I was relieved when she said she wouldn’t have dessert and coffee. “I like the aftertaste of the wine to linger in my mouth until bedtime.”
The relief didn’t last long. When the bill came, my head and shoulders sagged.
“Is anything wrong?” said Nancy.
“I have a bit of a problem here,” I said, straightening my shoulders. “Do you mind paying the tip?”
Nancy was generous. Her tip was bigger than the prevailing standard of fifteen percent.
As we drove back, I was overwhelmed by feelings and thoughts that froze my post-dinner libidinous intentions. Asking a woman to pay, even for a minor share, was a hard humiliation to swallow. Worse was the realization of my stupidity, well beyond the acceptable folly of youth. In my desire to impress, I had lost all sense of proportion. The cash I had left was just enough to pay my Greyhound bus fare to New Haven via New York. What hubris!
I had to find money for my meals for the remaining month of my Washington summer. Having to eat spaghetti with ketchup for days in a row left me despondent.
As I lay my head on the pillow that evening, I wondered what my mother would say. “You can’t escape the karmic law, Vishnu. You’ll have to pay for your delusions of grandeur.” Papa would be more teacherly. “There’s always someone more knowledgeable than you. Nancy knew her wines but did not brag.” Then he would toss in an English proverb. “A little learning is a dangerous thing, son.”
My options were limited. The Tuckers were on holiday in the remote islands of Fiji. On my student visa, I could only work on campus. I tried the library. “We are halfway through the summer and all jobs are taken,” said the head librarian.
When I first told my friend Janet at Yale of my summer plans, she had said that a family friend managed the university dining room and that I should call on her upon arrival in D.C. “She might ask you to join her family for coffee or maybe dinner.” I hadn’t done so.
Like a dog tucking its tail between its hind legs, I trekked to her office.
“You’re Vishnu! Why didn’t you call earlier?”
I had rehearsed my answer.
“It took me a while to get adjusted to the system here. Now I’m settled and more relaxed. Indeed, I have free time in the evenings and I wonder if you have something for me to do in the dining room.”
She had the eyes of a benevolent yet shrewd aunt who could see through me and guess the real reason for my job request.
“We all need some extra cash sometimes,” she said. “I have nothing in the dining room, but I could use you in the kitchen.”
Had Janet shared with her the story of my chutzpah at Yale? The thought crossed my mind, but I dismissed it. During the past academic year, Janet and I had become good friends, arguing a lot but enjoying the banter. She had asked me to spend a few days with her family in New York on my way back to New Haven.
The kitchen in D.C. was an even bigger industrial operation than the one at Yale. Colossal vats of shiny steel. Mega freezers and mega ovens. The heat of molten metal. I was sweating before I had even touched any equipment, utensils, or plates.
Cold looks greeted me when the manager introduced me to the staff on Monday, and they all returned to their tasks. No time for social chitchat here, I thought.
I spent the first week washing dishes. One of my co-workers looked like an aging version of Pelé. Like the Brazilian soccer star, he danced his way in and out of the kitchen, as if he was always dribbling and passing a ball, enjoying life.
“I can see this is new to you,” he said, taking a plate from my hand. “Before you put it on the line, you must swipe the heavy food into the garbage. Otherwise there’s blockage somewhere.”
I looked at his hands as he disposed of the food remnants. They were strong, veiny, muscular. So unlike my sookwaar hands.
“So much food wasted in America,” he said.
He had a French accent.
“Are you from Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire?” I asked, naming the most prominent French colonies that had recently attained independence.
“No, Zaire, the former Belgian Congo.”
My next question was prompted by his graying hair.
“Are you a doctoral student?”
“I’m a dentist. I’m preparing license exam.”
“Can’t you work with a dental practice until you get the license?”
“The American Dental Association don’t allow. I graduated dentistry from Bruxelles and practiced five years at Kinshasa, but they require American dentistry exams. I must first take TOEFL course to improve my English.”
“Why work here?”
He shook his head. “Student visa. Must follow the rules. I don’t want deportation to Mobutu’s dictatorship. Besides, I don’t mind this; in Bruxelles I cleaned toilets to pay my studies.”
“Your name?”
“Patrice.”
“Like Lumumba?”
“You know Patrice Lumumba?”
Patrice’s face changed. It was a grave look. I didn’t know whether to continue the conversation or not.
I took a risk. “Didn’t Mobutu and the CIA murder him?”
Patrice slapped me hard on my shoulder blade. His face shone. “I think we are on the same wavelength,” he said. “And we’ll speak French.”
I knew that from that moment on, he’d be my friend in the kitchen.
Our job was simple. Mop the floor at the start of the evening shift. Swipe off the sticky and heavy food remnants, put the plates on the line. Repeat that a thousand times, maybe more, maybe less. Mop the floor before we leave. I needed no special skill, but handling so much leftover food that resembled giant rheums and snot made me nauseous.
“Well done,” Patrice said as we bade each other good-bye that night.
I was about to step out when I had a thought.
“Patrice, why don’t you ask the dean of the dental school for academic credit and exam waivers? Yale gave me a year’s credit for my A-levels and a year for my study in Madagascar. I’ll be a senior next year.”
Patrice looked skeptical.
“In America, everything is negotiable. Students here are not like at home; they knock on their professors’ doors and try to negotiate their grades.”
After I left the kitchen area, I sensed a strange odor around me. I sniffed my clothes, drenched in perspiration: they stank. I sniffed my hands: they exhaled the odor of fermentation.
In the dorm, I headed straight to the shower. Tim wasn’t in.
In the morning, my calves hurt as I stood up to shave. I remembered that I had spent the evening on my feet.
At work the next evening, Patrice was somber.
“The dean said it’s not a matter for the university; he can’t do anything about the requirements of the American Dental Association; they are inflexible.”
“Well, at least you tried,” I said.
I told him about my aches and pains. Patrice advised me to leave my dress shoes in my closet and buy special working or basketball shoes if I planned to continue in the kitchen for some time. He spoke more as a doctor than a dentist: “This isn’t interning in the Congress. With dress shoes, the problems will develop—aching muscles, corns, bunions, ankle pain, varicose veins, back pain.”
I couldn’t afford shoes, not even secondhand ones.
The third evening, Tim was lounging on the couch when I returned to the dorm from work. He wrinkled his nose. I couldn’t blame him; I wasn’t emitting perfume.
The tedium continued unabated for a whole week, every evening from 6 p.m. till 10 p.m., when the university dining room closed. The only breaks in the routine occurred when the other kitchen staff—the cooks and those handling the massive equipment—walked by, sweaty from the infernal heat. They ignored me but always greeted Patrice. I asked him why. “They think you’re uncomf
ortable working here, so you must be from rich family. A snob. They’ll change when they know you better.”
On Friday, my Congolese friend brought me what he called a countryside specialty, goat stew and cassava cooked in banana leaves, and asked me to join him and his friends the next evening. We would meet at the basement apartment where he was housesitting in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood not yet gentrified and at the time bordering on the seedy.
On Saturday, I woke up at two in the afternoon. The alarm clock, set for 9 a.m., had rung for so long that it drove Tim to switch it off. He shook me up, but I fell back to sleep. I was physically drained, and stayed in my room. I read The Federalist Papers in preparation for the following week’s test but was unable to concentrate. I longed for my weekends in Madagascar, weekends of leisurely ice cream at Blanche Neige and entraîneuses at the nightclub.
When the glow of sunset on the horizon loomed over my window, I decided to go to Patrice’s. It was not just the incandescence and warmth of the sunset that changed my mood. I thought of Patrice—cleaning toilets to become a dentist, escaping death in his native land at the hands of Mobutu’s henchmen, and still so resilient that he sambaed his way into the kitchen every day. He lived by my mother’s words: “You should get used to some manual work; you never know what life may bring you.”
Before I walked out the door, I aimed the cologne at my chest, for a double spray to eliminate the kitchen emanations, vestiges of smells that remained despite taking the shower. When I put down the bottle, I noticed changes in my hands: some fingers were scaly from dryness, others had scars. There were lumps on my palm. Would they grow into calluses like my father’s or into boils?
The kitchen crew was at Patrice’s. Aware of their indifference to me, he introduced everyone. They were all on scholarship. The foreigners were older and were in D.C. to polish their English language skills before starting graduate school in the fall. In the kitchen, Liu Wang, a Taiwanese woman, seemed to specialize in plants used for seasoning. Whenever I turned my neck to the cooking section, she was carrying bunches of different herbs: mint, thyme, rosemary, and others I couldn’t identify. Francisco, from El Salvador, worked with the most mechanized components of the culinary enterprise, equipment too heavy to be moved. “I know how to use these fuckers, and I fix them when they break,” he said proudly.
Red-haired James, from a mining family in Appalachia, was the meat man. He grilled the steak served on “special treat” days and flipped beef burgers. He puffed up his shirtless white chest and smiled when the others called him “redneck,” but he was diffident about his studies. Patrice told me he was in some remedial program that would help him cope with college in the fall. The other American was a Navajo Indian, Sam Bitsui. He had won a scholarship to Dartmouth, in New Hampshire, and was in D.C. to complete a course in calculus that wasn’t offered at the high school on his reservation.
“You know a lot about us,” said Sam. “What’s the deal with you? What brought you to our kitchen halfway through the semester?”
“I blew my entire savings on a single dinner, just to impress an American girl.”
Sam wasn’t gentle. “That’s what happens when you try to ape the white man.”
“The rich white man,” said James.
“Vishnu, you have big hole in your pocket to fix,” Francisco said. “You can’t make it washing dishes only. I got some shifts at a fancy restaurant in town; you can replace me at the university kitchen.”
“I’ll give it a try,” I said, and we toasted our agreement with Patrice’s Algerian wine. “Seventy-five cents a bottle. That’s what the French mixed with their lower-grade Bordeaux and sold as table wine in the colonial days,” Patrice had said earlier. It was heady. Not long after, the pots and pans in the apartment mutated into musical instruments. James had barely finished singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” when everyone clamored for me to sing a Mauritian song. I did my best to emulate Kalipa and Fringant with “Lotte côté montagne chamarel.” Patrice tried to understand it.
“Sounds like Haitian Creole,” he said. “A somewhat archaic French.”
My memory of that alcohol-soaked summer night has gotten hazy, and the only other song that comes to mind is Francisco slurring over Santana’s “Oye Como Va.”
On Monday evening, after my dishwashing shift, Francisco initiated me to the intricacies of his machines.
“Every piece of equipment here carries a warning label,” he said. “That means be careful, otherwise you lose fingers or an arm.”
He showed me a giant slicer with a sharp blade spinning around. “Blades have to be washed and wiped,” he said as he stopped the spinning movement. He then pointed to the prongs holding the machine in place. Then on to the food grinder, which turned regular slabs of meat into hamburger meat. “Turn you into ground meat if you’re not careful,” Francisco warned. He took out of his wallet a laminated photo of the man who taught him how to operate the equipment: he had one finger missing. Francisco extracted from the grinder what he called a “worm,” a giant metallic corkscrew. I could imagine ground meat being produced by the worm spinning at high speeds, but I couldn’t imagine myself inserting the worm in or taking it out of the machine without my fingers being chopped. The next piece of equipment, the food chopper, had a blade that spun at five hundred to a thousand revolutions per minute. By then, the fear of losing a finger or a hand prevailed and I decided to stick to the dirty dishes.
Three more weeks of steam, fumes, and food remnants, smelly clothes and painful calves. On evenings when I lifted fifty-pound boxes of meat from the freezer, my back hurt. My face looked oily day and night, with an unwanted sheen. My hands racked up calluses. Patrice and I got free dinner but often ate it standing, sometimes leaning over a garbage can. I had succeeded in avoiding the purgatory of kitchen work at Yale but ended up in hell on a D.C. campus.
Nonetheless, Patrice set a living example of Mama’s admonition about working with one’s hands. Life did take an unwelcome turn at Sans Souci, and I wasn’t prepared for it. Washing dishes isn’t what I want to do in life, but that summer it saved me from total, wretched penury. I thought of Uncle Mohan, who, after losing his job in the police force, had to turn to cutting sugarcane in the pitiless sun to feed his family. After working with Liu Wang, James, Francisco, Sam, and Patrice, I could fully grasp and respect manual labor.
As the day of my departure neared, I grew sad at the prospect of leaving them. Patrice’s basement apartment had been the venue for more get-togethers where we unwound. The air-conditioning often broke down, but we didn’t mind as long as the cheap Algerian wine flowed and the pots and pans provided the instrumental accompaniment to the melting-pot repertoire.
* * *
—
As the Greyhound bus from Washington, D.C., chugged along the New Jersey Turnpike, the Manhattan skyline sprang up into view. The confident soaring of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings to the roof of the sky inspired awe. The tallest building in Mauritius in those days was five or six stories high. At the same time, it was with some dread that I approached the city. Though Janet Peters’s brother, Edward, was waiting for me at the bus terminal, the image that rolled in my mind’s eye was the Canadian from Alberta a year earlier, and his dire warnings on our flight from London.
The Greyhound Bus Terminal was massive. The odor of urine trapped in the building, overheated by the summer sun, the beer cans and scraps of hot dogs strewn on the floor, and the armed police eyeing everyone were not an invitation to a holiday. I thought of the bus stop back home, overlooking the sea, and the breeze wafting aromas of pastries and savories from the bazaar. There was never a need for police.
Maybe the Canadian was right about New York.
As Edward ushered me outside towards Penn Station, the oppressiveness of the terminal gave way to the dynamism of the street. It was dirty but throbbing with energy. The smell of burnt pretz
els and buttery popcorn clashed with that of fried onions from a steak-and-cheese stall. Unruly taxis, all canary yellow, hurled to their destinations.
Our subway train was smeared with graffiti, outside and inside, some political (“Viva Che Guevara,” “Get out of Vietnam”), many obscene or indecipherable, and one or two aspiring to art (a multicolored bird flying out of silvery fish). In half an hour we arrived at Stuyvesant Town, a complex of more than thirty high-rise buildings where Janet’s parents lived. It was much quieter and cleaner than the Penn Station neighborhood. Lots of brick and concrete, but no trees. Children frolicking in a sandy playground. I made sure not to lose sight of Edward, as the buildings looked identical. People came in and out of their apartments, and I could glimpse into living rooms. Similar doors, similar beige color scheme. The sounds and smells, however, changed as Edward and I took turns carrying my suitcase from one end of the hallway to the other. Tomato-based aromas filling the air to the tune of “That’s Amore” in the background were followed by the pungency of goat curry accompanying a reggae beat. A bald man on crutches lumbered out of a door, yelling obscenities at the woman inside. We entered the apartment that was two doors down.
Janet’s dad, wearing a yarmulke, read the newspaper while his wife cooked. At dinner, I asked if Jews always served bagels at breakfast, as my D.C. roommate Tim had said. I didn’t get an answer. Instead, everyone offered me an alternative history of the bagel. The mother claimed it was brought to America by Polish Jews, Janet said it came from Russia and originally had a wider hole, and the father averred that the most delicious bagels hailed from Lithuania. Edward had no opinion on bagels. “That’s our family. Everyone must have a different point of view.”
Halfway through dinner, Janet’s dad asked, “What do you know about Israel, Vishnu?”
“I’ve read the Bible, and Janet has told me about her stay in a kibbutz.”
“That’s a good start.”
“I also have an uncle who’s buried in Israel.”
Silent Winds, Dry Seas Page 21