by Kiran Desai
Not even a few sunshiny weeks had passed before the principal replied that he could recommend a promising student who had finished his bachelor’s degree, but hadn’t yet been able to find a job.
The student was Gyan, a quiet student of accounting who had thought the act of ordering numbers would soothe him; however, it hadn’t turned out quite like that, and in fact, the more sums he did, the more columns of statistics he transcribed—well, it seemed simply to multiply the number of places at which solid knowledge took off and vanished to the moon. He enjoyed the walk to Cho Oyu and experienced a refreshing and simple happiness, although it took him two hours uphill, from Bong Busti where he lived, the light shining through thick bamboo in starry, jumping chinks, imparting the feeling of liquid shimmering.
______
Sai was unwilling at first to be forced from her immersion in National Geographics and be incarcerated in the dining room with Gyan. Before them, in a semicircle, were the instruments of study set out by the cook: ruler, pens, globe, graph paper, geometry set, pencil sharpener. The cook found they introduced a clinical atmosphere to the room similar to that which awed him at the chemist, at the clinic, and the path lab, where he enjoyed the hush guarded by the shelves of medicines, the weighing scale and thermometers, cupules, phials, pipettes, the tapeworm transformed into a specimen in formaldehyde, the measurements already inscribed on the bottle.
The cook would talk to the chemist, carefully, trying not to upset the delicate balances of the field, for he believed in superstition exactly as much as in science. “I see, yes, I understand,” he said even if he didn’t, and in a reasonable tone recorded his symptoms, resisting melodrama, to the doctor whom he revered, who studied him through her glasses: “No potty for five days, evil taste in the mouth, a thun thun in the legs and arms and sometimes a chun chun.”
“What is a chun chun and what is a thun thun?”
“Chun chun is a tingling. Thun thun is when there is a pain going on and off.”
“What do you have now? Chun chun?”
“No, THUN THUN.”
The next visit. “Are you better?”
“Better, but still—”
“Thun thun?”
“No, doctor,” he would say very seriously, “chun chun.”
He emerged with his medicines feeling virtuous. Oh yes, he awaited modernity and knew that if you invested in it, it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.
But outside the clinic he would run into Kesang or the cleaner at the hospital or the Metal Box watchman, who would begin to declaim, “Now there is no hope, now you’ll have to do puja, it will cost many thousands of rupees….”
Or: “I knew someone who had exactly what you are describing, never walked again….” By the time he had returned home he would have lost his faith in science and begun to howl: “Hai hai, hamara kya hoga, hai hai, hamara kya hoga?” And he’d have to go back to the clinic the next day to recover his good sense.
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So, appreciating, desiring reasonableness, the cook brought in tea and fried cheese toast with chili pepper mixed into the cheese, and then sat on his stool just outside the door, keeping an eye on Sai and the new tutor, nodding approval at Gyan’s careful tone, the deliberate words that led, calculation by calculation, to an exact, tidy answer that could be confirmed by a list at the back of the text.
Foolish cook. He had not realized that the deliberateness came not from faith in science, but from self-consciousness and doubt; that though they appeared to be engrossed in atoms, their eyes latched tightly to the numbers in that room where the walls swelled like sails, they were flailing; that like the evening hour opening to deeper depths outside, they would be swallowed into something more treacherous than the purpose for which Gyan had been hired; that though they were battling to build a firmness from all that was available to them, there was reason enough to worry it was not good enough to save them.
The small correct answer fell flat.
Gyan produced it apologetically. It was anticlimactic. It would not do. Flicking it aside, the tremendous anticipation that could no longer be pinned on the sum gathered strength and advanced, leaving them gasping by the time two hours were up and Gyan could flee without looking at Sai, who had produced such a powerful effect upon him.
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“It is strange the tutor is Nepali,” the cook remarked to Sai when he had left. A bit later he said, “I thought he would be Bengali.”
“Hm?” asked Sai. How had she looked? she was thinking. How had she appeared to the tutor? The tutor himself had the aspect, she thought, of intense intelligence. His eyes were serious, his voice deep, but then his lips were too plump to have such a serious expression, and his hair was curly and stood up in a way that made him look comic. This seriousness combined with the comic she found compelling.
“Bengalis,” said the cook, “are very intelligent.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Sai. “Although they certainly would agree.”
“It’s the fish,” said the cook. “Coastal people are more intelligent than inland people.”
“Who says?”
“Everyone knows,” said the cook. “Coastal people eat fish and see how much cleverer they are, Bengalis, Malayalis, Tamils. Inland they eat too much grain, and it slows the digestion—especially millet—forms a big heavy ball. The blood goes to the stomach and not to the head. Nepalis make good soldiers, coolies, but they are not so bright at their studies. Not their fault, poor things.”
“Go and eat some fish yourself,” Sai said. “One stupid thing after another from your mouth.”
“Here I bring you up as my own child with so much love and just see how you are talking to me…,” he began.
______
That night Sai sat and stared into the mirror.
Sitting across from Gyan, she had felt so acutely aware of herself, she was certain it was because of his gaze on her, but every time she glanced up, he was looking in another direction.
She sometimes thought herself pretty, but as she began to make a proper investigation, she found it was a changeable thing, beauty. No sooner did she locate it than it slipped from her grasp; instead of disciplining it, she was unable to refrain from exploiting its flexibility. She stuck her tongue out at herself and rolled her eyes, then smiled beguilingly. She transformed her expression from demon to queen. When she brushed her teeth, she noticed her breasts jiggle like two jellies being rushed to the table. She lowered her mouth to taste the flesh and found it both firm and yielding. This plumpness jiggliness firmness softness, all coupled together in an unlikely manner, must surely give her a certain amount of bartering power?
But if she continued forever in the company of two bandy-legged men, in this house in the middle of nowhere, this beauty, so brief she could barely hold it steady, would fade and expire, unsung, unrescued, and unrescuable.
She looked again and found her face tinged with sadness, and the image seemed faraway.
She’d have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she’d be trapped forever in a place whose time had already passed.
______
Over the days, she found herself continually obsessed with her own face, aware that she was meanwhile whetting her appetite for something else.
But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer.
Fourteen
At 4:25 a.m., Biju made his way to the Queen of Tarts bakery, watching for the cops who sometimes came leaping out: where are you going and what are you doing with whom at what time and why
?
But Immigration operated independently of Police, the better, perhaps, to bake the morning bread, and Biju fell, again and again, through the cracks in the system.
Above the bakery the subway ran on a rawly sketched edifice upheld by metal stilts. The trains passed in a devilish screaming; their wheels sparked firework showers that at night threw a violent jagged brightness over the Harlem projects, where he could see a few lights on already and some others besides himself making a start on miniature lives. At the Queen of Tarts, the grill went zipping up, the light flickered on, a rat moved into the shadow. Tap root tail, thick skulled, broad shouldered, it looked over its back sneering as it walked with a velvet crunch right over the trap too skimpy to detain it.
“Namaste, babaji,” said Saeed Saeed.
______
Biju considered his previous fight with a Pakistani, the usual attack on the man’s religion that he’d grown up uttering: “Pigs, pigs, sons of pigs.”
Now here was Saeed Saeed, and Biju’s admiration for the man confounded him. Fate worked this way. Biju was overcome by the desire to be his friend, because Saeed Saeed wasn’t drowning, he was bobbing in the tides. In fact, a large number of people wished to cling to him like a plank during a shipwreck—not only fellow Zanzibaris and fellow illegals but Americans, too; overweight confidence-leached citizens he teased when they lunched alone on a pizza slice; lonely middle-aged office workers who came by for conversation after nights of lying awake wondering if, in America—in America!—they were really getting the best of what was on offer. They told such secrets as perhaps might only be comfortably told to an illegal alien.
Saeed was kind and he was not Paki. Therefore he was OK?
The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?
Therefore he liked Muslims and hated only Pakis?
Therefore he liked Saeed, but hated the general lot of Muslims?
Therefore he liked Muslims and Pakis and India should see it was all wrong and hand over Kashmir?
No, no, how could that be and—
This was but a small portion of the dilemma. He remembered what they said about black people at home. Once a man from his village who worked in the city had said: “Be careful of the hubshi. Ha ha, in their own country they live like monkeys in the trees. They come to India and become men.”
Biju had thought the man from his village was claiming that India was so far advanced that black men learned to dress and eat when they arrived, but what he had meant was that black men ran about attempting to impregnate every Indian girl they saw.
Therefore he hated all black people but liked Saeed?
Therefore there was nothing wrong with black people and Saeed?
Or Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, or anyone else…???
This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed an awe of white people, who arguably had done India great harm, and a lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else, who had never done a single harmful thing to India.
Presumably Saeed Saeed had encountered the same dilemma regarding Biju.
From other kitchens, he was learning what the world thought of Indians:
In Tanzania, if they could, they would throw them out like they did in Uganda.
In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.
In China, they hate them.
In Hong Kong.
In Germany.
In Italy.
In Japan.
In Guam.
In Singapore.
Burma.
South Africa.
They don’t like them.
In Guadeloupe—they love us there?
No.
Presumably Saeed had been warned of Indians, but he didn’t seem wracked by contradictions; a generosity buoyed him and dangled him above such dilemmas.
______
He had many girls.
“Oh myeee God!!” he said. “Oh myeee Gaaaawd! She keep calling me and calling me,” he clutched at head, “aaaiii… I don’t know what to do!!”
“You know what to do,” said Omar sourly.
“Ha ha ha, ah ah, no, I am going crazeeeeee. Too much pooky pooky, man!”
“It’s those dreadlocks, cut them off and the girls will go.”
“But I don’t want them to go!”
When pretty girls came to pick out their cinnamon buns with mine shafts of jeweled brown sugar and spice, Saeed described the beauty and the poverty of Zanzibar, and the girls’ compassion rose like leavened loaf—how they wanted to save him, to take him home and lull him with good plumbing and TV; how they wanted to be seen down the road with a tall handsome man topped with dreadlocks. “He’s cute! He’s cute! He’s cute!” they’d say, winding up tight and then wringing out their desire over the telephone to their friends.
______
Saeed’s first job in America had been at the Ninety-sixth Street mosque, where the imam hired him to do the dawn call to prayer, since he did a fine rooster crow, but before he arrived at work, he took to stopping at the nightclubs along the way, it seeming a natural enough progression time-wise. Disposable camera in his pocket, he stood at the door waiting to have snapshots of himself taken with the rich and famous: Mike Tyson, yes! He’s my brother. Naomi Campbell, she’s my girl. Hey, Bruce (Springsteen)! I am Saeed Saeed from Africa. But don’t worry, man, we don’t eat white people anymore.
There came a time when they began to let him inside.
He had an endless talent with doors, even though, two years ago during an INS raid, he had been unearthed and deported despite having been cheek-to-cheek, Kodak-proof, with the best of America. He went back to Zanzibar, where he was hailed as an American, ate kingfish cooked in coconut milk in the stripy shade of the palm trees, lazed on the sand sieved fine as semolina, and in the evening when the moon went gold and the night shone as if it were wet, he romanced the girls in Stone Town. Their fathers encouraged them to climb out of their windows at night; the girls climbed down the trees and onto Saeed’s lap, and the fathers spied, hoping to catch the lovers in a compromising position. This boy who once had so long dawdled on the street corner—no work, all trouble, so much so that the neighbors had all contributed to his ticket out—now this boy was miraculously worth something. They prayed he would be forced to marry Fatma who was fat or Salma who was beautiful or Khadija with the gauzy gray eyes and the voice of a cat. The fathers tried and the girls tried, but Saeed escaped. They gave him kangas to remember them by, with slogans, “Memories are like diamonds,”and “Your pleasant scent soothes my heart,” so that when he was relaxing in NYC, he might throw off his clothes, wrap his kanga about him, air his balls, and think of the girls at home. In two months time, back he was—new passport, new name typed up with the help of a few greenbacks given to a clerk outside the government office. When he arrived at JFK as Rasheed Zulfickar, he saw the very same officer who had deported him waiting at the desk. His heart had beat like a fan in his ears, but the man had not remembered him: “Thank God, to them we all of us look the same!”
______
Saeed, he relished the whole game, the way the country flexed his wits and rewarded him; he charmed it, cajoled it, cheated it, felt great tenderness and loyalty toward it. When it came time, he who had jigged open every back door, he who had, with photocopier, Wite-Out, and paper cutter, spectacularly sabotaged the system (one skilled person at the photocopy machine, he assured Biju, could bring America to its knees), he would pledge emotional allegiance to the flag with tears in his eyes and conviction in his voice. The country recognized something in Saeed, he in it, and it was a mutual love affair. Ups and downs, sometimes more sour than sweet, maybe, but nonetheless, beyond anything the INS could imagine, it was an old-fashioned romance.
______
By 6 A.M. the bakery shelves were stocked with rye, oatmeal, and peasant b
read, apricot and raspberry biscuits that broke open to a flood of lush amber or ruby jam. One such morning, Biju sat outside in a pale patch of sun, with a roll. He cracked the carapace of the crust and began to eat, plucking the tender fleece with his long thin fingers—
But in New York innocence never prevails: an ambulance passed, the NYPD, a fire engine; the subway went overhead and the jolting rhythm traveled up through his defenseless shoes; it shook his heart and sullied the roll. He stopped chewing, thought of his father—
Ill. Dead. Maimed.
He reminded himself his panicked thoughts were just the result of extra virile transport going by, and he searched for the bread in his mouth, but it had parted like an ethereal cloud about his tongue and disappeared.
______
In Kalimpong, the cook was writing, “Dear Biju, can you please help….”
Last week the MetalBox watchman had paid him a formal visit to tell the cook about his son, big enough now to get a job, but there were no jobs. Could Biju help him across to America? The boy would be willing to start at a menial level but of course a job in an office would be best. Italy would also be all right, he added for good measure. A man from his village had gone to Italy and was making a good living as a tandoori cook.
______
At first the cook was agitated, upset by the request, felt a war in him between generosity and meanness, but then…: “Why not, I will ask him, very difficult, mind you, but there is no harm in trying.”
And, he began to feel a tingle—the very fact the watchman had asked! It reestablished Biju in his father’s eyes as a fine-suited-and-booted-success.
They sat outside his quarter and smoked; and it felt good to be two old men sitting together, talking of young men. The deadly nightshade was blooming, giant glowing bell flowers, white and starched, sinister and spotless. A star came forth and a lost cow wandered slowly by in the dusk.
______