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.
Saeed was kind and he was not Paki. Therefore he was OK?
The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?
Therefore he liked Muslims and hated only Pakis?
Therefore he liked Saeed, but hated the general lot of Muslims?
Therefore he liked Muslims and Pakis and India should see it was all wrong and hand over Kashmir?
No, no, how could that be and -
This was but a small portion of the dilemma. He remembered what they said about black people at home. Once a man from his village who worked in the city had said: "Be careful of the hubshi. Ha ha, in their own country they live like monkeys in the trees. They come to India and become men."
Biju had thought the man from his village was claiming that India was so far advanced that black men learned to dress and eat when they arrived, but what he had meant was that black men ran about attempting to impregnate every Indian girl they saw.
Therefore he hated all black people but liked Saeed?
Therefore there was nothing wrong with black people and Saeed?
Or Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, or anyone else…???
This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed an awe of white people, who arguably had done India great harm, and a lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else, who had never done a single harmful thing to India.
Presumably Saeed Saeed had encountered the same dilemma regarding Biju.
From other kitchens, he was learning what the world thought of Indians:
In Tanzania, if they could, they would throw them out like they did in Uganda.
In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.
In China, they hate them.
In Hong Kong.
In Germany.
In Italy.
In Japan.
In Guam.
In Singapore.
Burma.
South Africa.
They don’t like them.
In Guadeloupe – they love us there?
No.
Presumably Saeed had been warned of Indians, but he didn’t seem wracked by contradictions; a generosity buoyed him and dangled him above such dilemmas.
He had many girls.
"Oh myeee God!!" he said. "Oh myeee Gaaaawd! She keep calling me and calling me," he clutched at head, "aaaiii… I don’t know what to do!!"
"You know what to do," said Omar sourly.
"Ha ha ha, ah ah, no, I am going crazeeeeee. Too much pooky pooky, man!"
"It’s those dreadlocks, cut them off and the girls will go."
"But I don’t want them to go!"
When pretty girls came to pick out their cinnamon buns with mine shafts of jeweled brown sugar and spice, Saeed described the beauty and the poverty of Zanzibar, and the girls’ compassion rose like leavened loaf – how they wanted to save him, to take him home and lull him with good plumbing and TV; how they wanted to be seen down the road with a tall handsome man topped with dreadlocks. "He’s cute! He’s cute! He’s cute!" they’d say, winding up tight and then wringing out their desire over the telephone to their friends.
Saeed’s first job in America had been at the Ninety-sixth Street mosque, where the imam hired him to do the dawn call to prayer, since he did a fine rooster crow, but before he arrived at work, he took to stopping at the nightclubs along the way, it seeming a natural enough progression time-wise. Disposable camera in his pocket, he stood at the door waiting to have snapshots of himself taken with the rich and famous: Mike Tyson, yes! He’s my brother. Naomi Campbell, she’s my girl. Hey, Bruce (Springsteen)! I am Saeed Saeed from Africa. But don’t worry, man, we don’t eat white people anymore.
There came a time when they began to let him inside.
He had an endless talent with doors, even though, two years ago during an INS raid, he had been unearthed and deported despite having been cheek-to-cheek, Kodak-proof, with the best of America. He went back to Zanzibar, where he was hailed as an American, ate kingfish cooked in coconut milk in the stripy shade of the palm trees, lazed on the sand sieved fine as semolina, and in the evening when the moon went gold and the night shone as if it were wet, he romanced the girls in Stone Town. Their fathers encouraged them to climb out of their windows at night; the girls climbed down the trees and onto Saeed’s lap, and the fathers spied, hoping to catch the lovers in a compromising position. This boy who once had so long dawdled on the street corner – no work, all trouble, so much so that the neighbors had all contributed to his ticket out – now this boy was miraculously worth something. They prayed he would be forced to marry Fatma who was fat or Salma who was beautiful or Khadija with the gauzy gray eyes and the voice of a cat. The fathers tried and the girls tried, but Saeed escaped. They gave him kangas to remember them by, with slogans, "Memories are like diamonds," and "Your pleasant scent soothes my heart," so that when he was relaxing in NYC, he might throw off his clothes, wrap his kanga about him, air his balls, and think of the girls at home. In two months time, back he was – new passport, new name typed up with the help of a few greenbacks given to a clerk outside the government office. When he arrived at JFK as Rasheed Zulfickar, he saw the very same officer who had deported him waiting at the desk. His heart had beat like a fan in his ears, but the man had not remembered him: "Thank God, to them we all of us look the same!"