Nestle and Xerox were fine upstanding companies, the backbone of the economy, and Kissinger was at least a patriot. The United States was a young country built on the finest principles, and how could it possibly owe so many bills?
Enough was enough.
Business was business. Your bread might as well be left unbuttered were the butter to be spread so thin. The fittest one wins and gets the butter.
"Rule of nature," said Odessa to Baz. "Imagine if we were sitting around saying, ‘So-and-so-score years ago, Neanderthals came out of the woods, attacked my family with a big dinosaur bone, and now you give back.’ Two of the very first iron pots, my friend, and one toothsome toothy daughter from the first days of agriculture, when humans had larger molars, and four samples of an early version of the potato claimed, incidentally, by both Chile and Peru."
She was very witty, Odessa. Baz was proud of her cosmopolitan style, loved the sight of her in her little wire-rimmed glasses. Once he had been shocked to overhear some of their friends say she was black-hearted, but he had put it out of his mind.
"These white people!" said Achootan, a fellow dishwasher, to Biju in the kitchen. "Shit! But at least this country is better than England," he said. "At least they have some hypocrisy here. They believe they are good people and you get some relief. There they shout at you openly on the street, ‘Go back to where you came from.’" He had spent eight years in Canterbury, and he had responded by shouting a line Biju was to hear many times over, for he repeated it several times a week: "Your father came to my country and took my bread and now I have come to your country to get my bread back."
Achootan didn’t want a green card in the same way as Saeed did. He wanted it in the way of revenge.
"Why do you want it if you hate it here?" Odessa had said angrily to Achootan when he asked for sponsorship.
Well, he wanted it. Everyone wanted it whether you liked it or you hated it. The more you hated it sometimes, the more you wanted it.
This they didn’t understand.
The restaurant served only one menu: steak, salad, fries. It assumed a certain pride in simplicity among the wealthy classes.
Holy cow. Unholy cow. Biju knew the reasoning he should keep by his side. At lunch and dinner the space filled with young uniformed busi-nesspeople in their twenties and thirties.
"How would you like that, ma’am?"
"Rare."
"And you, sir?"
"Still mooin’."
Only the fools said, "Well done, please." Odessa could barely conceal her scorn. "Sure about that? Well, all right, but it’s going to be tough."
She sat at the corner table where she had her morning tea and aroused the men by tearing into her steak.
"You know, Biju," she said, laughing, "isn’t it ironic, nobody eats beef in India and just look at it – it’s the shape of a big T-bone."
But here there were Indians eating beef. Indian bankers. Chomp chomp. He fixed them with a concentrated look of meaning as he cleared the plates. They saw it. They knew. He knew. They knew he knew. They pretended they didn’t know he knew. They looked away. He took on a sneering look. But they could afford not to notice.
"I’ll have the steak," they said with practiced nonchalance, with an ease like a signature that’s a thoughtless scribble that you know has been practiced page after page.
Holy cow unholy cow.
Job no job.
One should not give up one’s religion, the principles of one’s parents and their parents before them. No, no matter what.
You had to live according to something. You had to find your dignity. The meat charred on the grill, the blood beaded on the surface, and then the blood also began to bubble and boil.
Those who could see a difference between a holy cow and an unholy cow would win.
Those who couldn’t see it would lose.
So Biju was learning to sear steaks.
Blood, meat, salt, and the cannon directed at the plates: "Would you like freshly ground pepper on that, sir?"
"You know we may be poor in India, but there only a dog would eat meat cooked like this," said Achootan.
"We need to get aggressive about Asia," the businessmen said to each other. "It’s opening up, new frontier, millions of potential consumers, big buying power in the middle classes, China, India, potential for cigarettes, diapers, Kentucky Fried, life insurance, water management, cell phones – big family people, always on the phone, all those men calling their mothers, all those mothers calling all their many, many children; this country is done, Europe done, Latin America done, Africa is a basket case except for oil; Asia is the next frontier. Is there oil anywhere there? They don’t have oil, do they? They must…"
The talk was basic. If anyone dared to call them Fool! they could just point at their bank accounts and let the numbers refute the accusation.
Biju thought of Saeed Saeed who still refused to eat a pig, "They dirty, man, they messy. First I am Muslim, then I am Zanzibari, then I will BE American." Once he’d shown Biju his new purchase of a model of a mosque with a quartz clock set into the bottom that was programmed, at the five correct hours, to start agitating: "Allah hu Akbar, la ilhaha illullah, wal lah hu akbar. …" Through the crackle of the tape from the top of the minaret came ancient sand-weathered words, that keening cry from the desert offering sustenance to create a man’s strength, his faith in an empty-bellied morning and all through the day, that he might not fall through the filthy differences between nations. The lights came on encouragingly, flashing in the mosque in disco green and white.
"Why do you want to leave?" Odessa was shocked. A chance like they had given him! He surely didn’t know how lucky he was.
"He’ll never make it in America with that kind of attitude," said Baz hopefully.
Biju left as a new person, a man full to the brim with a wish to live within a narrow purity.
"Do you cook with beef?" he asked a prospective employer.
"We have a Philly steak sandwich."
"Sorry. I can’t work here."
"They worship the cow," he heard the owner of the establishment tell someone in the kitchen, and he felt tribal and astonishing.