by Kiran Desai
“Pay at the window around the corner and you can collect your visa after five P.M.”
How could this be?
A man he had spoken to, still in the line behind him, called out in a piercing tone:
“Were you successful, Biju? Biju, were you successful? Biju? Biju!”In that passionate peacock cry, Biju felt this man was willing to die for him, but his desperation was for himself, of course.
“Yes, I was successful.”
“You are the luckiest boy in the whole world,” the man said.
______
The luckiest boy in the whole world. He walked through a park to luxuriate in the news alone. Raw sewage was being used to water a patch of grass that was lush and stinking, grinning brilliantly in the dusk. Out of the sewage Biju chased a line of pigs with black watermarks across their bellies, ran after them in jubilation. “Hup hup,” he shouted. The crows that had been sitting on the pigs’ backs scrambled into indignant flight, having to start up backward. A jogger in a tracksuit stopped to stare, the chauffeur waiting for the jogger and brushing his teeth with a neem twig, meanwhile, also stopped and stared. Biju ran after a cow. “Hup hup.” He hopped over the ornamental plants and he jumped on the exercise bars, did pull-ups and push-ups.
______
The next day, he sent a telegram to his father, “the luckiest boy in the whole wide world,” and when it arrived he knew his father would be the happiest father in the world. He didn’t know, of course, that Sai, too, would be overjoyed. That when he had visited Kalimpong for that doomed interview with the cruise ship, she had found her heart shaken by the realization that the cook had his own family and thought of them first. If his son were around, he would pay only the most cursory attention to her. She was just the alternative, the one to whom he gave his affection if he could not have Biju, the real thing.
“Yipeee,” she had shouted when she heard of his visa. “Hip hip hooray.”
______
In the Gandhi Café, a little after three years from the day he’d received his visa, the luckiest boy in the whole world skidded on some rotten spinach in Harish-Harry’s kitchen, streaked forward in a slime green track and fell with a loud popping sound. It was his knee. He couldn’t get up.
“Can you get a doctor?” he said to Harish-Harry after Saran and Jeev had helped him to his mattress between the vegetables.
“Doctor!! Do you know what is medical expense in this country?!”
“It happened here. Your responsibility.”
“My responsibility!” Harish-Harry stood over Biju, enraged. “You slip in the kitchen. If you slip on the road, then who would you ask, hm?” He had given this boy the wrong impression. He had been too kind and Biju had misunderstood those nights of holding his boss’s divided soul in his lap, gluing it together with Harish-Harry’s favorite axioms. “I take you in. I hire you with no papers, treat you like my own son and now this is how you repay me! Living here rent-free. In India would they pay you? What right do you have? Is it my fault you don’t even clean the floor? YOU should have to pay ME for not cleaning, living like a pig. Am I telling YOU to live like a pig?”
“Biju’s throbbing knee made him brave, reduced him to animal directness. He glared at Harish-Harry, the pretence was gone; in this moment of physical pain, his own feelings were strained clear.
“Without us living like pigs,” said Biju, “what business would you have? This is how you make your money, paying us nothing because you know we can’t do anything, making us work day and night because we are illegal. Why don’t you sponsor us for our green cards?”
Volcanic explosion.
“How can I sponsor you?! If I sponsor you I have to sponsor Rishi, and if I sponsor Rishi, then I have to sponsor Saran, and if him then Jeev, and then Mr. Lalkaka will come and say, but I have been here for longest, I am the most distinguished, and I should be first in line. How can I make an exception? I have to go to the INS and say that no American citizen can do the job. I have to prove it. I have to prove I advertised it. They will look into my restaurant. They will study and ask questions. And the way they have it, it’s the owner who gets put in jail for hiring illegal staff. If you are not happy, then go right now. Go find someone to sponsor you. Know how easily I can replace you? Know how lucky you are!!! You think there aren’t thousands of people in this city looking for a job? I can replace you like this,” he snapped his fingers, “I’ll snap my fingers and in one second hundreds of people will appear. Get out of my face!”
But since Biju couldn’t walk, it was Harish-Harry who had to leave. He went back up and then he came back down, because his temper had changed in a flash—it was always like that with him, a thunder squall that moved on fast.
“Look,” he said more kindly, “when have I treated you badly? I am not a bad man, am I? Why are you attacking me? As it is, I stick out my neck for you, Biju, tell me, how much more can you ask? These risky things I cannot do.” He counted out fifty dollars from his wallet. “Here. Why not take some rest? You can help cutting the vegetables while lying down and if you are not better, go home. Doctors are very cheap and good in India. Get the best medical attention and later on you can always return.”
A modest geometry of morning light lay on the floor, a small rhombus falling through the grate. “Naaty boy,” Harish-Harry waggled his finger like a joke. The geometrical shape began to leak light, became shifty, exited slithering up the walls.
Return.
Come back.
Somebody in one of the kitchens of Biju’s past had said: “It could not be so hard or there would not be so many of you here.”
But it WAS so hard and YET there were so many here. It was terribly, terribly hard. Millions risked death, were humiliated, hated, lost their families—YET there were so many here.
But Harish-Harry knew this. How could he say “Return–come back,” in that easy oiled way?
“Naaty boy…” he said again when he brought Biju prasad from the temple in Queens. “Giving so much worry and trouble.”
And in that prasad Biju knew not to expect anything else. It was a decoy, an old Indian trick of master to servant, the benevolent patriarch garnering the loyalty of staff; offering slave wages, but now and then a box of sweets, a lavish gift….
So Biju lay on his mattress and watched the movement of the sun through the grate on the row of buildings opposite. From every angle that you looked at this city without a horizon, you saw more buildings going up like jungle creepers, starved for light, holding a perpetual half darkness congealed at the bottom, the day shafting through the maze, slivering into apartments at precise and fleeting times, a cuprous segment visiting between 10 and 12 perhaps, or between 10 and 10:45, between 2:30 and 3:45. As in places of poverty where luxury is rented out, shared, and passed along from neighbor to neighbor, its time of arrival was noted and anticipated by cats, plants, elderly people who might sit with it briefly across their knees. But this light was too brief for real succor and it seemed more the visitation of a beautiful memory than the real thing.
______
After two weeks, Biju could walk with the aid of a stick. Two more weeks and the pain left him, but not, of course, the underlying green card problem. That continued to make him ill.
His papers, his papers. The green card, green card, the machoot sala oloo ka patha chaar sau bees green card that was not even green. It roosted heavily, clumsily, pinkishly on his brain day and night; he could think of nothing else, and he threw up sometimes, embracing the toilet, emptying his gullet into its gullet, lying over it like a drunk. The post brought more letters from his father, and as he picked them up, he cried. Then he read them and he grew violently angry.
“Please help Oni…. I asked you in my previous letter but you have not replied…. He went to the embassy and the Americans were very impressed with him. He will be arriving in one month’s time…. Maybe he can stay with you until he finds something….” Biju began to grind his teeth through his nightmares, woke one morning wi
th a tooth that had cracked across.
“You sound like a cement mixer,” complained Jeev, “I just can’t sleep myself, what with you grinding and the rats running.”
One night, Jeev woke and trapped a rat in the metal garbage can where it was foraging.
He poured in lighter fluid and set the rat aflame.
“Shut the fuck up, motherfucker,” men shouted from up above. “Shithead. What the fuck. For fuck’s sake. Asshole. Fuck you.” A rain of beer bottles crashed around them.
______
“Ask me the price of any shoes all over Manhattan and I’ll tell you where to get the best price.”
Saeed Saeed again. How did he come popping up all over the city?
“Come on, ask me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Pay attention, man,” he said with strict kindness. “Now you are here, you are not back home. Anything you want, you try and you can do.” His English was good enough now that he was reading two books, Stop Worrying and Start Living and How to Share Your Life with Another Person.
He owned twenty-five pairs of shoes at this point; some were the wrong size, but he had bought them anyway, just for the exquisite beauty of them.
Biju’s leg had mended.
What if it hadn’t?
Well, it had.
Maybe, though, maybe he would return. Why not? To spite himself, spite his fate, give joy to his enemies, those who wanted him gone from here and those who would gloat to see him back—maybe he would go home.
While Saeed was collecting shoes, Biju had been cultivating self-pity. Looking at a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept in sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn’t afford them anymore.
“Stay there as long as you can,” the cook had said. “Stay there. Make money. Don’t come back here.”
Thirty-one
In the month of March, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Lola, Noni, and Sai sat in the Swiss Dairy jeep on their way to the Darjeeling Gymkhana to exchange their library books before the trouble on the hillside got any worse.
It was some weeks after the gun robbery at Cho Oyu and a program of action newly drawn up in Ghoom, threatened:
Roadblocks to bring economic activity to a standstill and to prevent the trees of the hills, the boulders of the river valleys, from leaving for the plains. All vehicles would be stopped.
Black flag day on April 13.
A seventy-two-hour strike in May.
No national celebrations. No Republic Day, Independence Day, or Gandhi’s birthday.
Boycott of elections with the slogan “We will not stay in other people’s state of West Bengal.”
Nonpayment of taxes and loans (very clever).
Burning of the Indo-Nepal treaty of 1950.
Nepali or not, everyone was encouraged (required) to contribute to funds and to purchase calendars and cassette tapes of speeches made by Ghising, the top GNLF man in Darjeeling, and by Pradhan, top man in Kalimpong.
It was requested (required) that every family—Bengali, Lepcha, Tibetan, Sikkimese, Bihari, Marwari, Nepali, or whatever else in the mess—send a male representative to every procession, and they were also to show up at the burning of the Indo-Nepal treaty.
If you didn’t, they would know and… well, nobody wanted them to finish the sentence.
______
“Where is your bum?” said Uncle Potty to Father Booty as he got into the jeep.
He studied his friend severely. A bout of flu had rendered Father Booty so thin his clothes seemed to be hanging on a concavity. “Your bum has gone!”
The priest sat on an inflatable swimming ring, for his gaunt rear ached from riding in that rough jeep running on diesel, just a few skeleton bars and sheets of metal and a basic engine attached, the windscreen spider-webbed with cracks delivered by stones flying up off the broken roads. It was twenty-three years old, but it still worked and Father Booty claimed no other vehicle on the market could touch it.
In the back were the umbrellas, books, ladies, and several wheels of cheese for Father Booty to deliver to the Windamere Hotel and Loreto Convent, where they ate it on toast in the mornings, and an extra cheese for Glenary’s Restaurant in case he could persuade them to switch from Amul, but they wouldn’t. The manager believed that when something came in a factory tin with a name stamped on it, when it was showcased in a national advertising campaign, naturally it was better than anything made by the farmer next door, some dubious Thapa with one dubious cow living down the lane.
“But this is made by local farmers, don’t you wish to support them?” Father Booty would plead.
“Quality control, Father,” he countered, “all-India reputation, name brand, customer respect, international standards of hygiene.”
Father Booty was with hope, anyway, whizzing through the spring, every flower, every creature preening, flinging forth its pheromones.
The garden at St. Joseph’s Convent was abuzz with such fecundity that Sai wondered, as they drove by in the jeep, if it discomfited the nuns. Huge, spread-open Easter lilies were sticky with spilling anthers; insects chased each other madly through the sky, zip zip; and amorous butterflies, cucumber green, tumbled past the jeep windows into the deep marine valleys; the delicacy of love and courtliness apparent even between the lesser beasts.
______
Gyan and Sai—she thought of the two of them together, of their fight over Christmas; it was ugly, and how badly it contrasted with the past. She remembered her face in his neck, arms and legs over and under, bellies, fingers, here then there, so much so that at times she kissed him and found instead that she’d kissed herself.
“Jesus is coming,” read a sign on the landslide reinforcements as they nose-dived to the Teesta.
“To become a Hindu,” someone had added in chalk underneath.
This struck Father Booty as very funny, but he stopped laughing when they passed the Amul billboard.
Utterly Butterly Delicious—
“Plastic! How can they call it butter and cheese? It’s not. You could use it for waterproofing!”
______
Lola and Noni were waving out of the jeep window. “Hello, Mrs. Thondup.” Mrs. Thondup, from an aristocratic Tibetan family, was sitting out with her daughters Pem Pem and Doma in jewel-colored bakus and pale silk blouses woven subtly with the eight propitious Buddhist signs. These daughters, who attended Loreto Convent, were supposed to make friends with Sai—once, long ago, so the adults had conspired—but they didn’t want to be her friends. They had friends already. All full up. No room for oddness.
“What an elegant lady,” Lola and Noni always said when they saw her, for they liked aristocrats and they liked peasants; it was just what lay between that was distasteful: the middle class bounding over the horizon in an endless phalanx.
Thus, they did not wave to Mrs. Sen emerging from the post office. “They keep begging and begging my daughter to please just take a green card,” Lola mimicked her neighbor. Liar, liar, pants on fire….
They waved again as they passed the Afghan princesses sitting on cane chairs among white azaleas in flower, virginal yet provocative like a good underwear trick. From their house came the unmistakable smell of chicken.
“Soup?” shouted Uncle Potty, already hungry, nose trembling with excitement. He had missed his usual leftovers-inside-an-omelet breakfast.
“Soup!”
Waving, then, at the Graham’s School orphans in the playground—they were so angelically beautiful, they looked as if they had already died and gone to heaven.
The army came jogging along overlaid by courting butterflies and the colorful dashes—blue, red, orange—of dragonflies, hinged in th
e severely cricked geometric angles of their mating. The men puffed and panted, their spindly legs protruding from comically wide shorts: how would they defend India against the Chinese so close over the mountains at Nathu-La?
From the army mess kitchens came rumors of increasing vegetarianism.
Lola often encountered young officers who were not only vegetarian, but also teetotalers. Even the top command.
“I think to be in the army you should eat fish at least,” she said.
“Why?” asked Sai.
“To kill you must be carnivorous or otherwise you’re the hunted. Just look at nature—the deer, the cow. We are animals after all and to triumph you must taste blood.” But the army was retreating from being a British-type army and was becoming a true Indian army. Even in choice of paint. They passed the Striking Lion’s Club that was painted a bridal pink.
“Well,” said Noni, “they must be tired of that mud color over every single thing.”
“FLOWERS,” it read on a grand sign nearby as part of the Army Beautification Program, though it was the only spot on the hill where there were none.
______
They stopped for a pair of young monks crossing to the gates of a mansion recently bought by their order.
“Hollywood money,” Lola said. “And once upon a time the monks used to be grateful to Indians, the only country to take them in! Now they despise us. Waiting for Americans to take them to Disneyland. Fat chance!”
“God, they’re so handsome,” said Uncle Potty, “who wants them to leave?”
He remembered the time he and Father Booty had first met… their admiring eyes on the same monk in the market… the start of a grand friendship….
“Everyone says poor Tibetans—poor Tibetans,” Lola continued, “but what brutal people, barely a Dalai Lama survived—they were all popped off before their time. That Potala Palace—the Dalai Lama must be thanking his lucky stars to be in India instead, better climate, and let’s be honest, better food. Good fat mutton momos.”