"Put it in the back, boys." The trunk opened, and "That’s all?" the voice behind the gun said in disgust. Then the car had driven off.
They waited at the corner, sweating away, my God, my God… Finally a battered van came by and they paid into the cracked open door, handed over their photographs taken according to INS requirements showing a single bared ear and a three-quarter profile, and were thumbprinted through the crack. Two weeks later, they waited once more – they waited – and waited – and… The van did not come back. The cost of this endeavor once again emptied Biju’s savings envelope.
Omar suggested they console themselves since they were in the neighborhood.
Kavafya said he would join him.
Only thirty-five dollars.
Prices not raised.
Biju blushed to remember what he had said in his hot dog days. "Smell awful… black women… Hubshi hubshi."
"It’s too hot," he said, "for me to go."
They laughed.
"Saeed?"
But Saeed didn’t have to go to whores.
He was meeting a new pooky pooky.
"What happened to Thea?" asked Biju.
"She has gone for hiking outside the city. I told her, ‘AFRICAN MEN don’t look at leaves!!’ Anyway, man, I still have one or two pooky pookies that Thea don’t know about."
"You better watch out," said Omar. "White women, they look good when they’re young, but wait, they fall apart fast, by forty they look so ugly, hair falling out, lines everywhere, and those spots and those veins, you know what I’m talking about…"
Saeed said, "Ah ah ah ha ha, I know, I know." He understood their jealousy.
At the bakery a customer found an entire mouse baked inside a sunflower loaf. It must have gone after the seeds…
A team of health inspectors arrived. They entered in the style of U.S. Marines, the FBI, the CIA, the NYPD; burst in: HANDS UP!
They found a burst sewage pipe, a hiccuping black drain, knives stored behind the toilet, rat droppings in the flour, and in a forgotten basin of eggs, single-celled organisms so comfortable they were reproducing on their own without inspiration from another.
The boss, Mr. Bocher, was called.
"The friggin’ electricity blew," said Mr. Bocher, "it’s hot outside, what the fuck are we supposed to do? "
But the same episode had occurred twice, in the days before Biju, Saeed, Omar, and Kavafya when there had been Karim, Nedim, and Jesus. The Queen of Tarts would be closed in favor of a Russian establishment.
"Fucking Russians! Crazy borscht and shit!" shouted Mr. Bocher in anger, but to no avail, and abruptly, it was all over again. "Fuck you, you fuckers," he yelled at the men who had worked for him.
"Come and visit uptown sometime, Biju man." Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.
Biju knew he probably wouldn’t see him again. This was what happened, he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway, then they vanished again. Adresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore.
Lying on his basement shelf that night, he thought of his village where he had lived with his grandmother on the money his father sent each month. The village was buried in silver grasses that were taller than a man and made a sound, shuu shuuuu, shu shuuu, as the wind turned them this way and that. Down a dry gully through the grasses, you reached a tributary of the Jamuna where you could watch men traveling downstream on inflated buffalo skins, the creatures’ very dead legs, all four, sticking straight up as they sailed along, and where the river scalloped shallow over the stones, they got out and dragged their buffalo skin boats over. Here, at this shallow place, Biju and his grandmother would cross on market trips into town and back, his grandmother with her sari tucked up, sometimes a sack of rice on her head. Fishing eagles hovered above the water, changed their horizontal glide within a single moment, plunged, rose sometimes with a thrashing muscle of silver. A hermit also lived on this bank, positioned like a stork, waiting, oh waiting, for the glint of another, an elusive mystical fish; when it surfaced he must pounce lest it be lost again and never return… On Diwali the holy man lit lamps and put them in the branches of the peepul tree and sent them down the river on rafts with marigolds – how beautiful the sight of those lights bobbing in that young dark. When he had visited his father in Kalimpong, they had sat outside in the evenings and his father had reminisced: "How peaceful our village is. How good the roti tastes there! It is because the atta is ground by hand, not by machine… and because it is made on a choolah, better than anything cooked on a gas or a kerosene stove… Fresh roti, fresh butter, fresh milk still warm from the buffalo…" They had stayed up late. They hadn’t noticed Sai, then aged thirteen, staring from her bedroom window, jealous of the cook’s love for his son. Small red-mouthed bats drinking from the jhora had swept over again and again in a witch flap of black wings.
Eighteen
"Oh, bat, bat," said Lola, panicking, as one swooped by her ear with its high-pitched choo choo.
"What does it matter, just a bit of shoe leather flying about," said Noni, looking, in her pale summer sari, as if she were a blob of melting vanilla ice cream…
"Oh shut up," said Lola.
"It’s too hot and stuffy," Lola said then, by way of apology to her sister. The monsoon must be on its way.
It was just two months after Gyan had arrived to teach Sai, and Sai had at first confused the tension in the air with his presence.
But now everyone was complaining. Uncle Potty sat limply. "It’s building. Early this year. Better get me rum in, dolly, before the old boy is maroooooned."
Lola sipped a Disprin that fizzed and hopped in the water.
When the papers, too, reported the approach of storm clouds, she became quite merry: "I told you. I can always tell. I’ve always been very sensitive. You know how I am – the princess and the pea – my dear, what can I say – the princess and the pea."
At Cho Oyu, the judge and Sai sat out on the lawn. Mutt, catching sight of the shadow of her own tail, leapt and caught it, began to whizz around and around, confused as to whose tail it was. She would not let go, but her eyes expressed confusion and beseeching – how could she stop? what should she do? – she had caught a strange beast and didn’t know it was herself. She went skittering helplessly about the garden.
"Silly girl," said Sai.
"Little pearl," said the judge when Sai left, in case Mutt’s feelings had been bruised.
Then, in a flash, it was upon them. An anxious sound came from the banana trees as they began to flap their great ears for they were always the first to sound the alarm. The masts of bamboo were flung together and rang with the sound of an ancient martial art.