by A. X. Ahmad
“The kids are okay,” she says softly. “Kids are just kids, you know? All they need is love, but the adults … You know, when I first got here, I thought that people who live in those fancy buildings must have it made. But working there, you see how messed up they are.”
At least she’s talking. “How are they messed up?”
“Like…” Her sea-green eyes shine with reflected light. “This kid I take care of, Alex, he’s four. The mom, she’s gone all day, the dad travels a lot. They only want him to eat organic peanut butter, organic this, organic that. And you know what the kid wants? He wants to go to the park and get ice cream from the ice-cream truck. But they won’t let him.” She pauses. “And he hardly sees his parents. Sometimes they come back late and wake him up so they can play with him. Last time that happened, he said, No, no, I want Leela. His mom was really mad, but what could she say? So the next morning the bitch yelled at me for being five minutes late.”
They turn south on the Van Wyck and speed past the darkness of Corona Park.
Ranjit nods. “Mohan said the same thing. He said that the tenants, they treat him like a servant.”
“Oh, Mohan.” She smiles tiredly. “He’s really good with those kinds of people. He does things for them, little things, and they become dependent on him. He’ll go out in the rain to get Swiss chocolates for this old lady … and the younger ones like him too.”
Ranjit doesn’t reply, and she hastens to explain.
“I mean, he’s not my type, but the other women, doesn’t matter if they’re nine or ninety, he charms them all. There’s this actress … no, I shouldn’t gossip.”
“Shabana Shah? He was talking about her.”
“Yes. The other guys say that they have a thing going on, but Mohan, he won’t talk about it. He’s funny that way.”
“Who are your other friends who come to Izizzi? Mohan said they’re a nice crowd.”
“You know Kishen? Mohan’s cousin?”
Ranjit shakes his head, and makes a mental note. Leela’s tiredness seems to have been erased by the darkness and the motion of the cab. He’s seen it happen before with his passengers, who open up on long rides, as though he is a priest in a confessional.
“Kishen’s really fun. Sometimes he brings his buddies, but they’re a little rough. They dress all flashy, but you can still smell the grease on them.”
He must look confused, because she explains. “Kishen works in a garage somewhere in the Bronx, he’s a mechanic, fixes fancy cars. Lamborghinis, Ferraris, like that.”
“And they’re tight? Mohan and Kishen?”
“I guess so. They’re from the same village in India or something…”
Maybe Mohan is holed up at this Kishen’s place. How hard could it be to find an Indian mechanic in the Bronx?
An ambulance goes by in the other direction, siren wailing. She swivels her head to see its red taillights, then turns to him. “Hey, I’ve been talking and talking. What about you? How long have you been driving?”
He is conscious of the spaghetti straps of her dress cutting into her smooth shoulders. “About two years. The cab is just temporary. Till I get back on my feet.”
She laughs, a quick exhalation of breath.
“What’s so funny?”
She shakes her head in amusement. “You know, that’s exactly what my dad used to say. He drove a cab here for fourteen years.”
Ranjit has to smile. Ali Khan and all the other cabbies always claim that their decade-long careers are “just temporary.”
“Yeah, well, nobody wants to drive a cab. So your dad got out? What’s he doing now?”
Leela is silent, and when she speaks, he strains to hear her voice.
“He passed away. A couple of years ago.” She stares off into the darkness.
Damn it, why did he have to ask that? “I’m sorry if I upset you.”
“No, it’s okay. Sometimes, when things were quiet, I’d ride around with him. This reminds me of him.” She gestures at the dark, sleeping city. “At the end, when he was in the hospital, the other cabbies would come and visit him. They’d talk about potholes, speeding tickets, the best route from here to there. He was dying, and that was what he wanted to talk about. I couldn’t understand it then, but now I can. He just wanted to feel normal. That’s what people want, right? To feel normal?”
Ranjit thinks about Shanti sitting, far away, in Chandigarh, and aches to hug her.
“You’re right about that. So you were close with your dad?”
“He left Guyana when I was fourteen. I only got a visa to come here when I was nineteen, so I hadn’t seen him for a long time. And he was so strict, I couldn’t get used to that. Plus I didn’t like living in Little Guyana. Everybody is always in your business, everybody gossips … it’s worse than a village.”
“But you still live there.”
“Yeah. I don’t like it, but who can afford Manhattan?”
He nods.
“Hey, you’re divorced, right? How long has it been?”
Her question stuns him. “Two years. It’s that obvious?”
“I can always tell. Divorced men, they ask questions, they listen. They’re more, what’s the word … solicitous.”
He likes this girl. He likes her laugh, and her directness, and the way she searched and found the one particular word she needed. And so far he hasn’t told her about the murder.
“I think I’m just old-fashioned. Listen, Leela, I wanted to tell you something—”
“No, you’re not old-fashioned. Indian men either want to worship women, or treat them like whores. You’re not like that. You saw that creep at the club, you got me out of there. Other guys, they would have ignored it, or picked a fight.”
Ranjit is silent as they turn onto Liberty Avenue. They are deep in the heart of Queens now, amongst cramped, long rows of houses, with yards the size of postage stamps. The garbagemen must still be on strike, because the curbs here are crowded with trash cans; he sees a rat the size of a small cat jump out of a can and disappear into the shadows.
As they get closer to Little Guyana, the street comes alive with people out in the warm night, strolling and shopping. They pass a shop selling gaudy chandeliers, a hundred of them blazing in the darkness, and then a shop selling gold ornaments. Stopping at a light, he watches a man with a cart full of green coconuts slash one open with a machete, pop in a straw, and hand it to a waiting couple.
They drive past a white concrete Hindu temple which sits cheek by jowl with Matty’s Mini-Mart and the Famida 99 Cents store. They pass Little Guyana Bake Shop, Anjee’s Sari Shop, and Spice World. Everywhere Ranjit sees India, but somehow distorted, the colors wrong, the smells unfamiliar.
Leela points into the distance. “Hey, you can drop me off across from Sonny’s Roti Shop. It’s that one, under the El, with the yellow awning.”
“I can take you home, no problem … And, Leela, there is something I have to talk to you about.”
She’s smiling now, her face in half-shadow as they drive under the dingy iron structure of the elevated train line.
“Yes, okay,” she says.
“Okay … okay about what?”
“You were going to ask me out, right? So, yes, okay.”
Despite the confusion, he feels something swell inside his chest. “Great. But Leela—”
“I’m working tomorrow. So maybe Sunday? We can meet at Sonny’s.” She gestures at the large yellow awning with its red lettering. “Say, seven? They have good doubles.”
“I’ve never had doubles. What’s that?” He pulls the cab to a stop.
“Roti, filled with chickpeas, chicken, tamarind sauce, mango pickle. Well, thanks for the ride. It was sweet of you.” Her hand rests on the door handle.
“Sounds good. But listen. There is something else—”
She looks expectantly at him with her sea-green eyes.
“Look, I didn’t tell you the whole story about Mohan, why he wasn’t at the club tonight. I thought
you would know about it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s all over the news. Mohan, he … they suspect that he killed Shabana Shah, the actress.”
“What?”
“And the cops think I’m mixed up in it. Mohan’s vanished somewhere, and I have to find him. If you have any idea where he might be, please tell me.”
In the fluorescent light from the shops he sees her eyes go blank.
“Shabana’s dead?”
“Yes. Last night, at the Dakota.”
Her voice is a whisper. “My God. I can’t believe it…” She covers her mouth with one hand. “I can’t get involved in this. I can’t.”
“What do you mean? Why would you be—”
“You don’t know these people.”
She is out of the cab in one movement, and the door slams.
“Hey, wait—”
She moves fast, running across the road, and he jumps out of the cab and follows her.
“Leela, listen—”
She passes Sonny’s and rounds the corner, running down a side street lined with tiny detached houses, overflowing trash cans lining both curbs. Two young men sit in folding chairs out on the sidewalk, drinking forties, and Leela yells something at them, wrenches off her stilettos, and keeps on running, her shoes held in her hands. Her dress flares under a streetlight, then vanishes into the garbage-smelling darkness.
“Yo, man, why you after Leela?”
The two young men saunter out into the street. They have Indian features, but they’re way too muscular, with broad shoulders and thick biceps under their baggy white T-shirts, and their style is Hispanic, with shaved heads and thin beards carved onto their chins.
Ranjit is already breathless. “I just want to talk to her.”
The bigger man steps into Ranjit’s path and pushes a hand into his chest. The smaller, ferret-faced man giggles excitedly.
“She don’ wan’ to talk to you. Fuck off, turban man.”
He pushes harder, and Ranjit stumbles backward.
“Just give me a minute. You don’t understand—”
“You don’ fuckin’ understan’. You about to get hurt.”
The big man’s arm pulls back, forming into a fist. The smaller man moves closer.
Just as it used to in combat, a part of Ranjit’s mind detaches, and he knows the movements of both men, knows exactly where the big man’s fist is going to be.
He sidesteps, easily ducking the blow, then punches hard into the side of the man’s thick neck. As the big man gasps and doubles over, Ranjit brings his knee up, hearing it crunch into cartilage, and the man falls moaning to the street.
The smaller man’s thin face contorts in anger and he reaches under his baggy shirt. Ranjit knows that he is going for a gun, but there is no time to get out of the way. His foot finds a trash can and kicks at it.
The small man pulls a snub-nosed automatic from his waistband, but he takes a second to sidestep the rolling trash can, and in that instant Ranjit dives into the street. A bullet cracks above him, and then he is rolling and ducking behind a car parked on the other side.
Shielded by the flank of the car, he comes up in a half crouch, and the Glock appears in his fist, an automatic reflex. Peering through the car’s darkened window, he sees the small man swaggering across the street, his gun hand out, a perfect target, silhouetted against the streetlight. Without thinking, Ranjit raises the Glock, ready to shoot through the car window, one bullet smack into the man’s chest.
His finger is tensed on the trigger, when he catches himself. No. No matter what, he must not fire. Lowering the weapon, he peers into the mirror again, seeing that the small man is still advancing, a sneer on his face, the gun held sideways, gangsta style. Very stylish, but hard to shoot accurately like that.
Ranjit will have to chance it. Sticking the gun back into his waistband, he suddenly rises and runs, crouched over, using the line of parked cars as cover.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” The small man is screaming excitedly as he fires, two shots going wild. One of them ricochets off a car, and there is the sound of shattering glass, followed by shouts. Lights are coming on all down the street as Ranjit rounds the corner.
The cab is where he left it, and he sprints across the avenue, jumps in and guns the engine, which roars into life. Thank the Guru that his cab is a retired Ford Vic police interceptor.
As he speeds away down Liberty Avenue, a shot comes hurtling out of the darkness, cracking into the cab’s right-hand side mirror.
He speeds through a red light, seeing a group of boys in shiny football jerseys staring at him open-mouthed. Sirens wail through the darkness, and as Ranjit gets onto the Van Wyck, two police cars pass him, going in the other direction, lights flashing.
As soon as he’s on the Van Wyck, he’s just another yellow cab, lost in the stream of cabs heading in both directions. He leans back in his seat, soaked in sweat, realizing that he’d come within a split second of shooting the weasel-faced man. It is as though someone else took over, a self that he thought was long gone. So the instincts are all still there, hidden deep inside, there when he needs them.
The adrenaline high fades away, and he realizes that his right hand is throbbing from the punch he threw. Yet he feels more alive than he has in a long time, and then he realizes why: his anger is back, burning nakedly in his chest, incinerating all the stored-up fear.
As his breathing subsides, he thinks through what happened back there.
Clearly those men thought they were protecting Leela. He’s seen guys like those in every outer-borough neighborhood: small-scale drug dealers mostly, self-styled neighborhood heroes. Leela probably knows them from the neighborhood, a pretty girl who brings out their chivalrous instincts.
He thinks of her last words, blurted out before she ran: You don’t know these people. Who the hell is she talking about? Damn it, if only he’d had a few more minutes with her. Calm down, try and figure this out. Shabana lived at the Dakota, and Leela and Mohan both work there. Was Leela referring to someone from the building? Another doorman? Her employers?
There is no way of knowing more, but at least Leela had told him about Mohan’s cousin; an Indian mechanic in the Bronx can’t be that hard to find.
When Ranjit reaches home, he parks in an alley and examines the cab’s right-side mirror: it hangs on by a few shreds of plastic, with a bullet hole cobwebbing the glass. Grunting, he rips off the mirror and pushes it deep into a trash can. He doesn’t want Ali Khan returning a cab with a shot-up mirror. Better to call it an accident and pay for a new one.
* * *
Half an hour later, he lies on his narrow bed, thinking of Leela running away like a frightened animal. She’s the first woman with whom he’s had a real conversation in two years, and all he’s done is scare her to death. He thinks of his ex-wife, Preetam, all her beauty and self-confidence evaporating during their marriage. He thinks of Anna Neals, coughing blood as she died in his arms on a remote beach in the Vineyard. Maybe he should just stay away from all women.
What about his daughter, the one woman in his life that he cannot ever abandon? Shanti is coming in three weeks, and he can’t see any way out of this mess. Will he end up losing her too?
He checks the time: three A.M., past noon in India. On an impulse he calls her, and she picks up on the first ring.
“Hi, beti. What are you up to?”
“Papaji, you never call me this late. Are you okay? Is something wrong?”
“I’m fine, fine, I just wanted to hear your voice.” He can hear the sound of the television. “What are you watching?”
“I was just thinking about you. This actress, Shabana Shah, she was murdered in New York, it’s so sad. They’re doing a program about her. Did you hear about it?”
He stiffens. “Yes, I heard something, it’s terrible.”
“Mama is worried about me coming to New York, she says it’s a dangerous place—”
“Now, look.” H
e closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “We’ve been through all this, I’m not going to renegotiate everything with your mother. It’s perfectly safe. I’m looking for a nice apartment, and we’ll be fine. Let’s talk about something else.”
Shanti tells him about school, and her Hindi test, and Ranjit listens, but has nothing else to say.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Papaji? You’re very quiet.”
“You’re right, it’s very late here, I’m tired. I’ll call you again, soon.” He pauses and then forces himself to say it. “And I love you, okay?”
There is a shocked silence. “I love you too, Papaji.”
He hangs up, and across the room his reflection stares back at him. He lies awake for an eternity, and reminds himself that no matter how much he loves his daughter, what happens next is not in his control, has never been in his control. A scrap of prayer drifts through his mind:
Some form alliances with friends, children, and siblings.
Some form alliances with in-laws and relatives.
Some form alliances with chiefs and leaders,
But my alliance is only with the Lord, who is everywhere …
What happens now is in the hands of the Gurus.
Chapter Twelve
BOMBAY, 1995
Shabana was in the middle of a dance sequence, her long black hair whipping around her head. Thumping music filled the air, Hindi lyrics combined with the latest techno beat, and a row of backup dancers swirled behind her.
After the success of Amerika Ke Kahanie, she had no shortage of roles, and was now shooting four movies at the same time. Today, she was deep into her role as Laila, the disco-going daughter of a rich family who had fallen madly in love with a poor street boy. Laila Aur Paul was a Bollywood remake of Romeo and Juliet, supplemented with dance scenes and fantasy sequences.
Shabana’s hips gyrated to the hypnotic beat, and she had just started a split when the world suddenly slowed. She became aware of her thigh muscles tensing, heard the swish of the backup dancers’ dresses, could smell their sweat. Then: blackness.
She woke to warm hands stroking her cheeks. They were so tender that she wanted to fall into the darkness again, and allow the hands to keep on caressing her. People touched her all the time—wardrobe assistants, makeup men—but not like this. This touch awoke a tenderness in her that had been hidden since her father’s death.