Biju finds a new job at the Queen of Tarts bakery. The place is full of rats and creepy crawlies. Yet, he manages to make fresh baked products every morning. Sai continues to go for tuition at Mon Ami. Noni realises she cannot teach her Physics. Her efforts to grasp the subject end in vain and so the judge asks the local college principal to recommend a tutor. That is when Gyan enters the picture. A young lad, he makes Sai aware of her looks and she feels herself silently falling for him. Meanwhile, the cook starts sending Biju requests from his friends to help their sons or relatives soon to be arriving in USA.
The judge looked up from his chess. Sai had climbed up a tree at the garden’s edge. From its branches you could look onto the road curving down below and she would be able to catch Gyan’s approach.
Each succeeding week of mathematics tutoring, the suspense was growing until they could barely sit in the same room without desiring to flee. She had a headache. He had to leave early. They made excuses, but the minute they left each other’s company, they were restless and curiously angry, and they waited again for the following Tuesday, anticipation rising unbearably.
The judge walked over.
“Get down.”
“Why?”
“It’s making Mutt nervous to see you up there.”
Mutt looked up at Sai, wagged, not a shadow crossed her eyes.
“Really?” said Sai.
“I hope that tutor of yours doesn’t get any funny ideas,” said the judge, then.
“What funny ideas?”
“Get down at once.”
Sai got down and went indoors and shut herself up in her room. One day she would leave this place.
“Time should move,” Noni had told her. “Don’t go in for a life where time doesn’t pass, the way I did. That is the single biggest bit of advice I can give you.”
******************************
In Kalimpong, the cook was writing on an airmail form. He wrote in Hindi and then copied out the address in awkward English letters. He was being besieged by requests for help. The more they asked, the more they came - Lamsang, Mr. Lobsang Phuntsok, Oni, Mr. Shezoon of the Lepcha Quarterly, Kesang, the hospital cleaner, the lab technician responsible for the man who plugged the holes in rusting pots, everyone with sons in the queue ready to be sent. They brought him chickens as gifts, little packets of nuts or raisins, offered him a drink at Ex-Army Thapa’s Canteen, and he was beginning to feel as if he were a politician, a bestower of favours, a receiver of thanks.
“Bhai, dekho, aesa he…” he would begin to lecture them. “Look, you have to have some luck, it is almost impossible to get a visa…” It was superhumanly difficult, but he would write to his son. “Let’s see, let’s see, perhaps you will get lucky…”
“Biju beta,” he wrote, “you have been fortunate enough to get there, please do something for the others…”
Then he applied a homemade mucilage of flour and water to glue down the sides of the airmail forms, sent them finning their way over the Atlantic, a whole shoal of letters…
They would never know how many of them went astray in all the rickety connections made along the way, between the temperamental postman in the pouring rain, the temperamental van across the landslides on the way to Siliguri, the lightning and thunder, the befogged airport, the journey from Calcutta all the way to the post office on 125th street in Harlem that was barricaded like an Israeli army outpost in Gaza. The mailman abandoned the letters atop the boxes of legal residents, and sometimes the letters fell, were trampled, and tracked back outdoors. But enough came through that Biju felt he might drown.
“Very bright boy, family very poor, please look after him, he already has visa, will be arriving…Please find a job for Poresh. In fact, even his brother is ready to go. Help them. Sanjeeb, Thom, Karma, Ponchu and remember Budhoo, watchman at Mon Ami, his son…”
“I know, man, I know how you feel,” Saeed said.
Saeed Saeed’s mother was dispensing his phone number and address freely to half of the Stone Town. They arrived at the airport with one dollar in their pocket and his phone number, seeking admittance to an apartment that was bursting with men already, every scrap rented out: Rashid Ahmed, Jaffer Abdullah, Hassan Musa, Lutfi, Ali and a whole lot of others sharing beds in shifts.
“More tribes, more tribes. I wake up, go to the window, and there - more tribes. Every time I look - another tribe. Everybody saying, ‘Oh, no visas anymore they are getting very strict,’ and in the meantime everybody who applies is getting a visa. Why they do this to me? That American Embassy… Why?! Nobody would give that Dooli a visa. Nobody. One look and you would say OK, something is wrong here but they give it to him!
“The sweetest fruit in all of Stone Town grew in the graveyard, and the finest bananas grew from the grandfather’s grave of that same wayward Dooli whom the American Embassy had so severely misjudged as to give him a visa,” Saeed was telling them when he glanced out of the window and in a second he was under the counter.
“Oh my God!” Whispering. “Tribes, man, it’s the tribes. Please God. Tell them I don’t work here. How they get this address?! My mother! I told her, No more! Please! Omar, go! Go! Go tell them to leave.”
Outside the bakery stood a group of men, looking weary as if they’ d been travelling several lifetimes, scratching their heads and staring at the Queen of Tarts.
“Why do you help?” asked Omar. “I stopped helping and now they all know I won’t help and nobody comes to me.”
“This is not the time to give a lecture.”
Omar went out. “Who? Saeed? No, no. What name? Sayad? No, no one of that name. Just me, Kavafya, and Biju.”
“But he works here. His mother told us.”
“No. No. You all get moving. Nobody here who you want to see and if you make trouble we get into trouble, so now I ask you nicely… Go.”
“Very good,” said Saeed, “thank you. They have gone?”
“No.”
“What are they doing?”
“They are still standing and looking,” said Biju feeling brave and excited by someone else’s misfortune. He was almost hopping.
The men were shaking their heads unwilling to believe what they’d heard.
Biju went out and came back in. “They say they will try your home address now.” He felt a measure of pride in delivering this vital news. Realised he missed playing this sort of role that was common in India. One’s involvement in other peoples’ lives gave one numerous small opportunities for importance.
“They will come back. I know them. They will try many more times or one will stay and the others will go. Close the door, close the window….”
“We can’t close the shop. Too hot, can’t close the window.”
“Close it!”
“No. What if Mr Bocher visit us?” He was the owner who dropped by at odd moments hoping to surprise them doing something against the rules.
“No bossi,” Saeed would tell him. “We do everything you tell us just like you tell us….”
But now….
“It’s my life we’re talking about, man, not little hot here and little hot there, boss or no boss….”
They closed the window and the door, and from the floor he telephoned his apartment. “Hey Ahmed, don’t answer the phone, man, that Dooli and all the boys have come from the airport! Lock up, stay down, don’t stand, and don’t go near the window.” “Hah! Why they give them a visa? How they buy the ticket!” They could hear the voice at the other end. Then it vanished into Swahili.
The phone rang in the bakery.
“Don’t answer,” he said to Biju who was reaching for it. When the answering machine came on, it went off.
“The tribes! They always scared of the answering machine!”
It rang again and then again. Tring tring tring tring. Answering machine. Phone down. Again: tring tring.
“Saeed, you have to talk to them.” Biju’s heart was suddenly pulsing with the anguish of the ringing. It could be the boss; it could be India on the line.
Kavafya picked it up and a voice projected into the room raw and insistent with panic. “Emergency! Emergency! We are coming from airport. Emergency! Emergency! Saaeed S-aa-eed.”
He put it down and unplugged it.
Biju’s sympathy for Saeed leaked into sympathy for himself, then Saeed’s shame into his own shame that he would never help all those people praying for his help, waiting daily, hourly, for his response. He, too, had arrived at the airport with a few dollar bills bought on the Kathmandu black market in his pocket and an address for his father’s friend, Nandu, who lived with twenty-two taxi drivers in Queens. Nandu had also not answered the phone and had tried to hide when Biju arrived and to his distress found Biju still standing there two hours later.
“No jobs here anymore,” he said. “If I were a young man I would go back to India, more opportunities there now, too late for me to make a change, but you should listen to what I’m saying. Everyone says you have to stay, this is where you’ll make a good life, but much better for you to go back.”
Nandu met someone at his work who told him of the basement in Harlem and ever since he had deposited Biju there, Biju had never seen him again.
The green card… the green card. Without it he couldn’t leave. To leave he wanted a green card. This was the absurdity. How he desired the triumphant ‘After The Green Card Return Home.’ Thirsted for it - to be able to buy a ticket with the air of someone who could return if he wished, or not, if he didn’t wish…
He watched the legalised foreigners with envy as they shopped at discount baggage stores for the miraculous, expandable third-world suitcase, filled with pockets and zippers to unhook further carnies, the whole structure unfolding into a giant space that could fit in enough to set up an entire life in another country.
Then, of course, there were those who lived and died illegal in America and never saw their families, not for ten years, twenty, thirty, never again.
How did one do it? At the Queen of Tarts, they watched the TV shows on Sunday mornings on the Indian channel that showcased an immigration lawyer fielding questions.
They waited at the corner, sweating away, my God, my God…Finally a battered van came by and they paid into the cracked open door, handed over their photographs taken according to INS requirements showing a single bared ear and a three-quarter profile, and were thumbprinted through the crack. Two weeks later, they waited once more.
They waited and waited and…The van did not come back. The cost of this endeavour once again emptied Biju’s savings envelope.
Omar suggested they console themselves since they were in the neighbourhood. Kavafya said he would join him.
Only thirty-five dollars.
Prices not raised.
Biju blushed to remember what he had said in his hot dog days.
“Smell awful… black women… Hubshi hubshi.”
“It’s too hot,” he said, “for me to go.”
They laughed.
“Saeed?”
But Saeed didn’t have to go anywhere. He was meeting a new girl.
“What happened to Thea?” asked Biju.
“She has gone for hiking outside the city.”
“You better watch out,” said Omar. “White women, they look good when they’re young, but wait, they fall apart fast, by forty they look so ugly, hair falling out, lines everywhere, and those spots and those veins, you know what I’m talking about…”
Saeed said, “Ah ah ah ha ha, I know,” He understood their jealousy.
At the bakery a customer found an entire mouse baked inside a sunflower loaf. It must have gone after the seeds…
A team of health inspectors arrived. They entered in the style of U.S. Marines, the FBI, the CIA, the NYPD; burst in: Hands up!
They found a burst sewage pipe, a hiccupping black drain, knives stored behind the toilet, rat droppings in the flour, and in a forgotten basin of eggs, single-celled organisms so comfortable they were reproducing on their own without inspiration from another.
The boss, Mr. Bocher, was called.
“Come and visit uptown sometime, Biju man.” Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.
Biju knew he probably wouldn’t see him again. This was what happened, he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes, someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway, then they vanished again. Addresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep any more.
To Be Continued
