“I love this filthy villager!” many of them said.
During the next three weeks, Prem settled into an unexpected life in which he slept on a mattress near four men and Beena Joshi became his best friend. Although he still had no bearings on where his life was going, he fell into a kind of happy routine. In the mornings, he lounged on his mattress and enjoyed his tea as everyone got ready around him. Amarleen often settled herself onto his mattress, and he would spend the rest of the morning trying to get her off of it. He would lie down again before taking his shower, waiting for the hot water to replenish itself after his roommates were done, which it never fully did. Then he would stay in the shower until the water ran cold again. Early afternoons were spent wandering the scraggly grounds of the apartment complex until he found some similarly idle person on a porch step to have a chat with. For the first time in his life, he felt his natural reticence receding, discovering that people liked to tell him things. One time an outwardly strict Jain vegetarian accountant divulged a love of Kentucky Fried Chicken, while another time a very old woman in sneakers and a sari told him she had a priceless Mughal miniature painting hidden in her sock drawer. Some days he would join the circle of white-haired men he’d seen on his first day there as they sat in the yard and talked or just sat. Later in the afternoons, he would nap, have more tea, and visit Beena either in her apartment or at the Drug Fair. After he discovered that Tun-Tun and Tony Gupta in 12D had a VCR and three Hindi movie videos (Awara, Don, and a shaky copy of the underrated Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro), he stopped in regularly to watch for an hour or two. And in the evenings, after the roommates trickled in from their various jobs and the upstairs neighbors came down, they would eat the feast that Amarleen made them. No one questioned him again about his background, and Prem was relieved he didn’t have to recite the story he had concocted about being the son of a toothpaste salesman. Once a week, he made a call to India from Beena’s apartment to assure his father that filming was going well, and once a week, he felt bad about himself for an hour.
And so Prem became an integral part of the block-printed raw silk fabric of King’s Court. He made himself readily available to anyone who wanted to waste some time before or after or sometimes even during work, and he felt at last the freedom to do nothing. Yet he was not ignorant of the hard work going on around him. Everyone was trying to be someone; no one sat still. The three paying guests in 20A woke up at 4:30 a.m. to walk to their jobs as line cooks two miles away. Tony held two jobs, one as a power equipment operator at a department store distribution center and another in the stockroom at Kmart, while Tun-Tun gave hours of exacting Kathak dance lessons in their drawing room to mostly unenthusiastic second-generation girls. Prem witnessed with admiration the opening of Ashoka, the first Indian restaurant on Oak Tree Road, and when it was vandalized—its decorations destroyed, its entrance egged, the police reportedly unconcerned—just one day after the Grand Opening sign had been taped up on the window, Prem helped the owner tape his sign back up and pluck the eggshells from the pavement. King’s Court’s would-be shop owners steeled themselves and worked twice as hard, leaving Prem astounded and guilty once again for his lack of striving. Lazing while his friends toiled, Prem eventually felt the pressure to act, and at the end of November, still living out of the nearly depleted polka-dotted pouch of his father’s money, he was told by his best friend that he needed to get a job.
* * *
The snaps on the Exxon jumpsuit took a long time to button all the way up, and on his first morning stepping into it, Prem had misaligned them. He stood alone in the drawing room, unsnapping and starting over. Everyone had already left, even Amarleen, who was helping Urmila Sahu in 12A wax her arms. When he was done getting dressed, he looked down at his spotless uniform and considered the possibility of catching the next flight back to India. He had maybe gone too far with this charade. What would his family say if they saw him? But, then again, how would they?
He walked up Oak Tree Road as though strolling alongside a river, enjoying the largely concrete scenery, feeling relaxed and free under the mild New Jersey sun. It was an unseasonably warm day for late November, perfect for starting a gas station job. He pondered the abandoned-looking parking lot with the screen, which he had learned was a defunct drive-in theater, and couldn’t understand how such an excellent concept had failed. Probably it would fail in India too, he thought, on account of the excessive honking and total disregard for traffic rules. He remembered there was such a theater in Ahmedabad and wondered how that had worked. He passed Oakwood Pizza—where he had tried American pizza for the first time two nights before, finding its cheese rubbery—and across the street was Exxon’s rival, BP, whose employment opportunities the Indians in Edison had so far resisted for the obvious British reasons.
Mohan and Gopal were already at work when Prem reported to a real job for the first time in his life. The other attendant working that morning was Abdul Rashid, a professorial man with perfectly round wire-rimmed glasses and tasseled shoes. Mohan and Gopal had warned Prem that Abdul Rashid tried to match his personality to his accessories by cornering people and lecturing them on obscure subjects such as farm subsidies in the Deccan or the Indic origins of chess. He had aspired to be a historian or scholar and harbored the hope still, but wound up in America where he could theoretically earn enough to finance his higher education. At times he went on and on, deeper and deeper into a topic until his audience wanted to run into the street screaming. But in the end, he was a good person, Mohan and Gopal explained, thoughtful and harmless.
It was a physically grueling, very pleasant morning, with a bump in customers around lunchtime followed by a lull. Prem had learned the basics of pumping gas and collecting payment the day before, but everyone agreed he was the worst Exxon employee to ever wield a squeegee. He never gave customers the correct credit card slip and showed a remarkable lack of dexterity with American coins. At noon, he soaked one leg of his uniform with gas. By 2:00 p.m., Abdul Rashid lured him into a lopsided conversation about kites. Yet it was a good day.
“You see, many people believe kites were invented in India, which is a logical supposition, of course, because of the intense nature of kite festivals and kite fighting there.” Prem marveled at the accuracy of Mohan and Gopal’s description of their coworker. They were idling near the pumps, pitching pebbles into a greasy puddle. A warm petrol-laden breeze passed, and Prem closed his eyes and tilted his head back to feel the sun on his face. As if this wasn’t gratifying enough, when he opened his eyes, he found that a wild-haired woman was undressing on Minerva the Psychic Reader’s lawn across the street.
“But in actuality, kites originated in China in the fifth century BC, where materials for making kites—silk and bamboo—were readily available.”
The woman, whom Prem decided must be Minerva, had stripped down to her undergarments or maybe a bathing suit. She was, as far as Prem could tell, not planning to remove any more clothing and preparing to lie in the sun. With great care, she spread a towel out on the grass and arranged herself on top of it, propping up under her chin some sort of collapsible board with aluminum on one side. By now, Mohan and Gopal were also transfixed, but Abdul Rashid persisted with his kites.
“Yet, it was in India that the fighter kite evolved. We are the ones who began to coat the line with crushed glass.”
Minerva put aside her reflector and rubbed her body with oil until it glistened. Passing cars began to slow down, and one honked. Mohan swallowed hard. If this was work, Prem thought, he could endure it for some time.
Gopal’s interest in Abdul Rashid’s seminar was briefly aroused by a tangentially related question: “If d-o spells ‘do’ and t-o spells ‘to,’ then why g-o doesn’t spell ‘goo?’”
Abdul Rashid continued, “And kites were used not just in play fighting. The Air Service Journal describes the military use of kites in trench warfare.” He went on to delineate the three uses of kites in World War I.
Minerva put her board aside and fully reclined on the towel. Her complexion seemed already two shades browner, and Prem couldn’t understand why she would do this to herself.
“Two: suspending illuminating devices over the field of combat—”
Then a most outstanding thing happened: Minerva flipped onto her stomach and unclasped her top.
“And three: raising photographic apparatus.”
There was a long silence as the three men watched Minerva. Abdul Rashid became engrossed in a book that had materialized out of nowhere. After some time it appeared that Minerva had fallen asleep, and Prem suspended his hope that she would suddenly stand up and face the Exxon. Gopal said, “That kite camera would be of great use today.”
In the next hour, the attendants periodically pumped gas and chatted. Upon learning that Prem was a Hindi movie aficionado, Abdul Rashid began a discourse on the evolution of gender roles in the films of Rajesh Khanna. Eventually the discussion reached the 1970 hit Kati Patang—the “kite that has been cut”—and Abdul Rashid began again to lecture about kites. After Minerva’s skin was sufficiently burned, she reclasped her top and stood by the side of the road with her board. The nonshiny side had a message scrawled in marker:
Communication with the Dead 2-for-1 Special
Such an unusual woman, Prem thought. She shook her sign and lifted it above her head at times. Prem wondered if the special meant one person could talk to two dead people, or if two people, for the price of one, could each talk to their own dead person. Could she really converse with the dead? Didn’t she notice that it wasn’t so warm? And why couldn’t this guy stop talking about kites?
Minerva held up her sign straight through rush hour, with no one turning into her driveway the whole time. When traffic slowed and the day began to dim, she folded it up and went inside. She had left her sun-burning accessories—the towel and oil—on the grass. Prem immediately identified this as a moment in which a certain boldness might be rewarded. “Should I, maybe, I don’t know, collect them and knock on her door?”
“And then what?” Mohan said. “She will invite you to her bed?”
“Maybe?” Prem said.
“I already tried that,” Abdul Rashid said. “No luck.”
Lying under his onions that night, Prem thought of Minerva. Her arms must have gotten tired holding that sign. And she never sat down. How hard she worked, standing nearly naked by the road all day to bring in customers for her talking-to-the-dead business.
In the month that followed, Prem was confounded by the joy that Exxon brought him. Despite the daily exhaustion, aching feet, and more than a few condescending customers, he took as many hours as they would give him and came to love his comfortable one-piece uniform. During the slow afternoon hours, huddled together in the Tiger Mart on the coldest days of winter, the attendants carried on a never-ending game of teen pati with a ragged deck of cards. Minerva stood by the side of the road on a regular basis with her sign, regrettably fully clothed, and one time Prem thought she maybe winked at him, but the other guys said there was no chance. It wasn’t long before it became widely known that Prem had no ambition beyond working at Exxon, for which he took some regular ribbing and which he didn’t mind. His peers gave him an assemblage of nicknames—Pumpwalla! Petrol!—rooted in his apparent contentment with pumping gas for a living. And when he held his first paycheck, an off-the-books check from the owner’s personal account—a paltry sum, peanuts, really—he was proud.
On the walk home in the evening after his thirty-ninth day of work, Prem decided he would stay a few more months, maybe even a year. He could let his family think the movie was being made, and then, when it never came out, he could say there was a problem with distribution. He would take this time to figure out a plan, something that would dazzle everyone, including himself. This was a chance to take a break, gain some life experience, regroup, breathe. When Prem walked in, Iqbal was at the stove flipping rotis. He used his tongs to pick up an aerogram from the counter and toss it to Prem. In Ashok Kumar’s inimitable handwriting was a one-sentence message:
I know there is no movie.
5
Prem spent the entirety of the following morning pacing Beena Joshi’s apartment, which was difficult to manage because of all the papad drying on the floor. Beena had been up at five grinding and kneading two pounds of urad dal, then flattening it into one hundred thin lentil pancakes which she would like to have dried in the sun. Instead, she laid them out on a series of overlapping blue floral bedsheets, where they would remain for two days. It was Saturday, so naturally, Cinema Cinema—the TV show of Hindi movie song clips, some brand new and bouncy, some black and white and evergreen, all entrancing their viewers like siren songs from their abandoned homeland—was turned on, as it was in every apartment in King’s Court in possession of a set. Today they were counting down the top ten songs involving the moon.
“Give it here.” Beena snatched the letter from Prem. “This is it? No nothing about you-must-come-back-or-you-are-in-the-big-trouble-mister?”
“It is understood from the tone,” Prem said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. He felt the way he had in the seventh standard when he was caught bunking class to see the below-average Dharam Karam. “So if you could, you know, tell me what to do, that would be helpful.”
Beena ran the blender.
“Should I go home? How can I go back with nothing to show!”
Beena ran a second blender.
“Or should I stay and disrespect my father?” It was all too much for him to decide, there among the papad. He was enjoying his carefree American lifestyle and wanted to enjoy it a bit more before he returned to India. But he wasn’t one to ignore his father.
Beena stopped the blenders and fished some green chutney out of one of them with a spoon. She tasted it and threw several palmfuls of salt into the mixture. Prem waited for her to offer some advice while a number from Pakeezah, a pillar of the tormented-courtesan genre, rang from the television, from the hallway, and through the ceiling. “How can I face my family when they know I lied?” Prem flopped down on the plastic couch and rested his head on an armrest. “This song should not be number five. Maybe eight or nine, but not five.”
