by Tania James
She has come to value these rare hours alone, but Bird prefers to spend every last moment with Anju. It was a strange and subtle shift in Bird’s behavior, the slightest need in her now that makes Anju feel alternately irritable and guilty. On Friday, Ghafoor tells Bird to stay late and straighten out the books, leading Bird to turn her plaintive gaze on Anju. “You don’t have to wait for me,” she says. “Unless you want to.”
“I thought I would go to the sari store,” Anju says. “Just to look.”
“You want a sari?”
“No. Just want to see the new styles.”
Bird hesitates, then consents. “Be home in an hour, okay? Don’t wander too much.”
Anju waves, already out the door and with every intention of wandering. She walks down the street toward the lofted 7 train as it rattles across the tracks, drowning the argument of two men gesturing wildly outside Rajan Exchange. She stands before the window of an electronics store where a television is tuned to her favorite news commentator, a marshmallowy white man with fists that occasionally pummel the desk. He begins his show looking puffy and pale, until he works himself up into a merry rage over the various wars his country is facing, including the War on Terror, the War on Obesity, the War on Illegal Immigration. She tried to watch him yesterday evening, but it was difficult to do so with Bird beside her, groaning and heckling.
ANJU CONTINUES DOWN Seventy-fourth Street on her way to the sari shop. Later she will wonder how her life might have been different had she not decided to toe a stubborn ball of ice down the sidewalk, opposite from home, had her name never been bellowed from a distance:
“HEY! MELVIN! ANJU!”
In reverse order, but it is her name all the same.
She freezes. Glancing up, she sees a bearded man starting toward her, and by the time he is within half a block, she recognizes the camera strapped to his right hand.
“IT’S ROHIT!” Like King Kong, he slaps his chest with his free hand. “ROHIT!”
Unlike most in Manhattan, people in these parts are not used to blatant disruptions of normalcy: no VCR thrown from the window of a warring couple, no street-corner evangelists, no solo protester going up and down the blocks, clanging two pots together and announcing the number of dead civilians in Iraq. No one shouting and running without reason. Heads turn, and even the two men in front of Rajan Exchange pause their argument to look at Rohit, then Anju, then Rohit again.
With no other obvious option, Anju breaks into a run.
Aside from a few triumphant badminton serves, Anju was never exactly an athlete. Running, she discovers an agility born of pure fear, of the sound of wind and soles on sidewalks, the muffled urgency of a thudding pulse. She does not think of Rohit or his intentions, only that he represents the place she once fled.
“HEY, WILL YOU RELAX? I JUST WANNA TALK!”
Unwilling to lead him to Bird’s house, she has somehow run them into a residential area of narrow sidewalks and frosty lawns. This can continue for only so long before someone assumes that Rohit is a predator and calls the police. Over her shoulder, she yells: “TURN AROUND! GO HOME!”
Which comes out as a ragged gasp rather than an order.
“TURN IT OFF?” he asks. “YOU WANT ME TO TURN THE CAMERA OFF?”
She stops, her hands on her knees, heaving. Rohit stops a few yards away from her. She does not want to face him and his camera, nor is the current shot of her backside very flattering.
“Anju, listen. Can we talk?”
Still the camera is on. She would like to hurl it against the sidewalk if she weren’t so sure that rising would cause her to cry.
“I don’t want that camera on me,” she says.
“Fine.”
Once she hears the ping, she straightens up to face him. The camera is hanging at his side, still in his grip.
“What the hell you are doing here?” she says.
But before she can say anything more, Rohit suggests that they take their conversation to a more private place than the sidewalk. In a rare moment of agreement, they settle on McDonald’s. His treat.
STANDING BEFORE THE COUNTER, Rohit begins explaining the menu items to Anju. “A hamburger is a piece of beef between two pieces of white—”
“Number five,” she says. “Super-size, large soda, no pickle.”
They take a booth by the wall, near a glass cabinet that guards a treasure trove of cartoon figurines from an animated movie about sea creatures. Anju had seen the commercials with Bird, who found it disturbing that computer animation could give a cartoon guppy more breadth of expression than what is possessed by most actors in the flesh.
Anju turns her attention to Rohit. His beard is new, slightly coppery in contrast to the brown of his hair, a haphazard attempt at adding maturity to his face.
“You look great,” he says.
Without a word, Anju inspects her burger for pickles. Her courtesy will not be purchased for the price of a Junior Mac.
“Okay.” He slouches a bit, as if to say that he is somehow surrendering a false persona and offering her the Real Rohit. “I’ve been looking for you for so long, it’s like, now I’m not sure where to begin—”
“Why did you come here to wave a camera in my face? How did you find me?”
“All right. Easy question first: I figured that the secretary from Tan-don’s office was the only other friend you had. So I went all Columbo, you know, just came here on a hunch and checked with that guard in Tandon’s building. I showed him your picture and he said he’d seen you around. You have no idea how long I’ve been combing this same strip of Seventy-fourth Street, looking for you.” Rohit beams, rapping his thumbs on the tabletop, waiting to be thanked or congratulated. Anju dips a fry into a mini cup of ketchup. “As for the other question, I’m here about my film. I think you can help me. No—I think we can help each other.”
“Me? I thought it was a personal film about you.”
“It is a personal film. About you.”
· · ·
OVER THE LAST TWO MONTHS, Rohit has been hard at work in his editing suite, otherwise known as a corner of his Ex’s apartment. Here, Rohit pursued the impulse that struck him as soon as he received news of Anju’s disappearance—to make a seven-minute trailer that, if picked up by a production company, might evolve into a feature-length documentary film.
“My entire life I’ve been waiting to strike gold,” he says. “That’s what it’s like sometimes, being a doc filmmaker. It’s not necessarily the smartest or the most skilled that land on the best film. Sometimes the best film just lands on you.”
The landing began on the day of Anju’s disappearance, while Mrs. Solanki was sorting the mail. “I had my camera with me,” he says, “because I had this feeling that something was about to go down.” When Anju presses him for specifics, he admits that nothing had been going down in relation to his personal film, whose plot had long been flatlining. At a loss, Rohit had planned to conduct an on-the-spot interview with his mother concerning his childhood, hoping to stumble across some revelatory jewel of poor parenting.
“So I’m shooting her and asking her questions, which she’s trying to evade by opening the mail, but I can see by the way she’s using that letter opener that she’d like to slit my throat. Nothing special. I mean there are only so many close-ups you can get of a letter opener. But then there’s this one letter that she unfolds and reads silently for a couple minutes before she even notices I’m still there. It’s a great shot, a really slow, steady zoom. And in this deathly voice, she goes, ‘Oh God. Rohit. Call your father.’
“So I just kept filming everything else, like my mom freaking out and my dad yelling. I also had those tapes of you at dinner, plus the meeting with Rajiv Tandon. I never turned off the camera.” He gives a macho shrug. “I just put it on my knees. Lucky I invested in a Sennheiser mic. Picks up sound like you would not believe. I interviewed Miss Schimpf, your principal, your friend Sheldon—”
“Fish? You interviewed Fish?
What did he say?”
Rohit sat back, grinning with satisfaction. “He cried.”
“Cried?”
“Almost. There was definitely a pregnant pause. Anyway, I got to learn about this amazing story that all goes back to you and your sister. Linno, right? And for once, I find myself at this nexus of luck and drama and serious fucking issues, and I’m like, what do I do with it all? I have to make a film.”
“About me?”
“About immigration, both legal and illegal. About sisters, about family pressure, about the cross-cultural divide between Indians at home and Indians abroad. All through the lens of your life.” Rohit is on a rampage now. When someone in a neighboring booth glances over at him, he lowers his voice to a lusty whisper, which only further attracts the neighbor’s attention. “I cut a trailer of everything I got and showed it to a contact at a production company. He loves it. He thinks it’s topical and riveting and he wants to fund me to make the rest if I can promise to come up with more good footage. Which is where you come in.”
Rohit pauses pregnantly. Anju is overwhelmed by the choreography of this speech, each word buffed and clean and effortless.
“I know what you’re thinking: What do I get out of all this? Well, you get the visibility of being in a full-length film and probably a string of festivals, which can’t hurt your cause. And while most documentarians would consider this unethical, I’m willing to pay for a top-of-the-line immigration lawyer, so I can follow you step-by-step on your way to obtaining legal status. I won’t screen the film until you’ve practically got a green card in your hand. I won’t ask you to sign a release until the very end, and if I haven’t made good on any of my promises, you refuse to sign the release and I’m screwed. See?”
At this moment, with his palms upturned on the table, Rohit resembles a lovelorn desperado, a look that he does not wear well.
“Okay, I see you’re a tough sell,” he says. “And that’s smart. You should never agree to anything until you read the fine print.”
He takes a paper from his messenger bag and triumphantly slaps it down before her. He begins to read aloud (“In consideration for my participation in the motion picture production identified above, I, the undersigned, do hereby expressly and irrevocably consent to be photographed and/or audiotaped …”) until she asks him to stop. At the bottom of the page is a line where her signature would go.
“I can’t screen a thing until I get your signature, Anju. Without you, this whole project collapses. See what I’m saying? So you can back out at any point. Though I have no idea why you would want to. I mean, this film is going to be important. The story of an illegal immigrant tunneling her way through the bureacracies of a post-9/11 America—”
“Excuse me, but I do not tunnel. I am not a worm. I walk on the sidewalk just like you.”
“I know, it’s just a figure of speech—”
“And I most definitely am not illegal,” Anju says. “My student visa will last until June of next year.”
For the first time, Rohit seems speechless. He stares at the Formica tabletop, as if trying to solve a mathematical problem in his head, and coming up empty, he leans forward to address her again. “Your student visa ran out a while ago.”
“No, incorrect. My visa is valid until June, it says on my Arrival/ Departure form …”
But something about Rohit’s altered way of speaking, confused and unrehearsed, seems to prove that he is telling not only fact but truth. “You’re legal only so long as you’re a student. That’s why it’s called a student visa.”
As proof, he pulls a binder of documents from his bag and flips open to a page that reads U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the upper corner, next to an official seal. The text is littered with terms like “alien” and “out of status.” Her mind races to find ways in which Rohit might have forged the material himself, but such a ploy seems too cruel, too useless for his purposes. What she is reading is truth. She is illegal and has been so for at least two months. “For academic students (visa category F-i): Failure to maintain a full course load without prior authorization is a status violation. The student’s period of authorized stay will be terminated.”
SHE EXCUSES HERSELF and emerges from the McDonald’s. Her breath appears and disappears like all her ideas. She fumbles her way to a bench and sits, though she can sense Rohit standing tentatively behind her, waiting for her to speak. All around her, the world is in whites and grays, the trees sweatered with snow.
But this country, she well knows, is quite full of color, too much color according to the squadron of men and women in suits, on the radio and the television. They speak of the Immigration Problem as if a pandemic is spreading through the land, a stealthy, smothering Brown Plague. “We are facing an overpopulation disaster like none this country has seen,” said the marshmallowy news commentator. And the truth is this: Anju thought herself on the healthy, innocent end of the disaster. Not now, but someday, she would be an American citizen, and when the pestilence was closing in on New York, its swelling shadow would fall over her as it would for every other citizen. Illegals? Terrible! They cut in line. They took the spots from those who worked for it. They controlled the Mexican Mafia from a California jail cell, as evidenced by Frank “Pancho Villa” Martinez, whom the news commentator referred to as a “deadly alien.” Not Anju Melvin. She was invited. But now, here she is: as illegal as a Cuban cigar and nowhere near as wanted.
At times like this, blame will do no good but is the easiest emotion to employ. Anju thinks of Bird. She was a secretary for an immigration lawyer, and she didn’t know? Is it possible?
On the other hand, Bird is no lawyer. Maybe there is only so much a secretary can know. And besides, this is the woman whose Cream of Wheat and extra pillow are sparing Anju from a worse fate.
Rohit takes the seat next to her, his hands stuffed in his pockets. Hesitantly, he looks at her. “I guess it’s a lot to digest,” he says. “I should’ve thought of that before I blurted it out. I just thought you knew …” His voice trails off in a gauzy white breath.
He sighs. “I’ll let you think things through. Do you have a computer at home?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll leave this with you, in case you’re curious.” He offers her his binder whose cover reads ANJU IMMIGRATION RESEARCH. Thick as a dictionary, the binder is full of immigration documents pertaining to her situation, all of them classified into subtopics including Student Visa Rules, Changing Status, and Interviews: What to Expect. He has written each subtopic on a neon tab, in careful print. Specific lines are highlighted according to a system that he has devised for her benefit. And under Vital Statistics, he has even listed her birthday, which passed two weeks ago, without her having told a single person.
“Information is key,” Rohit says. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
And though she usually believes that such aphorisms belong on bumpers, she feels a sudden pang of gratitude. Gratitude and some small, burrowing hope. As she flips through the binder, she sees not the words but the colors, the ruler-straight lines of yellow and blue and green whose care and color-coding almost bring tears to her eyes.
NOT A DAY GOES BY without Anju in it, and Bird has come to feel as though it was always this way. She has bought eggs, milk, cake mix, and frosting, having been struck by the spontaneous impulse to bake. She enjoys this idea of herself, a domestic sort of woman with fat shopping bags in both hands, briskly walking home where a warm end to the evening awaits.
So when she arrives home to find the apartment empty, the day suddenly seems not quite right, like a painting askew. She hadn’t wanted Anju to go wandering alone, but she could hardly say no to Ghafoor, who often and casually reminds her of his magnanimity where her employment is concerned. “Not many bosses would be so lenient,” he says. “But I suppose I owe it all to my poor managerial skills.”
At least Anju’s absence enables the possibility for surprise, and with Gwen at her boyfriend�
�s apartment, Bird can take over the kitchen. She hurries from cabinet to fridge, fetching eggs and oil and butter as the back of the box instructs, ignoring the intimidating slice of cake pictured on the front of the box. She cracks, she beats, she whisks. She ribbons the pale batter into the baking pan and checks the clock. An hour has passed since she arrived home and still no sign of Anju.
Now the day is at a slant. Where could the girl be? Did something happen to her? Bird tries to reassure herself with the memory of her younger years, how she loved to wander new towns alone and buy herself roasted peanuts in a cone of warm newspaper. It is natural for Anju to want to meander and explore. If only she would call. Has she been taken to the hospital? Melvin would never forgive Bird for such negligence. That he had trusted her at all was a miracle unto itself.
And aside from Melvin, Bird has come to need Anju, a terrifying thing at her age, to place her happiness in the hands of an unknowing stranger. But Anju needs her just as much, and their lives are twined in ways that no one would understand. Anju is everything that Bird once thought she lost.
She recalls Anju’s words: I will have to make a way. Not a threat, but a simple conviction. Worry settles over Bird in a kind of ladylike paralysis, so that she sits perfectly upright in her chair, hands on her knees, ankles crossed, waiting for a door to open or a phone to ring. She remembers this sense of limbo and desperation, stretched out over the days of Gracie’s silence, before the newspaper told Bird to stop waiting.
THERE IS A COST to thinking of Gracie so often, and the price is collected in dreams. They are seamless dreams, so nearly logical that Bird can hardly tell that she has been pulled under. Here they are, Gracie and Bird, standing in silence as sisters do, by a pond. Such bliss in this, to be near her again, watching the water ruffled by a breeze and embroidered with light. Gracie points out something beneath the surface, but as soon as Bird kneels to look, she finds that the pond has grown infinitely long and endlessly wide with Gracie a mere wisp on the opposite side. Gracie shouts and points at the pond, now a chasm, the smile swept from her face. Her voice never weakens, a warm, invincible whisper in Bird’s ear.
