Pintu came back swinging. The fight, if it could be called that, was over quickly, with Prem kicking Pintu in the shin and Pintu being forcibly pulled away by his brother.
“What you are doing? You didn’t see him hit me?”
“You called his mother dumb,” Dinesh said. “Sit in the car.”
Pintu retreated with a surprising lack of objection, and Dinesh returned to Prem. “I am worried about you, man. How will you survive here?”
It was difficult to follow this man’s motivations, Prem thought. “You could give me my wallet and passport back?” he said.
Dinesh shook his head. “No, this is not the solution.” He knelt to unzip the suitcase on the ground between them. As he rifled through its contents, which consisted chiefly of cassette tapes, he continued with his oddly timed life guidance. “Look, if I don’t take your wallet, someone else will. Go back in the airport and tell the security what happened. They will help you call to your family and get home. Man, you have lot of cassettes.”
Pintu rolled down his window. “Why you are sending him to the police? You want us to go in the jail?”
Dinesh held up a few cassettes to his brother. “We have these?”
“Qurbani yes, Namak Haraam yes, take Saagar.”
“You want any T-shirts? The jeans will not fit until you stop eating so many Snickers.” Turning to Prem, he said, “Snickers is good. Try it.”
“But you took all my money,” Prem said.
“Do we have Laawaris or Janwar?” Dinesh said.
“Take them both,” Pintu said. “Is there a tongue scraper?”
“You are going to use his tongue scraper?”
“I am desperate, man. You cannot find them in America. It is a country of unscraped tongues.”
Dinesh dug out a tongue scraper from a bag of toiletries and then found a pen and scribbled some numbers on the liner of Qurbani. “Call if you need anything,” he said.
Prem took the liner. “Uh, thanks.”
“Hang in, buddy,” Dinesh said, and got in his car and drove away.
There is a moment in many Hindi films in which the hero finds himself virtually defeated by the forces of evil. They have taken away his birthright, separated him from his beloved, killed his family members, destroyed his father’s construction business, temporarily blinded his mother, banished his wet nurse, poisoned his father’s rice pudding, or fed his brother to a crocodile. The hero is brought to his knees. But something in him awakens. He stands up, vows revenge, and enacts it painstakingly through the second half of the film. Sometimes this takes months, sometimes years. In the case of the not-uncommon reincarnation-themed film, it takes an untimely death, rebirth, and almost instantaneous ascent to adulthood. Standing alone in a foreign parking lot, Prem wondered if he would ever even the score with the strange brothers. In any case, he would have to go home unsuccessful and humiliated, bearing nothing but a lifelong tracksuit aversion. He wished he could rise up as in the movies and beat them both with a tongue scraper, then interrogate the black-tracksuit man about his odd combination of compassion and criminality. Maybe someday, Prem thought, but probably not in this lifetime.
From a hidden pocket in his suitcase, he pulled out a polka-dotted pouch containing a large sum of money and tucked it into his jacket. He lugged the suitcase back across the lot, intending to return to India. But as he neared the arrivals building, he saw that the first cab in a long line of cabs was being driven by a Sikh man. For reasons that were a mystery even to himself, he threw his suitcase into the trunk and got in.
* * *
On the same plane as Prem, there had been a young Indian couple just starting out. They would eventually reach the sleepy former coal mining town of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where the husband would join an internal medicine practice and often get paid in fresh eggs. They would find no one who looked like them in that small town and would troll the local Kmart and Laurel Mall for brown faces, leaving homesick and discouraged each time. One evening, the wife would suggest they look for Indian names in the phonebook, whereby they would become fast friends with two Patels, a Sood, and a Balasubramaniam. This white-pages-as-friend-finder methodology has been employed by Indians across the country in such far-flung places as Bisbee, Arizona, and Chaska, Minnesota, but in Edison, New Jersey, no such desperate measures are required. “I just tumbled out from the airplane and fell on a pile of Indians,” one man said to another as they ate pistachios in front of Building 18 of King’s Court Estates.
They had been discussing an article from that week’s India Abroad, the chronicler of all things Indian in America, about Indians living miserable lives in transient hotels in New York City. “Happiness,” the man continued, pitching a pistachio shell at a squirrel, “is a matter of wise decision-making.”
“Wise decision-making,” the second man said.
“You see, they decided to go where there is no good community, they decided to become alcoholics and to take the drugs.”
“They decided, yes.”
“Of course they will have the psychological problems then,” the first man said.
“Of course, of course,” the second man said. “Why?”
“Because when they come back in the night from their filthy jobs cleaning the toilets or cooking the meats, they come to a dirty room with rats and no friends.” With his foot he swept the pile of shells on the pavement into the grass. “Someone just should collect them and bring them here.”
“Collect them and bring them here, only,” the second man said, nodding his head in agreement.
What they were agreeing on was that Edison, and King’s Court specifically, was the right place for an Indian to start his American life. Where was the room for loneliness and immigrant despair when Beena Joshi was knocking on your door with a yogurt container full of vegetable biryani? Theirs was a complex crammed with the dreams of a generation of Indian immigrants who poured in when visa restrictions were relaxed in 1986 and the floodgates of opportunity opened wide. Word had reached the subcontinent that it was a miraculous place where young and middle-aged men gathered on warm weekends to play five-hour games of cricket on small patches of grass, and young and middle-aged sari-and salwar-clad women assembled on concrete steps with large steel platters to shell peas, and the din of at least three Hindi movies emanated from any given building on any given afternoon, their spangling soundtracks spilling out from beneath doors to give King’s Court the air of the mother continent.
So, naturally, when Prem asked the Sikh driver to take him to a cheap, good place where he could stay for a while, the driver, Harbhajan Gill, thought immediately of Edison. He himself lived in a tall building in Irvington, where his four belligerent children and even more belligerent wife yelled at one another, at him, and at their majority Korean neighbors, who had stopped coming by with their cold pickled cabbage. His sister and her giant husband lived in King’s Court and happened to be looking for a fifth paying guest to join the other four who slept on their drawing-room floor, so Harbhajan Gill pulled onto the Belt Parkway.
“I know a place you can stay for some time,” he said, sizing him up in the rearview mirror. “Do you have money?”
Prem wanted to cry but also sleep for a long time. “I have a little,” he told the driver.
“Good,” Harbhajan said. “The apartment is close to the Metropark station, so lot of Indians live there and take the train for the jobs. Schools are good—but you do not have children, looks like.” Prem found his judgmental tone unwarranted. “Crime rate is low,” Harbhajan continued. “In bigger places there is so much of crime.”
“Is that right?” Prem said. He took in the landscape of America as it flew past his window. The grass on the side of the highway was bright green and the traffic was comfortingly congested, with none of the overwhelming desolation his father had warned of.
“In Edison, small crimes happen, but not so much of murder.”
“There is murder?” Prem said.
“Yes.”
Prem dozed off, waking up when the driver rolled down his window at a stunningly well-ordered toll plaza. They crossed over a bridge that was under another bridge, which Prem found suffocating. He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but Harbhajan wanted to know, “Hey man, you going to look for the job?”
