The Oust: Part the Third

Injustices in my country are so common and so intractable that almost all of the 1.2 billion of us barely waste the energy to feel enraged at them.  Bribes are paid, girls are trafficked, cops are corrupted, the rich get their way, funds are redirected from the public good to the private pocket, friends get benefits and strangers get cheated, caste and religious discrimination happens, the guilty go free, and the innocent get punished.  It ranges from the top, like tax money building mansions, to the bottom, like my sister’s husband getting mysteriously released by the police because he once did a favor for the village sarpanch.

But there are rare moments when the collective weight of the injustice becomes too heavy even for a people accustomed to carrying buckets of water on their heads.  We keep our eyes to the ground, but we pick up one foot and give our enemy a quick kick to the shins as we walk past.

I didn’t know that today would be one of those days when I heaved myself off my mat at the buzz of my mobile phone alarm.  I went through my morning routine in a depressed fog and headed for the kitchen. Pushing the door open quietly, I peered around in the semi dark, hoping for cool, quiet, emptiness.  But the Sahib bounded into view, flipping on the fluorescent lights as he came, brimful of obnoxious energy and wafts of deodorant. 

“Let’s get right at it, my boy!  Look at you!  You need to get more sleep young man.  How do you expect to perform and excel in the workplace if you come in dragging your gaand behind you?  I know you’re young and this is Goa, but you have to pay more attention to work and less to girls, if you want to get anywhere in this life.  Maybe you should do some exercises before you come in the morning, get your blood flowing and your mind working in tip-top shape.”

“Gi Sir, yes Sir,” I sighed and tried to shrug him off by quietly focusing on chopping tomatoes, onions, and peppers for the omelets.

The day continued like normal until 11:14 am (I know, because I glanced at the clock, noticing that I was late for my chai break).  The greatest shocks come when your mind is completely absorbed with the mundane and the usual.  You are not daydreaming about a girl or a heroic sea rescue or punching your boss in the middle of his sycophantic nose.  You are not alert to the people around you or the weather or the news.  You are simply lost in the midst of your tasks: wash the kadai, knead the atta, rinse the rice.

A noise startled me out of my mindless reverie.

A white man stood before me.  Unlike most of them, he was not tall or broad or loud.  He had thinning brown hair and a forgettable face, and had tapped lightly on the edge of the service window to get my attention.  I noticed his dress pants and shirt, which is not the usual garb for holiday-goers.

“Where is Ram?”

I was so befuddled that I stood there like the idiot he probably assumed I was, mouth open, mind racing.  “Ram…Ram, who in the world is……oh, he means the Sahib!”

I had forgotten his name.  So, I guess that made us kind of even, in a way.

“Oh, I’m sorry sir, ah, he is having his chai now, sir.”

“Can you take me to him please?  I need to collect some reports from him and I haven’t much time before I leave for the next hotel.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t interrupt his chai break.”  His voice was quiet and unaccusing, something so unfamiliar to me.

“Certainly sir, right this was please, sir.”

Since he was already in the kitchen, I led him the way I normally took to the break room.  If you walked behind the freezers, you could follow a small hallway, lined floor to ceiling with provisions boxes, and reach a back door to the break room in 30 seconds.  The Sahib didn’t use this door.  I always assumed it was because it wasn’t dignified enough for him.  He went around the front of the restaurant and came through the main door.

And so it was that we surprised him.

We stepped through the doorway into the tiny, white-tiled room with its plastic carafes of chai on plastic tables with plastic chairs.  It had to be the most plasticy room in the whole hotel.

The Sahib, Ram, whirled to meet us, the expense cash box open behind him, and a wad of 500 rupee bills in his hand.  There was a half a moment when I could have covered for him.  I had walked in the room first, and I could have delayed, blocking the visitor’s view for just long enough for the Sahib the stuff the money away.

But I didn’t.  In a split second I saw and understood everything, and then I quickly and deliberately stepped to the side, allowing the foreigner full view.

The Sahib’s expression of shock, followed by one of outrage at me, was quickly replaced with one of pandering explanation.  But his expressions and long-winded accounts of ‘what had really happened’ would be to no avail, the quiet foreigner would have none of it.  He apparently knew theft when he saw.

By the time afternoon chai rolled around, the Sahib was hotel history, a mere memory to be bandied about over our steaming plastic cups.  As we sipped our tea, I related events in dramatic detail to Gunpat, and he hung on to every word.  True to form, he began cackling with all his might and swatting at the table when I got to the end.

“I tell you Aalam, I always knew that Sahib would end up being escorted out the back door.  A thief is a thief, whether it’s a diamond or a cucumber!”

Gunpat’s revelation wasn’t nearly as hilarious as he thought it was, but I tipped my chair back and laughed my head off anyway, enjoying my small taste of freedom. 

The Oust: Part the Second

I finish wiping up (we call it disinfecting to meet with the international standards of our hotel chain, but my dirty rag probably doesn’t quite make the cut) and begin washing a massive container full of strawberries.  It’s not the right time of year for strawberries, but they get imported from somewhere.  In my village, we can only get them for a few months, usually around December or January.  Most of the tiny berries get sold to out-of-towners or boxed up and put on lorries to be eaten by strangers in the cities.  I sold strawberries for a short while when I was younger, nicking the tiniest ones and nearly making my eyes water with the burst of warm sweetness that reddened by tongue.  I smile at the memory and recall my younger sister then, her dark eyes glinting at the sun, laughing at my indignation as she took off with a handful of berries and disappeared behind the clog of rickshaws and cows.  But that was before.  She doesn’t laugh anymore, not now that Ratnesh spends many evenings with his bottle and his stick.

Hours later, my work is finished, and I take one last deep breath of the restaurant’s air conditioned interior before I trudge out into the Goan night, still as steamy as one of the hotel bathrooms just after a shower, despite the fact that it’s sometime past midnight.  It’s not far to the staff quarters, which stand in tin and asbestos rows like a set of ragged old soldiers.  An array of glorious mast trees blocks them from the view of hotel patrons who might gaze out their French doors or sit on their manicured balconies with their morning French press coffee.   Usually, each metal box houses 6 people, all of us migrants from other parts of India, having followed rumors of plentiful work and the off-chance of somehow getting a piece of the great wealth that floods into Goa in the pockets of Russians, Germans, and Brits.

A group of four Nepali boys used to share my house, but they all disappeared en masse a few weeks back.  Every hotel employee claims to know the true cause of their evaporation into thin air, postulations ranging from a better paying job in North Goa to an escape from a boss to whom they owed some money after a failed drug transfer.  So, now I share only with Gunpat, an ancient gardener who possesses three and a half teeth, nine toes, and a strangely durable sense of humor, which has lasted despite the deaths of his wives (first and second) and five of his six children.  He’s snoring on his chattai in the corner, but pops open one eye as I enter.

“Aalam,” he screech whispers, “he’s been doing it again.”

“Who’s been doing what again?” I ask, not sure if he’s dream-talking, dementia-talking, or really awake.

“That posh Sahib of yours has his hands in the big man’s pocket.  Moushie says that Sneha said that Pooja saw him fishing around the cash box during chai time.  Oh, and your fly is down.”

As I glance down at my pants, he cackles hysterically at his success in fooling me, smacking himself on the stomach several times before rolling over and re-closing his eye.

I have to grin a little at his joke as I strip down to my chuddies, rinsing a small spot out of my white shirt so that I can wear it again tomorrow.  All at once, my general torpor gives way and I feel myself filling with a blue-hot resentment towards the Sahib, who parades as a righteous, god-fearing, honest man with a bold red tikka streaked down his forehead.  “It is my joy to serve for the good of the hotel.”  That’s what he says, complimented by a dazzling smile, when in the presence of his superiors.  “Dog,” I think, as I drift off to sleep. 

BFF

1...2...3...4...
you began to count.
I roved with my eyes,
saw it, and ran.

11...12...13...14...
I collapsed myself
into the dark crevasse,
giggling, waiting.

19...20...21...22...
the anticipation built.
I knew you'd find me;
you always did.

38...39...40...41...
How long would it take?
It was a good spot,
but you knew, you must have known.

47...48...49...50...
Breathless silence, I sat still,
heard receding footsteps.
But you never came.

Enough Already

A haze of brown glass
muffles the mountains as they pass
from view.

I don't smell or hear
for I am in and they are there
outside.

Lining the track's edge
letting it fall over the ledge,
dark, rank.

Not caring, yet seen;
genitals hanging out, unclean,
these men.

Don't tell me, don't say,
save the tale for another day,
alright?

There's too much on me,
crushing faith, feelings, can't you see,
it weighs.

Your pain and your life,
one more in the story of strife,
would ache.

So, I'll stay here still;
you, me, and the wall windowsill,
cut off.

The Oust: Part the First

I feel it in the far right bottom corner of my stomach.

It’s something akin to an intestinal worm, but it’s made entirely out of bad emotions that are struggling to break through my esophageal sphincter and come pouring out of my mouth in some ugly shape or form.  But I squeeze them down and hold them in because they wouldn’t make any difference.  I want to shout at the man, I do, but things people say don’t ever seem to wound him in the least.  They roll off and come round to whack you in the back of the head like a cricket bat when you least expect it.

“Ahh, young man,” he’s saying, because I’m not sure he actually knows my name.  He’s all smiles and a whiff of body odor and garlic issues from some crevice that was not appropriately doused with cologne this morning.

“Ahh, young man, if you could just make sure you disinfect this whole area after you’ve finished cleaning up and then begin the fruit prep for tomorrow, that’d be grand.”

He puts on these Britishisms like “young man,” and “that’d be grand,” even though he’s never even been to England or even left the country.  My guess is that he likes the sound of himself being quaint, respectable, and dapper.  He likes the air it lends to his restaurant and the effect he thinks that will have on the ladies, particularly the foreign ones.  He ushers them to their seats making tasteful comments about their overwhelming beauty and looking into their eyes for just one moment before saying “Bon Appetit!” (which, of course, is French and not British, but he hasn’t realized that) and rushing back to his ruling counter.  From that maître d’ spot he will look suddenly and intensely busy.  Scrutinizing bills, punching thing on the computer, and scribbling notes to himself.  He’s even figured out that treating your inferior staff with respect goes over well with foreign guests, so he will whisper to us confidentially or smile and pat us on the back saying “good work boy!”  When the restaurant is empty, however, he becomes a different man, shouting at our inadequacies and ranting over our tiniest of mistakes.

“The Sahib,” as we call him behind his back, is putting on a show for a moderately attractive woman right now, an inspector who’s stopped by to check on health and sanitation.  But she’s from around here and so she’s not so easily fooled, although she’d never say it.

The truth is I always disinfect this area and don’t need to be bossed around.  The truth is that I will begin not only the fruit prep for the morning, but also the meat prep for the following day, washing of dishes, setting of tables, and whatever else he finds for me to do.  I will work past midnight or later, no matter that I need to arrive by 5:45 am to begin cooking breakfast.  The old guests often rise early (this seems to be a plague of old age; you finally get to stop working, but by then you don’t know how to sleep in) and want a bite to eat before they go meandering along the shoreline, picking up shells or pointlessly hurtling down the beach on rented cycles.  But there is no room to complain because he is always there too, working late and arriving early with a seemingly boundless supply of energy.  “You just need to economize, prioritize, and work more efficiently,” he says, the one day he finds me sleeping in one of the larders and I try to explain just how exhausted I am every day.  “Look at me.  I work just as hard as you, and I’m not exhausted, because I have motivation for excellence.  You should be able to complete your work in a lot less time, you know.  You just need to find that inner drive to be more than you are now, to succeed, and you could do so much better, young man.”

My head nodded in understanding and a feigned awe at his great wisdom.  Aalam, my brain wearily protested.  My name is Aalam.

But the other truth is, I don’t have connections or education, so I probably will never succeed and I need to hang on to this drab job and this sickening boss for all I’m worth.  Plus, I have another reason for needing a steady income.  There’s my sister to take care of.  And so, beneath the simple words he just spoke to me is a message I must understand and obey even though it’s never been and never will be said: Don’t answer truthfully about your working hours or how I treat you, or you’ll be out of here faster than a prostitute at the break of dawn.  

Family Legend 1

My Dad used to fly a plane.

It was a small four-seater; a lake amphibian with the nifty ability to land and take-off from either water or dry ground.  Apparently, I flew in it too, although I was too young for me to remember it now.

One fine day, my father effected a perfect water landing at a big fly-in shindig.  The lake sparkled, the shoreline teemed with other flying enthusiasts, and the planes shone in the mid-morning sun.

A boat appeared from somewhere to ferry the new arrivals to land, and my dad and mom began to disembark.  My Dad's mammothly long legs carried him easily to the waiting watercraft.  Of shorter stature, my mom had more difficulty, first tentatively placing one foot in the boat, while keep the other firmly planted in the plane.

As she planned her next physical maneuver, she had a disturbing inkling that something was going wrong.  The inkling became an impression, and then the impression became a conviction, as it became clear that the boat had decided to begin sliding away from the plane.

Not usually one for flexibility, on this occasion, my mom's growing split convinced the crowd that she must be a gymnast of olympic quality.  There was unmistakable strain at the seam of her pants and unambiguous pain in the grim look on her face, and yet the course of the boat continued to drift in the wrong direction.  A collective hush fell upon the crowd as the scene reached its climax: the legs in a completely horizontal position, freezing there for one of those hold-your-breath moments......and then?

KAFOOOSH!

Down she went.

Crossroads

Two roads did diverge, and I did choose the one with markedly fewer pedestrians.

But does it follow that my decision was the correct one?

There was no precursing flash of clarity, no spark of exuberance; just a grudging, reluctant commitment because a decision had to be made.

If the results of the decision are supposed to be any indication, then they too are baffling: some rejoicing positives, many soul-shattering negatives.

I'd be more than happy to do the right thing every time, if only someone would tell me what it is. 

"If only I could freeze this time of the day and live in it for 8 hours."

That's what she thought to herself as she hurried up the side street leading from her corner of the city to its main road.  It was just pre-dawn, and the unparalleled noise and congestion that characterize India were still just a muted rumble.  In the dusky light, few people were about, comparatively speaking, and even fewer noticed that she was a foreigner, or had the gall to shout it out to the rest of the pedestrian world.  It was a welcome respite from the usual onslaught of stares and comments in her somewhat provincial city.  Since it was only March, the weather still had the courtesy to cool down a bit at night.  So, although it would hit the mid-90s again today, for the moment the air was brisk, refreshing. Despite being laden with its normal potpurri of burning trash, fumes emanating from the poo field nearby, and exhaust, it was the kind of air that made you want to do something, made you feel you could act, could matter.

Find a rick, catch it, and get to the station in time for her train; those were her immediate tasks.  A year ago, she would have been terrified to be doing this alone.  She was still furious with herself for how little her Hindi had progressed since she had hit the turf here a year and a half ago.  But, she had to admit, she must have made at least a modicum of progress, for now she could complete this journey with few qualms.

She was convinced that allowing yourself to again become incompetent, dependent, and laughable was one of the greater sacrifices of moving overseas.  It was like being a teenager again, struggling to figure out how to accomplish things and be respected by the world...and she had never wanted to revisit those years.

A rick rumbled up beside her pretty quickly this morning, and she wedged herself into it among the four people and driver already inside.  "Another skill I've developed: pretzeling.  Too bad I can't put this on a resume, or get my friends back home to appreciate just how admirable it is," she thought ruefully.  Reaching the station, she extracted her limbs and coughed up 10 rupees.

As she climbed the steps up, over the tracks, and then down to her platform, she couldn't help but see the usual array of beggars, littered on the stairs and tossed into corners of the fencing.  Old, dirty, one younger guy with missing legs.  She had once seen a man with a bit of intestines poking out of his stomach, catching his waste in a filthy rag as it dripped out of his gaping side.  Her friend had explained that this was the procedure reserved for those who couldn't afford a colostomy bag.  It had made her shudder.

All of this still made her convulse a bit internally, although she had mastered a level of the acquiescence that is required in order to cope.

 "I almost hope they have mental disabilities too," she thought, "so that they don't have to realize just how terrible their lives are.  Is it awful and inhuman to hope something like that? Probably. I don't even know anymore....I'm losing my objectivity."

She was there doing social work, and she believed that she and the rest of the team at their start-up NGO were beginning to make a difference, perhaps bringing some pinpricks of light where there were none before.

"But it's just one rupee in 100 million crores worth of suffering in this world.  How desperately we do need our Great Hope." 

Duplicity

When I was learning about art as a child, I was fascinated with the Mona Lisa. I didn't think she was at all beautiful, even though that's what the textbooks insisted.  And I wasn't too interested in her relationship with Leonardo.  No, like most people, I was intrigued by her duplicity.  I would pick up a slip of paper and cover up half her face, then the other half.  Smile, no smile. Smile, no smile.

We do a lot of talking about authenticity and hear a lot of people championing "being true to yourself."  Despite the mantras, it's pretty obvious that most people have two faces, or even more than two.  One we show to the world most of the time, wearing it easily after the identity storm of adolescence is past, shrugging it on like a familiar sweater.  In fact, we may be under the impression that it is the 'real me.'

But then there are those moments.

The other self barges through somehow, shattering glass on its way into our world.  It comes when we're alone, or jumps into view in unguarded instants, like a sadistic jack-in-the box.  The event is usually embarrassing, as if you've suddenly had to admit that you have a man-eating monster chained up in the back yard.  And when it breaks loose (usually not in a spurt of heroic lovingkindness, but in a flood of anger or depression or meanness), you have to ask yourself,

Which one is really me?

Circles

When I was small, I thought that life was like climbing a mountain. It would be a hard but exciting ascension, pulling myself up rocky crags, all the while my blood pounding with "I think I can, I think I can," like the Little Engine in one of my favorite storybooks.  Eventually, I would reach the top and, exhilarated, survey my vast domain.  All that would be left would be to run joyously down the other side.

It wasn't too long, however, before the scenery on my climb began to look familiar.  Hadn't I passed that tree a couple times already?  And wasn't that vista uncannily similar to one I had seen recently?

I tell myself life isn't just a circle, spinning around fruitlessly like the backdrops in the ancient wild west movies that my dad bought us when we were kids. Instead, it must be like one of those tornadoes in the cartoons, spiraling in wider and wider circles until it eventually takes me up to the sky.

I hope I'm right.

Abounding Grace

So many times, so many countless times, you've heard the words uttered with such convicted fervor. Yet in your slightly padded chair, not even a whiff of Spirit-wind lifts a hair on your head. Despite the nicer-than-average clothes you have on, the mushy contents of your soul refuse to be stirred up by heartfelt prayer, by powerful music, by fervent testimony.  All you can manage to feel is tired, even though you had plenty of sleep last night and two cups of strong coffee this morning.  The exhaustion is like a living thing sitting rudely somewhere in the back of your chest, suppressing even the correct emotion that generally emerges in this context: guilt.  Guilt--repentance--forgiveness--renewal, that's the sequence, the prescribed agenda for anyone as unmoved and ungrateful as yourself.  And yet nothing happens.

Eventually, the service is over.  You turn off that side of yourself, zip it up into a suitcase until the next time you need to sit staring at your Bible.  A car ride home, a gray afternoon of normal activities, and all seems like a coma in your soul.

But this is not an existential movie and so that is not the final, tragic scene.  This is your life.  And at some moment, perhaps that evening, perhaps a year from now, a spark appears.  Brought on by the smallest of unexpected things, it bursts up in flame like a handful of pine needles.  And just like that, you're alive again.

Snow

People usually call me a pessimist.  OK, they always call me a pessimist.  Several times a year, however, generally between November and February (although also occasionally in March, and rarely and miraculously in October or April), I shed my dark cloak of general gloom and don an aspect that some would call downright infuriating. 

It happens on snow days.

Precisely 87% of the population of New England sees snow as some sort of pariah.  I know, because I did a careful and entirely scientific study via several forms of social media and word of mouth.   I’m not sure why they haven’t moved to Florida.  Rather than appreciating this rare and glorious phenomenon of Mother Nature, they act as if she took up smoking and was sitting at a dive bar in a skanky dress, blandly tapping her cigarette ash on our heads.  “Oh, sahry Hon, didn’t see ya theah,” she comments, as she tries to let off some stress about global warming.  And who could blame her, really?  If global warming means no more snow, then I might be forced to take up smoking too.

No matter what snow does to me, I find myself incapable of being angry at it.  While others rail at bad driving conditions and cold and the general unfairness of a white- clothed world, I am like an Israelite at the very first manna party.  I put my head back and let the white stuff fall right in my mouth.  While others see driveway shoveling as a special opportunity for a slipped disc, I look at it as a rare chance at a free workout that actually has a measurable result.  None of this treadmill-that-doesn’t-go-anywhere nonsense.  You have a clean driveway to show for all your effort.  And buff arms.  Many complain about the roads, but I love the excuse to have a legal thrill behind the wheel—beat the elements—show the world that I can manage an ’89 Thunderbird with rear wheel drive as well as any man.  In the snow, every cup of coffee seems more steaming and soothing, every warm sweater more cuddly, every fireplace more inviting, and every pair of slippers more like a small heaven for a set of toes.

I’m not sure why.

Perhaps it’s because snow is strangely isolating.

Since 87% of the population stays inside grumbling over their lost power or busted snowblower, the other 13% of us have the whole outside to ourselves.  When the snow is falling at night, you can take your dog out for a walk on your usually rather busy, but now deserted, suburban road.   With no cars in sight, you and he might traipse down the yellow line (which you can’t see, but which reason demands is still there), basking in pools of buzzing, yellow street light which illuminate falling particles and the very edges of sagging, sleeping branches.  The well-insulated world silences most of the normal, annoying, human noises.  Instead, you get the squeaking snow beneath your boot-shod feet, the cracking and groaning of aforementioned branches, and the strange swoosh of snow-laden winds.   Plus, you know when you’re truly alone, because footprints give away the presence of any trespassers on your privacy.  You step where no one has stepped before, like Lewis or perhaps Clark, on an uncharted drift or an unsure, iced-over pond.

Or perhaps it’s because snow makes us oddly companionable.

When you can’t get your car over the snowplow drift at the end of your driveway, the slightly zany and potbellied guy from across the road, who happens to possess a John Deere apparatus fitted with some massive snow-eating appendage, well, he suddenly becomes a chum.  “Would you look at all this snow!” you say to each other, for the first time having something in common to talk about.  “Would you just look at it….up to the top of my mailbox....how will the mailman get through…did you know Tom from down the road got a bit of collapsed roof….they said we were getting 6 inches, I’d say we’re up to 12 already…care for a cup of coffee?...thanks for getting me outta there, I owe you one.”  If you are one of the few who makes it into work in the morning, you and your colleagues trickle through the front door one by one, stamping and shaking and whooshing loudly through the mouth.  No one chastises you for being late as you pile your outerwear in a corner.  Instead, you look at each other with knowing respect, thinking “We are no delicate pansies, like those others who are currently pining and whining in their bathrobes back home.  We know how to drive in the snow.  We know how to live in the snow.  We know how to trail a snowplow and follow a salter (but not too closely), how to brake slowly and early, how to get up and shovel our driveways, and how to de-ice our windshields.  We know how to rig our coffeepot to our car battery if the power is out, how to build a good fire and make toast over it, and how to pre-warm our boots by said fire.  Heck, we define the term ‘New Englander,’ and no little snowstorm is going to make us go crying to the boss.” 

Even though you’ve made it to work, no one really expects you to get all that much done during a big downfall.  Your job is to hold the fort, to look hardcore, and to drink copious amounts of hot chocolate.  Instead of working, you trade stories about your morning commute and storms of your past.  The blizzard of ’78 is bound to come up, even if none of you are old enough to have lived through it. 

 And speaking of all this comradery, who hasn’t gotten a good feeling after shoveling out the little old lady two doors down?  We are all able to put aside a little of our “me,” a bit of our schedule, and a few of our differences in a big snowstorm.  We kibitz. We brandish our shovels. We help.  We actually see each other for once; dark figures against a stark and sparkling backdrop.  

Maybe that’s why I love the snow.