Though for a while he believed nothing could be more magical than the casual mastery of a Californian turning out of a Starbucks parking lot (the slumped tensionless driving style, one hand lazily swinging the wheel as the other administered hits of latte), he discovered that anything can become mundane. Fire hydrants, billboards, even the enamelled blue sky: all had shelf lives. One by one they expired.
Last to lose its aura was the TV, which was somehow more compelling than the world outside. The four benched consultants spent whole days in front of it, eating chips and salsa and trying to ignore their creeping panic. Most mornings one of them would have an interview, a tense half-hour hunched over the phone upstairs with the others trying not to listen, turning the tube up high, half hoping and half fearing that the interviewee would come back down hired. Usually as soon as the client found out he was talking to a foreign national on a temporary visa, the conversation was terminated. Victoria warned Diego she was on to him. Belle learned the truth about Jan’s pregnancy. Jerry goaded plus-sized women to fight with their love-cheat partners and Arjun spoke to three, five, seven companies. None of them wanted to employ him.
As he became more attuned to American language and economics, he realized he was living in a ‘low-income area’. In his bedroom the drone of traffic from Highway 101 was a constant presence. On the corner, listless young black and Latino men played bass-heavy music and leaned into car windows to have short conversations with the drivers. A hydrocarbon stink lay heavy in the air, and during the night the traffic hum was accompanied by police sirens and cracking sounds which, Vijay announced authoritatively, were gunshots. The idea of American poverty, especially a poverty which did not exclude cars, refrigerators, cable TV or obesity, was a new and disturbing paradox, a hint that something ungovernable and threatening lurked beneath the reflective surface of California. Arjun spent as little time as possible outside the house, convinced by his scrutiny of cable news channels that he would be putting himself in danger. Even unarmed, he found Americans physically intimidating. When he went to ‘middle-class’ areas (middle class being, he had discovered, an American word for white) he felt overwhelmed. Used to a world where everyone looked more or less like him, he found it took nerve to move through crowds in which everyone was so tall and heavy, so meaty.
During this time, the only direct contact they had with Data-bodies was through Sherry. She would park her Chevy Suburban on the street outside, arm the alarm, look around nervously and scuttle into their smell of dirty laundry and cooking oil, mispronouncing their names and bringing another set of administrative paperwork for them to sign. Everything about her seemed insufferably smug: her big hair, her gold S-H-E-R-R-Y necklace, her matching pink lipgloss and nail varnish, even the album of family pictures she carried in her purse. Her very averageness seemed arrogant, the bland superiority of a person whose access to the US labour market was a birthright.
They could have forgiven Sherry her choice of accessories had she not exuded such contempt for them. ‘How unusual,’ she would say, confronted with some unpalatable desi tic like Rohit chewing paan parag or Vijay singing along to bhajans. At least once a visit she would mention that her husband Bryan was having business difficulties, the subtext being that this was the only reason she would demean herself by pandering to their personal needs. ‘When she looks at us,’ Salim complained, watching out of the window as she started her car, ‘she sees a bunch of starving coolies. The bitch thinks she’s doing us a favour just by coming here. She might as well have “gift of the people of the United States of America” stencilled on her butt.’
But they had to be nice to Sherry. She was their only source of information, their sole reference point in the vast flat sprawl of the valley. And, though they didn’t like to admit it, her visits were, next to the afternoon Baywatch reruns, the highlight of their empty weeks.
Arjun would sit on the phone to India, horribly aware of the cost. The family would want to know everything, but somehow their questions only pushed them further away from him. Where is the mandir, asked his mother. Are you drinking bottled water? Are you cold? His father wanted to know about the ‘corporate culture’ of his workplace. It was impossible to tell the truth. ‘Yeah, Sis, Oracle is great. The work is very challenging. No, I didn’t spot anyone yet. Yes, if I see him I’ll get his autograph. No, not at all, I’m just kind of wiped out, that’s all.’
Finally, just when he could bear his state of suspended animation no more, something gave. Within the space of three days Salim and Rohit were placed with companies, one in Los Altos, the other in Menlo Park. In the little house off 101, there was Johnnie Walker and Häagen-Dazs. Two days later it was Arjun’s turn. The employer was a fish processor based somewhere called Portland, Maine. They needed someone to modify a database. They wanted him to start Monday. That, he told them, was no problem.
Until he saw the ticket and realized he was flying via Chicago, he thought ‘main’ must be like ‘central’ or ‘downtown’, and meant that the job was based in the business district of the city in Oregon. But Databodies had subcontracted his services to a bodyshop on the East Coast. Both sets of middlemen would be taking a percentage. He didn’t bother arguing.
As he packed his sweaters, he was uncomfortably aware of the TV booming out from downstairs: Vijay, the last man, mourn-fully watching a cookery show. Arjun had not known what to say.
‘I’m moving,’ he told his father on the phone.
‘You are being promoted already?’ Mr Mehta’s voice was thick with pride.
‘Yes,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m heading up a software development team in Portland. Troubleshooting.’
‘Troubleshooting? My boy. Wait a moment while I tell your mother.’
Eventually his mother stopped sobbing and passed the receiver to Priti, who squealed and made a static sound with her mouth that he guessed was supposed to be a crowd applauding. He had wanted to be honest with her, but she seemed so entranced by her image of his American life that in phone call after phone call he had never had the heart. She was so happy for him that he had even made up a few things to please her. Keanu Reeves in a Pizza Hut. An earth tremor. Crazy golf. She asked him about the job, and he said it would be ‘an exciting challenge’, hearing the hollow sound of his voice as he said the words. Then she asked for his ‘other news’, and he was suddenly racked by a profound homesickness, wanting so much to be back in India that he could not speak and had to end the call. Ten minutes went by before it occurred to him that throughout their conversation she had spoken with a perfect Australian accent.
As he changed planes at O’Hare, striding from one gate to the next, he felt his dreams were finally coinciding with reality. In Portland he was put up in a Super 8 Motel, where he briefly luxuriated in clean towels, MTV, packets of non-dairy creamer and, most of all, the snow. Surreptitiously he crept outside to the parking lot and scooped a little up in his hands. His first snow. It was more or less as he had imagined, apart from the sounds: the crunch as you walked on it, the squeak when you compacted it in your fist. He took some inside, thinking he would call Priti and get her to listen, but by the time he got to the phone it had melted.