“You are right, it is very good,” the nameless one whom Prem remembered was named Gopal said, sounding cheerful and convinced. Prem wondered about the jobs they walked to. The prospect of having to find employment to secure his place on the mattress provoked in him a flash of dread.
“What kind of work do you do?”
Lucky, the lascivious-looking one with the corner mattress, laid it out for him. “Mohan and Gopal are at the petrol pump, Deepak is at Drug Fair, and me? I am busy with the ladies,” he said and popped his extra-wide collar.
“He also works at Drug Fair,” Mohan said.
“You need the job?” Gopal said. “I can get you the job at Exxon.”
“No, man, he should come to Drug Fair. He can get the discount on the razor blades.” Lucky smoothed his thin mustache. “You need to keep things trimmed for the ladies.”
Prem was depressed by his choices. A petrol pump or some kind of store where they sell drugs and razor blades. He sighed. “Exxon, I guess. Not now, but maybe later. Thanks.”
Mohan assumed an air of smug triumph, as though he and Gopal had won Prem in a custody battle.
“What, the Drug Fair is not good enough for you? You are too good for the Drug Fair?” Lucky said.
“Yes, no, I am worse than the Drug Fair,” Prem said, “I mean, I like petrol.”
The others looked at him blankly.
“The smell of it.” Prem cleared his throat. “So, where can I exchange more rupees?”
“You didn’t exchange them all in the airport? Don’t worry. Beena Joshi in 11G exchanges the money. She is giving the best rate. Why the nickels are five cents and the dimes are ten cents when the dime is the small one?” Gopal said. Prem looked to the other three, who seemed not to have registered Gopal’s question.
“You look like my dog in Jaipur,” Mohan said, studying Prem’s face.
“Your dog looks like Shashi Kapoor?” Deepak said.
“He does not look like Shashi Kapoor. What makes you think you look like Shashi Kapoor? Who do you think you are?” Lucky said.
“Nobody, no, I don’t look like Shashi Kapoor.” Prem dropped his head in his hands and gave up.
“Good. Now let me show you the toilet.”
It was a tiny, spotless bathroom with no windows and a horde of toothbrushes and tongue scrapers jammed into a steel cup next to the sink. A stack of Archie Comics was piled on the toilet tank. Prem returned to the drawing room and rummaged around in his suitcase, which was apparently too big for the apartment and would have to be downgraded to something called a duffel bag as soon as possible. In the bathroom, he added his brush to the group and grabbed a Double Digest, emerging after ten minutes wearing his kurta pajama.
“Kurta pajama and all!” Mohan said. “Did you come from the village directly?”
“Man, leave him alone,” Deepak said with a mouth full of banana. “This is his first time seeing electricity!”
“And the running water!” Lucky said.
“And plates!” Gopal said.
“There are plates in the village,” Mohan said.
Prem looked around at the assortment of T-shirts and pajamas into which the others had changed. Mohan wore a Niagara Falls shirt and Lucky’s matching top and bottom were silky and leopard-printed. In what he recognized as a pathetic attempt to regain some footing, Prem said, “I’m not from a village, your mothers are from a village.”
Gopal, who failed to sense the tone, beamed. “Yes, my mother is from Derpur village, Birbhum district, West Bengal state. She grew up in a poor but happy hut there, then married and came to Calcutta. She knows sewing.”
“Leave him alone!” Amarleen shouted from the bedroom.
When, after twenty more minutes of mocking his primitive nightclothes, they finally took turns in the bathroom and shut off the light and television and went to sleep, Prem stared at the basket of onions suspended above his head. When had he decided to stay? Or was it somehow decided for him? It occurred to him that he wasn’t panicking. He should be, he thought, but instead, he felt that he could at last rest. He pulled the blanket to his chin, turned, and nestled his cheek into the pillow, closed his eyes, and slept.
Iqbal Singh rose at 3:00 a.m. to use the toilet, a habit that had arisen naturally as a constitutional adaptation to living with four men and a wife who occupied the bathroom for large swaths of the day. He peeked into the drawing room upon hearing something. It was the new boy, talking while sleeping. Prem said quite clearly and with a note of hostility the words, “But the egg smell is so strong!” then rolled to his side. Poor guy, Iqbal thought while reading for the fifty-second time about Veronica’s rival for Archie’s affections, the sassy redheaded Cheryl Blossom. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he felt Prem would do all right here in America. Despite his awkward manner, his air of depression, and his outmoded sideburns, there was something compelling about him. The quiet ones—there was sometimes more to them than you thought.
4
“See what you think of this idea: a store that sells sweets only.” “Sweets only. Ya, man, that is good!”
“Sandesh, cham-cham, besan laddu, some kaaju katli, and peda. Jalebi later, maybe.”
“Can you have moti choor laddu? I am dying for moti choor laddu.”
“He is not opening the store tomorrow, man, relax.”
“It will do well here, no?”
“Very well. With so many of Indians?”
It did do very well, eight years later, when Gopal opened Gopal’s Bengali Sweet House and sold hundreds of laddu each week, thousands around Diwali time. Even after several other sweets vendors set up shop along Oak Tree Road, Gopal’s store continued to thrive because the burgeoning Indian population required an ever-increasing supply of sweets and because Gopal’s kaaju katli was the best. It was only after Bengali Bob’s Sweets Palace opened directly across the street that Gopal’s Bengali Sweet House suffered a dip in sales. But he recouped by adding cross-country shipping to his offerings, which eventually necessitated the opening of a second location.
Gopal was not the only resident of King’s Court with entrepreneurial tendencies; most people there harbored a ferocious dream. In 13A, Mrs. Mehra aspired to launch a jewelry store specializing in heavy twenty-four-carat gold, diamond-encrusted wedding sets to meet the needs of brides and their frazzled mothers throughout New Jersey. In 9D, Nitin “Nathan” Kothari, passionate in tight polo shirts that strained at the paunch, was cooking up a plot to start a travel agency, while in 16J, Raghava Sai Shankara Subramanya had plans for a Dosa Hut. None of this was idle woolgathering. Between 1982 and 1987, the number of Indian-owned businesses in America increased 120 percent, and the Indians flooding King’s Court were gearing up to join the action. These were not the doctors or engineers who had come from India in previous waves. They were the waiters, the taxi drivers, the Burger King cashiers, and the jobless, who discovered that King’s Court did not offer the glamorous American apartments about which they had dreamed. So they put up portraits of Laxmi, purveyor of wealth, and set out to make something of themselves. Their apartments became idea factories, hotbeds of ambition, and their dreams would eventually spill out onto Oak Tree Road, where they would transform an average American suburb into an extension of India.
In 3D, Lucky mulled over the possibility of a sari boutique catering to the “attractive and unattached,” and the Singhs hoped to open an electronics store that carried top-of-the-line toasters. “Do I have to have a store?” Prem asked his crowd of roommates as they drank chai prepared in a sort of cauldron by Amarleen on his first morning in America. Already the TV was on, the cassette player was blaring Kishore Kumar, and Iqbal was first in the shower, singing a sad song loudly. “I don’t really have any ideas for a store.”
“You could open a bangle-and-bindi store,” Gopal said.
