"What is a chun chun and what is a thun thun?"
"Chun chun is a tingling. Thun thun is when there is a pain going on and off."
"What do you have now? Chun chun?"
"No, THUN THUN."
The next visit. "Are you better?"
"Better, but still – "
"Thun thun?"
"No, doctor," he would say very seriously, "chun chun."
He emerged with his medicines feeling virtuous. Oh yes, he awaited modernity and knew that if you invested in it, it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.
But outside the clinic he would run into Kesang or the cleaner at the hospital or the MetalBox watchman, who would begin to declaim, "Now there is no hope, now you’ll have to dopuja, it will cost many thousands of rupees…"
Or: "I knew someone who had exactly what you are describing, never walked again…" By the time he had returned home he would have lost his faith in science and begun to howclass="underline" "Hai hai, hamara kya hoga, hai hai, hamara kya hoga?" And he’d have to go back to the clinic the next day to recover his good sense.
So, appreciating, desiring reasonableness, the cook brought in tea and fried cheese toast with chili pepper mixed into the cheese, and then sat on his stool just outside the door, keeping an eye on Sai and the new tutor, nodding approval at Gyan’s careful tone, the deliberate words that led, calculation by calculation, to an exact, tidy answer that could be confirmed by a list at the back of the text.
Foolish cook. He had not realized that the deliberateness came not from faith in science, but from self-consciousness and doubt; that though they appeared to be engrossed in atoms, their eyes latched tightly to the numbers in that room where the walls swelled like sails, they were flailing; that like the evening hour opening to deeper depths outside, they would be swallowed into something more treacherous than the purpose for which Gyan had been hired; that though they were battling to build a firmness from all that was available to them, there was reason enough to worry it was not good enough to save them.
The small correct answer fell flat.
Gyan produced it apologetically. It was anticlimactic. It would not do. Flicking it aside, the tremendous anticipation that could no longer be pinned on the sum gathered strength and advanced, leaving them gasping by the time two hours were up and Gyan could flee without looking at Sai, who had produced such a powerful effect upon him.
"It is strange the tutor is Nepali," the cook remarked to Sai when he had left. A bit later he said, "I thought he would be Bengali."
"Hm?"asked Sai. How had she looked? she was thinking. How had she appeared to the tutor? The tutor himself had the aspect, she thought, of intense intelligence. His eyes were serious, his voice deep, but then his lips were too plump to have such a serious expression, and his hair was curly and stood up in a way that made him look comic. This seriousness combined with the comic she found compelling.
"Bengalis," said the cook, "are very intelligent."
"Don’t be silly," said Sai. "Although they certainly would agree."
"It’s the fish," said the cook. "Coastal people are more intelligent than inland people."
"Who says?"
"Everyone knows," said the cook. "Coastal people eat fish and see how much cleverer they are, Bengalis, Malayalis, Tamils. Inland they eat too much grain, and it slows the digestion – especially millet – forms a big heavy ball. The blood goes to the stomach and not to the head. Nepalis make good soldiers, coolies, but they are not so bright at their studies. Not their fault, poor things."
"Go and eat some fish yourself," Sai said. "One stupid thing after another from your mouth."
"Here I bring you up as my own child with so much love and just see how you are talking to me…" he began.
That night Sai sat and stared into the mirror.
Sitting across from Gyan, she had felt so acutely aware of herself, she was certain it was because of his gaze on her, but every time she glanced up, he was looking in another direction.
She sometimes thought herself pretty, but as she began to make a proper investigation, she found it was a changeable thing, beauty. No sooner did she locate it than it slipped from her grasp; instead of disciplining it, she was unable to refrain from exploiting its flexibility. She stuck her tongue out at herself and rolled her eyes, then smiled beguilingly. She transformed her expression from demon to queen. When she brushed her teeth, she noticed her breasts jiggle like two jellies being rushed to the table. She lowered her mouth to taste the flesh and found it both firm and yielding. This plumpness jiggliness firmness softness, all coupled together in an unlikely manner, must surely give her a certain amount of bartering power?
But if she continued forever in the company of two bandy-legged men, in this house in the middle of nowhere, this beauty, so brief she could barely hold it steady, would fade and expire, unsung, unrescued, and unrescuable.
She looked again and found her face tinged with sadness, and the image seemed faraway.
She’d have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she’d be trapped forever in a place whose time had already passed.
Over the days, she found herself continually obsessed with her own face, aware that she was meanwhile whetting her appetite for something else.
But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer.
Fourteen
At 4:25 A.M., Biju made his way to the Queen of Tarts bakery, watching for the cops who sometimes came leaping out: where are you going and what are you doing with whom at what time and why?
But Immigration operated independently of Police, the better, perhaps, to bake the morning bread, and Biju fell, again and again, through the cracks in the system.
Above the bakery the subway ran on a rawly sketched edifice upheld by metal stilts. The trains passed in a devilish screaming; their wheels sparked firework showers that at night threw a violent jagged brightness over the Harlem projects, where he could see a few lights on already and some others besides himself making a start on miniature lives. At the Queen of Tarts, the grill went zipping up, the light flickered on, a rat moved into the shadow. Tap root tail, thick skulled, broad shouldered, it looked over its back sneering as it walked with a velvet crunch right over the trap too skimpy to detain it.
"Namaste, babaji," said Saeed Saeed.
Biju considered his previous fight with a Pakistani, the usual attack on the man’s religion that he’d grown up uttering: "Pigs, pigs, sons of pigs."
Now here was Saeed Saeed, and Biju’s admiration for the man confounded him. Fate worked this way. Biju was overcome by the desire to be his friend, because Saeed Saeed wasn’t drowning, he was bobbing in the tides. In fact, a large number of people wished to cling to him like a plank during a shipwreck – not only fellow Zanzibaris and fellow illegals but Americans, too; overweight confidence-leached citizens he teased when they lunched alone on a pizza slice; lonely middle-aged office workers who came by for conversation after nights of lying awake wondering if, in America – in America! – they were really getting the best of what was on offer. They told such secrets as perhaps might only be comfortably told to an illegal alien.