it was in the small cracked mirror that hung in the communal bathroom of his old Sunset Park apartment. He did not know it was his last time, although if he had been asked, he would not have said he minded. Before moving to the United States he hadn’t seen his own face very much. The bathroom in the apartment in which he had grown up in Bangladesh, in the city of Sylhet, was a tiny one, with a squatting toilet. He had always bathed outside near the waterspout, rubbing his body with mustard oil, when he could afford it, and rinsing it off with a bucket while the others in his apartment complex waited nearby, eager to use the facilities. These did not include a mirror. His grandmother, with whom he had grown up, had a small hand mirror, which she had used to let him check his hair from the back when she had cut it on the second Sunday of every third month. Otherwise, he saw mirrors only in shops. Once he moved to America, he looked at himself in a mirror every day. He showered in a ceramic tub, and the water was always there in the pipes, waiting for him. The toilet had been difficult to manage but he had figured it out, eventually, by perching awkwardly over it in a spindly squat. In his first two months in America, Satya had realized that his favorite thing about the country was his own bathroom.
There had been a repeated knocking at the door. Satya didn’t realize it at first; he thought that this was just the throbbing of his head.
“Just a minute!” He heard a muffled response in a language he didn’t understand. Satya shrugged and looked at himself again, patting his cheeks and wondering when he would have enough hair to shave.
The apartment was his because he paid four hundred dollars a month, an amount he couldn’t afford, to live there, but it also belonged to the four other immigrants who called the minuscule two-bedroom home. Two of them were Mexican, Juan and Ernesto, and after they returned home from their job at a restaurant, they split their bounty of leftovers with each other over beers and hushed conversation in Spanish. All of the sounds seemed to Satya at once nasal and soft, like a sweet-sour pudding of a language. They stuck together, mostly, always quietly speaking with each other, but when they had extra food they always shared it with everyone, meticulously dividing each dish with almost surgical precision to ensure fairness in distribution.
One of the other residents, Kosi, was from Ghana, and though he had been an engineer in Africa, now he worked at an auto parts shop in the neighborhood. His voice reminded Satya of a thick stew with chunks of meat and bone in it. Satya, who prided himself on his fluid command of English, both the proper construction as taught to him in school and the slang he’d learned from the MTV videos he viewed in electronics stores, couldn’t understand a word his African housemate said. Satya decided that the poor man must be struggling to learn, and he generously tried to teach Kosi in between his own searches for work. Thus far these lessons had not progressed well. At times it seemed that Kosi thought that he was teaching Satya instead.
The last roommate was Satya’s only real friend, in America and in the world, Ravi Hafiz, his fellow immigrant from Bangladesh, the man who slept near him nightly on the floor of the kitchen and shared his dreams. They had been friends since they were six years old. They had snuck into America together. They had made a pact to help each other survive. And that morning, Satya was going to steal Ravi’s job.
Ravi and Satya had grown up together in Sylhet, which sat on the northeast corner of Bangladesh, very near the Indian border. They were not friends because of a shared religion, or even a shared language. Satya was Hindu, one of the small population still left in Bangladesh, and Ravi was Muslim, one of the overwhelming majority. They had gone to different schools and lived in different neighborhoods, and they had very little in common in background or family life. And yet, they had been thick as thieves—and sometimes they were thieves—since the day they met. They were friends because they were a part of the same club, and it was a terrible club indeed. They were both the sons of Bangladeshi war babies, inadvertent heirs of their country’s shame.
As 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
