By Rubaiyat Khan

MAHMUD stood behind the Carvel counter at Nathan’s, wearing a light yellow T-shirt, a barely discernible name tag pinned to his lapel. It was his first week at work, and he glanced nervously at the other Bangladeshi working the cash register at Nathan’s. Rubel served with ease, multi-tasking. ‘Yes miss, fish sandwich? Please wait five minutes as we have to fry it…next?’ Mahmud’s eyes caught Rubel’s, and the latter hollered, ‘Ki re? What’s up?’ and winked. Mahmud admired Rubel, and was afraid of him at the same time. He’d been in the land of the free for a decade now, starting out in New York City as a cabbie. He was once stabbed on the neck in the streets of Harlem, and he proudly shows the scar to Mahmud. ‘This is the price you gotta pay to live in this country man!’ Rubel was a seasoned fighter, a man who had made it. But Mahmud was going to have a better life than him. These were just stepping stones.
   ‘A small chocolate cone please,’ Mahmud’s attention was drawn back to a young, blonde woman standing in front of him at the counter. Mahmud straightened up and cleared his throat. His eyes flickered towards Rubel’s direction one more time before he said in a voice louder than usual, ‘You want better batter, or fudge brownie?’
   The woman looked at him strangely. ‘No, just a plain chocolate ice-cream, thank you.’
   Her white skin looked as flawless as plastic, like the pink plastic dolls they sell on the streets of Gausia Market in Dhaka. And her hair – like golden threads. Mahmud could not help staring. It all still seemed unreal to him. He handed her the ice-cream cone, and as he did so, his fingers brushed against hers, and he slightly shivered.
   Mahmud lived in a small red-brick, rundown building in Jamaica with Harun, two Indians, and a fat Pakistani. Harun was the man who helped bring him to New York, and to Harun, Mahmud’s family was greatly indebted. Harun was much older, in his late thirties, and knew Mahmud’s uncle. He was wearing sun glasses and a bright Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans when he came to pick up Mahmud at the airport. ‘Oi miya,’ he’d grinned and slapped him on his back. ‘Welcome to America!’ Harun had taken him to a strip club the same night. He’d guffawed, licked his lips, and slapped a twenty down on the table, signalling for a lap dance from a wispy red-haired woman with large breasts. Her breasts were larger than any Mahmud had seen, even larger than the women’s breasts in the blue films he used to watch back home with his buddies from high school. She wore a silver top that shimmered, and fish net stockings. As she straddled Mahmud and caressed his hair, he’d stiffened and leaned back against his chair, afraid to breath. This seemed to amuse both the dancer and Harun. The latter had thrown back his head and started to laugh, and Mahmud had felt ashamed.
   They shared a small room on the 7th floor, and slept on mattresses on the floor. The toilets were across the hall. There were posters of half-naked women pasted on the blue walls, and paint was chipping off in larger clumps near the ceiling. Mahmud slept next to the Pakistani, part of his feet sticking out of the mattress and the balls of his feet grazing the hard cement floor. That first night, as he lay in his bed in the cold, Mahmud felt very big. He lay awake, listening to the heavy sounds of breathing next to him. The sleeping man’s breath felt warm and moist on the nape of his neck. He lay awake, not quite being able to believe that he had made it, travelled thousands of miles, away from the heat and stench of Old town Dhaka, to America, where all dreams seemed possible. He saw himself in a large, white house, surrounded by trees that looked like they had been set on fire. He saw himself wearing a navy blue shirt, driving a white Mustang, a young woman by his side. Her hair was tied into a loose bun high at the back of her head, much like his mother’s, and tendrils of her brown hair curled around her neck. She had a small waist, and her breasts were supple, modest, under her red and white cotton sari. She was a foreign woman with deshi values. He sighed as he turned on his back that first night, and drifted off to sleep.
   In his sleep, Mahmud kept having the same dream. He walks unknown streets, and police sirens scream in his ears. He enters a narrow alley, and his feet skip over stagnant pools of dark liquid that glint in the distant orange streetlights. A homeless man transpires from thin air, wearing multiple layers of clothing as a rainbow, and starts to caress his chest, then reaches down to his groin. He wakes up soaked in sweat, the space next to him on the mattress empty and still warm.
   Mahmud took the subway to work every day. He stood in the same position on the platform, sat in the same corner seat in the metro and observed people. Lean businessmen wearing dark pinstriped suits, and ties, reading the English news daily, beautiful women in short floral dresses, their long legs crossed. They were different than the people he saw in his neighbourhood. In the weekends he wandered the streets of Manhattan alone, mesmerised by the glittering lights and huge neon screens and the sea of beautifully dressed people. He rarely missed his mother and father back home, his two brothers and two sisters. He was the youngest, and in the eyes of his family, now, the most successful. He wrote them letters sometimes, telling them of this wonderland that he would soon call home.
   
   MAHMUD was exhausted midway, before his shift at Carvel ended. The Carvel at Penn Station was a busy one, and the place hummed with the sounds of people talking in unison, in a language that was still foreign to him. His English was broken, and stilted. He knew a few phrases, and Rubel taught him some of the slangs. ‘Screw it’, Rubel liked to say when he got frustrated.
   ‘Screw it. I want to leave, go back home and start a business running my own shoe shop in Elephant Road.’ He leaned against the brick wall and smoked a cigarette. He offered one to Mahmud, and the two stood quietly, blowing smoke into the frigid air, each buried in his own thoughts. Mahmud looked up at a sky polluted in a reddish orange glow, saw a plane in the distance, blinking in the near dark. His mind raced with thoughts that he couldn’t assimilate all at once. He had been in the country for almost seven months now and still worked behind the Carvel counter. But the prevalent thought was, so what if he has a Bachelor’s in science from Dhaka College, and has a menial job? He was meant to be here. And his luck would soon change.
   ‘Oi shala…you bastard,’ Rubel was suddenly angry, ‘you think you’re so hot right now, but wait till a few years pass, and you’re still working behind your shitty counter.’ He grabbed Mahmud’s cheeks and shook them fiercely. ‘It ain’t happenin’ for you bro,’ he said in English. ‘Your sissy dreams make me sad,’ his shoulders shook with laughter. Mahmud shoved his hand away, and walked away without a word.
   
   MAHMUD was once again in a dark alley, but this time, he could smell the stench. The dark pools of liquid were human piss, and the smell overpowered him. He shivered as a cold gust of wind blew in his direction, and the homeless man materialised. As before, he reached down to touch Mahmud in his groin, but the tugging grew more insistent this time.
   As his vision cleared and adjusted itself in the dark, he noticed his breathing was cut short. Something hovered over him, and fondled his penis. It was Aziz, the Pakistani, breathing hard on his face, his lips curled into a grimace. Mahmud yelled and violently shoved him away, and as the lights were turned on, chaos unfolded.
   Mahmud moved out, missing work for a few days, as he looked for a place to stay. He ended up renting a room for $10 a night in Jackson Heights. In the evenings, he liked to look out the small broken window in his room. It faced the East, allowing a glimpse of the jagged skyline.
   The first few months, Mahmud liked to take the subway and get off at random places. He walked through the endless grey, concrete of Brooklyn streets, ate ice-cream in a sun-lit Battery Park, and took the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty – a gargantuan woman with her arm thrust high up in the air, carrying a torch that seemed to burn in his soul. But soon he confined himself to his home, and the bustling streets and familiar sounds of his neighbourhood. The streets were redolent with the smell of curry, and sari shops lined the pavement outside his building. He liked to gaze at the fare the shopkeepers sold, and sometimes snuck into a nearby restaurant, ‘Shagor’, (The Sea) that sold Bengali cuisine. He stuffed himself with rice and curry fish and lentils every other night.
   Mahmud threw himself to work. He scooped up ice-cream in a flash, and the flavours were engraved in his mind. Cookies ‘n Cream, Plain Chocolate, Better Batter, Fudge Brownie, Strawberry Delite, Lime-sickle, Banana cream…he had it all in his head, and whipped up a fresh cone each time, serving it to the next customer, and the next, and the next, with the disjointed grace of a pantomime. He was getting good at his work, and Sally, his boss, named him ‘Employee of the Month’. He carried the small, rectangular plaque home one evening, clinging it to his chest with much pride.
   
   SUMMER was here, and Mahmud once again began to enjoy the ride in the subway. Men and women now no longer wore dull, thick coats and leather jackets, but seemed to bloom. He stood in his usual corner and waited for the train to arrive to take him to work. It was an unusually hot day, and Mahmud shifted from leg to leg. Sweat already stained his Carvel T-shirt a dark yellow under the armpits. He sighed and looked at his watch, a cheap golden Rolex that he had bought from a street seller near the ‘Shagor’ restaurant. It was shiny, and expensive to look at, and he smiled at the bargain price he had gotten it for.
   The low, piping sounds of the saxophone stirred the humidity in the air. A woman next to him continued to crane in the direction of the darkened tunnel, and he unconsciously did the same. He observed a couple of grey mice running through the thick, wooden slabs of the tracks, and the last thing he heard was the low rumble of the approaching train, and the surprising thump of drum beats accompanying the saxophone.
   It was a month before he recovered, and his gait became a signature limp for the years to come. He had been somewhat of a celebrity for sometime, as headlines declared, ‘Immigrant worker miraculously survives Subway accident.’ Sally, his newfound buddy Jason who worked the evening shift at Nathan’s, and even Rubel had stopped by to see him at the hospital. Sally had bought flowers, a bouquet of bright carnations, and heart-shaped balloons that said ‘Get-well soon’ in luminous pink. It warmed his heart to know he had such friends.
   Another month had passed before he could muster the courage to travel on the subway. Sally was kind enough to give him his job back behind the Carvel counter, and as he stepped out of the train and onto the platform once again, he felt a sense of renewal. He smiled to himself as he pushed through the revolving iron doors and laboured up the steps into the sunlight.