A New Race of Men from Heaven (Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chaitali Sen’s short stories and essays have appeared in Boulevard, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, New England Review, Shenandoah, and many other publications. She is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky and holds an M.F.A from Hunter College. Born in India and raised in the U.S., she currently lives in Texas with her family.

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"The Immigrant" 

Dhruv found this faux French restaurant—a restaurant of sorts but perhaps more of a cafeteria—off the bypass road of a highway called Research Boulevard, close to his hotel. There were many of these restaurants all over the southern and midwestern states to which Dhruv traveled for work, and he had eaten in most of them. On a Wednesday night he was having a late dinner of something they called chicken friand, a square puff pastry stuffed with chicken and gravy and smothered in a thick, gummy mushroom cream sauce. As always, he ordered it from the counter and watched it plucked from its home under a heat lamp where it had been kept warm for an undisclosed length of time. This was one of the better ones, still somewhat moist and flaky. Sometimes the corners were so dry and hardened he couldn’t get his fork through it, yet he took his chances on this dish every time he came.

He had to admit the concept here was well executed, a testament to the power of objects. Mounted on a brick wall across from his table, a decorative iron hook held a long-handled copper saucepan. The hook’s baseplate was a pleasing silhouette of a rooster, a motif repeated throughout the restaurant, on a teacup, a ceramic jug, and a porcelain plate. A fireplace divided the two dining rooms and on the broad mantel rested a giant iron lid and a bellows. Dark wooden beams stretched across the plaster ceiling, and some of the walls were paneled with the same coffee-colored wood. The few segments of wall not made of brick or covered with wood were accented with framed pictures—maps of France, still life paintings, and sketches of ruined castles on riverbanks. The music was baroque.

He never dined idly anymore. During this meal he wanted to get a letter written to his parents. “I am sitting in a quaint French-style restaurant,” he wrote, in English. His old friend Tuli had once joked that his parents did everything in English—they shopped in English, they ate in English, they even made love in English. Picturing Tuli’s jolly, white-toothed grin, Dhruv sighed deeply before continuing his letter. He tried to describe the rustic décor and how it was meant to evoke the French countryside. This would mean little to them since neither he nor his parents had ever been to the French countryside and his parents had no appreciation for the charm of old things, no nostalgia for simpler times. They lived in India surrounded by old things, and their lives had always been relatively simple. Among the three of them, only Dhruv would have fallen victim to the manipulations of this interior. This dining room, reproduced hundreds of times in hundreds of cities, somehow awakened heartfelt pastoral yearnings, as if he’d been a French farmer in another life.

He wanted to write about a woman he loved but couldn’t begin for many reasons. For one thing, she had not yet returned his feelings, and for another, she was a Muslim, though not devout in the least. In fact, she was a heavy drinker. He believed he could fix that if she would give him the chance.

He was easily distracted from his letter. Outside in the parking lot, an old Asian man was shouting at an Asian woman, presumably his wife. Dhruv studied the man’s behavior, the angry spasms of his mouth and his arms flailing theatrically under the eerie orange street lamps. He wondered if something justifiably outrageous had set him off on a public tirade, or if he was just prone to tantrums.

Dhruv looked away momentarily to see if anyone else found this scene riveting, but the only other person facing the window was a woman sitting alone a few tables down. Dhruv had noticed her when he sat down with his tray because she was dining alone and reading a novel, and he was always curious about people dining alone. He tried to guess at her situation. She could not have been on a business trip. She was too much at home, with an unhurried air of self-possession. She looked to be in her mid-forties, not unattractive but not overly concerned with her appearance. His powers of deduction led him to conclude merely that she was an avid reader who had wanted to get out of her house. She did not look up to watch the man with the loose temper. Her book, whatever it was, held her unfailing attention. Every few pages she would lift her glass of white wine and take a sip, and that was her only distraction.

The Asian man threw his car keys on the ground and took off walking while his wife, somber with her head bent, remained by the car. After a moment she picked up the keys and drove away.

Then Dhruv saw a tiny boy wobbling around the restaurant with a giant laminated menu in his hand, smiling at anyone who was interested and tilting the menu vaguely in their direction. He was a beautiful child, with thick black hair and shining black eyes. He came to Dhruv’s table. “Are you the waiter?” Dhruv asked him.

The boy froze and stared at Dhruv’s mouth as he spoke.

“Would you like to give me a menu? Is there anything good to eat today?”

He finally stood up to look for the boy’s family. He did a kind of dance with him, herding him toward the adjacent dining room, where a large party had joined together many tables to accommodate everyone. An elderly gentleman saw them and came over, snatching the boy up and giving Dhruv a brief, grateful glance. As the boy was carried back to the table, he cried and dropped his menu, causing him to cry even louder and thrash about in the old man’s arms. The old man quickly dropped the boy into the lap of a young woman, surely his mother. Like the boy she was strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. She pressed the boy’s head against her chest, quieting him down, and a man who must have been the boy’s father picked up the menu, while still engaged in animated conversation, and put it absentmindedly on another table. Dhruv didn’t recognize the language they were speaking. Not Spanish. Portuguese? They were all dark haired and fair skinned.

Since he was up, he decided he might as well go to the pastry counter to get a chocolate croissant and a cup of coffee. He didn’t want to go back to his hotel room just yet. When he returned to his table, which had been cleared of his dinner tray, he began to write what was foremost on his mind: Ma, Baba, I have met someone. Before he could get very far, the woman with the book made a remark. “No one is watching that boy,” she said.

At first Dhruv didn’t understand what she meant.

“He’s wandered over here at least ten times,” she said, seeming stunned that Dhruv hadn’t noticed him earlier.

“Aah,” Dhruv said. “Well, we are all watching him, aren’t we?” He turned back to his letter, shrugging off the strange admonishment. At least he had returned the child to his family, while she sat there with her nose in a book.

As he wrote about Mahnoor, he knew he would never send this letter. He had seen her nearly every weekend for over a year through a small circle of Chicago friends who gathered frequently, yet he was at a loss for words to describe her. He listed the facts. She was a pediatric oncologist with a broad smile that turned her cheeks into two crescent moons. Long, wispy bangs grazed her eyebrows. She had a habit of brushing them aside with her fingers to reveal a narrow triangle of forehead that he found very attractive. He knew the group gathered during the week as well, in his absence, and when he returned on the weekends she always looked surprised to see him....