by Hari Kunzru
Now, with the sleeping mask perched on the top of his head and the sponge covers of a set of headphones clamped over his ears, he was engaged in an appreciation of the ergonomic rigour of his meal tray. The way the tub of fruit juice sat inside the coffee cup, the geometric abstraction of the nameless pink dessert, even the segmentation of the tray itself – all seemed to have been designed with his lifestyle preferences in mind. Certain items, such as the plastic ring which clipped the napkin to the cutlery, were particularly absorbing. Even the doughy and compacted quality of the food, so at odds with its description in the in-flight magazine, had its own uniquely aerospatial charm.
Pressing the stewardess button for a second refill of coffee, he played with the armrest controls and discovered that Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely was about to start on the in-flight Hindi channel. N2L2 was a big hit, and, though he had already seen it seven times, he sat back joyfully to watch it again. More than joyfully. Were he not a committed scientific rationalist, he would have taken it as a sign, a blessing on his endeavour, that this film was the airline’s entertainment choice. After all, N2L2, winner of eight Filmfare awards and the first Rocky Prasad picture to star newcomer Leela Zahir, was the reason he came to be on the plane in the first place.
Not everyone would make a major life decision on the basis of a movie. To make any kind of decision at all on the basis of Naughty Naughty, Lovely Lovely, an entertainment so light as to be almost gaseous, is the mark of a true devotee of popular cinema. Arjun was such a devotee, one of the hordes who queued for tickets during N2L2’S first weekend of release, grossing it ten crore rupees and making it one of the biggest openers in Indian cinema history. He had been expecting a lot (he had always liked Rocky Prasad’s work), but, sitting in the stalls of the Aakash Cineplex, he found more than he imagined possible: the film was nothing less than a call to change his life. In its hero he found a role model even more potent than the great Amitabh Bachchan, whose gangly form had dominated his teenage years. So, as the great jet engines pushed him on towards California, he toggled the volume and adjusted the spongy earphone covers with a kind of reverence, the attitude of a man about to commune with his innermost hopes and dreams.
N2L2 is a love story. Its hero, Dilip, is a home-loving boy. Despite his good looks and college education, he is content to laze around on his father’s farm, set amid the picturesque yellow mustard fields of the Punjab. He does little except lie about in these fields, watching clouds, chewing on stalks of grass and flirting with the troupes of attractive peasant girls who trip gaily back and forth carrying water jars and large squares of coloured silk. Dilip sings about the clouds, the girls, and his general sense of well-being, which is immediately disturbed by the arrival of Aparna, a beauty from London, back in the old country to visit her relatives.
Aparna (played by Leela Zahir) is everything Dilip is not. Though she has traditional values, as we witness in a montage of winsome roti cookery, demure prayers and well-manicured hands pressing the feet of aged relatives, she is also a thrusting investment banker, driven to career success by a wish to avenge her father’s ruin in a long-running lawsuit. In an amusing mistaken-identity scene, Dilip speaks to her roguishly, thinking that the pair of dark eyes behind the veil (she is traditionally and demurely dressed) must belong to some village girl, temporarily without silk square or water vessel. He is taken aback by her college-educated retorts, and falls instantly in love.
Despite Dilip’s attempts to impress Aparna by riding a horse very fast, standing on his hands and boxing the ears of a group of eve-teasers in the marketplace, she remains unmoved, singing to him that the man who wins her heart must have more than a distinguished nose, flat abs and a happy-go-lucky manner; he must also command the respect of his fellow citizens and hold down a highly paid job in commerce or industry. Dilip is confused, until he spies Aparna and her uncle praying before a picture of her dead father. Eavesdropping on their conversation, he learns of the lawsuit, and of the patently very evil Christo, a well-connected London financier and underworld don who drove the dead man to alcoholic collapse.
That evening Dilip spots Christo on CNN World Business Report and realizes that the key to his beloved’s heart lies in acquiring NRI status. He vows to change his life, and become the man Aparna wants him to be. Bidding farewell to his father, he sings that he will tarry among clouds and mustard fields no more, but will go forth to seek his destiny in the international capital markets. When Aparna flies back to London, he follows her, pausing briefly at Heathrow to rescue the stolen luggage of a European bigshot, before heading into the city centre. There he encounters a series of snooty British types who sing to him of his country manners and woeful desi ignorance, as he searches for a cheap hotel in the vicinity of Buckingham Palace.
Sidetracked by the delights of tourism, Dilip visits Madame Tussaud’s and Covent Garden, then foolishly exhausts his meagre funds by taking repeated rides on the London Eye. He is sitting at a table in the Hard Rock Café, facing the chilling realization that he will be unable to pay for his chicken burger combo, when he bumps into his friend the grateful Eurobigshot, who reveals that he heads the biggest investment bank in the City and would like to offer Dilip a job. Dilip agrees, Bigshot settles his bill, and our hero moves from his sleazy Buckingham Palace dive into a riverfront apartment with a view of Big Ben.
Dilip discovers that a childhood of haggling in the Jalandhar Market has given him an aptitude for finance, and in no time at all he is vastly wealthy. Spurning the advances of Bigshot’s beautiful daughter, he decides the time has come to make himself known to Aparna, who has been passing the time in a montage of demure praying and chewing a pencil at her desk. As a boring meeting comes to a climax, Dilip strides in, buys the company and sings to Aparna of his undying love. She is bowled over and agrees to be his, subject to her uncle’s blessing. They go walking by the Thames, on the white cliffs of Dover, on the battlements of Windsor Castle and briefly in the Swiss Alps, wearing a variety of outfits and describing the life they will lead together once they are united in marriage.
Everything is joyous. It is holi, so Dilip and Aparna run through Piccadilly, throwing coloured dye at each other and annoying policemen. In a fantasy sequence, the action switches to the Punjab, and Aparna (whose modern London clothes have been swapped for a traditional wet sari) sings that Dilip has won her heart through his bravery, decisiveness and diversified investment portfolio. Evil Christo chooses this moment to kidnap Aparna, whom he intends to make his wife. His henchmen beat up Dilip, leaving him for dead among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. As Dilip’s prone body is pecked by hungry birds, the villains take Aparna to the gang’s underground hideout beneath Brighton Pavilion. Luckily Dilip is helped by an old pigeon-feed vendor who was himself ruined by Christo many years ago. Mr Vilson, the vendor, leads Dilip to the underground hideout, where together they spray a high-pressure hose over the gang, washing them all into the English Channel. The police arrive, arrest the evil boss and take him off to prison. Aparna’s uncle and Dilip’s father (who are passing through Brighton on their way to Chandigarh) bless the union. Dilip and Aparna garland each other, singing the title song:
Something naughty
Can be lovely
Something lovely
Can be naughty
Naughty naughty
Lovely lovely
Love!
As the end credits rolled over a dissolve of a queue of relatives feeding the happy couple sweetened rice, Arjun experienced the same sense of potential that had struck him so forcefully on his first seven viewings. As he had argued to Aamir over frequent coffees at the Internet Shack, Dilip was him. It was as simple as that. He was a dreamer. He had been idling his time away. If he wanted to live in reality, instead of in his imagination, it was time for a change. How could he not see this movie as a parable?
The rest of the flight passed in a haze, interrupted only by a jetlagged stumble through the duty-free zone at Singapore Airport. Finally, after w
hat seemed like several days’ travel, Arjun found himself descending through a thick fog towards San Francisco Airport. He stowed his tray table, put his seatback in the upright position and carefully packed his complimentary sleep-socks into a side pocket of his carry-on bag. The throb in his depressurizing ears seemed to be sending him a message: It is time, it is time.
A figure, a walking man, trudging along the margin of a wide California highway. One foot in front of the other, each pace bringing him a little closer to the point, marked with a low concrete barrier, where the Taco Bell lot ended and the Staples lot began. Beyond Staples was a Wal-Mart and beyond that a road junction. Beyond the junction, perhaps three blocks or thirty more minutes’ walk away, was a mini-mall with a Thai take-out, a dry-cleaner and the convenience store which was the pedestrian’s intended destination.
Anyone on foot in suburban California is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging. This person, whose thin frame was almost lost inside a grubby Oakland Raiders shirt, was moving too slowly to be a jogger. He appeared edgy, dispossessed. Defeat radiated from him like sweat. If the soccer moms zipping by in their SUVs registered him at all, it was as a blur of dark skin, a minor danger signal flashing past on their periphery. To the walking man, the soccer moms were more cosmological than human, gleaming projectiles that dopplered past him in a rush of noise and dioxins, as alien and indifferent as stars.
He stopped for a moment, squinting into the harsh sunlight at the way ahead. The cracked concrete lots expired in a grudging ribbon of public space, a not-quite-sidewalk that stretched away from him in a glitter of shattered windshield glass. At the Taco-Staples border he paused again, this time to fumble with his Walkman, a low-status hunk of black plastic attached to headphones with dirty foam pads: homeless audio, the type of machine the socially excluded keep on loud to drown out the voices. He replaced the batteries, untwisted the headphone flex and carried on.
*
It was July, and Arjun had been in the States for a year, a year of repeating this walk, or walks like it. To the store, wherever the store happened to be. Back from the store. To the bus-stop. Back. Long intervals, standing in skeletal vandalized shelters. Wind and silence. The California of the non-driver.
At first it had been because he did not feel confident, settled enough. Then it was because he was never in one place. More recently, now that he was desperate, now that the sense of being diminished by this environment had become a suspicion of actual physical shrinkage, it was because he no longer had the money for driving lessons.
Living his dreams was proving hard.
In retrospect, the signs were there at the start. When Sherry collected him from the airport, he had been too busy looking out of the car window to spot her fixed grin of distaste. With her business card (Sherry L. Parks, Databodies Personnel Liaison Manager) clutched in his hand, he had sat in sublime passenger-seat contentment, counting off his first McDonald’s, his first stop sign, his first highway patrol car. Even when they clattered his cases through the screen door and stepped into the house, he had been too blinkered by his expectations to notice, really notice the glum faces of the men in the living room, sitting silently around a fuzzy portable TV.
‘Hello, Vee-jay, hello, Sah-leem, hello, Row-heet,’ twittered Sherry, her mouth stretched into what Arjun would later hear the others call her ‘Mother Teresa among the lepers’ smile. No one responded. He felt embarrassed and looked down at the floor. Objects on the patterned carpet: empty soda bottles, socks, chap-pals, O’Reilly technical manuals, convenience-food packaging. The one with the bushy moustache had a dirty plate balanced precariously on the arm of his chair. He ashed his cigarette on to it, then leaned forward and held out a hand.
‘Welcome to the bench, bhai.’
The bench. Waiting to play. For about three days, being on the bench was cool. At least when Arjun used his new calling card to talk to his family, it sounded cool. On the bench. As if he had been assimilated into the quasi-military culture of American sports, and was living a life of high-fives and huddles, time-outs, play-offs, spit-balls. When Sherry drove him into the city for his induction, he made her stop off at a Foot Locker, where he bought the Raiders shirt, so as to feel even more on the bench.
Linguistic glamour. Examples: when he watched TV, it was ‘tube’, when he thought of his parents, he didn’t think of them as his parents, but as ‘the folks back home’. The others did it too: little experiments with slang, tentative new accents. You spoke from the TV couch to whoever was trailing telephone flex down the stairs, coming back after a family call.
How are the folks back home?
And they replied: A-OK, man. They’re good.
The folks. The bench. Man, good.
Good. Until the second day, when Arjun asked where he would be working and was told that the job Databodies had guaranteed him was not in fact guaranteed at all. He would have to interview by phone with potential clients. Until at his induction meeting he shook the hand of a man who seemed like a clone of Sunny Srinivasan, except seedier, sharper, less seductive, a man who turned out to be Sunny’s brother-in-law and who coldly informed him that until he successfully secured a post, Databodies would pay him a grand total of $500 a month, half of which would be taken back as rent for the house-share. Arjun reminded him of the $50,000 a year his contract guaranteed. Sunny’s brother-in-law shrugged. If you don’t like it, he said, you can always go back home. You’ll owe us for your visa and ticket, and we’ll have to charge you an administrative fee for the inconvenience. Ten thousand should cover it. Rupees? No, bhai, dollars.
Arjun did some calculations. It quickly became obvious that (after he deducted his outgoings) every day he spent on the bench he would be losing money. He did not have many savings. There was only so long he could last. Still, he did not despair. He was a qualified IT consultant, and even though the terms of his visa meant he had to stay with Databodies or leave the country, there would be work soon enough. After all, American companies were desperate for people like him.
Weren’t they? Salim, the chain-smoker, found this so funny he made Arjun repeat it three times. He had already been on the bench ten weeks. Rohit, twelve.
‘Don’t you ever read the business pages?’
As a matter of fact Arjun didn’t. When they told him he actually laughed; it seemed so absurd. America was booming. This was known (in India, at least) to be a permanent condition, a fact about the country like its fifty states, 19,924 km of coastline and 12,248 km of land borders. Furthermore, as if their old economy weren’t booming enough for them, they had declared a new one. Double-boom. The idea that not one but two economies could shudder to a halt was inconceivable. Yet there it was: market correction, cyclical downturn, crash. Not an atmosphere in which to learn a new and difficult skill, like driving a car.
All he could do was to wait for a call. In the meantime he set out to discover America via regular ten-block walks to the store. The new specificities were absorbing. The bass pumping out of lowrider cars was an inversion of India’s screaming treble. Grown men wore short pants like children. Behind the 7-Eleven, feral-looking kids, surely the poor, rode battered skateboards, kicking them up against kerbs and railings to go airborne in flurries of baggy cotton. Not for American shoppers the bustle and haggling of the marketplace. Inside a sepulchral Safeway the air-conditioning played icy breath on his neck as he padded down aisles where the produce was lit like a film set and sprinklers sprayed cricket-ball-sized tomatoes with a fine mist of water. In every parking lot men and women dressed in pastel lycras and cottons pushed staggering cubic volumes of merchandise towards their cars – and what cars! Mythical chariots gleaming with window tint and metallic paint, vehicles built to transport whole clans, entire communities, from one place to another. The first time he saw an RV he actually forgot to breathe. There it was, forty feet of elephantine home-from-home airbrushed with a rock-opera design of white horses in a forest glade, passing by with the immensity and slowness o
f a science-fiction mother-ship. This vision had a brace of trailbikes on the back and a bearded man at the wheel, a man who Arjun could only imagine was possessed by some blood-memory of covered-wagon times, prisoner of an obsessive urge to migrate, to set up further on down the road.
Though for a while he believed nothing could be more magical than the casual mastery of a Californian turning out of a Starbucks parking lot (the slumped tensionless driving style, one hand lazily swinging the wheel as the other administered hits of latte), he discovered that anything can become mundane. Fire hydrants, billboards, even the enamelled blue sky: all had shelf lives. One by one they expired.
Last to lose its aura was the TV, which was somehow more compelling than the world outside. The four benched consultants spent whole days in front of it, eating chips and salsa and trying to ignore their creeping panic. Most mornings one of them would have an interview, a tense half-hour hunched over the phone upstairs with the others trying not to listen, turning the tube up high, half hoping and half fearing that the interviewee would come back down hired. Usually as soon as the client found out he was talking to a foreign national on a temporary visa, the conversation was terminated. Victoria warned Diego she was on to him. Belle learned the truth about Jan’s pregnancy. Jerry goaded plus-sized women to fight with their love-cheat partners and Arjun spoke to three, five, seven companies. None of them wanted to employ him.
As he became more attuned to American language and economics, he realized he was living in a ‘low-income area’. In his bedroom the drone of traffic from Highway 101 was a constant presence. On the corner, listless young black and Latino men played bass-heavy music and leaned into car windows to have short conversations with the drivers. A hydrocarbon stink lay heavy in the air, and during the night the traffic hum was accompanied by police sirens and cracking sounds which, Vijay announced authoritatively, were gunshots. The idea of American poverty, especially a poverty which did not exclude cars, refrigerators, cable TV or obesity, was a new and disturbing paradox, a hint that something ungovernable and threatening lurked beneath the reflective surface of California. Arjun spent as little time as possible outside the house, convinced by his scrutiny of cable news channels that he would be putting himself in danger. Even unarmed, he found Americans physically intimidating. When he went to ‘middle-class’ areas (middle class being, he had discovered, an American word for white) he felt overwhelmed. Used to a world where everyone looked more or less like him, he found it took nerve to move through crowds in which everyone was so tall and heavy, so meaty.
