by Tony D'Souza
Walking among the Indians was slow and hideous, a pothole every two feet, an endless minefield of cow dung and paan spit. Had anyone ever heard of a traffic light? How about a stop sign? Every little task in India that only required one guy to do back home took twenty here—three guys to turn the tire iron, and seventeen to look on and shout advice, and then Peter would walk by, and they’d drop what they were doing to clap and laugh. The truck they were working on was so trashed anyway it looked unfit to drive. All he had come here to do was help these people. But who could help people like this?
It wasn’t long before Peter subjected himself to the torture of haggling for a bicycle. And what a torture it was. When he’d asked the merchant, “How much for that bike?” the merchant had clapped a boy on the side of the head and sent him to bring back tea.
“Sit down, my friend,” the merchant had said, and smiled, patting a dirty stack of newspapers in the corner of the crowded bicycle shop.
“Can’t you just tell me the price?”
“That is what we are going to find out.”
But Peter had enjoyed a bit of emotional respite later as he zipped through the town, the breeze soothing his anger at the bike seller’s skillful separation of him and much too much of his money. When my mother saw him on that bike for the first time, standing up to pedal, ringing his bell, kicking a cow out of the way as he whirled through the market in a blur, she, like everyone around her, felt her eyes drawn to him. What a spectacular thing that big white man was. Going that fast. Kicking that cow. And it became more spectacular yet, because Peter started wearing his uniform.
My mother said to Lenore at the temple, “Why would you ever want to sleep with Peter Merchant?”
“I feel sorry for him. He’s nice to me. We talk together. I know he’s awful, but I can’t help it. Things aren’t as easy for us as they are for you.”
My mother smiled. “It’s like what Steve Stewart said to me in Wisconsin. ‘Are you attracted to any of the girls here?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘Yes, to whichever one will be stationed closest to where I’ll be.’ You only need to go into Peter’s room, Lenore.”
“Sometimes I think I might do that.”
It was at this time that Peter demanded that the cook, Krishna Arjuna or Rama Krishna, a Hindu name like that, prepare American food for them. Though she hadn’t been sure of his name at the time, my mother would be able to conjure the cook’s face in her mind for the rest of her life. The nose so veined and bulbous that it looked like it would ooze blood if touched. The thick hair like wool. The pockmarks sprinkled across his cheeks like freckles. He was a head shorter than the shortest of them, thin with a fat potbelly. He would flash a quick and betel nut-stained smile when they’d compliment his green coconut chutneys, his thick lentil dais. But the cook was otherwise shy. My mother knew these few things about him: He was Malayalam from Kerala, he had been married for a long time, he had a wife and many children in his natal village in the mountains. Who had he been? Because he had been in their inner life, inside their house, my mother had kept her distance from him.
Peter in his Eagle Scout uniform had begun to swerve at dogs, to scatter groups of children with his bicycle. One afternoon, after coming back from the market, he went into the courtyard and dressed down the cook in English. He wagged his finger. His anger made his face turn red. The Indian’s cooking was the reason why Peter hadn’t had a solid bowel movement since the moment he’d been here. It was the reason why all of them were always sick. How many times had they told him not to make the food that spicy? Did he think they were kidding? Was he trying to poison them?
Peter said, “From now on, you will cook only American food for us. I’ve been to the market. Don’t tell me that the ingredients aren’t there, as I know you’ll try to do,” and the cook saluted the American in his Eagle Scout uniform and said, “Yes, sir!” Which was what Peter needed from him, and which the old man gave him.
What followed were some funny days, with Peter spending the better part of them in the courtyard teaching the cook how to make American food. The blond American with his patches and tight shorts, dripping sweat from his chin as he stood over the cook on his stool, making him peel potatoes for French fries and mix flour and water for pancakes with his fingers, which Peter had made him wash twice with soap, the cook glancing up again and again as though to ask if he was getting it right, when he knew he couldn’t possibly be, the scene looking to my mother as she smoked and watched from the porch like an organ grinder training his monkey. Why had she thought it okay then to let Peter do that?
And then there was the ultimate thing of all, hamburgers, with the buns trimmed from the centers of thick chapatis and fried, and the meat minced fine with a knife on the cutting board, and rolled into patties. The cook had never touched meat before, he had to stop the mincing now and again to stifle his gags. What could Peter do but fold his arms and sigh? He’d take a break from his frustrations with the cook to do something inside the house, and every time he did, the cook mixed spices into the meat. Then Peter would come back to taste what the cook had grilled, and he’d scowl and say, “Didn’t I tell you ‘no’? Why can’t you get that simple thing through your thick Indian skull? No spices. Not in American food.” Then he’d take the spiced meat and throw it over the gate to the waiting dogs. The dogs, in their scrawny pack, had never known such luck or gluttony as they snarled and snapped over the meat.
My mother sat on the porch in her sari with Lenore, fatigued from the heat of the day, watching what was going on with a mixture of amusement and abhorrence. She’d fan herself with a folded sheet of the day’s Hindu newspaper, wanting to step in and stop it, yes, but also wondering how it would all turn out. Despite herself, she was eager to eat food from home. She and Lenore smoked cigarettes and drank Kingfisher beers that had chilled in their butane refrigerator, and while she felt bad for the old man, she felt that Peter, no matter how much she disagreed with his choices, had as much of a right to live here in his way as she did in hers. The pancakes and burgers they would eventually eat only resembled food from home in a tangential way, translated by a boy in an Eagle Scout uniform to a Hindu in a lungi in impatient English, a language the cook could manage only on his best of days. It was entertaining, and it was frightening. Look at what India could do to people.
Peter, in his struggles, had unwittingly turned the old man into his symbol for the whole of India. Though India was a thing he could not control, the old man was something that he could. My mother understood this even as she watched it happen. Maybe it was the strange slowness of this new monsoon season, her first, its foreboding gray sky, the way it muted the colors of the flowers, the colors of the extravagant fruits piled in the market, even the women’s saris, the painted horns of the cattle, the yellow and green rickshaws with their slogans about God’s benevolence stenciled on them in Hindi, everything muted and made small again. But, too, it was my mother’s time to settle herself in India, to sleep and wake in it under her mosquito netting, to discover again and again each morning that she really was here, and to let who she’d been at home recede into her memory. My mother herself had become muted in the monsoon, didn’t anymore know who she was, if she ever had, or why she was really here or what would come of it. Nothing she knew was simple any longer. Peter demanded that the cook prepare American food, and my mother didn’t say anything. So the rain fell in its first sprinkles in the late afternoon on the coals of the old man’s grill, and the coals turned the rain to steam, and then the cook would carry the grill by its handles into the covered shed of the kitchen, and Peter would stand over him, wagging his finger to make sure he got it right.
“Don’t you want to say something to him, Denise?” Lenore would say to my mother in the dark of their room at night, the sound of the crickets and the last oxcarts’ bells coming to them from outside after the end of the rain.
“Peter will have his India, and we will have ours.”
“I don’t want to sleep with him a
nymore.”
“Don’t you?”
“Well, yes and no. I want to be touched by somebody is the thing.”
“Then you’ll be touched by somebody soon. Personally, I hope it’s not Peter. But we are friends now. Even if it is him, our friendship won’t be involved in it.”
As she turned to her side under her netting, my mother understood that she really was Lenore’s friend. The Peace Corps was a strange thing like that. As well as placing her in India, it had exposed her to all of these Americans she wouldn’t have otherwise met. Certainly they didn’t live in the world as she would have wanted them to, but they were also here with her. It was more now with Lenore than just making do. Lenore was the one person in the world who would ever take these first steps into this new life with her.
My mother walked all through Hassan in the mornings before the afternoon rains. The women in the market had graduated from calling her The One Who Walks Slow to calling her Shanti, the first word of her organization’s tide, which she translated for them into Hindi to explain her presence there. Among those poor people, my mother began to see herself as the embodiment of that idea. How that idea brought the blood up under her skin! Of the three of them, she spent the most time outside the compound by far, and wandering in the busy market, or into the shantytown of the working poor, where children took her fingers to lead her to their families’ shacks, where she’d stand with them in the low doorways to smile down at their mothers over their pots, and also smile at the idea that she was Peace stopping by to look in. Even then she knew that India would become the singular event of her life.
The old cook stopped my mother one afternoon as she walked through the courtyard to her room. She’d just come back from another one of her aimless walks through the town, through the rice paddies of its outskirts, where the thin men in lungis whipped buffalo to pull the plows until the paddies’ wet clods were churned to a soupy muck for the planting, and she’d seen a handful of new things that the others hadn’t: a mendicant with a long beard tying a red string around the trunk of a flowering jacaranda in pooja, a troop of vervet monkeys at the main temple peeling and eating the bananas left at the feet of the statue of Lord Vishnu by worshippers in the alcove inside. Her ankles were splattered with mud from the road, and she was sweaty and weary. The old man had never really spoken to her before. But this day, he hurried across the courtyard to her, took her hands in his, and said, “I know the women call you ‘Shanti-devi.’ You are the one becoming like us. Also more than us. Always will you be more because you are white. But you must help me. Peter is hating how I cook. He wants what I cannot do. You must come to my side. Tell him my cooking is good. Even if you feel I am stupid, you must aid me, Shanti-devi.”
My mother said to him, “If I say anything to Peter, it will become worse. Peter has his way. Listen to him and do your best. Peter has no real authority over you, my uncle. If he did, you would not still be here.”
“I am afraid, Shanti-devi. I do not know ‘French fries.’ I do not know ‘pancakes.’ Even now, I cannot cleanse my hands from the touching of the meat.”
“No matter what Peter says, as long as I am here, you will have a job with us.”
“I am not sleeping. I must not lose this job. For myself, yes, but for my family also. This job is one that does not really exist. Cooking for white people here, who has ever heard of it? I sit at your feet. I am your very own child. How can it not be so? Without this job, I have nothing. The minister gave this job to me only because the low-caste reforms have come. Afterward, he will give it to someone close to him. I hold this job in my hands like water only. Protect me, Shanti-devi. I am your child.”
My mother nodded, and the cook pressed his hands together to thank her and let her go. My mother could not yet know what that conversation really meant, the commitment she’d made to him in it. Her growing love for India was as colorful as the saris she was wearing more comfortably every day, but as she enjoyed the fall of the rain from the porch, smoking with Lenore, my mother thought she could take a break from India, too, when she needed. That she was happy and existing here was enough for now. As she went on letting Peter drill the old man in American cooking, my mother felt that she would soon leave this starting place to begin her real life in her own town. Things like Peter and the cook would matter more then.
What happened was this: The old man had always been a heavy drinker. Now with the red-faced American yelling at him at every turn, he felt that his livelihood was in jeopardy. After the Americans went to bed, he assuaged his fears by pouring fenny down his gullet. Night after night, week after week. This new and heavier drinking ate into his savings, which made him ever more fearful, and so he spent even more time drunk than he had before. That he was a drunk they all knew. But his drinking at night hadn’t seemed to infringe on his cooking.
One night, with the smell of the meat again on his hands and feeling very far from his religion and the family in the mountains he was working to send money to, but hadn’t in a long while now, the cook sat on his stool in the kitchen shed and drank a bottle of the strongest fenny in the light of the last coals in the grill.
He had done his best to cook American food, hadn’t he? Still, the American man in his uniform had nothing but scorn for him. He had done a fine job, he was a fine preparer of food. But what were these French fries they wanted from him, what was this horrible hamburger? If his wife only knew what he had to deal with, she would understand why he had not sent money. The leering face of the American above him was as terrible as a rakshasa. The American clearly hated him. He had even prostrated himself before the one called Shanti-devi, and while she had promised she would help him, she had done nothing. She must hate him, too. What could he possibly do now to please that angry man? He needed this job as sorely as he had ever needed anything. Why was this what life was like? Why couldn’t the American see that he was only doing his best? The cook poured fenny into his mouth. He wiped his chin on his wrist, again doused his troubles with more of it. All of that meat. How could they eat it? How could he have touched that meat for them? Only fenny could make life bearable. One knew that there really were gods in heaven because the gods had given man fenny. And what could one do but laugh now, because fenny made even the red-faced American wagging his finger and shouting at him seem funny. Like the face of a white cow. An angry white cow’s face yelling at him. Had he ever imagined that such a ridiculous thing would happen to him in this life?
The cook’s heart palpitated six quick times as though trying to run up steps, and he pressed his hands to his sternum as he realized his heart really was a thing in his chest. Then it pounded one large time, and the pain of it rolled him off of his stool so that he could see the stars, which the clouds had parted to reveal. The cook remarked to himself how nice it was that he could see the stars in their thousands at this monsoon time of year, and the stars were beautiful, and their beauty made him happy. But also, his heart was not supposed to be doing what it was doing. The stone of the courtyard felt pleasant and warm under him, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to be lying on it. He thought of his job and his wife and the children and every beloved thing that made him necessary in this world. Then his heart beat one last, huge time, and the cook was dead.
My mother came out in the early morning to see Peter and Lenore standing over the cook. The cook was clearly dead, his tongue hanging out of his mouth as though he’d been strangled. A single fly worried his nose, crawling in and out of his nostrils, a busy black bug. My mother looked up at the sky. The sky would be blue soon, a hot and clear morning before the rainy afternoon. Peter touched his sandaled foot to the cook’s puff of hair. He said, “No more French fries.”
Peter said, “He did this just to spite us. Now the police are going to come here and cause a big stink, and we’re going to have Indians poking through all of our things and in our house, and they are going to think up some reason why we have to give them money. They’ll talk about all of his kids and how we h
ave to give them money, too. Maybe if he wasn’t determined to drink himself to death, he could have had a better job. A better life. And how hard was it not to burn a fucking pancake?”
My mother and Lenore watched as Peter picked up what remained of the bottle of fenny, screwed the cap on it. Then he pushed the cook’s tongue into his mouth, closed the mouth with a pat of his hand, and lifted the body from the ground to hold it on his shoulder like a child. The cook’s lungi fell open to reveal his thin and pale legs. Lenore dropped her hands from her mouth to rush to Peter and fix that.
All around them in their courtyard, the light was rising. My mother looked at the stool under the tin shed, where the cook had drunk away his last night. At home, they would have thought that stool was a toy, something for a child to play with. The cook’s bed in the corner was a single sheet over a bare foam pad. The butane burner on the table, the pots and pans of the cooking stacked around it. The sacks of onions and potatoes against the wall, the big bags of rice in a tidy pile. The kitchen shed was as cluttered as a junk shop. This man had lived there. The birds in their breadfruit tree began to awaken and chirp. India had been right here all this time.
Peter lifted the latch on the big steel doors that kept their courtyard concealed from the road, banged through them with the cook on his shoulder. He carried the body through the town toward the bus stand. There were only the first morning people about, the fishmonger pushing his buckets of mackerel on a cart, the rickshaw drivers stretching and yawning as they stood from sleeping on the seats of their machines, the tea vendors with their clay cups and thermoses letting up the first sharp calls for “Chai! Chai! Chai!” and from the Muslim quarter on the other side of town came the muezzin’s mournful and operatic “Allahu akbar,” like an old man practicing scales. But even these few people’s mouths dropped open at the sight of the tall white man carrying an Indian in a lungi on his shoulder. Peter explained it by holding up the bottle of fenny. “Ah,” these people nodded, and spit. The man was drunk. The white man’s servant. The cook most certainly. Who didn’t know a cook who wasn’t also a drunk? Not any more of that good living for this one. Things would be hard at first when he woke up, and then he would go to this cousin or that, and find some new job, the way that people always did. Maybe the next time, he would know better than to be a drunk. Even the rickshaw drivers knew that he wouldn’t.