When he returned, the ridiculous boy was still lying on his back ridiculously, a dazed expression on his face. It occurred to Hemant that the boy may have suffered some sort of head injury and could threaten to sue. Then it occurred to him that the boy probably did not know the meaning of “sue.” Still, someone could put the idea in his broken head, and then what would happen? Better to be nice, Hemant conceded. “Let me tell you what,” he said to Prem. “Clean this mess and go. No payment necessary.” He flung the mop and rag at him, but then thought this did not convey the desired tone, so he forced an unnatural and somewhat frightening smile onto his face. “First-rate deal, no?” he said. In this way, Hemant got Prem to clean up every sticky orange drop and, while he was at it, the entire store. Prem spent much of the rest of the day mopping and scrubbing in places where no Gold Spot could possibly have reached: on the tops of the highest shelves, inside the cabinets, both sides of the front door, inside the refrigerators. He gave the checkout counter a thorough cleaning and then, under Hemant’s careful supervision, polished the cash register. The only part of the store untouched by Prem’s hand was the back office.
By five o’clock, Hemant had to admit the boy was an above-average cleaner. He walked over to where Prem was straightening the shelf of divine supplies—ghee, sandalwood powder, cotton wicks, and whatnot. “You can go,” he said, patting him on the back and taking a box of camphor from his hand. But he was sorry to see the boy go, with his gas station attendant’s window-wiping expertise and his no-nonsense approach to mopping. Then Hemant had what he thought at the time was a light-bulb moment, a brilliant flash of genius, though in later years he would consider it to be the principal mistake of his life. “Your lucky day, Pumpy,” he said. “Come four times this week, four times next week, and your debt will be erased, just like that. Free education I am giving you, my boy!”
Dripping with sweat and orange soda, his sleeves sopping wet from cleaning the inside of the horizontal freezer, Prem agreed to the plan wholeheartedly. Hemant rubbed his palm against the grain of his evening stubble. He wasn’t certain, but he thought the boy might have glanced at the door to the back office before agreeing to his offer. But in the end Hemant chose to ignore this. Instead, he congratulated himself for another great coup in the realm of procuring free labor and thought of Prem’s considerable height and the bags of atta he could easily place on the top shelves.
* * *
It had been five months since Prem held the long, skinny, somewhat grimy neck of a Gold Spot bottle in his hand. At the end of a disheartening week, he entered India America Grocers in search of this drink and was greeted by a whiff of India and an assortment of his roommates and gas-station colleagues curiously employed at various modes of cleaning.
Prem lingered at the door because conversations with these friends of his could be taxing, and he felt taxed enough. He held his pompom hat and took a moment to compose himself near a “we stock large variety rices” sign. A strong smell of cardamom came from someplace close, and “I am a Disco Dancer,” the super hit song from the super hit film Disco Dancer of five years prior, was in the air. A tower of Frooti boxed mango drink rose up in a far corner, and at the back there appeared to be a section of Hot Mix. It was not a bad place to spend a little time. A miniature, more orderly India, Prem thought, but he didn’t get how cleaning fitted into the agenda.
The fridge of beverages was located next to Lucky, who appeared to be wiping bottles of Hajmola Digestive Tablets with a man’s undershirt. Prem was vaguely curious about the motivation behind this choice of pastime, but he also just wanted to find his drink.
“Not now, Pumpwalla,” Lucky said, though Prem was quite sure he hadn’t said anything.
“Just getting a Gold Spot and going,” he said. He plunged his arm into a horizontal fridge that seemed to contain only Limcas and Thums Ups.
“Because I am busy,” Lucky said, then looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice, “with a girl.”
“Oh,” Prem said, scanning the aisle in search of any girls, “because it looked like you were busy cleaning Hajmola with an undershirt.”
Lucky stopped his wiping. From his unauthoritative squatted position he looked up at Prem gravely and said: “There is much you can learn from me, man, about the romance.” This, Prem knew, was something Lucky believed absolutely. Just last week, he came across Lucky standing on the lawn of Building 19, yelling Urdu poetry up to the balcony of an irate seamstress. Later, after Prem would come to know him well, Lucky would regularly reference this as a fine example of his stately courtship style. “Eshtyle, man,” he would say, “you are needing eshtyle for impressing the ladies, Pumpwalla!” He would also, Prem noticed, regularly omit the end of that story, the part when the seamstress dumped a pot of rice on his head. Generally, whenever Lucky stood beneath a balcony, a pot of something was flung upon him. Still, he gelled his hair vigorously and donned his signature white sunglasses, applied too much cologne, and carried on entreating women with his overly aggressive poetry. By the end of his first month in America, Prem had heard, Lucky had already been thus rejected by more than a dozen of King’s Court’s maidens, including a Neeta, a Geeta, a Sita, two Ritas, and a Praneeta. How he counted himself a ladies’ man, Prem would never understand.
“So where is she?” From where he stood, elbow deep in the wrong sodas, Prem could see only a very frail woman in a sari sniffing a cabbage.
“Shhhhh,” Lucky said, waving the undershirt at him. “He will hear you.”
“Who will hear what?” Prem said. Just then, a distinctly movie-villain snarl commanded everyone out of the store and widespread pandemonium ensued. “What is happening?” Prem asked, at the same time triumphantly yanking a Gold Spot from the fridge. But in the midst of his moment of glory, the only remotely glorious moment he’d had that week, a panicked Lucky shoved him, causing him to lose his footing and fall spectacularly to the floor.
On his back in a pool of his favorite drink, amongst an alarming number of lentils packages, he propped himself up on his sopping elbows. “Man,” he said, flicking some glass from his pant leg, “that was the last one.” Lucky loomed above, still in a panic but offering Prem a hand, while at the end of the aisle a sizable gawking crowd gathered. “I am okay, no need for alarm,” Prem called out, though no one was showing any sign of alarm. One of them, a disturbingly old man, snickered then recommenced investigating a bag of onions. Suddenly, the store’s owner barreled toward them from the head of the aisle. Lucky dropped Prem’s hand, causing him to fall back with a thud into the orange puddle.
“Sorry, Pumpwalla. Okay, see you, bye.” With that, Prem’s friend stepped over him and ran for the door. Prem wrung orange soda from the sleeve of his only Exxon jumpsuit. “I am needing better friends,” he muttered.
When Hemant reached him, Prem attempted ardently to apologize for the accident. “Uncle, so sorry, let me—” But he didn’t get very far with this, as the thickset, incongruously dapper man launched into his own, considerably more wrathful speech. Prem gave up and gathered the packages of lentils into a soggy pile.
The week was not going well. Five days earlier, he had donned his Exxon jumpsuit and with an air of mild enthusiasm headed up Oak Tree Road to Shoe Town, where Sushila Mukherjee, his latest love interest, was a saleswoman.
The manager of Shoe Town, a heavy-set Punjabi woman with very long earlobes, fluffed up her hair when he walked in. “Oh, my love of my life,” she said with a flourish of dramatic Hindi movie anguish which Prem quite enjoyed. “Just marry me already so I do not have to kill myself.” He had been in three times that week to try on a pair of fairly impractical loafers, and she had conveyed a similar sentiment each time.
He pulled off his hat and grinned a half grin that never worked on anyone in his age range, but which older ladies seemed to welcome. “Auntie,” he said, resting his arms up on the counter before her, “you know I would marry you today, but what would Uncle say?”
“He would not notice.”
When Sushila emerged from the stockroom, she looked less like the woman of his dreams and more like a woman he might pass on a footpath without noticing. She wore a brown blouse with brown slacks, and he thought, but wasn’t certain, that maybe her eyebrows had connected to each other in the past few days. Nonetheless, he remained undeterred, knowing that in other, more flattering, less fluorescent lighting, she was pretty. And she seemed generally to be a good person who was particularly kind to dogs and the elderly.
“I will try those same shoes,” Prem said to the manager, who was holding his hand on the counter now.
“Sushila, those same loafers.” The manager squeezed his hand. “Size eleven.”
Prem found a bench on the other end of the store and sat down and took off his shoes. He looked up at the shelves of overpriced footwear and wondered if someday he would marry Sushila, and if so, whether she would continue to work at Shoe Town so they could enjoy many years of discounted shoes. He hadn’t quite worked out whether they would eventually return to India or remain in America forever; nonetheless, he was envisioning the variety of sneakers he might own when Sushila reappeared and thrust a shoebox at him.
“I told you that do not come to my work. I am busy.” Instead of kneeling down and helping him as she had done on his prior visits, she remained standing.
Prem looked to his left then his right. “But there are no customers,” he said.
“Look,” Sushila said, “you are nice. Also, you have a good height. But this is not enough. Look at Roopesh, he just got the promotion in the bank. And Urmila’s friend Kishan, he is studying engineering in the night. The thing which I am trying to tell you is,” she said, plopping down next to him on the bench, a familiar, leathery smell emanating from her skin, “you are a petrol pumpwalla only.”
A petrol pumpwalla only. She was a salesperson in the Shoe Town. Prem opened the box and bent over to put on the loafers. Reluctant to face Sushila, he lingered at his feet for as long as he could and considered what had transpired before coming back up. He thought he understood but wanted to leave no room for misapprehension of what she was saying. “What are you saying?”
“We are finished.”
Prem had heard the same story many times since coming to America: you are lazy, you have no future, you only talk about movies, you smell like gas. Amitabh never seemed to have this problem in any of his films, nor Rajesh Khanna, nor any of the Kapoors. He had spent many adolescent hours studying their demeanors, memorizing their suave dialogues, yet the Indian women of America were immune to these charms. There seemed to be widespread agreement that he was handsome, yet there was also agreement that he was good-for-nothing. After rejection upon rejection, Prem began seriously to worry that he might be a mere sidey in the motion picture of life. As such, he would forever be relegated to flanking the more virile and important hero, dancing unattractively alongside him and contributing inane dialogue that served only to elevate him, never breaking free of his sidey-ness and taking center stage. He turned to face Sushila, who was extracting something from beneath a fingernail. “So why did you wait so long?” he said. “From the beginning you knew I work in Exxon.”
Sushila sprang up from the bench and stood in front of him, her arms crossed in a manner that Prem thought more stern than the situation required. “I was thinking that maybe you were having a plan.”
“Plan for what?”
“Doing some better thing.”
He had never noticed Sushila’s large hands before, but now they were all he could think about as she laid out the usual reasons why he was not suitable: his lack of ambition, his lack of a bedroom, his limited funds. When she was done, she put her large hands on her hips, annoyed at having to explain the obvious. But then, her eyes brightened as something seemed suddenly to occur to her.
“Do you think you maybe will buy the Exxon one day?” she said.
“Uh, no?”
“Then ya, we are finished.”
Prem removed the loafers and placed them back in the box. He stuffed the balled-up tissue paper back into each one and covered them with the lid.
