A tall, sturdy woman with a thick braid came rushing out from what Prem gathered to be the only bedroom. “What is this?” she said, looking back and forth between Prem and her brother.
“New paying guest,” her husband said. He pointed at Prem with the hot roti tongs. “He is Prem and he can pay.”
Amarleen studied Prem’s face and attire, pausing at the hole in his jeans. “You can pay?” she said.
“Ya,” Prem said. He dug his hands in his pockets and added, “I’m thinking of buying some gold chains too.”
Amarleen’s scowl mutated into the broadest, most frighteningly yellow smile he had ever seen. “Do you like gobi? Sit, have gobi. Iqbal!” she yelled at her husband who was standing right next to her. “Gobi for Prem.”
She tugged Prem’s sleeve, guiding him to an empty mattress. “This will be yours.” She nudged him to sit and plopped down beside him. “Iqbal! Gobi!”
“Soft mattress.” Prem pressed down on the mattress with his palm until, he was pretty sure, he felt the floor.
Iqbal handed Prem a plate of his spicy cauliflower then turned to his wife. “Are you sharing him or keeping him for yourself only?”
With unbridled apathy, Amarleen used her nose to point to her various boarders. “That is Gopal and that is Mohan. That one with no chin, he is Deepak. Sitting on that side with too much hair coming out from his shirt is Lucky.” The four men, each with his own mattress, dispensed a series of nods, grunts, and hellos, neither particularly friendly nor particularly unfriendly. Amarleen’s assessment of Deepak’s chin was harsh in Prem’s estimation, but her portrayal of Lucky’s bountiful chest hair was unfortunately accurate. Prem nodded back.
“These other ones,” Amarleen said, referring to a row of five men with varying dimensions of mustache sitting against a wall, “they are paying guests upstairs but come to eat the dinner here like a bunch of loafers.”
“We give you money for the dinner,” one of the loafers protested.
Harbhajan made a plate for himself and sank into a mattress next to Gopal. “Maybe I will sleep here tonight.”
“No, no, you have to go home to your angry family,” Amarleen said. She seemed to have shifted closer to Prem on the mattress, and he wondered when that had happened.
A very fair woman on TV was reporting a story about something serious in Paris, and a segment of the young men debated whether or not she was attractive. “What do you think?” Lucky—formerly Lakhvir—directed his question to Prem, and the entire room turned to look at him as if awaiting the verdict in the 1960 suspense thriller Kanoon, in which Kailash, played affectingly by Rajendra Kumar, defends an innocent man in the murder of a moneylender who was actually killed by the judge presiding over the trial, who was, coincidentally, also Kailash’s prospective father-in-law.
Prem adjusted his position on the mattress several times. He wasn’t sure why the issue had become so heated or what kind of answer would be regarded as favorable, so he stated his actual opinion. “You know, I don’t know, she’s okay, but maybe she has big teeth?”
The room burst into inexplicable anarchy. Mohan punched a pillow and Iqbal brandished his tongs.
“This is what I said!” Deepak, who sported a gold incisor, waved a roti in the air. “Monstrous teeth!”
“But the golden hair!” Lucky was impassioned on this point. “You would not touch her hair because you are scared of her teeth?”
“She seems nice,” Harbhajan said.
“You look like Shashi Kapoor!” Amarleen blurted out to Prem.
“Wife, control yourself!” Iqbal said.
“The teeth I am finding tolerable, but the nose!” an upstairs paying guest said. “The nose is too small, it is like a bug.”
“Shashi Kapoor has a blonde wife,” Harbhajan said.
“Jessica!” another upstairs paying guest said.
“Jennifer,” Prem said, glad to contribute something.
When the majority had regained their composure, Mohan asked Prem, “Hey, man, where you from? What you are doing here?”
Prem rubbed the back of his neck. He did not want to go into the distressing details of how he came to be in Edison. He was, himself, still confounded by the turn of events. Sitting there in King’s Court on a mattress with Amarleen, he could not in actual fact say what he was doing here. “Delhi,” he said finally, “but there was nothing for me to do there, so.”
Much of the room nodded silently. Prem was relieved that the less than upbeat topic of unemployment in the homeland brought to an abrupt end the discussion of his background, but Mohan, chewing on a pinky fingernail, eyed Prem. He was wearing a grayish-blue one-piece uniform with “Exxon” emblazoned on the front, and his hair was rather straight and shaggy for an Indian person. Prem couldn’t tell if his expression was one of curiosity, puzzlement, or antagonism. “So?” Mohan said.
“So, you know, everything is, you know, such a mess there. Roads, schools, hospitals,” Prem said. Before adding the thing he hoped would divert the conversation altogether, he looked tentatively from Harbhajan to Iqbal, then said, “Even the post office.” As if opening the gates of the Bhakra Nangal Dam, Prem’s words unleashed a torrent of tears from Amarleen, who seemed to harbor a hatred of the Indian Department of Posts. She began to wail and her giant husband knelt in front of her so she could cry on his shoulder. He handed Prem his tongs.
“Nothing reaches!” Amarleen said. “They open your boxes and keep what they want like it is a shopping bazaar!”
Deepak stuffed most of a roti in his mouth and slid over to Prem’s mattress. Still chewing, he whispered to Prem the traumatic story of a toaster oven and power adapter that Amarleen had parceled to her sister Simarleen as a wedding gift. The oven, a General Electric Ultra, was a wildly extravagant token meant to demonstrate to the sister their profound sorrow at being unable to attend the marriage festivities. Tragically, it never reached its destination. Though Amarleen insisted during several costly, static-ridden phone calls that she had sent it and could not afford to send a replacement, Simarleen and her new husband stopped speaking to Amarleen and Iqbal and, according to Harbhajan, had no intention of resuming relations until another toaster was sent.
“My sister’s oven is warming the postal director’s chutney veg toast right now,” Amarleen said before resuming her sobbing.
“No, no,” Iqbal comforted. “It is four a.m. in Ludhiana.”
Deepak concluded his account in the same muffled tones, though everyone could hear him plainly. “And she cannot send another oven even if they find the cash because what if the post-wallas take it again?” he said. “They cannot allow the Indian post office to destroy her will to live.”
This let loose a new wave of anguish from Amarleen, and by now, Iqbal was bawling as well. Prem felt terrible, but he hadn’t been able to come up with another way to divert attention from himself. He stood and brought his plate and the tongs to the sink. Harbhajan, who was about to leave, blocked Prem’s path. “What kind of move was that, man?” He narrowed his eyes. “I am watching you.”
That night, after Iqbal and Amarleen, with their unique variety of volume, flirtation, and lament, had retired to their room and the upstairs paying guests had dispersed, Prem was left to make the acquaintance of his new roommates Mohan, Lucky, Deepak, and one whose name he couldn’t remember. It was the exact scenario that had crippled him his entire life, being left alone with peers to make a positive impression and be cool and normal. On the many occasions in which he failed to do this, well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning people had urged him to “have confidence” and “don’t be shy.” Well-adjusted people said the stupidest, most unhelpful things.
“They are crazy, but decent,” Deepak said of their landlords while peeling a banana.
Prem looked around at the mattresses, the onions, the small windows, and the Zenith TV. “So you guys like it here?”
The one whose name he didn’t remember shrugged. “Is okay.”
“Okay only?” Mohan, who had been fully reclined under his blanket, sat up, visibly angered. “You get the cheap place for sleeping, warm food, you can walk to the job. What more you need, huh?”
