America for Beginners

by Leah Franqui

  Bhim had explained the stereotypes about Punjabi people, making Jake laugh uneasily, unsure whether he should find this funny or not. He lapped up Bhim’s descriptions of Punjabi boys he had gone to school with, plump, loud people bursting with practical jokes. Bhim never spoke about people from home.

  On the first day of the swimming lessons, Jake picked Bhim up promptly at one. He was careful to be on time at the end of what he assumed had been a negative experience. But when he drove up, Bhim looked tired but happy.

  “How was it, slugger?”

  “I floated. I felt weightless,” Bhim explained, excited.

  “Did you learn any strokes?” Jake asked.

  “I learned how to float. This way I won’t drown. Thank you. It was an excellent gift.” Bhim seemed so happy that Jake didn’t know how to explain that floating wasn’t swimming. And of course it didn’t matter, only somehow, it did. If you couldn’t swim, how could you move forward? Jake said nothing. He had a surprise planned, something he thought Bhim would like, a reward for the day.

  “Would you like to see a movie?”

  Jake’s surprise was a drag night at a theater that was featuring a Bollywood film from the nineties. South Asian men of all shapes and sizes had shown up dressed as the heroine of the film, with long black wigs and hilariously outrageous saris swishing everywhere as they got up and danced together in each and every one of the ten musical numbers.

  Jake thought that Bhim would be delighted, but he soon realized that he was far more entertained than his boyfriend, who was sitting silently beside him, watching the movie with a deep frown of concentration.

  It was amazing to see, all the people playing the female lead and not a single male hero in sight dancing the men’s parts, just a rush of brightly colored figures running and bobbing away from nothing as the sitar twanged in the background and the high-pitched nasal singing rang in Jake’s ears. He loved it, laughing and humming along, although he did not know the tunes, as Bhim beside him grew more withdrawn.

  Jake had planned the evening for weeks, ever since he saw the ad on a local gay lifestyle blog. He had bought special Indian snacks at an ethnic market and he had even found a soda Bhim had mentioned that he couldn’t find in the States, something that was like Coke but wasn’t Coke. He’d thought Bhim would be thrilled. But his face said that he was not. They left long before the four-hour film finished, not that Jake knew what was happening anyway.

  On the way home Bhim mused softly about how strange it all had been, how much he had loved that movie as a child, how sad he had felt watching it without his mother, and what a funny feeling it had given him to watch men pretend to be women. He tried to explain how he didn’t find it wrong, per se, but Jake could only hear the strain in Bhim’s voice and the way Jake had failed to make him happy, and he couldn’t pay attention. Bhim pleaded with Jake to understand, and he nodded, and looked out onto the streets of the city and let the songs of the movie play in his head, drowning out Bhim’s voice.

  Bhim left Los Angeles the next day to go back to Berkeley and study his snails, and he was still thrilled that he could float. He kissed Jake tenderly, and thanked him for the swimming lessons, and did not mention the movie. Jake knew they would never see a Bollywood film together again, that some other door had been closed.

  He was running out of doors. What would he do when they were all shut, and it was just him and Bhim in a locked room? Would Jake be enough? Would Bhim? Would he ever have the relationship he wanted? Would they ever even live together? Would they get married? Could Bhim even dare to think of such a thing? He tried to put the thoughts out of his head, but when he closed his eyes he saw the bright Bollywood film and Bhim, refusing to see the happiness of the men dancing proud and free.

  23

  To: boss@americabestnumberonetours.com

  From: satyaroy57@yahoo.com

  Boss, writing from Niagara just now. Hotel has computer room with complimentary internet for two minutes only. Reached falls successfully after minor troubles on road not worry other cars not us. Madam has enjoyed falling water no sickness at boat motion and also aloo gobi at India restaurant. Kind very nice roti. Rebecca companion reads mostly. No gifts purchased at shop. Weather is cold but madam does not yet complain.

  Satya

  To: boss@americabestnumberonetours.com

  From: Rebecca.Elliot.74@gmail.com

  Mr. Munshi,

  All quiet on the western front! Mrs. Sengupta declared Niagara to be “inspiring” and also declared that the car ride was “bearable.” Satya assured her that dinner would be “best possible” but Mrs. Sengupta also seems to enjoy the American continental breakfast. No health issues or affronts to modesty at any time. Satya knows many interesting facts, which he is able to share. We are all eager for the glass museum tomorrow! A whole museum of glass. What a treat. Mrs. Sengupta is looking forward to it!

  Best,

  Rebecca

  While the trip to Niagara had seemed an eternity to Satya, the trip back breezed by. He felt reborn in the early morning light as their car, with a new driver this time, a Chinese man named John, picked them up at the Comfort Inn and had them on the road by eight a.m. Their next destination was Philadelphia, but they would be stopping on their long ride for a few hours at the Corning Museum of Glass. Ronnie had carefully explained to Satya that this was an important stop along the trip, because Satya would receive a small percentage of whatever his guests spent in the museum shop, and therefore it was vital in order to maintain this symbiotic relationship between guide and museum, no matter how little interest his tour group might have in the destination.

  Satya had no problem with this system; in fact, it felt like how things worked at home. Bargaining with people felt much more comfortable than anything else, and Satya wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that most things in America had definitive prices, that he couldn’t haggle his way around anything. He wasn’t totally comfortable with the idea that prices couldn’t shift, wasn’t sure he wasn’t being cheated. At least at home he had known about the real costs of things and seen the deception as it was happening. Here he could only speculate. Sideways had always been the only way to approach anything. He was not accustomed to front doors.

  It wasn’t difficult to persuade Mrs. Sengupta to go to the Corning Museum of Glass, much to his relief. It was Satya himself who had no interest in the museum, and he wasn’t sure how he would have sold the experience to someone else. He couldn’t imagine making an entire museum for glass, and to his mind it spoke to the wastefulness of the United States. Growing up, the only glass thing Satya had known had been windows. He had never drunk from a cup made of glass before his arrival in New York. His grandmother’s kitchen had contained metal drinking glasses, small, cool containers that left his mouth with a pleasant metallic taste long after the murky water was gone. He missed that taste in his mouth. In a glass, water just tasted like nothing.

  They reached the Corning Museum of Glass within four hours of leaving Niagara Falls, which John assured them was excellent time. After the fits and starts of the journey the day before, it had been a delight to arrive at their destination with no stopping whatsoever. It was not quite fast enough for Satya’s bladder, however, as he badly needed to urinate. He would have been happy to do so on the side of the road, but that didn’t seem to be common here like it was at home. Hardly taking notice of the museum itself, he waved to the two women and John, and rushed through the entrance to find a bathroom. When he emerged into the large sunlit lobby, he found himself staring up into a green vortex of delicate spiraling light. There seemed to be a plant of some kind growing. Blinking, he realized this was actually a structure fixed to the ground. Stepping back to join Mrs. Sengupta and Rebecca as they marveled at the piece, Satya understood that the thing was made of glass.

  It looked like a sea creature, or a wild jungle plant, as he had first thought. It looked alive. He had never seen anything solid look so much like it was in motion, the way the light
from the high large windows all around illuminated different parts of the spirals. He wanted to reach out and touch it, but he knew he wasn’t allowed. He stared at it for a long time, and when he looked around for his charge and fellow employee he saw that they were gone, only to be replaced with a small group of little children, whose gaping mouths, he realized as he shut his own, had been a mirror image of his.

  He barely had noticed the building when he entered, but now he saw that it was a mixture of metal curves and glass plates, bouncing the light around. He had only been inside one museum since he was a small child. Perhaps they all looked like this now. He tried to keep his mouth closed, but he was still amazed, no matter what his face was doing, at the glass and what it could be shaped into. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad.

  He found Mrs. Sengupta and Rebecca waiting in line for tickets, and he quickly joined them, inserting himself in front of both of them so he could arrange for things before they had a chance to try to do so. Rebecca rolled her eyes at this, but Mrs. Sengupta seemed amused, so Satya surged forward, asking for three passes precisely to all parts of the museum please no exceptions thank you. The clerk looked at him as if about to object, but Satya held his gaze, giving his bargaining face, eyes implying that he wouldn’t stand for any nonsense or conversation. The clerk nodded warily and asked for the fee.

  Satya, sure this fee had been slightly lowered for him, smiled at the confused clerk triumphantly and waved at the women to continue onward. He counted out change from the money belt he had strapped on underneath the top layer of the three shirts he was wearing. First was his new flannel, then a lighter cotton shirt from home, and finally a white T-shirt underneath it all. He was terrified of the cold, and while he had been sweating in his layers thus far, he knew he would thank himself for his foresight when they reached a colder state.

  He collected their passes from the admissions desk and ushered the women through into the body of the museum.

  “Okay, so what do we want to see?” Rebecca chirped.

  It was Satya’s turn to roll his eyes. “This is a museum for glass. We will look at the glass.”

  Rebecca sighed and handed Satya a folded pamphlet, which, as Satya realized upon examining it, was a map of the museum. “There are thousands of things to see here. Centuries of glass represented. There is industrial glass, artistic glass, scientific glass, the town of Corning’s relationship with glass. It’s all glass.”

  “There is a museum for everything here, I think,” Mrs. Sengupta observed.

  Satya paged through the map quickly. His own research materials, that is, the guidebook that Ronnie had told him to read, had not included a map of the museum, and now that he looked he realized this museum was so extensive they might not be able to see it all if they had a week, let alone the two and a half hours carefully budgeted for this place, which included a fifteen-minute tea break in the café and, most importantly, the half an hour allotted to the gift shop. He turned to Mrs. Sengupta.

  “What kind of glass are you most wanting to notice, madam?”

  Mrs. Sengupta looked a bit overwhelmed.

  “There is quite a bit to see, yes?” intoned the widow, her voice breathy. Rebecca and Satya confirmed this, nodding. “Then we will start from the beginning, and see what we can do, shall we?”

  “The beginning, madam?” Satya had no idea where this museum began or ended.

  “The beginning of glass.”

  Ten minutes and two false turns later, the trio gazed upon a museum display case proudly declaring that it was “glass in nature.” Satya had imagined that he would be guiding them through the museum and was now nervously wondering how fast he could read the signs and interpret them before Mrs. Sengupta or Rebecca, for that matter, saw them. But he soon realized that neither woman had any intention of staying together or being guided. Rebecca looked around and after perusing a few of the strange rocky structures behind the display cases, continued on, heading for a display on Roman glassmaking techniques. Satya was about to protest but she waved her hand behind her and called that she would meet them in the gift shop in two hours. He turned to Mrs. Sengupta, only to find that she herself had moved on. He rushed toward her.

  “Do you need assistance, madam?”

  Mrs. Sengupta smiled at him vaguely. “Are you an authority on glass, Satya?”

  “I have been trained to guide you in many things—”

  “I believe I can walk through this museum on my own. We have museums in Kolkata, you know. Although not”—and here she paused to look around appreciatively—“as well kept as this one. We do not know how to treat our own history. And then we become angry when others take it away from us. Sometimes I wonder if we deserve anything at all.”

  Satya couldn’t help the spurt of indignation that bubbled up in his chest at this statement. Though Mrs. Sengupta reminded him of his grandmother, making him feel protective of her, when she spoke he remembered that she was Indian, Bengali, and in her own mind, above him. She talked about history because she was lucky enough to have it. It had not been ripped from her by every surrounding country and she had not been left with something bloody and dirty where a legacy should have been.

  There were two museums Satya knew of in Sylhet, one for folk art and one celebrating General Osmani, who had led the Bangladeshi army to victory against Pakistan in 1972. Schoolchildren were taken to the one for General Osmani. The one for folk art, the Museum of the Rajas, had been unknown to Satya until his grandmother had dragged him there when he was fourteen and sullen about everything. She had spent the visit to the museum imploring him to be proud of his Bangla heritage, of all the things their people had given to the world. All he saw were dusty artifacts and photographs of dead people he didn’t know and didn’t care about. And no one else cared about them either, did they? Wasn’t that what this museum proved about Bangladesh? That no one cared?

  His grandmother had made him promise he would stay after she died, that he would work and study and be part of the new generation of Bangladeshi citizens, the new group of people set to change their country, ready to rebuild it and make it better. He had broken that promise as easily as breathing. Unbidden, the image of Ravi rose up in his mind, Ravi’s family, the promises to send something back for them. Would Ravi do that now? Should Satya?

  When you had no history, you couldn’t be expected to understand it, and if this woman knew anything about what it was like she wouldn’t have said a word.

  Something must have shown on his face, despite Ronnie’s admonitions about being deferential, because Mrs. Sengupta took one small step back. Satya tried to smile, to make it better, but he was just baring his teeth. Mrs. Sengupta looked down, and Satya felt that he had won something, somehow. It was a rare feeling, but it didn’t feel as good as he had hoped.

  “I will go at my own pace, Satya. I am an old woman, and I need to take things in my own time.” Satya nodded once, the comment about her age pulling him back to remember the respect he owed her.

  “Rebecca gave me my own map. I promise I will not get lost.” Satya nodded again, and Mrs. Sengupta and her funny little smile drifted off in the direction of Glasses of the Islamic World. Satya stayed where he was, in natural glass, looking around at himself reflected in the surfaces of the exhibition cases.

  The glass in the exhibit was strange to him, and he did not at first understand how it was glass. There were strange rocks, and some shiny black oval objects that fascinated him. The display card told him these were obsidian tools, carved out of glassy rock and used in the Stone Age. This satisfied him, until he wondered what the Stone Age was.

  In his limited Hindu education, which had mostly consisted of his grandmother dragging him to temples to make offerings and drone out prayers, and then listening to her lecturing him all the way home about the perfidy of priests, he had been forced to read a handful of books describing the ages of the world, and positioning him and his life well within Kaliyuga, the age of chaos, of arguments, and of men’s irrevere
nce and badness. The other ages were better, as Satya had read, holier, and full of better harmony.

  But as he looked at these rocky glass specimens, created from molten lava and lightning crashing against the earth, he wondered if the other ages of life had been any better. He wondered how holy this Stone Age could have been. He could not tear his eyes away from the shiny black of the obsidian. What had it been, a spearhead, maybe? Something that had been used to kill, certainly; it was sharp and carved for violence. There was nothing delicate or artistic about it. He couldn’t understand how most of the fragile glass objects around him had survived. But this could survive anything, this black mass of twisting shards and sharp edges.

  He looked at it for a long time, and after that, nothing else caught his interest. He had no use for delicate cups and vases, not when he had seen what glass could really do.

  Passing through the rest of the displays, Satya caught sight of a glassblowing demonstration. He had never seen glass being blown before, and he wasn’t sure exactly what was happening as he watched a man with a long metal pipe inhale deeply and exhale through the pipe down to a small orange bulb at the other end, which slowly began to expand, a syrupy bubble rising by the efforts of the man’s lungs. The glass puffed and expanded, a glowing-hot sphere. Satya watched, entranced for a moment, but then walked on. He still preferred a metal cup over anything else.

  He had to admit it was a better museum than the two he had seen back home. He hadn’t known a museum could be so nice, frankly. If he had come here with Ravi they would have made fun of the informational plaques and probably tried to follow women around without their noticing instead of looking at the glass. He felt a kind of hollow loneliness that made him want to break a fragile display. He walked on, trying not to see anything else as he passed cases by.