‘You’re late,’ barked Kurt, manager of Fully Food. He had a football-shaped head on a boxer’s body gone soft, like Lee J. Cobb in Twelve Angry Men. To him his workers were Fully Fools.
‘Hey Kurt,’ Daanish muttered. ‘I got held up.’ He swiftly brushed by before Kurt could get started. ‘Held up? This is a high-volume job.’
Daanish hung up his jacket, bound the knee-length apron, adjusted his cap, and entered the dish room. The kitchen reeked of sweat, bleach, stale greens, ranch dressing thrown in vinaigrette, cheese dumped in orange juice. Wang from China and Nancy from Puerto Rico said hi when he took his place at the sink but no one else bothered.
He started hosing down a copper pot that reached halfway down his thighs. Particles of ravioli sprayed his eyes and lips. The fare tonight was pasta and meatballs, mince pie, mashed potatoes and gravy, pan pizza, and the usual salad bar. Daanish learned each day’s menu not to prep his palate but to prep his muscles and olfactory nerves. Starch and gravy were the meanest to clean. The crust of that pan pizza would be a bitch. He chuckled at how readily he’d picked up such phrases, though barely two months had passed since his arrival. Turning off the hose, he started scraping off the glutinous residue of Reddi-Mash from the pot’s interior with a knife. The smell made his stomach weep. He’d skip dinner again.
His mind replayed the day’s events: woke at seven after a bad night (his roommate came home drunk at three in the morning again, and with his usual timely expertise, proceeded to vomit once inside the door); breakfast (tea and an English muffin) alone as usual; Wayne’s class at nine; bio at eleven; lab at two. After work he’d go for a swim and march straight to Becky’s. His family kept calling to ask, ‘So, how is it?’ What did they expect? What did he expect?
Nancy passed behind him with a stack of plates. She nearly slipped on the sodden floor but caught herself in time. ‘Pendejo,’ she hissed. Then to Daanish, ‘Better wear those rubber gloves, pretty boy, or your woman won’t have you.’
He gave her a mischievous grin. ‘She will.’ Still, he briefly examined his bare hands. Steam and bleach were turning them to flakes of goose meat. Nancy slapped the gloves beside him. He slipped them on.
When the student diners finished their meal they piled the trays on a conveyor belt that rolled inside to Wang and Youssef. Wang, square-framed and sticky, emptied the contents of each plate into a massive trash can, whipping thick colors inside it. Youssef, a sleek Senegalese, scoured the silverware and glasses. Nancy piled the plates and carried them to Amrita from Nepal, who soaped and rinsed them. Ron, an African-American, loaded dollies. Vlade, Romanian, did too.
Daanish hadn’t told Anu that his scholarship entailed spending twenty-five hours a week under Kurt. Let her think he was asked to do nothing but bend over books, to become a man of letters. Why confess he bent over sinks, scouring away letters – of alphabet soup? In Karachi, he’d only entered the kitchen to be fed. Becky teased that mommy spoiled him. She could talk. She sat outside in the dining hall, worrying about her waistline while daddy paid the bills.
Once, over the phone, Daanish had told his father about the job. The doctor had little to say. He’d given him advice once and only once on the drive to the Karachi airport, when seeing Daanish off. His warm smoker’s voice asked his son to remember it. Then he added, ‘Hold your head up high. Life is yours to build. One day you’ll look back and laugh at the spaghetti in your hair.’
Daanish battled with the pizza tin. His back was to the others but he heard Ron swear. Turning, he saw Youssef struggle with several glasses drenched in blue cheese dressing dribbled generously with strawberry sauce and strewn with granola. In one of the glasses a napkin shaped like a wafer carried a message from the other side of the belt: Eat me.
‘Sick mother-fuckers,’ said Ron, sealing the trash and slinging it over his shoulder.
Kurt hovered over Amrita, his favorite prey. She was slow with the washing, especially when attempting not to be, but never missed a crumb. Kurt rested knobby knuckles on his hips and thundered: ‘How did I get this far? By working. You think everybody gets the chance to work, Anna? You know how many people bang on our doors begging for this? This is a high-volume job. You’re lucky to have it.’
She bit her lip and dropped a plate.
‘Would you believe it!’ He threw his hands up. Amrita gathered the broken pieces but instead of disposing of them in the bin reserved for shattered ware, she quickly thrust them in the recycle bin. ‘Would you believe it!’ he repeated. ‘Is it any wonder they call it the developing world?’ He followed her from the wrong bin to the right one, insisting the first hadn’t been cleaned out properly. Then he trailed her back to the dishes. ‘A high-volume job, Anita,’ he continued. ‘How do you think we built this country?’
Ron stopped wheeling a dolly of Mayo-Whip and glowered. Nancy gave Daanish a look that said: Kill Kurt and I’ll love you for ever. Everyone else merely chugged along. Like machines, thought Daanish, wanting badly to touch Nancy.
Kurt continued, ‘We didn’t do it by standing around, that’s for sure. You can keep hoping the work will go away the way they do back where you come from, but it’ll only pile up.’
When he finally left the dish room, Nancy said to Amrita: ‘Don’t worry girl, he couldn’t find his dick with two hands and a map.’
Daanish wanted to console her too but didn’t know how. Instead, when Vlade wheeled silently by, he was suddenly reminded of bullock carts on the streets of Karachi. The soulful Masood Rana resounded in his ear: Tanga walla khair mang da. The cart-driver asks for contentment.
At 9.45 he removed his Fully Food gear, picked up his jacket and stepped out into the crisp mid-October air. He ought to go home, shower, and work on a paper. Instead, he walked up the hill to Becky Floe’s house.
They’d met just over a month ago at the gym. He was lurching out of the swimming pool and on to the sopping tiles when he saw her lime-colored swimsuit and tadpole-like toes inches from his chest. The nails were painted pink to match her freckled flesh. She was broad, heavy-bosomed, about five foot six, and proclaimed: ‘You’re so graceful, Day-nish.’ His chlorine-blazed eyes blinked. He’d never seen her before, but she even knew his name. He’d forgive her inability to say it. For the first time in his life, he’d been sought.
She held his hand as he walked her home. The weather had become suddenly warm – Indian Summer she called it. Her potato-colored hair dripped onto an aquamarine T-shirt that read Choice. He wondered if that was the name of a band.
She wanted to know all about where he was from. Was it just like India? He wasn’t sure why she needed this reference because she’d never been there either. She’d left her country just once, last year, for a month in Mexico. When he described his food she said it sounded, ‘Just like in Mexico.’ So did the climate, the traffic and beggars. The people, the passion, the politics. The music, corruption and drugs. That month, she explained, had been priceless. It made her understand all that was authentic.
‘So, did you grow up in, like, a palace or something?’
‘Oh no,’ he laughed, ‘my father’s a doctor.’
She eyed him quizzically, as if unable to believe the Third World had doctors. The look quickly turned to disbelief when their conversation progressed to his job at Fully Food. ‘You’re a doctor’s son but you need financial aid?’ In the sunlight, her unshaven legs changed from blonde to strawberry.
‘Well, yes.’ Realizing she wouldn’t be convinced till he quoted figures, he clarified, ‘In Pakistan, on average a physician earns about ten dollars an hour. While this is extremely high compared to the national average, it’s not enough to send a child to America on, is it?’ In the following years he would come to repeat these figures numerous times. He’d say, with far more exasperation than the first time, ‘Not everyone who’s brown or black is either dirt poor or filthy rich. There