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, with two roommates instead of four. It bought him clothing and decent food. It left him secure, this job, and filled with the purpose that had been so lacking in his life up until now, but it also felt empty. He showered every evening, washing the city off his skin, still feeling dirty. Nothing would erase the sense of continued shame.
He distracted himself, studying maps and guidebooks every day, and after two months he got a call from his boss, Mr. Munshi, on the brand-new pre-owned phone Mr. Munshi had given him. There was a job for him. He would be leaving New York soon and traveling across the country with a Bengali widow and a female American companion, one Mr. Munshi was looking for even now. Ravi would have laughed to hear it, but he wasn’t there, and when Satya pretended to tell him one night in the bathroom, he still couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. He wondered if he ever would again.
Rebecca Elliot woke up to the sound of snoring. This wasn’t the first time Max’s nasal trumpeting had disturbed her but it would be the last, she told herself as she stared up at the ceiling. A headache from last night’s whiskey pounded at her temples. She had met this one, like many before him, at a bar, after another failed audition a few weeks ago where the casting director had eyed her breasts but not her performance and sent her on her way with a limp “Great work.”
Rebecca habitually used her combined salary from part-time jobs in a coffee shop and a small map store to buy cheap drinks at the place around the corner from her apartment, a Chinese restaurant that became a dive bar after five. It attracted odd people, which is why Rebecca liked it. This boy, Max, had joined her that night, and together they’d washed away her desperation with alcohol, only here it was again, as always, waiting for her as the man beside her slept.
Yesterday’s audition, the third she had drunk her way toward forgetting since she met Max, had been particularly painful. It was for the role of Anya in The Cherry Orchard. Rebecca loved that role; she had wanted to play it since college. It was a prestigious director and it was a huge production and it was Anya. But when she had entered the room, the casting director had looked her up and down and frowned, explaining that they would be doing the readings for Varya, Anya’s older sister by seven years, the following day. Rebecca had blinked back her tears and explained that she was there for Anya and everyone had laughed and joked and pretended it was fine. Rebecca had auditioned and tried to “use it” but the damage was done. She left shaking, wishing she could throw up, wishing she had the kind of mom she could call for sympathy.
Rebecca had grown up in Washington, DC, the only daughter of well-educated, well-bred American Jews. Her father, Morris Elliot, ran a small law firm specializing in divorce, which was a prosperous business given his discretion and the instability of many political marriages. Rebecca’s mother, Cynthia Greenbaum, taught economics at Georgetown University, where she delighted in sparring with her Catholic coworkers. They had raised Rebecca with strong assurances that she could be anything she wanted to be, and then, like so many American parents, were surprised and dismayed when she believed them.
She had attended Columbia University because her parents, alumni of the school, approved, and since they were the people footing the bill, that was important. To her, it didn’t matter where she went, just as long as it was in New York. She had dreamed of the city since she had been a child. She’d done well, but she hadn’t made friends, holding herself apart from everyone but the theater crowd and acting in every role for which someone cast her. It seemed for a time that it would even be easy. She couldn’t imagine failure. Who can, before it’s actually happening?
Rebecca graduated with a flurry of acting accolades and enough flashbulb photos snapped by her proud parents to cause a seizure in a susceptible person. But once the world of acting was no longer
