America for Beginners

by Leah Franqui

  Mrs. Sengupta shook her head slightly. “No, not yet. I had just been observing my opportunities. They seem limited. I do not eat meat of any kind, which seems to be a rarity here. Almost all these dishes include some degree of flesh.”

  Rebecca nodded. “Have you ever had Thai food? It’s an excellent choice for vegetarians.” It also had a variety of curries and rice dishes, thought Rebecca, which might ease Mrs. Sengupta into non-Indian options slowly and comfortably. Mrs. Sengupta wiggled her head from side to side, confusing Rebecca. She had seen, in the last three days, each of the other members of the group employ this head-wiggling motion, but she couldn’t tell what it meant. As far as she had understood, it could mean anything, or nothing.

  “I have eaten Thai food twice. There is one excellent place in Kolkata and I finished my shopping early on two occasions and indulged in lunch alone. It was very nice. I would like to join you, if you do not mind. Please, order for me. I enjoy many things. No meat, or fish, or eggs, please.” Rebecca had turned away to order when she heard the widow clearing her throat. She turned back. Mrs. Sengupta seemed almost shy, but the widow opened her mouth again to speak with determination.

  “Would you eat with me please? I have had Thai food only alone. It would be a nice change, to share it with you.”

  Thirty minutes later, sitting on a chair in Mrs. Sengupta’s suite, Rebecca opened up a steaming plastic container of red curry with tofu and offered it to Mrs. Sengupta, who sniffed the fragrant steam with delight. Rebecca also opened a small packet of vegetable spring rolls and set them on a paper plate, along with their sweet, sticky sauce, and finally she unveiled her own entrée, a heaping mound of vegetarian pad thai. Mrs. Sengupta seemed about to protest as Rebecca offered her this, too, so Rebecca quickly explained.

  “I thought we could share. This way you can try more dishes, if you like. I requested that everything was meat- and egg-free, and—oh!” Rebecca broke off, standing quickly and making for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have something else to add.”

  Rebecca left the room and returned a few minutes later with a bottle of wine in her hands.

  “Here! It’s white, so it goes perfectly with Thai food. I know I should switch to red, with the fall, but I’m not quite ready to make that transition yet. I’ll grab the glasses from the bathroom. Did you try it yet? I hope it’s good.”

  Rebecca spoke nonstop as she collected two glasses; unscrewed the bottle, internally congratulating herself on picking a screw top; and poured a healthy measure for both herself and Mrs. Sengupta, before opening a small white rice box. Mrs. Sengupta looked at the glass as if it were a snake that might bite her.

  “I have never had alcohol before.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I had thought that was Muslims, I didn’t know that—”

  “What was Muslims?”

  “Uh. Muslims have a religious law against drinking. Don’t they?”

  Mrs. Sengupta nodded.

  “I didn’t know that Hindus did, too.”

  “We don’t. Not formally. My husband drank. It’s only that, women aren’t supposed to drink. There are women who drink, but it’s . . . it’s bad.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Very bad, those women are.”

  Rebecca smiled.

  “That must make me a terrible woman then.” She raised her glass and tipped it at Mrs. Sengupta, and took a swallow of her wine.

  “Have you . . . have you drunk with others?”

  Rebecca could have sworn that the woman looked eager.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That is, do you drink with . . . with men?”

  “Sometimes. If they pay!” Rebecca joked.

  “Of course, things are so different here.” Rebecca noticed that Mrs. Sengupta was not smiling as she said this.

  “Does that apply to everyone in India?” Rebecca asked.

  “I don’t know. Everyone I know, at least. But I don’t know so many people.”

  “I’m sorry. You don’t have to drink it, of course. I’m happy to have yours.”

  Mrs. Sengupta looked at her glass and wiggled her head slowly.

  “I hope you don’t think less of me, because I’m having wine. I was just kidding, before. I’m not bad. At least, I don’t think so.”

  Mrs. Sengupta wiggled her head again. Rebecca sighed internally and twirled noodles around her fork. She wasn’t sure what to make of this conversation. Perhaps Mrs. Sengupta did think less of her now. Who could tell with that gesture? And really, did it even matter? Would she be less fit as a companion now in Mrs. Sengupta’s eyes? Rebecca had no sense of alcohol as a moral issue. She had never been one for addiction of any kind, except, apparently, to failure.

  “This is very nice.”

  Rebecca looked up to see Mrs. Sengupta enjoying the tofu with a small forkful of white rice. Rebecca smiled. “I’m glad you like it. It makes a nice change, doesn’t it?”

  “All of this is a change. It is very nice, to change, sometimes.”

  Mrs. Sengupta wrinkled her brow in determination and lifted her glass. Rebecca watched, amazed, as the widow took a small sip of her wine. Her face stayed wrinkled, and she handed the glass to Rebecca.

  “This is not for me. Still, I thank you. A nice change.” Rebecca smiled and added the portion of wine to her own glass.

  “You are not a terrible woman,” Mrs. Sengupta told her seriously, and took a bite of the curried tofu, her eyes closing in delight.

  “Thank you,” Rebecca said, equally seriously. As she watched, the widow savored each bite like it was the finest meal she had ever had. Perhaps it was.

  21

  The trip to Niagara Falls had been a good idea, Pival thought as she stared into the mountain of water gushing toward her. She hadn’t thought that it could have been worth the arduous drive, but it was. Every bump in the road and stall in the traffic had felt like torture but now, seeing the massive falls pour their sheets and sheets of water so close to her that she could feel the spray, she knew it was only the torture that comes before joy.

  It had been a pilgrimage, she realized, thinking of her shrine at home, and now she was seeing the divinity in store for her. Astounding rainbows exploded off the edges of the waterfall. When Pival closed her eyes she could almost feel their colors on her face. Her body encased in a bright blue plastic poncho, she leaned off the edge of the deck into the spray of the falls, trying to crane her body as close to the water as possible.

  Around her, a surprising number of Indians jostled with each other for space on the deck, pushing and shoving and muttering rude comments as their phones and cameras rose above the crowd, snapping a never-ending series of photos of the same exact view. Just like home, Pival thought, watching her countrymen elbow each other out of the way and berate each other for their rudeness. “Are there many Indians here?” she asked Satya, who looked startled at the question.

  “There are Indians everywhere,” Rebecca said, adjusting her slicker so it would cover her hair completely. Pival wondered if that was really true. Certainly everyone she knew at home had sent someone to America. But they usually came back. Where had all these people come from? What was life here like for them? Had Rahi been here? Had he seen the falls, crashing on and on and on?

  Amid the crowd, one man took his small son—Pival judged him at three or four—and raised the boy over the water, dangling him off the side of the boat, and the child kicked and squealed with delight, making his dangerous position even more precarious.

  Pival gasped in horror at the man’s tenuous grip on the wildly bucking child. The man was thin and reedy, struggling under the weight of the boy, and the more the child’s body squirmed the more likely it seemed that he would be dropped into the cold and fast-moving waters below. One of the attendants who had outfitted them with slickers and warned them about the water was blowing a whistle, and next to her, Rebecca and Satya seemed not to notice.

  “Put your son
down!” Pival realized it was her own voice, calling out in Bengali. The man ignored her, or maybe he didn’t understand, so she repeated it in Hindi and finally in English, straining her quiet voice uselessly against the pounding of the falls. A gentle hand touched her arm, making her jump. It was Rebecca.

  “You might startle him, Mrs. Sengupta. And see? He’s finished.”

  The girl was right. The man was already bringing his laughing son back down, letting his little legs hit the safety of the deck even as a plump woman, her pink sari fold peeking out underneath her raincoat, stormed toward them, scolding and bewailing the man’s lack of sense. At least, that’s what Pival assumed they were doing; they were speaking Punjabi, a language she did not understand.

  Slowly her breathing came back under control. She was amazed she had shouted. Ram would have been appalled. She had been terrified for the father more than for the son, and for the mother most of all. If their child had died, what would they do? She wondered if she would have reacted in such a way to a white child, if she would have cared so deeply had the child not been Indian. She probably wouldn’t have; she probably would not have thought it was any of her business. But watching people who looked like her dangle their son out into the arms of death had made her blood run cold, forcing her mouth to open. It was like watching her own life, her own son, dangling off a precipice, and she wasn’t sure if he had fallen or been saved.

  A wave of disappointed cries from her fellow passengers forced Pival to look up, and she realized that the boat was swinging back to shore. The time on the falls was done.

  “Are you all right, madam?” Satya asked. She shook her head slightly and kept her eyes down. She did not want to see the water anymore.

  Filing off the boat, Pival caught snippets of Marwari, Tamil, Gujarati, and of course, Hindi, Hindi everywhere, out of the mouths of her fellow passengers.

  Now that the boat ride was over, her mind floated back to the trip up to Niagara Falls from New York. The energy of the gorgeous view had faded, leaving only sadness and weariness behind, a hangover of the long car ride and watching a child’s brush with danger. It was odd, Pival considered, that they had spent so long getting there to spend less than an hour on the water.

  Accidents on the highway had turned their ride into a fourteen-hour trip. At first Pival had tried to ask Satya questions about his life in America, about what it was like here for him. But apparently Satya suffered from carsickness, a fact he had never known, having never spent any similar length of time in a car before. He finally dozed off near an open window, making the car cool with the fall air, waking every so often to dry-heave, apologize, and fall back asleep again, depleted.

  Pival herself tried to sleep but found that her body, in a rebellion against the time zone shift, had given up on the concept altogether. She hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in days. She wondered how long she could go on like this, and why didn’t she feel tired? At home she was always tired, napping in the afternoons and going to bed early each night, only to wake up in the midmorning. Now she couldn’t close her eyes without wanting to open them again, knowing there was something new to see. Energy coursed through her body, and hope and despair fought battles daily through her mind. Even as they had sped along the monotonous highway toward the falls she had been absorbed with the world outside, unwilling to miss a moment of it. What if she missed a view Rahi had loved?

  Rebecca somehow was able to tune everything out by reading a book, Anna Karenina, one Pival had heard of but knew nothing about. She was afraid to ask, however, as she felt it was a book she should know, something she should have read.

  She liked Rebecca, but something about her disconcerted Pival. She was not used to younger people being more confident than people of her own generation. Though she had felt comfortable with her the evening before, Pival felt uneasy with Rebecca in the light of day. She had never shared a meal with a servant before, and never had wine with anyone. But Rebecca did not act like a servant, even if Satya did, and perhaps that made some kind of difference.

  Ram would have hated this self-possessed young woman, who said things in a tone of voice so sure and strong that you started nodding along with her before she even finished her thought. Watching Rebecca read the novel, whose length alone daunted Pival, she couldn’t decide if she wanted to be close to the girl, and if such closeness would be possible at all. She so wished she could have asked her more about men, about sex. She was sure the girl had had it. She must have, drinking with men like that. What would it have been like, being with another man? She couldn’t imagine it.

  Her thoughts had swirled around in her mind throughout the car ride, confusing her, until errant potholes in the road dislodged them and she had to gather them up again. She tried to read from her book of poetry but couldn’t focus on the pages without feeling ill herself, so instead she studied the lines on Satya’s face as he groaned and slept, and the movements of Rebecca’s expression as she read, and wondered when they would arrive. When they finally had, they were swept onto the boat, and now they were being swept off it again, and Pival still was not tired, only deflated, unused to feeling so many things in one day.

  After the ride to the falls, families scattered in all directions. Many of them fled to the nearby parking lot, and Pival realized that these people lived close to the falls, or close enough to drive, at least, as large groups piled into large cars and honked their horns at each other, all as desperate to be the first to leave as they had been eager to be the first on the boat. This seemed odd to her, that there were so many of her own kind, and yet not her kind, living in this strange part of the country. She had assumed that America would look totally different from India. She had not anticipated that anything in America would remind her of home.

  Pival swayed slightly, the adrenaline leaving her body. Satya declared that it was now time for an hour’s rest at the hotel, followed promptly by dinner at Taj Mahal, no substitutions. It seemed that in Ronnie’s absence Satya was trying to take on the mantle of all-knowing guide. For the moment, Pival was content to let him do so. Rebecca’s lips tightened unhappily, but she said nothing, and together they escorted Pival to her room in the hotel, this time a Comfort Inn, which was not, to Pival’s mind, all that comfortable. Everything in the hotel seemed to be a strange shade of mustard, which reminded Pival of Ronnie’s ties, which had hung around his neck unfastened, more like scarves than neckpieces.

  They had made their good-byes to Ronnie early that morning. It was strange, Pival thought, how sad he was to watch us go. He had always seemed irritated with her on the phone, and no special bond had formed between them during her time in New York. In fact, Pival had found his servility oppressive and his condescension even more so. More than that, she resented the fact that he had thought he would be able to pass as Indian, and by not objecting outright, she had let him get away with it. It was like her driver at home’s announcing he had washed the windows after a rainfall.

  She had known from the moment she had met Satya that she had been duped, that he was not Bengali at all. Following closely on the heels of this knowledge was an understanding that forged a bitterness deep in the pit of her stomach, that there were no Bengalis at this company whatsoever, only Bangladeshis trying to fool gullible tourists. She was not against Bangladeshis, at least not strongly, but she did not appreciate being lied to. Looking at the boy’s dark face that first moment in the breakfast room of the hotel, Pival had felt white-hot realizing that Ronnie had fooled her, that he thought her so stupid she wouldn’t know the difference between her own race and a foreigner, that Ram had been right after all.

  She was everything he said she was, and deserved every insult he had hurled at her. She had opened her mouth ready to send the boy away, to cancel the trip, to demand her money back, to book a flight home. She wasn’t sure what she would do but this would not work, none of it, she could not execute her plan being dragged along by this Bangladeshi boy. Worst of all she had been as incompetent, gullible, and u
seless as her husband had always claimed. Obviously she did not deserve to have what she wanted when she had bungled the business right from the start. She would never find Rahi. She could go home to Kolkata and die of shame.

  And then the boy smiled at her, his slightly crooked white teeth like tilted sticks in his mouth, a strong jawline and a firm nose foretelling a handsome man somewhere in the future of this skinny boy. Reaching down, he touched her feet gently with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. The breath caught in Pival’s throat. It was a gesture of respect coming from a person whom she would have refused to look in the eye at home, a refugee who would only have come begging to her on the streets. Bengalis seldom encouraged the practice anymore, it was antiquated, demeaning, silly, a North Indian holdover best discarded. But it spoke of respect, regardless of being out of fashion. He honored her in the most menial way possible even as she had been so furious at being so close to him.

  When she looked down at his bent head as he lowered himself to touch the dust of her feet, his skull was just like Rahi’s. The whorls and spirals of his dark curls seemed identical. That maze of hair had been so familiar to her when Rahi was a child. She had combed it every day after he emerged from the bath, dripping all over like a wet dog. Gently smoothing his snarled knots with amla oil, she had worked a wooden comb carefully through the tangles, freeing him only once she was satisfied that every hair on his head was separated from all the others, that his scalp was fully conditioned. It had been their bath-time ritual, one she had adored until Ram had declared the boy too old for such treatment. He had insisted that she was making Rahi a sissy, a mama’s boy, with her affection. Though she had stopped, when she saw his head she always felt a sense of knowledge and of pride. She knew his head better than any other part of him. So odd it was, now, to find her son’s head on someone else’s body.