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Mr. Rossi entered Dunkin’ Donuts. He found that it was silent. It was Sunday. The patrons of the establishment stared at the toppings that were yet to be eaten and into the coffee that was yet to be sipped. They were content with life. Mr. Rossi laughed at them for their easygoing ways.
The nation was under attack!
While these people ate donuts blissfully, the Muslims were cross-dressing and corrupting the morals of American society at its deepest level. If they weren’t stopped, there would be soon be a day when Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, and even The Situation from Jersey Shore would be seen in public wearing burkas.
But not if he had anything to say about it.
Mr. Rossi moved his round head on his stout neck and scanned the establishment.
And there he was!
He was dressed in a burka, casually paying the cashier for some all-American coffee and all-American donuts. The gall of it! Mr. Rossi walked up to the counter and threw open the flap of the burka. He found himself staring into a perfectly oval face and the most beautiful pair of dove-shaped eyes that he had ever seen. Eyes that widened in fear and flashed with anger.
“You bloody bastard!” the woman inside the burka yelled.
These seemed to be the code words for activating the other subversives in the shop.
Mr. Rossi found himself pushed against a wall. A Hispanic man dressed in a hoodie had his palms pressed against his chest. The man seemed to be in a particularly bad mood, as though he had just been advised to go on a diet and stay off the donuts. He had one question for Mr. Rossi.
“What’s your problem, man?”
If Mr. Rossi were to be honest, he would say that the biggest problem he currently faced was that this particular gentleman’s hands were pressed way too tightly against his chest. But he didn’t say anything. For one, the hands that were pressed against his chest made it difficult for him to utter even a single word. In addition, he perceived that this particular gentleman wasn’t really looking to make conversation.
He began to breathe in gasps so that it appeared that he was in the final stages of cardiac arrest. The man eased up on his grip a little. It was the opening that Mr. Rossi needed. He pushed hard, and his questioner was thrown back against a table. Mr. Rossi rushed out of the restaurant. The colors on his flag might not run, but even if they did, it was doubtful that they would have been able to keep up with Mr. Rossi. He was going, going, and he was gone.
Mr. Jain opened the door of the restroom cautiously. He had put on his burka. He was hopeful that he wouldn’t be confronted by the flag man. Surely this man wouldn’t accost a burka-clad person in a neighborhood where all the Muslim cab drivers of New York City came home to roost.
“It’s all right, sister.”
Mr. Jain peeked out of the mesh over his eyes to see a young Hispanic man. He was well built and had a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, visible where his sweatshirt sleeves were pushed up.
“There was someone walking around harassing women,” he said. “But I took care of him. But be careful out there. It’s a crazy world full of crazy people. There’s a lot of ignorant fools out there.”
Mr. Jain looked at this man in the hoodie with a devout air. He appeared to be a messenger of God who had been sent down to protect Mr. Jain. Mr. Jain thought about how God took so many forms when he came down to earth. Sometimes he manifested himself as the warrior Kalki on a white horse, at others a Puerto Rican gentleman with a picture of an angry snowman on his hoodie.
Mr. Jain nodded vigorously inside his burka to convey his gratitude to his savior. He wanted to shake hands with him and shower him with effusive praises. However, for the first time he sensed that his hands were too big and his voice too deep for him to convey his gratitude without complicating matters further. He felt hopelessly inadequate to thank this god among men. He felt a great sense of shame, which compelled him to leave the establishment hastily.
He was surprised to see that, even in this turbulent world, the sun had continued to shine brightly. The birds improvised their compositions, but now their efforts were wasted upon Mr. Jain. He walked toward his apartment with his mind clouded in fog. His irritation was further increased as he bumped into a man inspecting an orange outside the Patel Brothers grocery store.
“These stupid Indians,” he muttered. “They will look at an orange from all angles as though they are buying a Picasso painting.”
He instinctively knew that it was wrong to stereotype individuals. In fact, this very propensity for stereotyping in modern society was responsible for all the problems he currently faced. However, Mr. Jain was too angry to feel magnanimous enough to admit his mistake. He repeated his assertion to himself, and by the time he had reached his apartment house, his views on the matter of Indians and oranges had hardened.
He rushed up the stairs without waiting for the elevator. There was a small wooden box outside his apartment. Mr. Jain smiled inside his burka. He knew it was a Christmas gift from Mr. Kohnen, an entrepreneur in the borough of Brooklyn.
Two years ago, Mr. Jain had helped the young man with the architecture for a datacenter just as he was launching his startup. Since the two men didn’t know each other well enough to discuss matters of religion, Mr. Kohnen did not know that Mr. Jain’s religion did not permit him to touch a drop of alcohol. The young man had shown his appreciation by sending Mr. Jain a bottle of wine for the holidays each year since. For the last two years, Mr. Jain had re-gifted the bottle to the superintendent of his building.
But today he carried it inside and sat down on the couch.
“Collateral estoppel,” he said to himself. “One person cannot be convicted for the same crime twice.”
Collateral estoppel was one of the fundamental tenets of the American Constitution, an area that Mr. Jain had studied extensively after reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He recalled how the principle of double jeopardy had been most memorably applied to the Ashe v. Swenson case in 1970.
Now, Mr. Jain applied it to his own situation. He had already committed the cardinal sin of eating meat. For this trespass, he would be reborn as a cockroach, a rat, or one of those thieving rickshaw drivers in New Delhi. Since he was already condemned, why shouldn’t he go ahead and sample the wine? It wasn’t as if matters could get any worse in the afterlife. . . .
A Supreme Court justice would have pointed out to Mr. Jain that his reading of the situation was flawed. Taking the life of another animal and drinking alcohol were, in fact, two different crimes. Mr. Jain could be tried separately for each and be given an even harsher punishment. He could, for example, be reborn as a cockroach in a New Delhi rickshaw.
But Mr. Jain’s mind, normally so astute and incisive, had been muddled by his repeated interactions with the flag man. Let alone the complicated tenets of US Constitutional law, he was now incapable of recalling even the far simpler tenets of the good Pandit Shri Bharilji.
Mr. Kohnen was not a terribly sophisticated man. He had selected a wine bottle that had a screw top. Mr. Jain opened it effortlessly. He reached for a glass from the top shelf of his kitchen cabinet. He watched with wonder as the red liquid gurgled its way into the glass, sometimes appearing dark, sometimes lighter, but always mysterious-looking.
The first sip was bitter. But after Mr. Jain placed the glass down, he found that the taste stayed with him. He thought of yet another couplet from Ghalib that his wife had once recited:
The scent of a flower, the sigh of a heart, and the smoke of the lamps from your assembly/Whosoever departed from your gathering departed perturbed.
Mr. Jain had departed from his assembly with the wineglass, and he found that his nose, his lips, and indeed his entire being were deeply perturbed. It was an insistent perturbation, one that demanded instant satisfaction.
Mr. Jain picked up his glass and drank deeply of the wine. His chest felt warm. His mind began to swirl with thoughts. At
the epicenter of this tornado was the flag man. Mr. Jain felt with a deep conviction that the flag man was at the root of all the troubles in his life. In fact, the flag man was at the epicenter of all the problems in American society. The flag man stood against the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson and the very men who had founded this nation.
He had another long swallow of the wine and tried to remember Tom (the founding father now appeared familiar to Mr. Jain) Jefferson’s words. What was it that the great man had said? Mr. Jain thought he recalled that it had something to do with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In America, a man had the liberty to choose between Nike and Adidas as he pursued his happiness. He had the liberty to choose his food. His religion. His garment, even if that garment was a burka. Mr. Jain began to feel angry toward people like the flag man, who stood in the way of accomplishing Tom Jefferson’s dream.
Mr. Jain stood up. These were times that called for action. What if Gandhi had told the British, “Go ahead and levy that salt tax. I can’t be bothered right now. I have to watch Larry King Live on television.” India would be such a different country. Replete with colonial powers, the world would be a terrible place. But Gandhi hadn’t sat at home and watched basic cable. He had marched on to Dandi. He had walked. As Mr. Jain would walk now.
With his burka flapping in the wind and the wine swirling in his head, Mr. Jain turned onto Northern Boulevard. He made a left turn on 71st Street and went up to the home with the flag.
And even though it wasn’t cold, his body trembled with agitation. Mr. Jain recited the words of the Pandit to calm himself.
Dayadharm Ka Jhanda/Jag Mein Lahraya.
The flag of nonviolence/You unfurled in the world.
Mr. Jain repeated the words to himself, but the wine induced a small yet crucial error.
Dayadharm Ka Danda/Jag Mein Lahraya.
The baton of nonviolence/You unfurled in the world.
The flag man was washing his store window. In his worst transgression to date, far worse than the eating of the goat and the sipping of the wine, Mr. Jain committed an act of active violence. He did not have a baton, but God had given him a pair of hands. Mr. Jain punched the flag man in the face.
Mr. Rossi widened his eyes as he saw a row of knuckles coming toward him. . . .
When he came to, he found a bright light shining on his face.
The man who wore a burka stood nearby, squinting and looking away. Mr. Diaz also saw the young Hispanic man from the Dunkin’ Donuts shop earlier that morning, and he was talking to a TV news reporter. Mr. Rossi recognized her from the evening news.
“Mr. Rossi?” the Hispanic man said. “Is that the creep’s name? Whatever. So I saw this Mr. Rossi this morning in Dunkin’ Donuts. He was being a public nuisance, walking around pulling the burkas off women’s faces. Big ups to my brother in the burka here. It takes courage, you know, to offer yourself up as bait to apprehend a criminal.”
Mr. Jain looked at the nice police officer who had been his wife’s student.
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” Officer O’Hare said to the news person, who had asked him a string of questions. He then pursed his lips and refused to open his mouth to say anything more, not even to caution the cameraman, who was in danger of tripping on an untied shoelace.
At the beginning of the millennium, Officer O’Hare had read about two American and Chinese fighter jets that had collided in midair over Hainan Island. The journalist had referred to the affair as an “international incident.” The words had left a deep impression on Officer O’Hare’s mind. He had thought at the time that if he could get through life without being part of an international incident, he would have done well for himself. Now, he saw that he would have to follow the instructions on his yellow police tape if he were to make good on his resolution. He would have to proceed with Caution.
“Mr. Jain,” he asked, “did you dress in a burka because you were worried about how Muslims were being treated in our country? And because you wanted to catch people who harassed them?”
Mr. Jain smiled weakly. He resolved that this would be his last sin. After this one time, there would be no more meat. No more wine. And no more lies.
“Yes,” he said.
Officer O’Hare’s instincts had not failed him. The encounter of Mr. Jain and Mr. Rossi did become an international incident.
However, it blossomed into that rarest of entities, an international incident of the good kind.
Mr. Jain was awarded a Presidential Citizens Medal for “protecting the religious diversity of American society.” Leaders of Arab nations issued statements praising “a non-Muslim for defending the honor of Muslim women.” A women’s-liberation group in Saudi Arabia, greatly moved by Mr. Jain’s call for “liberty of choice,” started a group on Facebook called No Gain without Jain and defiantly honked car horns through the streets of Jeddah.
And, although I wasn’t privy to it, there also must have been a domestic incident in Mr. Jain’s residence. I called on my uncle a few weeks after the winds of publicity had blown over. His wife was still upset with him. His daughter had not yet stopped calling their residence from Bombay every fifteen minutes.
“I leave you alone for a few days, and this is what you go and do. I suppose I don’t mind that you wore a burka, but you actually went and hit another man?”
“And why don’t you mind that he wore a burka?” asked Mrs. Chang. “If I were you, I would mind.”
Mr. Jain smiled thankfully as I changed the topic to the A4 processors on the new smartphones. My stomach rumbled as we got into a heated discussion on sub-45 nanometer engineering.
“Do you want to step out and grab a bite to eat?” I asked.
“No, no,” said Mr. Jain. “We have some excellent leftovers.”
About the Author
Arun Krishnan is a writer of Indian origin based in New York City. He is the author of The Loudest Firecracker which was published by Tranquebar Press. The book was nominated for the Crosswords Books Award and won favorable reviews from Time Out, The Pioneer and The Hindu.
Arun is also the host of the Learn Hindi from Bollywood Movies Podcast. The podcast has been featured in The Guardian, National Geographic Traveler and the Wall Street Journal.
The podcast and links to other writings can be found at www.cuttingchai.com
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