Leah Franqui - America for Beginners

Carefully removing the drying flower garland, she opened up the back of Ram’s photograph, smiling gently to think of the appropriateness of this as her hiding place. Between the back of the frame and the benevolent, falsely smiling image of her husband was all her trip information. Her itinerary, her ticket, her passport with its crisp new tourist visa, everything she would need. It was far worse than her servant could have possibly imagined. Pival wasn’t going to meet anyone at all in America. She had no family to meet there, no matter what she had told the maids. At least, not in the way they thought.

Ram had had a large family, many of whom still lived in Kolkata, all of whom had been quick to guide Pival through the rituals of death and widowhood with a speed and sense of authority that left her breathless. While they might not have been true dyed-in-the-wool Brahmins, they acted that way when interacting with the world and expected her to do so as well. This was why it was essential for her trip to happen soon, and silently, while the noise of the massive Durga Puja festival left them distracted. She would escape from her life and take a tour, a cross-country trip of America. It would give her a chance to see the country her son had known and loved, the place he had refused to leave, even for her. It would bring her to Los Angeles. She would have time to prepare, time to make herself ready to meet him, the person who had taken her son away.

Pival looked back at the family portrait, her hands in the shot around a plump and grinning version of Rahi, theirs the only two smiling faces in a sea of familial disapproval and stern Bengali brows. She walked up to it and traced Rahi’s tiny face with her pinkie. She then dipped her pinkie back into the depression left by her half-hearted suicide attempt of the previous fall. November would mark a year since Ram had told her Rahi died. She wondered as she stared into the fat baby face, not for the first time, if it was really true. Surely her son couldn’t have died while she still lived. She refused to accept a universe in which Rahi had died. She knew she would have felt his death like a blow to her own body. She didn’t care what had been said, what had been told to her. Everyone could be lying. Ram had always tried to control the way she saw the world, not lying, exactly, but forcing reality to fit his desires. He might have told her Rahi was dead because he was already dead to Ram. It could have been something he had told people so often he really started to believe it himself. She had to go to America and find Rahi, alive and whole or dead and gone. She had to be sure. And if he was gone? Well, then it was her time, too.

Ram had declared their son dead so often by the time the phone call came from America that afterward Pival was never sure if the phone had really rung or not. While she had always nodded along with Ram in public, in private she had never agreed that their son was dead, and that had, she knew, troubled Ram. When she looked up that day and watched him put down the phone, she realized that she hadn’t heard the ringing. That was not surprising; she lived in such a dream world in those days. Ram said, “It’s done. He’s gone,” and Pival had believed him in that moment. But now, months later, she couldn’t decide if Ram had really heard news from across the world or if he couldn’t stand her continued love for the son who had so dishonored him. Things were so blurry, even now. She had to find the truth, even if it stabbed at her heart.

Pival Sengupta was going to America to find her son or his lover. And to kill herself.

Halfway around the world, Ronnie Munshi was, most unprofessionally, avoiding Pival’s calls. Perhaps if he had known about her dramatic intentions he might have been more eager to speak to her, but it was doubtful. Suicide is awfully bad for business.

Ronnie Munshi had a policy. He would answer his phone before a tour was booked, but never afterward. His usual strategy with customers was to woo them with relentless passion, but once he booked them he cut off all communication until their trip, to give them no opportunities to back out once he had received their deposit. He was terrified of such an occurrence, and not without reason. Indians, Ronnie thought, with complacent derision, were notoriously unreliable, especially when presented with the bill.

It would have come as a surprise to many that the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company was, in fact, run by Bangladeshis. The fact that this surprise would have been essentially unpleasant, or at the very least awkward, for his clients made it information that Ronnie was careful to hide. He had heard that Indian-Bangladeshi relationships had improved since his departure from his native land, but he suspected strongly this only applied to wealthy people, who were all the same anyway, wherever you went.

In his fifteen years in America, Ronnie had transformed from a skinny adolescent dishwasher at his distant uncle’s Curry Hill kebab joint to a plump and prosperous owner of his own business. He had also learned enough to understand that that business came at the cost of being Bangladeshi. So for all intents and purposes, publicly, at least, he wasn’t. To the best of his ability, that is. It’s very difficult to pretend to be from a country you dislike while living in another country that doesn’t know that the country you dislike and the country you are from are actually two distinct and separate places. Still, Ronnie had managed thus far, and he had no intention of letting Mrs. Sengupta, an uppity Bengali widow, interfere with his performance. Her calls, however, were not doing wonderful things for his heartburn.

Ronnie reached into a drawer on his desk and pulled out a jumbo-sized container of Tums, or rather, an off-brand knockoff guaranteed to get him the same results. His deceit, although carefully calculated and developed over many years, coupled with his avoidance policies, gave him digestive issues, and the right half of his desk was devoted to medicines, be they Ayurvedic or pharmaceutical, to aid his ever-aching stomach. As he chewed the chalky mouthful of pink and yellow tablets, he tried to remember the last day he had gone through without stomach pain.

Ronnie had arrived in America at the age of eighteen with four hundred dollars in his pocket, fifty of which were rapidly stolen by a cabdriver who could see that the frightened foreigner had no concept of United States currency, and a letter of introduction to his uncle and uncle’s family.

His uncle, Pritviraj Munshi, actually a third cousin of his late father, introduced himself to his trembling relative as Raj, informing him that this name was easier for Americans to understand. This introduction confused Ronnie, then Rosni, because surely his uncle could count on a relative to understand his real name, even if these strange white people couldn’t. But Rosni was too tired and overwhelmed to question his uncle, who had, after all, not only survived for some twenty years in the United States but prospered. Pritviraj had left Bangladesh after the revolution and somehow had made it in America, and that made him a hero in Rosni’s exhausted eyes.

Recovering from his jet lag, Rosni presented himself at his uncle’s Manhattan business the following day to start working. He realized to his horror that his uncle, a proud Bangladeshi man, had set up an Indian restaurant. Instead of mustard-scented fish curries and coconut mutton chops served with plain rice, his uncle was doing good business selling people kebabs and dals and naan in a cramped but cheerful place with large color-enhanced photos of the Taj Mahal all over the walls and sitar music twanging in the background. There was a tandoori section of the menu, but no tandoor in the kitchen, and nothing was the way he had thought it would be. Confused, and less recovered from his flight than he had thought, Rosni almost fainted on the spot.