They continued to creep around the perimeter of the store for a few more minutes, even snapping a few pictures with a small camera Bishakha carried in her purse, before, naturally, being picked up by the cops.
* * *
It was a long night in the Woodbridge Township police station’s interrogation room. Prem was questioned separately from Bishakha, but when at 4:00 a.m. he was finally released, they assured him she had also been let go. He woke up the following afternoon and didn’t call her. What would be the point? He didn’t want to know if she had learned anything more about the ring shopping. He wanted to forget he had seen anything at all.
That evening he biked to his office, this time with his ledger instead of his drink. At his desk he opened it up and began:
211. I will love you forever.
212. I will love you forever.
213. I will love you forever.
214. I will love you forever.
215. If by chance I suddenly am murdered, remember I will love you forever, okay? That is all there is.
36
By June, Wristwatch had become a fixture at King’s Court, skulking around the grounds, lurking behind Building 3 as threateningly as he could. He’d visited New Jersey from Mumbai several times over the years but lately had been stationed there permanently, more or less, to remind Prem to whom he was beholden. Residents had begun to recognize him, even greeting him by name on sunny mornings. “Ah, Wristwatch! Beautiful sunshine, no?” they would say, or “Good morning, Mr. Wristwatch, you’re looking very smart today!” For Halloween, more than one child went dressed as him, which he was quite flattered by. But when Tun-Tun invited him to join them for dinner (“You cannot eat only the restaurant food, Wristwatchji. Not good for the digestion.”), he began to worry that perhaps he was no longer eliciting the necessary panic and dread required for a man in his line of work.
But what was that work? he pondered one day, sitting in the grass among the white-kurta uncles. This certainly wasn’t what he’d dreamed of as a boy. His childhood had been marked by grueling daily labor, a particularly cruel brand of urban poverty that typically did not lend itself to optimism. An only child, he had taken it upon himself by the age of nine to shoulder some of his dear parents’ workload. That work was hand-embroidering complicated designs onto blouses, blankets, lehengas, saris, and ball gowns, which would be sold someplace, someday, he presumed. A serious, somewhat bored-looking man appeared once a week to pick up the completed pieces and drop off more work. Along with five other families from their tenement, in a cramped workshop on the fourth floor, the parents and son toiled for hours, stopping only when their eyes hurt and their fingers bled. The mother would tend to her son’s fingers, washing them and wrapping them in scraps from their work, kissing each one twice. Wristwatch—not yet Wristwatch but Hamza still—knew it pained his mother to keep him home from school, which he attended part-time, if at all. He never complained about the work as the neighbor children did, which pained his mother all the more. He regularly assured her that there was nothing to complain about; he loved the work.
He had become enamored of the artistry of what they were doing. The type of handicraft that their particular subcontractor supplied was in the venerated Aari embroidery tradition, in which intricate patterns were painstakingly chain-stitched using a long, hooked needle into fabrics stretched tightly over a wooden frame. Young Hamza took very seriously the acquisition of his craft. He became adept at manipulating the needle, catching and pulling silk thread through fabric. His pieces were admired for their density and precision, their metallic trim shimmering like light on water. In time, the subcontractor noticed his talent and dedication and singled him out for more difficult assignments. Eventually, Hamza began making his own suggestions for new motifs they might try out in addition to the usual paisleys and peacocks, some of which were adopted (mangoes and geese) and others that were rejected (Shah Rukh Khan and potatoes). He became the go-to guy for new patterns and was taught how to transfer them onto cloth using tracing paper and chalk solution. Thus as his life progressed, so did his knowledge of the embroidery trade. And all along, he thought of himself not as a victim deprived of his innocence by the dictates of modern capitalism and its destitute masses, but as an apprentice, honing his skill, training to become the thing he most longed to become: a master craftsman.
As Hamza’s technical prowess grew, so did his physique. Nimble little hands grew into nimble enormous hands, and everyone wondered how such tiny parents could yield such a mammoth child. While other laboring children suffered from stunted growth due to cramped working conditions, Hamza somehow became a gigantic young man, albeit with arthritic fingers and significant neck pain. He always stood out among the crowd of smaller, less enthusiastic embroiderers, and no one was surprised when one day he was asked to visit the subcontractor’s office.
The occasion of a possible promotion called for sharp, professional attire, in the absence of which Hamza cleaned and pressed what clothing he had as best he could. His mother combed his hair and used a bit of coconut oil to keep the part smoothly in place. At 8:00 a.m., he reported to an address just a few blocks away, which would make for an easy daily commute, he thought. The building was more impressive than he’d expected for a simple garment business, with a long driveway preceded by a gate so formidable that it made Hamza feel small for the first time. Two guards with guns and angry-looking dogs watched as he ascended a set of black marble stairs.
“Who Hamza, what Hamza?” a voice from behind the appointed door barked. “Hm? Oh, ya, bring him in.”
The subcontractor was nowhere to be seen; instead, Hamza found a mustached, plump, menacing sort of figure, much like the actor Amjad Khan in Sholay or Amjad Khan in Laawaris or Amjad Khan in Kaalia, or really Amjad Khan in mostly anything except Yaarana, in which he was quite a loyal friend. Also in the room were several men in dark suits—unembroidered—standing silently, their hands clasped behind them. The Amjad Khan–ish man remained seated and looked Hamza up and down. After issuing a few approving grunts, he whispered in the ear of one of the suited men, who in turn nodded at another suited man, who led Hamza out of the room.
Hamza would look back on that moment as one in which he experienced the most consequential misunderstanding of his life. “You have been given the job,” he was informed, then directed to go up another three flights to be briefed for his new position. Though he knew he should be elated, he felt uneasy. There was no evidence of embroidery anywhere, no threads scattered on the floor, no garments hanging on display. Just frightening, silent men guarding doors and attending to other more frightening and mostly seated men. By the time he reached the fifth floor, he was convinced he was about to be murdered.
He wasn’t murdered, but murder, it turned out, would be an integral part of the job. The person who informed him of his new position was a tiny elderly woman, sari-clad and bespectacled with her hair in a severely tight bun. “Congratulations,” she said in an unexpectedly deep and monotone voice. “You have been selected for the position of junior enforcer in our organization. Come. Let us get you fitted.”
This seemed to Hamza like the proper juncture to ask what exactly was going on. He’d always been a quiet boy, but when he did speak, he did so with complete certainty. So it came as a surprise even to him when he lost all semblance of composure. “Madam? Fitted? Why fitted? What enforcer? Where are the threads?”
The tiny woman glared at him and cleared her throat. “Be calm. This type of behavior is not acceptable from an employee of T-Company.”
Hamza felt a tightening in his chest, then a feeling of disconnection, as though he were watching a movie of himself. Dizzy, he tried to steady himself as he backed away slowly to the door. “I will, I think, madam, I am happy with my current role in embroidering, so I will just continue that only. Thank you, thank you, good day.”
It became starkly clear to Hamza that he was not being offered a choice in the matter. He would have to accept his new post, or else. So, he did the only thing he could do, which was to find the tailor and get fitted. He walked down to the fourth floor, his simple rubber slippers slapping the marble with each step. How did he get here? What went haywire? he wondered. And why did starting a job as a thug require a tailor? Only the third question was answered that day.
The floor of the tailor’s quarters was blanketed in broken pieces of thread, which felt familiar and comforting to Hamza. Three men were at work on sewing machines, each with a tape measure around his neck and Gandhi-type round spectacles. “Masterji,” one of the tailors, evidently an apprentice, said to the head tailor. “Client has come.”
The head tailor looked up and gasped. “Hamza? It cannot be,” he said. The head tailor was the boy’s longtime across-the-way neighbor, Shyamsundar.
“Shyamsundarji Uncle? You are here?”
“I am here, but why you are here?”
“I don’t know really how I am here, but how are you here?”
Shyamsundar took the measurements himself rather than leaving it to his subordinates. “Okay, tell me what happened,” he said in hushed tones as he took Hamza’s inseam.
“The embroiderywalla told me to come to this office. I thought they were making me the top embroiderer or some such job.”
Shyamsunder let out a heavy sigh. “I see.” He continued taking measurements with an expression of deep concern on his face. “Just do as they tell you and do not make any comments or demands or loud noises.”
Hamza nodded, the reality of his situation setting in. “I thought you worked in the sari store,” he said.
“Your knees are shaking, boy,” the tailor whispered. “You must make them stop. You are a T-Company man now.”
At 5:00 p.m., Hamza was finally permitted to leave the compound. He exited through the massive gates and stepped back into the hectic street. Relieved to be returned to the oppressive heat of the outside, stagnant and familiar, he walked deliberately. He had fresh appreciation for the auto rickshaws, the beggars on the corner, the usual waft of roasted corn from the roadside vendors. Somewhere nearby, a fire burned, as always. Yet as he continued walking, the things he knew so well seemed suddenly at a remove, as though they no longer recognized him. He was in the midst of it all yet no longer part of it.
As he headed toward home, he tried to digest what had happened to him. He was tricked into joining the underworld. He was fitted for a suit by his neighbor. Then he had his first lesson in how to intimidate, harass, stalk, injure, and shoot. In the end, he was given a watch. It offered Hamza a degree of comfort, not because of any particular fondness for high-end baubles; it represented for him the one positive point about this terrible turn of events. He would make enough money to help his parents out of poverty.
When T-Company told him the amount he would be receiving every week, plus bonuses for murdering and maiming, it assuaged some of his shock and terror. Initially, to get himself out of the predicament, he had considered telling his new employers about his chronic neck pain, weak eyesight, and arthritic hands—all byproducts of the embroidery trade. He would also inform them that they’d incorrectly assumed from his height and build that he was athletic or tough, when he was neither. But then he pictured his parents, old and hunched over their stitching year after year, and he stayed silent.
What would he tell his parents? He’d asked his unassuming neighbor, the masterji to the mob, not to mention anything to them. The best thing Hamza could do for his parents was to keep them in the dark, ignorant of their only child’s dangerous entanglement. He would tell them he had indeed been promoted and that going forward he would be doing his embroidering at the company’s offices and workshops, which were beautiful and state-of-the-art. He would say they wanted him to focus primarily on zari work, with only pure threads—red silk, twisted with silver, dipped in twenty-two-carat gold—which would grace the likes of movie stars and the wives of major industrialists. He would be given free rein to choose his own color combinations, and they would train him to create original designs and transfer them to silks, just as he’d hoped, when in reality, he would never embroider anything again.
* * *
The ledger that Prem had kept all these years, crammed with declarations and observations for an imagined Leena, was weathered and falling apart. Its faux-leather cover was scuffed, and on the back were several overlapping circles of tea stains. Pages were crumpled and the binding was tired and worn. Still, it soldiered on.
216. I saw you going into Gurnani Restaurant and Tiffin Service. You wore a yellow dress. Who were you meeting?
