A figure, a walking man, trudging along the margin of a wide California highway. One foot in front of the other, each pace bringing him a little closer to the point, marked with a low concrete barrier, where the Taco Bell lot ended and the Staples lot began. Beyond Staples was a Wal-Mart and beyond that a road junction. Beyond the junction, perhaps three blocks or thirty more minutes’ walk away, was a mini-mall with a Thai take-out, a dry-cleaner and the convenience store which was the pedestrian’s intended destination.
Anyone on foot in suburban California is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging. This person, whose thin frame was almost lost inside a grubby Oakland Raiders shirt, was moving too slowly to be a jogger. He appeared edgy, dispossessed. Defeat radiated from him like sweat. If the soccer moms zipping by in their SUVs registered him at all, it was as a blur of dark skin, a minor danger signal flashing past on their periphery. To the walking man, the soccer moms were more cosmological than human, gleaming projectiles that dopplered past him in a rush of noise and dioxins, as alien and indifferent as stars.
He stopped for a moment, squinting into the harsh sunlight at the way ahead. The cracked concrete lots expired in a grudging ribbon of public space, a not-quite-sidewalk that stretched away from him in a glitter of shattered windshield glass. At the Taco-Staples border he paused again, this time to fumble with his Walkman, a low-status hunk of black plastic attached to headphones with dirty foam pads: homeless audio, the type of machine the socially excluded keep on loud to drown out the voices. He replaced the batteries, untwisted the headphone flex and carried on.
*
It was July, and Arjun had been in the States for a year, a year of repeating this walk, or walks like it. To the store, wherever the store happened to be. Back from the store. To the bus-stop. Back. Long intervals, standing in skeletal vandalized shelters. Wind and silence. The California of the non-driver.
At first it had been because he did not feel confident, settled enough. Then it was because he was never in one place. More recently, now that he was desperate, now that the sense of being diminished by this environment had become a suspicion of actual physical shrinkage, it was because he no longer had the money for driving lessons.
Living his dreams was proving hard.
In retrospect, the signs were there at the start. When Sherry collected him from the airport, he had been too busy looking out of the car window to spot her fixed grin of distaste. With her business card (Sherry L. Parks, Databodies Personnel Liaison Manager) clutched in his hand, he had sat in sublime passenger-seat contentment, counting off his first McDonald’s, his first stop sign, his first highway patrol car. Even when they clattered his cases through the screen door and stepped into the house, he had been too blinkered by his expectations to notice, really notice the glum faces of the men in the living room, sitting silently around a fuzzy portable TV.
‘Hello, Vee-jay, hello, Sah-leem, hello, Row-heet,’ twittered Sherry, her mouth stretched into what Arjun would later hear the others call her ‘Mother Teresa among the lepers’ smile. No one responded. He felt embarrassed and looked down at the floor. Objects on the patterned carpet: empty soda bottles, socks, chap-pals, O’Reilly technical manuals, convenience-food packaging. The one with the bushy moustache had a dirty plate balanced precariously on the arm of his chair. He ashed his cigarette on to it, then leaned forward and held out a hand.
‘Welcome to the bench, bhai.’
The bench. Waiting to play. For about three days, being on the bench was cool. At least when Arjun used his new calling card to talk to his family, it sounded cool. On the bench. As if he had been assimilated into the quasi-military culture of American sports, and was living a life of high-fives and huddles, time-outs, play-offs, spit-balls. When Sherry drove him into the city for his induction, he made her stop off at a Foot Locker, where he bought the Raiders shirt, so as to feel even more on the bench.
Linguistic glamour. Examples: when he watched TV, it was ‘tube’, when he thought of his parents, he didn’t think of them as his parents, but as ‘the folks back home’. The others did it too: little experiments with slang, tentative new accents. You spoke from the TV couch to whoever was trailing telephone flex down the stairs, coming back after a family call.
How are the folks back home?
And they replied: A-OK, man. They’re good.
The folks. The bench. Man, good.
Good. Until the second day, when Arjun asked where he would be working and was told that the job Databodies had guaranteed him was not in fact guaranteed at all. He would have to interview by phone with potential clients. Until at his induction meeting he shook the hand of a man who seemed like a clone of Sunny Srinivasan, except seedier, sharper, less seductive, a man who turned out to be Sunny’s brother-in-law and who coldly informed him that until he successfully secured a post, Databodies would pay him a grand total of $500 a month, half of which would be taken back as rent for the house-share. Arjun reminded him of the $50,000 a year his contract guaranteed. Sunny’s brother-in-law shrugged. If you don’t like it, he said, you can always go back home. You’ll owe us for your visa and ticket, and we’ll have to charge you an administrative fee for the inconvenience. Ten thousand should cover it. Rupees? No, bhai, dollars.
Arjun did some calculations. It quickly became obvious that (after he deducted his outgoings) every day he spent on the bench he would be losing money. He did not have many savings. There was only so long he could last. Still, he did not despair. He was a qualified IT consultant, and even though the terms of his visa meant he had to stay with Databodies or leave the country, there would be work soon enough. After all, American companies were desperate for people like him.
Weren’t they? Salim, the chain-smoker, found this so funny he made Arjun repeat it three times. He had already been on the bench ten weeks. Rohit, twelve.
‘Don’t you ever read the business pages?’
As a matter of fact Arjun didn’t. When they told him he actually laughed; it seemed so absurd. America was booming. This was known (in India, at least) to be a permanent condition, a fact about the country like its fifty states, 19,924 km of coastline and 12,248 km of land borders. Furthermore, as if their old economy weren’t booming enough for them, they had declared a new one. Double-boom. The idea that not one but two economies could shudder to a halt was inconceivable. Yet there it was: market correction, cyclical downturn, crash. Not an atmosphere in which to learn a new and difficult skill, like driving a car.
All he could do was to wait for a call. In the meantime he set out to discover America via regular ten-block walks to the store. The new specificities were absorbing. The bass pumping out of lowrider cars was an inversion of India’s screaming treble. Grown men wore short pants like children. Behind the 7-Eleven, feral-looking kids, surely the poor, rode battered skateboards, kicking them up against kerbs and railings to go airborne in flurries of baggy cotton. Not for American shoppers the bustle and haggling of the marketplace. Inside a sepulchral Safeway the air-conditioning played icy breath on his neck as he padded down aisles where the produce was lit like a film set and sprinklers sprayed cricket-ball-sized tomatoes with a fine mist of water. In every parking lot men and women dressed in pastel lycras and cottons pushed staggering cubic volumes of merchandise towards their cars — and what cars! Mythical chariots gleaming with window tint and metallic paint, vehicles built to transport whole clans, entire communities, from one place to another. The first time he saw an RV he actually forgot to breathe. There it was, forty feet of elephantine home-from-home airbrushed with a rock-opera design of white horses in a forest glade, passing by with the immensity and slowness of a science-fiction mother-ship. This vision had a brace of trailbikes on the back and a bearded man at the wheel, a man who Arjun could only imagine was possessed by some blood-memory of covered-wagon times, prisoner of an obsessive urge to migrate, to set up further on down the road.