“I am from India. Darjeeling. Where are you from?”
“I am originally from Rolpa, but my parents have moved to Jamunaa, near Ilam. Have you been there?”
“No, I have never been to Nepal.”
“You haven’t been to your own country?” She was genuinely shocked.
“My country is India. I’ve always wanted to go to Nepal, but I’ve never been there.”
“Then how come you speak such excellent Nepali?”
“Everyone in Darjeeling speaks Nepali. We speak Nepali at home. I am Nepali.”
“But for a Nepali your Nepali is really bad,” she pointed out.
“We speak a different Nepali from the Nepali you people in Nepal do.”
She didn’t pursue the topic.
“Madam tells me you want someone to cook Nepali food. I can do that. I am free Saturdays and Tuesdays.” She used the Nepali names for the days. No one I knew besides my grandmother did that. In Darjeeling, we—at least people my generation—peppered our Nepali with English words.
“What are those days in English?”
She let me know.
“Should we start this week?” she asked. It was Thursday. This strange woman, this pushy Nepalese, was ready to be at my place Saturday. Soon, I would walk into work smelling like I had been doused in turmeric. And we hadn’t even brought up payment.
“How much money are we talking?” I asked.
“Why should there be money involved?” Her tone was defensive. “It’s one Nepali helping another. I cook your food, and you teach me English. Problem solved. Let’s not be petty.”
Her feistiness was as alarming as her use of big Nepali words.
These were not the only aspects of her personality that would surprise me. She also had no respect for my time. Early Saturday morning, I received a call from her asking me what time we were supposed to meet.
“Wasn’t it two?” I asked, looking at the alarm clock and resisting the temptation to break it.
“Two? I can come by earlier if you want. I could clean a bit, too.”
“But I’ve another maid to clean my place,” I said.
An uncomfortable silence greeted me. Kaam garne in Nepali is definitely more euphemistic than “maid” and crudely translates to “servant,” an undignified but still widely used term, and I had just categorized her as one.
“You know, she does my laundry and cleans the toilet.” I hoped I wasn’t worsening the situation. “I wouldn’t expect you to do all that. It wouldn’t be right. I wouldn’t feel right. But if you want to come early, please feel free. I just woke up. It will take you an hour to get here.”
“I can be there in half an hour,” she said.
By the time I buzzed her in, I was showered and shaved.
“Hello.” A plain-looking girl, clad in inexpensive jeans and a kurti, with a nose too pronounced, greeted me. You would have dismissed her appearance back home as ordinary but found her attractive after a few years in America influenced you to change your standards of beauty. “Ammamama, lots of hapshis in this area.”
“It’s Harlem,” I said. “This was once the capital of Black America, so, yes, you will find lots of black people. But it’s changing. A lot of young professionals have moved in. I bought this place only two months ago, but a lot of people like me are moving in.”
“Bought?”
“Yes.” I tried not to sound too proud.
“It must be expensive.”
“It’s all right.”
“I haven’t come across any Nepali who owns property.” She placed her purse on the coffee table. “Not in Woodside. Not in Jackson Heights. Not in Manhattan, obviously.”
“A lot of them own their places, I am sure, and I am an Indian. How long have you lived here?”
“It’s been a little over five years.” She looked around at my apartment.
“Did you—” I had difficulty framing the question—“first come on a tourist visa?” This insinuated that she was an illegal immigrant, one of those thousands who arrive in this country on a tourist visa but never leave.
“No, I am a citizen now,” she replied, her eyes once again scanning the apartment. “I won the DV lottery.”
Okay, she was a diversity-visa winner. I had always been jealous of her kind. America, in an attempt to boost diversity, offered a program that allowed people of underrepresented nations to enter a draw. Those who got lucky, such as Sabitri, received their green cards while we ordinary mortals needed to jump through countless hoops before getting one. But didn’t one need to pass an English test to be a citizen? If Sabitri had problems with her language, as Anne mentioned, the most lenient interviewer must have tested her on the citizenship exam.
“Lucky,” I said. “People would give their children’s lives to win one.”
“That’s what they say in Nepal,” she said. “But I am working as a kaam garne here. No one in my family knows it.”
“No one in the family knows it?” I repeated. Her choice of words to describe her job threw me off.
“They think I am working in an office. And no one knows about the seven people who are my roommates. Three are men. Almost all of them are illegal.”
As someone familiar with the reality of poverty in India, and South Asia for that matter, I knew that seven people crowding into one-bedroom apartments wasn’t such an issue. I attempted to frame a sentence in my mind to let her know in the least offensive way that I understood, when she spoke.
“The kitchen’s slightly small, but this is a nice place,” she said.
Again, she used the Nepali term for “kitchen,” a word I had long forgotten. Had she not been staring at the kitchen when she described it, I wouldn’t have guessed what she was talking about.
“Seven people living in a one-bedroom apartment isn’t so bad, is it? I am sure it’s bigger than this.”
She sized up my apartment.
“Yes, it is bigger but not so nice. Most of these people didn’t have much money in Nepal, so to them our place is great. I don’t like it, but I shouldn’t complain. Wouldn’t people give up their children to be here?” She smiled. Her teeth were better than mine, though her smile hardly lit her face.
“How is working with Anne?” I asked.
“She’s nice, really nice, but I know I’ll die if I stay there forever,” she replied. “There’s nothing to do. Americans are clean people. Sometimes her grandchildren visit, but they are very disciplined kids. The granddaughter wants me to teach her a Nepali dance. I don’t even know how to dance so well.”
It didn’t escape my notice that she was avoiding a pronoun to summon me. The Nepali language has three variations of the second-person pronoun, dependent mostly on respect, age, intimacy, and familiarity. I addressed her with the same pronoun I used for elders. It sounded contrived, and she was clearly uncomfortable.
“Something to drink?” I asked, the absurdity of the question not failing me—here was a prospective maid being asked if she wanted anything by her employer. It’d have been unthinkable were we back home.
“I’ll make something,” she said. “Coffee?”
Of course, the kitchen had no coffee, and the fridge was empty. I asked her if she wanted me to accompany her to the grocery store, a proposition she was only too happy about.
“It will give me an idea of what to buy in the future,” she said.
We wandered along the aisles of the supermarket scouring for the staples of South Asian cooking—rice, lentils, chickpeas, cloves, nutmeg, and spices whose anglicized names I had never known—before returning home. While waiting in the checkout line, Sabitri leaned over to whisper about her discomfort with blacks after spotting a dark-skinned man ahead of us. It was a strangely intimate thing to do and, taken aback as I was, I tried not to think too much of it. She hadn’t been assimilated well enough, and derogatory comments based on skin color were hardly uncommon among people back home. I couldn’t hold her to American standards of political correctness just yet.
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I would have helped her put the groceries away on our return, but the kitchen was too small for both of us to be working together without bumping into each other.
“I’ll watch TV,” I said. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“All right,” she replied.
I had forgotten to tell her to go light on the spices but decided not to until I had smelled and tasted her food. The kitchen area bustled with activity—the never-used pressure cooker whistled and the blender ground—as she hummed Bollywood numbers in synchrony with the clattering pots. I smiled to myself and tried concentrating on the Full House rerun on TV, not annoyed by the intrusion from the kitchen. The apartment was soon really hot—that’s what cooking in a shoebox, even if it’s March, can do—and I asked Sabitri if she wanted me to turn the air conditioner on. She replied she didn’t mind because she was used to living without the convenience.
Soon a variety of aromas filled the apartment. Curious, I entered the kitchen. Half a dozen Tupperware containers, filled to the brim with daal, sautéed spinach, and potato curry, were ready to be deposited into the freezer. Sabitri labeled which container held what with Post-it notes in Nepali. Yellow dominated the countertops, the dishes, and the floor, and a combination of odors from Darjeeling and Café Himalaya piqued my nostrils as she rationed out my food for the rest of the week before setting the table for me.
“What about your plate?” I asked.
“I’ll eat later.”
“No, you can eat with me.”
She took a plate and sat in the dining chair farthest from me.
“What do your parents do?”
I had complimented her on the food, which, though not excellent, I still liked. I have always maintained that Nepalese cooking has become infiltrated by the growing influence of North Indian cuisine. The usage of spices, grease, and oil in Nepalese food is these days bordering on the excessive, robbing the cuisine of its authenticity, and making it North Indian–like. The meal Sabitri prepared was just Nepali enough, and it wouldn’t cause me the digestive damage that meals from Indian restaurants often did. I could sacrifice finger-licking delicious for healthy and agreeable on the constitution.
“My father is a clerk, and my mother’s a housewife,” she said. It was jarring how few English words crept into her speech despite her five years in America.
“And how many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“A younger brother. He’s in Class Eight. Failed last year.”
“Does he study in Kathmandu?”
“No, he’s in Ilam with my uncle. Mount Mechi.” It was a tone that expected me to be familiar with the school. I nodded.
“So, are you sending money home?” Often, when you’re dealing with people below you in class, the most personal questions aren’t deemed as inappropriate. I asked every cabbie I came across how much he made.
“Yes, I am.” She got up to go to the kitchen. “I’ve been sending it since the first month I got here. We had to take out a loan for my airfare and my first month’s rent.”
That was news to me. While I didn’t exactly grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth—my parents were both lecturers at North Point College—I didn’t know anyone who had to get a loan to come to America.
“How do we want to do the English lessons?” she asked from the kitchen.
Until then, I hadn’t really given the lessons much thought.
“Sabitri.” She looked me in the eye—it was the first time I had called her by her name and also the first time we stared at each other that long. “From now on, we’ll always, always, always speak in English.”
It was awkward at first. When she returned Tuesday evening, I could see she was hoping I had forgotten about only speaking in English. The minute she opened her mouth, I said, in English, “I am sure what you are about to say is in English.”
I spoke slowly and softly, enunciating words with more than three syllables and ensuring that my sentences had fewer than ten words.
“How was your day?” I started. In English.
“Fine.”
“Could you tell me something about it?”
“Sorry.”
“Tell me something about your day.” Measured, six words.
“I wake up.” Pause. “I waked up, I ate my foods, and then washing clothes, cleaning house, and then I cook lunch. I came here.”
“How did you come here?”
“Subway.”
“Subway—what?” I said.
She looked at me, unsure. “I took subway to come here.”
“Did you not go to Anne’s today?”
“No. Today holiday.”
This exhausted me. I was never good at small talk. And this was like small talk with a child. I’d have to spice it up.
“How many members are there in your family?”
“Four.”
“Who are they, and how old are they?”
“My father—his name Purna Bahadur Karki. He is fifty-four. My mother is forty. Benimaya Karki. My brother is Samik Karki. Sixteen year old.”
“What does your father do?”
“He is clerk in office.”
“Does he make good money?”
“No, my family very poor. I send them money every month.”
“Do you miss your family?”
“No. I like it here.”
“What about your roommates?”
“Some of them smells.” She covered her nose. “All poor people, even poorer than me.”
“Who’s your best friend?”
“I like Binita, but lazy.”
“Why do you say so?”
“See don’t want to learn how to use the computer. And see pass high school.” Like many Nepali-speaking people, she couldn’t properly pronounce words like “she” and “shower.”
“What about you?”
“I pass high school, too, and I learn how to use the computer from Dev.”
“Who’s Dev?”
“My another roommate.”
“How does he know how to use the computer?”
“He learn in Kathmandu.”
“What do you do on the computer?”
“I watched YouTube videos in computer.”
“Can you send e-mails?”
“Yes.”
“From now on, you will send me e-mails.”
“Yes.”
“One paragraph on what you did that day. Every day.”
“Yes.”
“Do you like your work?”
“I earn better than friends.”
“What’s your ambition?”
“Sorry.”
“Am-bi-tion?”
She shook her head. “Sorry?”
“Am-bee-shun—what do you want to become in life? A teacher, a doctor, a pilot?”
“Don’t know. Make a lots of money.”
“How?”
“Own store one day.”
“What kind of a store?”
“Clothes store.”
“Cool,” I said.
We developed a pattern.
Tuesdays, we’d ride the subway uptown together from my workplace. She started cooking right away while I changed in the bedroom and shouted conversation with her. We spoke only in English. While something marinated in the kitchen, we went through printouts of her e-mails; I pointed out mistakes or praised her for an error-free sentence. She was a fast learner and seldom repeated errors. When she did, she rebuked herself by hitting her forehead a couple of times. As she garnished or ladled out food in the kitchen, I pulled a chair close by and engaged her in a translation game in which she had to come up with an English word for every Nepali noun I mentioned. The tight space was disconcerting at first, and I still placed the chair as far away from her as I could, but it was a tiny kitchen. She needed to move a lot, and her ponytail occasionally brushed against my shoulders when she energetically turned her head to translate a word I threw at her.
Saturdays, she came in early in the morning. I had
discovered the beauty and freshness of farmers’ markets when I was in school back in Pennsylvania, but I hadn’t been to one in New York. With Sabitri’s arrival early in the morning and my awaking well before the usual time as a result, a farmers’ market was the best place to go. Every Saturday, long before eight, we stood in line for the freshest produce in Manhattan and returned home with enough food to feed an orphanage. I helped Sabitri put away the groceries, after which she cooked while I did laundry or cleaned—she had convinced me to get rid of my German maid. The slow, labored conversation continued throughout the day. I had asked her to begin thinking in English. In the beginning, she said it was impossible to stop thinking in a language spoken since birth. She’d soon begin dreaming in English if I repeated myself often enough, I reasoned.
Back issues of New York and The New Yorker littered my bathroom floor, and one day she asked me what the magazines were doing there.
“I read in the bathroom,” I said.
“I don’t believed you,” she remarked.
“Yes, I do. It’s the most productive thing to do.”
“But I don’t knows anyone who does that.” She was incredulous.
“I do, and a lot of people I know do that.”
“Chee,” she offered by way of disapproval.
“You just used a Nepali word.” I gave her a stern look.
“But only one, and it’s not word even.”
“You could use the English word for it. It’s ‘eww.’”
“Ewwww?”
“Yes.”
“Anne grandchildrens says that when I show them how to eat a chicken with hands.”
“Did they?” This was funny. “So now you know chee is ‘eww.’”
“Yes, ewwww.” She repeated it a few times and laughed. Soon, she was in convulsions. “Eww, eww.”
“What’s so funny?”
“I think, I thinks . . .” she struggled to find the right words and laughed again.
“Yes, tell me.”
“Can I say in Nepali? Too hard—tough, really hard.”
“No, English, English.” I was stubborn.
She began saying a word, shook her head vigorously, tried reconstructing the sentence, lost track midway and started all over again. I was sympathetic, and yet I began to lose patience. “Okay, one last chance in Nepali.”
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