Varsha agreed about the nose, and there was further discussion of the film’s excellent qualities. Prem wanted to mention his brief but wholly positive run-in with Amrish Puri, who played the soon-to-be legendary villain Mogambo, but couldn’t figure out how to work it in. The following weekend, they, minus Hemant and Sanjay, plus Abdul Rashid, watched it again. Prem thought of Leena, Leena thought of Prem, and Snigdha tried in earnest to suspend disbelief.
The third week after Prem’s entry into the Engineer household, a second paying guest was introduced. “This is Viren Bhai,” Hemant said. “He is chemical engineer.”
An exceedingly slight and diminutive man, fifty-something Viren Bhai had been in America for quite some time. He was well respected at his job in Merck’s Animal Health division for his contribution to the development of the first recombinant DNA vaccine against diarrhea in piglets, but his true passion was for ancient Vedantic teachings. He devoted himself utterly to understanding the principal Upanishads, particularly the Aitareya and Chandogya ones, and decided, as a result, to forgo marriage. As part of his ongoing austerity measures, he recently let go of his townhouse in favor of a mattress on Hemant’s floor. Mild-mannered but with a core of confidence, Viren Bhai was quiet and kept to himself. Prem would often wonder how a man could be so noiseless, yet so strong. Because he rarely socialized, leaving the house only for work, groceries, and to lead a Bhagavad Gita discussion group, he seemed always to be in the apartment, wearing some variation of the same dress shirt and slacks, even during his morning yoga routine, which he performed in the middle of the drawing room.
The morning after Viren Bhai moved in, Prem tried to talk to Leena while Hemant was out for his involuntary morning constitutional. Leena lolled on the swing, flipping through a pickles catalog, dog-earing the pages with the most popular kinds. The sun streamed in from the window behind her and through the swing’s carvings, creating patterns on her golden arms. Prem watched her from the couch opposite while Viren Bhai contorted himself on the floor between them.
“You like pickles?” Prem said, immediately regretting this choice.
Leena smiled; Viren Bhai threw his legs in the air for Sarvangasana.
“I just, I mean,” Prem said. What he really wanted to say was, I want to know everything you like so I can one day buy it all for you and devote my life to giving you the things you like, but he didn’t know if they could trust Viren Bhai to keep their secret. So he had to confine his talk to pickles. “I like mango kind. You like mango?”
Viren Bhai began his Ujjayi breathing then, which could get quite loud, so Prem and Leena stopped trying to talk to each other about pickles and joined him on the floor. He taught them how to use their thumbs and forefingers for alternate nostril breathing, to calm the mind and cleanse the energy, which quickly became a daily ritual. The summer went on like this, with ancient yogic breathing exercises, Prem trying to be alone with Leena, and Viren Bhai getting in the way. Though he was a nice man, pious and peaceful, and together they learned a lot from him that would soon come in handy, he was also their kabab mein haddi, the bone in their meat skewer, their third wheel. Prem wished he could take Leena out somewhere for a secret dinner, but he had no money for that and had to content himself with the fact that he saw her every day, even though it was with her father and a spiritual chemical engineer.
He dedicated himself for the rest of July to gathering all the essential facts about Leena. She had finished school in India before moving to Houston and hoped to attend Rutgers. Her dear mother, like his own, had suffered an untimely death, the discussion of which immediately boosted their bond by two levels. Like her father, she passionately partook of the second of India’s two national obsessions, the first being movies: cricket. She had amassed a vast knowledge of the finer points of the game—the importance of slip fielders being sure-handed, the need for India to pick up its run rate earlier in the innings, the line and length of the bowlers—and she ardently despised the Indian team’s principal rivals, Pakistan and Australia, though she conceded a grudging respect for the latter. Together, she and her father cherished their 1983 Thums Up bottle top inners collection featuring images of the Indian and West Indian participants of that year’s World Cup, along with their Kapil Dev flicker book, which they had earned by turning in a large number of inners and which they now considered their prize possession. In the absence of televised cricket matches, the thing she missed most about her original country, father and daughter contented themselves with reading recaps in India Abroad and admiring their collection, which was kept in the same closet as the gods, on a shelf just under Ganesha. In anyone else, Prem would have found such behavior strange, but in her it was endearing.
When she wasn’t talking to her father about cricket or painstakingly controlling his diet, Leena was busy ironing hair. Prem was astonished when he first witnessed her dragging the ironing board from her bedroom to the space between the drawing room and kitchen, plugging in the iron, laying one side of her face down, spreading out her hair, and then ironing it. Hemant noticed the alarm on Prem’s face. “Silkiness requires monumental effort,” he said. It turned out that Leena spent considerable time ironing the hair of other women as well. They had learned of the secret to her perfect coif and begged her to similarly ease the frizzy quality of their waist-length tresses. At night, if Leena had left her equipment out, Prem collected broken pieces of her hair from the board and put them in the side pocket of his bag. He did this only on days when she had no clients and straightened only her own hair, because why would he want anyone else’s hair?
It was when Leena was ironing Tun-Tun’s hair that Prem first learned of the Dotbusters. “They won’t rest until they kill us all,” Tun-Tun said, her cheek flat on the board. “You must have heard, Hemant Bhai, they want to murder all Indians in America?” This account was somewhat of an exaggeration of something that did not require exaggeration, Hemant thought. “Not quite what they wrote, but yes,” he said.
Prem went to Beena’s to get his facts straight.
“Oh, ya, no, those Dot-kids are terrible,” Beena said. She appeared to be simultaneously deep frying pakoras and chopping an alarming quantity of onions. “Where are their parents? They have been spitting on the Indians in Jersey City, smashing cars and houses and all, writing the graffiti on the businesses.”
“Didn’t they kill someone?” Prem said.
“Ya, and they killed someone,” Beena said, wiping onion tears with the back of her hand. She pointed to a jumble of newspapers on the coffee table, among which there was a piece about a scribbled letter that had appeared at the offices of the Jersey Journal, ugly and shocking in its hatred of Indian Americans and its stated intent to harm them. “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out,” it said. “If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu … I will hit him or her.” The day after the letter, Bharat Kanubhai Patel was beaten in his home with a metal pipe after his name had been picked out of a telephone book.
“Do you think they know ‘Joshi’ is Indian?” Beena said. “Could be something else, no? But for Patel, there was no chance,” she said, shaking her head.
“Are you not worried?” Prem said.
“Worried, no, but angry, yes. If we are such a weak race, why they are so jealous of us? And is this not a land of immigrants? Are their ancestors not from some other place? They are not Native Americans, are they? And doesn’t their religion teach not to hurt people? What will their god say? Where are their parents?” Beena turned her attention to the oven, which seemed to be emitting smoke.
On his walk home, Prem wondered what kind of person would sit down to write such a letter. Did he think about what paper to use or the color of the ink? Did he compose multiple drafts and show it to a colleague for editing? Regardless, it would be fantastic to see one of them cross paths with Beena, who would surely thrash them with her rolling pin.
That evening, Hemant came home and announced that Sanjay Sapra and he had organized a meeting for the next night so the residents of King’s Court could come together to formally discuss the racist incidents and come up with strategies to protect their community. The meeting would be held at Sanjay’s apartment, would they like to come?
“Most certainly,” Viren Bhai said from his one-legged inverted staff pose.
“Yes, of course, very important, I will be there,” Prem said, then immediately took it back upon catching the sharp, eyebrow-raised look Leena was directing at him: “No, nuh-uh, not tomorrow, no, sorry, can’t make it.”
“Working in the Exxon?” Hemant said. He was using a black marker to make signs with information about the meeting to hang up around the complex.
“That’s it, yes, working in the Exxon,” Prem said. “Cannot miss work!” He realized belatedly that he sounded unnecessarily upbeat about this news.
“Very good, very good, sticking with the job, staying strong,” Hemant said, nodding his head. “These good-for-nothings, they want to scare the Indians from the jobs. And then what? Are they going to do our jobs? Are they going to come here and order parval and karela for the store?” He continued on about how Indians were fleeing the state, and then something about Dotbuster identification cards found in a high school. Throughout Hemant’s oration, Prem thought of how he would have an hour, maybe two, depending on the level of fury and disorder, alone with Leena. They could talk about everything openly: Where did she see this going? How long would they hide from her father? Were they in love? Maybe he could even hold her hand. Did she want to? He hoped she would be okay with it.
The next day was the longest day ever at the gas station. No one had anything interesting to talk about, so Abdul Rashid expounded upon the history of boredom. Prem tried to play cards with Mohan and Gopal, but his head wasn’t in it, so then he threw pebbles at other pebbles for a while. He tried not to count the minutes until he could be with Leena. The hours dragged. Just when he felt like he couldn’t listen to another word about ennui and the creative potential of the unengaged mind, it occurred to him that he should secure his alibi for that evening. He turned to Abdul Rashid. “Hey, at the meeting tonight, if Hemant asks, say I am working a late shift, okay?”
“Why you’re asking Abdul Rashid when he is not even going to the meeting?” Mohan said.
“I am not going to the meeting?” Abdul Rashid said.
“You’re going to the meeting?” Gopal said.
“They are trying to bust the Hindus,” Mohan said. “There is no Hijabbusters.”
Abdul Rashid removed his glasses and rubbed the lenses with a handkerchief. “You think these Dotbusters know the difference between a Hindu Indian and a Muslim Indian? You think they will stop and say, ‘Sir, we know you are of Indian origin, but may we inquire about your religious affiliation?’ before they beat me with their metal pipes? I am going to the meeting,” he said. “And don’t worry, Prem. I will lie to the grocer for you so you can have the romance with his daughter.”
The pair had agreed to meet back at the apartment at 7:20, well after the start of the meeting. Hemant and Viren Bhai would be gone by then, and they could eat the dinner Leena had prepared earlier in the day. Walking down Oak Tree that evening, Prem relished the American summer, its luxurious, nonstifling warmth, the hiss of sprinklers over green grass. He breathed in deeply, trying to make the perfect air of that moment a permanent part of himself.
He entered Building 5 and reached the foot of the stairs and looked up. She was at the top, looking down with a funny smile. Her hair fell forward in two silky walls to frame her face, and her graceful arm was extended, her hand resting on the banister. She contained at once the radiance of a hundred movie heroines, and the hallway rang with the romantic songs of the fifties whose lyrics suddenly made beautiful sense.
“Flop plan,” she said.
“What?” Prem walked up the stairs, coming as close to her as ever. He angled his head toward hers and took a breath of her coconut hair before turning the corner and discovering a pile of shoes.
The meeting had apparently been moved to the Engineers’ apartment, and when Leena and Prem entered, the drawing room was crammed beyond capacity with people on the floor, on the couch, on mattresses, squeezed in on the swing which was perfectly still from the excessive weight, lounging on the dining table and kitchen counter, and perched on the windowsills, relegating poor Viren Bhai to a corner of the room, where he assumed the lotus posture.
That night Prem lay on his mattress across from Viren Bhai’s, reflecting on how, instead of speaking with Leena at last about their future together, he had listened to various loud people of the community opining on how to battle an association of bigoted thugs. Someone had suggested penning a response in the Jersey Journal, while others proposed a protest march, meetings with congresspeople, education in the schools, meetings with local law enforcement, meetings with lawyers about the lack of response from local law enforcement, hunger strikes, taking up arms, and even buying a missile. In the end, it was decided to adopt a combination of all of these minus the artillery, and leadership roles were assigned. Prem was proud to see his fellow countrymen unite to take action. He wished he could be as impassioned as they were, but in the end, all he could think of was her in the next room, which seemed so far away.
By morning, he had decided he needed to figure out a new strategy for seeing her alone. It occurred to him that she had done all the scheming thus far to get them together. He resolved to become a more active schemer. When Hemant was in the shower, Prem dared to whisper something to Leena in the kitchen, with the hope that Viren Bhai wouldn’t hear.
“Meet me behind the Dairy Queen at five,” he said, leaning in next to her at the open fridge.
“Wow,” Leena said, nearly toppling a spaghetti-sauce jar of coriander chutney. “Okay, ya, Dairy Queen, five.”
