“Uh-oh,” Beena said, slapping her forehead with her palm. She walked across the room and turned off the song mid-mujra. “Listen, this type of loafing will not do. So, you don’t want to go back and work in the company.”
“No.”
“And you don’t want to do anything here.”
“I’m working in Exxon.”
“You are hanging around to pass time.”
“Ya, okay.”
“You cannot hide here forever.”
“I’m not hiding. Okay, yes, I am hiding. But not forever. Just until I am ready.”
Beena examined Prem’s face and decided he was sincere. “Okay then, let’s have chai.”
They sipped their tea and together composed a note on a US aerogram, which was a more vibrant shade of light blue than the Indian:
I am staying. Just a few more months. With your permission, I have decided. Okay, bye. Please send a tongue scraper.
After the letter was folded and sealed and the matter was settled and Prem spent twenty minutes in the throes of self-doubt and panic, they heard through the ceiling that “Dam Bhar Jo Udhar Munh Phere” was the number-one moon song, and they discussed for a while why this was right. In the subsequent months, Prem waited but did not get a response from his father. After a while, he stopped expecting one.
During that time, it came to Prem’s attention that King’s Court was crawling with eligible Indian women. They were everywhere: hanging laundry on balcony clotheslines, peeling potatoes in the courtyard, performing aarti at the Shree Ram temple, which used to be the First Baptist Church. At first, Prem was characteristically hesitant, but then they started to notice him back, waving him over to talk. He gained confidence with each encounter, developing a kind of awkwardly charming manner, which he learned to deploy at a moment’s notice. When he was ready to move beyond flirting and into actual real relationship territory, however, things did not go so well. First, he tried courting the obvious beauty of King’s Court, but she was holding out hope for a doctor. Next, he went after a somewhat nice-looking pharmacy student, which was all right for a few days before she declared he smelled too much of gasoline. He pursued a deep-voiced bank teller and a large divorcée, and although they were initially interested, both ultimately decided their parents would not approve so what was the point. Faced with the grim reality that no woman in King’s Court would attach herself to a seemingly penniless, ostensibly rootless gas-station attendant, Prem wondered if it might be time to go home. Increasingly, his time was spent with senior citizens, and he had been suffering from backaches, most likely due to his hopeless mattress. He was beginning to miss things he didn’t realize he liked, such as his Mysore Sandal soap and his Neem toothpaste because American toothpastes were far too tasty to be effective. He hadn’t seen any new movies in the five months since leaving India, and Exxon was losing its luster. Unable to decide what to do, he remained in Edison by default, biding his time, enjoying the American holiday season, hoping he would have a vocational epiphany and head home soon. But not just yet.
It was in those fancy-free days of 1987 that the course of his life took a sensational Hindi movie twist. On a dewy spring morning, he had a hankering for Gold Spot. Since he’d heard from Amarleen that India America Grocers carried this drink, he had not been able to shake a yearning tinged with nostalgia for his mother country’s orange soda. India America Grocers was owned by Hemant Engineer, a fleshy and short-even-for-an-Indian man, whose multiple chins cascading from his face underlined a permanent frown. His always-put-off expression combined with his impeccable grooming—his pressed shirts and shiny ties, his precisely coifed hair suffused with Brylcreem—lent him an air of importance. On the Saturday morning when Prem was about to walk in, Hemant was practicing an economic tactic that entailed exploiting the young men who loitered in his store.
“Nothing doing,” Hemant said, inserting a broom and dustpan into Gopal’s hands. Gopal began sweeping in front of the checkout counter next to Deepak, already on his knees wiping the floor with a rag.
“In one small corner, how about?” Gopal said. He was attempting for the third time that week to convince Hemant to carry some of his homemade sweets in the store. “Three, four types, just?” he said, sweeping the patch of floor just cleaned by Deepak. His deep desire to sell sweets in America came from his parents—good, modest civil servants with the Indian Railways—who saved their whole lives to send their only child to America where he could open a sweets shop and bring them over as well. No one had any idea this goal would take years to reach.
“Not here, donkey, not here!” said Hemant. “Sweep at the back!” He shooed Gopal in the direction of the packaged spices, then took a turn about his store, looking for tasks for the other two useless young men who were standing around, wasting their lives and distracting Deepak from his wiping. Worthless, all of them, he thought. It irked him that these boys who should have been the toppers, the best of the best, striving to elevate the name of India in this country, showed such little potential for growth. At least he could teach them what it meant to work hard. If any one of them ever made anything of himself, Hemant believed, he will think back to the work he did here for me and thank me for the lesson. “You there, donkey, the canned foods are covered in dust,” he said and threw a threadbare undershirt at the boy. “Other donkey, listen carefully.” Hemant lowered his voice. “Take this pen and change the expiry date on the achaar bottles from 1986 to 1988, got it? No messiness, very important job I am giving to you.”
“How about sandesh only!” Gopal yelled from the back. “How about laddu and cham-cham!”
Hemant smoothed his already smooth hair and made his way back to his place behind the counter, nodding hello along the way to a woman squeezing an eggplant in either hand. He was satisfied; things were getting done this morning. His store, wedged in though it was between Quicker Liquor and a sinister sort of hardware store, was a glorious addition to Oak Tree Road. He was, he felt, a man who had given the people what they wanted: Parle-G biscuits, canned lychees, unlimited low-priced cumin, all of it neatly crammed into three aisles of shelves, two fridges, and a freezer which he maintained at the highest possible temperature. No point wasting money on overfreezing.
Hemant was correct in his assessment of his store’s significance. The advent of an Indian grocery store in Edison was akin to the arrival of the light bulb in America’s homes; it lit up the neighborhood and no one could remember how they’d managed without it. In a dingy strip mall with a crumbling parking lot, India America Grocers was the first store in town to bank on the mushrooming Indian American population’s ardent desire for basmati rice, canned ghee, and a wide selection of bottled pickles. Because it was directly across the street from King’s Court, the store was wildly successful from the moment it opened its doors just one week and three days earlier.
It was barely 9:15 and a boisterous line had already formed at the counter. Two women were talking loudly about the cut-rate price of the coriander, and another woman was reprimanding her husband for God-knows-what, who cares, they both clutched baskets heaping with canned this and bottled that, the big-money items, to Hemant’s great delight. The morning carried on in this manner, music to his ears—the ringing and slamming of the cash register drawer and the constant tinkle of the bell above the door signaling the arrival of more customers, which was barely audible above the hubbub of people and the Hindi movie soundtrack but which Hemant heard every time. But all of this came to a grinding halt, in his head at least, when the door to the back room opened at the far end of the store and Leena Engineer emerged.
“I need you to sign here and here, and then also here,” she said, coming rapidly at him. In a phenomenal feat of vision, Hemant was at once aware of the movements of all four young men who were meant to be busy at their assigned tasks. These boys were not here for the pleasure of his company or the wisdom of his teachings; they were here to ogle his daughter, whom he therefore put in charge of accounts, at which she was exceptionally adroit and which kept her toiling away in the back room for extended periods of time. He was thus able to put off hiring help for the store while keeping the leering eyes of such rubbish boys away from her. But Hemant knew, as did the boys, that Leena had to come out some time.
“And I do not understand why we are ordering so little Hot Mix,” she said. She was behind the counter now with Hemant, who was simultaneously ringing up a bag of okra and giving Deepak, paused midwipe in aisle one, an admonishing look.
“Really, Papa, everyone likes Hot Mix,” Leena said, leaning her head on his shoulder and squeezing his arm. She turned to Hemant’s customer then: “You are liking it, aren’t you, Auntie?” There was no disagreeing with Leena Engineer and her aggressively effervescent air. It wasn’t that she was pushy or difficult; it was that she was so passionate and so vivacious that no one could help but be swept up in whatever she wanted them to be swept up in.
“Because of economics, you see,” Hemant whispered, “supply and demanding, you will be learning this when you go to the university—”
“Hot Mix?” the woman said. “Hot Mix, yes, I will have two bags.”
From the back, Gopal yelled: “I am liking Hot Mix!”
Leena was pleased. “So, I will be ordering three more cases for next month, Papa. You’re so sweet,” she said, pinching his cheek.
Hemant could contend with unreliable packaged food distributors, hammer out a rental agreement that was just barely profitable for his landlord, wrangle the lowest possible prices for fresh vegetables short of getting them for free, and build a life in a foreign land, but when faced with the charm and iron resolve of his only child, he was defenseless. What he could do in that moment, however, was scream at the boys. “Gopal! Two bags of Hot Mix! Who takes the whole day in sweeping?” He gave Leena the signatures she required so she could head back to the office and then yelled in the direction of aisle two: “Dustingwalla! There is still dust! I am seeing it from here!”
The bell on the door tinkled and Hemant was disgusted to find yet another young man come to gawk at Leena. This one seemed particularly brainless, in an Exxon jumpsuit and blue winter hat with a pompom though it was warm and April. Hemant’s exact thought was, No future, but tall, so he can stock the top shelves. His suspicions about the boy’s exceptional patheticness were confirmed when the others addressed him:
“Petrol pumpwalla!”
“Pumpwalla has come? Pumpwalla!”
And from the achaar bottles section: “Petrol is here!”
Thus Hemant’s first impression of Prem was an overwhelmingly negative one. He heard these pump-related nicknames and concluded that Prem was a joke among jokers, a buffoon in a gang of fools, at the bottom of the success barrel.
Hemant continued to ring up his customer while his daughter flitted down aisle three, pausing once to tidy the mango pulp cans on her way back to her accounting. He inspected Prem up and down. “Something you are looking for?”
Prem tugged at the pompom on his head and pulled off his hat. A fluffy mop of hair emerged, which he swatted from his eyes but which promptly fell back in an avalanche onto his face. It seemed to Hemant that he had not heard the question or, like an inexcusable barbarian, opted not to respond.
Hemant’s irritation ascended as the boy closed his eyes and took a deep breath of his store’s masala air. The thought crossed Hemant’s mind that he should find a way to charge for this nasal pleasure, but it quickly passed when Deepak, chewing noisily on something and still wiping the same spot of floor in aisle one, called to Gopal in what he thought was a discreet voice: “Hey, how can we make her come out again?”
“That’s it, OUT!” Hemant roared, slamming the cash drawer and startling a customer into dropping several bars of Ayurvedic soap. “Go, out, let’s go!” he yelled, his hands fervidly shooing, his angered expression making his jowls appear even more jowly. The startled boys, not knowing what to do with their various cleaning implements, hesitated before dropping everything and scrambling for the door. Several confused shoppers also began heading in that direction before Hemant stopped them (“No, no, not you, Mrs. Verma. Please stay, Mrs. Parekh … ”). To the boys he was about to add, “And do not come back,” but he remembered the large shipment that had to be unloaded from the truck the next day and sighed. “Come tomorrow,” he said.
A thunderous crash accompanied by the clatter of breaking glass erupted from the lentils section to Hemant’s great horror. He presumed one of the boys, in a fit of unjustified fury, must have toppled a shelf, but when he hurried to the scene he found the petrol pump-walla on his back, doused in Gold Spot. Lentils were strewn across the floor and orange soda mingled with glass everywhere. Most upsetting of all, the boy’s pompom hat lay in a pool of orange next to him. This did it for Hemant. “No-good, worthless bevakoof from Exxon with the pompom—who is cleaning this mess, who is paying? What is the answer for this? I will tell you the answer, the answer is YOU.”
The boy began uttering something about so sorry and all that, but Hemant was already on his way to fetch a rag and mop. “Where do these duffers come from, and why do they all find me?” he asked an assortment of customers along the way. “What is wrong with their brains?” And to the woman at the head of the line: “Give me two, three minutes, I will be just there, ginger is on sale, did you see?”
