I felt myself deteriorating. I had gained so much weight I couldn’t get into the cords even when I tried. I couldn’t understand the soap operas. I didn’t know the answers to game shows. And so I cooked, shopped, and cleaned, tended the old folks, and made conversation with Professorji when he got home.
Professorji was a good man, by his lights, but he didn’t seem the same caring teacher who, in sleek blue American aerograms only months before, had tempted Prakash, his best engineering student, to leave the petty, luckless world of Jullundhar. Flushing was a neighborhood in Jullundhar. I was spiraling into depression behind the fortress of Punjabiness. Some afternoons when Professorji was out working, and Nirmala was in her shop, and the old Vadheras were snoring through their siestas, I would find myself in the bathroom with the light off, head down on the cold, cracked rim of the sink, sobbing from unnamed, unfulfilled wants. In Flushing I felt immured. An imaginary brick wall topped with barbed wire cut me off from the past and kept me from breaking into the future. I was a prisoner doing unreal time. Without a green card, even a forged one (I knew at least four men in our building who had bought themselves resident alien cards for between two and three thousand dollars), I didn’t feel safe going outdoors. If I had a green card, a job, a goal, happiness would appear out of the blue.
One Monday—after a particularly boisterous Sunday—Professorji came home around two in the afternoon and caught me crying as he barged into the dark bathroom. He seemed helpless before my grief. I tried to stop my sobbing and swallowing, but the more I tried, the harder the tears came.
Professorji turned on the light, and with it the noisy, hateful fan. “You’re like a daughter to me,” he said, in his stiff, shy way. “Has anybody been treating you like a servant?”
Disappointments tumbled out of me. I told him I wanted a green card more than anything else in the world, that a green card was freedom.
Professorji put the toilet lid down and sat on it cautiously. He lit a cigarette and held it pinched between thumb and index finger, as my brothers used to. “A green card,” he said, “is an expensive but not an impossible proposition. For the rich, such a matter is arranged daily.”
“Then arrange it!” I begged. “Please! I’m dying in this limbo.” I’d sign any IOU he wanted, at any interest rate he fixed, if he would advance the two or three thousand.
“You?” Professorji smiled. “You think you have enough skills to pay me back so much money within my lifetime?” He suggested I send word to my brothers to see if they could pay him in rupees. “For Prakash’s sake,” he said, “I’ll make this concession. I’ll take rupees.” He quoted black-market exchange rates that weren’t outrageously unfair.
I calculated in my head. Three thousand dollars would come to fifty thousand rupees. My brothers were generous, loyal, ingenious men, but they couldn’t get together fifty thousand fixing motor scooters in Hasnapur. I wouldn’t demand it of them. Still, Professorji didn’t have to know that.
I glared down at the embarrassed and unhappy man sitting on the toilet lid. “The card is for me, and I shall make the payments.” I had to believe that given a chance I could make the payments.
“And how do you think you’ll do that?” he said. He stood up and flushed his cigarette. Then he said, “All right. I shall make all the necessary arrangements. But this is not something we want to discuss with my wife and parents.”
I was so thrown by his quick turnaround that I dropped to my knees and touched his feet to thank him, as I would have done in Hasnapur. He walked slowly out into the hall, as though my desperation hadn’t gone head to head with his generosity in the tiny bathroom.
Professorji came through, but he was emotionally tight, with Nirmala, with his parents, with me. I was grateful, and I admired him, but I didn’t understand him. He was secretive, he was parsimonious with his affections. I remembered Prakash’s rage against Jagtiani, his depressions, his glee. He told me everything, took pleasure in my adventures, small as they were. Nirmala had no idea where her husband worked—he never told her. “What if there’s an accident?” I asked, and she smiled, like a child. “He will know,” she said, using the pronoun. She had no idea what he did. He was following an ancient prescription for marital accord: silence, order, authority. So was she: submission, beauty, innocence.
One day his father cut his head open on the bathtub faucet. I couldn’t decide, because I didn’t know enough about the old man’s immigration status and medical insurance, if I should rush him by taxi to a hospital or call the emergency squad. Old Mrs. Vadhera was screaming for a doctor, a priest, and her son. I called Queens College and asked for Professor Vadhera. They asked which department, and I didn’t know. They checked every variant spelling, every department, and couldn’t find him. Try Queensborough College, the woman suggested. Or LaGuardia Community. I did. Nothing.
Leaving the old woman in charge, I hurried down to Nirmala’s sari shop. She was sitting in the back with a Coke, watching an Urdu film. Scurrying through old papers, she found an address for him. The Almighty Him. It was a street number, not a college.
Flushing was not the downtown of dreams I’d conjured from the aerogram back in Jullundhar. And Professorji was not a professor. He was an importer and sorter of human hair. The hair came in great bundles from middlemen in villages as small as Hasnapur all over India. The middlemen shipped the hair in switches. Every weekday Professorji sat from eight o’clock till six on a kitchen ladder-stool in a room he rented in the basement of the Khyber Bar BQ measuring and labeling the length and thickness of each separate hair.
Junk hair he sold to wigmakers. Fine hair to instrument makers. Eventually, scientific instruments and the U.S. Defense Department. It was no exaggeration to say that the security of the free world, in some small way, depended on the hair of Indian village women. His integrity as a man of science, and as a businessman, rested on the absolute guarantee that hair from Dave Vadhera met the highest standards and had been personally selected.
As for his father, he said he’d call a doctor friend, an uncertified but still hopeful Delhi doctor working as a technician for a blood bank, who lived three floors down, to come around and bandage the wound. He acted more upset that I’d found him; found him out. He suspected that I’d deliberately shamed him, using the excuse of an injured father to pry information out of Nirmala. Now she’d get suspicious if I didn’t talk about the university and his labs and all his assistants.
I told him not to worry. I would.
Actually, he said, he still was a scientist. America hadn’t robbed him of his self-respect. “No synthetic material has the human hair’s tensile strength. How to gauge humidity without strands?” He picked out a long black hair from the 24-inch tray. “Like this beautiful one. How to read the weather?”
A hair from some peasant’s head in Hasnapur could travel across oceans and save an American meteorologist’s reputation. Nothing was rooted anymore. Everything was in motion.
“You could sell your hair, if you wanted to. It is eighteen inches at least, I think. We are purchasing Indian ladies’ hair only. Indian women are purists, they’re cleansing their hair with berries or yogurt only, they’re not ruining their hair with shampoos, gels, dyes, and permanents. American women have horrible hair—this I have learned since settling here. Their hair lacks virginity and innocence.”
I got the point. He needed to work here, but he didn’t have to like it. He had sealed his heart when he’d left home. His real life was in an unlivable land across oceans. He was a ghost, hanging on.
That’s when he offered to introduce me to the master forger, another renter in the Khyber basement. He made up a fake bill of sale, my future hair when it was twenty-four inches, for three thousand dollars. He was buying my silence for his shame, and I felt the shame as well.
A week later, I found myself calling Kate Gordon-Feldstein.
21
ALL Saturday Du shuts himself in his room, reshuffling circuits, combining new functions. Why
should a radio produce only sound, a light switch only light? Dus light automatically brings music, since for him the two are intimately connected. All his lights are on dimmers, the dimmers scan the FM band as they control the lights. Efficiency, he would say—why should dimmers confine themselves to one, boring function? He can disconnect as well. Why should a bathroom fan be attached to the light, forcing people to shit in the dark if they don’t like the noise, or don’t mind the smell?
Like Prakash, he has a surgeons touch. He transforms the crude appliances that he touches. Months after he arrived, while Bud was still in the hospital, he rigged my alarm clock to the coffee maker in the kitchen. He transformed remote-control garage-door openers into door openers for a chair-bound man. He’s attached his Walkman to the car’s stereo, giving it a tape deck. His favorite phrase is “Zap it.” He is the son Prakash and I might have had.
Bud is gratified, but not that impressed. He says it’s because Du never worked it out as a child. Technology’s a giant birthday cake for him. He never slaved over model trains, never built model planes. Bud notices a lot of Du’s genius is for scavenging, adaptation, appropriate technology.
The brightest boy in the camps. The boy who survived.
“Still at it?” I look in on him because I am lonely. We are by ourselves in the house this weekend. Bud’s in Des Moines for another conference. The themes sound pretty much the same to me; this time it’s “Transitional Agriculture: Impact on Farmers and Bankers.” Bud’s been in demand since the shooting. All in all, he jokes, even cheap celebrity is not worth the price. Something’s gotten out of hand in the heartland, says the Elsa County Mental Health Center consultant who’s coordinated this weekend’s conference. He’d hate to use an old-fashioned word like “civility,” but that seems to be fitting. The drought’s a catalyst, it’s not the problem.
Last week in Dalton County a farmer dug a trench all around his banker’s house with stolen backhoe equipment. On TV he said, “Call it a moat of hate.”
Over by Osage a man beat his wife with a spade, then hanged himself in his machine shed.
I’ve started to keep the front door locked when Bud’s away. I want my family under one roof, the door bolted against nameable dreads.
“Right, still at it,” says Du.
“How’s it going?”
“Okay. Everything’s okay.”
“Do you want to invite Scott over?”
“No, Mom. Scott’s good for watching TV with. I’m a gearhead, remember?”
“Where do you learn all this engineering, Du?”
“It’s not engineering. It’s recombinant electronics. I have altered the gene pool of the common American appliance. I have spliced the gene of a Black & Decker paint sprayer onto the gear drive of a repaired Mixmaster. I have created a multi-use super air blower with a variable-speed main-drive. I leave the application to the Scotts of the world. And another thing—I didn’t have to learn it, it’s what I do. Like Dad handles money and you—” He fumbled his needle-nosed pliers. “Shit!”
“And I what?”
“Handle Dad.”
I take a step inside. “Well, he has special needs, doesn’t he?” I watch him part a mass of wires with his pliers, then reach for his soldering gun. “I can do that, you know. I’ve had experience. Small, skinny fingers and all. I’ve handled a soldering gun.”
“Congratulations.”
“I understand circuitry.” I pick up the soldering gun, and he pinches the wires together over the terminal as I drop a bright bead of smoking silver on it.
“I’ve also killed a man, you know. There’s nothing in this world that’s too terrible.”
I drop a second bead on the next connection.
“I know,” he says. “So have I. More than one.”
I go back downstairs and wait for Bud to call me from his hotel. He’ll call at 11:05, after the rates change. He has his routines and his frugalities. He is the most reliable, considerate man I know.
At 11:05 the phone rings. I cradle it. I let it ring against my chest. Upstairs Du is gutting another scavenged tuner. He has plans, he says. My suggestion was to fill it with soil and plant some corn or beans inside. Keep the knobs and dials on the outside. From the streets of Saigon to Iowa State engineering school.
“Maybe I’ll make a bomb,” he said, and cackled like a mad scientist.
“Sweetheart,” Bud says. I try to picture him in a hotel room. Orrin Lacey, the Ag Loans man who drove Bud to the conference, will have helped Bud change into pajamas and settle in the center of the hotel bed, then gone down to the bar. Bud’s teeth are flossed raw and smell slightly of spearmint. His feet are warmly socked. He has started to wear socks to bed because his circulation has slowed since the accident. “I hope you’ve had a better day.”
“That bad?” I say.
“Worse. I had a guy come up to me after my paper. The guy said, ‘When I shoot, I don’t shoot just to maim.’ Then he taped a pamphlet to my chair. Jews Take Over Our Farmland. Orrin tore it off.”
“Be careful out there,” I say.
“Des Moines’s the pits. It used to be a pretty little city. I could be proud of Des Moines wherever I traveled.”
“Be proud of Elsa County,” I said. “Be proud of Baden. You practically built it.”
I think he must be crying in his hotel room. Crying comes over him suddenly these days. They call it posttraumatic syndrome. Small things, mildly depressing things, suddenly become too poignant to bear.
“There’s so many pretty places I want to show you and I can’t. Things weren’t always this ugly, Jane.”
22
WHEN I met Kate Gordon-Feldstein in her loft, she said, “They’ll love you. Really. You don’t have to be scared of them.”
I was just an hour out of Flushing. Professorji didn’t have this number.
Her corner loft was huge, an entire floor in the garment district. It could have held five of the Flushing apartments. Two walls were solid windows, looking out on somber buildings and a patch of sky. It had been a dance space, then a television studio. A third wall had been converted into a series of darkrooms with appropriate drainage. The remaining wall was gypsum board painted in strips of very bright colors: parrot green, blueberry yogurt, crushed raspberry, even glossy black, where hundreds of photos were pinned. Clotheslines crisscrossed from wall to wall, post to post, all of them clipped and pinned with drying prints.
As we talked, she was taking pictures of me from every angle. “What a great face,” she said.
They had no real furniture, just a baby grand piano and three futons, two folded over as sofas and the third left as their unmade bed. Filing cabinets spewed clothes. Her husband was out of town, on a shoot. The incidental clutter was astounding to me, after the order of Professorji’s apartment: chair frames without seats, wet towels on the floor, magazines and newspapers stuffed into a wicker clothes hamper, cardboard containers from a takeout place on the window ledge.
It thrilled me. Sunlight smeared one wall of windows. It spoke to me of possibility, that one could live like this and not be struck down.
I remembered Kate’s book of photographs of migrant workers that Lillian, the proud mother, had shown off to me back in Fowlers Key. That book had brought back such sharp memories of Hasnapur that I’d cried. It was now only a few months later, but I didn’t think I could cry over Hasnapur, ever again.
I took it now to mean this was what a girl from a swampy backwater could accomplish. I had wandered into that same clearing. I had seen those same women and children, or ones just like them. And then I had seen them again, but really for the first time, thanks to Kate, in a prize-winning book. This loft, if it stood for anything beyond incredible good luck in the Manhattan housing market, was also a reflection of her mother’s taste, put into practice by a dutiful daughter: simple, ample, plain, functional, frugal, even spiritual.
Kate said, “I know what you’re thinking. If they’re friends of mine, they must be just as messy
. Don’t worry, you won’t have to pick up after them. You’ll be looking after Duff. The Hayeses are terminally neat.”
“Duff is a girl’s name?”
I had just escaped from the tidiness, the neatness, of my benefactors in Flushing. I’d just abandoned whatever chance at security I had in the world. I tried to put it all in words while Kate circled me, snapping away from the floor, from the chair frames, from the window ledge. I didn’t have that much English, but what little bit I had came tumbling out, frustrated by all the months in Flushing. I had come to America and lost my English.
“Oh, you did the right thing,” said Kate. “Don’t apologize for what you did, it’s heroic.”
My note to Professorji had been properly self-condemning. My unhappiness was all my fault. Their generosity was more than I, poor wretch, deserved. Hold the memory of Prakash as dear as I do. I promised to pay back any debts I might have incurred (this deliberately fuzzy in case Nirmala read it). I thanked them all for the lessons they had taught me.
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