by Leah Franqui
When Satya’s grandmother finally passed away, unable to live through another difficult year in an impossible place, the last tie to Bangladesh was severed for Satya. His mother had died in childbirth, and his father, a wealthy businessman who had seduced and abandoned her, had never known of Satya’s existence. Satya’s grandmother, who despite her own bloody and brutal experiences, the worst of which had led to the birth of her child, was far sturdier than her fragile daughter. She had raised Satya herself, telling him the best of his mother and leaving him to speculate on the worst. He had nothing to tie him down to Sylhet, nothing to cling to. He decided to move on. And when Satya found a way to sneak onto a freighter departing to New York, he invited Ravi to come along with him, and Ravi said yes.
And so they came to America and moved to their tiny shared place in Sunset Park and searched for jobs and watched their money fall from their hands like sand. Both boys, now almost men, had planned to send riches back home to Ravi’s parents and now they worried they might have to beg for funds from their already overtaxed families, or in Satya’s case, from Ravi. Both of them had thought they spoke English like natives but somehow had to constantly repeat themselves. Ravi, a Muslim whose beard and prayer beads hanging at his waist made him as visible in New York as they had made him invisible at home, found himself even further from acceptance. Satya, a Hindu who looked Indian enough, was familiar looking in New York, acceptable to deli owners and store managers, who, if they didn’t hire him, at least rarely treated him like a threat.
Their friendship, which had been so unified at home, had begun to splinter under the weight of hunger and fear. Ravi called his family constantly, while Satya envied him the comfort of relatives. He began to resent having to share everything, the food he bought, the information he found: he worried that Ravi wasn’t sharing equally with him even as he plotted how to hide things from his friend.
And when Ravi told Satya that he had a strong lead on a job at a tourism company run by Bangladeshi Hindus, Satya knew that he could do the job as well as Ravi, if not better. He wasn’t sure how to be a guide, but he knew how to be a Hindu. Ravi had come home delighted by the prospect, with an interview set up for the next day, and Satya hated him. Ravi was his friend, but he had a father and a mother and now a job, and besides, he was better looking and always smoother with girls. Satya had his grandmother, now gone, and a pimple-marked face that women overlooked. Fueled by months of rejection, hunger, and fear, and a lifetime of feeling worthless, Satya sat down with a bottle of cheap scotch and got his best friend drunk. It was a celebration, he said, of this new job, this new life. And Ravi trusted him, as he had since they met.
Ravi snored in the next room as Satya prepared for the interview Ravi had planned to have. He had dressed himself in his best clothing, a bright red-and-purple collared shirt emblazoned with stars at the breast pocket and his most expensive pair of jeans, stylishly faded with seams running diagonally and up and down his legs. He slicked his hair and applied copious amounts of cologne carefully, looking, he thought, like the most successful of the shop boys and hawkers he’d seen at home. It was all perfect, except Satya noticed as he combed his hair that he couldn’t meet his own eyes in the mirror, but what did that matter? He didn’t have to look at himself. Only other people had to do that.
Satya arrived at the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company a full half an hour before Ravi’s scheduled interview and, because of the slowness of the day, was seen immediately. Satya was thrilled; he wasn’t exactly sure that Ravi wouldn’t wake up and make his own way there through some survival instinct. As he sat in front of Ronnie Munshi, on the very edge of his chair, he smiled nervously. The man looked at him and sighed, a strange expression in his eyes that Satya couldn’t read. The boss looked resigned, somehow. As soon as Satya tried to open his mouth to speak Ronnie waved his hand to cut him off and grimly informed him that the job was his, and sent him off to talk to another guide about how to work. And that was that. Satya finally had something to hold on to in America. He would tell Ravi when he returned home, and Ravi would be happy. It would be both of theirs, like everything was, and Satya could stop resenting that now that it was his first. They would share the profits until Ravi got his own job. This was for the best, for both of them. Ravi would understand.
But when Satya came home that day, Ravi was gone. No forwarding address. No way to find him. Vanished. Now that he didn’t have to share a thing, Satya wished he could.
Two months went by, and Satya heard nothing from Ravi. He had no official status in the United States, like Satya, so inquiries were impossible, although Satya tried. He could have tried harder, he knew, but he pushed that thought out of his mind like the memory of a bad dream. He couldn’t look backward. He had too much to do. Still, he wondered on the edges of his mind where Ravi was, what he was doing, what had become of him. He couldn’t tell if he felt free or alone.
And then one day, in the mail, Satya received a letter, his first in America. It was from Ravi’s mother. She had written to ask how he was, knowing that no one else from home ever would. She told him that she had not heard from Ravi, but she knew that Satya would be there to keep him safe. He read it over and over again until he wept and knew what he felt wasn’t freedom at all.
Ronnie paid his guides a monthly salary, low but livable. It was one kindness he extended to his workers, something to live off of between guiding jobs, for which they received a set fee. It was more money than Satya had ever seen in his life, and it let him move into a new place, with two roommates instead of four. It bought him clothing and decent food. It left him secure, this job, and filled with the purpose that had been so lacking in his life up until now, but it also felt empty. He showered every evening, washing the city off his skin, still feeling dirty. Nothing would erase the sense of continued shame.
He distracted himself, studying maps and guidebooks every day, and after two months he got a call from his boss, Mr. Munshi, on the brand-new pre-owned phone Mr. Munshi had given him. There was a job for him. He would be leaving New York soon and traveling across the country with a Bengali widow and a female American companion, one Mr. Munshi was looking for even now. Ravi would have laughed to hear it, but he wasn’t there, and when Satya pretended to tell him one night in the bathroom, he still couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. He wondered if he ever would again.
8
Rebecca Elliot woke up to the sound of snoring. This wasn’t the first time Max’s nasal trumpeting had disturbed her but it would be the last, she told herself as she stared up at the ceiling. A headache from last night’s whiskey pounded at her temples. She had met this one, like many before him, at a bar, after another failed audition a few weeks ago where the casting director had eyed her breasts but not her performance and sent her on her way with a limp “Great work.”
Rebecca habitually used her combined salary from part-time jobs in a coffee shop and a small map store to buy cheap drinks at the place around the corner from her apartment, a Chinese restaurant that became a dive bar after five. It attracted odd people, which is why Rebecca liked it. This boy, Max, had joined her that night, and together they’d washed away her desperation with alcohol, only here it was again, as always, waiting for her as the man beside her slept.
Yesterday’s audition, the third she had drunk her way toward forgetting since she met Max, had been particularly painful. It was for the role of Anya in The Cherry Orchard. Rebecca loved that role; she had wanted to play it since college. It was a prestigious director and it was a huge production and it was Anya. But when she had entered the room, the casting director had looked her up and down and frowned, explaining that they would be doing the readings for Varya, Anya’s older sister by seven years, the following day. Rebecca had blinked back her tears and explained that she was there for Anya and everyone had laughed and joked and pretended it was fine. Rebecca had auditioned and tried to “use it” but the damage was done. She left shaking, wishing she could throw
up, wishing she had the kind of mom she could call for sympathy.
Rebecca had grown up in Washington, DC, the only daughter of well-educated, well-bred American Jews. Her father, Morris Elliot, ran a small law firm specializing in divorce, which was a prosperous business given his discretion and the instability of many political marriages. Rebecca’s mother, Cynthia Greenbaum, taught economics at Georgetown University, where she delighted in sparring with her Catholic coworkers. They had raised Rebecca with strong assurances that she could be anything she wanted to be, and then, like so many American parents, were surprised and dismayed when she believed them.
She had attended Columbia University because her parents, alumni of the school, approved, and since they were the people footing the bill, that was important. To her, it didn’t matter where she went, just as long as it was in New York. She had dreamed of the city since she had been a child. She’d done well, but she hadn’t made friends, holding herself apart from everyone but the theater crowd and acting in every role for which someone cast her. It seemed for a time that it would even be easy. She couldn’t imagine failure. Who can, before it’s actually happening?
Rebecca graduated with a flurry of acting accolades and enough flashbulb photos snapped by her proud parents to cause a seizure in a susceptible person. But once the world of acting was no longer confined to her pool of fellow students, Rebecca realized for the first time that acting was a form of begging, and all you could have was what people decided to give you.
She had gotten a few roles, a few commercials, a lot of promises of things that were going to be “the thing that launched her,” and nothing had. So, after the early difficult years following college, Rebecca found herself performing in her own life. When she met someone new they would transform in her mind to an audience, and Rebecca would go to work. Her body would grow languid and pliable, her breath lifting her chest in trembling motions that held men, and sometimes women, captive. She was sick of this performance, but it kept attracting audiences, and given that almost a year had passed since her last real acting job, she wasn’t sure if she could actually play another role anymore.
Next to her, Max shifted again, throwing his hand over her breast. It was clammy with sweat. Glancing at her buzzing phone, Rebecca realized that she was late for work at the coffee shop, again, which meant she would be fired, again. She supposed she should be unhappy, but she only felt annoyed. Every job but the map store was disposable and yet she was always surprised when she discovered her employers felt the same way about her.
“Turn that off, would you?” the guy, Max, asked groggily. It was one in the afternoon. Rebecca’s phone buzzed again, a voice mail this time. She deleted it, already knowing what it said.
“Thanks.” Max coughed, and reached down to his pants, which were lying in a heap on the floor of Rebecca’s otherwise neat apartment. He took out a pack of cigarettes and fumbled around his pocket for a lighter.
“What are you doing?” Rebecca didn’t mind smokers. She even had the occasional cigarette herself, when drunk or stressed or devastated or all three at once, which happened more and more these days. But no one smoked in her apartment. Not that he was asking, this near stranger, this idiot poser who claimed to want to make music but really just spent his time getting high in the Williamsburg apartment his parents had purchased for him after he graduated from the Berklee College of Music without a record deal or a clue.
The strength of Rebecca’s sudden hatred surprised her. She had enjoyed Max, his banter, his faux self-deprecation and real self-satisfaction. She even liked him in bed, finding his confidence and his rich vocabulary welcome. Now, sitting naked, blowing smoke in her face, with last evening’s drinks seeping out of his pores and sweating onto her sheets, he disgusted her.
“I have to go. I have work.” Rebecca stood and walked into the bathroom. In her studio apartment, the walk wasn’t long. Avoiding her own gaze in the mirror, she ran the shower, soaping up briskly, tempted to linger in the hopes that Max would leave and never return and that would be the end of it.
“I’m making us breakfast!” His cheerful call echoed through the apartment. Damn it, Rebecca thought. He was trying to be nice. He was trying to be the “good guy.” There had been ones like him in the past, ones who had thought they liked her for her no-strings declarations, somehow thinking they were a lure and a challenge, not statements of fact. They rushed in to claim her in some way, but this quickly moved from amusing to disturbing. They took such pride in being good, these men, in being what they assumed she must want based solely on her insistence that she didn’t.
Rebecca rushed out of the bathroom in a manufactured hurry.
“I’m late! Sorry, sorry, so sweet of you, sorry, but I have to run. Sorry!”
She pulled on clothing quickly, tying up her wet hair and hopping into jeans as Max, standing with a bowl of half-beaten eggs in his hands, looked on, concerned.
“You should eat something, Beck. It’s important.”
He had a nickname for her? Rebecca’s mouth twisted with disgust.
“No time! Sorry! Had such a good time I didn’t even remember my stupid job. Really gotta go! That smells great. Please, eat it, obviously, and let yourself out when you go. The door locks behind you, okay?”
And she was gone, closing the door on his protest. Her phone beeped.
Last night was great. Miss you already, sexy. Get some breakfast on your way.
It was perfectly constructed, a neatly packaged mix of flirt and feeling. Rebecca closed her eyes, her head pounding even harder.
Thanks, she responded. Please don’t smoke in my apartment. She turned off her phone, and, with nothing else to do, she headed north, to the map store.
Maps on St. Mark’s was a small dusty place owned and operated by its founder, Rasheed Ghazi, who first opened the store in 1980. Mr. Ghazi, as everyone, including Rebecca, now called him, had been a philosophy professor in his native Tehran before his disagreements over matters such as freedom of speech and other trifles ran him afoul of the ayatollah and he was forced to depart. In Tehran, Professor Ghazi had specialized in giving people complicated answers designed specifically to provoke more complicated questions, but now he ran a dusty tiny store selling maps in the East Village, and specialized in giving people large pieces of paper designed to tell them simply where to go. The irony was not lost on him, or Rebecca, who had learned his life story over their many long afternoons together, watching the tourists outside of the store’s one window drift by.
Mr. Ghazi referred to Iran by its older title, Persia, as the only act of rebellion left to an expat unable to return to his homeland. Not that he would have wanted to. The country he had known and loved was gone, its current incarnation bearing little resemblance to what he thought of as home. With his family either displaced throughout America or slaughtered, and unwilling to put old friends in danger by contacting them, Mr. Ghazi contented himself with the small older Persian population he could scrape together in New York. However, he did not limit himself to their numbers alone. He found he had a kind of affinity with many immigrants, especially Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian ones. They shared spices and rices, and the whispers of a destroyed but still missed home buzzed in all their ears. Mr. Ghazi felt comfortable with these men, these Pakistani cab drivers and Lebanese convenience store owners, much to the consternation of his wife, Sheedah, who felt that he was lowering himself in spending time with uneducated foreigners. Rebecca heard them arguing about it some days, for the Ghazis lived over the store. Personally she enjoyed the strange men who came to greet Mr. Ghazi and bring him rose-scented pastries and bags dripping with grease. She always got the leftovers.
Mr. Ghazi had bought his tiny apartment and the store below it twenty years ago when the East Village was still a wild no-man’s-land. Back then it had been all he and his wife could afford. Now he and Sheedah were immune to astronomical rent raises and were, in fact, sitting on a gold mine. Sheedah, whose only interest in American ev
ents was reading the local real estate news, begged him to sell so they could buy a condo and retire in suburban New Jersey, but he refused. For this, Rebecca would be eternally grateful, as the work was easy, the pay was enough, and the stability of the store was the only thing keeping her vaguely sane.
Mr. Ghazi was a creature of habit. He opened the shop each day at ten a.m. exactly. He ate lunch, a curry from a local place that delivered, along with a fruit salad (for health) and strong black coffee, every day, closing the shop from twelve thirty p.m. to one thirty p.m. to enjoy his lunch in peace. Anyone who knew him knew this. Rebecca assumed he would be surprised to see his only employee knocking tentatively on the door at one twenty-five that Friday afternoon.
She didn’t need to knock, being in possession of a key, but she did so anyway out of respect. Rebecca made her own hours but always told him what those hours would be, and she felt a twinge of guilt at not calling to tell him she was coming. After all, he barely needed her at all, even when she was scheduled to work.
Mr. Ghazi had hired Rebecca seven years ago after he had broken his ankle due to a fall reaching for an atlas from 1498 describing the geography of medieval Europe. He needed help while he healed. At twenty-one Rebecca was kind, responsible, and cheerful, and in need of part-time work. She competently ran the shop as he recuperated. Once he had fully healed, however, he couldn’t bear to fire this bright young actress, and he kept her on to assist him, to keep him company, to charm customers and browsing friends, and to give Sheedah someone to foist lamb dishes and pastries on. Sheedah, who usually hated American women with their bare arms and their loud voices, took an instant liking to Rebecca for no particular reason other than her once-mentioned interest in Persian rugs. It was done. Rebecca became a permanent fixture in the shop.
Rebecca smiled tentatively as she entered the shop, savoring the scents of old paper and dust and curry from Mr. Ghazi’s lunch. The needs reflected in the eyes of her recent bed partner were mercifully banished by Mr. Ghazi’s familiar smiling gaze, though it did hold a hint of worry.
