America for Beginners

by Leah Franqui

  Dedication

  For Rohan, who told me I should

  and

  for my family, who always knew I could

  Epigraph

  Flying toward thankfulness, you become

  the rare bird with one wing made of fear,

  and one of hope. In autumn,

  a rose crawling along the ground in the cold wind.

  Rain on the roof runs down and out by the spout

  as fast as it can.

  Talking is pain. Lie down and rest,

  now that you’ve found a friend to be with.

  —Rabindranath Tagore

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  “You’re going to get violated, madam, that’s all I have to say on the matter.”

  Given that her maid, Tanvi, had been lecturing her for over an hour, talking as the other servants of the house had come and gone, Pival Sengupta was quite certain that this was not all the maid had to say about the matter. It was irrelevant that Pival had told Tanvi that she was visiting family, that she would be perfectly safe in America. Beyond being scandalized that she was traveling a mere three months after her husband Ram’s death, no one believed that she would survive the trip.

  Perhaps their suspicion came from Bollywood, from movie after movie where women on their own in foreign lands were constantly propositioned. Or more likely it came from the thousand lectures that girls from India’s villages received about how travel of any kind led to rape. It was amazing, Pival thought, that so many village girls came to Kolkata to work if their families were all so concerned about losing their honor. If anything, Pival had assured her servants, America would be safer than India. It had to be. But they refused to listen.

  All of the servants had shown their disapproval in their own ways, from Suraj, her yoga instructor, who told her as he stretched out her calves that the prospect of the trip was altering her breathing and negatively affecting her chakras, to Pinky, the cook, no more than eighteen years old and already scowling at Pival like an old village woman. Even the milkman had taken a few moments out of his busy early morning schedule to warn her about the dangers of traveling anywhere, particularly alone.

  All of them she could patiently ignore, except Tanvi. Her voice was the loudest, a never-ending fount of dire warnings and forebodings that barely stopped even as the maid chewed and spat paan, her words bubbling out with red spit around the mouthful of leaves. Her lips were stained bright red, which was the point. Pival knew she and the other maids chewed the stuff for its lipstick-like qualities. Pival would catch them admiring their crimson mouths in the mirror, humming songs from the latest Shah Rukh Khan movie. She knew she should scold them for their laziness, but she could never bring herself to do so. They hid their stained red teeth with closed-mouth smiles, but when they laughed it looked to Pival like their mouths were full of blood.

  “Such things happen in America, every day. Nice people go on trips abroad and come back violated. And, it’s expensive. Huh! Lakhs and lakhs for a pair of shoes. What is the point, I ask you? Shoes are here. Why go somewhere to get violated for shoes? Visiting relatives is all well and good but decent people should be coming here to comfort you, not this leaving and begging-for-family nonsense.”

  Sarya, the other maid in the room, nodded as she received Tanvi’s wisdom and the white garment Tanvi had folded. It was a perfect square. As Tanvi grew upset, her folding became increasingly precise and perfect, until you could have cut onions with the razor-sharp corners of the sari silk.

  Pival had never liked Tanvi. Her husband, Ram, had employed the girl when they first married, presenting a child of fifteen to his twenty-year-old bride before the maid had the chance to wipe the dust from her village off her shoes, before his bride’s wedding henna had begun to fade. Pival wanted to keep her own maid, but Ram insisted that young Tanvi would be easier to train. At the time Pival had accepted the new servant as an indulgence, one of the many Ram, then so generous, lavished on her. As Tanvi grew from Pival’s maid into a kind of housekeeper, directing all the servants around her with an iron fist, she wondered if Ram had known even then that his wife would be lacking in authority and had found a servant who could act as a substitute. That, too, she had seen as a kind of kindness, a thoughtfulness on Ram’s part, making up for her deficits, anticipating her flaws. It wasn’t until years later that Pival realized Ram didn’t want a servant more loyal to Pival and her family than to him. He had built himself an ally, who would turn against Pival when needed.

  Of course, Pival didn’t allow herself to think such things about her husband until much later, after they’d had Rahi and lost him, before he lived and gave her life light and then darkened it again.

  The maids continued with their packing and dividing. Pival never knew she had so many clothes until she saw them pass through the hands of so many people. She could not help; she would not be permitted to do so. They would be silently furious with her if she tried, more angry than they were now, even, and Tanvi would sigh and recite the wages they paid each woman, an unsubtle commentary meant to remind her that any labor she performed was a waste of her own money.

  Pival looked at Ram’s photo in its permanent shrine, warping slightly under the weight of the faded marigold wreaths and lit by small lamps whose ghee was refilled daily. The combined scent of flowers and ghee made her feel slightly sick. Still, she liked the flickering lights, the cotton wicks, the way the fire swayed and gave things a golden glow. She was obligated, she knew, to treat Ram’s picture as a sacred object, to give it offerings like she would an idol. He didn’t deserve such a place in anyone’s home; perhaps that was what made her feel ill, and not the smell at all.

  Looking around, Pival realized that the maids had started unpacking the carefully sorted trunks and boxes. At her gasp, Sarya looked up, her large eyes wide.

  “It’s bad business. Best not to do it. What will people say?”

  Tanvi shook her head in agreement, clucking like a chicken.

  “Going to such places? Begging old relatives to take you in? You will lower yourself, madam. What would sir think? Who does such a thing?”

  “And what are you saying, either of you? How would you know what people do? Living in the same ten streets all your life, what do you know but the tread of your shoes? Close your drooling mouths and pack my things!”

  Tanvi stared at Pival, her mouth wide in surprise. Sarya had already begun to cry, her childish wails filling the air between them. Pival had shocked even herself. She was never so articulate in Bengali, and she never got angry. While Ram Sengupta might have raised his voice at the servants, Pival rarely spoke above a soft tone, making most people strain toward her when she talked. It was one of her husband’s many criticisms of her. He had called her with disdain a little squeaky mouse.

  Pival had tried to speak louder. She had gone to a breathing seminar taught by a prestigious doctor tur
ned guru to improve her lung capacity and diaphragm control. She had even seen a throat and larynx specialist, who informed her that what she lacked was not strength of voice but strength of confidence. Pival had known then that it was a lost cause. Whatever confidence she had once had was now a withered thing, dead on the vine.

  A cacophony of wailing, like a funeral procession, brought Pival back to the present. She gazed dispassionately at the faces of her sobbing maids. She said nothing as Sarya and then Tanvi left her room. Sarya fled like a deer, but Tanvi made a more leisurely departure, waiting for Pival to call her back and apologize. As the older maid waddled away, Pival couldn’t help but think of the thin child she’d met all those years ago and looked for her in Tanvi’s plump frame. She couldn’t find her, couldn’t see that girl who had pressed her lips together with happiness when she first ate a piece of chocolate, trying to keep it in her mouth forever.

  Pival turned, shaking her head. Why should she care what Tanvi and Sarya and all the rest of them thought? Pival looked at herself in the mirror. She had been avoiding mirrors since Ram’s death, afraid she would look too old, too unhappy, or worse, too happy. She couldn’t find her younger self in her own face anymore either. The room around her was richly appointed, filled with beautiful and expensive things. They reflected behind her in the mirror, overwhelming her thin, faded face, leaving her feeling ugly next to their glow. She had been overwhelmed and buried by her own life. And now, unable to dig herself out, she was going to leave it all behind.

  Pival rubbed at her wrists gently, an old habit to comfort herself. She didn’t like that she had yelled at the servants. She may not have liked the maids but that was no excuse for cruelty. Since Ram had died, all their help had been so devastated, mourning much more deeply than Pival could herself. She should have had sympathy for those who loved her husband more than she had.

  She rubbed her wrist again, looking at it. She had always been fascinated by the skin on her wrists, the thinness of it, the way she could see blue veins popping up through it like tunnels. She had thought of ending her life this way, with a shard of glass to the wrist, the way women did in the Bollywood movies she would sneak off to watch alone when Ram was at work. Other women in the theaters cried and sighed at every twist and turn, but for her, the only parts that interested her were the mothers, the ones who martyred themselves for their sons. As a young woman she had found this ridiculous. Now she found it shaming. She watched them slice through their veins with a kind of envy, but she hadn’t thought she could bear cutting through her own skin. She had tried it once, when Ram had told Rahi he could never come home again, and there was a small dip in the skin of her left wrist as evidence of her failure. She had cleaned up and bandaged her wrist and hid it from Ram under her bangles. Besides, after Rahi was banished Ram stopped looking at her at all. She checked now for that little dent, rubbing at it gently, pressing her pinkie into the pucker as her thumb caressed the rest of her wrist.

  “This is not done, madam.” Tanvi’s formal declaration interrupted Pival’s thoughts and she hid her hands behind her quickly, like a little girl. It was always this way with Tanvi, like Pival was the servant and the maid the master. She forced herself to bring her hands back to her sides, pressing her sweaty palms into the skirts of her white sari. “You have hurt Sarya. She is threatening to leave.”

  “She should, then. It’s time for her to marry, anyway. Soon she will be too old.”

  Pival was amazed by how quickly the words sprang to her lips. Tanvi had never married. The maid looked like she had been slapped.

  “This is not doing what sahib would have wanted. Leaving home like this.”

  “I have no home, Tanvi,” Pival said, looking toward the wall at a large family photo of the Senguptas taken thirty years ago, at Rahi’s first birthday.

  Pival knew this was blasphemy to the maid, who had left her village of one-room houses and well water and now lived in the luxury of the Senguptas’ apartment, with a maid’s quarters she barely had to share and fresh milk delivered daily. Pival was lucky, she knew. In another age, in another family, she would have been banished to a wing of the house, forced to live as a pariah for her widowhood. In villages outside of Kolkata these things still happened. Perhaps where Tanvi was from, even. She knew that she, Pival, was privileged, for being so free, for having so much when most people around her had less than nothing. She saw the maid’s eyes dip to the jewelry sitting in a box. She felt her face hardening.

  “Please repack my things. I’ve already told you, you can take whatever you like. You needn’t worry about your salary, Tanvi. I told you, I will pay everyone through to the new year. So you may stop pretending to be concerned about me now. You can have everything you need. Do you understand?”

  Tanvi began to cry again, angrily this time, and stomped from the room, though not, Pival observed, without a trailing handful of sari silks streaming from the pocket of her apron. Good. Tanvi should take such things from her. For Tanvi they were riches. For Pival they were fetters, caging in her life. Tanvi could keep them all. Pival only hoped Tanvi would share them with the other maids, who were even now peeking out from their quarters, watching their leader return.

  She decided to call her travel agent. She slipped a disposable cell phone she’d bought on the street out of her pocket. It took a long time for a phone call to reach America. Pival wondered how it would be for her, when even the phone seemed afraid to let its call leave India. The phone rang and rang and then the now-familiar voice of her travel agent, a nasal drone, began, inviting her to leave a message in three languages. She left her message softly and carefully, merely asking him to call her back without explaining in either English or Bengali what she really needed, because she wasn’t sure herself. Assurance, maybe, that America was a real place.

  Carefully removing the drying flower garland, she opened up the back of Ram’s photograph, smiling gently to think of the appropriateness of this as her hiding place. Between the back of the frame and the benevolent, falsely smiling image of her husband was all her trip information. Her itinerary, her ticket, her passport with its crisp new tourist visa, everything she would need. It was far worse than her servant could have possibly imagined. Pival wasn’t going to meet anyone at all in America. She had no family to meet there, no matter what she had told the maids. At least, not in the way they thought.

  Ram had had a large family, many of whom still lived in Kolkata, all of whom had been quick to guide Pival through the rituals of death and widowhood with a speed and sense of authority that left her breathless. While they might not have been true dyed-in-the-wool Brahmins, they acted that way when interacting with the world and expected her to do so as well. This was why it was essential for her trip to happen soon, and silently, while the noise of the massive Durga Puja festival left them distracted. She would escape from her life and take a tour, a cross-country trip of America. It would give her a chance to see the country her son had known and loved, the place he had refused to leave, even for her. It would bring her to Los Angeles. She would have time to prepare, time to make herself ready to meet him, the person who had taken her son away.

  Pival looked back at the family portrait, her hands in the shot around a plump and grinning version of Rahi, theirs the only two smiling faces in a sea of familial disapproval and stern Bengali brows. She walked up to it and traced Rahi’s tiny face with her pinkie. She then dipped her pinkie back into the depression left by her half-hearted suicide attempt of the previous fall. November would mark a year since Ram had told her Rahi died. She wondered as she stared into the fat baby face, not for the first time, if it was really true. Surely her son couldn’t have died while she still lived. She refused to accept a universe in which Rahi had died. She knew she would have felt his death like a blow to her own body. She didn’t care what had been said, what had been told to her. Everyone could be lying. Ram had always tried to control the way she saw the world, not lying, exactly, but forcing reality to fit his desires. He m
ight have told her Rahi was dead because he was already dead to Ram. It could have been something he had told people so often he really started to believe it himself. She had to go to America and find Rahi, alive and whole or dead and gone. She had to be sure. And if he was gone? Well, then it was her time, too.

  Ram had declared their son dead so often by the time the phone call came from America that afterward Pival was never sure if the phone had really rung or not. While she had always nodded along with Ram in public, in private she had never agreed that their son was dead, and that had, she knew, troubled Ram. When she looked up that day and watched him put down the phone, she realized that she hadn’t heard the ringing. That was not surprising; she lived in such a dream world in those days. Ram said, “It’s done. He’s gone,” and Pival had believed him in that moment. But now, months later, she couldn’t decide if Ram had really heard news from across the world or if he couldn’t stand her continued love for the son who had so dishonored him. Things were so blurry, even now. She had to find the truth, even if it stabbed at her heart.

  Pival Sengupta was going to America to find her son or his lover. And to kill herself.

  2

  Halfway around the world, Ronnie Munshi was, most unprofessionally, avoiding Pival’s calls. Perhaps if he had known about her dramatic intentions he might have been more eager to speak to her, but it was doubtful. Suicide is awfully bad for business.

  Ronnie Munshi had a policy. He would answer his phone before a tour was booked, but never afterward. His usual strategy with customers was to woo them with relentless passion, but once he booked them he cut off all communication until their trip, to give them no opportunities to back out once he had received their deposit. He was terrified of such an occurrence, and not without reason. Indians, Ronnie thought, with complacent derision, were notoriously unreliable, especially when presented with the bill.

  It would have come as a surprise to many that the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company was, in fact, run by Bangladeshis. The fact that this surprise would have been essentially unpleasant, or at the very least awkward, for his clients made it information that Ronnie was careful to hide. He had heard that Indian-Bangladeshi relationships had improved since his departure from his native land, but he suspected strongly this only applied to wealthy people, who were all the same anyway, wherever you went.