Hamza knew immediately that Prem was responsible for this miraculous embroidery workshop. He took off his suit jacket and folded it over the chair. Before sitting down to do the thing he loved most in the world, he looked over everything again, noting every exquisite detail. Prem was either a thoughtful, generous benefactor or a creepy, diabolical genius adept at field research. Either way, he would give the man what he wanted, which was more time. Because the gift was lovely.
37
You find yourself atop a mall-kiosk empire of your own creation and you ask yourself, How? Much earlier in your story, well before the interval, you move with your father to Edison, New Jersey, where together you open the first Indian grocery store in town. One day, a lanky yet devastatingly handsome young man, not unlike a young Shashi Kapoor, boyish with a chiseled jaw and floppy hair, crashes into your life like lightning, on his back in shattered glass. He glows from within the way special people sometimes do, soaking in your mother country’s orange soda.
You go about your work, ordering Hot Mix and counting Hajmola Digestive Tablets, all the while hoping to see him again. You do not have to wait long as your father essentially tricks him into working at the store without pay for two weeks. You’re thrilled and also strangely proud of your father. You peek at the young man here and there, careful not to let anyone see.
He seems a bit offbeat, this guy whose name you’ve learned is Prem. His friends call him synonyms for gasoline, and it appears he shaves his chest. Aunties flock to him like he’s their best friend, and, in a few cases, he is. You like him. True, he sang the completely wrong song in antakshari, precipitating a bewildered silence, but he sang it so well and with style. You tell him as much from a distance as you’re leaving. His palm when you examine it at a party—after having examined several less exciting palms just to get to his—is softer than you expected for someone who works at Exxon. You pretend to read something in the life line or fate line, not revealing you have no chiromantic abilities and invented the ruse to talk to him. You ponder out loud whether you should cancel your vendor meeting for which you need to leave soon, hoping Prem will beg you to stay. Instead, he tells you to go. You are dejected until he explains: He respects you as a businesswoman. He respects your hard work. He would never advise you to do anything to jeopardize this. Go to your meeting and come back, he says. It is almost unbelievable to you that he could be this way. Wise, unselfish, exhibiting great strength of character. He’s like an old man in a young Shashi Kapoor’s body. You go and come back to find multiple girls flinging themselves at him, but he looks only at you.
Things move quickly from there. You begin to exchange notes in secret, leaving them in a predetermined hiding spot in the store, which is both exciting and greasy. You meet him behind the Dairy Queen, the bowling alley, until finally he moves in. It’s not a real move-in but rather a scheme whereby your father takes Prem in as a paying guest, which was of course your idea.
These are magical days for you and Prem. His hands brush yours near the automatic roti maker, you steal glances as your father tacks a plant to the ceiling. You think back to these moments a few years later when Maine Pyar Kiya comes out and Salman Khan romances his family’s houseguest Bhagyashree, calling her bedroom phone from his home-office phone when his father is in a meeting or squeezing her when his mother turns away to throw darts. You are crushed when one day your father and Prem conspire to stall your life.
One million and one dollars. How did your father come up with such a ludicrous number? You are disgusted, not just with your father but with Prem too. It’s like he became a different person when the talk of money began. You spend the rest of that rainy day in your room with the door shut. You have never been so angry. Lying in bed, you go over it all again and again, dipping in and out of sleep. When the street lamps come on in the parking lot and the Quicker Liquor sign casts its dull glow, you wrest the Gits idli mix box with its gasoline scent from under the bed. The clump of oily notes inside fills you further with rage. You ball them together and flush them down the toilet, which emits a guttural glug then overflows. You do nothing about the clog or the water flooding the bathroom. Your father and the other paying guest, Viren Bhai, are standing in the kitchen when you open the door, and they can see the lavatorial destruction you’ve wrought. You walk past them and out of the apartment, though you feel guilty about Viren Bhai. It turns out he was the only wise man in your apartment all along.
After a maddening fight in the rain underscores the end of your relationship, you walk around irate for days, creating an uncomfortable living situation in 5F. “Did you even think of how your plan would upset me?” you accuse your father. He accuses you back, “Did you even think how you marrying a bum would upset me?” You over-order pani-puri concentrate to make a point to your father, though you’re not sure what that point is.
“Enough,” he says, finally, in the store one day. He doesn’t seem cross, just tired, leaning heavily against the checkout counter, the fight gone from his eyes. This gives you pause. You’ve seen this exhaustion before. During the darkest moment in your immigrant story, in the somber waiting room of a Texas hospital, your father’s knees buckled. He broke his own fall by grabbing onto a chair. But he stayed on the floor like that, clutching the chair, depressing its worn upholstery with his cheek, for a long time. You’d never seen him cry before.
Your mother’s life ended there in that hospital because she had chest pain in the wrong neighborhood. You, sixteen years old, and your father had driven her to the closest medical center, where they ruled out a heart attack and asked her to leave. No insurance, they said, try Harbor View for further care. An orderly who thought herself quite benevolent let you borrow a wheelchair. Somehow you got your mother in the car. She may or may not have been breathing when you reached Harbor View. Aortic dissection, they said, at time of death.
After that, your father vowed never to be poor and powerless again. He didn’t state it out loud, but you knew. Every decision he made from that moment till now, though patient dumping became illegal and he secured insurance and built a thriving business, has been colored by the devastation of that day.
From behind the counter, he looks pleadingly at you by the Golden Temple wheat-flour sacks. “Okay, Papa. Enough,” you say.
But what’s Prem’s excuse? You can’t find an explanation for his bizarre life perspective. The only option left for you, obviously, is to go to Minnesota. Your bua who lives there has been urging you to visit. You do not intend to spend a full two months with your father’s sister, but then you meet Mikesh. He has nice hair. You enjoy his company, and your father enjoys that you enjoy it. Together, you laugh a lot and he takes you to a bunch of lakes. By the time you return to Edison, you are done with Prem.
You pour yourself into the family business with renewed excitement for ordering Bournvita malted health drink and negotiating the bulk price of incense. You are fulfilled, happy to be making a difference in your father’s life and in the lives of your customers. You work long hours in the store but make sure to spend time with friends along the way. Sometimes you go with them to Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant to enjoy the baffling ice cream. You keep up with the latest Hindi movies, participating in the worldwide mania for DDLJ and witnessing the advent of the triple Khans at first with suspicion, then with applause.
In time, the store runs itself, signaling to you, fresh out of Rutgers with a degree in business administration and a GPA-padding minor in Hindi, that it has entered the growth stage of its life cycle. You must decide whether to expand or to remain stable and profitable, allowing you to partially disengage and pursue other interests.
You disengage.
You enjoyed establishing and building up India America Grocers with your father, more than you’d expected, but it is his store. It’s time you created something of your own, something so big and so remarkable that generations to come would scarcely believe that such a business as this originated on this earth. Much as in Rocky IV, which Mikesh rented and made you watch twice and which you ended up quite liking for its motivational soundtrack and discernible real-life impact on the Cold War, you follow Rocky’s example after Apollo dies and resolve to act. The action you take is steeped in hair. For years you have already been ironing ladies’ tresses out of a makeshift beauty parlor in your father’s bedroom, but now you expand your offerings: haircuts, hair coloring, updos, perms, every conceivable breed of waxing. The affluent auntie set, first from beyond King’s Court and then beyond that, comes in droves. You set your rates so low, they forgo fancy, legitimate salons in favor of your cheap, illegitimate one. And your most in-demand service, facial-hair threading, yields the proverbial line out the door and a near-continuous logjam at the entrance to Building 5.
As all this capitalist initiative is unfolding in your father’s bedroom, Sachin Tendulkar’s storied cricket career is unfolding in the drawing room. Both you and your father are captivated on a semiregular basis—semi because your customers will be more patient waiting for their appointments if Shah Rukh Khan is striking his signature arms-wide-open pose on your TV screen, so you turn off Sachin and turn on SRK, telling yourself it’s okay, the matches, for the most part, aren’t live anyway. Your father becomes disgruntled. You don’t blame him because in his place you would feel the same. He has earned the luxury of cricket anytime, while you are just at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey.
You pack up and move your salon and your life over to Mikesh’s, where your client list grows steadily: the usual aunties, upper-crust doctor-and lawyer-types, a growing line of American-born hirsute Desi girls. One day, an unprecedented and astonishing thing happens: a white woman comes in.
The woman is not a complete stranger who made a wrong turn on Oak Tree, panicked at the variety of Gujarati grocery stores and so darted in by mistake. Hannah Abrams is the mother of Arthur Abrams, a close friend of Mikesh’s who is also a doctor and a frequent caller at your apartment. You quite like him. He is well-groomed, affable, and always comes bearing Milano cookies. He takes more than a passing interest in your business, inquiring about overhead and asking you to explain in great detail the mechanics of threading while you watch old episodes of Three’s Company and wait for Mikesh to come home.
It is Arthur who made the appointment for his mother, who, he explains, has always struggled with her mustache. “The poor thing,” he says, “at one point it was practically a full handlebar!” You don’t know what this is exactly but understand that it isn’t good. “For years she bleached it,” Arthur continues, “but that just made her mustache look blonde. She waxed for a while, but she got burned one too many times. She went through an au naturel phase, but my dad wasn’t a fan, so she tried some sort of battery-operated device that kept cutting her. There was also this chemical thing that hurt, I think. Finally, she just began plucking. One hair at a time. Super painful, she says, and it comes in all stubbly now. Leena, help her, please,” he said with a moving blend of desperation and drama.
“And she has never tried threading?” you asked.
“Never even heard of it, I’m sure.”
“Okay, bring her here.”
Hannah Abrams does indeed have a bristly upper lip. Some spots are more woolly than wiry, and this variety of textures suggests to you that the situation is dire. “I have seen worse,” you say. Beginning with a hot towel, you move through the various stages—applying baby powder to absorb oil, showing the client how to push her tongue against the inside of her mouth to make the skin around her lips taut, twisting and pulling, twisting and pulling, ending with aloe vera and an ice cube. Hannah examines herself in the mirror. “Honey, you’re a miracle worker!” she says. “It’s all gone! And so fast!”
“The growth will be less thick next time, and it will hurt less and less until it won’t hurt at all,” you smile.
“You’re kidding, right? Arthur, tell me she’s kidding.”
“And the craziest part?” Arthur crows. “It costs practically nothing.”
“How much is practically nothing?”
“Seven dollars.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
What follows is a mother-son, all-out verbal assault on the parameters of your current business model. She is sitting on a gold mine, how can she work so hard for so little, what about expansion, doesn’t she want to tap into the untapped hairy non-Indian market? When Mikesh comes home, he joins the fray. Imagine if you actually advertised, you should write a business plan, what about investors? Of course, there are taxes, licensure, and certifications to consider, but that can be handled. They list the key selling points: no chemicals, dyes, hot wax, or sharp objects; cheaper, faster, less painful than waxing; longer lasting, no damage to skin. This could be huge.
Their excitement becomes your excitement, and you realize this is the big idea you’ve been searching for. Mainstream threading. So simple, so obvious. Low overhead, easily scalable, and hasn’t been done beyond the Indian parlors. It’s time to take your hitherto underground salon out into the legitimate light of the American shopping mall.
As soon as you can, you set up a kiosk at Woodbridge Center, then another at Menlo Park. You hand out flyers explaining what threading is. You hire a publicist to get the word out. You build a strong client base and approach more malls. You assemble a network of skilled threading specialists, unearthing them at India Day parades and Diwali garbas. In time, you expand your enterprise throughout the tristate area, then to other states, sending teams to set up the booths and recruit and train local threaders. In the span of barely a decade, the Eastern seaboard plus pockets of the Midwest and Canada are brimming with Drop Thread Gorgeous kiosks, specializing in brow shaping and mustache management. You marvel at what you’ve accomplished without the unsolicited participation of a man, beginning with a single spool of Griffin No. 40 pure cotton thread by Coats. The idea of a lifetime, right under your nose.
Though you’ve lived in Edison all these years, you haven’t really been there. You’ve been consumed by DTG, aggressively striving, meeting, traveling, grinding it out, sweating blood, or as your father puts it, overworking, overexerting. Of course, you visit him all the time at King’s Court, at the store, at the restaurants up and down Oak Tree Road. But you haven’t been entirely present until now. Your father is not well, and you decide finally to come home.
* * *
In the classic Hindi movie, the audience is sometimes alerted to the importance of a character’s reappearance by the manner of her entrance. For instance, a dramatic, slow-motion stride with a drawn-out, purposeful gait would likely signal something momentous. The billowing of the heroine’s or occasional fluffy-haired hero’s mane would almost certainly portend a significant plot point, the magnitude of which could be measured by the intensity of the waft. You glide into Building 5 one gentle spring morning looking as though you just came from a dust storm.
You notice the white walls have faded to yellow and the wood floors are not what they used to be, and you wonder when this all happened. In one corner lies a Little India newspaper and an empty bottle of Thums Up cola. Yet as you finally stop to take it all in, the sweet simplicity of those early New Jersey days comes back to you.
Not that your own living situation is glamorous. You’ve been in the same basic and efficient apartment all these years, and your car is not the kind that elicits any particular admiration. Because of this and because you prefer to keep out of the limelight, seeing no need to advertise your success, your father doesn’t completely grasp how big your business has grown. For him, it can’t possibly be prosperous if you’ve never even been on the news or in the paper or in Time magazine. At this stage of his life and yours, and now with his illness, you want to assure him that you’ve done well and he does not have to worry about you. So you allow for a bit of publicity.
