Chapter 12 Rupi #2
“She had an opportunity,” I say. “She had to take it. We knew our mother was never waking up. There was no reason for Simi to stay.”
“So, you’re the one who insisted she take the opportunity?”
“I encouraged her to take it, yes.”
“How long after Simi left did your mother die?”
“Six months.”
“I’m sorry,” Saj says. Even his sympathy is robotic.
Simi thanks him.
“And how long after that did you meet Ron?”
“A year and a half after Simi left. A year after our mom died.”
He notes something on his legal pad, which he’s been scribbling on off and on. “So, what changed your mind about taking Ron up on his offer?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, pushing away the darkness of the memories of that time. “I think it was between the shock of actually getting the visa, a feeling of loneliness, and the hope of seeing my sister again.”
“That must have been quite the reunion,” Saj says. “Meeting your sister after two years.”
“I never did get to meet her. Not until now.”
“Why?”
“Because of what happened when I got to LA.”
“Tell me what happened,” Saj says, his spear-sharp pencil hovering over his legal pad. The page is already covered in neat, methodical writing.
“I’m getting to it,” I say. Then I take a breath and tell them the rest.
Ron picked me up from the airport by himself.
Tina was nowhere in sight. In fact, in the year that I lived in LA and worked at the restaurant, I saw Tina only a couple of times, and she ignored me completely both times.
At first, I wondered if I got it wrong and that Tina wasn’t Ron’s wife but just someone he had traveled with.
Turns out Tina was, indeed, the wife. When I asked Ron, he told me to ignore her and said she’d only been that happy in India because she’d been on vacation and high, which, according to Ron, was her general state.
Ron took me from the airport to a hotel, where he tried to kiss me. It was something he’d never before done. I was surprised, but when I told him I was tired (I wasn’t. I was super excited and nervous), he backed off.
Then he took me to a McDonald’s for dinner and bought me a chicken sandwich, fries, an apple pie, and a huge milkshake. He said he’d already eaten and watched me eat the entire thing.
After that he dropped me off at a hotel, where despite not thinking I was tired, I fell into a half-awake sleep with the door dead bolted.
At the front of my mind, I still believed the fairy tale I wove for myself: that friends, a job, and a safe life awaited me in America, along with my sister.
But somewhere at the very back of my mind, the truth lurked.
I knew the moment I saw the expression on Ron’s face when I pulled away from his kiss that I had made a mistake.
That life would always be as I’d known it. Just sinkholes and land mines.
From then on, things unfolded in the most bad-movie, predictable manner.
I might as well have been an actress in a horror film who followed the scream into the dark forest instead of running in the opposite direction.
Ron tried again the next morning to come in for a kiss, but when I pulled away for a second time, he asked me to pack and took me to the restaurant.
Curry, Ron’s Indian restaurant, was a dimly lit, seedy joint with velvet curtains, cheap bronze statuettes, and some twenty tables covered in red-and-gold chintz tablecloths.
It was nothing like the fancy eatery he described in India.
The food was cooked mostly by Jesús and his two assistants from Mexico.
Indian students worked as servers in the evenings and weekends.
The employees were all polite with me but skittish.
Apparently, I was not the first “girlfriend” Ron had installed to “keep an eye” on the employees.
Some of the waitstaff consisted of pretty young South Asian girls dressed in very tight sequined cholis over very tight embroidered skirts.
They all wore long braided black-hair wigs, lined their eyes with dark kohl, had nose rings, and wore bindis.
They were always assigned to a particular kind of table of raucous, heavily drinking men. The girls often left when the men left.
They barely ever spoke to the other employees.
In turn, we ignored them too. Basically everyone ignored everyone.
That was the culture at Curry, and it was so potent that within days of getting there, I became just as skittish and suspicious as everyone else.
Not that I hadn’t already been those things before I got there.
We all did our jobs. Served the drunk crowd that showed up for dinner starting at 7 p.m. and then stayed until 2 a.m., leaving behind so much filth that the two servers and I took four hours to wash the beer-sticky floors, tables, and utensils.
Jesús cleaned the kitchen and put away the leftovers, which would be used for the lunch take-out orders the next day.
No one questioned how a place this wretched stayed so busy.
It certainly wasn’t the food. Even so, I saw, smelled, served, and packed so much butter chicken, dal makhani, and saag paneer that if I never see those dishes again in my lifetime, I’ll be okay.
Even now the memory makes me want to bring up my tea.
There were a couple of rooms above the restaurant, and Ron gave me one with a mattress on the floor to live in.
I think Jesús and a few of the other staff lived in the other room.
I never asked. The culture of silence that permeated the staff was absolute.
No one even made eye contact. Everyone obviously lived in terror of deportation and being arrested.
Ron had taken my passport for “safekeeping” the day I got in.
When he left me at the restaurant, he warned me not to leave the premises or tell anyone anything about myself, because I was not legally allowed to work there.
He promised not to tell anyone that he was paying me in room and board.
Apparently not needing to pay rent or pay for food was a deal anyone in my situation would kill for.
After two months of working twenty-hour days, seven days a week, and never leaving the dingy restaurant, and not seeing Ron, I started to fear that I was never getting out of this situation. At the end of two months, he showed up to give me the promised tour of LA.
As we drove around LA, I let him kiss me and touch me, and I made sure I liked it.
What I didn’t like was that smelly, bug-infested room above the restaurant and the idea of ever having to wear those cholis and skirts.
Ron told me he had an apartment in Koreatown that I was going to love.
I told him how lucky I felt that he thought that.
He was right. I did love his apartment. It had real furniture and sunlight.
If navigating Ron’s vile breath and sweaty body while having sex was the price for it, then it wasn’t that high a price.
He only visited the apartment a few times a week, and his visits came with a trip to the grocery store.
Those ten months were the most peaceful months of my life.
I worked—turns out Ron owned another restaurant, Tikka, where he moved me—and slept in a clean bed and let Ron talk about himself and allowed him access to my body.
Fortunately listening to him talk about himself was much more frequent than the other part of the job.
I never asked about Tina, but after a few scotches, complaining about his wife took up as much weight as talking about himself.
Her materialism, her constant need for validation, her laziness.
He was always buying her happiness, with jewelry and bags and clothes and fillers.
One weekend when Tina was in Cancún with her girlfriends, Ron took me to the home he shared with her.
A McMansion in Palos Verdes with a pool and palm trees.
We had sex on Tina and Ron’s bed. It was the most vigorous Ron had ever been.
When he showed me Tina’s closet, I wanted to throw up.
There were more shoes and bags and clothes than I’d ever seen in a store.
He showed me her jewelry, describing the indiscretions (his) and tantrums (hers) that went with each piece.
He knew I wouldn’t touch any of it. He knew I had nowhere to run to if I stole something. He knew me as well as any owner knew his caged birds.
I missed Simi terribly, but that was not a life I wanted her to see me in. Ron sure as hell wasn’t getting anywhere near her.
I played the role to perfection. So much so that Ron swore he was never letting me go.
I never asked for a thing, never talked about myself, and listened with rapt interest. I kept the apartment spotless—much cleaner and tidier than when he first moved me there.
I had no curiosity about any of the shady goings-on at Curry or about how Tikka stayed in business with barely any customers.
I didn’t care. So long as I had a roof over my head and food to eat, and no cops knocking on my door, what did I care?
The vacation ended when Ron was hit by a drunk driver.
I was at the restaurant when I found out from Jesús.
He’d also been moved to Tikka a few months after me.
Together, the two of us removed all the cash from the register—a total of $2,000 and change.
We split it, and then he packed up and left, which meant I had to do the same.
When I got to the apartment, I saw that Tina and a couple of her cronies had already made it there and were having the locks changed.
I turned around and made my way to Ron and Tina’s home.
I’d memorized the code Ron used to open the front door.
I searched the house for my passport but had no luck.
So, I made my way to Ron’s closet and picked up a backpack, a Lakers hat, and a pair of diamond cuff links.
I picked out the pieces of jewelry from Tina’s stash that seemed to have the largest diamonds.
Then I helped myself to a few pairs of her jeans and T-shirts, some snacks from the pantry, and a pair of sneakers that amazingly fit perfectly, then went to the bus station.
For the next six months, I traversed the country on trains and buses until I found myself on a CTA train in Chicago, where I met Matthew.
Obviously, I give them the PG-13 version of the story. Not that one needs much of an imagination to fill in the NC-18 parts. I don’t mention the blackmailing cop in Mumbai or taking the documents from Ron’s closet. That information is a little more than I want to reveal.
When I finish, the room is so quiet, I can separate the sound of each person’s breathing.
Simi and her rasgulla have tears in their eyes. Usually sympathy makes me sick to my stomach, but Simi looks like she’s in enough pain that I’m the one who feels sympathy for her.
Saj’s eyes are as flat and opaque as the black granite in Ron’s kitchen.
“Any more questions?” I ask him.
“Several, but first you should know that you were trafficked into the country.” A blast of hot rage slips into his eyes, but he leashes it. “We can put Tina away, get you justice. Will you be okay pressing charges?”
This time the laugh that bursts from me is so loud, it makes my breath hiccup.
“Justice?” I say. How cute. “Can you bring Ron back from the dead and have him pay? Even if you could, he was actually the one person who at least gave me something in return for what he took from me. That’s more than anyone else has ever done.
All I want is to not have to go back to India.
Can you make that happen? That’s all the justice I want. ”