“Or a sari store,” Deepak said.
“No, I am already doing that, man,” Lucky said.
“Okay, a music store,” Gopal said.
“Okay, he can do that,” Lucky said.
Prem was feeling suffocated by the bizarre and specific pressure to open a store and annoyed at having woken up to the very questions of plans and career that he was trying to escape. “You know, I don’t think I … maybe I won’t open a store.”
“Oh, sorry, sorry, you must be more into computers,” Deepak said. He dipped three biscuits into his tea at the same time. “Very good, this is the future. Are you into computers?”
“No, you know, that is not—” Prem began.
“Does he look like he is into computers?” Mohan said, gesturing at Prem with an open palm.
“Then let me see. I am thinking engineering,” Deepak said.
“How engineering is so different from computers? Do you know even what is engineering?” Mohan said.
“Bathroom is free.” Iqbal appeared in the drawing room with a thin towel at his waist.
Despite the eyeful of Iqbal’s hirsute body, Prem was relieved by the interruption. “Who is going next? Should I go?”
“Sit down, man, relax. Gopal goes next because he has to be at the job first,” Deepak said. “So, engineering? No? Then what will you do?”
“Why you are after his life?” Amarleen flung herself onto Prem’s mattress as she had often flung herself onto the mattresses of the others. They whispered that she regularly added a splash of bourbon to her chai despite the strict injunctions of her religion, which loosened her inhibitions and explained her flinging. “He just came yesterday. Does he have to tell you his all plans today? Come, Prem, let me make you comfortable,” she said, moving over as close to Prem as she could with impunity.
Her husband, still half-naked in the drawing room, asked, “What schooling did you do? What line your father is in?”
Prem jumped up. “You know, really, I have to, I should exchange my rupees. Which apartment did you say? What was her name?” He tripped on the end of Mohan’s bedsheet and lost his footing, hurling himself into his suitcase. He fumbled around for his jacket, eventually emerging with his pouch of cash. When he stood back up and did a cursory smoothing of his kurta, he found all eyes in the room staring at him in bewildered silence. He tucked the pouch under his arm and brought his cup to the sink. “Where am I going?”
“11G, Beena Joshi,” Deepak said, dunking another three biscuits. “Water drips from the ceiling in the hall there. Maybe take a hat.” Prem ducked out as quickly as he could, just barely catching Amarleen’s parting advice—“Do not let her touch you!”—and exited the building. He stood for a long time on the steps, watching men with briefcases heading toward the main road. Once again, he had behaved oddly. But there was no need, he felt, for these new people to know anything about his family. If they did, they would assume things: that he had spent his formative years boozing and partying, that he drove a Mercedes and had a private jet on which he flew down to Goa on a whim, that his life was without struggle. They would make him pay for everything when they went out and expect lavish gifts on their birthdays. Maybe his rent would be raised. Maybe they would try to get their sisters married to him. But could he have deflected their questions in a more normal manner? The parking lot across the street was lined with a disturbing number of cars in front of Quicker Liquor for 7:00 a.m. He had to get on with things, he thought, so he kicked himself for his unrivaled awkwardness and went in search of 11G.
“The main thing you must know is that Uttam Jindal wears a wig and tried to kill his wife.” Prem was enjoying his second cup of chai that morning, sitting on Beena Joshi’s plastic-covered sofa and wondering why she kept a second fridge in the drawing room. “You see, he was carrying on with a Gujarati girl from Hidden Valley apartments who works in the underwear section of Bamberger’s. Who knows what the underwear worker wanted with Uttam and his wig, but after one year, she convinced him to put poison in Mrs. Jindal’s Bournvita malted chocolate beverage.”
Beena spoke in a Bombay accent with vaguely English inflections she had picked up at a boarding school run by nuns. Prem learned this as well as the other essential details of her life within the first ten minutes of entering her apartment and asking her to exchange his rupees. She had come to America in 1978 with seven dollars in her husband’s pocket; they settled in Edison after staying in Parsippany with her maternal aunt’s brother-in-law for a month. Although they had arranged their own love marriage, which their parents grudgingly accepted though the star charts indicated it was an inauspicious match, the pair was only mildly happy together. Almost immediately, the husband revealed an addiction to gambling, at which he was, unfortunately, extraordinarily mediocre. He journeyed frequently to Atlantic City and accumulated a massive debt just two years after immigrating. Beena divorced him and sent him back to India while she stayed on in America and began cooking on a large scale. Prem couldn’t decide if she was a youngish old lady or an oldish young lady. He was just appreciative that, unlike Amarleen, she did not seem at all interested in touching him. “Then what?” he said.
“You won’t believe it, he put the poison in, but she didn’t die!” Beena laughed and laughed and slapped the table several times. “Constitution like a horse,” she said. After she was done laughing, she slid a pair of scissors across the coffee table and motioned to Prem to help her cut coupons from an array of papers strewn before them. He found he quite enjoyed the task, resting his concentration on something outside of himself while Beena related the rest of the poison story. It turned out the wife figured out the whole plot, and instead of reporting the incident to the police, she forced her husband to stay with her for the rest of their lives as punishment. The underwear seller married a doctor and moved to Miami.
“So, ya, not much else happening here. Oh, Kailash Mistry in 3G was fired from his chemistry job in the Revlon factory for harassing female colleagues with perfume, and the Yadhavs’ unmarried daughter is pregnant. They will be forcing her engagement shortly. Now, what about you, Mr. Prem?” As he would many times in the coming weeks, Prem wondered what he was doing in this place. He couldn’t say how long he was staying or where he would go next, but he was comfortable and relaxed here with this large, lively woman in her sunny apartment that smelled of potatoes. So he told her his whole story, beginning with his lonely upbringing, his mother’s death, his incompetence in the eyes of his father, and ending with the tracksuit brothers making off with his tongue scraper.
Beena Joshi was a practical woman, perhaps the most practical of all the many practical women in King’s Court. After her divorce, she tripled her hours at Drug Fair and began cooking mountains of food for various clients. This underground catering business was a marvelous feat. When Indians from miles around arrived at her doorstep to collect their ordered stacks of parathas and vats of dal that would provide dinner for the week, the men of King’s Court would turn to their wives in frustration for not applying their own cooking skills to any useful purpose except feeding their own families. After hearing about his struggles, she gave him a tip: “Do not tell anyone anything.”
Her point was not, she clarified, that he should be embarrassed by his shortcomings and myriad failures, but that the people of King’s Court would at best treat him differently and at worst resent him for his wealth. They would make him pay for everything when they went out and they would expect lavish gifts on their birthdays. The Singhs would raise his rent, and the paying guests would try to get their sisters married to him. “Ya, I was thinking the same thing,” Prem said.
They talked for a while more, Beena getting up periodically to stir some chana, until it was time for her to begin the walk to Drug Fair. She pulled out a colossal calculator and figured out the numbers for the currency exchange, pausing briefly to call a mysterious bank teller to confirm the 12.8-rupees-to-dollar rate while Prem collected the clipped coupons into a neat pile.
Beena handed him a brown paper bag of cash. “Okay, come back and see me anytime, just come.” She patted him vigorously on the cheek as if trying to imprint the invitation on his face. Prem agreed and took the bag, alarmed at how light it was.
* * *
Prem woke up the following morning bewildered anew by where he was and how he had gotten there. He longed for a servant to bring him a hot cup of tea with biscuits while he lay in bed watching movie news. Instead, five men took turns telling off-color jokes while waiting for the bathroom.
“And the woman says, ‘You’ve been eating grass for past ten minutes!’” Lucky said to a highly receptive room.
“Wow, man, good one,” Deepak said, trying to lick some jelly that had fallen from his toast onto his shirt. “I think I know her!”
“Here’s one, here’s one,” Mohan began. “A guy goes to the store to buy the condoms … ”
At some point, Prem wasn’t sure when, Amarleen had slid onto his mattress and was blowing on a cup of tea with great fervor. “First chai is for you,” she said, handing it over to him, then staying to adore the side of his face.
“… he is not that ugly!” Mohan finished, unleashing another round of knee slapping and guffaws. “Village boy, your turn,” he said to Prem.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” Amarleen said, admiring her new paying guest with awe and wonder. “Prem is too pure and clean for nonveg jokes.”
Prem proceeded to tell the dirtiest, smuttiest, most vulgar joke any of them had ever heard in their lives. He had acquired the joke and many similarly obscene ones in the movie halls of his youth, not knowing that the filth he was gleaning would be so useful. When he delivered the foul punchline, there was a brief silence before the crowd erupted into mayhem. There was hooting and backslapping as Prem had never before seen and it was all directed at celebrating his surprising vulgarity. Even Amarleen seemed delighted and proud. He had never commanded attention or regaled a room before. It felt good.
For the next hour, they exchanged crass jokes, and Prem continued to offer up the choicest ones. At times, he wasn’t even sure what they meant or to what they were referring, but he kept going. Some of the upstairs tenants heard the hoopla and wandered in, throwing their own bits of filth into the mix and adding to the general salute of Prem’s lewdness. It was the most shining moment of his life to that point. He wished his mother could see him, though perhaps not hear him, making friends of his own age, having fun, being applauded and accepted by his peers.
“Who is this skinny kurta pajama boy anyway?” Keshav Rathod from upstairs said. Bitter about the tepid response to his joke about Bengali sex workers versus Punjabi ones, he lashed out at Prem, whom he recognized as an easy target. “Did he just come from the village? Does he know what is a toilet? Does he wash himself outside with the bucket and mug?”
Prem was thrust right back to his school days, singled out and ridiculed, ready to die of discomfort, with no one on his side. “We already made those same jokes yesterday about the village,” Gopal said. “Find something new to joke.”
“Or even better, just go,” Deepak said, waving his toast in the direction of the door.
“Maybe he is a skinny kurta villager,” Lucky said, “but he is our skinny kurta villager.”
The joke session soon simmered down and slowly the men went home or got ready and filtered out of the apartment to start their days. Prem was the last in the bathroom as he had nowhere to be. The remainder of the morning, he wandered around the unkempt apartment grounds, perplexed by how much he liked it here. He took a long afternoon nap; in the evening, he distributed some of his remaining cassette tapes to his new friends.
