217. I hiccupped today. Was that you who was thinking of me? You must be having hiccups every day. I think of you every day.
218. Did you know that Hindi movies are colorful and bright so the people with a bad print or watching in a hall with the poor projector or dirty screen can still enjoy? I learned this today from Nachiket Rao.
219. You must have liked Lagaan. With the cricket match and all. Songs were good, no?
220. Have you heard about this Wristwatch character? Wears a suit always and sunglasses even in the dark. If you see him, walk the other way. He is maybe not the best guy.
221. So, ya, this Wristwatch…It seems he is here to scare me. Remember, I told you before about the goondas from Mumbai? He is with them. They want some money—return on investment type of thing—but I need just a little bit more of time. This was not a good idea, getting involved with this group. But how could I not? I wanted to make money, to be successful, to impress your father and my father. Why fathers need money to be impressed? I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to impress myself. This guy, Wristwatch, was spotted more than one time trying to catch a squirrel. I think he is planning to kill it and deliver it to me.
222. I don’t understand why communism does not really work. Do you? Everyone is equal in communism, no? No money worries. Do the people in China not worry about money? Are the fathers all impressed?
223. So, ya, he killed the squirrel and delivered it to me.
224. Sometimes I feel afraid when I ride around on my bicycle in the dark. I can hear your voice saying, Then stop riding around on your bicycle in the dark. But that is my best thinking time. I think of my business and what I am doing here, still, in America, and I think of you. What good is all this success without you?
225. In the newspaper today I read that people in Norway and Denmark are very happy and not rich and not poor but just right.
226. Do you know Markandeya and Roohi? Shah? Someone told me they are very wealthy. They still stay in a one-bedroom in King’s Court.
227. Your haircut looks nice.
228. I think maybe things have gotten out of hand. T-Company—that is the group of goondas after me, I know, the worst goondas of all the goondas—sent a letter. It was the second letter they ever sent. The first one was written in blood, but this one was neatly typed. They really are quite good in office management. The letter said if I do not pay immediately, they will break the nose and jaw of the pretty girl I like. Now, this could be you or it could also be not you. Not because there is any other girl! But because how would they know? Is the T-Company research department so skilled? I think probably not. So, no need to worry you, I think. Did you notice how this threat is the same threat they made in India in my filmmaking days? They couldn’t think of something new? No creativity. But they ended politely: “Kindly do the needful.” Also, they included this business card:
Birju’s Hindu Funeral Home
WE UNDERSTAND
cremations • poojas • final rites
we can arrange shipping of body to India
compassionate treatment and fair pricing
Hindu Funerals of America Code of Ethics
Serving Hindu, Sikh, Jain
Or maybe this was a separate delivery, who knows, it was all together in the office mailbox.
* * *
Wristwatch did not actually kill a squirrel. It was true, however, that he had recently been following them around in the grass. They seemed so sweet and he just wanted to pet one’s tail. This gentle, sylvan distraction came at a particularly opportune time in his involuntary career.
The latest directive from T-Company headquarters was of the variety Wristwatch most dreaded: inflicting bodily harm on an innocent. Over the years, as he rose through the ranks from Junior Thug to the coveted position of Senior International Thug, he cultivated a foreboding persona that conveyed the impression of impending violence. He never left the house in anything but an expertly tailored black suit and prescription sunglasses his employers had given him after he failed the standard eye exam. He seldom spoke, and when he did, it was in a deep, gravelly monotone. Smiling was out of the question, replaced by a constant clenching of the jaw. All of this, bolstered by his unflinchingly erect posture, lent him the air of a bloodthirsty robot. People were so terrified at the mere sight of him that they would wet themselves and then give him whatever he wanted. A urine-soaked target was all in a good day’s work.
Thus in all his years with T-Company, Wristwatch never actually hurt anyone. He threatened and insinuated, stalked and terrified, but never broke any body parts, burned anyone with acid, or maimed or mutilated, though these were important aspects of his job description. But Prem was proving to be his greatest challenge yet. He showed no sign of caving, seemingly unphased by Wristwatch’s murderous façade. He began to worry that he might have to follow through on the threat put forth by T-Company to break the nose and jaw of a young woman close to Prem.
This place, Edison, New Jersey, had turned out to be a peaceful place for him, away from the constant throngs, without T-Company monitoring him. He enjoyed his time sitting with the old men in the circle, especially so that June morning, as a warm, gentle breeze rustled the very green grass. Such an interesting place, this King’s Court, comprised entirely of people who had come from India and people who had come from people who had come from India. Clusters of satellite dishes burst forth from sides of buildings like unexpected flowers, allowing tenants to access Sony TV, Zee TV, TV Asia, Star Plus, Sahara One. There was a Shirdi Sai temple nearby, as well as Sai Baba, Shri Krishna Vrundavana, Sai Datta Peetham, Shri Umiya Dham, and Guruji temples even nearer. A woman watering plants on her balcony called down to passersby to inquire who had won the drawing for the five-gallon pressure cooker at Apna Bazaar, and Wristwatch marveled at the mini-India that had been created here. He wished he had come under different, less homicidal circumstances, but this was his strange lot in life. Years earlier, he had considered how he might escape his employers, but every possibility led to either his or his parents’ murder. For this reason, he had never married or started a family; more loved ones would just mean more to worry about. At least I got to see America, he consoled himself.
The white-kurta uncles had been sitting in silence when one of them pointed to the street. A squirrel had been run over by a car, its carcass still fresh. Wristwatch stood and walked toward it to have a closer look. The tail was still bushy and the face still intact. A profound sadness overtook him, and he sat down on the curb and wept for a long time. When he was done, the uncles had disbanded. It was getting late, and people were returning from or going to work. He picked himself up and went to the dumpster behind Building 20 in search of some old newspaper. That night, he wrapped the squirrel in Little India and shoved it into Prem’s office mailbox along with the business card of a funeral company, which he felt added an appropriately morbid touch.
* * *
The legendary and implausible fight sequences in classic Hindi movies have been ridiculed—or celebrated, depending on whom you ask—over the years, their action defying the very laws of gravity and motion. Jackie Shroff in Shapath successfully evaded a barrage of bullets while running sideways on a wall; Mithun Chakraborty in the new Kaalia leaped from a cartwheeling airborne motorcycle onto a burning pyre; and who can forget Dharmendra in Loha catching a bullet with his bare hand? The list goes on. Such films eschewed mathematical accuracy, opting instead for invincible heroes fending off entire squads of goons; speeding cars, rickshaws, and trains boasting aerobatic capabilities; and all manner of absurd flipping, lifting, straddling, hanging, and exploding. An entirely new branch of science arose, lately and lovingly referred to as “Bollywood physics.”
Thanks to their familiarity with Bollywood physics, no one at the intersection of Wood Avenue and Oak Tree was fazed when one day Prem was forced to stop short and was launched from his bicycle, prompting him to execute a perfect midair somersault and land effortlessly on his handlebars. He hadn’t expected to be in a near-fatal bicycle catastrophe when he woke up that morning. He hadn’t slept at all well, the matter of T-Company and Wristwatch and the squirrel weighing on him all night. If he just paid the sum that was past due, his erstwhile financiers would back off; they’d always been fair in that way, gangsters though they were. But paying them back now was not an option. His living expenses were modest, but the cost of running Superstar Entertainment was not insignificant. Moreover, he had a separate account into which he deposited funds to make payments to T-Company after big shows; and another for his personal savings, which he thought of as his “Hemant ultimatum” account, the money that would prove that he was finally worthy, though there was no longer anyone to whom his worthiness had to be proved. The hefty sum he’d just lent to Lucky had come from both of these last two buckets, and he refused to pull money from one bucket to fill the other. This he was very clear on. T-Company would just have to wait.
“You are telling me you would rather be harassed and maybe killed by goondas from India instead of taking some money out from this pointless Hemant Engineer pile of cash?” Beena Joshi was not at all amused by the situation Prem laid out for her. “You know what I think? I think you started losing your mind many years back, and slowly, more was lost, and now the job is complete. No mind left.”
Prem sank into the couch from which Beena had finally removed the plastic. “Can I borrow your gun for some time?”
Beena scoffed in disbelief. “Really, gone. No logic remaining at all. Also, how are you knowing I have a gun?”
“Everyone knows. It’s in the Swad Wheat Flour sack.”
Beena did not give him her gun that day, despite Prem’s surprisingly persuasive arguments and eventual begging. He left Beena’s place defeated and despondent. Thinking a bike ride might help clear his head, he set out east, headed nowhere. Almost immediately, before even the Dosa Hut that was formerly Dairy Queen was out of sight, he felt eyes on him. The sensation at the back of his neck was so palpable and searing, it seemed an absolute certainty: Wristwatch was following him. Prem didn’t turn around, hoping perhaps he was wrong and no one was there, or, at worst, it was just Beena. But as he approached Movie City 8, now showing Asoka, he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being pursued by someone ill-intentioned. He pedaled faster up Oak Tree, finally looking back as he came upon the former Shoe Town, now dealing in halal meat. It was as he suspected. Wristwatch was closing in on him despite being on foot and wearing dress shoes.
Prem held out hope that Wristwatch was just out for a stroll on a pleasant afternoon, but in his heart, he knew the madman was after him. He stood out of the saddle and bore down on the pedals with his entire weight, yet still Wristwatch gained ground. Knees shaking and lungs short of breath, Prem made the rash decision to push forward through a yellow traffic light, hoping to leave Wristwatch behind to wait for green, but he had sorely miscalculated. The light turned red as he breached the intersection, and the cars on Wood Avenue sprung forward. He applied the brakes just as he was about to collide with an Oldsmobile. He was propelled into the air, soaring and tumbling forward spectacularly, landing back on his riderless bike that had continued to move forward after flipping over the hood of the car. Adhering to the laws of Bollywood physics, Prem and his bicycle emerged from the incident unscathed. No one at that corner that day—not the attendants at Exxon, nor Wristwatch stalled by the red light—questioned what they had witnessed, not even Minerva the Psychic Reader, who had seen it coming all along.
* * *
After nearly dying in front of Burger King, Prem contemplated a course correction. Approaching T-Company again to request a deadline extension did not seem viable. He could capitulate and pay them from his savings, but this would undoubtedly send him spiraling even further into depression and poor hygiene, from which he might never return. Prem considered Wristwatch. Who was this silent, large, and punctual man? Where did he come from? What were his nonmercenary interests? There had to be some humanity in him. Suddenly, it became clear—tube light!—like Amitabh in Aakhree Raasta, when his character, David, decides to avenge his wife’s death and his own murder conviction by going after the true criminals, who are being protected by a police inspector who is actually David’s unwitting son Vijay (also played by Amitabh), he would have to take matters into his own hands and unearth where that humanity lay.
* * *
Two weeks passed during which Wristwatch left Prem alone. He had put the poor guy through so much with the squirrel and the bicycle ride of death, he thought he deserved a break. Really, he felt they both deserved a break. He had terrified people for so long, and Prem had entertained them for probably just as long, all for what? Both were alone, with a lot of cash. How unfortunate it was that money, by virtue of the way humanity had structured civilization, played such a central role in any given life. He didn’t know what had taken Prem down his particular path, what had landed him here, or what was keeping him from making a change. But it was clear they were both stuck.
These were the thoughts rattling around in Wristwatch’s head one evening when he came home to the apartment that had been rented for him at King’s Court. It was a regular one-bedroom, but it seemed spacious because it was so spare. A table and single chair by the kitchenette and a comfortable bed were the only pieces of furniture. Which was why the unexpected presence of a large wooden frame with a beautiful piece of fabric stretched over it was all the more astonishing when Wristwatch walked in that day. In neat rows along the wall were rolls of silk, spools of thread in every color, and boxes of hooked needles, beads, and stones. Tacked up on the wall were pattern samples, and, on the table, chalk and tracing paper on which he could at last create his own designs.
