Leah Franqui - America for Beginners

Ronnie then placed an advertisement on Craigslist, with Anita’s help, but that disaster of emails and calls from most unsuitable candidates was best never thought of again. So now he would visit his friend Mr. Ghazi, the owner of the map store. Then he would think the problem over again in a new environment over a plate of kebabs from a nearby Pakistani deli. What he needed was someone who would have no interest in Satya. Perhaps he was going down the wrong road interviewing Bangladeshi girls? If he found someone white, they would surely have no interest in this Bangla boy, he thought as he boarded the subway.

He was considering his lunch order when he walked into Maps on St. Mark’s and almost tripped over a set of cartographer’s charts from the sixteenth century.

“Ah, I’m sorry, Mr. Munshi! I’ve been meaning to put those away.” Mr. Ghazi cheerfully greeted Ronnie from the other side of his small counter, enjoying a cup of black coffee, his fifth at least. Mr. Ghazi was always meaning to put things away and never doing it. The shop was only in any kind of state for visitors on the days his employee came, a girl Ronnie had spotted once reorganizing travel guides in their small section in the corner. Mr. Ghazi did not approve of selling travel guides because of the ways they chopped maps up into small pieces and isolated them from each other, but he had to admit, travel guides sold well.

“How are you today, Mr. Ghazi?” Ronnie asked politely as Mr. Ghazi disappeared into the back room to retrieve Ronnie’s standing order.

“Very well! Very well. This time of year is quite invigorating, don’t you think?” The weather had just started turning brisk, something Ronnie dreaded.

“Invigorating. That is a word for it, yes.”

Mr. Ghazi smiled. “What can I say, it keeps my brain fresh, being on ice!” He laughed at his own joke, looking up when he realized Ronnie wasn’t joining him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Ghazi, I have a trouble on my mind and not ices. It’s very funny, yes, I am just not in a laughing way today.”

As Ronnie explained his problem, he realized that Mr. Ghazi’s expression had changed from displaying the interest of a concerned friend to showing a certain level of calculation, a strange expression for his usually guileless face.

“So there you have it. I need to find her, and soon, or this whole job is kaput. She’s willing to pay double, you see, which is no small amount. And these Bengalis always have so many friends and relatives who they will tell if the trip is not good. Real problem, no?”

Mr. Ghazi looked at Ronnie for a moment and then looked away, his lips moving slightly.

“I might have a solution for you, Mr. Munshi. Of course, it all depends, obviously and completely, but if it works, it might be the best solution for everyone.”

“Everyone?”

The doorbell chimed as the shopgirl entered the small store, smiling.

“Everyone.”

The First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company was housed in an office building in Queens exactly four blocks from the second-to-last stop on the N train, a trip that took Satya two hours each way from Brooklyn. He rode almost the entire length of the N train daily, boarding at Eighteenth Avenue, six stops from the end of the line in Brooklyn. He had, more than once, ridden the train to each of its ends, falling asleep on his way to or from his job and waking up to see the train turning itself around. But this hadn’t bothered him; in fact, he enjoyed these subway rides, watching the entire line in motion and the change in customers from one end of the route to the other. It was the people in the middle who were the most strange to him, loud people who looked too wealthy to be on a subway at all, and gaping tourists whose teeth chattered from the movement of the train from Fourteenth Street to Times Square. But most of his fellow travelers on either end were people like himself, exhausted but determined, their eyes locked on the floor of the train car.

He had never seen so many kinds of people in his life before he had moved to America. At home, everyone looked the same, or if they looked different, like he did, like Ravi had, everyone had known why. Skin tones varied within a limited spectrum; hair ranged from blue-black to the hennaed red that old men dyed their beards, hoping to look younger but never succeeding.

Here, everyone looked like combinations of people, more colors and shapes and bodies than he had known possible. The irony was that everyone dressed in the same colors, somber blacks and grays, while back at home the monotony of people’s faces had been obscured by the violent rainbow of their clothing, printed cottons as far as the eye could see, swathing women in their saris or draping playfully around them in a salwar kameez. Sometimes a flash of color caught in the corner of his eye, or he saw a Muslim prayer cap, and he thought it might be Ravi, but it never was. They had both brought only Western clothing with them, anyway. Ravi’s mother had promised to keep their kurtas safe for them at home. Satya wished he had burned his instead. He thought about writing her and asking her to do so, but he knew that would raise too many questions. He still hadn’t responded to her letter. So instead he looked for Ravi on trains, and wondered what he was doing, and what he thought of all the different kinds of people who lived in America.

One morning Satya took his normal ride, leaving Brooklyn at six in the morning to arrive just past eight at the agency. No one else ever showed up at this hour, so he sometimes treated himself to a cup of tea from a street vendor who let him have it at half the price, leaning against the building and waiting for Ronnie to let him in. Satya supposed that he could actually leave Brooklyn at a later time, but what was the point of staying in his dingy apartment and listening to his new roommates snore?

Ronnie was particularly late that morning. Satya waited, making his tea last for a full hour until Vikrum arrived, producing his own copy of the building key. Satya found September already quite chilly, although no one around him seemed to share that feeling, as the people passing him by wore short sleeves like it was high summer.

“It’s lucky this isn’t the winter, eh? You would have frozen to death, brother.” Vikrum grinned at Satya with his golden smile.

“It can’t get that cold, can it?” Vikrum only laughed in response. Satya watched the burly man putter about with surprisingly elegant gestures, preparing a pot of coffee for the office.

“Make yourself useful, then, take the messages.” Satya shot up to do the older guide’s bidding. Gentle as Vikrum was, Satya was a bit afraid of him. He was the kind of man who was hired by criminals back home to intimidate shop owners and scare people. If Vikrum had been an actor in Bollywood he would have been cast as a goon, but he was a very good guide, and a deeply kind person. He often divided some portion of his lunch to share with Satya. He arrived before most other guides, and so Satya had grown accustomed to spending quiet mornings with Ronnie’s snorts and scowls, Vikrum’s placid whistling, and his own thoughts. Ravi would have made fun of Vikrum, Satya knew, for his large size and easy smile, and Satya would have laughed, agreeing. Satya frowned; the thought tasted bitter in his head.

He listened to the messages, dutifully recording the names and numbers of potential clients. Ronnie encouraged most of his Indian and Pakistani clients to speak English, claiming it was good for them to practice before they arrived, but that was really to mask his own accented Hindi, which could give him away as a Bangladeshi. If they were Bengali, however, he didn’t bother. For Hindi-speaking tourists, Ronnie had two guides who spent most of their time practicing by watching Indian films from the 1950s and ’60s to get the cleanest and most proper accent they could. In general, however, he encouraged English as much as possible, even in the office, and while many of his guides resented it, the reality was it helped them more than most of them ever acknowledged. Ronnie had never forgotten the sour feeling in his stomach when he had learned how much that cab-driver had ripped him off on his first day in America. He understood, even if his guides didn’t, that not understanding English was something recent immigrants could rarely afford.