He was there with the gang to celebrate Deepak’s twenty-fifth birthday, for which he wanted to try a margarita. The others were surprised to learn that Deepak had never before had one, but then, he had always been a vague sort of character. No one really knew anything about him—where he was from in India, what shape his immigration story took—and though they liked him and guessed he was probably just a regular guy, they also agreed they wouldn’t be surprised if he had murdered a few people.
The waiting area of Chi-Chi’s was packed with Indians like the Howrah Junction Railway Station at rush hour, so they decided to wait out front. Car after car pulled up and let out a bevy of people who put their names down on the list and came back out to wait. It was a perfect evening for standing outside in a parking lot along US Route 1, warm but punctuated by a summer breeze, and the group passed the time easily by teasing Gopal about his hairline. Prem was relieved no one had asked him why he’d moved in with Beena Joshi instead of back in with them at the Singhs’.
Mohan spit something into a bush and turned to Prem. “Yaar, why did you move to Beena Joshi’s instead of back with us?”
“It didn’t work with Leena, so now you are trying for an older woman?” Deepak inquired.
“Ya, that is what happened,” Prem responded.
“Is she as good in the bedroom as she is in the kitchen?” Lucky said.
“Does she roll you like a roti?”
“Does she fry you like a pakora?”
“Does she cook you with onions and garlic and then add turmeric and garam masala?” Deepak said.
“We are losing focus,” Mohan said.
“Will someone share a Tampico with me?” Gopal said. “Why American restaurants give so much of food?”
Just then, Leena emerged from a Pontiac with Falguni, Snigdha, Varsha, and four guys from Brighton Village apartments. It was unclear how they had all fit into one car; Prem did not want to think about it. He hung back, grabbed onto a high wooden beam in the architecture, and obscured his face with his arm as she and her friends came by and chatted for a minute with his group. He barely looked up, even when the conversation turned to movies, but as they were walking away, he couldn’t resist. He raised his gaze; she was looking at him too, just for a second, and then she stepped into Chi-Chi’s.
Prem wanted to throw up. The sight of her surrounded by those lecherous Brighton Villagers, though they were not as awful as her doctor fiancé, was too much for him. He felt he was suffocating. He began taking slow, deep breaths but had to stop and head inside when the hostess called for “Indian Studs, party of five,” which was his group. Leena was not seated in the same room, but he thought he caught a glimpse of her behind a plastic cactus on his way to the bathroom. He tried to conceal himself behind an oversized sombrero in order to get a closer look at what was going on at her table, but soon realized it wasn’t her and that he was just a ridiculous, sad figure lurking behind a very large hat. That night he had five margaritas—more even than Deepak—and ended up vomiting after all. In the morning, the only thing he could recall was that they had spent a lot of time arguing about how the fried ice cream was made.
The next day, he walked to Drug Fair and bought a ledger, in which he wrote the date and three questions:
1.Did you see Tezaab?
2.Isn’t the Chi-Chi’s spicy salsa and chips quite good?
3.How do you think the fried ice cream is made?
He couldn’t bear the thought of all the lost conversations that Leena and he might have had, so he began keeping a log of the questions he would ask her if ever he had the chance again. He genuinely wanted to know her answers and sometimes tried to imagine what her opinions might be on certain subjects, but this could not replace his longing for the real thing. Beena came home as he was writing in the ledger at her kitchen table that first day.
“I know a question you can put. Why don’t you ask if she has heard the rumors about us?” she said.
Prem put his pen down. “So people are ribbing you too?”
“Well, more they are congratulating me,” she said, ruffling his hair. Then, with discernible regret she said, “Still, you probably should find a new place to stay.”
Prem agreed. It would take just one day for rumors to spread through the entire apartment complex and two for them to spread to the neighboring complexes as well. This in itself did not bother him, but he did not want to damage Beena’s reputation—though, actually, he seemed to be bolstering it—and he certainly did not want Leena to start thinking something untoward was going on. So he packed up his few things—his toothbrush, his Exxon jumpsuit, his ball of Leena’s hair—leaving behind the VCR as a thank-you, and walked back to Building 3.
“Of course you can live with me again!” Amarleen said, throwing her arms around him.
“What, Beena Auntie broke it off with you?” Mohan asked.
“Maybe she was too much auntie for you to handle,” Lucky said.
“Can you pay?” Iqbal said.
16
The Singhs’ apartment was, in all likelihood, the best place for Prem to mend his broken life, as he could not possibly fall into a lonely abyss if he was never alone. There were the half-dozen people who lived there, of course, plus the friends who came over as they did in India, unannounced and all the time. King’s Court was bursting at its rickety seams with immigrants, with one hundred percent of its inhabitants now from the subcontinent—one hundred and fifty if one took into account illegal paying guests and newly arrived relatives who stopped there as a first port of call before continuing on their immigration journeys. Everyone knew everyone, so addresses became relative; if anyone inquired after the location of the Singhs’ apartment, they would be told, “The apartment below the tone-deaf singing chemist, Kailash Mistry, and across from the anesthesiologist janitor, Vilayat Hussain,” and if anyone inquired after the Voras’ apartment, they would be told, “Below the apartment of the grocery owner Hemant Engineer and his engaged but unmarried daughter, Leena,” though a few years would pass before she was referred to as such. Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Marathi, English, and Tamil were the principal languages represented there, with other Indian languages peppered in. With their tiffin picnics and Diwali fireworks, their ubiquitous blue aerograms and pirated videos, King’s Court’s tightly packed community boldly withstood the ravages of Westernization, which was just what Prem needed after losing everything.
On a sweltering August afternoon, the windows of 3D were thrown wide open and the boys were splayed out on their mattresses, dousing themselves with water periodically to keep cool while watching a movie they had already seen an obscene number of times. The film’s lead actress, Mandakini, was singing in a wet, clinging white sari, wearing no undergarments, and frolicking rather too close to a waterfall. It was the only thing that could effectively distract them from the heat and Prem from his situation.
“Again?” Amarleen said when Iqbal and she came home from their bimonthly trip to Jackson Heights, Queens, that corner of New York which had essentially transformed itself into Delhi, drawing Indian Americans from miles around to purchase three pounds of assorted sweets followed by a visit to Sam & Raj to satisfy their discount-electronics needs. “You have watched this song 700 times, isn’t it?”
“Never enough,” Lucky said.
“It is timeless,” Deepak said.
Iqbal plunked himself down on Prem’s sopping mattress. “Is this sweat from your body?” he said, jumping up but immediately sitting back down. “No, it is no problem, it is good, fine, very good.”
Everyone had been painfully nice to Prem since Leena’s engagement, which made him feel doubly pathetic. The gas-station guys covered some of his shifts, and Shanta Bhatt began throwing his laundry in with hers. Even Leena’s friends stopped by with cassettes and Parle-G biscuits. Prem deduced that his roommates had conspired to make sure he was never left alone by putting into place a schedule of sorts, with timeslots available from midmorning into the late-night hours. He felt he was being involuntarily babysat, which, in the end, wasn’t such a bad thing.
“Okay, duffers, I need potatoes,” Amarleen said. “Who is going to the store for potatoes for me?”
“I can go,” Prem said.
Lucky quickly jumped in. “No, man, you stay, relax, I will go,” he said.
“Fantastic,” Amarleen said. “Next, bathroom is disgusting. I am not a servant here. Who is cleaning it?”
“I will clean it,” Prem said.
“No, man,” Lucky said. “Gopal can do it.”
