The day he learned that Leena was unattached should have been a pivotal frame in the storyboard of his Hindi movie life, Prem thought, a radiant and resplendent panel standing apart from the rest, if only his to-do list didn’t look like this:
Make sure beloved is not stabbed in the eye.
Track down CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Plan extraordinary Bollywood Gold Awards program.
Declare undying love.
The first three were the more pressing matters. The fourth, the most important, would just have to wait. He was running errands for the show up and down Oak Tree, a job typically handled by his assistant but which Prem took upon himself as Pankaj was occupied with hiring covert-ops bodyguards. The smoky air of recent weeks had returned, accompanied now by a dull haze. Prem felt the burn of it in his throat, which reminded him again of another place. Maybe the stars, scheduled to arrive in just over a month, would find it comforting.
The usual arrangements, the ones that had been the same for Lights! Camera! Indian! and Masala in the Meadowlands, were already in place: an event space, AV, accommodations for the stars, biryani for Salman, etc., but some of the elements unique to awards shows still remained to be dealt with. A sit-down dinner was to be catered by Beena, for which the banquet hall would provide most of the infrastructure, but it was up to Prem to make it glamorous, with stage and hall décor and something called a tablescape. He would hire a company for this and a separate one for stage management and artistic direction. Apparently, a long carpet was required, and rather than renting a red one, he would commission an orange one with gold polka dots from Hayden’s Impossibly Long Carpets, the best impossibly long carpet maker in the state. There was also the matter of getting the Gold Spot statuettes made and the little cards and envelopes printed with winners’ names. Wine and spirits, sodas, waters, but mostly wine needed to be procured. And most bafflingly, fancy bags of free things had to be assembled for attendees, some of whom were among the wealthiest people in the world.
After he picked up one hundred fitness trackers from Crazy Aadi’s Electronics, Prem headed to his office. He slept there most nights over the coming weeks, partially because the work required it and partially to avoid the constant King’s Court chatter about Leena and her apocryphal engagement. Various vendors came in and out of his office daily with updates on seating charts, programs, videography, photography, movie clips, winners’ acceptance music, presenters, interstitial entertainment, and Hollywood’s Richard Gere. Once numbers one and three on Prem’s list seemed to be coming along nicely—Pankaj having secured the best elite ex-military protection services money could buy—it was time to focus on the second item.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN proved a more elusive mark than Prem had anticipated. He tried the CNN headquarters general number and the medical desk number, both of which were dead ends. Next, he tried the CNN tip hotline but was rebuffed with extreme prejudice. After exhausting all expected CNN possibilities, he moved on to Indian ones, first contacting every Gupta he’d ever come across to uncover a relative, then digging around for Dr. Gupta’s parents’ numbers, both to no avail. He thought of tracking down old medical school batchmates to get to him that way and managed to get through to one, but when he had her on the line, he panicked and hung up. As a last resort, he considered inflicting some kind of medical mystery upon himself, even spending time poring through medical tomes at the library in the hopes of attracting the doctor’s journalistic attention. But in the end, he couldn’t figure out how.
Biking from the library to his office one evening, he stopped by India America Grocers under the pretense of inquiring about Hemant’s recuperation, guessing correctly that Leena might be there in his stead. She was going through the aisles and straightening up sections that had been disturbed through the course of the day. Prem caught her smiling widely, her face lighting up when she saw him, then dimming as she regained her composure. For that moment, the whole of the week’s troubles went away. They greeted each other and spoke about Hemant’s health, then steered clear of topics to do with their actual lives, sticking with talk of groceries.
“When did they come out with Maaza lychee?” Prem asked, turning juice bottles so their labels faced uniformly outward.
Leena was crouching by the Punjabi biscuits, which were in a state of disarray. “There is guava now too,” she answered.
“Do people buy guava over mango and lychee?”
Leena thought for a second. “No, actually, they don’t.”
Both smiled and kept tidying. The bell above the door, the same one that had tinkled when he first entered with his pompom hat all those years ago, announced the arrival of a customer whom Leena went to tend to. Being there again with her at the store where his life had really begun, Prem understood that this was where he wanted it to end as well.
“I see you have a new employee,” the customer, a prying older auntie-type, said, eyeing Prem.
“Him? Oh ya, his Superstar business was not paying enough so he took a second job,” Leena teased, holding back a smile while ringing up a price adjustment on toor dal. Prem’s heart did a tiny flip. It was the first time she’d mentioned she knew anything about what he had been up to all these years.
The nosy auntie tsked disapprovingly at Leena. “See you, Prem,” she said, collecting her bag of discount lentils. “Looking forward to the awards function.”
Leena swept the floor and locked up soon after that, and Prem walked her to Building 5. She had moved out of the apartment she had shared for so many years with Mikesh, living now with her father to take care of him for the time being. She had offered to move him to a bigger, fancier place, she told Prem, but he had refused. “What would I do there?” he’d said.
Before Prem turned to go, he had an idea. “I forgot, I need cardamom.”
“Should we go back? It’s no trouble,” she said.
“No, no, be with your father,” Prem said. “I’ll come again tomorrow.”
That night, he slept on his mattress at King’s Court, smelling faintly of the store’s tangy garam masala aroma. To him, it was the smell of her.
* * *
The next few weeks continued like that for Prem, picking up Bollywood Gold–branded tumblers and meeting with media sponsors in the mornings, hunting Dr. Gupta in the afternoons, and stocking high shelves and organizing heavy sacks of rice for Leena in the evenings. Every night he claimed to have forgotten a different item—kidney beans, black pepper cashews, dahi vada raita masala—making sure to name only shelf-stable items so as to avoid cultivating a rotten stench in his office. They spoke easily about Iraq and the upcoming Kal Ho Naa Ho, the refreshingly tart and cloudy Limca, India’s original lemon-lime soft drink, and, most recurrently and disgustedly, India’s unforgivable recent collapse at the ICC Cricket World Cup finals. Prem told her how Giants Stadium was booked for half the summer by Bruce Springsteen, and Leena told him the Pine Barrens were on fire again.
“Again?” said Prem. “When were they before? And what are the Pine Barrens?” It turned out the veil of smoke that had shrouded New Jersey of late was coming from a wildfire to the south, in the state’s wooded heartland among the highways.
“I know I shouldn’t say this,” Leena said, almost at a whisper, “but I like the smell of it.”
Prem dropped a bag of Lay’s Magic Masala potato chips and appeared horrorstruck. “How can you even think such a thing? Aren’t people’s houses burning down? And trees being destroyed?” Visibly appalled by her own insensitivity, Leena began to backpedal from her comment, but stopped when she noticed Prem smiling. “I like the smell too,” he said.
She feigned indignance, then laughed, and he loved that it was the same laugh from before. That evening, he decided to forget a packet of mustard seeds, and the next evening, she had it ready for him at the counter. When an older couple in search of breath-freshening digestive mukhwas of the sweet fennel variety came in, Prem helped them find it, after which they tried to give him a dollar for his help.
“No, no, take it,” the husband said when Prem refused the money.
Thinking she had figured out the problem, the wife interceded. “His salary must be extremely high, you know, because his boss is a millionaire.” She turned to Leena at the counter. “You are a millionaire, no?”
“You are a millionaire?” the husband said, his eyebrows raised. “Then, why your dad is still selling eggplant and radish?”
Prem could see Leena was becoming irritated. “He likes selling eggplant and radish,” she said.
“Fine, that’s fine,” the wife said. “But why are you here? Can’t you hire ten people?”
“Miss, how many bottles of mukhwas would you like?” Prem said.
“Miss? No one calls me miss anymore, ever,” the wife said, visibly delighted and returning her attention to Prem.
“That cannot be true,” Prem said with exaggeratedly fake disbelief. “You look like his daughter! Are you his daughter?”
Blushing now, the woman smiled and continued eyeing Prem as her husband paid the bill. “If you still want a doctor,” she said to Leena as they were leaving, “you can meet my Raju. You remember my Raju?”
Taking inventory of the refrigerated foods after the couple was gone, Leena asked Prem, “How did you do that?”
“Do what?” Prem looked down from his place removing expired Bedekar pickle bottles from a shelf.
