Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 19

"Now don't you grow up and run off somewhere else," Mrs. Jenkins said. "There's some fine, fine men in Jamaica, and we gon get us some."

"Oh, no," Patricia said as if Mrs. Jenkins had implied that the girl was capable of doing something horrible.

"And how we gon get to Jamaica?"

"On a slow boat by way a China."

None of that meant very much to me then, of course. It was just so much bulls.h.i.+t heard over the hours of a long day.

By the summer of 1962 I was making forty dollars a week and that November I had enough to buy a used Ford from a longtime friend of my parents. "Always know where the seller lives in case the thing turns out to be a piece of junk," my father once said. The first long trip I took in the car was to Fort Holabird in Baltimore, where Lonney was inducted into the man's army. I came back to Was.h.i.+ngton and dropped his mother off at her house and then went back to work, though Penny had said I could take the day off. Perhaps it was the effort of trying to get through the day, of trying not to think about Lonney, that made me feel reckless enough to ask Kentucky out again.

Penny had waited on her, and I followed Kentucky out of the store. I waited until we were across O Street and asked with words that would have done my mother proud if I could take her to Howard Theater to see Dinah Was.h.i.+ngton that Sat.u.r.day night.

"I'd like that," she said without much hesitation. And because she was the kind of woman she was, I knew it was the simple truth, no more, no less. She set down her bag of stuff and pulled a pen and a slip of paper from her pocketbook. She began to write. "This is my telephone number. If you're going to be late," she said, "I'd like the courtesy of knowing. And if you are late and haven't called, don't come. I love Dinah Was.h.i.+ngton, but I don't love her that much."

I found her family a cold and peculiar lot, except for her little sisters, who were as pa.s.sionate about the Was.h.i.+ngton Senators as I was. A few times a month we had dinner at their place on N Street. Her father was a school princ.i.p.al and talked as if every morning when he got up, he memorized an awfully big word from the dictionary and forced himself to use that word in his conversations throughout the day, whether the word actually fit what he was saying or not. Kentucky's mother was the first Negro supervisor at some office in the Department of Commerce. She was a bit better to take than her husband, but she was a terrible cook and I seemed to be the only person at her dinner table who realized this.

The first time we slept together was that January. I had waited a long time, something quite unusual for me. I had started to think I would be an old man with a d.i.c.k good for nothing but peeing before she would let me get beyond heavy petting. So when she turned to me as we were sitting at the counter at Mile Long one Sunday night, I didn't think anything was up.

She turned to look at me. "Listen," she said and waited until I had chewed up and swallowed the bite of steak sandwich I had in my mouth. "Listen: Thou shall have no other woman before me. I can take a lot but not that." Which didn't mean anything to me until we got back to her apartment. We had just gotten in and shut the door. She took my belt in both her hands and pulled me to her until our thighs and stomachs met. Until then I'd made all the moves, and so what she did took my breath away. She kissed me and said again, "Thou shall have no other woman before me." Then she asked if I wanted to stay the night.

A very mischievous wind came through Was.h.i.+ngton that night and the rattling windows kept waking us, and each time we woke we would resettle into each other's arms, to drift away with sleep and return with another rattling. I can be twenty-two forever as long as I can remember that evening and that night.

When you work in a grocery store the world comes to buy: tons of penny candy and small boxes of soap powder because the next size up-only pennies more-is too expensive and rubbing alcohol and baby formula and huge sweet potatoes for pies for church socials and spray guns and My Knight and Dixie Peach hair grease and Stanback ("snap back with Stanback") headache powder and all colors of Griffin shoe polish and nylon stockings and twenty-five cents worth of hogshead cheese cut real thin to make more sandwiches and hairnets for practically bald old women trudging off to work at seventy-five and lard and Argo starch not for laundry but to satisfy a pregnant woman's craving and mousetraps and notebook paper for a boy late with his what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation paper and Kotex and clothespins and Bat 'N' b.a.l.l.s and coal oil for lamps in apartments where landlords decline to provide electricity and Sneaky Pete dream books and corn flakes with the surprise in the box and light bulbs for a new place and chocolate milk and shoestrings and Wonder Bread to help "build strong bodies 12 ways" and RC Cola and Valentine's Day specials to be given with all your heart and soul and penny cookies and enough chicken wings to feed a family of ten and bottles of bluing. . . .

By the time I came on the scene, Penelope Jenkins had been selling all that and more for about fifteen years. She and her husband ("the late Mr. Al Jenkins") had bought the place from a Jewish family not long after World War II. Al had died ten years before I showed up, and Penny had had a succession of helpers, including a son who went off and died in Korea, never to come back to Al's and Penny's Groceries.

Because of my life at the store, my sense of neighborhood began to expand; then, too, it's easier to love a neighborhood when you love the girl in it. My allegiances had always been to the world around New York Avenue and 1st Street, around Dunbar, because that was Home. In fact, I hadn't much cared for the world around 5th and O; when I was still in junior high I'd gotten my a.s.s whipped by a boy who lived around 5th and O. Lonney and I and people from our world had always a.s.sociated the whole 5th and O area with punk fighters, and the boy I fought turned out to be one of the biggest punks around. From the get-go, this guy went for my privates with a hard kick and it took everything out of me; you never recover from s.h.i.+t like that, so even though I lost, I didn't lose fair.

The second time I realized my allegiances were expanding, that I was making room in my soul for more than one neighborhood, was when I was asked to be G.o.dfather to two babies within one month; Penny got to be the G.o.dmother and I stood beside her as the G.o.dfather. The first time, though, was the afternoon Penny gave me the combination to the safe she kept in the little room off the main room. She had me practice the combination that afternoon until I knew it by heart. After a few turns I got tired of that and ended up looking through some of what was in the safe. There was a stack of pictures Al Jenkins had taken in those early years, mostly pictures of people in the 5th and O Street neighborhood. Many of the people in the pictures still lived around there; having served them in the store for so long, I recognized them despite what time had done to them. I sat on the floor and read what Al had written on the backs of the black-and-white pictures. One picture showed Joy Lambert, the mother of Patricia and Tommy Turner. Surrounded by several girlfriends, Joy was standing on what must have been a sunny day in front of the store in her high-school graduation cap and gown. Al had written on the back of the picture, "June 1949. The world awaits." This picture, above all the others, captivated me. You could tell that they were innocents, with good hearts. And the more I looked at those smiling girls, especially Joy, the more I wanted only good things for them, the way I wanted only good things for my nieces and nephews. Perhaps it was tiredness, but I began to feel that I was looking at a picture of the dead, people who had died years and years before, and now there was nothing I could do.

"Now you know why I keep all those in the safe." Penny had come up behind me and was looking down on me and the pictures spread out before me. "Out of harm's way," she said, "way in back, behind the money."

Kentucky and I fell into an easy, pleasant relations.h.i.+p, which is not to say that I didn't tip out on her now and again. But it was never anything to upset what we had, and, as far as I know, she never found out about any of it. More and more I got to staying at her place, sleeping at my mother's only a few times a month. "I hope you know what you doin," my mother would say sometimes. Who knew? Who cared?

In fact, my mother said those very words that August Thursday night when I went to get clean clothes from her place. That Friday was hot, but bearably humid, and the next day would be the same. The weather would stay the same for a week or so more. After that, I remember nothing except that it stayed August until it became September. The air-conditioning unit installed over the front door, which Penny had bought second-hand, had broken down again that Wednesday, and we had managed to get the repairman, a white man with three fingers missing on one hand, to come out on Thursday and do his regular patch-up job. In the summer, we had two, sometimes three, deliveries a week of sodas and stuff like Popsicles and Creamsicles that the kids couldn't seem to do without. For years and years after that, my only dreams of the store were of a summer day and of children coming to buy those sodas and ice cream. We always ran out of the product in my dreams and the delivery men were either late or never showed up and a line of nothing but children would form at the door, wanting to buy the stuff that we didn't have, and the line would go on down 5th Street, past N, past M, past New York Avenue, past F, past Pennsylvania Avenue, all the way down into Southwest, until it went on out Was.h.i.+ngton and into another land. In the dreams I would usually be yelling at Penny that I wanted her to do something about that line of children, that we weren't in business to have a line like that, that I wanted it gone pretty d.a.m.n soon. Eventually, in the dreams, she would do something to placate me-sometimes, she would disappear into the back and return with a nib of sniff that I recognized immediately as the homemade ice cream my mother said her parents always made when she was a little girl.

About a half hour or so before closing that Friday, Kentucky came by. She had bought a new stereo and all week I had been borrowing records from friends because we planned a little party, just the two of us, to break in the stereo. Penny left the locking up to me and got ready to go.

"Who's the man tonight?" Kentucky asked Penny. I think she must have had more boyfriends than Carter had liver pills. I had just finished covering the meat for the night, something Penny and I called putting the chickens to bed.

"Ask me no questions . . . ," Penny said and winked. She whispered in Kentucky's ear, and the two laughed. Then Kentucky, looking dead at me, whispered to Penny, and they laughed even louder. Finally, Penny was ready to leave.

If the sign said we closed at nine, that was precisely the time Penny wanted the store closed and I wasn't allowed to close any sooner. I could close later for a late-arriving customer, but not any sooner. And as it happened, someone did come in at the last minute and I had to pull out some pork chops. Penny said good night and left. I locked the door after the pork chop customer. I may or may not have heard the sound of a car slamming on brakes, but I certainly heard little Carl Baggot banging at the door.

"You little squirt," I said to him. "If you break that window, I'm gonna make your daddy pay for it." I'd pulled down the door shade to an inch or so of where the gla.s.s ended, and I could see the kid's eyes beaming through that inch of s.p.a.ce. "Can't you read, you little punk. We closed. We closed!" and I walked away. Kentucky was standing near the door and the more the kid shouted, the closer she got to the door.

"He's hysterical, honey," she said, unlocking the door. She walked out, and I followed.

Penny's lavender Cadillac was stopped in the middle of 5th Street, one or two doors past O Street. From everywhere people were running to whatever had happened. Penny was standing in front of the car. I pushed my way through the crowd, and as I got closer I saw that her fists were up, shaking, and she was crying.

"She hit my sista," Tommy Turner was saying, pounding away at Penny's thigh. "This b.i.t.c.h hit my sista! This b.i.t.c.h hit my sista!" Some stranger picked the boy up. "All right, son," the man said, "thas anough of that."

Patricia Turner lay in the street, a small pool of blood forming around her head. She had apparently been chasing a rolling Hula Hoop, and she and the hoop, now twisted, had fallen in such a way that one of her arms was embracing the toy. Most of what light there was came from the street lamps, but there were also the Cadillac's headlights, s.h.i.+ning out on the crowd on the other side of the girl. "You should watch where you goin with that big ole car," Mrs. Baxter said to Penny. "Oh, you know it was a accident," a man said. "I don't know no such thing," Mrs. Baxter said.

The girl's eyes were open and she was looking at me, at the people around her, at everything in the world, I suppose. The man still had hold of Tommy, but the boy was wiggling violently and still cursing Penny. Penny, crying, bent down to Patricia and I think I heard her tell the child that it would be all right. I could tell that it wouldn't be. The girl's other arm was stretched out and she had a few rubber bands around the wrist. There was something about the rubber bands on that little wrist and they, more than the blood perhaps, told me, in the end, that none of it would be all right.

Soon Joy, the girl's mother, was there. "You murderin f.u.c.kin monster!" she kept yelling at Penny, and someone held her until she said that she wanted to go to her baby. "Look what that murderin monster did to my baby!"

The police arrived, but they did not know what else to do except handcuff Penny and threaten to arrest the man who held Tommy if he didn't control the boy. Then the ambulance arrived and in little or no time they took the girl and her mother away, the flas.h.i.+ng light on the roof s.h.i.+ning on all the houses as it moved down 5th Street. A neighbor woman took Tommy from the stranger and took the boy inside. Wordlessly, the crowd parted to let them by, as it had parted to let the ambulance through. The police put Penny in the back of the scout car and I followed, with Kentucky holding tight to my arm. Through the rolled down window, she said to me, "Bail me out, if they'll let me go." But most of what she said was just a bunch of mumbles, because she hadn't managed to stop crying. I reached in the window and touched her cheek.

I opened the store as usual the next day, Sat.u.r.day. The child died during the night. No one, except people from out of the neighborhood, spoke when they came in the store; they merely pointed or got the items themselves and set them on the counter. I sold no meat that day. And all that day, I kept second-guessing myself about even the simplest of things and kept waiting for Penny to come and tell me what to do. Just before I closed, one girl, s...o...b..ll Patterson, told me that Mrs. Baxter was going about saying that Penny had deliberately killed Patricia.

Penny called me at Kentucky's on Sunday morning to tell me not to open the store for two weeks. "We have to consider Pat's family," she said. I had seen her late that Friday night at No. 2 police precinct, but she had said little. I would not see her again for a month. I had parked the Cadillac just in front of the store, and sometime over the next two weeks, the car disappeared, and I never found out what happened to it, whether Penny came to get it late one night or whether it was stolen. "Pay it no mind," Penny told me later.

She called me again Monday night and told me she would mail me a check for two thousand dollars, which I was to cash and take the money to Patricia's family for her funeral. The police were satisfied that it had been an accident, but on the phone Penny always talked like old lady Baxter, as if she had done it on purpose. "Her mother," Penny said, "wouldn't let me come by to apologize. Doesn't want me to call anymore." All that month, and for some months after, that was the heart of the phone conversation, that the mother wouldn't allow her to come to see her and the family.

Joy came in one day about three months after Pat died. Tommy came with her, and all the time they were in the store, the boy held his mother's hand.

"You tell her to stop callin me," Joy said to me. "You tell her I don't want her in my life. You tell her to leave me alone, or I'll put the law on her. And you"-she pointed at me-"my man say for you not to bring me no more food." Which is what Penny had been instructing me to do. The boy never said a word the whole time, just stood there close to his mother, with his thumb in his mouth and blinking very, very slowly as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet.

About once a week for the next few years, Penny would call me at Kentucky's and arrange a place and time to meet me. We always met late at night, on some fairly deserted street, like secret lovers. And we usually met in some neighborhood in far, far Northeast or across the river in Anacostia, parts of the world I wasn't familiar with. I would drive up, park, and go to her car not far away. She wanted to know less about how I was operating the store than what was going on with the people in the neighborhood. She had moved from her apartment in Southwest, and because I had no way of getting in touch with her, I always came with beaucoup questions about this and that to be done in the store. She dispensed with all the questions as quickly as possible, and not always to my satisfaction. Then she wanted to know about this one and that one, about so-and-so and whoever. Because it was late at night, I was always tired and not always very talkative. But when I began to see how important our meetings were, I found myself learning to set aside some reserve during the day for that night's meeting, and over time, the business of the store became less important in our talks than the business of the people in the neighborhood.

And over time as well, nearly all the legal c.r.a.p was changed so that my name, just below hers, was on everything-invoices, the store's bank account, even the stuff on the door's window about who to call in case of emergency. After she had been gone a year or so, I timidly asked about a raise because I hadn't had one in quite a while. "Why ask me?" she said. We were someplace just off Benning Road and I didn't know where I would get the strength to drive all the way back to Kentucky's. "Why in the world are you askin me?"

I went about my days at first with tentativeness, as if Penny would show up at any moment in her dirty ap.r.o.n and make painful jokes about what I had done wrong. When she was there, I had, for example, always turned the bruised fruit and vegetables bad side up so people could see from jump what was what, but Penny always kept the bruised in with all the healthy pieces and sold the good and the not-so-good at the same price. Now that she was not there, I created a separate bin for the bruised and sold it at a reduced price, something she had always refused to do. But the dividing line of that separate bin was made of cardboard, something far from permanent. Every week or so the cardboard would wear out and I had to replace it.

Because there were many nights when I simply was too exhausted to walk the two blocks or so to Kentucky's, I made a pallet for myself in the back room, which would have been an abomination to Penny. "Work is work, and home is home," she always said, "and never should those trains meet."

When Mrs. Baxter came in to buy on credit, which was about twice a day, she would always ask, "How the murderer doin?" I tried to ignore it at first, but began trying to get back at her by reminding her of what her bill was. Generally, she owed about a hundred dollars; and rarely paid more than five dollars on the bill from month to month. Since Penny had told me to wipe the slate clean for Patricia's mother, Old Lady Baxter became the biggest deadbeat. Baxter always claimed that her retirement check was coming the next day. After I started pressing her about the bill, she stopped bad-mouthing Penny, but I found out that that was only in the store, where I could hear.

When I told her that I wouldn't give her any more credit until she paid up, she started crying. My mother once told me that in place of muscles G.o.d gave women the ability to cry on a moment's notice.

"I'll tell," Mrs. Baxter boo-hooed. "I'm gonna tell."

"Oh, yeah," I said, loud enough for everyone in the store to hear. "Who you gonna tell? Who you gonna go to?"

"Penny," she said. "I'll tell Penny. She oughta know how you runnin her sto into the ground. I'm a tell her you tryin to starve me to death."

Within a few weeks her account was settled down to the last penny, but I still told her never to step foot in the store again. Surprisingly, the old lady took it like a man. It was a full month before I got the courage to tell Penny what I had done. I could see that she did not approve, but she only had this look that my mother had the day my brother came home with the first piece of clothing my parents allowed him to buy on his own. A look of resignation-Thank G.o.d I don't have to live with it.

At first, with Penny's blessing, I hired my more trustworthy friends or cousins or a few people in the neighborhood, but either they could only work part time or they didn't do the job well enough to suit me. Kentucky even helped out some, but after she got into an executive training program at what she called her "real job," she didn't want to work in the store anymore.

Then, in the spring of 1965, I lucked onto a Muslim who lived on 6th Street. She was on public a.s.sistance and had three children, which made me skeptical about her working out, but I gave her a one-week tryout, then extended it another week. Then extended two weeks more, then I took her on full time, permanent, and gave her two ap.r.o.ns with her named st.i.tched over the left pockets. I was always afraid that I'd find the place overrun with her kids every day, but in all the time I knew her, despite the fact that she lived only a block away, I met her kids only a few times and came to know them only by the pictures she showed me. Her name was Gloria 5X, but before she lost her slave name, the world-and she seemed to know three fourths of it-had called her Puddin. And that was what I learned to call her.

After I got where I could leave things in Puddin's hands, I was able to take off now and again and spend more time than I had been with Kentucky. We did two weeks in Atlantic City in the summer of 1965, back when the only rep the city had was what the ocean gave it, and that seemed to revive what we had had. That fall I set about redoing the store-repainting, rearranging shelves, and, at long last, getting a new meat case. The renovations left me, again, spending more and more nights on the pallet in the back. There were fewer people buying coal oil and I wanted to tear out the pump, but Penny vetoed that. "Wait," she said. "Wait till the day after the very last person comes to buy some, then you tear it out."

I pa.s.sed the halfway mark in the new work before the end of winter and wanted to celebrate with a good meal and a movie. I was to meet Kentucky at her office one evening in February, but I was late getting there for a reason I don't remember, for a reason that, when it is all said and done, will not matter anyway. When I did get there, she iced me out and said she was no longer interested in going out, which p.i.s.sed me off. I kept telling her we could have a good evening, but she insisted we go home.

"You know," she said as I continued trying to coax her to go, "you spend too much time at that d.a.m.n store. You act like you own it or something." I was making $110 a week, had a full-time employee and one part-time worker, and I didn't particularly want to hear that s.h.i.+t.

"It's my job," I said. "You don't hear me complainin and everything when you come home and sit all evening with your head in those books."

"It's not every single day, not like you do. Maybe once every three weeks. You come first, and you know it."

When we got home, she began to thaw.

"Why are we letting all this come between you and me?" she said. "Between us?" She repeated that "us" three or four times and put her arms around me.

Because she was thawing, I felt I was winning. And I think I got to feeling playful, because the first thing that came to mind after all those uses was that joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger looking up to see a band of Indians bearing down on them: "What they gonna do to us, Tonto?" "Whatcha mean 'us,' Kemo Sabe?"

I don't think I said that line out loud. Maybe I did. Or maybe she just read my mind. In any case, she withdrew from me, then went to the window, her arms hugging her body. "I thought so," she said after a bit. "Clean your things out of here," she said, in the same quiet way she used to tell me to remember to set the clock's alarm. "Clean everything out as soon as possible."

Despite what she had said, I left her place feeling pretty c.o.c.ky and went to Mojo's. After four beers, I called Kentucky to say we should wipe the slate clean. She calmly told me not to call her again. "You f.u.c.kin b.i.t.c.h!" I said. "Who the f.u.c.k do you think you are!" After a while I went to my mother's place. For the most part, I had sobered up by the time I got there. I found my mother at the kitchen table, listening to gospel on the radio. I don't recall what conversation we had. I do remember noticing that she had lost, somewhere in time, three or four of her teeth, and it pained me that I did not even know when it had happened.

It took me three days to clean out my life from Kentucky's place. She stayed at work until I had finished each day. And on each of those days, I left a note telling her I wanted to stay.

I suppose any man could take rejection by any woman as long as he knew that the morning after he was cast out, the woman would be bundled up with her best memories of him and taken away to a castle in the most foreign of lands to live there forever, guarded by a million eunuchs and by old women who had spent their lives equating s.e.x with death. No, no, the woman would have to say to the old women for the rest of her life, I remember different.

If you approached Al's and Penny's Groceries coming down O Street from 6th you could see the bright new orange color I myself put on, a color announcing to the world an establishment of substance, a place I tried to make as friendly as a customer's own home. Joy and Tommy and Tommy's father moved away when the paint was still fresh and bright. And it was still bright when Mrs. Baxter went on to her reward, and though she had not been in the store since the day I told her not to come back, Penny had me send flowers to the funeral home in both our names. The paint was still radiant when the babies I was G.o.dfather to learned to walk in the store on their own and beg for candy from me.

One evening-the season it was is gone from my mind now-I let Puddin go home early. Alone in the store, I sat on my high stool behind the counter, reading the Afro, a rare treat. At one point I stood to stretch and looked out the O Street window to see Penny, with shorter hair and in her ap.r.o.n, looking in at me. I smiled and waved furiously and she smiled and waved back. I started from behind the counter and happened to look out the 5th Street window and saw my father coming toward me. When I saw that he too had on an ap.r.o.n, I realized that my mind, exhausted from a long day, was only playing tricks.

I do not know what would have happened had Penny not decided to sell. Perhaps I would be there still, and still going home each evening with the hope that I would not see, again, Kentucky arm-in-arm with someone else. Penny and I had continued to meet in her car about once a week. The night she told me she was selling the place, we met on Q Street, between 5th and 6th. And the very last meeting was on O Street, in front of Bundy's playground. From meetings far, far from the neighborhood, we had now come to one that was just down the street from the store. I came out of the store about midnight, locked it, stepped back to take one final look at the place as I usually did, and walked only a few yards. In a few minutes, Penny drove up.

"You been a good friend to me," she said as soon as I got in the car. She handed me two envelopes-one with a month's pay for Puddin and the other with four thousand dollars for me. "Severin pay," she said. "Don't spend it on all the wh.o.r.es, for a man does not live on top of wh.o.r.es alone."

She hugged me, kissed me hard on the cheek. After a while, I got out and watched her make a U turn and go back down the way she had come. I had a feeling that that would be the last time I would ever see her and I stood there with my heart breaking, watching her until I lost her in the night.

The next week I took the G2 bus all the way down P Street, crossing 16th Street into the land of white people. I didn't drive because my father had always told me that white people did not like to see Negroes driving cars, even a dying one like my Ford. In the fall, I was sitting in cla.s.ses at Georgetown with glad-handing white boys who looked as if they had been weaned only the week before. I was twenty-seven years old, the age my mother was when she married. Sometimes, blocks before my stop on my way home from Georgetown in the evening, I would get off the G2 at 5th Street. I would walk up to O and sit on the low stone wall of the apartment building across the street from what had been Al's and Penny's Groceries. The place became a television repair shop after it stopped being a store, then it became a church of Holy Rollers. But whatever it was over the years, I could, without trying very hard, see myself sitting in the window eating my lunch the way I did before I knew Kentucky, before Pat was killed. In those early days at the store, I almost always had a lunch of one half smoke heavy with mustard and a large bottle of Upper 10 and a package of s...o...b..ll cupcakes. I sat on the stone wall and watched myself as I ate my lunch and checked out the fine girls parading past the store, parading as if for me and me alone.

Jhumpa Lahiri.

INTERPRETER OF MALADIES.

At the tea stall Mr. and Mrs. Das bickered about who should take Tina to the toilet. Eventually Mrs. Das relented when Mr. Das pointed out that he had given the girl her bath the night before. In the rearview mirror Mr. Kapasi watched as Mrs. Das emerged slowly from his bulky white Amba.s.sador, dragging her shaved, largely bare legs across the back seat. She did not hold the little girl's hand as they walked to the rest room.

They were on their way to see the Sun Temple at Konarak. It was a dry, bright Sat.u.r.day, the mid-July heat tempered by a steady ocean breeze, ideal weather for sightseeing. Ordinarily Mr. Kapasi would not have stopped so soon along the way, but less than five minutes after he'd picked up the family that morning in front of Hotel Sandy Villa, the little girl had complained. The first thing Mr. Kapasi had noticed when he saw Mr. and Mrs. Das, standing with their children under the portico of the hotel, was that they were very young, perhaps not even thirty. In addition to Tina they had two boys, Ronny and Bobby, who appeared very close in age and had teeth covered in a network of flas.h.i.+ng silver wires. The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors. Mr. Kapasi was accustomed to foreign tourists; he was a.s.signed to them regularly because he could speak English. Yesterday he had driven an elderly couple from Scotland, both with spotted faces and fluffy white hair so thin it exposed their sunburnt scalps. In comparison, the tanned, youthful faces of Mr. and Mrs. Das were all the more striking. When he'd introduced himself, Mr. Kapasi had pressed his palms together in greeting, but Mr. Das squeezed hands like an American so that Mr. Kapasi felt it in his elbow. Mrs. Das, for her part, had flexed one side of her mouth, smiling dutifully at Mr. Kapasi, without displaying any interest in him.

As they waited at the tea stall, Ronny, who looked like the older of the two boys, clambered suddenly out of the back seat, intrigued by a goat tied to a stake in the ground.

"Don't touch it," Mr. Das said. He glanced up from his paperback tour book, which said "INDIA" in yellow letters and looked as if it had been published abroad. His voice, somehow tentative and a little shrill, sounded as though it had not yet settled into maturity.

"I want to give it a piece of gum," the boy called back as he trotted ahead.

Mr. Das stepped out of the car and stretched his legs by squatting briefly to the ground. A clean-shaven man, he looked exactly like a magnified version of Ronny. He had a sapphire blue visor, and was dressed in shorts, sneakers, and a T-s.h.i.+rt. The camera slung around his neck, with an impressive telephoto lens and numerous b.u.t.tons and markings, was the only complicated thing he wore. He frowned, watching as Ronny rushed toward the goat, but appeared to have no intention of intervening. "Bobby, make sure that your brother doesn't do anything stupid."

"I don't feel like it," Bobby said, not moving. He was sitting in the front seat beside Mr. Kapasi, studying a picture of the elephant G.o.d taped to the glove compartment.

"No need to worry," Mr. Kapasi said. "They are quite tame." Mr. Kapasi was forty-six years old, with receding hair that had gone completely silver, but his b.u.t.terscotch complexion and his unlined brow, which he treated in spare moments to dabs of lotus-oil balm, made it easy to imagine what he must have looked like at an earlier age. He wore gray trousers and a matching jacket-style s.h.i.+rt, tapered at the waist, with short sleeves and a large pointed collar, made of a thin but durable synthetic material. He had specified both the cut and the fabric to his tailor - it was his preferred uniform for giving tours because it did not get crushed during his long hours behind the wheel. Through the winds.h.i.+eld he watched as Ronny circled around the goat, touched it quickly on its side, then trotted back to the car.

"You left India as a child?" Mr. Kapasi asked when Mr. Das had settled once again into the pa.s.senger seat.

"Oh, Mina and I were both born in America," Mr. Das announced with an air of sudden confidence. "Born and raised. Our parents live here now, in a.s.sansol. They retired. We visit them every couple years." He turned to watch as the little girl ran toward the car, the wide purple bows of her sundress flopping on her narrow brown shoulders. She was holding to her chest a doll with yellow hair that looked as if it had been chopped, as a punitive measure, with a pair of dull scissors. "This is Tina's first trip to India, isn't it, Tina?"

"I don't have to go to the bathroom anymore," Tina announced.

"Where's Mina?" Mr. Das asked.

Mr. Kapasi found it strange that Mr. Das should refer to his wife by her first name when speaking to the little girl. Tina pointed to where Mrs. Das was purchasing something from one of the s.h.i.+rtless men who worked at the tea stall. Mr. Kapasi heard one of the s.h.i.+rtless men sing a phrase from a popular Hindi love song as Mrs. Das walked back to the car, but she did not appear to understand the words of the song, for she did not express irritation, or embarra.s.sment, or react in any other way to the man's declarations.

He observed her. She wore a red-and-white-checkered skirt that stopped above her knees, slip-on shoes with a square wooden heel, and a close-fitting blouse styled like a man's unders.h.i.+rt. The blouse was decorated at chest-level with a calico applique in the shape of a strawberry. She was a short woman, with small hands like paws, her frosty pink fingernails painted to match her lips, and was slightly plump in her figure. Her hair, shorn only a little longer than her husband's, was parted far to one side. She was wearing large dark brown sungla.s.ses with a pinkish tint to them, and carried a big straw bag, almost as big as her torso, shaped like a bowl, with a water bottle poking out of it. She walked slowly, carrying some puffed rice tossed with peanuts and chili peppers in a large packet made from newspapers. Mr. Kapasi turned to Mr. Das.

"Where in America do you live?"

"New Brunswick, New Jersey."

"Next to New York?"

"Exactly. I teach middle school there."

"What subject?"

"Science. In fact, every year I take my students on a trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. In a way we have a lot in common, you could say, you and I. How long have you been a tour guide, Mr. Kapasi?"

"Five years."

Mrs. Das reached the car. "How long's the trip?" she asked, shutting the door.

"About two and a half hours," Mr. Kapasi replied.

At this Mrs. Das gave an impatient sigh, as if she had been traveling her whole life without pause. She fanned herself with a folded Bombay film magazine written in English.

"I thought that the Sun Temple is only eighteen miles north of Puri," Mr. Das said, tapping on the tour book.

"The roads to Konarak are poor. Actually it is a distance of fifty-two miles," Mr. Kapasi explained.

Mr. Das nodded, readjusting the camera strap where it had begun to chafe the back of his neck.

Before starting the ignition, Mr. Kapasi reached back to make sure the cranklike locks on the inside of each of the back doors were secured. As soon as the car began to move the little girl began to play with the lock on her side, clicking it with some effort forward and backward, but Mrs. Das said nothing to stop her. She sat a bit slouched at one end of the back seat, not offering her puffed rice to anyone. Ronny and Tina sat on either side of her, both snapping bright green gum.

"Look," Bobby said as the car began to gather speed. He pointed with his finger to the tall trees that lined the road. "Look."