“If you want to buy them I can give you the discount,” Sushila offered, with the sympathetic tone of voice he’d once heard her take with a puppy.
He stood up and handed her the box. “Like me,” he said, “they are not very useful.”
On his way out, he stopped by the manager, who again fluffed her hair for him. He took her hand and held it to his chest. “I know you belong to someone else,” he said, “but even so, from time to time, the thought of you will cross my mind.”
The manager tilted her head and sighed. Then a look of sudden recognition registered across her face. “Is that a line from Kabhi Kabhie?” she said.
Prem nodded and returned the pompom hat to his head, then exited the Shoe Town. For the remainder of that week, the matter of Sushila weighed upon him. He felt, again, the contradictory urges to no longer remain in Edison and to not return home. At the end of several alternately self-loathing and self-pitying days, Prem went in search of Gold Spot only to find himself instead on the floor covered in it and scolded by an unpleasant, albeit nicely put-together man.
As Hemant left to fetch cleaning supplies, the defining moment of Prem Kumar’s life occurred: The door to the back room opened, and the most beautiful head he had ever seen—on the big screen or off—peeped out.
Even as a lifelong lover of Hindi movies, Prem had never fully accepted the idea of falling in love at first glance. How really could Raj have loved Bobby and Dharam loved Rajkumari Pallavi immediately, without a word spoken between them? Surely it was a dangerous thing to devote oneself to someone based on appearance alone. But in that split second, he came to know that every Hindi movie, including Bobby and Dharam Veer, had been right. True love really could be so sudden.
His breath caught in his chest and he thought he might vomit. It was love-induced Hindi movie nausea, and he instantly diagnosed it as such. He became acutely aware of his Exxon jumpsuit and his Gold Spotted state but found himself paralyzed in the position he was in. In that frozen moment, he forgot about the bellicose dating landscape he had faced in America. He let go of the nice-looking pharmacy student, the recent divorcée, the deep-voiced bank teller, the slightly angry ice-cream shop manager, and even Sushila.
The woman had a full face punctuated by a heavy brow and puffy mouth. Her slightly crooked nose was dangerously close to belonging in the category of outsized but somehow fit her face perfectly. Her lush mane fell in waves past her shoulders. She bore no resemblance to any of the movie heroines he had spent his life dreaming about, yet she possessed a star quality, a decided unsideyness that provoked in him a tremor of excitement that would not end until his life did.
They stared at each other, he from a puddle of soda, she with eyes narrowed. Prem’s heart pounded in his chest. The bustle of the store—the customers, the cash register, the bell on the door—became muted, and the movie soundtrack was the only sound left for Prem as he looked at her. Suddenly, she was wearing a sky-blue sari and running toward him on a snowy mountaintop, the end of her skirt billowing behind her. And he, too, was running in a matching leisure suit. When they reached each other, they stopped short of embracing and instead sang a song. She circled shyly around him, and when he leaned in for a kiss, she turned her face and he settled for her cheek. Then her father threw a mop at him.
Prem did not see Leena again that day as he cleaned the whole of India America Grocers. She had slammed the door almost immediately upon seeing him sprawled on the floor. There was nothing that suggested to Prem that she was thinking about him as much as he was thinking about her. Furthermore, he had no reason to believe she would not reject him as others had before her. But on that clear spring evening, the stars dazzling in the sky, as he walked the third of a mile up Oak Tree Road to the gas station for his shift, he thought of Chori Chori and An Evening in Paris, Namak Halaal and Betaab, and the dozens of other films in which the heroine doesn’t initially but does eventually fall for the hero, and he was heartened by the possibility that so far things were going according to script.
6
On the bright April day after Prem spilled Gold Spot and saw Leena for the first time, Tun-Tun and Tony Gupta were having a party in their apartment for no reason except just because. A jovial couple happy to celebrate anything and spend time with friends, the Guptas were almost always laughing—hers a deep, throaty laugh, his a high-pitched giggle. Some thought the buxom and round Tun-Tun and lanky Tony an odd couple, but that was before they understood the couple was bonded by the love of a good time. If they had fewer than three parties to attend or throw on a given weekend, they considered it a failure. Tony would pick out the perfect earring and trim his very neat beard, Tun-Tun would yank her hair up into a teetering bun, and they would be off. Though not often found together at these parties, the pair was also never without each other.
“We are keeping a get-together for this Saturday. Come down,” they told everyone in Buildings 1–10 plus an assortment of people from 11–20. In preparation, four of the five young men of 3D vied for space in front of the bathroom mirror, elbowing and jockeying for position while the fifth took a hot shower.
Prem did and undid and redid the top few buttons of his white, slightly shiny shirt. He didn’t know for sure but spent the entire day hoping she would be there. His recent decision to hang out and essentially not worry about anything for a while was replaced by a new resolution to see the store owner’s daughter again and perhaps drink orange soda with her for the rest of their lives. He had learned that father and daughter had moved to Edison from Houston, where they had operated a convenience store for five years. It was unclear why they had uprooted themselves; it was rumored it had something to do with her mother, whom nobody seemed to know anything about. The daughter, who planned to apply to Rutgers next year, would continue to live at home to save money and help manage the business. Her name was Leena.
Prem was nearly on the verge of a decision about his buttons when he was struck, and simultaneously revolted, by the lengths to which men would go to attract the attention of a pretty girl, specifically in the realm of hair maintenance and removal. Would Leena really be swayed by the careful dishevelment of Mohan’s hair? Or the meticulously plucked expanse between Deepak’s eyebrows, which in truth was just one long eyebrow?
“Yuck, yaar, go outside and do that,” Mohan said to Lucky, at once acknowledging their brotherhood and friendship while also berating him. Lucky was at work tweezing his nose hairs one at a time. He was hopeful that he might attract a lady that night, whether it was Leena or someone else, because it had been too long since he was alone. In India, he had grown up happily and comfortably in an upper-middle-class family, but when his parents passed away in quick succession when he was just nineteen, his uncles refused to give him his share of the properties and businesses. A lawsuit ensued; he was too inexperienced and uncunning to get very far and abruptly lost everything. In America, he hoped to forget his greedy relatives and begin anew. For him, this meant finding a caring mate who could be his new family and help him bear the burden he’d been carrying all these years, someone whose shoulder he could finally rest his head upon. Unfortunately, he had not yet found this woman and in the process of looking had garnered a reputation as a lecherous sari-chaser.
“Who is doing what!” Deepak called from behind the curtain.
“You don’t worry what is happening out here,” Lucky said just as he ripped out a hair and a tear plopped down one cheek. “What are you doing in there?”
“Ya, man, how long is it taking you to shower?” Prem said. He said this not out of annoyance or amusement or any of the other reasons why five young men crammed in a bathroom might harass one another, but rather out of self-defense, out of a desire to deflect attention from himself, out of sheer better-him-than-me, because as repelled as Prem was by the sight of the tiny hairs littering the sink, he recognized that he was not faultless in this regard. Just an hour earlier, he had stood in the shower and made an impulsive move from which he feared there was no turning back. He had shaved his chest.
Prem was not a chest-shaving sort of guy, but as he stood under the shower, engulfed in steam, and looked down at his patch of curly, not-terribly-thick-but-still chest hair, he had the sinking realization that all of his roommates shared the same goal for that evening. And even if he succeeded in beating out the others and attracting Leena with his sideburns and shiny shirt, what hope did he have of holding her interest? Why would she run across a field into his open arms when she could run into Mohan’s or Gopal’s, or better yet, the embrace of someone who did not work at Exxon? Weighed down by pessimism, Prem continued to lather when an image from the 1985 knock-off sleeper hit Adventures of Tarzan—much discussed for its racy content and frequent wet sari sequences—appeared in his head, its titular hero bare-chested and glistening. In a split second of desperation and flickering hope, he applied razor to chest.
Mohan gave Gopal a shove that propelled him out of the bathroom. “Why do you have to be in front of the mirror to spray cologne, yaar?”
“What kind is that?” Iqbal called from his bedroom. “It is smelling like my foot!”
Amid the commotion over Gopal’s foul cologne, Prem tried to slip away from the bathroom.
“Petrol, wait,” Mohan said. “Something is looking different here.”
“Different? Nothing is different. Your mother is different,” Prem said, turning away from Mohan and bumping into Lucky, still at work on his nasal grooming.
“Easy, man!” Lucky said after his tweezers were shoved a little too far into his nose.
Mohan wiped away the steam on the mirror and peered into Prem’s reflected face. “Something is different … ”
“What is different!” Deepak called from behind the curtain.
An alarming feeling of inevitability washed over Prem. These guys, who had become his good friends, were vicious. If they detected something was amiss in the region of his collar and then discovered his hairless torso, there would be no end to the taunting. “Come on, yaar,” Prem said and smiled uneasily.
“No, no,” Mohan said, directly facing him now. “Something definitely is there … ”
Gopal, now returned to the bathroom, said, “Prem, yaar, you shaved your chest!”
What ensued was nothing short of a mauling. Mohan lunged at Prem’s neck while Lucky went for his waist. Prem twisted and writhed as he clutched the neck of his shirt. He was plunged into the drawing room and wrestled to the floor, where Mohan climbed on top of him while Gopal and Lucky grappled with his flailing arms. Even Deepak jumped out of the shower and was on the sidelines with a towel and somehow a slice of cold pizza, dripping and cheering. In a moment of singular clarity and overwhelming calm, Prem recalled a dozen or more times he had watched his big-screen heroes barehandedly overpower a gang of swarthy villains. He stopped struggling and his roommates, surprised and suspicious, paused as well. Prem gathered his strength and when he was ready, with an eruption of pent-up energy—dishoom!—he burst forth. When Amitabh Bachchan cocked his fingers in Sholay and uttered, “Dishoom,” he did not know he was launching a sound effect that would accompany all manner of movie combat: bullets, jabs, karate chops, uppercuts. But Prem’s dishoom accompanied nothing. Instead, his head fell back to the floor with a thump. Mohan ripped open Prem’s shirt, sending buttons skating across the floor in all directions and exposing his smooth chest.
Mohan shook his head. “Petrol, Petrol. You really were thinking this will improve your chances?”
Prem attempted in earnest to explain. “You know that hair at the top of the shirt, how it comes up?” But in the face of his roommates’ smirks and looks of amusement, he hung his head and conceded defeat. “Fine,” he said.
Mohan, Gopal, Deepak, and Lucky took turns passing comments in the vein of “Who do you think you are, Tarzan?” and “What kind of a skinny Tarzan are you?” then disbanded and resumed getting ready for the party.
Prem picked himself up from the floor for the second time in two days. “I am needing better friends,” he said, collecting his buttons from around the room.
* * *
When the five roommates, preened to perfection but still as a group smelling vaguely of gasoline, stepped outside to head to Tun-Tun and Tony’s party, the tilting streetlamps in the parking lot had already come on. It was a crescent-mooned night, clear and with a warm breeze, unusual for that time and place but harkening back to something familiar for the tenants of King’s Court. Prem, feeling rather hopeful, was humming the tune of a long-ago film song while Deepak kicked along a can of soda. Lucky pointed out Shanta Bhatt’s gigantic underwear fluttering on a balcony clothesline above them and they all had a pleasant laugh, as they always did when Shanta Bhatt’s gigantic underwear was above them.
“Why is this here even?” Mohan said when they arrived at Building 12. The defunct intercom buzzer next to the door hadn’t, to anyone’s knowledge, ever buzzed. Much of King’s Court similarly had not buzzed in years. Bald light bulbs had long since gone out in windowless halls, and thin white walls had faded to yellow. Banisters were rickety and wall-to-wall carpeting seldom reached from one wall to the other. Yet King’s Court had become an Ellis Island of sorts, a first stop, sheltering the tired and poor masses from across the ocean yearning to breathe free and sleep on a mattress in the drawing room of a one-bedroom apartment with eight other people for sixty-seven dollars a month.
