"The food is cold," the customers complained. "Soup arrived cold! Again! The rice is cold each and every time."
"I’m also cold," Biju said losing his temper.
"Pedal faster," said the owner.
"I cannot."
It was a little after 1 a.m. when he left Freddy’s Wok for the last time, the street lamps were haloes of light filled with starry scraps of frozen vapor, and he trudged between snow mountains adorned with empty take-out containers and solidified dog pee in surprised yellow. The streets were empty but for the homeless man who stood looking at an invisible watch on his wrist while talking into a dead pay phone. "Five! Four! Three! Two! One – TAKEOFF!!" he shouted, and then he hung up the phone and ran holding onto his hat as if it might get blown off by the rocket he had just launched into space.
Biju turned in mechanically at the sixth somber house with its tombstone facade, past the metal cans against which he could hear the unmistakable sound of rat claws, and went down the flight of steps to the basement.
"I am very tired," he said out loud.
A man near him was frying in bed, turning this way, that way. Someone else was grinding his teeth.
By the time he had found employment again, at a bakery on Broadway and La Salle, he had used up all the money in the savings envelope in his shoe.
It was spring, the ice was melting, the freed piss was flowing. All over, in city cafés and bistros, they took advantage of this delicate nutty sliver between the winter, cold as hell, and summer, hot as hell, and dined al fresco on the narrow pavement under the cherry blossoms. Women in baby-doll dresses, ribbons, and bows that didn’t coincide with their personalities indulged themselves with the first fiddleheads of the season, and the fragrance of expensive cooking mingled with the eructation of taxis and the lascivious subway breath that went up the skirts of the spring-clad girls making them wonder if this was how Marilyn Monroe felt – somehow not, somehow not…
The mayor found a rat in Gracie Mansion.
And Biju, at the Queen of Tarts bakery, met Saeed Saeed, who would become the man he admired most in the United States of America.
"I am from Zanzibar, not Tanzania," he said, introducing himself.
Biju knew neither one nor the other. "Where is that?"
"Don’t you know?? Zanzibar full of Indians, man! My grandmother – she is Indian!"
In Stone Town they ate samosas and chapatis, jalebis, pilau rice… Saeed Saeed could sing like Amitabh Bachhan and Hema Malini. He sang, Mera joota hai japani.. ." and "Bombay se aaya mera dost – Oi!" He could gesture with his arms out and wiggle his hips, as could Kavafya from Kazakhstan and Omar from Malaysia, and together they assailed Biju with thrilling dance numbers. Biju felt so proud of his country’s movies he almost fainted.
Eleven
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were the days Noni tutored Sai.
The cook dropped her off and collected her at Mon Ami, continuing to the market and the post office in the meantime, and selling his chhang.
He had first started a liquor business on the side for Biju’s sake, because his salary had hardly been changed in years. His last raise had been twenty-five rupees.
"But sahib," he had begged, "how can I live on this?"
"All your expenses are paid for – housing, clothing, food, medicines. This is extra," growled the judge.
"What about Biju?"
"What about Biju? Biju must make his own way. What’s wrong with him?"
The cook, known for the fine quality of his product, would buy millet, wash and cook it like rice, then, adding yeast, would leave it to ferment overnight in hot weather, longer in winter. A day or two in a gunny sack, and when it had that sour dry buzzing flavor, he would sell it at a shack restaurant called Gompu’s. It filled him with pride to see men sitting in the steam and smoke with their bamboo mugs full of his grain topped with hot water. They sucked up the liquid, filtering out the millet with a bamboo stem for a straw – aaaaah… The cook urged his customers to keep some chhang near their beds in case they felt thirsty at night, claiming it gave strength after illness. This venture led to another, even more lucrative one as the cook made contacts in the brand-name black market and became a crucial, if small, link in the underground business of subsidized army liquor and fuel rations. His shack was an easy jungle-camouflaged detour for military trucks on their way to the officers’ mess. He stood in the bushes, waiting. The vehicles paused and quickly the crates were unloaded – Teacher’s, Old Monk, Gilby’s, Gymkhana; he carried them to his shack and later to certain merchants in town who sold the bottles. They all received a cut of the money, the cook a smidgen in the scheme of things, fifty rupees, a hundred rupees; the lorry drivers a bigger amount; the men at the mess even more; the biggest cut of all went to Major Aloo, friend of Lola and Noni, who procured for them, by similar means, their favorite Black Cat rum and cherry brandy from Sikkim.
This the cook had done for Biju, but also for himself, since the cook’s desire was for modernity: toaster ovens, electric shavers, watches, cameras, cartoon colors. He dreamed at night not in the Freudian symbols that still enmeshed others but in modern codes, the digits of a telephone flying away before he could dial them, a garbled television.
He had found that there was nothing so awful as being in the service of a family you couldn’t be proud of, that let you down, showed you up, and made you into a fool. How the other cooks and maids, watchmen and gardeners on the hillside laughed, boasting meanwhile how well they were treated by their employers – money, comfort, even pensions in special bank accounts. In fact, so beloved were some of these servants that they were actually begged not to work; their employers pleaded with them to eat cream and ghee, to look after their chilblains and sun themselves like monitor lizards on winter afternoons. The MetalBox watchman assured him that each morning he consumed a fried egg – with white toast, when white bread had been fashionable, and now that brown bread was most in vogue, with brown.
So serious was this rivalry that the cook found himself telling lies. Mostly about the past since the present could too easily be picked apart. He fanned a rumor of the judge’s lost glory, and therefore of his own, so it flamed and prospered up and down the market. A great statesman, he told them, a wealthy landowner who gave his family property away, a freedom fighter who left a position of immense power in court as he did not wish to pass judgment on his fellow men – he could not, not with his brand of patriotic zest, jail congresswallahs, or stamp out demonstrations. A man so inspiring, but brought to his knees, to austerity and philosophy, by sorrow at his wife’s death, the wife herself a martyred and religious mother of the kind that makes a Hindu weak in the knees. "That is why he sits by himself all day and every day."
The cook had never known the judge’s wife, but he claimed that his information had been handed down from the older servants in the household, and eventually, he had grown to believe his own marvelous story. It gave him a feeling of self-respect even as he picked over the vegetables being sold cheap and considered rebate melons with caving pates.