They closed the window and the door, and from the floor he telephoned his apartment. "Hey Ahmed, don’t answer the phone, man, that Dooli and all them boys have come from the airport! Lock up, stay down, don’t stand, and don’t go near the window."
"Hah! Why they give them a visa? How they buy the ticket!" They could hear the voice at the other end. Then it vanished into Swahili in a potent dungform, a rich, steaming animal evacuation.
The phone rang in the bakery.
"Don’t answer," he said to Biju who was reaching for it.
When the answering machine came on, it went off.
"The tribes! They always scared of the answering machine!"
It rang again and then again. Tring tring tring tring. Answering machine. Phone down.
Again: tring tring.
"Saeed, you have to talk to them." Biju’s heart was suddenly pulsing with the anguish of the ringing. It could be the boss, it could be India on the line, his father his father -
Dead? Dying? Diseased?
Kavafya picked it up and a voice projected into the room raw and insistent with panic. "Emergency! Emergency! We are coming from airport. Emergency! Emergency! Saaeed S-aa-eed?"
He put it down and unplugged it.
Saeed: "Those boys, let them in, they will never leave. They are desperate. Desperate. Once you let them in, once you hear their story, you can’t say no, you know their aunty, you know their cousin, you have to help the whole family, and once they begin, they will take everything. You can’t say this is my food, like Americans, and only I will eat it. Ask Thea" – she was the latest pooky pooky interest in the bakery – "where she live with three friends, everyone go shopping separately, separately they cook their dinner, together they eat their separate food. The fridge they divide up, and into their own place – their own place! – they put what is left in a separate box. One of the roommates, she put her name on the box so it say who it belong to!" His finger went up in uncharacteristic sternness. "In Zanzibar what one person have he have to share with everyone, that is good, that is the right way -
"But then everyone have nothing, man! That is why I leave Zanzibar."
Silence.
Biju’s sympathy for Saeed leaked into sympathy for himself, then Saeed’s shame into his own shame that he would never help all those people praying for his help, waiting daily, hourly, for his response. He, too, had arrived at the airport with a few dollar bills bought on the Kath-mandu black market in his pocket and an address for his father’s friend, Nandu, who lived with twenty-two taxi drivers in Queens. Nandu had also not answered the phone and had tried to hide when Biju arrived on his doorstep, and then when he thought Biju had left, had opened the door and to his distress found Biju still standing there two hours later.
"No jobs here anymore," he said. "If I were a young man I would go back to India, more opportunities there now, too late for me to make a change, but you should listen to what I’m saying. Everyone says you have to stay, this is where you’ll make a good life, but much better for you to go back."
Nandu met someone at his work who told him of the basement in Harlem and ever since he had deposited Biju there, Biju had never seen him again.
He had been abandoned among foreigners: Jacinto the superintendent, the homeless man, a stiff bow-legged coke runner, who walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking, with his stiff yellow bow-legged dog, who also walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking. In the summer, families moved out of cramped quarters and sat on the sidewalk with boom boxes; women of great weight and heft appeared in shorts with shaven legs, stippled with tiny black dots, and groups of deflated men sat at cards on boards balanced atop garbage cans, swigged their beer from bottles held in brown paper bags. They nodded kindly at him, sometimes they even offered him a beer, but Biju did not know what to say to them, even his tiny brief "Hello" came out wrong: too softly, so they did not hear, or just as they had turned away.
The green card the green card. The…
Without it he couldn’t leave. To leave he wanted a green card. This was the absurdity. How he desired the triumphant After The Green Card Return Home, thirsted for it – to be able to buy a ticket with the air of someone who could return if he wished, or not, if he didn’t wish… He watched the legalized foreigners with envy as they shopped at discount baggage stores for the miraculous, expandable third-world suitcase, accordion-pleated, filled with pockets and zippers to unhook further crannies, the whole structure unfolding into a giant space that could fit in enough to set up an entire life in another country.
Then, of course, there were those who lived and died illegal in America and never saw their families, not for ten years, twenty, thirty, never again.
How did one do it? At the Queen of Tarts, they watched the TV shows on Sunday mornings on the Indian channel that showcased an immigration lawyer fielding questions.
A taxi driver appeared on the screen: watching bootleg copies of American movies he had been inspired to come to America, but how to move into the mainstream? He was illegal, his taxi was illegal, the yellow paint was illegal, his whole family was here, and all the men in his village were here, perfectly infiltrated and working within the cab system of the city. But how to get their papers? Would any viewer out there wish to marry him? Even a disabled or mentally retarded green card holder would be fine -
It was, of course, Saeed Saeed who found out about the van and took Omar, Kavafya, and Biju to Washington Heights, and there they waited on a street corner. All the shops had grills, even the little chewing gum and cigarette places. The pharmacies and liquor stores had buzzers; he saw people ringing, gaining admittance into a cage set into the shop from where you could survey the shelves and point to what you wanted, and after money had been placed in the revolving tray set into a little hole carved out of the grill and the bullet proof glass, purchased objects would be sent grudgingly around. Even in the Jamaican patty place, the lady, the patties, the callaloo and rotis, the Drinks Nice Every Time – sat behind a high-security barricade.
Still, it was jolly. Many people thronged by. Outside the Church of Zion, a preacher baptized a whole line of people in the spray of a fire hydrant. A man emerged in a Florida hibiscus shorts-and-shirt combo, thin knobby knees, crinkly pomaded hair, little square Charlie Chaplin – Hitler mustache, carrying a tape player, "Guantanamera… guajira Guantanamera. …" A pair of saucy women hailed him from the windows: "Oooo BABY! Look at them l e g s! Ooooooooo weeee! You free tonight?"
Another lady was giving advice to a younger woman who accompanied her: "Life is short, sweetheart – Put him out with the garbage! You are young, you should be happy! Poot! heem! out! weeth! de! gar-baje!"
Saeed was at home here. He lived two streets up and many people hailed him on the street.
"Saeed!"
A boy with a gold chain as fat as a bathtub attachment, his prosperity flashing out, slapped Saeed on the back…
"What does he do?" Biju asked about the boy.
Saeed laughed. "Hustling."
To further chili-pepper the occasion, Saeed regaled them with a story of how he had been helping one of the tribes move; and a car stopped while they were struggling with boxes of patched clothes, an alarm clock, shoes, a blackened pot all the way from Zanzibar thrown into the suitcase by a tearful mother – and a gun came out of the car window and a voice said: