by Leah Franqui
“Do I look that bad?” Rebecca patted her still-damp hair self-consciously.
“I have never understood how you leave your home with hair still dripping. My mother would have had fits.”
Rebecca smiled as Mr. Ghazi scolded her. “So would mine.” She stepped around Mr. Ghazi and headed to the minuscule back room to put her bag down and try to do something presentable with her wet, bedraggled hair. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, her eyes smudged with last night’s eye makeup, she sighed.
“I do look that bad,” she called out to him.
“These are your words, not mine.” Rebecca smiled. Her boss was a sweet man. “It was a bad night?” Rebecca was wiping off her eye makeup and almost missed the question. She paused for a moment, as she often did before responding to Mr. Ghazi’s probes into her personal life. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but Rebecca was careful with her candor, because Mr. Ghazi, while liberal in many respects, was still a Muslim immigrant from Iran, and Rebecca was never sure what would shock. It was safer to test the waters with little moments than to reveal her entire life to him. Rebecca didn’t want to lose her tentative Persian family, so she made her life fit into what she perceived to be their scope of understanding and morality.
But something about the morning, with its crushing panic, and her immediate reaction of escaping and fleeing to the map store, made her feel that if she did not tell Mr. Ghazi in some small way that she was suffocating she would start to cry, and she didn’t want to do that in front of him.
“It was a bad night.” She finished washing her face and stepped back into the main room of the store, where Mr. Ghazi’s inquiring eyes made tears spring from her own. Damn, she thought, there I go.
“What is it, Rebecca? What makes you so sad?” Mr. Ghazi gestured for Rebecca to sit, keeping a formal distance. He had always been awkward around emotional females, his wife included, but he considered it an honor that Rebecca had admitted her pain, which she so often kept tucked away like a handkerchief. Watching her in the seven years she had been in his employ, he had seen her early enthusiasm become a hardened fear, and he worried for her.
Rebecca struggled to contain herself, but it felt so futile. What was the point of holding herself back? What was she containing her feelings for, anyway? A politeness? A vague social expectation that she wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all? The way everyone kept saying that they were fine until the point where the word lost all meaning? She wasn’t fine. She hadn’t been for years.
“There was this boy—” she started.
“Did someone hurt you?” Mr. Ghazi looked both disturbed and in some way relieved. If it was a love affair gone wrong, this was at least familiar territory. There were platitudes he could express, soothing words he could say. He waited.
“He’s not important. I just feel like I am slipping. It’s harder than I thought anything could be and I’m so tired. I need someone to give me the chance. I hate that. Why can’t I choose, instead of wanting to be chosen?”
She felt pathetic. He looked at her with pity and she wanted to hide.
“I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.” Rebecca’s voice pierced the air as she apologized for herself, brushing aside her feelings in a bid to return to normalcy. She should have claimed it was women’s troubles and let it be.
“You are not stupid, Rebecca. But if this is your life, you must change it. If this is the world you live in, one that confronts you with a feeling that you are not worth being chosen, then it is a stupid world.”
He didn’t understand. He was kind, but he didn’t understand anything.
“Unless I can change the things I want, how can I change the way my life is?”
Mr. Ghazi had no answers. Maybe that was the cure for pain. It was to stop wanting anything at all.
9
Ronnie woke up to the sound of a buzzing phone. He often woke up this way. His life was ruled by buzzing. He received texts from tour guides reporting on the nature of their tours and complaining about the Indian food in Iowa, a state where it was impossible to find decent paneer, and clients alternately praising him and berating him for some new trial or tribulation, and sometimes even his mother informing him of the latest developments in her soap operas, which Ronnie followed religiously without ever seeing a single minute of any of them.
It was five a.m. in Queens, which meant it was two p.m. in Kolkata, just around the time that most people, people of means, at least, took their tea. Ronnie sighed and glanced at the screen, where his suspicions about his caller were confirmed. It was Mrs. Sengupta making another bid to contact him and check, he assumed, on the progress of her tour arrangements.
Ronnie usually placated his clients with a mixture of obsequious flattery, gentle intimidation, and well-placed xenophobic warnings, a cocktail that always left them putty in his soft ring-bedecked hands. But none of those tactics seemed to be working on Mrs. Sengupta, not his soothing tones nor his invocations to trust in fate, destiny, the stars, and his own authority as a World-Class Number One Best Tour Guide. Didn’t she know that he was a busy man?
In the twin bed three feet from Ronnie’s own, Anita snored and snorted in her sleep as if she were laughing at him. Ronnie looked over at her with disgust. Ronnie had felt deeply betrayed by Anita’s refusal to cooperate with his brilliant plan. He should have known better than to ask her. Ronnie watched Anita shift in her sleep, marveling at her ability to fall asleep anywhere and sleep through anything. Here he was tearing what was left of his hair out, tormented by clients, and she simply turned over, enjoying her dreams, in the bed he had paid for, in the apartment he had bought.
He leaned back on his pillow and, unable to sleep, for he was not a good sleeper under the best of conditions, played a game in his mind of counting objects. This often helped him sleep, at least briefly. He had heard that the American equivalent of this was called counting sheep, but attempts to count lamb-based dishes had made him hungry, not tired. It was no use. Once the buzzing began he was up.
Anita slept on. Eventually, if they ever wanted to start a family, as his mother and hers constantly urged them to, he would probably be the one waking up at the baby’s screams as his wife dreamed blissfully. That, more than anything else, held him back from suggesting they start trying. The business was his child, and it was already keeping him up. Why add something else to disturb him?
Walking from the subway later that morning, Ronnie decided that instead of sending a lackey to fetch his monthly supply of maps, which he kept in large supplies for all his guides and clients, he would fetch the things himself. Thinking of lamb, he had hopes that the trip to Manhattan and subsequent diverse lunch options it would entail might clear his head and give him an idea for Mrs. Sengupta’s companion.
He had asked each of his guides for options, but the women they presented, sisters and cousins from their own families, were all either too traditional or too wild for his liking. This companion must be someone who could aid Mrs. Sengupta in her trip, a respectful, intelligent, and interesting person without a personal agenda or an interest in flirting with Satya Roy, the guide. Green as the boy was, this was an easy job in theory, with only one guest to corral and a companion to aid him. Ronnie thought this would be the perfect introduction for Satya to cross-country guiding, a task he wanted to train Satya to do. It was simply unfortunate that as the boy had worked for Ronnie and gotten large helpings of good food and long walks shadowing guides for day-trippers, his emaciated form had started to fill out and Ronnie now had a rather handsome guide on his hands, despite his oily skin and crooked smile. The boy had inspired breathy sighs on the part of the interviewees for companion-hood, good Bangladeshi girls who were supposed to be the perfect companions for Mrs. Sengupta. Instead, their love-struck giggles ruled them all out instantly. If only they had seen him when he had just arrived, thought Ronnie ruefully, all this nonsense could have been avoided.
Ronnie then placed an advertisement on Craigslist, with Anita’s help, b
ut that disaster of emails and calls from most unsuitable candidates was best never thought of again. So now he would visit his friend Mr. Ghazi, the owner of the map store. Then he would think the problem over again in a new environment over a plate of kebabs from a nearby Pakistani deli. What he needed was someone who would have no interest in Satya. Perhaps he was going down the wrong road interviewing Bangladeshi girls? If he found someone white, they would surely have no interest in this Bangla boy, he thought as he boarded the subway.
He was considering his lunch order when he walked into Maps on St. Mark’s and almost tripped over a set of cartographer’s charts from the sixteenth century.
“Ah, I’m sorry, Mr. Munshi! I’ve been meaning to put those away.” Mr. Ghazi cheerfully greeted Ronnie from the other side of his small counter, enjoying a cup of black coffee, his fifth at least. Mr. Ghazi was always meaning to put things away and never doing it. The shop was only in any kind of state for visitors on the days his employee came, a girl Ronnie had spotted once reorganizing travel guides in their small section in the corner. Mr. Ghazi did not approve of selling travel guides because of the ways they chopped maps up into small pieces and isolated them from each other, but he had to admit, travel guides sold well.
“How are you today, Mr. Ghazi?” Ronnie asked politely as Mr. Ghazi disappeared into the back room to retrieve Ronnie’s standing order.
“Very well! Very well. This time of year is quite invigorating, don’t you think?” The weather had just started turning brisk, something Ronnie dreaded.
“Invigorating. That is a word for it, yes.”
Mr. Ghazi smiled. “What can I say, it keeps my brain fresh, being on ice!” He laughed at his own joke, looking up when he realized Ronnie wasn’t joining him.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ghazi, I have a trouble on my mind and not ices. It’s very funny, yes, I am just not in a laughing way today.”
As Ronnie explained his problem, he realized that Mr. Ghazi’s expression had changed from displaying the interest of a concerned friend to showing a certain level of calculation, a strange expression for his usually guileless face.
“So there you have it. I need to find her, and soon, or this whole job is kaput. She’s willing to pay double, you see, which is no small amount. And these Bengalis always have so many friends and relatives who they will tell if the trip is not good. Real problem, no?”
Mr. Ghazi looked at Ronnie for a moment and then looked away, his lips moving slightly.
“I might have a solution for you, Mr. Munshi. Of course, it all depends, obviously and completely, but if it works, it might be the best solution for everyone.”
“Everyone?”
The doorbell chimed as the shopgirl entered the small store, smiling.
“Everyone.”
10
The First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company was housed in an office building in Queens exactly four blocks from the second-to-last stop on the N train, a trip that took Satya two hours each way from Brooklyn. He rode almost the entire length of the N train daily, boarding at Eighteenth Avenue, six stops from the end of the line in Brooklyn. He had, more than once, ridden the train to each of its ends, falling asleep on his way to or from his job and waking up to see the train turning itself around. But this hadn’t bothered him; in fact, he enjoyed these subway rides, watching the entire line in motion and the change in customers from one end of the route to the other. It was the people in the middle who were the most strange to him, loud people who looked too wealthy to be on a subway at all, and gaping tourists whose teeth chattered from the movement of the train from Fourteenth Street to Times Square. But most of his fellow travelers on either end were people like himself, exhausted but determined, their eyes locked on the floor of the train car.
He had never seen so many kinds of people in his life before he had moved to America. At home, everyone looked the same, or if they looked different, like he did, like Ravi had, everyone had known why. Skin tones varied within a limited spectrum; hair ranged from blue-black to the hennaed red that old men dyed their beards, hoping to look younger but never succeeding.
Here, everyone looked like combinations of people, more colors and shapes and bodies than he had known possible. The irony was that everyone dressed in the same colors, somber blacks and grays, while back at home the monotony of people’s faces had been obscured by the violent rainbow of their clothing, printed cottons as far as the eye could see, swathing women in their saris or draping playfully around them in a salwar kameez. Sometimes a flash of color caught in the corner of his eye, or he saw a Muslim prayer cap, and he thought it might be Ravi, but it never was. They had both brought only Western clothing with them, anyway. Ravi’s mother had promised to keep their kurtas safe for them at home. Satya wished he had burned his instead. He thought about writing her and asking her to do so, but he knew that would raise too many questions. He still hadn’t responded to her letter. So instead he looked for Ravi on trains, and wondered what he was doing, and what he thought of all the different kinds of people who lived in America.
One morning Satya took his normal ride, leaving Brooklyn at six in the morning to arrive just past eight at the agency. No one else ever showed up at this hour, so he sometimes treated himself to a cup of tea from a street vendor who let him have it at half the price, leaning against the building and waiting for Ronnie to let him in. Satya supposed that he could actually leave Brooklyn at a later time, but what was the point of staying in his dingy apartment and listening to his new roommates snore?
Ronnie was particularly late that morning. Satya waited, making his tea last for a full hour until Vikrum arrived, producing his own copy of the building key. Satya found September already quite chilly, although no one around him seemed to share that feeling, as the people passing him by wore short sleeves like it was high summer.
“It’s lucky this isn’t the winter, eh? You would have frozen to death, brother.” Vikrum grinned at Satya with his golden smile.
“It can’t get that cold, can it?” Vikrum only laughed in response. Satya watched the burly man putter about with surprisingly elegant gestures, preparing a pot of coffee for the office.
“Make yourself useful, then, take the messages.” Satya shot up to do the older guide’s bidding. Gentle as Vikrum was, Satya was a bit afraid of him. He was the kind of man who was hired by criminals back home to intimidate shop owners and scare people. If Vikrum had been an actor in Bollywood he would have been cast as a goon, but he was a very good guide, and a deeply kind person. He often divided some portion of his lunch to share with Satya. He arrived before most other guides, and so Satya had grown accustomed to spending quiet mornings with Ronnie’s snorts and scowls, Vikrum’s placid whistling, and his own thoughts. Ravi would have made fun of Vikrum, Satya knew, for his large size and easy smile, and Satya would have laughed, agreeing. Satya frowned; the thought tasted bitter in his head.
He listened to the messages, dutifully recording the names and numbers of potential clients. Ronnie encouraged most of his Indian and Pakistani clients to speak English, claiming it was good for them to practice before they arrived, but that was really to mask his own accented Hindi, which could give him away as a Bangladeshi. If they were Bengali, however, he didn’t bother. For Hindi-speaking tourists, Ronnie had two guides who spent most of their time practicing by watching Indian films from the 1950s and ’60s to get the cleanest and most proper accent they could. In general, however, he encouraged English as much as possible, even in the office, and while many of his guides resented it, the reality was it helped them more than most of them ever acknowledged. Ronnie had never forgotten the sour feeling in his stomach when he had learned how much that cabdriver had ripped him off on his first day in America. He understood, even if his guides didn’t, that not understanding English was something recent immigrants could rarely afford.
As a result of this policy, most of the messages left were in English. Satya had a hard time with recorded messages, but
he knew he needed the practice. He would listen to each message five or six times before he was confident that he had gotten the information correct. There was a rather shrill message in Bengali from a woman in Kolkata, which he listened to ten times that morning. Although he spoke the language, the emotion in her voice made it hard to understand, but also the sound of a woman speaking Bengali reminded him of home. His grandmother had visited Kolkata once and described it to Satya. He wondered who would guide this woman and wished, for a moment, that he could meet her, and ask her if the stories his grandmother had told him about the city were true.
That afternoon, sitting in the small break room, Satya looked up from his lunch, a pile of roti he had burned into hard black disks and sour, undercooked dal made of a mixture of lentils and kidney beans. Ronnie had arrived, followed by a slim white woman. Vikrum was out for the afternoon and hadn’t offered Satya anything to eat before he left. Satya had never cooked much before arriving in America, and his early attempts had not been particularly successful. He grimaced, his mouth full of unhappy tastes, as he watched the woman’s body sway.
He wasn’t the only one staring. It was a rare occurrence to see any white person, or any nonemployee in general, enter the office. Almost everyone working that day, studying maps, categorizing invoices, or fighting with Ranjit, the bookkeeper, over receipts accumulated during tours, raised their eyes from their work to watch the girl go by. Satya lifted his nose to sniff, trying to catch any hint of her scent in the air.
Satya could smell nothing, he realized sadly as the woman went by. Ravi had told him that you could smell it when a woman was ready for a man, and since then he had tried to surreptitiously sniff around when he saw a new woman, but it had never worked. Maybe Ravi had been lying to him, he thought. The notion comforted him. How could Ravi have known about things like that?