America for Beginners

10 (#ulink_ea7376ad-20d1-51fc-9832-aa92676a9516)

The First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company was housed in an office building in Queens exactly four blocks from the second-to-last stop on the N train, a trip that took Satya two hours each way from Brooklyn. He rode almost the entire length of the N train daily, boarding at Eighteenth Avenue, six stops from the end of the line in Brooklyn. He had, more than once, ridden the train to each of its ends, falling asleep on his way to or from his job and waking up to see the train turning itself around. But this hadn’t bothered him; in fact, he enjoyed these subway rides, watching the entire line in motion and the change in customers from one end of the route to the other. It was the people in the middle who were the most strange to him, loud people who looked too wealthy to be on a subway at all, and gaping tourists whose teeth chattered from the movement of the train from Fourteenth Street to Times Square. But most of his fellow travelers on either end were people like himself, exhausted but determined, their eyes locked on the floor of the train car.

He had never seen so many kinds of people in his life before he had moved to America. At home, everyone looked the same, or if they looked different, like he did, like Ravi had, everyone had known why. Skin tones varied within a limited spectrum; hair ranged from blue-black to the hennaed red that old men dyed their beards, hoping to look younger but never succeeding.

Here, everyone looked like combinations of people, more colors and shapes and bodies than he had known possible. The irony was that everyone dressed in the same colors, somber blacks and grays, while back at home the monotony of people’s faces had been obscured by the violent rainbow of their clothing, printed cottons as far as the eye could see, swathing women in their saris or draping playfully around them in a salwar kameez. Sometimes a flash of color caught in the corner of his eye, or he saw a Muslim prayer cap, and he thought it might be Ravi, but it never was. They had both brought only Western clothing with them, anyway. Ravi’s mother had promised to keep their kurtas safe for them at home. Satya wished he had burned his instead. He thought about writing her and asking her to do so, but he knew that would raise too many questions. He still hadn’t responded to her letter. So instead he looked for Ravi on trains, and wondered what he was doing, and what he thought of all the different kinds of people who lived in America.

One morning Satya took his normal ride, leaving Brooklyn at six in the morning to arrive just past eight at the agency. No one else ever showed up at this hour, so he sometimes treated himself to a cup of tea from a street vendor who let him have it at half the price, leaning against the building and waiting for Ronnie to let him in. Satya supposed that he could actually leave Brooklyn at a later time, but what was the point of staying in his dingy apartment and listening to his new roommates snore?

Ronnie was particularly late that morning. Satya waited, making his tea last for a full hour until Vikrum arrived, producing his own copy of the building key. Satya found September already quite chilly, although no one around him seemed to share that feeling, as the people passing him by wore short sleeves like it was high summer.

“It’s lucky this isn’t the winter, eh? You would have frozen to death, brother.” Vikrum grinned at Satya with his golden smile.

“It can’t get that cold, can it?” Vikrum only laughed in response. Satya watched the burly man putter about with surprisingly elegant gestures, preparing a pot of coffee for the office.

“Make yourself useful, then, take the messages.” Satya shot up to do the older guide’s bidding. Gentle as Vikrum was, Satya was a bit afraid of him. He was the kind of man who was hired by criminals back home to intimidate shop owners and scare people. If Vikrum had been an actor in Bollywood he would have been cast as a goon, but he was a very good guide, and a deeply kind person. He often divided some portion of his lunch to share with Satya. He arrived before most other guides, and so Satya had grown accustomed to spending quiet mornings with Ronnie’s snorts and scowls, Vikrum’s placid whistling, and his own thoughts. Ravi would have made fun of Vikrum, Satya knew, for his large size and easy smile, and Satya would have laughed, agreeing. Satya frowned; the thought tasted bitter in his head.

He listened to the messages, dutifully recording the names and numbers of potential clients. Ronnie encouraged most of his Indian and Pakistani clients to speak English, claiming it was good for them to practice before they arrived, but that was really to mask his own accented Hindi, which could give him away as a Bangladeshi. If they were Bengali, however, he didn’t bother. For Hindi-speaking tourists, Ronnie had two guides who spent most of their time practicing by watching Indian films from the 1950s and ’60s to get the cleanest and most proper accent they could. In general, however, he encouraged English as much as possible, even in the office, and while many of his guides resented it, the reality was it helped them more than most of them ever acknowledged. Ronnie had never forgotten the sour feeling in his stomach when he had learned how much that cab-driver had ripped him off on his first day in America. He understood, even if his guides didn’t, that not understanding English was something recent immigrants could rarely afford.

As a result of this policy, most of the messages left were in English. Satya had a hard time with recorded messages, but he knew he needed the practice. He would listen to each message five or six times before he was confident that he had gotten the information correct. There was a rather shrill message in Bengali from a woman in Kolkata, which he listened to ten times that morning. Although he spoke the language, the emotion in her voice made it hard to understand, but also the sound of a woman speaking Bengali reminded him of home. His grandmother had visited Kolkata once and described it to Satya. He wondered who would guide this woman and wished, for a moment, that he could meet her, and ask her if the stories his grandmother had told him about the city were true.

That afternoon, sitting in the small break room, Satya looked up from his lunch, a pile of roti he had burned into hard black disks and sour, undercooked dal made of a mixture of lentils and kidney beans. Ronnie had arrived, followed by a slim white woman. Vikrum was out for the afternoon and hadn’t offered Satya anything to eat before he left. Satya had never cooked much before arriving in America, and his early attempts had not been particularly successful. He grimaced, his mouth full of unhappy tastes, as he watched the woman’s body sway.

He wasn’t the only one staring. It was a rare occurrence to see any white person, or any nonemployee in general, enter the office. Almost everyone working that day, studying maps, categorizing invoices, or fighting with Ranjit, the bookkeeper, over receipts accumulated during tours, raised their eyes from their work to watch the girl go by. Satya lifted his nose to sniff, trying to catch any hint of her scent in the air.

Satya could smell nothing, he realized sadly as the woman went by. Ravi had told him that you could smell it when a woman was ready for a man, and since then he had tried to surreptitiously sniff around when he saw a new woman, but it had never worked. Maybe Ravi had been lying to him, he thought. The notion comforted him. How could Ravi have known about things like that?

Both boys had left Bangladesh virgins, at least as far as Satya knew. And yet, it had never occurred to him before to question this knowledge. He was annoyed with himself. Why had he trusted Ravi with something so important?

Satya’s time in America had already exposed him to many women and had given him a new understanding of what it meant for women to be so on display. At home in Sylhet, women’s bodies were largely shaded from the male gaze, and their faces, with their downcast eyes, held no invitations. America, however, was completely different, in ways he never could have anticipated.

Each of the guides around Satya was looking at the girl like a dog watching hanging chickens in a butcher shop. It was a profound comfort to Satya to know that these men also watched women with a single-minded focus. Together they made a detailed study of the strange girl’s body (slim, but with nicely shaped breasts and sweetly curving hips), which was covered with a floating thin top that was somehow longer in the back than in the front, an issue with the manufacturing, Satya assumed. Her legs were clad in tight-fitting gray pants that ended at her ankles, and small shoes that looked like slippers fit her feet, with an anklet gently gracing her right ankle like a ribbon around a present. When he finally found the time to examine her face, Satya found it to be a pale heart-shaped one surrounded by light brown and honey-tinted wavy wisps of hair. Large brown eyes sat widely over a substantial but not overwhelming nose, and plump pink lips pursed, he realized, in an expression of concern. She did not, he suddenly understood, enjoy being stared at by a roomful of strange men. She hesitated once, shrinking into herself against so many concentrated gazes, but then walked on, and for a moment Satya admired her.

He turned back to his terrible lunch and his studying. Whatever was going on with this woman and Boss, it was certainly no concern of his. His grandmother, he knew, would have been happy with him for averting his eyes. Ravi would have mocked him, calling him an idiot. But Ravi wasn’t there. Satya was not sure if what he felt was guilt or relief. His eyes looked at a passage from his tour book on the Grand Canyon, describing the Hopi people and their devotion to the canyon as a religious site. He tried to lose himself in the book, but the image of the canyon swirled in front of his eyes, becoming at once Ravi’s smile and this strange woman’s face, shrinking and pinched with discomfort. If she had had a dupatta on, he thought, I never would have known.

11 (#ulink_5eb0d2dc-ce4f-5a75-9151-8ab9f6c75b7b)

Rebecca sat, ramrod straight, in front of the strange man who Mr. Ghazi had assured her was far less dodgy than he seemed.

The plump, small figure in front of her had on the most gold jewelry that she had ever seen on any man. He wore three gold chains around his neck, the longest of which dipped into the hairy V formed by the undone top buttons of his collared shirt. The shirt itself was a violent shade of puce, a color Rebecca had never actually seen in real life and was surprised to find looked exactly the way it sounded, like something toxic.

He had several bracelets around his pudgy wrists, which were exposed by his shirtsleeves. His stomach wasn’t grossly large, but it extended gently over the top of his black pants. He wore gold rings with gemstones on each of his fingers, except for his thumbs, whose rings instead held large golden structures that looked to Rebecca like Aztec temples. The effect was finished off by what smelled like a potpourri shop of men’s fragrances, from sandalwood to Axe body spray, undercut slightly by the smell of antacids. Opening his mouth, Mr. Munshi revealed a tongue coated in light pink, and he ate a handful of Tums like candy, crunching loudly.

Mr. Munshi was sweating profusely, his armpits showing deeper shades of puce whenever he lifted his hands. A cold cup of tea sat next to his elbow and Rebecca worried vaguely that his enthusiastic hand gestures might send it tipping all over his desk at any moment.

Mr. Ghazi had explained that Mr. Munshi’s business catered mostly to Indian tourists. At first she had thought he was merely sharing a tidbit of information with her, but the urgency in his gaze and the blatant hope on the face of the other man, who introduced himself with a sweaty handshake and the words “Ronnie Munshi, madam, very pleased, impressed, and happy to meet you,” had convinced Rebecca that something else was going on.

Mr. Ghazi took the long way around when explaining things, a quality that Rebecca had initially found frustrating but now enjoyed, understanding that this was simply his way of being polite, sidling up to an important or difficult subject without tackling it right away. Mr. Ghazi began this particular explanation by contextualizing Mr. Munshi, describing briefly Bangladesh and his own experience with the country, which was nonexistent, and mentioning Mr. Munshi’s wife, Anita, and the circumstances of their relationship. He then moved on to Mr. Munshi’s work, its evolution out of his time on the Circle Line, and Mr. Ghazi’s own feelings on boats and their attractions, and then settled upon this new client of Mr. Munshi’s, who, Rebecca realized by Mr. Munshi’s sudden interest in the conversation, had been the point all along.

When Mr. Ghazi had mentioned Rebecca as a potential companion for the trip she had immediately started shaking her head no. She could miss auditions. It would be insane to leave town, no matter what they were willing to pay her, no matter how much she could use the money. She simply couldn’t leave New York for something that wasn’t an acting job.

However, Mr. Ghazi had looked her in the eye and asked her to think about it, and so she had agreed to do so, while privately feeling that her decision had already been made.

When she got home, though, she couldn’t get Mr. Ghazi or Mr. Munshi out of her mind. She thought about his stumbling description of this widow languishing in Kolkata, and his heartfelt and circuitous explanations of how this trip would make the widow’s life worth living.

She thought of Time magazine photos she had seen of women in white saris weeping while tossing the ashes of their husbands into the Ganges. One image had stayed with her, a woman, mouth open, tossing the ashes into the water. She wondered if she should, in fact, take the job. After all, it wasn’t like anyone would cast her for anything anyway. She scolded herself for her self-pity, but the damage was already done, and she thought more seriously about this trip, now considering it less a death sentence for her career and more an escape from her dull and unrewarding life.

Rebecca decided to call her mother, who she knew might give her good advice by virtue of recommending the thing Rebecca least wanted to do. Arguments with her mother solidified Rebecca’s resolve on a number of issues and she looked forward to them as a kind of reinforcement against her own fears.

The phone rang twice.

“Yes?” Cynthia barked, her usual greeting. This alternately amused and annoyed Rebecca, depending on her mood. Today, she found it soothing.

“Hey, Mom.” Rebecca heard an audible sigh from her mother.

“Well, it’s good to know you are alive, Rebecca,” her mother said briskly, her words clipped, “although I wish I received proof more often.”

“Sorry, Mom. I’ve been busy.”

“You got a thing? Some show or something?”

Rebecca gritted her teeth.

“Not quite.”

“Ah. So what do you have to be busy about?”

Rebecca counted to five slowly, a trick some daytime talk show had implied was good for uncontrollable rage. It never worked.

“Rebecca? Are you still there? It’s gone quiet. Stupid phone. I keep telling Morris—”

“Yeah, I’m here, Mom. Listen, I have something I want to talk to you about. You remember my boss?”

“You have a job?” Rebecca gritted her teeth again at this and waited. “Oh, the map store. Yes. Right. He’s Saudi, right?”

“Persian. Anyway, look, through him, it doesn’t matter how, basically someone needs a companion for a cross-country trip, and he asked me if I would want to do it. And I’m just wondering what you think.”

“A companion? Is that like, what is that?”

Rebecca smiled at her mother’s worried tone, realizing what she feared this job might entail. “It’s not an escort thing. It’s not, like, sexual. The person who needs the companion is a woman—”

“That doesn’t preclude sexuality, Rebecca.”

“Mom, she’s an Indian widow from Kolkata so even if she swings that way I think it’s going to be pretty latent. She wants to go on a tour, and she has a guide, but he’s a man, so she wants a woman to come along for, I guess, modesty? Safety? I don’t know. It’s all expenses paid and it’s three thousand dollars in my pocket. Two weeks, cross-country, New York to L.A.”

Rebecca waited for her mother’s opinion, sure that it would come pouring out of Cynthia like a geyser.

“Why isn’t she going to San Francisco?”