America for Beginners. Leah Franqui

Satya had learned in school, along with every other Bangladeshi child, the revolution of 1971 had been met with an immediate Pakistani invasion and the wide-scale systematic rape of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women. Those rapes had, approximately nine months or so after the army came through, led to the emergence of pale-skinned babies from the bodies of their darker mothers. Though fairer had always been lovelier in Bangladesh, these butter-skinned children were a visible reminder of the revolution and the generation of women who should, as they were so often told, have fought harder. Despite the departure of the Pakistani army, the seeds they had spread were already growing into people.

      Ravi and Satya knew on the day that they met that no matter how different they were, they had both come from the same place. Both boys had become used to being targeted on account of their paler faces. Satya had run, as was his habit, and hidden behind a row of parked rickshaws until the bigger boys got tired of calling him a whore’s cur and throwing stones at him and left him alone. He was settling into a corner formed by the wheels of several vehicles when a pair of running feet flashed in front of his eyes. He reached out and grabbed the back of the running boy’s neck and pulled him down, furious that this idiot might give away his spot. Ravi was panting loudly and Satya had to throw his hand over Ravi’s mouth to stop his unseemly noise. It turned out that Ravi was not as accustomed to this treatment as Satya, and had in fact run almost a mile from his own schoolyard before being pulled into Satya’s hiding hole. Satya, all of six, surveyed the Muslim boy and sighed, figuring that it was just his luck to be saddled with this idiot. Although he could not have explained why, Satya knew as he walked Ravi home that their time together would stretch on because they knew each other, as few others ever had. They shared something that made them disgusting to the people around them. They would have to be friends. They already had too many enemies.

      They started teaming up in small ways, stealing coins from beggars and using them at the local cinemas, coaxing extra rotis out of Satya’s grandmother, who raised him, or candies from Ravi’s father’s store. But their world was changing; it seemed that it had never stopped changing, never staying in one place for long. No sooner did India become East Pakistan become Bangladesh than it became something else entirely. As Satya and Ravi grew up, images of American pop stars and British singers emerged on walls of shops and buildings, hung side by side with Bollywood vixens and images of Lord Shiva. America was everywhere, with people moving and writing and calling and even, eventually, emailing home. Ravi and Satya watched any movie with an American in it, imitating the accents and pretending to shoot each other. Soon even these pleasures weren’t enough, and the boys discovered beer, junk food, and music, steps on the bridge that took them piece by piece from their home. Poor but smart, well cared for but careless, the boys were sick of being the dirty secret of their nation’s sad and violent history, sick of Bangladesh and its poverty and its corruption and its crime and the ways that their own pasts seemed inescapable.

      When Satya’s grandmother finally passed away, unable to live through another difficult year in an impossible place, the last tie to Bangladesh was severed for Satya. His mother had died in childbirth, and his father, a wealthy businessman who had seduced and abandoned her, had never known of Satya’s existence. Satya’s grandmother, who despite her own bloody and brutal experiences, the worst of which had led to the birth of her child, was far sturdier than her fragile daughter. She had raised Satya herself, telling him the best of his mother and leaving him to speculate on the worst. He had nothing to tie him down to Sylhet, nothing to cling to. He decided to move on. And when Satya found a way to sneak onto a freighter departing to New York, he invited Ravi to come along with him, and Ravi said yes.

      And so they came to America and moved to their tiny shared place in Sunset Park and searched for jobs and watched their money fall from their hands like sand. Both boys, now almost men, had planned to send riches back home to Ravi’s parents and now they worried they might have to beg for funds from their already overtaxed families, or in Satya’s case, from Ravi. Both of them had thought they spoke English like natives but somehow had to constantly repeat themselves. Ravi, a Muslim whose beard and prayer beads hanging at his waist made him as visible in New York as they had made him invisible at home, found himself even further from acceptance. Satya, a Hindu who looked Indian enough, was familiar looking in New York, acceptable to deli owners and store managers, who, if they didn’t hire him, at least rarely treated him like a threat.

      Their friendship, which had been so unified at home, had begun to splinter under the weight of hunger and fear. Ravi called his family constantly, while Satya envied him the comfort of relatives. He began to resent having to share everything, the food he bought, the information he found: he worried that Ravi wasn’t sharing equally with him even as he plotted how to hide things from his friend.

      And when Ravi told Satya that he had a strong lead on a job at a tourism company run by Bangladeshi Hindus, Satya knew that he could do the job as well as Ravi, if not better. He wasn’t sure how to be a guide, but he knew how to be a Hindu. Ravi had come home delighted by the prospect, with an interview set up for the next day, and Satya hated him. Ravi was his friend, but he had a father and a mother and now a job, and besides, he was better looking and always smoother with girls. Satya had his grandmother, now gone, and a pimple-marked face that women overlooked. Fueled by months of rejection, hunger, and fear, and a lifetime of feeling worthless, Satya sat down with a bottle of cheap scotch and got his best friend drunk. It was a celebration, he said, of this new job, this new life. And Ravi trusted him, as he had since they met.

      Ravi snored in the next room as Satya prepared for the interview Ravi had planned to have. He had dressed himself in his best clothing, a bright red-and-purple collared shirt emblazoned with stars at the breast pocket and his most expensive pair of jeans, stylishly faded with seams running diagonally and up and down his legs. He slicked his hair and applied copious amounts of cologne carefully, looking, he thought, like the most successful of the shop boys and hawkers he’d seen at home. It was all perfect, except Satya noticed as he combed his hair that he couldn’t meet his own eyes in the mirror, but what did that matter? He didn’t have to look at himself. Only other people had to do that.

      Satya arrived at the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company a full half an hour before Ravi’s scheduled interview and, because of the slowness of the day, was seen immediately. Satya was thrilled; he wasn’t exactly sure that Ravi wouldn’t wake up and make his own way there through some survival instinct. As he sat in front of Ronnie Munshi, on the very edge of his chair, he smiled nervously. The man looked at him and sighed, a strange expression in his eyes that Satya couldn’t read. The boss looked resigned, somehow. As soon as Satya tried to open his mouth to speak Ronnie waved his hand to cut him off and grimly informed him that the job was his, and sent him off to talk to another guide about how to work. And that was that. Satya finally had something to hold on to in America. He would tell Ravi when he returned home, and Ravi would be happy. It would be both of theirs, like everything was, and Satya could stop resenting that now that it was his first. They would share the profits until Ravi got his own job. This was for the best, for both of them. Ravi would understand.

      But when Satya came home that day, Ravi was gone. No forwarding address. No way to find him. Vanished. Now that he didn’t have to share a thing, Satya wished he could.

      Two months went by, and Satya heard nothing from Ravi. He had no official status in the United States, like Satya, so inquiries were impossible, although Satya tried. He could have tried harder, he knew, but he pushed that thought out of his mind like the memory of a bad dream. He couldn’t look backward. He had too much to do. Still, he wondered on the edges of his mind where Ravi was, what he was doing, what had become of him. He couldn’t tell if he felt free or alone.

      And then one day, in the mail, Satya received a letter, his first in America. It was from Ravi’s mother. She had written to ask how he was, knowing that no one else from home ever would. She told him that she had not heard from Ravi, but she knew that Satya would be there to keep him safe. He read it over and over again until he wept and knew what he felt wasn’t freedom at all.

      Ronnie paid his guides a monthly salary, low but livable. It was one kindness he extended to his workers, something to live off of between guiding jobs, for which they received a set fee. It was more money than Satya had ever seen in his life, and it let him move into a new place,