Oh no, not again -
Yes again -
Krishna and the gopis, village belle at the well…
And the menu -
Oh no, not again -
Yes, again -
Tikka masala, tandoori grill, navrattan vegetable curry, dal makhni, pappadum. Said Harish-Harry: "Find your market. Study your market. Cater to your market." Demand-supply. Indian-American point of agreement. This is why we make good immigrants. Perfect match. (In fact, dear sirs, madams, we were practicing a highly evolved form of capitalism long before America was America; yes, you may think it’s your success, but all civilization comes from India, yes).
But was he underestimating his market? He didn’t care.
The customers – poor students, untenured professors – filled up at the lunch buffet, "ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR $5.99," tottered out overcome by the tipsy snake charmer music and the heaviness of the meal.
To add up the new numbers that came clinking in, Harish-Harry’s wife arrived on Sunday mornings after she had washed her hair. A horsetail of sopping tresses, bound loosely in a gold ribbon from a Diwali fruit-and-nut box, dripped onto the floor behind.
"Arre, Biju… to sunao kahani," she always said, "batao… what’s the story?"
But it didn’t matter that he had no story to tell, because she went immediately to the ledgers kept under a row of gods and incense sticks.
"Hae hae," her husband laughed with pleasure, diamond and gold glints coming forth on the black velvet of his pupils, "You can’t make a fool of Malini. She get on the phone, she get the best deal of anybody."
It had been Malini who had suggested the staff live down below in the kitchen.
"Free housing," Harish-Harry told Biju.
By offering a reprieve from NYC rents, they could cut the pay to a quarter of the minimum wage, reclaim the tips for the establishment, keep an eye on the workers, and drive them to work fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-hour donkey days. Saran, Jeev, Rishi, Mr. Lalkaka, and now Biju. All illegal. "We are a happy family here," she said, energetically slapping vegetable oil on her arms and face, "no need for lotions-potions, baba, this works just as well."
Biju had left the basement in Harlem one early morning when the leaves of the scraggly tree outside were an orange surprise, supple and luminous. He had one bag with him and his mattress – a rectangle of foam with egg crate marking rolled into a bundle and tied with string. Before he packed, he took one more look at his parents’ wedding photo that he had brought from India, the color leaching out; it was, by now, a picture of two serious ghosts. Just as he was about to go, Jacinto, who always appeared for his rent at the right moment, came around the corner: "Adios adios," gold tooth flashing a miner’s delight.
Biju looked back for the last time at that facade of former respectability deteriorating. In the distance stood Grant’s tomb like a round gray funeral cake with barbarous trim. Closer, the projects were a dense series of bar graphs against the horizon.
At the Gandhi Café, amid oversized pots and sawdusty sacks of masalas, he set up his new existence. The men washed their faces and rinsed their mouths over the kitchen sink, combed their hair in the postage stamp mirror tacked above, hung their trousers on a rope strung across the room, along with the dishtowels. At night they unrolled their bedding wherever there was room.
The rats of his earlier jobs had not forsaken Biju. They were here, too, exulting in the garbage, clawing through wood, making holes that Harish-Harry stuffed with steel wool and covered with bricks, but they moved such petty obstructions aside. They were drinking milk just like the billboards told them, eating protein; vitamins and minerals spilled out of their invincible ears and claws, their gums and fur. Kwarshikov, beri beri, goiter (that in Kalimpong had caused a population of mad toad throated dwarves to roam the hillside), such deficiency disorders were unknown to such a population.
One chewed Biju’s hair at night.
"For its nest," said Jeev. "It’s expecting, I think."
They took to creeping up and sleeping on the tables. At daybreak they shuffled back down before Harish arrived, "Chalo, chalo, another day, another dollar."
Toward his staff Harish-Harry was avuncular, jocular, but he could suddenly become angry and disciplinary. "Shuddap, keep shut," he’d say, and he wasn’t above smacking their heads. But when an American patron walked through the door, his manner changed instantly and drastically into another thing and a panic seemed to overcome him.
"Hallo Hallo," he said to a pink satin child smearing food all over the chair legs, "Ya givin your mom too much trouble, ha ha? But one day ya make her feel proud, right? Gointa be a beeeg man, reech man, vhat you say? Ya vanna nice cheekan karry?" He smiled and genuflected.
Harish-Harry – the two names, Biju was learning, indicated a deep rift that he hadn’t suspected when he first walked in and found him, a manifestation of that clarity of principle which Biju was seeking. That support for a cow shelter was in case the Hindu version of the afterlife turned out to be true and that, when he died, he was put through the Hindu machinations of the beyond. What, though, if other gods sat upon the throne? He tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he himself couldn’t tell which one of his selves was the authentic, if any.
It wasn’t just Harish-Harry. Confusion was rampant among the "haalf ‘n’ haf" crowd, the Indian students coming in with American friends, one accent one side of the mouth, another the other side; muddling it up, wobbling then, downgrading sometimes all the way to Hindi to show one another: Who? No, no, it was not they pretending to be other than who and what they were. They weren’t the ones turning their back on the greatest culture the world has ever seen…
And the romances – the Indian-White combination, in particular, was a special problem.
The desis entered feeling very ill at ease and the waiters began to smirk and sneer, raising their eyebrows to show them what they thought.
"Hot, medium, or mild?" they asked. "Hot," the patrons said invariably, showing off, informing their date they were the unadulterated exotic product, and in the kitchen they laughed, "Ha ha," then suddenly the unadulterated anger came out, "sala!"
The evildoers bit into the vindaloo -
And that vindaloo – it bit them back.
Faces smarting, ears and eyes burning, tongues becoming numb, they whimpered for yogurt, explaining to the table, "That is what we do in India, we always eat yogurt for the balance…"
The balance, you know…
You know, you know -
Hot cool, sweet sour, bitter pungent, the ancient wisdom of the Ayurveda that can grant a person complete poise…
"Too hot?" Biju would ask, grinning.
Weeping, "No, no."
There was no purity in this venture. And no pride. He had come home to no clarity of vision.
Harish-Harry blamed his daughter for rattling his commitment. The girl was becoming American. Nose ring she found compatible with combat boots and clothes in camouflage print from the army-navy surplus.
His wife said, "All this nonsense, what is this, give her two tight slaps, that’s what…"
"Good you did like that," he had said, but slaps had not worked. "You go, girl!" he said, trying to rise, instead, to the occasion of his daughter being American. "You GO, gurllll!!!" But that didn’t work either. "I didn’t ask to be born," she said. "You had me for your own selfish reasons, wanted a servant, didn’t you? But in this country, Dad, nobody’s going to wipe your ass for free."