Leah Franqui - America for Beginners

As a result of this policy, most of the messages left were in English. Satya had a hard time with recorded messages, but he knew he needed the practice. He would listen to each message five or six times before he was confident that he had gotten the information correct. There was a rather shrill message in Bengali from a woman in Kolkata, which he listened to ten times that morning. Although he spoke the language, the emotion in her voice made it hard to understand, but also the sound of a woman speaking Bengali reminded him of home. His grandmother had visited Kolkata once and described it to Satya. He wondered who would guide this woman and wished, for a moment, that he could meet her, and ask her if the stories his grandmother had told him about the city were true.

That afternoon, sitting in the small break room, Satya looked up from his lunch, a pile of roti he had burned into hard black disks and sour, undercooked dal made of a mixture of lentils and kidney beans. Ronnie had arrived, followed by a slim white woman. Vikrum was out for the afternoon and hadn’t offered Satya anything to eat before he left. Satya had never cooked much before arriving in America, and his early attempts had not been particularly successful. He grimaced, his mouth full of unhappy tastes, as he watched the woman’s body sway.

He wasn’t the only one staring. It was a rare occurrence to see any white person, or any nonemployee in general, enter the office. Almost everyone working that day, studying maps, categorizing invoices, or fighting with Ranjit, the bookkeeper, over receipts accumulated during tours, raised their eyes from their work to watch the girl go by. Satya lifted his nose to sniff, trying to catch any hint of her scent in the air.

Satya could smell nothing, he realized sadly as the woman went by. Ravi had told him that you could smell it when a woman was ready for a man, and since then he had tried to surreptitiously sniff around when he saw a new woman, but it had never worked. Maybe Ravi had been lying to him, he thought. The notion comforted him. How could Ravi have known about things like that?

Both boys had left Bangladesh virgins, at least as far as Satya knew. And yet, it had never occurred to him before to question this knowledge. He was annoyed with himself. Why had he trusted Ravi with something so important?

Satya’s time in America had already exposed him to many women and had given him a new understanding of what it meant for women to be so on display. At home in Sylhet, women’s bodies were largely shaded from the male gaze, and their faces, with their downcast eyes, held no invitations. America, however, was completely different, in ways he never could have anticipated.

Each of the guides around Satya was looking at the girl like a dog watching hanging chickens in a butcher shop. It was a profound comfort to Satya to know that these men also watched women with a single-minded focus. Together they made a detailed study of the strange girl’s body (slim, but with nicely shaped breasts and sweetly curving hips), which was covered with a floating thin top that was somehow longer in the back than in the front, an issue with the manufacturing, Satya assumed. Her legs were clad in tight-fitting gray pants that ended at her ankles, and small shoes that looked like slippers fit her feet, with an anklet gently gracing her right ankle like a ribbon around a present. When he finally found the time to examine her face, Satya found it to be a pale heart-shaped one surrounded by light brown and honey-tinted wavy wisps of hair. Large brown eyes sat widely over a substantial but not overwhelming nose, and plump pink lips pursed, he realized, in an expression of concern. She did not, he suddenly understood, enjoy being stared at by a roomful of strange men. She hesitated once, shrinking into herself against so many concentrated gazes, but then walked on, and for a moment Satya admired her.

He turned back to his terrible lunch and his studying. Whatever was going on with this woman and Boss, it was certainly no concern of his. His grandmother, he knew, would have been happy with him for averting his eyes. Ravi would have mocked him, calling him an idiot. But Ravi wasn’t there. Satya was not sure if what he felt was guilt or relief. His eyes looked at a passage from his tour book on the Grand Canyon, describing the Hopi people and their devotion to the canyon as a religious site. He tried to lose himself in the book, but the image of the canyon swirled in front of his eyes, becoming at once Ravi’s smile and this strange woman’s face, shrinking and pinched with discomfort. If she had had a dupatta on, he thought, I never would have known .

Rebecca sat, ramrod straight, in front of the strange man who Mr. Ghazi had assured her was far less dodgy than he seemed.

The plump, small figure in front of her had on the most gold jewelry that she had ever seen on any man. He wore three gold chains around his neck, the longest of which dipped into the hairy V formed by the undone top buttons of his collared shirt. The shirt itself was a violent shade of puce, a color Rebecca had never actually seen in real life and was surprised to find looked exactly the way it sounded, like something toxic.

He had several bracelets around his pudgy wrists, which were exposed by his shirtsleeves. His stomach wasn’t grossly large, but it extended gently over the top of his black pants. He wore gold rings with gemstones on each of his fingers, except for his thumbs, whose rings instead held large golden structures that looked to Rebecca like Aztec temples. The effect was finished off by what smelled like a potpourri shop of men’s fragrances, from sandalwood to Axe body spray, undercut slightly by the smell of antacids. Opening his mouth, Mr. Munshi revealed a tongue coated in light pink, and he ate a handful of Tums like candy, crunching loudly.

Mr. Munshi was sweating profusely, his armpits showing deeper shades of puce whenever he lifted his hands. A cold cup of tea sat next to his elbow and Rebecca worried vaguely that his enthusiastic hand gestures might send it tipping all over his desk at any moment.

Mr. Ghazi had explained that Mr. Munshi’s business catered mostly to Indian tourists. At first she had thought he was merely sharing a tidbit of information with her, but the urgency in his gaze and the blatant hope on the face of the other man, who introduced himself with a sweaty handshake and the words “Ronnie Munshi, madam, very pleased, impressed, and happy to meet you,” had convinced Rebecca that something else was going on.

Mr. Ghazi took the long way around when explaining things, a quality that Rebecca had initially found frustrating but now enjoyed, understanding that this was simply his way of being polite, sidling up to an important or difficult subject without tackling it right away. Mr. Ghazi began this particular explanation by contextualizing Mr. Munshi, describing briefly Bangladesh and his own experience with the country, which was nonexistent, and mentioning Mr. Munshi’s wife, Anita, and the circumstances of their relationship. He then moved on to Mr. Munshi’s work, its evolution out of his time on the Circle Line, and Mr. Ghazi’s own feelings on boats and their attractions, and then settled upon this new client of Mr. Munshi’s, who, Rebecca realized by Mr. Munshi’s sudden interest in the conversation, had been the point all along.

When Mr. Ghazi had mentioned Rebecca as a potential companion for the trip she had immediately started shaking her head no. She could miss auditions. It would be insane to leave town, no matter what they were willing to pay her, no matter how much she could use the money. She simply couldn’t leave New York for something that wasn’t an acting job.

However, Mr. Ghazi had looked her in the eye and asked her to think about it, and so she had agreed to do so, while privately feeling that her decision had already been made.