America for Beginners. Leah Franqui
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.
Ronnie crunched another handful of Tums, his stomach rebelling at the thought of this, the first lesson in America for beginners. His uncle, sensing his complete disorientation and despair, hastily sat his nephew down and, making sure the place was locked, as business had not yet started for the day, explained that most Americans were not aware of Bangladesh as a concept. They were, however, aware of India, made popular by a band called the Beatles in the past, and they had, at least in New York, developed a taste for North Indian food, and so North Indian food is what Raj gave them. Ronnie, who had never cooked a day in his life, could start on the dishwashers and, if he showed promise, work his way up to a cook. Ronnie agreed, reluctantly, because what else could he do? Working his way dejectedly through a plate of sweet butter chicken, which coated his mouth with viscous sauce, he knew his mother’s chicken curry with mustard seeds and curry leaves was highly superior, but they could only afford chicken a few times a month at home. Here, it might have been bland, soaked in butter and too sweet, but he could have it every day. If it hurt his nationalist sensibilities to work in a place that pretended to be Indian, well, he was hungrier than he was patriotic.
Ronnie did not, in fact, show any promise in food service whatsoever, for though he ate the food he still disapproved of it. He quit, and soon found himself selling tickets to Circle Line boat tours around the island of Manhattan. If America had quickly lost its glamour for Ronnie, there was no reason, he thought, that this experience should be the same for others. He was eager to give people insider tips about America and steer them, should they seem interested, back to his uncle’s restaurant, because family is family after all and besides, Ronnie still lived with them.
When one particularly satisfied Ohio-based family turned to Ronnie, who had urged them onto the boat, off the boat, and over to the restaurant with a smooth professional air, and told him that he really ought to give his own tours, he listened. But the competition for American tourists was fierce, and Ronnie’s English, while much improved over his five years in the United States, was far from perfect, making him an unsafe bet for many Midwestern and Southern sightseers who did not appreciate accents other than their own. Ronnie was on the verge of throwing in the towel and returning to the Circle Line when a rare stroke of luck came in the form of a family from California but originally from West Bengal. Though Indian, the family was so relieved to find someone who spoke Bengali that they overlooked Ronnie’s Bangladeshi roots. It was while showing these people New York and commiserating on the difficulties of this New World living that Ronnie realized it wasn’t his idea that was wrong, it was his client base. Once he began to advertise himself as an Indian guide for Indian people (his gut clenched at this, but he soldiered on), the tourists poured in, first from the United States and Canada and soon, as phone lines and Internet connections grew, all over the world.
He looked out onto the office. It was empty now, true, but it had fifteen desks in it, each one for one of his guides. Ronnie ran his tour company from the third floor of a building in Astoria, a cheap space for a growing business, although if anyone asked they were located “in the heart of Manhattan exactly.” Of course clients didn’t ask, they asked about the Grand Canyon and where to buy the cheapest imitation designer bags. He tended to lie about such things, as he had no idea. Ronnie saw no irony in sending his clients all over a land he had barely seen. He had taken exactly two trips since his arrival to New York, one back home to Bangladesh after the careful acquisition of his green card, to pick up his arranged and mother-approved bride, Anita, and one for their honeymoon to Wisconsin, land of cheese.
The thought of cheese pushed his fragile internal life to the limit. Ronnie reached for his trash can and vomited all the Tums, and then, mechanically, reached for the container and stuffed another handful in his mouth. He knew he shouldn’t feel so stressed. This was not his only client who expected a Bengali guide. All Ronnie’s clients harbored strong expectations of a Bengali tour guide of decent birth and background, but once they arrived in America they were perfectly happy to be stuck with a courteous, helpful, cheerful, Bengali-speaking tour guide who had been well trained in downplaying his Bangladeshi patriotism; concealing his Islamic faith, should any such exist; and flatteringly expressing a strong desire to be re-included in either the Indian or the Pakistani state, depending on the audience.
Picking out Mrs. Sengupta’s guide would be extremely difficult, Ronnie thought, nodding his head in grim agreement with his own mind. Who shall I give her? There was Vikrum, a burly fellow with gold teeth who made guests feel safe in this strange country, and serenaded them with early Bollywood tunes and village chants in his surprisingly melodic tenor. There was Ashwin, a mild-mannered guide whose ability to rattle off statistics made him very popular with visiting engineers and the like. There was even Puli, a consummate foodie who had mapped out the finest Indian cuisine possible in all fifty states. The man could find rice in a pasta store. But were any of them right for this widow? Besides, they were booked already. All that was really left was the new boy, Satya, a recent addition to the team.
Ronnie paused his volley of thoughts and considered that prospect. It might be possible. Perhaps Mrs. Sengupta would want a guide who felt like the son who should have been taking care of her? It wasn’t a bad idea, that.
Mrs. Sengupta was traveling scandalously alone, without a husband or gaggle of women her own