Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [59]
I let Emad—that was the med student’s name—and his family get a decent start on the food, then joined in, tearing off bits of the soft, lacy, crepe-flat bread. Dunk in stew and chew. It was an act of good-neighborliness.
The family observed its own strict version of table manners. The man talked; the women and children listened. Everybody scarfed, fingers darting from platter to jaw with the quick daintiness of lizards’ tongues. I kept pace with Emad’s mother, and only half listened to Emad pontificate on newsworthy national events. His take on the city, the country, the world, came from some alternative information bank. In his world, the aliens had already landed and their kids were going to college. America’s whole energy, its entire national military and economic output, was directed like a laser against Somalia for the killing of American marines. The press attacks on pious medical practitioners and their adolescent female patients were the clearest evidence. Just by positioning himself at the head of the dinette table, Emad had metamorphosed from the shy, smiling immigrant who avoided me in the hallway into the spellbinding oracle of Western civilization’s end.
I had my own quarrels about the way that love and wealth were distributed in my immediate orbit, but this Somalian was so way off base that I couldn’t dismiss it as comic relief from my agony over what my mother might be doing with Ham in Ham’s bathroom or bed.
“For those without faith,” Emad pronounced, in English so I wouldn’t feel left out, “the end is now.” His children stared at my painted-on tattoos. The women smiled at me, and demonstrated elegant finger-licking methods to keep the yellow-brown gravy from dripping onto the table. Someone down the hall was playing Buzz Cocks, very loud. I tried to figure out who, because I didn’t want to have to listen to Emad keep shouting, “For you Westerners, it is code blue!” He had no right to target me for his apocalyptic harangue. “Before we’ve finished our supper,” Emad went on, “the orderlies of the Holy War will be wheeling the West’s corpse out of ICU!” He turned to the children. “What is ICU? Please define for our American guest.”
Quiz and catechism.
The older of the two kids spoke for the first time at the table. “ICU equals ‘Intensive Care Unit.’ It is a place where the infidel die. The faithful are saved so that they can do good.”
Father knows best.
“The infidel will pay!” Emad pledged. “You know what the Immigration people did to my wife at Heathrow? They took her away. They dragged her off to a room and they strip-searched her. They shoved their filthy fingers into my wife, my wife …”
I glanced at the women. They kept their heads lowered. I tasted shame as well as goat meat in the stew.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. I was. But I could have said, I envy you, I envy the clarity of your hate. That, too, would have been true. I might’ve been questioned rudely, but not strip-searched, at Heathrow.
My apology cut short Emad’s demagoguery. “How you like the food?” he asked me. Norman Rockwell’s ghost floated in through a closed, grimy window. An immigrant family in an American kitchen sharing its bounty with a guest who has less than they do. Thanksgiving on the Lower Haight. “My wife,” he beamed at the young woman whom I’d watched stirring and stewing, “she is a very good cook, yes?”
“I thought she was your sister,” I countered.
“Wife number one,” Emad bragged. The cook smiled at me from across the table.
I smiled back. “Three stars, I’m a Guide Michelin scout.”
Emad should have left the introductions at that. But he was in a good mood, maybe even a patriotic mood. “Wife number two,” he continued, pointing to the second-youngest woman. “She is the children’s mother.”
Two wives? A bigamist on Beulah? Maybe the guests on shock shows on TV were more in touch with American reality than Ham and Jess were. I was living a tabloid life.
Emad gestured at the women I’d assumed were his mother and aunt. “Number three and number four.