“Get that lady off of my head.”
Prem grinned. “The auntie crowd is my crowd.”
They continued with their respective tasks in silence until Leena asked, “Why does everyone here always want to talk about money? Isn’t it impolite?”
Prem understood the situation perfectly. “They are not talking about money, they are talking about their fear.”
“Hm.” Leena went back to counting boxes of frozen cocktail samosas.
Though his daytime hours were spent working under enormous stress, the time Prem got to spend with her made these days some of the happiest he’d had since 1988. One day, as they restocked the dried fruit and nuts section, she read his palm, holding his hand and peering into it for a long time before declaring she knew nothing about palm reading. They had an uproarious laugh about it, never referring to that earlier time she’d “read” his and other palms, though he was thinking of it the whole time and hoped she was too. As the Bollywood Gold Awards neared, he presented her with two premium tickets with the understanding that she would bring her father if he was able. She accepted, and they went about their dusting and tidying of the store until he felt a yawn coming on and dropped his head down to conceal it. When he looked up, she was yawning and looked away, and he knew she had been looking at him. It was the closest he’d ever come, he realized, to experiencing the sublime. That night, he brimmed with hope as he pedaled in the moonlight back to his office, which was bursting with nonperishable Indian grocery items with which he had no plans to cook.
* * *
When Prem opened his eyes in the morning, Wristwatch stood over him, unsmiling, his arms folded. “Tiger will meet you at 12:30 at the newly opened Cheesecake Factory at the Menlo Park Mall,” he said and left. After he splashed his face with water and fully woke himself, Prem accepted that Wristwatch’s appearance was not a dream and began to panic. He had the idea to call Pankaj to reassign half the ex-Navy SEALs guarding Leena to guard him instead, but then pictured Leena alone with the canned goods and roti and thought better of it. There was nothing he could do but go to the Cheesecake Factory.
“This shopping mall,” said Tiger, already settled into an unnecessary booth with two henchmen standing guard, “is named after Thomas Edison’s lab.” She bit into a fried zucchini stick and motioned for Prem to sit.
“His pet name for the lab was Invention Factory,” she went on. “I learned this in the tour. Excellent tour. He made four hundred inventions there. Four hundred.”
Prem wasn’t sure if he was meant to respond to this, and if so, how. So he did perhaps the boldest thing he’d ever done in his life: he took a zucchini stick from Tiger’s plate.
Tiger looked at Prem as though he had murdered her mother. Her nostrils flared as she watched him eat and when he was done, she kept staring at him.
Prem maintained his cool outwardly and broke the terrifying silence. “You are probably wondering why I took your zucchini stick,” he offered. Tiger nodded very slightly and entirely unblinkingly. The henchmen had turned to face into the booth and were glaring at Prem as well.
Prem swallowed hard. “You see, Tiger, madam, miss, is it miss?”
Tiger said nothing.
“It will be important for you,” Prem said slowly and carefully, “to immediately offer your date an appetizer on Saturday.”
Tiger looked at Prem as though he had resurrected her mother. “Date? You mean, really, here, Saturday?”
“Well, not here in the Cheesecake Factory,” Prem said. “At the Gold Awards.” He was so relieved to have pleased her that he almost believed that Sanjay Gupta would really be there.
“Oh yes, brilliant, now I will not forget to offer an appetizer to the doctor, stat.” For the remainder of the meeting, Tiger ordered plate upon plate of exotic dishes for them to share, jabbering on about what to wear and what she would say and what kind of appetizers would be served. “Do one thing,” she said, dipping something called a pretzel bite into a strange bowl of cheese, “give my ticket to Wristwatch next time he comes and tell him where I have to go and all.”
“Can he come a normal way this time?” Prem asked.
“No, he cannot,” Tiger replied, on to a quesadilla now. “What was I saying? Oh yes, magical place, this Edison. You know it was called Raritan and they changed it to Edison? Good they did that. Light bulb was invented here. The motto for Edison is ‘Let There Be Light.’ Is it not perfect?”
“Yes, it is perfect.”
“Exactly, Junior Titan, exactly. You are a wise man, just like he was. Not just an inventor, but also a reinventor. I respect that. What did you think of the zucchini stick? I did not care for it.”
Prem knew that nothing had actually been resolved there; he had, in fact, made things worse. Yet he had bought himself two days to figure out a plan. “So no need for the eye-stabbing game now, correct?”
Tiger paused mid-quesadilla and looked squarely at Prem. “We shall see on Saturday.”
42
Prem went directly from the Cheesecake Factory to India America Grocers to ask Leena not to come to the show. On his way, he tried to calm himself with an illogical line of reasoning that had no relevance to the actual situation but that made sense to his frantic mind. Leena couldn’t possibly die this week because she was the heroine and he was the hero. But what if he wasn’t? What if Lucky was the hero? Or Beena, or Tiger? Where would that leave Leena? Then he would start again. Leena couldn’t possibly die this week because she was the heroine.
When he reached the store and parked his bike, he took several slow, deep breaths with the hope of composing himself, but realized he couldn’t and went in as he was. Leena was ringing up a talkative customer who wanted to discuss the smoky summer they’d been having and the imprudence of the July Fourth fireworks that had just passed. Prem lined up uncomfortably close to her and began tapping his foot, which was appreciated by no one. The Maggi Noodles packet he’d pretended to have forgotten the night before was sitting at the end of the counter.
“Goodness, she wouldn’t stop talking,” Leena laughed when her customer left. She picked up the Maggi packet and presented it to Prem with a flourish that made him want to cry. “No charge today, sir.”
“You can’t come to the show,” Prem blurted out.
“What? Did you say I can’t come to the show?”
“Yes, you see, it’s just a terrible show. Poor lighting, unpleasant dance numbers, no chairs, cold food—”
“No chairs? And why will the food be cold?” Leena was puzzled.
This approach was not yielding the result he needed fast enough. “Actually, do you have any business trip you need to do? You should go, go to Italy or Norway, I can take care of your store and father.”
“What is wrong with you? Why are you sending me to Europe?”
“You can go today even, let me check the tickets, why wait?”
Leena’s confused expression turned quickly to disbelief, then disappointment, descending rapidly toward anger. She dropped a chickpea-flour bomb of condemnation upon him with fury the likes of which he hadn’t seen since Sridevi’s “Moments of Rage” instrumental dance in 1991’s Lamhe. There were false accusations and intermittent foul words, tempered with huffing and the occasional stomp. “What kind of person are you?” she yelled in a way that signaled to Prem she was wrapping things up. “Falguni and Snigdha said you have become odd, and you know what I said? I said, No, he is different in a nice way. We all were wrong. What you are is unreliable.”
She could have said any word in that moment and the result would have been the same. Heartbreak. “Can I be more than one thing?” he said.
“No.”
Before he left, he said he forgot a Tilda Ready-to-Heat basmati-rice bag and, even though he was standing there in the store, he would come back for it much later or get it when he was taking care of the store for five or six weeks while she was in Europe.
