His son was at Andover, costing nearly 12,000 dollars a year. When Manny converted the 12,000 from dollars to rupees, which he often did as he sat in his small, dreary office listening for screams in the hall; the staggering rupee figure reassured him that he had done well in the New World. His son had recently taken to wearing a safety pin through his left earlobe, but nothing the boy could do would diminish his father’s love.
He had come to America because of the boy. Well, not exactly come, but stayed when his student visa expired. He had met Camille, a nurse, at a teaching hospital and the boy had come along, all eight pounds and ten ounces of him, one balmy summer midnight. He could always go back to Delhi if he wanted to. He had made enough money to retire to India (the conversion into rupees had made him a millionaire several times over). He had bought a condominium in one of the better development ‘colonies’ of New Delhi, just in case.
America had been very good to him, no question; but there were things that he had given up. There were some boyhood emotions, for instance, that he could no longer retrieve. He lived with the fear that his father would die before he could free himself from the crazies of New York and go home. He missed his parents, especially his father, but he couldn’t explain this loss to Camille. She hated her mother who had worked long hours at Korvette’s and brought her up alone. Camille’s mother now worked at a K-Mart, even though she didn’t need the money desperately. Camille’s mother was an obsessive- compulsive but that was no reason to hate her. In fact, Manny got along with her very well and often had to carry notes between her and her daughter.
His father was now in his seventies, a loud, brash man with blackened teeth. He still operated the moviehouse he owned. The old man didn’t trust the manager he kept on the payroll. He didn’t trust anyone except his blood relatives. All the ushers in the moviehouse were poor cousins. Manny was an only child. His mother had been deemed barren, but at age forty-three, goddess Parvati had worked a miracle and Manny had been born. He should go back to India. He should look after his parents. Out of a sense of duty to the goddess, if not out of love for his father. Money, luxuries: he could have both in India, too. When he had wanted to go to Johns Hopkins for medical training, his parents had loved him enough to let him go. They loved him the same intense, unexamined way he loved his own boy. He had let them down. Perhaps he hadn’t really let them down in that he had done well at medical school, and had a job in the State set-up in Queens, and played the money market aggressively with a bit of inside information from Suresh Khanna who had been a year ahead of him in Delhi’s Modern School and was now with Merrill-Lynch, but he hadn’t reciprocated their devotion.
It was in this mood of regret filtered through longing that Manny had driven in Manhattan and parked his Porsche on a side-street outside the Sari Palace which was a block up from the New Taj Mahal, where behind the counter he had spied the girl of his dreams.
The girl—the woman, Manny corrected himself instantly, for Camille didn’t tolerate what she called ‘masculists’—moved out from behind the counter to show a customer where in the crowded store the ten-pound bags of Basmati rice were stacked. She wore a ‘Police’ T-shirt and navy cords. The cords voluted up her small, rounded thighs and creased around her crotch in a delicate burst, like a Japanese fan. He would have dressed her in a silk sari of peacock blue. He wanted to wrap her narrow wrists in bracelets of 24-carat gold. He wanted to decorate her bosom and throat with necklaces of pearls, rubies, emeralds. She was as lovely and as removed from him as a goddess. He breathed warm, worshipful stains on the dingy store window.
She stooped to pick up a sack of rice by its rough jute handles while the customer flitted across the floor to a bin of eggplants. He discerned a touch of indolence in the way she paused before slipping her snake-slim fingers through the sack’s hemp loops. She paused again. She tested the strength of the loops. She bent her knees, ready to heave the brutish sack of rice. He found himself running into the store. He couldn’t let her do it. He couldn’t let a goddess do menial chores, then ride home on a subway with a backache.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she said. She flashed him an indolent glance from under heavily shadowed eyelids, without seeming to turn away from the customer who had expected her to lift the ten-pound sack.
‘Where are the fresh eggplants? These are all dried out.’
Manny Patel watched the customer flick the pleats of her Japanese georgette sari irritably over the sturdy tops of her winter boots.
‘These things look as if they’ve been here all week!’ the woman continued to complain.
Manny couldn’t bear her beauty. Perfect crimson nails raked the top layer of eggplants. ‘They came in just two days ago.’
If there had been room for a third pair of hands, he would have come up with plump, seedless, perfect eggplants.
‘Ring up the rice, dal and spices,’ the customer instructed. ‘I’ll get my vegetables next door.’
‘I’ll take four eggplants,’ Manny Patel said defiantly.
‘And two pounds of bhindi.’ He sorted through wilted piles of okra which Camille wouldn’t know how to cook.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute, sir,’ the goddess answered.
When she looked up again, he asked her out for dinner. She only said, ‘You really don’t have to buy anything, you know.’
She suggested they meet outside the Sari Palace at six thirty. Her readiness overwhelmed him. Dr Patel had been out of the business of dating for almost thirteen years. At conferences, on trips and on the occasional night in the city when an older self possessed him, he would hire women for the evening, much as he had done in India. They were never precisely the answer, not even to his desire.
Camille had taken charge as soon as she had spotted him in the hospital cafeteria; she had done the pursuing. While he did occasionally flirt with a Filipino nutritionist at the hospital where he now worked, he assumed he did not possess the dexterity to perform the two-step dance of assertiveness and humility required of serious adultery. He left the store flattered but wary. A goddess had found him attractive, but he didn’t know her name. He didn’t know what kind of family fury she might unleash on him. Still, for the first time in years he felt a kind of agitated discovery, as though if he let up for a minute, his reconstituted, instant American life would not let him back.
His other self, the sober, greedy, scholarly Dr Patel, knew that life didn’t change that easily. He had seen enough Horowitzes to know that no matter how astute his own methods might be and no matter how miraculous the discoveries of psychopharmacologists, fate could not be derailed. How did it come about that Mr Horowitz, the son of a successful slacks manufacturer, a good student at the Bronx High School of Science, had ended up obese, disturbed and assaultive, while he, the son of a Gujarati farmer turned entrepreneur, an indifferent student at Modern School and then at St. Stephen’s in Delhi, was ambitious and acquisitive? All his learning and experience could not answer the simplest questions. He had about an hour and twenty minutes to kill before perfection was to revisit him, this time (he guessed) in full glory.
Dr Patel wandered through ‘Little India’—the busy, colourful blocks of Indian shops and restaurants off Lexington in the upper twenties. Men lugged heavy crates out of double-parked pick-up trucks, swearing in Punjabi and Hindi. Women with tired, frightened eyes stepped into restaurants, careful not to drop their shopping-sacks from Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. The Manhattan air here was fragrant with spices. He followed an attractive mother with two pre-schoolers into Chandni Chowk, a tea and snacks- stall, to call Camille about the emergency that had come up. Thank god for Mr Horowitz’s recidivism. Camille was familiar with the more outrageous doings of Mr Horowitz.
‘Why does that man always act up when I have plans?’ Camille demanded. ‘Amarcord is at the rep tonight only.’
But Camille seemed in as agreeable a mood as his goddess. She thought she might ask Susan Kwan, the wife of an orthodontist who lived four houses up the bloc
k and who had a son by a former marriage also at Andover. Her credulousness depressed Manny. A woman who had lived with a man for almost thirteen years should be able to catch his little lies.
‘Mr Horowitz is a dangerous person,’ he continued. He could have hung up, but he didn’t. He didn’t want permission; he wanted sympathy. ‘He rushed into my office. He tried to kill me.’
‘Maybe psychiatrists at state institutions ought to carry firearms. Have you thought of that, Manny?’ she laughed.
Manny Patel flushed. Camille didn’t understand how the job was draining him. Mr Horowitz had, for a fact, flopped like a walrus on Dr Patel’s desk, demanding a press conference so that the world would know that his civil liberties were being infringed. The money-less schizos of New York state, Mr Horowitz had screamed, were being held hostage by a bunch of foreign doctors who couldn’t speak English. If it hadn’t been for the two six-foot orderlies (Dr Patel felt an awakening of respect for big blacks), Mr Horowitz would probably have grabbed him by the throat.
‘I could have died today,’ he repeated. The realization dazed him. ‘The man tried to strangle me.’
He hung up and ordered a cup of masala tea. The sweet, sticky brew calmed him, and the perfumed steam cleared his sinuses. Another man in his position would probably have ordered a double Scotch. In crises, he seemed to regress, to reach automatically for the miracle cures of his Delhi youth, though normally he had no patience with nostalgia. When he had married, he burned his India Society membership card. He was professionally cordial, nothing more, with Indian doctors at the hospital. But he knew he would forever shuttle between the old world and the new. He couldn’t pretend he had been reborn when he became an American citizen in a Manhattan courthouse. Rebirth was the privilege of the dead, and of gods and goddesses, and they could leap into your life in myriad, mysterious ways, as a shopgirl, for instance, or as a withered eggplant, just to test you.
At three minutes after six, Dr Patel positioned himself inside his Porsche and watched the front doors of the Sari Palace for his date’s arrival. He didn’t want to give the appearance of having waited nervously. There was a slight tremor in both his hands. He was suffering a small attack of anxiety. At thirty-three minutes after six, she appeared in the doorway of the sari-store. She came out of the Sari Palace, not up the street from the New Taj Mahal as he had expected. He slammed shut and locked his car door. Did it mean that she too had come to the rendezvous too early and had spied on him, crouched, anxious, strapped in the bucket seat of his Porsche? When he caught up with her by the store window, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever talked to.
Her name was Padma. She told him that as he fought for a cab, to take them uptown. He didn’t ask for, and she didn’t reveal her last name. Both were aware of the illicit nature of their meeting. An Indian man his age had to be married, though he wore no wedding ring. An immigrant girl from a decent Hindu family—it didn’t matter how long she had lived in America and what rock groups she was crazy about—would not have said yes to dinner with a man she didn’t know. It was this inarticulate unsanctionedness of the dinner date that made him feel reckless, a hedonist, a man who might trample tired ladies carrying shopping-bags in order to steal a taxi crawling uptown. He wanted to take Padma to an Indian restaurant so that he would feel he knew what he was ordering and could bully the maitre d’ a bit, but not to an Indian restaurant in her neighbourhood. He wanted a nice Indian restaurant, an upscale one, with tablecloths, sitar music and air ducts sprayed with the essence of rose-petals. He chose a new one, Shajahan, on Park Avenue.
‘It’s nice. I was going to recommend it,’ she said.
Padma. Lotus. The goddess had come to him as a flower. He wanted to lunge for her hands as soon as they had been seated at a corner booth, but he knew better than to frighten her off. He was mortal, he was humble.
The maitre d’ himself took Dr Patel’s order. And with the hors d’ oeuvres of samosas and poppadoms he sent a bottle of Entre Deux Mers on the house. Dr Patel had dined at the Shajahan four or five times already, and each time had brought in a group of six or eight. He had been a little afraid that the maitre d’ might disapprove of his bringing a youngish woman, an Indian and quite obviously not his wife, but the bottle of wine reassured him that the management was not judgemental.
He broke off a sliver of poppadom and held it to her lips. She snatched it with an exaggerated flurry of lips and teeth: ‘Feeding the performing seal, are you?’ She was coy. And amused.
‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he murmured. Her lips, he noticed, had left a glistening crescent of lipstick on a fingertip. He wiped the finger with his napkin surreptitiously under the table.
She didn’t help herself to the samosas, and he didn’t dare lift a forkful to her mouth. Perhaps she didn’t care for samosas. Perhaps she wasn’t much of an eater. He himself was timid and clumsy, half afraid that if he tried anything playful he might drip mint chutney on her tiger-print chiffon sari.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
He busied himself with food while she took out a packet of Sobrani and a book of matches. Camille had given up smoking four years before, and now handwritten instructions THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING IN THIS HOUSE decorated bureautops and coffee tables. He had never got started because of an allergy.
‘Well?’ she said. It wasn’t quite a question, and it wasn’t quite a demand. ‘Aren’t you going to light it?’ And she offered Manny Patel an exquisite profile, cheeks sucked tight and lips squeezed around the filter tip.
The most banal gesture of a goddess can destroy a decent-living mortal. He lit her cigarette, then blew the match out with a gust of unreasonable hope.
The maitre d’ hung around Manny’s table almost to the point of neglecting other early diners. He had sad eyes and a bushy moustache. He wore a dark suit, a silvery wide tie kept in place with an elephant-headed god stick-pin, and on his feet which were remarkably large for a short, slight man, scuffed and pointed black shoes.
‘I wouldn’t recommend the pork vindaloo tonight.’ The man’s voice was confidential, low. ‘We have a substitute cook. But the Bengal fish curry is very good. The lady, I think, is Bengali, no?’
She did not seem surprised. ‘How very observant of you, sir,’ she smiled.
It was flattering to have the maitre d’ linger and advise.
Manny Patel ended up ordering one each of the curries listed under beef, lamb and fowl. He was a guiltlessly meat- eating Gujarati, at least in America. He filled in the rest of the order with two vegetable dishes, one spiced lentil and a vegetable pillau. The raita was free, as were the two small jars of mango and lemon pickle.
When the food started coming, Padma reluctantly stubbed out her Sobrani. The maitre d’ served them himself, making clucking noises with his tongue against uneven, oversize teeth, and Dr Patel felt obliged to make loud, appreciative moans.
‘Is everything fine, doctor sahib? Fish is first class, no? It is not on the regular menu.’
He stayed and made small talk about Americans. He dispatched waiters to other tables, directing them with claps of pinkish palms from the edge of Manny’s booth. Padma made an initial show of picking at her vegetable pillau. Then she gave up and took out another slim black Sobrani from a tin packet and held her face, uplifted and radiant, close to Manny’s so he could light it again for her.
The maitre d’ said, ‘I am having a small problem, doctor sahib. Actually the problem is my wife’s. She has been in America three years and she is very lonely still. I’m saying to her, you have nice apartment in Rego Park, you have nice furnitures and fridge and stove, I’m driving you here and there in a blue Buick, you’re having home-style Indian food, what then is wrong? But I am knowing and you are knowing, doctor sahib, that no Indian lady is happy without having children to bring up. That is why, in my desperation, I brought over my sister’s child last June. We want to adopt him, he is very bright and talented and already he is loving this country. But the US governmen
t is telling me no. The boy came on a visitor’s visa, and now the government is giving me big trouble. They are calling me bad names. Jealous peoples are telling them bad stories. They are saying I’m in the business of moving illegal aliens, can you believe? In the meantime, my wife is crying all day and pulling out her hair. Doctor sahib, you can write that she needs to have the boy here for her peace of mind and mental stability, no? On official stationery of your hospital, doctor sahib?’
‘My hands are tied,’ Manny Patel said. ‘The US government wouldn’t listen to me.’
Padma said nothing. Manny ignored the maitre d’ A reality was dawning on Manny Patel. It was too beautiful, too exciting to contemplate. He didn’t want this night to fall under the pressure of other immigrants’ woes.
‘But you will write a letter about my wife’s mental problems, doctor sahib?’ The maitre d’ had summoned up tears. A man in a dark suit weeping in an upscale ethnic restaurant. Manny felt slightly disgraced, he wished the man would go away. ‘Official stationery is very necessary to impress the immigration people.’
‘Please leave us alone,’ snapped Manny Patel. ‘If you persist I will never come back.’
The old assurance, the authority of a millionaire in his native culture, was returning. He was sure of himself.
‘What do you want to do after dinner?’ Padma asked when the maitre d’ scurried away from their booth. Manny could sense him, wounded and scowling, from behind the kitchen door.
‘What would you like to do?’ He thought of his wife and Mrs Kwan at the Fellini movie. They would probably have a drink at a bar before coming home. Susan Kwan had delightful legs. He had trouble understanding her husband, but Manny Patel had spent enjoyable hours at the Kwans’, watching Mrs Kwan’s legs. Padma’s legs remained a mystery; he had seen her only in pants or a sari.
The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories Page 4
