SERIAL : 28

INDIAN IN COWBOY COUNTRY

TWO LINES

When Satish first came to the America, like any new immigrant to this country, he was given many telephone numbers of people from the old neighborhood who now lived in the U.S.

Vikas, a fifteen-year veteran of this country, living in Manhattan, was one of them. He had one piece of advice for him: “Don’t go changing your name to Sat or Stan. If this country can say Zbogniew Brzezininski, it can Satish, Heck, your name has two vowels in it, and recognizable syllables from the English language!” Zbigniew Brzezinski was the secretary of state in the Carter administration.

“Pardon,” exclaimed Quynh. “I don’t understand ‘speak news?”

“No, Zbigniew,” he said, It was too difficult to explain, so let it pass.

“You from Vietnam?” he asked as she turned on her clippers.

“Yes, “she said, again quite pleased. “How did you know?”

“Easy,” he said. “Your name is Vietnamese.”

“Yes. You say it so well, but most people find it so hard,” she complained.

“You know lot of Vietnamese people?”

“Yes,” he said. “Who does not, if you live long in Houston?”

“You live in Houston?”

“Eleven years. When did you come here?” he asked.

“Two years ago,” she said, and then the dam burst open.

She was born in Honoi, in North Vietnam. Her father had his own business, building boats. In the early eighties, she and her family left Vietnam in a boat, seeking a better life.

“I was nine year old, maybe ten. I don’t remember. One hundred and fifty people in a boat, for many days, no food, no water, all smelly and sick. One day we landed in Macao. You know Macao?”

“Yes,” he said. “Near Hong Kong. It was a Portuguese colony.”

“Yes, said Quynh. “We children go to villages to beg for food, to bring to big people. Children were good for begging for food,“ she said, pleased with her insight.

“Villagers gave food for a few days, weeks, maybe months, but soon they ask us to leave. We go back to the boat and leave Macao. Again, all smelly and sick and no food till we land in Hong Kong. My father, mother, and all of us sent to camp for Vietnamese refugees.

“I learn English there, “she added. She beamed when she said that. Then she cut quickly to how all of them were shipped back to Vietnam from Hong Kong, and her father went back to his boat-building business. Soon she got her visa to come to the U.S. “But only my mother and I come to the U.S. with my brother.”

“Your brother? Where did he come from?” he asked.

“Yes, I have a four-year old brother. He was born in Vietnam,” she said. “I work to take care of my mother and brother.”

Quynh had a slight smile, or so he imagined when he saw her face in the mirror. It was that slight smile of being in the moment, of being aware and happy as she went about cutting his hair. He sensed that she knew that she was better off at that moment than she ever was before. When she was done, he gave her a handsome tip.

With images of sick Vietnamese boat people, a child begging in the villages of Macao, and refugee camps in Hong Kong still swirling in his mind, Satish stepped into the neighborhood’s giant grocery store. Usually this errand was a pleasure, but today it was soaked with irony. He grabbed a basket and made his way to the deli, where women and men wearing transparent plastic caps and latex gloves were helping other customers.

He politely took a position in front of the counter, glancing around at the people who were ahead of him in this informal line. There was no organized line; just people scattered along the length of the deli counter, some peering into the glass enclosure that displayed a variety of cold cuts, cheeses, and refrigerated products. Quynh and the irony persisted as he joined the curious crowd and began walking up and down the display while keeping tabs on his relative position.

Before it was his turn to respond to the query, “who is next in line?” he was tempted by the tabouli salad in the window. A helpful assistant offered him a plastic spoonful sample of the salad, and she closed the sale.

“Half a pound of that tabouli salad, please,” he found himselfsaying. The assistant went on to say how it was her favorite salad. She poured out a little more than half a pound and said, “It’s a little more; would you like me to remove some?”

“No,” he said. A spoonful more would not hurt. As she packed the salad and put a price sticker on it, he remembered, thankfully, the original mission that brought him to this counter.

“Will that be all?” asked the cheerful deli assistant.

“No, I’d like half a pound of pepper jack cheese, please,” he said. “The same brand.”

She disappeared and came back holding an almost translucent slice.

“Is this Okay?” she asked.

“No, a little thicker, please.”

She disappeared again and came back with thicker, more acceptable slices.

Again she said, “It’s a little more; would you like me to remove a slice?”

“No,” he responded, but he was beginning to see pattern here. “A little more” was about 10 percent more than he had requested.

Before he could mentally compute what 10 percent of everything sold in the deli would amount to, and its impact on the obesity of the local population, not to mention the store’s cash flow, he remembered that he had to buy multigrain bread. So he went to the bakery section and pulled from a special display stack a loaf of “whatever low-fat multigrain bread is on sale.”

Next, he stopped at the dairy section without getting distracted or tempted by hundreds of food items that were on his path to buying milk. He remembered a sage professor from his executive MBA program saying, “Always place the dairy section at the far end of a grocery store, so customers can see other items in the store. Every customer needs milk and dairy products, so use those as magnets to draw customers through the store so that they can make impulse or other purchases.”

“Hah!” he thought as he made his way to the dairy section with singular focus, not even sneaking a glance at his favorite jalapeno potato chips that were strategically positioned on his route.

He grabbed a gallon of milk-2 percent fat, store brand, of course-and rushed past the tempting ice section to the “less than five items” checkout counter. He paid cash to the clerk, and when he was ready to dart to his car, he heard a voice call out his name.

It was “Harry,” his Sikh friend Harbhajan, who had Americanized his name for Texans. He had migrated to the U.S. during the Reagan era, and had not heard the Zbigniew Brzezinski story from Vikas. Harry had a large load of groceries, his cart brimming with basic supplies and more.

“Looks like you just moved into a new house and you’re stocking up your refrigerator and pantry,” Satish said.

Harry’s face fell as he said, “We just came back from Mumbai. We had a death in the family.”

“I am so sorry to hear that, Harry,” Satish said. His voice dropped from its former ebullient tone, greeting a good friend, to a softer one, empathetic and sympathetic to the loss he had suffered.

“My nephew, my sister’s son suddenly passed away,” Harry added, with tears brimming this Sikh’s eyes.

As he dropped his face to conceal the tears, Satish reached out and patted his back.

“Oh God, Harry,” he said. “This is the worst loss we can face in life. The death of a child. Come, sit here for a moment,” Satish said as he guided the visibly shaken man to a nearby bench.

At that moment, it did not matter to him that he was in the U.S., in suburban Sugar Land, Texas, as he held Harry and led him to a nearby bench. He could sense that many people watched curiously the unusual sight of one Indian man holding another, but his friend’s grief was intense. He sat next to him, consoling him the best he could.

Harry sad, “He was only twenty, doing so well at medical college so bright and successful, so responsible, and so full of joy and happiness.

“Every parent should be blessed with a child like that. I wish the whole world had children like my nephew, but suddenly he is gone. He went into a coma-no one knows why-and then, a few days later, he was gone!”

“My sister is still inconsolable. I tried to tell her that she had a perfect son for twenty full years, and most people don’t have that for a lifetime. She enjoyed him all these years.”

“But a mother’s sadness and grief is simply beyond words. I stayed with her as long as I could. But I could not console my sister. What use is a brother if he cannot help his sister at a time like this? Only God and time can help.”

Then he turned to his groceries, “Look at the cart. I can feed a whole village in India for a week,” he proclaimed.

“Or a boat full of Vietnamese refugees,” Satish thought.

“You bought only milk, cheese, bread. And this green stuff?” Harry asked.

“Tabouli salad,” he replied.

Harry abruptly got up, composed himself, and asked, “So, Satish, are we going to help some candidates win some city council elections this year, or what?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, attempting to march the regained enthusiasm in his friend’s voice.

Grabbing his hand and pumping it, Harry said, “Thanks, my friend.” He turned to his cart and rushed out of the store, the automatic door opening barely in time to let him and his cart through.

When Satish reached home and emptied his grocery bags’ contents on the kitchen counter, Monica noticed the container with tabouli salad and examined it closely.

“You paid $3.25 for just this much salad?” she asked in a voice tinged with a combination of incredulity and disappointment. “Half of this is water!

“I don’t know why I spend so much time looking for coupons and saving money, and I don’t know why I send you to the grocery store. All you do is buy useless stuff and waste money.” She put the accursed plastic container in the refrigerator with a thud of displeasure, Seeta briefly looked puzzled. She wondered, for an instant, why her mother was so upset but went back to play with her toys on the kitchen floor.

Normally, Satish would have reacted to his wife’s well-intended criticism and leaped into a rebuttal, arguing that, occasionally, he was allowed to make some impulsive purchase. Instead, he said nothing. He sat still as a slight, almost invisible smile of awareness crept across his face.

He thought about Harry’s loss, Joe’s layoff and Quynh’s life when a phrase from his native Tamil, “Iru Kodugal,” crossed his mind. It literally meant “two lines,” but was commonly used to convey two unequal lines, one long and one short. The phrase was the idiomatic equivalent of, “I cried because I had no shoes, until I saw a man who had no feet!”

Satish picked up Seeta from the floor and hugged her warmly. With his daughter in his arms, he went over to his displeased wife, embraced her affectionately and whispered in her ear, “I love you!”

Monica wondered why he was acting so strange and pushed him away gently after she tenderly whispered back, “So do I, but next time don’t waste money!”