Chapter 5: This is how my parents met.
My mother’s from New York City. East Harlem, to be exact. Grew up there in the 70s and 80s, surrounded by Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Cubans, along with black folk and a smattering of Italians, long before anyone had ever seriously considered putting the words “gentrification” and “Harlem” in the same sentence. East Harlem hadn’t exactly been a “good” neighborhood for a long time — actually, lots of it had been pretty crappy for a while — but at least where my mom lived, it wasn’t… well, it wasn’t absolutely-fucking-awful.
She lived on a block where people sat outside on stoops on nice evenings, gabbing and laughing and bitching about whatever nonsense was going on in the neighborhood at the moment, playing cards, rolling dice, listening to music, spitting sunflower seed husks onto the sidewalk and telling each other things like, “Where little Jimmy at? I heard he broke up with Maria last week,” and, “Your Momma still sick? You tell her she been in my prayers,” and, “Nah, what I heard was that he was messing around on her, and she came home one day and chased him right out the ’partment with a broom!” and then everybody would cackle and pass a pitcher of lemonade or a beer can or a pack of Kools or whatever they were sharing that day.
And then the crack epidemic hit in the mid-80s, and everything went from “mediocre-bad” to “really fucking shitty.” It isn’t noticeable at first; it starts with little Jimmy not coming home one night, then turning up on the street a few weeks later, disheveled and stinking of stale urine, clothes a mess and lips chapped, face ashy, pockets clinking with empty vials and a glass pipe, begging for money.
Then other things happen. People who’d always had steady jobs all the sudden can’t keep them. Kids get this haunted, wide-eyed look on their face when momma disappears for a few days at a time. Young dudes wearing oversized parkas stand on street corners with 40-ounces in brown paper bags in one hand, baseball bats in the other hand to keep customers in line, and they’re loud and they’re feral and they’re posting ten year-olds on the corners as lookouts.
New York got bad. East Harlem got worse. It became the kind of place where you had to pretend not to see some of the things you were seeing unless you wanted you or your family to be the next drive-by victims.
People stopped hanging out on stoops.
Well, some people still hung out there. But they weren’t the kind of people you really wanted to spend time with.
#
1984 and my mother was twenty-two years old, working a stable job at the Port Authority, the kind of lady who sits behind plexiglass for eight hours at a time, selling bus tickets to locals and giving out directions to tourists.
That’s where she was when my father found her. Six years older and six inches shorter than my mother, Dad followed his sister and his brother-in-law from Kathmandu to New York City, wooed by tales of easy riches and abundant jobs and a stable government. It was still ten years before the Maoists in Nepal tried to overthrow the government and ended up embroiling the country in a fucked-up civil war that lasted a decade, but even before the war, Nepal was isolated and corrupt and lacked opportunity. And for an ambitious young guy like my dad, who, entranced by the rock ’n roll and the wandering white hippies who’d just started filtering into his country, the United States seemed like a fairy-tale land, a place where anything could happen. A place where a man could make a mark on the world. So a year after his brother-in-law whisked his sister away to Queens, Dad followed.
Black woman from East Harlem. Tall and thick and tough, not willing to take nothing from nobody.
Shrimpy Nepalese guy fresh off the boat. Skinny and smiley and sheepish about his broken English, speaking and moving in halting stutter-steps, like he’s afraid that at any moment, somebody’s going to tell him he’s doing it wrong.
When people meet my parents, they’re like, “Wha —? How the fuck did they —?” And then they do things like shrug and look skyward, as if to say, “Heaven only knows how your parents got together. Clearly some people really are destined for each other.”
But me, I don’t bring destiny into it. I get my parents. Anybody with a few brain cells who thinks about it for longer than a fucking minute can get them.
To get the weird mismatch that is my parents, you just have to think about Kathmandu and East Harlem. Because, really? Those two places, at that particular moment in history, they weren’t that different in the end. Take a poor city, get its own government to neglect it, bring in outsiders to exploit it, leave the locals feeling angry and hopeless — that kind of environment, it’ll produce a certain kind of person. And Mom at twenty-two and Dad at twenty-eight, they were both that certain kind of person — each in their own way. They were these strong, stubborn, passionate young people who went back and forth between being pissed off at the world and being determined to turn it on its head.
To hear my dad tell it, the story of their love was an epic tale, a fucking Frank Sinatra song come to life, a remake of West Side Story minus anything resembling tragedy or Italians.
This is how it happens for him:
He sees her behind her plexiglass window, and boom, something clicks into place inside him. Like he’s been working on a fucking jigsaw puzzle his whole life and finally found the missing piece that’s been caught beneath the rug this whole time.
He’s in love from moment one.
He makes his way to the front of the line, asks about bus tickets. She answers him. He’s not ready for the conversation to be over, so he asks her more questions. She starts to answer again, but he interrupts, saying what he needs to say slowly and as clearly as he can, trying to keep his accent out of the way:
“You’re beautiful. Please, let me buy you dinner.”
He asks this because he loved American movies long before he loved America, and from the movies, he knows a little about American dating, and he knows this is what you say when you ask a beautiful woman out on a date. You invite her for a drink, or for dinner, and since this is America and not Nepal, if you’re polite and you’re funny, she’ll let you take her hand, let you help her take off her jacket, let you walk her to her door at the end of the night and maybe even give her a kiss.
This, I imagine, is what he’s thinking as he asks my mother out the first time.
Ask Mom, she’ll tell a totally different story. There’s no love at first sight in her version. In fact, mainly what she remembers is this short little Asian guy annoying the hell out of all the customers in line behind him as he takes up her time with a bunch of stupid-ass questions she can barely understand thanks to the thick plexiglass and his thicker accent. And when he asks her to dinner, her whole face scrunches like she’s sucking a lemon and she says:
“Hell, no. Get outta my line. Next!” And she dismisses him with an annoyed wave of her hand.
But he comes back the next day with a bundle of daisies he bought for three dollars on the street. He’s working as a bus boy at a restaurant that belongs to his brother-in-law’s brother. He’s earning enough to get by, but it varies from week to week, sometimes not even hitting minimum wage. And everything’s under the table, off the books. Three dollars is a small fortune, but he spends it on this beautiful woman he’s going to take to dinner.
And she’s surprised but still annoyed to see him back, won’t accept the flowers, shoos him away while her coworker grins behind her hand. He leaves the daisies on the counter.
Comes back the next day with tulips.
The day after that it’s a single rose.
Then another bunch of daisies.
On the fifth day — I know, it sounds like fucking Genesis, right? — on the fifth day, there’s a plastic vase taped to the countertop with a handwritten sign above it that says “FLOWERS” in black marker and has an arrow pointing down at the vase. He puts his mums in the vase, waits to see if Sheronda (he’s learned her name, at least) will turn around, but she’s fake-busy with fake paperwork, back to the plexiglass, and the only person who will look at Pathik (that’s Dad) is Sheronda’s coworker, who’s grinning behind her hand.
Day six is daisies again, day seven lilies, day eight peonies.
Day nine he doesn’t show up. Sheronda’s kind of disappointed, and disappointed that she’s kind of disappointed.
Day ten she asks him where was he on day nine, and he hangs his head and tries to explain about the other bus boy being sick, and how he himself wasn’t feeling great, and he worked even longer that day, and he’s sorry — he’ll bring extra flowers for day eleven to make up for that. And what Sheronda thinks about his story is, “He’s got a job.”
Day eleven he brings extra flowers like he promised.
Day twelve she smiles at him, and he tells her she is a living goddess.
Day thirteen the plastic flower vase and the handwritten sign that says FLOWERS is gone, leaving only half-scraped-off Scotch tape behind on the plexiglass, and Sheronda tells him about how her supervisor came by, and was upset about the vase, and Pathik really has to stop doing this. Really. He has to stop coming by every day like this, bringing her flowers and trying to talk to her.
On day fifteen, she asks him, “If I let you take me to dinner, will you promise to stop?” At first, he doesn’t understand the question; she has to rephrase it a couple more times before he nods in understanding. He beams at her; he swears she’ll never have to see him again after they go out. It’s the happiest day of his life. He will be back at the end of her shift.
Sheronda says, “Okay, fine. Five-thirty.”
He walks away on bouncy steps, on top of the fucking world. Sheronda only sits down on her side of the counter with a sigh. But when Sheronda’s coworker keeps grinning at her behind her hand, Sheronda swivels and snaps at the woman, “What?”
“Nothing,” says the other woman. “That Chinaman, he really like you.”
Normally, Sheronda would never go out with a man immediately after work. She would go home, she would take a bath, fix her hair, put on something nice, add some jewelry. But she has every intention of blowing Pathik off as quickly as possible, feigning a headache or a stomachache halfway through dinner and insisting she can find her own way home. She plans to be home by seven-thirty tonight. Eight at the latest. And then no more harassment from Pathik.
(Who, she knows, is from Nepal, not China. People can be so ignorant.)
He’s back at exactly five-thirty, clean-shaven and smelling of a shower, and when he walks her away from the Port Authority, he runs ahead to open doors for her; when they make it to the sidewalk, he walks on her outside, between her and the street; and when a crackhead comes too close, begging for change, he positions himself between the crackhead and Sheronda, puffing out his narrow chest and ordering the man away in English that doesn’t stutter.
They wind through Manhattan for several blocks this way, getting closer to Hell’s Kitchen, which makes Sheronda nervous, and she asks “Where are we going?” to which Pathik, who has been beaming the whole time, gives a confusing answer that has something to do with an Indian restaurant, his sister, his brother-in-law, his brother-in-law’s brother, cumin, and a fire escape. Sheronda nods along skeptically, catching only every two to three words of the story, wondering when they pass a subway stop if she should bail right now and head back uptown.
But — and you can call it fate if you want, but I just call it fucking curiosity — she follows the wiry little man until he stops on the sidewalk and points excitedly and says, “Bhaswar’s. This Bhaswar’s restaurant.” She follows his jabbing finger and suppresses the puckered lemon-face look just in time, because the place is an utter dive. Greasy spoon, Indian style, probably with cockroaches clinging to the underneath sides of the tables while patrons’ elbows rest on the sticky tops.
She opens her mouth, feigned headache speech already prepared, but Pathik waves his arm down the sidewalk. “Other side, fire escape,” he says, like this is some sort of explanation.
She follows a few steps behind as he rounds the corner into an alley, eyes alert, ears scanning for danger as she grips her handbag tightly against her chest and prepares herself to fight. She’s pretty sure she can take shrimpy little Pathik — he only comes up to her chin — as long as he didn’t bring any friends to this party.
But when she steps into the alleyway, Pathik has stopped a few feet ahead of her, that idiotic, gap-toothed smile still plastered on his face, and he points up and behind him. Sheronda follows his finger for the second time, eyes climbing the brickwork, snaking up black iron fire escapes and around laundry lines, and finally, she sees it. A round table with a pristine white tablecloth that flutters in the wind five stories up, a glass vase on top filled with bright red roses, two chairs on either side.
Pathik pulls down on the whining, screeching bottom stairs of the fire escape, his smile faltering a bit. “I sorry so far up,” he apologizes to Sheronda. Then he points down at her feet. She’s still in her work shoes — ugly black sneaker-like things with thick rubber soles. “I glad safe shoes,” he says.
Sheronda hesitates for a moment. Moment of truth. Go through with it like she said she would, or turn back around.
(“It was my smile that won your mother over that night,” my father says to me a couple decades later, his English perfect and most of the accent gone. “She couldn’t resist my good looks and my charm.”
She slaps his arm, clucking her tongue at him. “That’s what you think. Truth was, I’d been at work all day and I was just hungry.”
He arches a black eyebrow at her, and crow’s feet crinkle around the folds of his dark eyes. “Whatever you say, my darling.”
And I roll my eyes because I was fifteen when I heard that story, and by default, their love story was impossibly maudlin, impossibly fucking dorky.)
Whatever the reason, Sheronda walks up the fire escape. Pathik follows a few steps behind her.
And she surprises herself by having a good time. When Pathik can make himself understood, he’s funny. He regales her with stories about growing up in Kathmandu, making up for his limited English with wild hand gestures, miming, and sound effects. He tells her about the time he and his friends released the grumpy old elephant from the man who used it to give rides to American tourists; he shows her pictures of his aging mother and his dead father, his five siblings, his tribe of nieces, nephews, cousins, aunties, uncles, and on and on. And Sheronda laughs at the right moments and gasps in surprise at the other moments and leans over the faded, dog-eared photographs, and the rows of smiling faces remind her of East Harlem before it was that bad, and when he walks her back to the subway stop just before nine o’clock, she says to him, “You bringing me flowers tomorrow?”
His brow clouds, probably thinking his English is failing him. “Flowers? I promise, no more flowers.”
She repeats her question, slower. “I know I said that. But I’m asking: Are. You. Bringing. Me. Flowers. Tomorrow?”
Finally, he gets it. His face splits into a trademark broad smile, and he says, “Yes. Flowers tomorrow.”