“Yes.” Prem hung his head so only his rumpled hair was visible. “I could not let them hurt anyone, Papa.”
Ashok perceived a crack in the boy’s voice, a quiver he had not heard since his mother’s passing. He sat next to Prem on the couch and patted his untorn knee. “No, beta,” he said, “you could not.”
A servant entered with a tray of tea and biscuits and began serving father and son. Prem blew on his tea and had a sip, then returned the cup to its saucer with a loud clink. He seemed to be trying to say something, but instead issued a series of small grunts.
“What is it?” Ashok said.
“Sorry,” Prem said, “about the money.”
Ashok was moved by Prem’s illogical concern. “Nonsense,” Ashok said. “Good you gave them the money. These crime networkwallas, they are ruthless. They think they own India. Never did any decent work in their lives. Thugs who can hardly read! How can you own India but not know basic mathematics?” He caught himself being overtaken by indignation over the scourge of underworld activity afflicting the nation and returned his thoughts to Prem. “Bombay is no place for you, Son. Stay here. Join Kumar Group. No one will break anyone’s body parts.”
“But the five crores,” Prem said, “we can get it back. The police cannot help because they are scared of T-Company, but what if we call the home minister … ”
Though Ashok felt the rage of a powerful man being toyed with, he had lived long enough to know the way things worked in this country and knew the harm that criminal organizations could inflict. They were a lawless, godless bunch. “There is no need for calling Hari. Do not think of the money. It was nothing,” he said. “I expected to lose it.”
“Huh.” Prem pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek and nodded slowly. During the entirety of his Bombay excursion, from the long, frustrating days on set to his unfortunate dealings with the mafia, Prem had been buoyed by his father’s unprecedented faith in him. But now, to learn that his father had had no faith at all, Prem contemplated jumping behind the drapes.
The whole production had been abysmal, from the sluggish beginning to the blood-spattered, cruel-to-animals end. After multiple warnings—a smashed camera, a fire in a dressing room, a script that had been shredded and stuffed inside a broken mirror ball that was to appear in a discotheque scene—Prem had tried desperately to reason with the goons. The final threat came wrapped in a Marathi language newspaper left at the side door. Yashika found the package and, upon opening it, shrieked and fell to the floor. At first everyone assumed, naturally, that she was drunk again. But when Prem came closer he discovered the cat, its head severed from its body. Attached was a note: “The girl’s nose is next.”
That evening, Prem went to the market to purchase a large suitcase. The luggage shops were huddled in the middle of a lane congested by a slow-moving mass of people and an upsetting number of dogs. In a dreary hovel of a store, he found an orange hard-backed suitcase that he purchased without bargaining. That night he filled it with cash and the next morning gave it to the tiny gangster.
There was a long silence between the younger and the elder Kumar in the drawing room. They watched Rajesh Khanna try to convince his girlfriend Hema Malini to pursue her study of law in America despite the implicit three-year separation, unaware that it was part of her sinister, well-dressed father’s plot to tear them apart. Prem and Ashok, at the same time, wondered about the usefulness of an American law degree in India. But Rajesh Khanna, all asparkle, felt it was a brilliant plan that would ensure her success and, somehow, her fame, and their future children would proudly proclaim that their mummy was “America return.” Prem turned the odd phrase over in his head. America return. He’d heard it once before, in reference to a cousin who had gone to do something in Michigan and was today basking in steady employment and knee deep in respect at Maruti Suzuki, Delhi corporate offices. From there his thoughts darted to other America returns: their family friend’s daughter who returned with an MBA, which she did not use but which her parents always mentioned when introducing her; the guy who came once a month to treat their koi pond, if Prem recalled correctly, held an advanced degree in marine biology from the United States. And didn’t their head cook train under someone somewhere there?
“Now what will you do?” Ashok said as an Air India plane, presumably with Hema Malini on board and headed to America, took flight.
“I have some ideas,” Prem said.
3
Hindi movie scripts in the mid-1980s did not often take America as their settings as they would in later years, and Prem would never have imagined that his life would. But in the days following his botched cinematic foray, he concocted a plan to run far away from his excessively successful family into the wide-open arms of the United States. The seed planted by Hema Malini took root in Prem’s brain when during his usual study of Stardust—the People magazine of India before there was an actual People in India—he came across a sidebar describing a film project that was in its early stages in New York City. The director was an unknown, so it was all the more impressive that he should choose to be among the first to shoot on location in the US. But the movie—Love in New York it was called, in the Love in Tokyo and Love in Simla vein—seemed promising. Prem felt instinctively that he needed to be involved. He tracked down the number of a cousin of the director and spent two days battling anxiety and a general aversion to phone calls by scripting his side of a conversation and rehearsing it until it resembled something natural. The cousin, it turned out, knew nothing. But he registered Prem’s information and his ardent desire to be part of the production and promised to look into the matter. The next day the cousin called back: “Bunty says, ‘Yes, join us in the States.’” Ashok was skeptical. “What really do you know about this project? Who is this director you have not talked to? What is your position? What is the film’s story?” Prem had few answers. But in the end, his father helped him obtain a work visa and purchased a ticket for him with an open-ended India return.
Prem didn’t know what life would be like there, but he found reassurance in the fact that some of his favorite Hindi films had begun as American ones: Chori Chori had borrowed liberally from It Happened One Night, while Ek Ruka Hua Faisla was an Indian Twelve Angry Men and Satte pe Satta was unapologetically Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This all seemed to bode well, he thought as he waited at the gate next to a family of four. The daughter was penciling answers into a math workbook, and the boy, in an all acid-wash ensemble, was nodding in agreement with his Walkman. In the next row sat a monk in saffron robes and glasses with thick lenses that made his eyes bulge. He seemed an unlikely candidate for overseas travel, and Prem felt a sudden concern for how he would be treated abroad. But upon further consideration, Prem decided the monk would be fine. What could go wrong in America? He boarded the plane and wedged himself into a middle seat.
He didn’t sleep during the entire eighteen-hour (plus a brief Amsterdam stopover) Air India flight, instead migrating from cabin to cabin, finding an available seat in whichever cabin was showing the movie he preferred. Sometime in the fifth hour, he began questioning the prudence of his latest life choice. It wasn’t that he doubted the merits of Love in New York, which would absolutely be a hit, what with its inevitable Statue of Liberty love scene; he doubted his own ability to thrive. He had never had a job before, never worked for anyone, and with his recent utter failure, there were legitimate reasons to panic. He felt suddenly suffocated in his middle seat, as if on the upward incline of a rollercoaster. It was too late to get off and marry an eggy heiress. A flight attendant asked if anyone needed anything, but when Prem requested tea, she said no.
John F. Kennedy International Airport was a marvel of orderliness. The floors were shiny and void of debris, while Customs and Immigration was a series of tidy queues with nobody shoving anyone. Its lofty ceilings, functional water fountains, and adequate lighting were magnificent. After many cramped hours of anxiety and compulsive movie watching, he found the excitement for his American adventure swell again. On the walk to baggage claim, he envisioned a pivotal scene in which a hero chases a heroine through the terminal, dodging attendants, pilots, and a track team from Kenya, at last catching her as she is about to board the plane. After a breathless declaration of everlasting love, she says yes and they break into a dance number under a colorful display of international flags. He would have to mention the idea to the director. Maybe they could call the song “Tu Meri Aakhri Manzil” (“You Are My Final Destination”), Prem thought as he came to the end of the hall and two men threw their arms around him.
What followed was backslapping and shoulder squeezing, bolstered by empty syllables including, “Hey!” “Ho!” “Aare!” and “Vah!” then booming laughter and more backslaps. Both men wore slippery tracksuits, one red, one black, with white stripes down the legs and gold hoops in one ear. Prem had known someone would be picking him up, but he hardly expected such a joyous welcome. He was delighted until it occurred to him that maybe they had the wrong guy. “I am Prem,” he said. “Kumar?”
More laughter ensued, particularly from the burlier, red-tracksuit man. They seemed confident in the accuracy of their airport pickup, so Prem relaxed and enjoyed the jubilation of his first American minutes. Feeling uncharacteristically comfortable, he even related the story of a sari that was nearly unraveled by the plane’s catering trolley. When the black-tracksuit man tightened his grip on Prem’s shoulder and steered him firmly in the direction of the Air India carousel, Prem realized neither man had actually said an actual word. “How is shooting going?” Prem said. “Is Directorji there now? Also, who are you?”
The question of who they were would plague Prem for years to come. Were they petty criminals or mafia goondas? Did the Bombay goondas know the American goondas, or were they unrelated goondas entirely? he would ask himself whenever he saw a man in Adidas pants. In reality, they were not goondas at all. They were brothers from Pune temporarily lodged at their uncle’s in Queens. Getting by on the occasional odd job—unloading trucks, walking dogs for an elderly Colombian woman—they found themselves disenchanted by the US and wondered if they should have tried Canada instead. Their uncle, who operated a respectable newsstand, was making frequent calls to their mother in India asking when her hopeless sons would decamp from his house. So when they got the call from their buddy in Pune that a foolish but wealthy boy would be coming to New York and they should “help” him at the airport, it reaffirmed just in time their faith in America as the land of opportunity.
“Pintu and Dinesh,” the black-tracksuit one said in a way that suggested Prem should already have known this.
Prem did not recall a Pintu or a Dinesh coming up in conversation with the director’s cousin. But he did not wish to appear forgetful or bad with names on his first day. “Oh, ya, ya, Pintu and Dinesh, okay,” he said, wishing he knew which was which.
When he tugged his slim suitcase from the throng of bigger ones, the red-tracksuit guy looked at it and then at Prem. “That is it?” he said. “The son of Ashok Kumar, the chief of the Kumar Group Company, is having one lousy bag only?”
“It’s European,” Prem replied. They stepped out through the sliding glass doors into the brisk, shadowy, 4:00 p.m.-in-November American air. It smelled of bus fumes back home, Prem thought, but in a fresher, breezier way. He would certainly need a more appropriate coat, maybe one of those really fluffy-looking ones, especially for outdoor shootings.
Pintu and Dinesh were silent as they walked for a very long time through a sprawling, staggeringly neat parking lot. “Are we going first to the hotel or directly to the set?” Prem said. Neither man said a word. The red tracksuit looked up at a low plane coming in for a landing. “Maybe we can go for some chai first?” Prem said.
If he had been slightly less hopeful and entirely less trusting, Prem might have recognized the situation for what it was. But consumed by movie-making dreams and willfully ignoring the signs, he kept walking until they reached a Toyota at the deserted outer limit of the lot. The men demanded his wallet.
“But why?” Prem said. Though the disastrous, possibly life-threatening nature of his predicament was becoming evident, he still held on to the unlikely thread of hope that they wanted his wallet for safeguarding.
“Because we are robbing you, idiot.”
Prem let go of the thread.
“Passport too,” Pintu or Dinesh said.
When Prem handed over the items, he looked with total ingenuousness into his assailant’s bloodshot eyes. “But what will the director say?”
The brothers had diverging reactions to this unparalleled display of innocence: Pintu, of the red tracksuit, responded as he often did to people he deemed stupid, which was with anger, while Dinesh found himself atypically moved.
“How can anyone be so dumb?” Pintu said, tucking the passport into the waistband of his pants. “The director does not know you exist.”
“What?” The truth sunk slowly, miserably in. “Oh,” Prem said. He dropped his head and looked for a long time at his shoes.
“Really, I want to know, how can anyone be so dumb?”
“Wait, wait,” Dinesh said, holding a hand up at his brother. He turned to Prem and spoke as he might to a frightened toddler. “You need to be little smarter, man, that’s all. Pay attention, ask questions, maybe do not come to the other side of the world and go to a parking lot with strangers.”
“I know your father is not dumb,” Pintu continued. “Is your mother dumb?”
Prem saw in the far distance the workbook girl and acid-wash boy getting into a car as their father arranged their luggage in the trunk. Prem wished he could climb into their unattractive van and go with them to whichever American village they were from. How could he let this happen? How, indeed, could he be so dumb? He wanted to be done with these deceitful, felonious, slightly misaligned brothers, but when the question of his mother came up, Prem found himself throwing a wild punch that didn’t land entirely on Pintu’s face, but didn’t entirely miss either.
