Floating City (11 page)

I rushed to see Santosh, who looked pale and exhausted. “Please, not now,” he pleaded. The store was filled with customers. “I cannot give it to you now. You will meet me, later tonight.”

“Give me what? Where is Manjun?”

“You haven't come for his money?” His voice trailed off and he began rubbing his head.

“Santosh, what money? Do you know where Manjun is?”

“Come back tonight, later. Things will be quiet and I will talk with you.”

I looked for some of Manjun's other friends, but none were at their jobs. I called Angela and some of the sex workers who'd worked out of Manjun's store in the past, but not a single one answered her phone. I went to his home in Queens and no one answered the doorbell.

A few hours later, I returned to Santosh's video store. He was gone. He'd left early, they said.

•   •   •

T
he next day, I managed to connect with Officer Michael. He picked me up in his car and we drove to a quiet street. “You know what it's like, Sudhir,” he said. “These places, life can turn from good to bad just like that.”

The thief had come back. He'd beat Manjun pretty badly, sending him to the hospital. Because of the severity of the attack, local police believed Manjun had been letting someone sell drugs from inside the store, and the thief had come looking for the stash.

I couldn't believe this. Manjun was losing money on the bed rental business because of his soft heart at a time when he really couldn't afford it. That was the kind of person he was, a good person. I couldn't believe he had ventured into the drug trade. Something was missing, some part of the story was invisible to us—and now the secretive rules of the underground were affecting me.
My friend was lost because of some kind of underground conflict resolution mechanism that we couldn't see.

This is what normal people go to the police to solve—and to lawyers, small-claims courts, and all the other arms of the justice system. But in the underground, the law is typically not a helpful protector. Manjun's underworld option would have been to pay for protection, but I couldn't imagine the mild South Asian gentleman searching out those kinds of helpers. Here is where the real fragility of the underground became clear to me. It was fine for me to talk about the provisional communities that gathered around a cause like Mortimer's, but I could not avoid the darker side of this world. There was real violence here. And yet, whatever Manjun had done or not done, I honestly did not know whether I wanted to find out the truth. Unlike the big-
n
researchers who work the telephone and never see the nameless souls who give them forty-five uninterrupted minutes, an ethnographer is always haunted by his subjects
and their tragic vulnerabilities. Insight gets more painful when you grow close to people.

•   •   •

A
few weeks later, after returning from the holidays, I dropped by Manjun's old store again. No sign of him. I looked for Shoomi; no sign of him either. Most of the porn stores seemed to be going out of business too, replaced by wine bars and children's clothing stores. The end of the year must have meant the end of their leases too.

Santosh was gone as well. I'd heard that, using the small profit from his porn career, he'd opened a restaurant near the main subway stop in Jackson Heights, so I went up to ask him to lunch. As I entered, an older woman wearing a long red sari led out two Indian men who looked as if they had just landed at JFK, bags in hand, bleary eyed and hungry. She shouted in Santosh's direction, “Why do they all come today?”

Santosh grabbed her arm and steered her toward the back room. He returned with two small cups of tea, strong and milky sweet.

“Sometimes I miss our old place,” he said. “It was nice there—mostly because I could get away from here!”

It turned out that the restaurant had been part of Santosh's mini empire for a while. The angry woman in the red sari was his wife. And the two Indians were part of yet another business Santosh had going: smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States.

Smiling at his relentless enterprise, I asked him how much he charged for his smuggling services. “Five thousand!” he said. “And ten thousand for all settlement-related
ac-tiv-i-ties
.” He said the final word slowly, with mocking precision.

“‘Activities',” I said, smirking. “That's a nice word for it.”

“Two weeks' comfort and station.”

“Station?”

“Food, clothing, introductions.”

In a matter of thirty minutes, Santosh gave me a very nice sketch of the market, including the number of brokers and the dangers. He also filled me in on the old neighborhood. Azad was still working in the black market, Rajesh had found a job as an accountant, some had children in college already. It felt like old times, which reminded me of why I was there.

“Have you heard anything of our old friend?” I asked.

He shrugged. As far as he knew, Joshi and Sula were heading off to Bangladesh; they were both doing well.

“And Manjun?”

Santosh sighed. “We sacrifice for our families.”

Finally, he told me what really happened when Manjun's money was stolen. He'd been involved in drugs and “bad things” with another man who knew where he was hiding the cash, and that man was the one who'd robbed him. The “bad things” included counterfeit documents, he admitted.

“But where's Manjun now?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

Santosh raised the tea to his mouth. “We know only of his family.” But he was being evasive—I could tell.

“Please,” I begged.

He sighed and sipped his tea. Finally he said, “Sudhir, we find that Manjun was doing something not very pleasant.”

Getting the story out of him took some time, but in the end I gathered that Manjun had been involved with some very dangerous people, and under their pressure he found himself forcing women from India to become prostitutes—to live in a brothel for a short stint in order to pay their family debts. The horror of this was what had been making him unravel back when I thought he was just worried about being robbed.

“And now?” I asked.

Santosh took a deep breath. “I don't think we will ever see him again.”

This is why nobody would speak to me, he explained. “It is very important that the rest of us don't know anything—that we don't talk or say anything. Our ignorance is what can save us, and keep us in this country. And for you, I would also suggest that you not ask too many questions. That is not a safe way to be.”

Saddened, I began talking about the needs of survival in a foreign land, finding a way to excuse the terrible things my friend had done. But Santosh grabbed my hand from across the table. “
Surviving is easy
,” he said with a forceful voice I had never heard from him. “We are so much smarter than most of these people, so much better educated, and we work so hard and do nasty things, but they succeed without effort. And the demons visit you at night.”

Understanding dawned slowly. In Santosh's view, Manjun had made a fatal error. He'd listened to his demons.

Eat from the hand of a demon, and his hand becomes your hand
. How often had I seen this in the underground economy? People who generally lived good, decent lives turned to the illicit world to make a buck, and then it began to suck them in. Santosh was saying that Manjun could have made different choices, could have changed his attitude or his approach or his exposure, could have
imagined
a different future. But the demon's hand had become his hand, and it was too easy to keep on letting that hand do its dark work. At the same time, of course, Santosh recognized that as a poor brown immigrant in the United States, Manjun had few real options and had to seize the opportunities that became available to him. That was what made it so sad.

After that, Santosh and I had little more to say to each other. Talking about Manjun had drained us.

He asked that I come back in two weeks, for a small party for his grandchild. When the day arrived, I found the restaurant filled with balloons and streamers and “Happy Birthday” signs, and everyone greeted me as “Mr. Professor.” When the party was over, Santosh came over to me and sighed. “It is important that you see
this side too. This is the side I want you to remember. Not just the sadness. Maybe even you can remember your own time growing up—very much like this, no?”

“Yes, Santosh. Very much,” I said as my eyes began tearing up.

•   •   •

Y
ears later, I still turn back to Santosh's words, because it is the counsel that I have received countless times from the disenfranchised, whether single mothers in the Chicago projects or immigrants seeking out opportunities in the global city.
Don't pity us. Don't treat us like victims. We're more than our hardships.
But fine as that advice is, I was grappling with two seemingly contradictory thoughts. First was a vision of global New York as an unrestricted field of opportunity where even the low-income immigrant could climb the ladder and experience a better life, as Santosh had. The second was global New York as a ruthlessly hierarchical town with great social benefits for the victors and potentially devastating consequences for the losers. Perhaps this was how things had always been, whether for the early Italians or the great Irish migration. New York offered opportunities, but made no promises. This too was a form of globalization: white Europeans migrating in droves to America, creating bursting-at-the-seams ethnic enclaves where they could make a new home for themselves, often rooting their eventual Americanization in off-the-books marketplaces where people bartered, lent money, paid one another under the table, and so on—all excellent training in the spirit of American entrepreneurship. As they established credit, found legitimate jobs, and moved into the social mainstream, it would help them achieve great success.

But now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, globalization had brought about a much different narrative of assimilation. Today's immigrants were more likely to be brown and black, from Africa and Asia. Since 2000, most of the immigrants who have
come to New York City have been from Mexico, Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China. By 2005, historian Nancy Foner would find, recent immigrants made up a startling 37 percent of the city population. If you counted their American-born children, then the figure rose to half of all New Yorkers. This new wave of immigrants couldn't just shorten their names and lose their accents. Nor did they seem to be moving from menial work to well-paying factory or government positions—those jobs had disappeared in global cities. Instead, these immigrants were servicing the well-to-do via poorly paid service sector work, as clerks, cab drivers, cleaners, nannies, busboys, and so on. Most such jobs paid off the books and offered little hope of advancement or recourse when things went wrong. And unlike previous generations of low-income workers, these recent immigrants weren't joining unions for a step up the ladder; as the new century began in New York City, nearly one in three lived in poverty.

One problem became increasingly apparent to me. As I watched immigrants like Angela, Manjun, Shoomi, and their peers shuttle through the city, I noticed they always had limited relations with people outside their social class and ethnic group. They may have worked for an upper-class clientele, but these relationships were hierarchical. Angela talked about finding wealthy white clients and Manjun dreamed of taking his engineering skills into a corporate job, but the chances seemed small. It was painful to acknowledge the reasons. They spoke poor English and they had dark skin. Most of all, perhaps, they just didn't seem interested in the lifestyle that is the second currency of global New York: the music and movies and art and food that people talk about when they are enjoying relations that are not hierarchical. They seemed to be stuck in their own ethnic worlds, their social courage weakened by the demon's hand.

If there was any real hope for these newcomers to latch onto, it
was the traditional hope immigrants put in the prospects of their children. But these too had grown more slender. As sociologist Mary Waters and her colleagues discovered, more than half of the second-generation immigrant children in New York would attend or graduate from a four-year college or university. But the pace of globalization today has become so fast and ruthless, with capital zipping from place to place at such hyperspeed, taking jobs and resources along with it, we seem to be at risk of creating a new class of the long-term disenfranchised. So many of the people I saw in Manjun's neighborhood had made the wrong bet. They didn't see the change coming, and now they had to be cleared out. That has always happened, but never so fast or so universally, or in such utter obscurity. Today's champions of globalization are so busy celebrating the wondrous wealth and the charming artifacts of food and music produced by international interchange that they have little time for the plight of the invisible underclass that helps make it happen.

Alas, my time here was up too. With Angela also on her way out, Manjun's disappearance meant the end of my tenure in Hell's Kitchen. Too many other people I knew were moving on as well. The neighborhood was now deep into the transformation that one critic called “the suburbanization of New York.” Average household income had doubled from 1990 to 2000 and average rents rose correspondingly, a pace that accelerated into the new century. I decided it was time to start floating again, perhaps to renew my long-stalled effort to research the other end of the illegal income spectrum. But as the weeks passed, I couldn't stop worrying about Manjun.

One day I went back downtown to press Officer Michael for more details.

“You don't know what we know,” he said flatly. “We think he might have been pressured into doing all the things he did.”