiva. America was everywhere, with people moving and writing and calling and even, eventually, emailing home. Ravi and Satya watched any movie with an American in it, imitating the accents and pretending to shoot each other. Soon even these pleasures weren’t enough, and the boys discovered beer, junk food, and music, steps on the bridge that took them piece by piece from their home. Poor but smart, well cared for but careless, the boys were sick of being the dirty secret of their nation’s sad and violent history, sick of Bangladesh and its poverty and its corruption and its crime and the ways that their own pasts seemed inescapable.