Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

“What are you going to be when you finish school?” she’d ask me and blow rings, like kisses, that wobbled to my face and broke gently across it. I didn’t know anyone who blew smoke rings. I thought they had gone out with black-and-white films. I became a staunch admirer of Nepal.

What I wanted to be in those days was someone important, which meant a freedom like Danny’s but without the scams. Respectable freedom in the bigger world of America, that’s what I wanted. Growing up in Queens gives a boy ambitions. But I didn’t disclose them. I said to Rosie what my ma always said when other Indians dropped by. I said I would be going to Columbia University to the Engineering School. It was a story Ma believed because she’d told it so often, though I knew better. Only the Indian doctors’ kids from New Jersey and Long Island went to Columbia. Out in Flushing we got a different message. Indian boys were placed on earth to become accountants and engineers. Even old Idi Amin was placed on earth to force Indians to come to America to become accountants and engineers. I went through high school scared, wondering what there was in my future if I hated numbers. I wondered if Pace and Adelphi had engineering. I didn’t want to turn out like my Aunt Lini, a ghetto moneylender, and I didn’t want to suffer like my mother, and I hated my father with a passion. No wonder Danny’s world seemed so exciting. My mother was knocking herself out at a kiosk in Port Authority, earning the minimum wage from a guy who convinced her he was doing her a big favor, all for my mythical Columbia tuition. Lini told me that in America grades didn’t count; it was all in the test scores. She bought me the SAT workbooks and told me to memorize the answers.

“Smashing,” Rosie would say, and other times, “Jolly good,” showing that even in the Himalayan foothills, the sun hadn’t yet set on the British Empire.

Some afternoons Rosie would be doubled over in bed with leg pains. I know now she’d had rickets as a kid and spent her childhood swaying under hundred pound sacks of rice piled on her head. By thirty she’d be hobbling around like an old football player with blown knees. But at sixteen or whatever, she still had great, hard, though slightly bent legs, and she’d hike her velour dressing gown so I could tightly crisscross her legs and part of her thighs with pink satin hair ribbons. It was a home remedy, she said, it stopped circulation. I couldn’t picture her in that home, Nepal. She was like a queen (“The Queen of Queens,” I used to joke) to me that year. Even India, where both my parents were born, was a mystery.

Curing Rosie’s leg pains led to some strong emotions, and soon I wanted to beat on the gentlemen callers who came, carrying cheap boxes of candy and looking her over like a slave girl on the auction block. She’d tell me about it, nonchalantly, making it funny. She’d catalogue each of their faults, imitate their voices. They’d try to get a peek under the covers or even under the clothing, and Danny would be there to cool things down. I wasn’t allowed to help, but by then I would have killed for her.

I was no stranger to the miseries of unrequited love. Rosie was the unavailable love in the room upstairs who talked to me unblushingly of sex and made the whole transaction seem base and grubby and funny. In my Saturday morning Gujarati class, on the other hand, there was a girl from Syosset who called herself “Pammy Patel,” a genuine Hindu-American Princess of the sort I had never seen before, whose skin and voice and eyes were as soft as clouds. She wore expensive dresses and you could tell she’d spent hours making herself up just for the Gujarati classes in the Hindu Temple. Her father was a major surgeon, and he and Pammy’s brothers would stand outside the class to protect her from any contact with boys like me. They would watch us filing out of the classroom, looking us up and down and smirking the way Danny’s catalogue brides were looked at by their American buyers.

I found the whole situation achingly romantic. In the Hindi films I’d see every Sunday, the hero was always a common man with a noble heart, in love with an unattainable beauty. Then she’d be kidnapped and he’d have to save her. Caste and class would be overcome and marriage would follow. To that background, I added a certain American equality. I grew up hating rich people, especially rich Indian immigrants who didn’t have the problems of Uganda and a useless father, but otherwise were no better than I. I never gave them the deference that Aunt Lini and my mother did.

With all that behind me, I had assumed that real love had to be cheerless. I had assumed I wouldn’t find a girl worth marrying, not that girls like Pammy could make me happy. Rosie was the kind of girl who could make me happy, but even I knew she was not the kind of girl I could marry. It was confusing. Thoughts of Rosie made me want to slash the throats of rivals. Thoughts of Pammy made me want to wipe out her whole family.

One very hot afternoon Rosie, as usual, leaned her elbows on the windowsill and shouted to me to fetch a six-pack of tonic and a lemon. I’d been sitting on the stoop, getting new tips from Danny on scalping for an upcoming dance recital — a big one, Lincoln Center — but I leaped to attention and shook the change in my pockets to make sure I had enough for Mr. Chin. Rosie kept records of her debts, and she’d pay them off, she said, just as soon as Danny arranged a green card to make her legit. She intended to make it here without getting married. She exaggerated Danny’s power. To her, he was some kind of local bigwig who could pull off anything. None of Danny’s girls had tried breaking a contract before, and I wondered if she’d actually taken it up with him.

Danny pushed me back so hard I scraped my knee on the stoop. “You put up the posters,” he said. After taping them up, I was to circulate on the subway and press the pictures on every lonely guy I saw. “I’ll take care of Rosie. You report back tomorrow.”

“After I get her tonic and a lemon,” I said.

It was the only time I ever saw the grown-up orphan in Danny, the survivor. If he’d had a knife or a gun on him, he might have used it. “I give the orders,” he said, “you follow.” Until that moment, I’d always had the implicit sense that Danny and I were partners in some exciting enterprise, that together we were putting something over on India, on Flushing, and even on America.

Then he smiled, but it wasn’t Danny’s radiant, conspiratorial, arm-on-the-shoulder smile that used to warm my day. “You’re making her fat,” he said. “You’re making her drunk. You probably want to diddle her yourself, don’t you? Fifteen years old and never been out of your auntie’s house and you want a real woman like Rosie. But she thinks you’re her errand boy and you just love being her smiley little chokra-boy , don’t you?” Then the smile froze on his lips, and if he’d ever looked Mexican, this was the time. Then he said something in Hindi that I barely understood, and he laughed as he watched me repeat it, slowly. Something about eunuchs not knowing their place. “Don’t ever go up there again, hijra-boy.”

I was starting to take care of Danny’s errands quickly and sloppily as always, and then, at the top of the subway stairs, I stopped. I’d never really thought what a strange, pimpish thing I was doing, putting up pictures of Danny’s girls, or standing at the top of the subway stairs and passing them out to any lonely-looking American I saw — what kind of joke was this? How dare he do this, I thought, how dare he make me a part of this? I couldn’t move. I had two hundred sheets of yellow paper in my hands, descriptions of Rosie and half a dozen others like her, and instead of passing them out, I threw them over my head and let them settle on the street and sidewalk and filter down the paper-strewn, garbage-littered steps of the subway. How dare he call me hijra , eunuch?