Jasmine (13 page)

Kate, the ironist, wrote me that she and her sister sold the house on stilts to a retired orthodontist from Tampa. For back taxes, he’d already picked up and remodeled a deserted motel down the road (the Flamingo Court, did I know it?), then he bought the barracks and the land around the Kanjobal settlement, and now, with Lillian’s property, he was advertising a “Key West-style cottage,” for people accustomed to “a slower, more gracious time.” He’s
developing the whole area into something called Paradise Bay Complex: A Mixed-Use Vacation and Residence Community.

A sanctuary transformed into a hotel; hell turned into paradise—to me this seems very American. The brochure says that Paradise Bay is situated “just steps away from a private marina.” Is this the scummy, collared cove bobbing with garbage sacks where Half-Face beached us? Now the new Flamingo Court Hotel is a ten-minute drive from a 2,400-foot airstrip. Goodbye, nigger shipping! Hello, America! New Half-Faces have found a more profitable product.

At Paradise Place, a one-bedroom unit with Gulf front, bath, and balcony costs $280 a night. That would be Kate’s old room and mine. The Kanjobal women’s room is described as having a “Gulf breeze.” During our cut-rate residence with Lillian, we stayed away from the windows. We didn’t check out the fishing promised in the brochure either. Pompano, grouper, cobia; trout, mackerel, redfish, flounder, mullet; blue crabs and stone crabs. I do remember flying fish striking the deck of
The Gulf Shuttle,
and crawling after them before they slithered overboard.

In the brochure, fit blond young couples charter fishing boats, play tennis, train binoculars on bald eagles and spoonbills, slather each other with sunscreen lotions.

It is by now only a passing wave of nausea, this response to the speed of transformation, the fluidity of American character and the American landscape. I feel at times like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab
hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride I’m on. Down and down I go, where I’ll stop, God only knows.

At ten in the morning on a Monday I arrived in New York City. There were scores of policemen swinging heavy nightsticks, but none of them pounced on me at the bottom of the escalator. They were, indeed, watching. A black man in shredded pants asked me for a handout. Beggars in New York! I felt I’d come to America too late. I felt cheated. I had Lillians parting gift of one hundred dollars, of which I’d already spent twenty on food, and a bag of Florida oranges and grapefruit as a house present for Professorji.

This American beggar kept clawing at me, grabbing and touching in familiar ways, and when it became clear that I had nothing to give, he yelled, “You fucking bitch. Suck my fucking asshole, you fucking foreign bitch!” As passengers stared, he bounded up the down escalator.

In the taxi to Queens I wept hot, bewildered tears.

“Look, lady.” In the rearview mirror I caught the drivers watchful glance. “You got American dollars?”

I nodded. He was from my part of the world, given to bitterness and suspicion. I could have spoken to him in Punjabi or Urdu, but I didn’t. I wanted distance from all his greed and suspicions. “And if I run short,” I said, “Professorji will take care of it. He was my husbands friend.”

The driver said, “In Kabul I was a doctor. We have to be here living like dogs because they’ve taken everything from us.”

I said nothing.

He went on about the wrongs. Bitterness seemed to buoy him, make him special. I would not immure myself as he had. Vijh & Wife was built on hope.

We took the bridge into Queens. On the streets I saw only more greed, more people like myself. New York was an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens.

20

Y
OU
want to know what’s wrong?” Darrel says on the phone. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.”

We’re on a party line. The whole town seems to be hurting. I can hear the sighs of eavesdroppers. Last week a tenant farmer went to feed his hogs after supper. Three hours later his wife found him in the manure pit with a bullet in his head. His farm wasn’t one of the ones in trouble, Bud said.

“I think you should go to Dalton. Go talk some more to those people about their golf-club idea.”

“Dalton’s not far enough,” Darrel says. “I think I should go to Tahiti. Introduce beans and hogs to Tahiti, what do you think? I should get the hell out of Iowa.”

“So, go to Tahiti.”

“You’re saying I’m running away from my problems.”

“Running,” I say. “Not running away.” And to myself I say,
Why should you care what I think?

The farm country is closing over Darrel. And over me, over Du. Tomorrow I’ll plead with Bud.

I know what Darrel’s going through.

I got out of Flushing within five months. Flushing was safe, a cocoon to hatch out of. Then one night—I was unrolling my sleeping mat on the floor of the Vadheras’ living room—something came over me, and early the next morning I picked up my bag and my pocketbook and took the #7 train out of the ghetto. One more night and I would have died. Of what? I might have said then, of boredom, but boredom is only a manifestation of something worse.

Can
wanting
be fatal?

Professorji and his family put me up for five months—and it could have been five years, given the elasticity of the Indian family—just because I was the helpless widow of his favorite student. I was also efficient and uncomplaining, but they would have tolerated a clumsy whiner just as easily.

I want to be fair. Professorji is a generous man. Somehow, the trouble is in me. I had jumped a track. His kind of
generosity wasn’t good enough for me. It wasn’t Prakash’s, it wasn’t Lillian Gordon’s.

The family consisted of his aged parents and his recent bride, Nirmala, a girl of nineteen fresh from a village in the Patiala district. The marriage had been arranged about a year before. She was pretty enough to send a signal to any Indian in Flushing:
He may not look like much over here, but back in India this guy is considered quite a catch
.

In what I already considered “real life,” meaning America, he was at least forty, thickening and having to color his hair. He had a new name in New York. Here he was “Dave,” not Devinder, and not even Professor, though I never called him anything but Professorji. When he answered the phone, “Dave Vadhera here,” even the Vadhera sounded English. It sounded like “David O’Hara.”

They had no children. He had avoided marriage until he had saved enough to afford two children, and to educate them in New York. Male or female did not matter, he was a progressive man. They’d been trying, according to Nirmala, who blushingly confided the occasional marital intimacy. I took enough interest in their problem to look and listen for signs of dedicated activity. Perhaps they were more imaginative than I gave them credit for. Nirmala was nineteen: According to my forged passport, I was nineteen too, but I was a widow. She was in the game, I was permanently on the sidelines. Professorji blamed his long hours and back pains. She blamed impurities in the food.

Pleading lab work, Professorji was out of the house by seven o’clock, five days a week. They both came back at six
o’clock, harassed and foul-tempered, looking first for snacks and tea, later for a major dinner.

Should anyone ask, I was her “cousin-sister.”

Nirmala worked all day in a sari store on our block. Selling upscale fabrics in Flushing indulged her taste for glamour and sophistication. The shop also sold 220-volt appliances, jewelry, and luggage. An adjacent shop under the same Gujarati ownership sold sweets and spices, and rented Hindi movies on cassettes. She was living in a little corner of heaven.

Every night, Nirmala brought home a new Hindi film for the VCR. Showings began promptly at nine o’clock, just after an enormous dinner, and lasted till midnight. They were Bombay’s “B” efforts at best, commercial failures and quite a few famous flops, burnished again by the dim light of nostalgia. I could not unroll my sleeping mat until the film was over.

I felt my English was deserting me. During the parents’ afternoon naps, I sometimes watched a soap opera. The American channels were otherwise never watched (Pro-fessorji’s mother said, “There’s so much English out there, why do we have to have it in here?”), but for the Saturday-morning Indian shows on cable. Nirmala brought plain saris and salwar-kameez outfits for me from the shop so I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself or offend the old people
in cast-off American T-shirts. The sari patterns were for much older women, widows.

I could not admit that I had accustomed myself to American clothes. American clothes disguised my widowhood. In a T-shirt and cords, I was taken for a student. In this apartment of artificially maintained Indianness, I wanted to distance myself from everything Indian, everything Jyoti-like. To them, I was a widow who should show a proper modesty of appearance and attitude. If not, it appeared I was competing with Nirmala.

Flushing, with all its immigrant services at hand, frightened me. I, who had every reason to fear America, was intrigued by the city and the land beyond the rivers. The Vadheras, who would soon have saved enough to buy a small apartment building in Astoria, had retired behind ghetto walls.

To date in her year in America, Nirmala had exhausted the available stock of Hindi films on tape and was now renting Urdu films from a Pakistani store. She faced a grim future of unintelligible Bengali and Karnataka films. Everyone in Flushing seemed to know her craving. Visitors from India left tapes of popular Indian television series, and friends from Flushing were known to drive as far as New Jersey to check out the film holdings in the vast India emporia. They had a bookcase without books, stacked with television shows.

Professorji and Nirmala did not go out at night. “Why waste the money when we have everything here?” And truly they did. They had Indian-food stores in the block,
Punjabi newspapers and Hindi film magazines at the corner newsstand, and a movie every night without having to dress up for it. They had a grateful servant who took her pay in food and saris. The parents were long asleep, no need to indulge ritual pleasantries. In the morning, the same film had to be shown again to the parents. Then I walked the rewound cassette back to the rental store.

Professorji’s parents, both in their eighties and rather adventurous for their age, demanded constant care. There were thirty-two Indian families in our building of fifty apartments, so specialized as to language, religion, caste, and profession that we did not need to fraternize with anyone but other educated Punjabi-speaking Hindu Jats. There were six families more or less like Professorji’s (plus Punjabi-speaking Sikh families who seemed friendly in the elevator and politically tame, though we didn’t mingle), and three of the families also had aged parents living in. Every morning, then, it was a matter of escorting the senior Vadheras to other apartments, or else serving tea and fried snacks to elderly visitors.

Sundays the Vadheras allowed themselves free time. We squeezed onto the sofa in the living room and watched videos of Sanjeev Kumar movies or of Amitabh. Or we went to visit with other Punjabi families in sparsely furnished, crowded apartments in the same building and watched their videos. Sundays were our days to eat too much and give in to nostalgia, to take the carom board out of the coat closet, to sit cross-legged on dhurries and matchmake marriages for adolescent cousins or younger
siblings. Of course, as a widow, I did not participate. Remarriage was out of the question within the normal community. There were always much older widowers with children to look after who might consider me, and this, I know, was secretly discussed, but my married life and chance at motherhood were safely over.

Professorji’s father always lost a little money at poker. Professorji always got a little drunk. When he got drunk he complained that America was killing him. “You want stress,” he asked anyone who would listen, “or you want big bank balance?”

The old folks’ complaints were familiar ones. In India the groom’s mother was absolute tyrant of the household. The young bride would quiver under her commands. But in New York, with a working wife, the mother-in-law was denied her venomous authority. The bent old lady who required my arm to make her way from the television to the bathroom had been harboring hatred and resentment of
her
mother-in-law for sixty-five years. Now that she
finally
had the occasion to vent it, Nirmala wasn’t around to receive it. This was the tenor of all the old people’s complaints—we have followed our children to America, and look what happens to us! Our sons are selfish. Our daughters want to work and stay thin. All the time, this rush-rush. What to do? There are no grandchildren for us to play with. This country has drained my son of his dum. This country has turned my daughter-in-law into a barren
field. If we are doomed to die here, at least let us enjoy the good things of America: friends from our village, plentiful food, VCRs, air conditioning.

I felt myself deteriorating. I had gained so much weight I couldn’t get into the cords even when I tried. I couldn’t understand the soap operas. I didn’t know the answers to game shows. And so I cooked, shopped, and cleaned, tended the old folks, and made conversation with Professorji when he got home.

Professorji was a good man, by his lights, but he didn’t seem the same caring teacher who, in sleek blue American aerograms only months before, had tempted Prakash, his best engineering student, to leave the petty, luckless world of Jullundhar. Flushing was a neighborhood in Jullundhar. I was spiraling into depression behind the fortress of Punjabiness. Some afternoons when Professorji was out working, and Nirmala was in her shop, and the old Vadheras were snoring through their siestas, I would find myself in the bathroom with the light off, head down on the cold, cracked rim of the sink, sobbing from unnamed, unfulfilled wants. In Flushing I felt immured. An imaginary brick wall topped with barbed wire cut me off from the past and kept me from breaking into the future. I was a prisoner doing unreal time. Without a green card, even a forged one (I knew at least four men in our building who had bought themselves resident alien cards for between two and three thousand dollars), I didn’t feel safe going
outdoors. If I had a green card, a job, a goal,
happiness
would appear out of the blue.