Most days, she worked long hours as a manager at a Speedy Mart, a thankless job, she felt, but one at which she excelled. “A bunch of idiots, teenagers mostly, work with me there and don’t know how to do anything. And now also I have to hear ‘Thank you, come again!’ hundred times in a day because of that useless Simpson show.”
“Ya, that show is a real problem for us,” Prem said.
“Terrible,” Anamika said.
“Ridiculous,” Prem said.
“Too too much,” Anamika said.
“At least we are on American TV,” Prem said. He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Why did you want to meet in the mandir?”
“Oh, I am a part-time professional funeral mourner,” Anamika said. “I have to mourn someone at three.”
“I see. So, uh, your last name is Painter. Do you come from a painting family?”
“No, I don’t know, maybe long time back.”
“So you don’t paint?”
“No,” she said.
Prem was having a harder time than usual forging a connection with his date and began to think it was not worth the effort. In a last, desperate attempt to interest her in some conversation, he told her about his Indian stage show business and his mounting, terrifying fear that he would have no stars for his show of stars, which did not seem to interest her at all. He gave up on that approach and tried one last thing. “I like your ponytail,” he said.
She responded to this with a look of confusion, but then her face relaxed. “Actually, I play the flute.”
It turned out Anamika was a talented musician who had studied with some of the best flutists in India. But her training ended abruptly when her parents dragged her to America to build a better life. They were praying for her to marry a doctor but were concerned about her lack of a college education. Prem asked her a series of in-depth, extensive questions about her music, which, it seemed, no one had ever done before. She twirled her ponytail between her fingers while she talked. By the end, Prem had convinced her of her exceptional qualities and the special value of her musical education. Maybe she even could continue it in New Jersey, he said. He asked a passerby for paper and a pen and composed a new ad for her on the spot:
SEEKING match for extremely talented musician daughter, tall and slim with beautiful long ponytail. Strong and confident with excellent managerial skills. Ideal candidate would be professional with above-average cooking skills.
Moved beyond words, she folded the paper carefully and tucked it inside her shirt. She took Prem’s hands and held them on the table between them. “I do not really want to get married,” she said. “To a man, I mean. Not to a woman either. I mean, I don’t know.” Prem understood that she had some things to figure out. He assured her it was okay and squeezed her hands in his.
“I have to go mourn now,” she said. Then, after a thoughtful pause, she said, “You know, I maybe have some connections that could help you.”
Thus Prem’s years as a philogynist began. He spent the better part of 1989 helping emotionally distraught women feel good about themselves and, in the process, felt better himself, less lonely and more useful. But Leena was always with him. He had been in America for just over three years and loved her for two years and eight months. It was unlikely, he knew, that she would suddenly break with her fiancé and run through a field of tulips into his arms, but he couldn’t say for sure that she would not. He also knew he could never be in love with anyone else. His work would have to be his avenue to happiness.
But the show was supposed to go on in three months and he had no superstars. He had no show at all. The thought of this had recently begun to induce hyperventilation and visible shaking in Prem, and, one frigid January morning, a full-on panic attack. Beena found him on the kitchen floor hugging a sack of Royal Basmati, sweaty and dizzy and mumbling about actors. She put a blanket around him and convinced him to let go of the rice. She helped him to the couch and got a cold compress for his forehead. When his breathing slowed, she tried to talk to him. “You cannot continue like this,” she said gently. “There are two months left. You still have time to cancel everything without losing too much of money.”
“But Hemant,” Prem said, as if out of a fever. “But my father.”
“What does one thing have to do with the other?” Beena said.
“They will see I have failed.”
“You have to stop this,” Beena said.
“But Leena,” he said, repeating it until she stopped trying to reason with him. He fell asleep and was in and out of consciousness all day, even missing an Exxon shift, all the while trying to understand how he had ended up in a situation in which he wanted so badly to succeed, to stand on his own feet, and its exact opposite, to do nothing, to hide from the world, at the same time. His conflicting desires left him paralyzed on Beena’s couch for two more days. On the third day, Salman Khan’s secretary called.
22
Salman required home-cooked chicken biryani; his secretary was adamant on this point. Despite his international fame, Salman was a simple guy and adhered to his simple ways. He maintained his superhuman physique by eating fresh foods and limiting greasy restaurant fare. Prem assured the representative that Salman would have the best home-cooked chicken biryani New Jersey had to offer, every day for lunch and dinner and even breakfast if he desired, to which they replied that Salman required egg whites in the mornings.
Prem promised to provide everything Salman could possibly want as long as he signed the contract and fulfilled his promise to rehearse and perform in the show. The secretary said they had a deal and Salman looked forward to participating and eating American biryani. Before ending the call, Prem wanted to know one last thing: What made the secretary finally return his call? It turned out the secretary had received a call earlier that week from an extremely persuasive, chatty Bengali lady in America to whom Salman owed a long-ago debt.
Next to come on board was Govinda, whose uncontrollable hips were sure to add a certain verve to the program, followed by Sunny Deol and Jackie Shroff, all of whom signed on as a result of their agents being persuaded by single Indian women living in New Jersey. It wasn’t hard for Prem to deduce the identities of his mysterious benefactors, and he thanked those dear friends that very afternoon.
After the first four agreed, it was easy to get other artists to sign on. With four men lined up, Prem turned to recruiting female stars, beginning with lovable newcomer Juhi Chawla, up-and-coming starlets Pooja Bhatt and Sonam, and finally, the crowning glory of the entire show, Madhuri Dixit. To round things out, Prem brought on legendary singer Asha Bhosle and comic actor Kader Khan. The lineup was too good for Prem to trust it. In fact, every aspect of the show was coming together too perfectly. The director and choreographer in Bombay were on track to begin rehearsals by mid-February. Posters went up all over New Jersey and New York and full-page ads ran in India Abroad, thanks to a rag-tag team of part-time publicists who worked for free in exchange for a promise to meet the stars. Nathan Kothari used his skill at paperwork to arrange the work permits for the actors, also in exchange for a chance to meet them. A volunteer army of Indian Americans handled the event’s myriad details—airline and hotel bookings, teleprompters, press interview scheduling, airport pickups—all free of charge, in the hopes of getting some autographs. Ticket sales soared.
“Stop eating my head,” Beena scolded Prem, who kept asking her to verify that the chicken biryani would be made in time. They were at Pizza Movers, right next to Ashoka, which had just added to its offerings a thin-crust, hot-and-spicy vegetarian pizza with onions, chili peppers, and a secret sauce called the “Indo-Pak Pizza,” trademark pending.
“Okay, ya, sorry,” Prem said. “There are just too many details. How will everything work together? How will it all happen?”
“I do not understand,” Beena said, sprinkling on some extra red pepper. “I thought it was going nicely, no?”
“Ya, but you know, so many things can go wrong.” He hadn’t been able to sleep the past few nights, staring up at his onions, turning over and over in his head the hundreds of things that still had to be done. It was true the whole operation was moving along shockingly smoothly, yet he was in a constant state of wanting to throw up. How could he trust a team of Indian actors, crew, and support staff to get their jobs done on time when they came from a land where the word for “tomorrow” was tragically an auto-antonym, the same as the word for “yesterday”? Where IST—Indian Standard Time—meant arriving at least an hour late to everything?
“Why do you worry when there is nothing yet to worry about?” Beena said. “Have some pizza. Do you know your show will be the first show like this in the world?”
“Like what?” Prem said, using a napkin to sop up oil from his slice.
“There have been classical programs, ghazal programs, Kathak and Bharatnatyam performances, Qawwali shows, but nothing filmi,” she said, using an adjective that had lately come to describe everything about mainstream Hindi cinema as well as anything marked by exuberance and rampant melodrama.
“That is just more pressure! If I mess it up, if it is a horrible disaster, I will have to jump from the King’s Court roof.”
“Stop your filmi dialogue before I hit you with my rolling pin,” Beena said.
They ate in silence for a while, partly because of the heaviness of what Prem was feeling and partly because their mouths were on fire. Joseph Kisch, the owner of the pizzeria, had consulted with local Indian American business owners to craft his fiery recipe. It proved lucrative, bringing in a steady stream of Indian and Pakistani customers daily, but alienated some white customers who were unhappy with his coziness with his immigrant neighbors.
“Joe!” Beena called when she spotted him behind the counter. “Bring your rolling pin!” she added as she waved him over.
