In Kalimpong, the cook was writing, "Dear Biju, can you please help…" Last week the MetalBox watchman had paid him a formal visit to tell the cook about his son, big enough now to get a job, but there were no jobs. Could Biju help him across to America? The boy would be willing to start at a menial level but of course a job in an office would be best. Italy would also be all right, he added for good measure. A man from his village had gone to Italy and was making a good living as a tandoori cook.
At first the cook was agitated, upset by the request, felt a war in him between generosity and meanness, but then…: "Why not, I will ask him, very difficult, mind you, but there is no harm in trying."
And, he began to feel a tingle – the very fact the watchman had asked! It reestablished Biju in his father’s eyes as a fine-suited-and-booted-success.
They sat outside his quarter and smoked; and it felt good to be two old men sitting together, talking of young men. The deadly nightshade was blooming, giant glowing bell flowers, white and starched, sinister and spotless. A star came forth and a lost cow wandered slowly by in the dusk.
So, the further to bolster his son and his own pride, the cook wrote on the blue airmail form: "Dear beta, please see if you can help the MetalBox watchman’s son."
He went to bed snug and glad, only at one moment waking in terror at a thud, but it was just the lost cow that had come back up through the ravine and was trying to push her way in out of the rain. He chased her out, brought back the thought of his son, and thus reconnected with his peace, returned to sleep.
A petition improved your status.
The green card, the green card -
Saeed applied for the immigration lottery each year, but Indians were not allowed to apply. Bulgarians, Irish, Malagasys – on and on the list went, but no, no Indians. There were just too many jostling to get out, to pull everyone else down, to climb on one another’s backs and run. The line would be stopped up for years, the quota was full, overfull, spilling over.
At the bakery, they called the immigration hotline as soon as the clock struck 8:30 and took turns holding the receiver for what might be an all-day activity of line holding.
"What is your status now, sir? I can’t help you unless I know your current status."
They put down the phone hurriedly then, worried that immigration had a superduper zing bing beep peeping high-alert electronic supersonic space speed machine that could
transfer
connect
dial
read
trace the number through to their -
Illegality.
Oh the green card, the green card, the -
Biju was so restless sometimes, he could barely stand to stay in his skin. After work, he crossed to the river, not to the part where the dogs played madly in hanky-sized squares, with their owners in the fracas picking up feces, but to where, after singles night at the synagogue, long-skirted-and-sleeved girls walked in an old-fashioned manner with old-fashioned-looking men wearing black suits and hats as if they had to keep their past with them at all times so as not to lose it. He walked to the far end where the homeless man often slept in a dense chamber of green that seemed to grow not so much from soil as from a fertile city crud. A homeless chicken also lived in the park. Every now and then Biju saw it scratching in a homey manner in the dirt and felt a pang for village life.
"Chkchkchk," he called to it, but it ran away immediately, flustered in the endearing way of a plain girl, shy and convinced of the attractions of virtue.
He walked to where the green ran out into a tail of pilings and where men like himself often sat on the rocks and looked out onto a dull stretch of New Jersey. Peculiar boats went by: garbage barges, pug-nosed tugboats with their snoots pushing big-bottomed coal carriers; others whose purpose was not obvious – all rusty cranes, cogs, black smoke flaring out.
Biju couldn’t help but feel a flash of anger at his father for sending him alone to this country, but he knew he wouldn’t have forgiven his father for not trying to send him, either.
Fifteen
In Kalimpong, the plum tree outside the clinic, watered with rotted blood from the path lab, produced so many flowers, that newlyweds had their pictures taken on a bench underneath. Disregarding one couple’s entreaties to remove himself from their photo shoot, the cook settled down at the end of the bench, donning his spectacles to read the letter from Biju that had just arrived.
"I have a new job in a bakery and the boss leaves us in complete charge…"
It was haat day in Kalimpong and a festive crowd thronged to the market in a high pitch of excitement, everyone in their best clothes.
The cook folded up the letter and put it in his shirt pocket. Feeling joyful, he descended steeply into the haat, pushing his way between bent and bowed Nepali ladies with golden nose rings dangling and Tibetan women with braids and prayer beads, between those who had walked from faraway villages to sell muddy mushrooms covered with brackish leaves or greenery, already half cooked in the sun. Powders, oils, and ganglions of roots were proffered by Lepcha medicine men; other stalls offered yak hair, untidy and rough as the hair of demons, and sacks of miniature dried shrimp with oversized whiskers; there were smuggled foreign goods from Nepal, perfumes, jean jackets, electronics; there were kukri sickles, sheets of plastic rainproofing, and false teeth.
When the cook and judge had first arrived in Kalimpong, wool caravans were still coming through, chaperoned by Tibetan muleteers in furry boots, earrings swinging, and the earthy smell of men and beasts had run a hot current against that exquisite scent of pine that people like Lola and Noni came from Calcutta to sample. The cook remembered yaks carrying over two hundred pounds of salt and, balanced on the top, rosy babies stuffed in cooking pots, chewing on squares of dried churbi cheese.
"My son works in New York," the cook boasted to everyone he met. "He is the manager of a restaurant business.
"New York. Very big city," he explained. "The cars and buildings are nothing like here. In that country, there is enough food for everybody."
"When are you going, Babaji?"
"One day," he laughed. "One day soon my son will take me."
Dried azalea and juniper lay bundled in newspaper packages. He remembered the day the Dalai and Panchen Lamas came to Kalimpong, and they had burnt this incense all along the path. The cook had been in the crowd. He was not Buddhist, of course, but had gone in a secular spirit. The muffled thunder of prayer rumbled down the mountain as the mules and horses stepped pom-pommed out of the fog, bells singing, prayer flags flying from the saddles. The cook had prayed for Biju and gone to bed feeling pious, so sparkily so that he felt clean although he knew he was dirty.
Now he walked through the greasy bus station with its choking smell of exhaust and past the dark cubbyhole where, behind a soiled red curtain, you could pay to watch on a shaking screen such films as Rape of Erotic Virgin and SHE: The Secrets of Married Life.
Nobody here would be interested in the cook’s son.
At the Snow Lion Travel Agency, the cook waited to claim the manager’s attention. Tashi was busy chatting up a tourist – he was famous for charming the Patagonia pants off foreign women and giving them an opportunity to write home with the requisite tale of amorous adventure with a sherpa. All around were brochures for the monastery trips Tashi organized, photographs of hotels built in the traditional style, furnished with antiques, many of which had been taken from the monasteries themselves. Of course he omitted the fact that the centuries-old structures were all being modernized with concrete, fluorescent lighting, and bathroom tiling.