“Are your parents living?”
“You look nice in the gas jumpsuit.”
The barrage of comments and questions, the uncomfortable crowding, the inordinate amount of laughter at his not-very-funny jokes—none of it seemed odd to Prem because he wasn’t really there. His thoughts were still with Leena. Lucky and Gopal, however, were paying close attention to the strange turn of events.
“What is happening?” Gopal said.
“I am shaving my chest tomorrow,” Lucky said.
“No, I got it!” Gopal said. “They are not interested in him.”
“No?”
“No. They are interested in why Leena Engineer was interested in him.”
And suddenly it seemed so obvious. The women weren’t just talking to Prem, they were reevaluating him, taking a second look, as if he were a pair of shoes they had previously rejected as impractical. Lucky and Gopal continued to observe. Aparna was peppering Prem with questions while Neha and Latha from 19C seemed to be discussing his hair. Roopa played with the gold chain at her neck as she considered Prem’s responses. When Neeta ran her hand down Prem’s arm, Lucky sprang to life. “You know what we should do? We should talk to Leena Engineer sometime in front of everyone.”
“Then the girls will talk to us?”
“Exactly.”
Thus, when Leena returned to the party a half hour later, she was accosted by Lucky and Gopal, who took it as some sort of cosmic sign that she had reappeared. Gopal insisted that she read his palm, and Lucky talked a lot about saris. All three kept looking in the direction of Prem and the women. It wasn’t long before everyone noticed everyone else, and Prem became jealous of his two roommates and Leena became jealous of the throng of women and Lucky and Gopal became jealous of Prem while Neha and Latha continued to discuss Prem’s hair.
Although many people were enmeshed in the scene, Prem and Leena saw only each other. He shrugged and half-smiled, as if saying, I don’t know what all these women are doing here but I wish they would go away. Leena giggled, and they held each other’s gaze for a very long time.
Though Leena and Prem didn’t speak again that evening—on account of Amarleen hating Cats and insisting they leave during the intermission—Prem was exuberant. He had confirmed Leena’s interest in his existence. As he cleaned up with the others that evening, throwing out half-empty plastic cups, sweeping eyebrow hairs under the fridge, he marveled at the great luck written in his hands.
The next day, when he reported for duty at the grocery store, he wanted to call her name to see if she was there. But that sort of thing—screaming a girl’s name, or even quietly saying it, right in front of her father—just wasn’t done in their corner of New Jersey. He kept his head down and worked diligently all afternoon, dusting the Cadbury chocolate bars, rearranging the salty snacks, always hoping she’d appear. At the end of the day, his patience was rewarded. The door to the back room opened, just barely, and Leena’s pretty hand passed him a note.
8
The note bore the refrain of a song from Mili, which she had watched in the theater when she was seven. She had liked the film and forever after liked its star, Jaya Bachchan née Bhadhuri, who many years later in an interview would describe her first impression of her husband, Amitabh. “He was very thin and his face was full of his eyes,” Jaya would say. Leena would read this interview with astonishment at the similarity of their experiences. She would recall her first glimpses of Prem and how skinny and wide-eyed he was and how she’d liked him right away.
The morning after the party, Leena woke up at five and prepared the usual breakfast for her father: masala mung sprouts, two pieces of dry toast, and chai with no sugar, all of which he hated. Then she pushed him out the door to walk for at least twenty minutes at a rigorous pace while she prepared dal and rice for their lunch. When he returned and she was ready, they walked across the street together to their store, where she spent half her time looking after their accounts and the other half looking after Hemant.
At 10:00 a.m., the usual band of boys came in and she sequestered herself in back. She couldn’t understand what it was they expected her to do. Would she look them over, choose one, and run into his arms? And even if she were the kind of girl to do such a thing, she wouldn’t choose any of them. They were disrespectful to her father, thinking they were fooling him with their flattery and their tepid cleaning. The only reason she hadn’t run them out of the store was that her father liked having them there. She heard him give them protracted lectures on self-discipline and the marvelous ethos of the hardworking local inventor Thomas Edison, and she knew in those moments her father was the erudite professor he had once dreamed of becoming.
At noon, Prem came in for his shift. Her father had him heaving heavy things onto high places. She watched him through a small hole she had discovered in the wall the previous week. He really was quite lanky. She liked the way his hair flopped about. And when the others—those duffers!—began to say things like “Hemant Engineer—Engineer of what? Groceries?” and “Why his hair looks like that?” and Prem didn’t chime in but instead said, “I don’t know, I think we maybe can learn some things from him,” she wanted, it turned out, to run into his arms. At the end of the day she slipped him a scrap of paper with lyrics that ended on N.
Prem couldn’t decide whether to respond with “Nakhrewali” or “Neela Aasman So Gaya.” He sat on his mattress that evening, quietly trying to make the best choice while Amarleen clipped his toenails.
“Really, there is no need,” he said, wrenching his foot from her grasp.
“There is need,” Amarleen replied. “Now be still.”
Her brother had stopped by again and was chewing on the end of a long stalk of sugar cane he had found in a Jamaican grocery store in the city. “Sister, get hold of yourself!” he said. Then shaking his head: “People will do the smelliest things just to come close to someone.”
Prem didn’t mind. It couldn’t hurt to be well groomed, he thought, and then he wondered if his smooth chest had contributed to Leena’s interest. If not the chest, then what? His awkward gyrating performance? His fluffy hair? And didn’t she mind he worked at Exxon? What was the best response to her N, and where would he find paper and a pen, and how would he get the paper to her? All he wanted in life at that moment was to talk to her again, but he couldn’t even find paper.
“Get up from there, woman!” Iqbal said from his place at the stove.
As Amarleen began to massage his calf, Prem decided to go with “Neela Aasman” for its more romantic, less offensive quality. The next morning, he went to Beena, who provided pen and paper and encouragement as well as an offer to deliver the note herself, at a moment when Hemant was looking the other way. It was unbearable to wait the entire day to learn whether the exchange had gone smoothly. But Beena returned in the evening with good news and a note from Leena ending in R. For several days, the antakshari continued like this, with Prem unable to think about anything other than Leena and the song she had just sent and what song he would send back. After a few exchanges, Beena removed herself from the equation to give them some privacy, though she was loathe to do so. She established a spot under a particular gallon container of canola oil for the two to leave their scraps going forward. The frequency increased to two, three, even four exchanges a day, with Prem’s longing for the oily bits of paper—the shelf had never fully recovered from a prior Wesson leak—growing along with his profound desire to be in her presence again.
He kept every note in a cleaned-out mango pickle bottle that he hid in his bag. When they reached 121 total, he sat in the grass in front of the notoriously subdued Building 15 and read through them all. He searched for a pattern in her choices, a secret message she was trying to convey. When she wrote “babuji dheere chalna, pyar mein zara sambhalna,” was she telling him to slow down and be careful? And when she responded to his T with “tere mere milan ki yeh raina,” was she suggesting they have a night together? In the end, after reading the notes several dozen times, he decided there was no mystery in the words. But he also found that the accumulation of her side of their conversation was a pile of love songs; nothing about friendship, nothing about society or country or God, just romance and longing, rain-drenched desire, and moonlit avowals—a documentation of their sudden love, forever binding her in his heart with the pungent aroma of Priya brand pickle.
That same night, Prem wandered through Tun-Tun’s open door hoping Leena might be there, but instead found twenty-one women wrapping peda in colored cellophane for an engagement party the next day. He sat on the floor and helped them pack the sweets, and when she never showed up, he returned to his apartment of men with the thought that he was cursed by the principal paradox of his country: an obsession with big-screen love stories matched only by the inordinate amount of time spent arranging marriages and forbidding dating. How could practically every Hindi movie ever made involve the subject of love when love was wholly prohibited by parents across the country and throughout the diaspora? How could the very people who had cried over the doomed affair between Prince Salim and the courtesan Anarkali in Mughal-e-Azam ask their daughters to wait until they were twenty-four to talk to any nonrelative of the opposite sex? It was virtually impossible to speak with Leena in person for her father was always watching. And in the rare moment he wasn’t, others were there to watch for him, ready to start a rumor with the meagerest of pretexts. With the previous women Prem had tried to date, it was easier because they had emigrated without parents, but Leena was young—just nineteen—and had arrived with a traditional father who, though he was wrapped three times around her finger, was protective and watchful of her.
Prem kept a kind of vigil for Leena that night, vowing to remain awake until he conceived a way forward. At 3:00 a.m., Iqbal, who had risen for his nightly toilet ritual, spotted a scribbled note on the floor beside the sleeping Prem: “mere sapnon ki rani kab aayegi tu?” He was initially alarmed by this line—roughly “Queen of my dreams, when will you come?” from Aradhana (1969)—because he thought it was certain evidence of an illicit affair between his paying guest and his wife. But then he thought of Amarleen’s brash manner and the frightening girth of her long braid and relaxed.
Prem planned to leave this in their canola-oil spot, but this time he would not rely on the lyrics alone. He added a question underneath, asking her to meet him on Tuesday at four behind the Dairy Queen. It was bold, he knew. Prem, not one for such moves, walked back and forth from the apartments to the store five times before going in for his final day of working to repay his lentil and Gold Spot debt to Hemant. Lucky and Gopal were already there, along with a hodgepodge of others from around King’s Court. Together, they were trying to move a tall freezer stocked with packaged okra, packaged spinach, packaged peas, and several unmistakable pink tubs of Reena’s Kesar Pista Ice Cream.
“More left,” Hemant said, flicking his hand in a leftward direction. “Lefter!” He would have moved the fridge on his own, but he fancied himself an elderly and wise man who should have stopped carrying fridges long ago. Everyone looked up as a strange shuffling sound, like the skitter of carrom pieces, came from the ceiling. They stayed that way for a long time, craning their necks and listening, some of them still holding the fridge. The bell on the door tinkled and Prem entered.
“Perfect!” Hemant said, grinning wildly and marveling at the wonder of his good fortune. “There is a squirrel in the ceiling. Bring the ladder.”
“Me?” Prem said, gaping widely and wondering at the marvel of his bad fortune. “You want me to bring the squirrel out of the ceiling?” He stared at Hemant, but then remembered whose father he was. “Yes, I will bring the squirrel out of the ceiling.”
Prem had no idea how to do this but marched anyway up the ladder, the note heavy in his pocket. The others had gathered around and Hemant had begun one of his lectures. With each rung, Prem felt a mounting pressure. The girl, the note, the father, the squirrel—it was all too much. He popped up a ceiling panel and stuck his head in.
“You see, boys,” Hemant continued, “you must work harder than you think is possible.”
“I don’t see anything,” Prem called down.
“Keep looking,” Hemant said. Then to the others, “You must get your hands dirty. You must bargain hard with suppliers. And you must wait as long as possible to turn heat on in the winters.”
The squirrel appeared and Prem nearly fell backward. “I see it,” he said. “Back in one corner.” Hemant handed Lucky a can of apple gourd and gestured for him to pass it up the ladder to Prem. “You want me to feed the squirrel some tinda?” Prem called down.
“No, no, Pumper, just throw the can on it,” Hemant called up. “Injure it, then drag it out.”
