PALLAVI SHARMA DIXIT
SAN FRANCISCO
EDISON
by Pallavi Sharma Dixit
Third State Books
93 Cumberland Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Visit us at www.thirdstatebooks.com
© 2024 Pallavi Sharma Dixit
First edition: June 2024
ISBN 979-8-89013-015-0 (hardcover)
979-8-89013-016-7 (e-book)
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024933123
Cover and text design by Kathryn E. Campbell
Printed in Canada by Friesens Corporation
For Amol, of course
phoolon mein, kaliyon mein, sapnon ki galiyon mein
tere bina kuch kahin naa
in flowers, in buds, in the streets of dreams
without you there is nothing anywhere at all
—MUQADDAR KA SIKANDAR (1978)
“Today, suburban areas like central
New Jersey serve as the backdrop
to both the beginning and end of the
search for the American Dream.”
—S. MITRA KALITA, Suburban Sahibs
PROLOGUE
Indians add “one” to things. When, for instance, Hemant Engineer attended the graduation party of his dear friend Sanjay Sapra’s daughter at Moghul Fine Indian Cuisine, the most celebrated and formal restaurant in our town, he wrote a check for one hundred and one dollars, as opposed to simply one hundred, and tucked it into a mortar-boarded card. When Leena Engineer, daughter of Hemant, attended wedding after wedding of friends much younger than she was while being increasingly referred to as “still unmarried” and “that poor girl,” she always brought with her a check for fifty-one dollars. Neither Hemant nor Leena, nor the recipients of these checks, nor the thousands of Indians in Edison, New Jersey—the Hindu ones, specifically—who give and receive such checks every week question the necessity of the extra dollar.
If pressed, a resident of Edison—this town brimming with Indians, where some joke there are more Indians than in India herself—might venture the opinion that perhaps it’s a superstition, something you do “just in case.” Such people who add one dollar out of fear of repercussions tend to add one to nonmonetary amounts as well. Several buildings over from the Engineers’ in King’s Court apartments, Beena Joshi adds one to the end of microwave-oven cooking times: 1:31 for leftover chana, 3:01 for popcorn. Her Seiko wristwatch is set one minute fast, and when she rewarded herself with diamond earrings after years of laboring as a cashier at Drug Fair and operating a catering business from her apartment on weekends, she insisted they each have precisely 1.1 carats, just in case.
Once, on a windless midsummer afternoon in 1988, a lively assortment of attendants at the Exxon gas station on Oak Tree Road attempted to answer their fellow attendant Abdul Rashid’s question: “Why the one?”
Attendant #1, known for his quickness to point out the stupidity of those around him, said, “Why are Americans listening to a groundhog for a weather report?” His point, which he didn’t state outright but which everyone understood, was that his parents in India added one, and their parents before them, and it was just another of the many inexplicable yet incontrovertible traditions lugged over to America, like cracking a coconut on momentous occasions.
“It is because zero has no meaning,” Attendant #2 said with a confidence not regularly associated with him. “It is nothing. Not a good number.”
Attendant #3, who was not scheduled to work that day but came to the gas station anyway for “time pass,” for shooting the shit, added that no one affixed one to non-zero-ending numbers, like twenty-five or fifty-five.
A battered and apologetic-looking Buick pulled up and a man started to emerge from it, but the attendants kicked up a mild uproar, sending the man back into his car. “This is New Jersey, sir,” Attendant #4 said at the rolled-down window, and after the requisite “Cash or charge?” exchange, amidst the heady bouquet of regular unleaded, he asked the customer to weigh in on the one-dollar discussion because, naturally, the man was Indian—what else would he be in this corner of our town?
“It is recommended in Hindu culture to stick to odd numbers,” the customer said. “In our temples, there is always an odd number of priests; and for the head-shaving ceremony of young boys, the child must be an odd number of years old. In weddings, how many sacred steps do the bride and groom take? Seven.” Before driving off, the customer, who was the chairman of public relations for the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh, handed Attendant #4 some flyers for the upcoming Janamashtami celebrations, stressing the importance of observing the birth of Krishna, who was, incidentally, seven years old when he lifted Govardhan mountain with one hand to shelter villagers from seven days and seven nights of cataclysmic rain.
