The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [47]
Dead? Dying? Diseased?
Kavafya picked it up and a voice projected into the room raw and insistent with panic. “Emergency! Emergency! We are coming from airport. Emergency! Emergency! Saaeed S-aa-eed?”
He put it down and unplugged it.
Saeed: “Those boys, let them in, they will never leave. They are desperate. Desperate. Once you let them in, once you hear their story, you can’t say no, you know their aunty, you know their cousin, you have to help the whole family, and once they begin, they will take everything. You can’t say this is my food, like Americans, and only I will eat it. Ask Thea”—she was the latest pooky pooky interest in the bakery—”Where she live with three friends, everyone go shopping separately, separately they cook their dinner, together they eat their separate food. The fridge they divide up, and into their own place—their own place!—they put what is left in a separate box. One of the roommates, she put her name on the box so it say who it belong to!” His finger went up in uncharacteristic sternness. “In Zanzibar what one person have he have to share with everyone, that is good, that is the right way—
“But then everyone have nothing, man! That is why Heave Zanzibar.” Silence.
Biju’s sympathy for Saeed leaked into sympathy for himself, then Saeed’s shame into his own shame that he would never help all those people praying for his help, waiting daily, hourly, for his response. He, too, had arrived at the airport with a few dollar bills bought on the Kathmandu black market in his pocket and an address for his father’s friend, Nandu, who lived with twenty-two taxi drivers in Queens. Nandu had also not answered the phone and had tried to hide when Biju arrived on his doorstep, and then when he thought Biju had left, had opened the door and to his distress found Biju still standing there two hours later.
“No jobs here anymore,” he said. “If I were a young man I would go back to India, more opportunities there now, too late for me to make a change, but you should listen to what I’m saying. Everyone says you have to stay, this is where you’ll make a good life, but much better for you to go back.”
Nandu met someone at his work who told him of the basement in Harlem and ever since he had deposited Biju there, Biju had never seen him again.
He had been abandoned among foreigners: Jacinto the superintendent, the homeless man, a stiff bow-legged coke runner, who walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking, with his stiff yellow bow-legged dog, who also walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking. In the summer, families moved out of cramped quarters and sat on the sidewalk with boom boxes; women of great weight and heft appeared in shorts with shaven legs, stippled with tiny black dots, and groups of deflated men sat at cards on boards balanced atop garbage cans, swigged their beer from bottles held in brown paper bags. They nodded kindly at him, sometimes they even offered him a beer, but Biju did not know what to say to them, even his tiny brief “Hello” came out wrong: too softly, so they did not hear, or just as they had turned away.
______
The green card the green card. The….
Without it he couldn’t leave. To leave he wanted a green card. This was the absurdity. How he desired the triumphant After The Green Card Return Home, thirsted for it—to be able to buy a ticket with the air of someone who could return if he wished, or not, if he didn’t wish…. He watched the legalized foreigners with envy as they shopped at discount baggage stores for the miraculous, expandable third-world suitcase, accordion-pleated, filled with pockets and zippers to unhook further crannies, the whole structure unfolding into a giant space that could fit in enough to set up an entire life in another country.
Then, of course, there were those who lived and died illegal in America and never saw their families, not for ten years, twenty, thirty, never again.
How did one do it? At the Queen of Tarts, they watched the TV shows on Sunday mornings