America for Beginners

by Leah Franqui

  She had closed her mouth and smiled as Satya straightened up, swallowing her anger whole. She would take this tour. What did it matter, anyway, that they had deceived her? All that mattered was traveling America to land in California, and if this boy with crooked teeth and her son’s hair could take her, what did anything else matter?

  Now this young man was leading her gently away from the falling water as the sun began setting above them and a group of attendants began preparing for what Pival assumed was the evening round of trips. She was glad they had made it in time to see the falls in the sun, even if they had left New York at three a.m. to do so. To feel the rainbows so close to her face, to see the light bouncing off the water and refracting to create such vivid streams of color, it had all been worth experiencing.

  “I hate how fast the light is going.” Satya and Pival both looked at Rebecca, confused. In this way Pival was not so far from Satya, she realized. Both of them were confused by the same turns of phrase, the American accents, the familiar words being used in unfamiliar ways. It was funny that she, a well-educated Bengali woman, could feel as lost as this Bangladeshi boy, but she refused to distance herself from him in her mind. It would not help her understand better anything Rebecca said by pretending to be less like Satya. Besides, Rebecca seemed to sense their mutual incomprehension, because she was already opening her mouth to speak again.

  “The way it gets darker earlier in the night, as the winter comes. It’s only September but already it’s growing darker earlier. It happens every year, but still it surprises me. It’s so depressing.”

  Pival had heard Rebecca use this word several times in the three days she had been with her. Depressing. It confused her. People did not speak so much of their inner feelings in Kolkata, and they did not use those terms unless speaking about someone with a serious mental disease. But Rebecca did not seem to suffer from a serious mental disease and threw the term out casually. She wondered if Rebecca felt exposed, saying such things in public. She had never told anyone what she felt, not since Rahi had moved away, and even before then, very rarely and only in moments of extreme pain or joy had she let her son into her mind. Telling people how she felt would be like showing them her naked body. And no one had seen her completely naked since she was ten years old.

  She had thought that on her wedding night Ram would take her in his arms, undress her gently, uncover all her secrets. Many had been quick to warn her of the shame of a woman’s body growing up, but her parents had not been that way, and as a girl she had heard soft sighs and giggles from her parents’ bedroom sometimes at night. She had not expected the violent ecstasy of a romantic movie, but perhaps simple quiet pleasures. A lingering touch, a hidden kiss. But instead, it had been efficient, and fast, so fast she was on her back, her sari bunched up around her hips one moment, and then smoothing herself out while Ram drank a glass of water the next. It was always like that, from that moment on. She wondered what aroused Ram, what made him reach for her. It seemed to have nothing to do with her, her body, at all.

  In the beginning of their marriage she had in fact tried to share her thoughts and feelings with Ram, but he had made it clear that this was neither welcome nor appropriate. Her feelings were her responsibility and no one else’s. In that way he had done her a kindness, she knew. He had not tried to take anything of her inner self. In the end she knew there had been no malice in her husband, only anger. Whatever it was he had been looking for in their marriage, he soon realized Pival couldn’t provide it. He was angry when she challenged him, and he was angry when she didn’t. His anger had become cruelty but it had not started out that way, now that she thought about him clearly, from the distance provided by time and oceans. He simply had not wanted to be responsible for anyone’s feelings but his own. What an impossible task, she thought, and a futile one.

  He had wanted people to be the way he thought they should be, that is, more like him. Contained. Appropriate. Autonomous in every way. He had thought he had found that in Pival when he first met her, and when he understood he hadn’t, he blamed himself, and her. He died thinking he had been the best husband and father he could, she knew. She hoped it had made him happy. In a way it was true; he had done the best he could. It was just that they had all deserved so much better.

  Rebecca threw around how she felt with a generous carelessness. Pival was unsure whether she was happy or uncomfortable to learn what was in her companion’s head. But what she said was true. The loss of the light was depressing, she thought, rolling the word around in her mind the way she’d rolled her first taste of wine on her tongue the night before.

  “Yes. It is.” She was proud of herself for agreeing, for daring to indicate her own feeling in this public space. Rebecca, however, just smiled vaguely, while Satya bobbed his head in another imitation of Ronnie and agreed over and over again, depressing, yes, that’s just what it is, madam, absolutely correct, until Rebecca broke in.

  “Well, it’s not that bad. At least the falls were beautiful, right?”

  “Stunning.” Pival said it firmly, reverently, and Rebecca smiled. Satya steered them back into the mustard-colored lobby, reminding them that dinner was in one hour and ten minutes approximately and exactly so one hour was theirs. He implored Pival to rest. With that, the little group split apart like the peel of a banana.

  Pival used the hour to take a bath instead of nap. She supposed she shouldn’t want to get wetter after her time on the water, but she did, in fact, almost as an act of remembering what it had been like. The bathtub spout was a pale imitation, but if she closed her eyes and sank down she could pretend it was the same. When she submerged her head underwater the running tap sounded like thunder, and she smiled. Maybe this would be a way to kill herself, she thought; she could close her eyes and sink away and remember all the light.

  She emerged moments later, sputtering, her lungs protesting at the lack of oxygen. Perhaps she would not be able to do it that way, she thought, rubbing soap on her arms briskly. It seemed her lungs wanted to breathe even if her mind didn’t want them to. She would have to think of another way. If Rahi was there, of course, it wouldn’t matter. The idea of his being alive filled her entire body with a fierce joy. If he wasn’t, well, maybe she would just die right there, will herself dead. But if that didn’t happen, she would have to think of a backup plan.

  Dinner was mediocre but familiar, rice and curries and vegetables that all looked just the same and tasted brown. She thought longingly of her cook’s fish curry, a delicate Bengali dish scented with mustard oil that couldn’t have been further from this buttery northern mess. It had surprised Pival that Indian food seemed to mean only one thing in the United States when it was so varied at home. That said, of course, she had never known so many other kinds of food existed, that the world held so much more. It seemed insurmountable, to know and understand them all. The Thai curry of the evening before had stung her tongue but she had enjoyed it, liked how foreign each bite had felt. After the long day of travel, though, the familiar smells of cumin and cardamom and fennel seed comforted her, even if they weren’t quite what she preferred.

  The heavy Punjabi cooking reminded her of her childhood, of her parents’ Punjabi maid and the dishes she had plunked on the table like large stones.

  “Do you cook, Mrs. Sengupta?” Rebecca asked brightly. Pival finally realized what it was that was so disconcerting about the girl. She spoke to everyone as though they were equal, even Pival, whom she was serving. Satya frowned at the direct question, the familiar tone.

  “I have always employed someone who cooks for me.” Rebecca looked up at her, wide-eyed. Satya looked down. He had clearly anticipated her response. He had expected her to have a cook, she knew.

  “Really? You have a cook? That’s amazing. Is that normal?” Rebecca asked.

  “Is this not normal here?” Pival asked, curious. Had Rahi had a cook? He didn’t know how to cook, or at least hadn’t in Kolkata. What had he eaten here? Funny, she had never even thou
ght about it before. She just had assumed he had someone cook for him.

  “Here most people don’t have personal chefs unless they are super rich, like celebrities or politicians, that kind of thing. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just so amazing to me that you have a cook. Wow!” Rebecca spoke quickly.

  “Where we are from, people have cooks. People hire people to do everything. People don’t need to do things themselves, they can hire people. It’s just like that.” Satya spoke matter-of-factly, without a hint of bitterness in his tone.

  Some part of Pival smarted at his statement, but she couldn’t contradict it. She had always had help. Before her marriage it had been more limited, but after her marriage it had been constant. Although she had perhaps used household help poorly, it was certainly something she knew was normal. She had help even now, she knew, this white girl and this brown boy who were only there to serve her. What had Rahi had?

  “Where do people get the food they need here? The Indian food?” she asked. Had Rahi lived on Coca-Cola and biscuits?

  “They buy it, I guess,” Rebecca said. “Or learn to make it.”

  The thought of Rahi cooking made Pival smile. She watched as Satya tore apart a piece of roti, preferring it to the naan Rebecca seemed to so enjoy. It must be exotic to him, Pival thought, given the way Bangladeshis live on rice alone. Pival herself had little use for any of the soft puffed Indian breads and preferred Western-style toast. Satya tore his roti into tiny pieces, letting each piece soak in the curry before scooping it up with his fingers and devouring it. Pival and Ram had not eaten with their hands, nor had they taught Rahi to do so, but Pival had seen it daily throughout her life, from her servants to men sitting and eating their daily thalis out on the street. For her generation, it had been one of the many ways they were taught not to be, no matter how delicious it looked, how satisfying it seemed like it would be. Sometimes it felt to Pival that Kolkata Bengalis still bore the brunt of British rule, some sixty years after it was over, desperate to impress their English overlords even now.

  It was clear, watching Rebecca’s reaction at every meal, that she had never seen people eat with their hands before. Pival was amused. Satya was not Rahi, no matter how much his hair reminded her of Rahi. He was not Ronnie, though he was his employee. He was something else.

  At home Bangladeshis had no status. They did the worst jobs, if they had jobs at all. They were illegal immigrants with no rights and no names, just men who melted into the background and women who looked hungry all the time. They were almost never employed for domestic help, those tasks going to the women from nearby villages whose drunk husbands couldn’t provide. Pival knew that many Bangladeshi women stood in line in Kolkata’s red-light district along with Nepalese immigrants and the most destitute Indian women in the city. Pival was not supposed to know about this, about the women waiting in line for men to pick them out like fruit at the market, but she did; she had seen it on the news one night when Ram had been out at his club. There was an organization that tried to help these women, teaching them to sew bags and to earn money that way instead. It was run by a smiling white woman and Pival had been amazed by her courage, and for a moment had wanted to help, but then Ram came home and she turned off the news and went to bed.

  Pival knew a bit about the war in Bangladesh; she remembered the invasion of East Pakistan, as the government had called it then, though she had been a girl when it happened, barely starting primary school. Later, history books called it a civil war, but that hadn’t made much sense to her. Now they called it a revolution. After it had gone out of the newspapers she had forgotten about Bangladesh, or rather, forgotten about the war. She remembered that it existed, that people lived there, that many had left or been killed, but beyond that she had stopped thinking about it. It was a poor country with nothing her own nation seemed to want, and despite its origins as a part of the state of Bengal, the border disputes that most interested the people she knew and the papers she read were all with Pakistan. Now that this new country no longer bore the name Pakistan, it had ceased to matter. Her contemporaries were still more concerned with the Partition than the land that bordered theirs, despite the shared language. And she had long ceased to form opinions on political happenings in the world, knowing that Ram didn’t want to hear them and Rahi was too far away to care.

  “I would love to learn how to cook like this,” Rebecca declared, reminding Pival of the original subject, cooking, another ability she did not have.

  “So would I,” she said, smiling ruefully.

  Satya looked up from his meticulous roti and curry concoction. “I can teach you,” he said. Stunned, Pival nodded slowly. If they came across a kitchen before they reached Los Angeles, she would remind him. And if they didn’t, it didn’t matter. The important thing was that he had offered to give her something. And that she had accepted.

  22

  They soon settled into a rhythm, Jake and Bhim. The conditions and circumstances of their relationship weren’t easy for Jake, but Bhim couldn’t believe how easy it seemed. He marveled at how comfortable they were, while Jake bit his tongue. Their little heap of shared experiences was too small for him to lose even one of them, so if Bhim thought it was easy, it was easy. They saw each other every other weekend, but once Bhim finished his coursework he spent two weeks a month with Jake, and two on his own in Berkeley, working. Jake offered to come to Berkeley again, but Bhim refused. He told him he preferred the apartment in Los Angeles, but Jake wondered if that was just another way for Bhim to separate their lives.

  Bhim was constantly marveling about Jake’s ability to keep a house, praising him for the simplest of tasks, like an easy weekday dinner or hanging a piece of art. Now that Bhim was practically living with him, Jake knew why. Bhim had no life skills, a fact he freely admitted with a cheerful shrug. He had never had to do anything for himself in Kolkata, he explained, and now he didn’t know how to. Sometimes Jake wasn’t sure if they were in a relationship or he was teaching Bhim how to be an adult. Sometimes he would come home to Bhim’s standing in front of something like a leaky faucet or a dead lightbulb, studying it like one of his snails. Then, when Jake would fix the problem, Bhim would praise him lavishly, declaring himself unable to live without Jake. And yet he did, up in Berkeley. It made no sense.

  Several weeks into their new schedule, Bhim made a comment about Jake’s having many friends. Jake was surprised; he wasn’t very social and had a small circle. Most of the people he had known growing up in Los Angeles were elsewhere now. Everyone he had gone to college with back on the East Coast had stayed there. There were a few people from work he liked enough to actually see after office hours, and a few more friends from disastrous attempts at online dating that had birthed friendships, if not boyfriends. But his social circle when he met Bhim was small. If Bhim thought this was a lot, how many did Bhim himself have? Jake wondered.

  Living in Los Angeles, Jake had always found it strange to be next to an ocean that he found never warm enough to swim in, given the icy currents of the North Pacific Gyre, which kept the water perpetually cold. When he told that to Bhim, Bhim admitted that this didn’t matter much to him, for he couldn’t swim at all. Jake had found this hilarious. It was inconceivable to him that Bhim did not know how to swim, not just because he was a marine biologist but because he didn’t know anyone at all who couldn’t swim. What would happen if he got into the water?

  “My work is on the shore. I don’t plan on getting into the water any time soon,” said Bhim testily. He hated being laughed at.

  “But what if you end up on a boat and it sinks and—”

  “You are describing that movie with the tiger and the Indian boy.”

  “It was a book. I didn’t see the movie,” Jake intoned smugly.

  “I don’t need to know how to swim.”

  “Everyone needs to know how to swim!” Jake told him cheerfully, echoing his parents’ own words to him long ago. To prove this, he enrolled Bhim in a begin
ner swimming class at the local Y. Bhim had refused to go, categorically, until Jake had dared him, asking him if he was afraid. Bhim bought himself a pair of trunks online that very evening and the next week the lessons began.

  Jake dropped Bhim off in the morning like a proud parent, handing him a bag with a change of clothes and a prepacked lunch. Bhim, who had had some time to think about his rash acceptance of Jake’s dare, looked gloomy at the prospect.

  “I don’t like getting my hair wet,” he grumbled.

  “And to think for a long time you didn’t know you were gay,” Jake quipped, and promised to pick him up in three hours.

  As he waited for Bhim at a local coffee shop, sending out emails and making digital mock-ups of garden plans, he wondered, not for the first time, what things were generally Indian and what things were specifically Bhim. He didn’t know much about Indians or India, and Bhim never wanted to talk about either. When pressed, he had admitted to Jake that he was worried that Jake would take Bhim’s opinions, his experiences, and use them as facts. This would not be fair to India, Bhim had said. This might have been true, but the policy of silence did not feel very fair to Jake.

  The only Indian person Jake knew other than Bhim himself was a lesbian from his softball league, Priya; they had sometimes gone out to dinner with Priya and her revolving door of girlfriends. She was second-generation Indian American, brash and cool with short Bettie Page bangs and a day job as an ADA for Los Angeles County. Her parents had accepted her sexuality because they had no choice, she’d explained. She was their only child and everyone around them had kids who were like her, individualistic and unwilling to bend to anyone’s dictates but their own. Bhim had been in awe of Priya, and yet Jake knew that some part of him had looked down on her. He had asked him about it after they had met her and her most recent girlfriend for drinks. Part of Jake wondered if Bhim’s disdain was because Priya had been born in America, but Bhim had carefully explained that actually it was because she was ethnically Punjabi, and those people, whatever else they were, were a little trashy. Jake had been amazed that Bhim had carried that stereotype with him out of India, but he said nothing. It was information, something to store away, some part of Bhim he hadn’t had before.