In a Free State

  He giggled nervously. ‘Santosh, you are a joker. I feel that we are of the same family already.’

  Then it came to me that I was being offered the whole room. I was stunned.

  Priya looked stunned too. He sat down on the edge of the soft bed. The dark hollows under his eyes were almost black and he looked very small in his double-breasted jacket. ‘This is how they make us dance over here, Santosh. You say staff quarters and they say staff quarters. This is what they mean.’

  For some seconds we sat silently, I fearful, he gloomy, meditating on the ways of this new world.

  Someone called from downstairs, ‘Priya!’

  His gloom gone, smiling in advance, winking at me, Priya called back in an accent of the country, ‘Hi, Bab!’

  I followed him down.

  ‘Priya,’ the American said, ‘I’ve brought over the menus.’

  He was a tall man in a leather jacket, with jeans that rode up above thick white socks and big rubber-soled shoes. He looked like someone about to run in a race. The menus were enormous; on the cover there was a drawing of a fat man with a moustache and a plumed turban, something like the man in the airline advertisements.

  ‘They look great, Bab.’

  ‘I like them myself. But what’s that, Priya? What’s that shelf doing there?’

  Moving like the front part of a horse, Bab walked to the shelf with the rice and the brass plate and the little clay lamp. It was only then that I saw that the shelf was very roughly made.

  Priya looked penitent and it was clear he had put the shelf up himself. It was also clear he didn’t intend to take it down.

  ‘Well, it’s yours,’ Bab said. ‘I suppose we had to have a touch of the East somewhere. Now, Priya –’

  ‘Money-money-money, is it?’ Priya said, racing the words together as though he was making a joke to amuse a child. ‘But, Bab, how can you ask me for money? Anybody hearing you would believe that this restaurant is mine. But this restaurant isn’t mine, Bab. This restaurant is yours.’

  It was only one of our courtesies, but it puzzled Bab and he allowed himself to be led to other matters.

  I saw that, for all his talk of renunciation and business failure, and for all his jumpiness, Priya was able to cope with Washington. I admired this strength in him as much as I admired the richness of his talk. I didn’t know how much to believe of his stories, but I liked having to guess about him. I liked having to play with his words in my mind. I liked the mystery of the man. The mystery came from his solidity. I knew where I was with him. After the apartment and the green suit and the hubshi woman and the city burning for four days, to be with Priya was to feel safe. For the first time since I had come to Washington I felt safe.

  I can’t say that I moved in. I simply stayed. I didn’t want to go back to the apartment even to collect my belongings. I was afraid that something might happen to keep me a prisoner there. My employer might turn up and demand his five thousand rupees. The hubshi woman might claim me for her own; I might be condemned to a life among the hubshi. And it wasn’t as if I was leaving behind anything of value in the apartment. The green suit I was even happy to forget. But.

  *

  Priya paid me forty dollars a week. After what I was getting, three dollars and seventy-five cents, it seemed a lot; and it was more than enough for my needs. I didn’t have much temptation to spend, to tell the truth. I knew that my old employer and the hubshi woman would be wondering about me in their respective ways and I thought I should keep off the streets for a while. That was no hardship; it was what I was used to in Washington. Besides, my days at the restaurant were pretty full; for the first time in my life I had little leisure.

  The restaurant was a success from the start, and Priya was fussy. He was always bursting into the kitchen with one of those big menus in his hand, saying in English, ‘Prestige job, Santosh, prestige.’ I didn’t mind. I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than I had ever been.

  Many of our waiters were Mexicans, but when we put turbans on them they could pass. They came and went, like the Indian staff. I didn’t get on with these people. They were frightened and jealous of one another and very treacherous. Their talk amid the biryanis and the pillaus was all of papers and green cards. They were always about to get green cards or they had been cheated out of green cards or they had just got green cards. At first I didn’t know what they were talking about. When I understood I was more than depressed.

  I understood that because I had escaped from my employer I had made myself illegal in America. At any moment I could be denounced, seized, jailed, deported, disgraced. It was a complication. I had no green card; I didn’t know how to set about getting one; and there was no one I could talk to.

  I felt burdened by my secrets. Once I had none; now I had so many. I couldn’t tell Priya I had no green card. I couldn’t tell him I had broken faith with my old employer and dishonoured myself with a hubshi woman and lived in fear of retribution. I couldn’t tell him that I was afraid to leave the restaurant and that nowadays when I saw an Indian I hid from him as anxiously as the Indian hid from me. I would have felt foolish to confess. With Priya, right from the start, I had pretended to be strong; and I wanted it to remain like that. Instead, when we talked now, and he grew philosophical, I tried to find bigger causes for being sad. My mind fastened on to these causes, and the effect of this was that my sadness became like a sickness of the soul.

  It was worse than being in the apartment, because now the responsibility was mine and mine alone. I had decided to be free, to act for myself. It pained me to think of the exhilaration I had felt during the days of the fire; and I felt mocked when I remembered that in the early days of my escape I had thought I was in charge of myself.

  The year turned. The snow came and melted. I was more afraid than ever of going out. The sickness was bigger than all the causes. I saw the future as a hole into which I was dropping. Sometimes at night when I awakened my body would burn and I would feel the hot perspiration break all over.

  I leaned on Priya. He was my only hope, my only link with what was real. He went out; he brought back stories. He went out especially to eat in the restaurants of our competitors.

  He said, ‘Santosh, I never believed that running a restaurant was a way to God. But it is true. I eat like a scientist. Every day I eat like a scientist. I feel I have already renounced.’

  This was Priya. This was how his talk ensnared me and gave me the bigger causes that steadily weakened me. I became more and more detached from the men in the kitchen. When they spoke of their green cards and the jobs they were about to get I felt like asking them: Why? Why?

  And every day the mirror told its own tale. Without exercise, with the sickening of my heart and my mind, I was losing my looks. My face had become pudgy and sallow and full of spots; it was becoming ugly. I could have cried for that, discovering my good looks only to lose them. It was like a punishment for my presumption, the punishment I had feared when I bought the green suit.

  Priya said, ‘Santosh, you must get some exercise. You are not looking well. Your eyes are getting like mine. What are you pining for? Are you pining for Bombay or your family in the hills?’

  But now, even in my mind, I was a stranger in those places.

  Priya said one Sunday morning, ‘Santosh, I am going to take you to see a Hindi movie today. All the Indians of Washington will be there, domestics and everybody else.’

  I was very frightened. I didn’t want to go and I couldn’t tell him why. He insisted. My heart began to beat fast as soon as I got into the car. Soon there were no more houses with gas-lamps in the entrance, just those long wide burnt-out hubshi streets, now with fresh leaves on the trees, heaps of rubble on bulldozed, fenced-in lots, boarded-up shop windows, and old smoke-stained signboards announcing what was no longer true. Cars raced along the wide roads; there
was life only on the roads. I thought I would vomit with fear.

  I said, ‘Take me back, sahib.’

  I had used the wrong word. Once I had used the word a hundred times a day. But then I had considered myself a small part of my employer’s presence, and the word was not servile; it was more like a name, like a reassuring sound, part of my employer’s dignity and therefore part of mine. But Priya’s dignity could never be mine; that was not our relationship. Priya I had always called Priya; it was his wish, the American way, man to man. With Priya the word was servile. And he responded to the word. He did as I asked; he drove me back to the restaurant. I never called him by his name again.

  I was good-looking; I had lost my looks. I was a free man; I had lost my freedom.

  *

  One of the Mexican waiters came into the kitchen late one evening and said, ‘There is a man outside who wants to see the chef.’

  No one had made this request before, and Priya was at once agitated. ‘Is he an American? Some enemy has sent him here. Sanitary-anitary, health-ealth, they can inspect my kitchens at any time.’

  ‘He is an Indian,’ the Mexican said.

  I was alarmed. I thought it was my old employer; that quiet approach was like him. Priya thought it was a rival. Though Priya regularly ate in the restaurants of his rivals he thought it unfair when they came to eat in his. We both went to the door and peeked through the glass window into the dimly lit dining-room.

  ‘Do you know that person, Santosh?’

  ‘Yes, sahib.’

  It wasn’t my old employer. It was one of his Bombay friends, a big man in Government, whom I had often served in the chambers. He was by himself and seemed to have just arrived in Washington. He had a new Bombay haircut, very close, and a stiff dark suit, Bombay tailoring. His shirt looked blue, but in the dim multi-coloured light of the dining-room everything white looked blue. He didn’t look unhappy with what he had eaten. Both his elbows were on the curry-spotted tablecloth and he was picking his teeth, half closing his eyes and hiding his mouth with his cupped left hand.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ Priya said. ‘Still, big man in Government and so on. You must go to him, Santosh.’

  But I couldn’t go.

  ‘Put on your apron, Santosh. And that chef’s cap. Prestige. You must go, Santosh.’

  Priya went out to the dining-room and I heard him say in English that I was coming.

  I ran up to my room, put some oil on my hair, combed my hair, put on my best pants and shirt and my shining shoes. It was so, as a man about town rather than as a cook, I went to the dining-room.

  The man from Bombay was as astonished as Priya. We exchanged the old courtesies, and I waited. But, to my relief, there seemed little more to say. No difficult questions were put to me; I was grateful to the man from Bombay for his tact. I avoided talk as much as possible. I smiled. The man from Bombay smiled back. Priya smiled uneasily at both of us. So for a while we were, smiling in the dim blue-red light and waiting.

  The man from Bombay said to Priya, ‘Brother, I just have a few words to say to my old friend Santosh.’

  Priya didn’t like it, but he left us.

  I waited for those words. But they were not the words I feared. The man from Bombay didn’t speak of my old employer. We continued to exchange courtesies. Yes, I was well and he was well and everybody else we knew was well; and I was doing well and he was doing well. That was all. Then, secretively, the man from Bombay gave me a dollar. A dollar, ten rupees, an enormous tip for Bombay. But, from him, much more than a tip: an act of graciousness, part of the sweetness of the old days. Once it would have meant so much to me. Now it meant so little. I was saddened and embarrassed. And I had been anticipating hostility!

  Priya was waiting behind the kitchen door. His little face was tight and serious, and I knew he had seen the money pass. Now, quickly, he read my own face, and without saying anything to me he hurried out into the dining-room.

  I heard him say in English to the man from Bombay, ‘Santosh is a good fellow. He’s got his own room with bath and everything. I am giving him a hundred dollars a week from next week. A thousand rupees a week. This is a first-class establishment.’

  A thousand chips a week! I was staggered. It was much more than any man in Government got, and I was sure the man from Bombay was also staggered, and perhaps regretting his good gesture and that precious dollar of foreign exchange.

  ‘Santosh,’ Priya said, when the restaurant closed that evening, ‘that man was an enemy. I knew it from the moment I saw him. And because he was an enemy I did something very bad, Santosh.’

  ‘Sahib.’

  ‘I lied, Santosh. To protect you. I told him, Santosh, that I was going to give you seventy-five dollars a week after Christmas.’

  ‘Sahib.’

  ‘And now I have to make that lie true. But, Santosh, you know that is money we can’t afford. I don’t have to tell you about overheads and things like that. Santosh, I will give you sixty.’

  I said, ‘Sahib, I couldn’t stay on for less than a hundred and twenty-five.’

  Priya’s eyes went shiny and the hollows below his eyes darkened. He giggled and pressed out his lips. At the end of that week I got a hundred dollars. And Priya, good man that he was, bore me no grudge.

  *

  Now here was a victory. It was only after it happened that I realized how badly I had needed such a victory, how far, gaining my freedom, I had begun to accept death not as the end but as the goal. I revived. Or rather, my senses revived. But in this city what was there to feed my senses? There were no walks to be taken, no idle conversations with understanding friends. I could buy new clothes. But then? Would I just look at myself in the mirror? Would I go walking, inviting passers-by to look at me and my clothes? No, the whole business of clothes and dressing up only threw me back into myself.

  There was a Swiss or German woman in the cake-shop some doors away, and there was a Filipino woman in the kitchen. They were neither of them attractive, to tell the truth. The Swiss or German could have broken my back with a slap, and the Filipino, though young, was remarkably like one of our older hill women. Still, I felt I owed something to the senses, and I thought I might frolic with these women. But then I was frightened of the responsibility. Goodness, I had learned that a woman is not just a roll and a frolic but a big creature weighing a hundred-and-so-many pounds who is going to be around afterwards.

  So the moment of victory passed, without celebration. And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over. When my moment of victory was over I discovered below it, as if waiting for me, all my old sickness and fears: fear of my illegality, my former employer, my presumption, the hubshi woman. I saw then that the victory I had had was not something I had worked for, but luck; and that luck was only fate’s cheating, giving an illusion of power.

  But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. I decided I would no longer stay in my room and hide. I began to go out walking in the afternoons. I gained courage; every afternoon I walked a little farther. It became my ambition to walk to that green circle with the fountain where, on my first day out in Washington, I had come upon those people in Hindu costumes, like domestics abandoned a long time ago, singing their Sanskrit gibberish and doing their strange Red Indian dance. And one day I got there.

  One day I crossed the road to the circle and sat down on a bench. The hubshi were there, and the bare feet, and the dancers in saris and the saffron robes. It was mid-afternoon, very hot, and no one was active. I remembered how magical and inexplicable that circle had seemed to me the first time I saw it. Now it seemed so ordinary and tired: the roads, the motor cars, the shops, the trees, the careful policemen: so much part of the waste and futility that was our world. There was no longer a mystery. I felt I knew where everybody had come from and where those cars were going. But I also felt that everybody there felt like
me, and that was soothing. I took to going to the circle every day after the lunch rush and sitting until it was time to go back to Priya’s for the dinners.

  Late one afternoon, among the dancers and the musicians, the hubshi and the bare feet, the singers and the police, I saw her. The hubshi woman. And again I wondered at her size; my memory had not exaggerated. I decided to stay where I was. She saw me and smiled. Then, as if remembering anger, she gave me a look of great hatred; and again I saw her as Kali, many-armed, goddess of death and destruction. She looked hard at my face; she considered my clothes. I thought: is it for this I bought these clothes? She got up. She was very big and her tight pants made her much more appalling. She moved towards me. I got up and ran. I ran across the road and then, not looking back, hurried by devious ways to the restaurant.

  Priya was doing his accounts. He always looked older when he was doing his accounts, not worried, just older, like a man to whom life could bring no further surprises. I envied him.

  ‘Santosh, some friend brought a parcel for you.’

  It was a big parcel wrapped in brown paper. He handed it to me, and I thought how calm he was, with his bills and pieces of paper, and the pen with which he made his neat figures, and the book in which he would write every day until that book was exhausted and he would begin a new one.

  I took the parcel up to my room and opened it. Inside there was a cardboard box; and inside that, still in its tissue paper, was the green suit.

  *

  I felt a hole in my stomach. I couldn’t think. I was glad I had to go down almost immediately to the kitchen, glad to be busy until midnight. But then I had to go up to my room again, and I was alone. I hadn’t escaped; I had never been free. I had been abandoned. I was like nothing; I had made myself nothing. And I couldn’t turn back.

  In the morning Priya said, ‘You don’t look very well, Santosh.’

  His concern weakened me further. He was the only man I could talk to and I didn’t know what I could say to him. I felt tears coming to my eyes. At that moment I would have liked the whole world to be reduced to tears. I said, ‘Sahib, I cannot stay with you any longer.’