The Inheritance of Loss (12 page)

Fourteen

At 4:25 A.M.,
Biju made his way to the Queen of Tarts bakery, watching for the cops who sometimes came leaping out: where are you going and what are you doing with whom at what time and why?

But Immigration operated independently of Police, the better, perhaps, to bake the morning bread, and Biju fell, again and again, through the cracks in the system.

Above the bakery the subway ran on a rawly sketched edifice upheld by metal stilts. The trains passed in a devilish screaming; their wheels sparked firework showers that at night threw a violent jagged brightness over the Harlem projects, where he could see a few lights on already and some others besides himself making a start on miniature lives. At the Queen of Tarts, the grill went zipping up, the light flickered on, a rat moved into the shadow. Tap root tail, thick skulled, broad shouldered, it looked over its back sneering as it walked with a velvet crunch right over the trap too skimpy to detain it.

"
Namaste, babaji,
" said Saeed Saeed.

________

Biju considered his previous fight with a Pakistani, the usual attack on the man’s religion that he’d grown up uttering: "Pigs, pigs, sons of pigs."

Now here was Saeed Saeed, and Biju’s admiration for the man confounded him. Fate worked this way. Biju was overcome by the desire to be his friend, because Saeed Saeed wasn’t drowning, he was bobbing in the tides. In fact, a large number of people wished to cling to him like a plank during a shipwreck—

not only fellow Zanzibaris and fellow illegals but Americans, too; overweight confidence-leached citizens he teased when they lunched alone on a pizza slice; lonely middle-aged office workers who came by for conversation after nights of lying awake wondering if, in America—
in America!
—they were really getting the best of what was on offer. They told such secrets as perhaps might only be comfortably told to an illegal alien.

Saeed was kind and he was not Paki. Therefore he was OK?

The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?

Therefore he liked Muslims and hated only Pakis?

Therefore he liked Saeed, but hated the general lot of Muslims?

Therefore he liked Muslims and Pakis and India should see it was all wrong and hand over Kashmir?

No, no, how could that be and—

This was but a small portion of the dilemma. He remembered what they said about black people at home. Once a man from his village who worked in the city had said: "Be careful of the
hubshi.
Ha ha, in their own country they live like monkeys in the trees. They come to India and become men."

Biju had thought the man from his village was claiming that India was so far advanced that black men learned to dress and eat when they arrived, but what he had meant was that black men ran about attempting to impregnate every Indian girl they saw.

Therefore he hated all black people but liked Saeed?

Therefore there was nothing wrong with black people and Saeed?

Or Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, or anyone else . . . ???

This habit of hate had accompanied Biju, and he found that he possessed an awe of white people, who arguably had done India great harm, and a lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else, who had never done a single harmful thing to India.

Presumably Saeed Saeed had encountered the same dilemma regarding Biju.

From other kitchens, he was learning what the world thought of Indians: In Tanzania, if they could, they would throw them out like they did in Uganda.

In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.

In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.

In China, they hate them.

In Hong Kong.

In Germany.

In Italy.

In Japan.

In Guam.

In Singapore.

Burma.

South Africa.

They don’t like them.

In Guadeloupe—they love us there?

No.

Presumably Saeed had been warned of Indians, but he didn’t seem wracked by contradictions; a generosity buoyed him and dangled him above such dilemmas.

________

He had many girls.

"Oh myeee God!!" he said. "Oh myeee Gaaaawd! She keep calling me and calling me," he clutched at head, "
aaaiii
. . . I don’t know
what
to do!!"

"You know what to do," said Omar sourly.

"Ha ha ha, ah ah, no, I am going crazeeeeee. Too much pooky pooky, man!"

"It’s those dreadlocks, cut them off and the girls will go."

"But I don’t want them to
go!
"

When pretty girls came to pick out their cinnamon buns with mine shafts of jeweled brown sugar and spice, Saeed described the beauty and the poverty of Zanzibar, and the girls’ compassion rose like leavened loaf—how they wanted to save him, to take him home and lull him with good plumbing and TV; how they wanted to be seen down the road with a tall handsome man topped with dreadlocks. "He’s
cute!
He’s
cute!
He’s
cute!
"
they’d say, winding up tight and then wringing out their desire over the telephone to their friends.

________

Saeed’s first job in America had been at the Ninety-sixth Street mosque, where the imam hired him to do the dawn call to prayer, since he did a fine rooster crow, but before he arrived at work, he took to stopping at the nightclubs along the way, it seeming a natural enough progression time-wise. Disposable camera in his pocket, he stood at the door waiting to have snapshots of himself taken with the rich and famous: Mike Tyson, yes! He’s my brother. Naomi Campbell, she’s my girl. Hey, Bruce (Springsteen)! I am Saeed Saeed from Africa. But don’t worry, man, we don’t eat white people anymore.

There came a time when they began to let him inside.

He had an endless talent with doors, even though, two years ago during an INS raid, he had been unearthed and deported despite having been cheek-to-cheek, Kodak-proof, with the best of America. He went back to Zanzibar, where he was hailed as an American, ate kingfish cooked in coconut milk in the stripy shade of the palm trees, lazed on the sand sieved fine as semolina, and in the evening when the moon went gold and the night shone as if it were wet, he romanced the girls in Stone Town. Their fathers encouraged them to climb out of their windows at night; the girls climbed down the trees and onto Saeed’s lap, and the fathers spied, hoping to catch the lovers in a compromising position. This boy who once had so long dawdled on the street corner—no work, all trouble, so much so that the neighbors had all contributed to his ticket out—now this boy was miraculously worth something. They prayed he would be forced to marry Fatma who was fat or Salma who was beautiful or Khadija with the gauzy gray eyes and the voice of a cat. The fathers tried and the girls tried, but Saeed escaped. They gave him
kangas
to remember them by, with slogans, "Memories are like diamonds," and "Your pleasant scent soothes my heart," so that when he was relaxing in NYC, he might throw off his clothes, wrap his
kanga
about him, air his balls, and think of the girls at home. In two months time, back he was—

new passport, new name typed up with the help of a few greenbacks given to a clerk outside the government office. When he arrived at JFK as Rasheed Zulfickar, he saw the very same officer who had deported him waiting at the desk. His heart had beat like a fan in his ears, but the man had not remembered him: "Thank God, to them we all of us look the same!"

________

Saeed, he relished the whole game, the way the country flexed his wits and rewarded him; he charmed it, cajoled it, cheated it, felt great tenderness and loyalty toward it. When it came time, he who had jigged open every back door, he who had, with photocopier, Wite-Out, and paper cutter, spectacularly sabotaged the system (one skilled person at the photocopy machine, he assured Biju, could bring America to its knees), he would pledge emotional allegiance to the flag with tears in his eyes and conviction in his voice. The country recognized something in Saeed, he in it, and it was a mutual love affair. Ups and downs, sometimes more sour than sweet, maybe, but nonetheless, beyond anything the INS could imagine, it was an old-fashioned romance.

________

By 6 A.M. the bakery shelves were stocked with rye, oatmeal, and peasant bread, apricot and raspberry biscuits that broke open to a flood of lush amber or ruby jam. One such morning, Biju sat outside in a pale patch of sun, with a roll. He cracked the carapace of the crust and began to eat, plucking the tender fleece with his long thin fingers—

But in New York innocence never prevails: an ambulance passed, the NYPD, a fire engine; the subway went overhead and the jolting rhythm traveled up through his defenseless shoes; it shook his heart and sullied the roll. He stopped chewing, thought of his father—

Ill. Dead. Maimed.

He reminded himself his panicked thoughts were just the result of extra virile transport going by, and he searched for the bread in his mouth, but it had parted like an ethereal cloud about his tongue and disappeared.

________

In Kalimpong, the cook was writing, "Dear Biju, can you please help. . . ." Last week the MetalBox watchman had paid him a formal visit to tell the cook about his son, big enough now to get a job, but there were no jobs. Could Biju help him across to America? The boy would be willing to start at a menial level but of course a job in an office would be best. Italy would also be all right, he added for good measure. A man from his village had gone to Italy and was making a good living as a tandoori cook.

________

At first the cook was agitated, upset by the request, felt a war in him between generosity and meanness, but then . . . : "Why not, I will ask him, very difficult, mind you, but there is no harm in trying."

And, he began to feel a tingle—the very fact the watchman had asked! It reestablished Biju in his father’s eyes as a fine-suited-and-booted-success.

They sat outside his quarter and smoked; and it felt good to be two old men sitting together, talking of young men. The deadly nightshade was blooming, giant glowing bell flowers, white and starched, sinister and spotless. A star came forth and a lost cow wandered slowly by in the dusk.

________

So, the further to bolster his son and his own pride, the cook wrote on the blue airmail form: "Dear
beta,
please see if you can help the MetalBox watchman’s son."

He went to bed snug and glad, only at one moment waking in terror at a thud, but it was just the lost cow that had come back up through the ravine and was trying to push her way in out of the rain. He chased her out, brought back the thought of his son, and thus reconnected with his peace, returned to sleep.

A petition improved your status.

________

The green card, the green card—

Saeed applied for the immigration lottery each year, but Indians were not allowed to apply. Bulgarians, Irish, Malagasys—on and on the list went, but no, no Indians. There were just too many jostling to get out, to pull everyone else down, to climb on one another’s backs and run. The line would be stopped up for years, the quota was full, overfull, spilling over.

At the bakery, they called the immigration hotline as soon as the clock struck 8:30 and took turns holding the receiver for what might be an all-day activity of line holding.

"What is your status now, sir? I can’t help you unless I know your current status."

They put down the phone hurriedly then, worried that immigration had a superduper zing bing beep peeping high-alert electronic supersonic space speed machine that could

transfer

connect

dial

read

trace the number through to their—

Illegality.

Oh the green card, the green card, the—

Biju was so restless sometimes, he could barely stand to stay in his skin.

After work, he crossed to the river, not to the part where the dogs played madly in hanky-sized squares, with their owners in the fracas picking up feces, but to where, after singles night at the synagogue, long-skirted-and-sleeved girls walked in an old-fashioned manner with old-fashioned-looking men wearing black suits and hats as if they had to keep their past with them at all times so as not to lose it.

He walked to the far end where the homeless man often slept in a dense chamber of green that seemed to grow not so much from soil as from a fertile city crud. A homeless chicken also lived in the park. Every now and then Biju saw it scratching in a homey manner in the dirt and felt a pang for village life.

"
Chkchkchk,
"
he called to it, but it ran away immediately, flustered in the endearing way of a plain girl, shy and convinced of the attractions of virtue.

He walked to where the green ran out into a tail of pilings and where men like himself often sat on the rocks and looked out onto a dull stretch of New Jersey. Peculiar boats went by: garbage barges, pug-nosed tugboats with their snoots pushing big-bottomed coal carriers; others whose purpose was not obvious—all rusty cranes, cogs, black smoke flaring out.

Biju couldn’t help but feel a flash of anger at his father for sending him alone to this country, but he knew he wouldn’t have forgiven his father for not trying to send him, either.

Fifteen

In Kalimpong,
the plum tree outside the clinic, watered with rotted blood from the path lab, produced so many flowers, that newlyweds had their pictures taken on a bench underneath. Disregarding one couple’s entreaties to remove himself from their photo shoot, the cook settled down at the end of the bench, donning his spectacles to read the letter from Biju that had just arrived.