Nan Violence Read online

Nan Violence

  On the evening of November 1, 2010, in the sixty-third year of his existence, my uncle Mr. Acharya Jain bit into a piece of meat for the first time in his life. I would not have believed such a thing possible, but I heard of the event from his wife, a teacher of mathematics and a woman of absolute integrity.

  The momentous event took place in the sometimes-Indian, sometimes-Bangladeshi, and sometimes-Colombian neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens.

  Mr. Acharya Jain was a most observant Jain. He did not pursue any course of action that was forbidden by the religion’s foremost apostles of nonviolence, the twenty-four Tirthankaras.

  “Nothing that breathes, that exists, that lives, or that has essence should be destroyed, or harmed, or denied of his or her potential,” Mr. Jain used to be fond of saying to anyone who was within hearing range, usually his wife or a fellow subway rider.

  He loved all of God’s creatures, big and small, and accorded an ant the same wonder and respect that one normally reserves for a whale on the National Geographic Channel. He strained his drinking water through a washcloth to avoid harming the bacteria. He organized online protest groups against the Draize test.

  “I can’t believe,” he used to say, “that we are living in a society that considers it acceptable to place noxious solutions into the eyes of conscious rabbits just so we can test if so-and-so deodorant is safe.”

  However, even though Mr. Jain could never quite gather up the defiance to eat a hamburger, he liked to think of himself as an adventurous man. He was the first person in his family to move west of his ancestral home in Chembur to the Bombay suburb of Santa Cruz. In the years to follow, Mr. Jain showed himself to be even more restless. He continued to move farther and farther west until he arrived in New York. And even in this city of sinners, where people killed cows and stuffed them between buns at fast-food joints, Mr. Jain refused to budge from the teachings of the Tirthankaras.

  “Eating meat is the deadliest sin,” he liked to say after rustling the morning newspaper. “Violence toward animals desensitizes us to violence toward man. When a pilot drops a bomb in Baghdad, or when a suicide bomber blows himself up in Tel Aviv, remember that it was that first chicken . . . that first fish he killed or ate that started him on this journey of violence.”

  Mr. Jain had come to America to work for the research labs at I— Corp. He was a bright man who had spent the years of his youth reducing the latencies between the electrical and mechanical components of the world’s first supercomputer.

  He had then spent his middle years fretting over the designs of every boy who courted (or spoke to) his daughter Ananya.

  Ananya had ultimately married a good-for-nothing Indian boy and moved back to Bombay to “discover her roots.” And I— Corp. had sent Jain off with an “ice cream social” to commemorate his retirement. The firm hadn’t even served strawberry ice cream at the event, which was his favorite flavor.

  Mr. Jain’s giant brain, freed from the encumbrances of business and family, now settled on the complex issue of laundry. The endless permutations and combinations presented by the mixing and matching of colors, whites, cycles, temperatures, and bleach fascinated him. Surely there had to be a formula that allowed one to arrive at the optimal amount of liquid detergent for light, medium, and heavy loads, something that was more comprehensive and emotionally satisfying than the recommended “one capful.”

  Mrs. Jain, who had retired earlier that year from the Joseph Pulitzer School, found her husband’s preoccupation with laundry taxing. She had spent over thirty-two years teaching mathematics to an endless procession of unwilling young minds. She would have liked nothing better than to commence her retired life by taking pleasure in new joys, be they reading poetry, pontificating on the relative merits of toe-up-with-gusset-and-slip-stitch-heel socks with her knitting partner, Mrs. Chang, or discussing the latest antics of her grandson via Skype with her daughter in India.

  However, she found that she couldn’t accomplish any of these simple pleasures with a husband who would interrupt a couplet about a heart found bloodied at the onset of spring with a question on whether it would be more optimal to wash gray clothes along with the colors or along with the whites.

  “Does it matter?” she asked him.

  “Of course it matters. There’s a time, place, and color for everything.”

  She could tell he was being serious, for Mr. Jain, like so many introverted men, frequently masked his earnestness by attempting to be clever.

  Mrs. Jain put on a sensible red sweater that she had knit the year before and took her troubles to the adjoining apartment building. She pushed at the gate until it dislodged a block of snow. As the gate opened, Mrs. Jain’s mind followed the slow, creaking sound back in time. How large the courtyard had seemed when Ananya used to spend entire afternoons playing hopscotch under the watchful eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Chang.

  What was it that the great Mirza Ghalib had said? The entire world appears like a playground/The dusk and dawn making their eternal rounds.

  A film of tears had formed in her eyes by the time she reached the Changs’ apartment.

  “Is everything all right?” asked Mrs. Chang.

  With a focused glare that shone through the moistness, Mrs. Jain told her neighbor her troubles. “Today, it’s the laundry,” she said. “Tomorrow, it will be the dishes. And soon, every day, it will be something.”

  “This will not do,” said Mrs. Chang. “Tomorrow morning, you get up and come directly here for the day. We’ll knit and talk about more sensible things. Woman things.”

  Woman things. The words blazed themselves into Mrs. Jain’s mind like the promise of a prophet, a sign in Times Square.

  That night, the second hand of the grandfather clock in the Jain residence went clickety-clack, clickety-clack like a pair of knitting needles, and Mrs. Jain woke up well before the first plane flew over their roof to land at LaGuardia International Airport. She flossed, shampooed, and conditioned with brisk efficiency, and even as the teakettle rumbled in its buildup to whistling, she made breakfast for her husband and went next door.

  Mrs. Chang had a teapot at the ready.

  Mrs. Jain told her about her grandson, who had skipped school to drink sugarcane juice. The principal had punished him with a caning. God had punished him with jaundice.

  Mrs. Chang responded by saying that children will be children. “Jaundice won’t be able to harm an angel like that,” she said, as she poured out a hot stream of tea.

  Mrs. Jain smiled.

  She took out a printout for a pattern from her handbag. The pattern called for a "multiple of 4+2". Her gauge was five stitches per inch. She imagined that the cap she wanted to knit for Mr. Jain would be ten inches wide. She decided on using forty-eight stitches, plus two.

  As she worked through the math, she was transported back to her classroom. She shifted her weight on the wooden chair, and it creaked like the chalk on her blackboard. She reflected happily on some of the many students she had guided through introductory algebra.

  Then she thought of what that great poet, Robert Browning, had once written: The lark’s on the wing, The snail’s on the thorn; God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world!

  But when lunchtime arrived, and Mrs. Chang began throwing vegetables into her hot pot, Mrs. Jain sensed that the lark had fallen off its wing. The snail had been pricked by the thorn. And she felt guilty.

  What would Mr. Jain do for lunch? Mrs. Jain knew that, even with his newfound interest in household chores, Mr. Jain would not be able to cook himself a meal. He was the kind of man who would weep even before taking a knife to an onion. Not that he would ever cut or, for that matter, eat an onion. A conscientious Jain like her hu
sband would never eat a root vegetable that could otherwise serve as a home to millions of God’s tiniest creatures.

  Mrs. Jain told her friend that she would go home and cook a meal for her husband.

  “That’s impossible,” said Mrs. Chang. “You must eat lunch. Here. With me. And you have to tell me more about your grandson.”

  Bombay was a large city, Mrs. Chang knew, and if it was anything like Beijing, the possibilities of mischief and disaster for a boy of seven to get into were endless. He had only just gotten done with jaundice. Cholera was surely around the corner. Besides, the strong diagonal eyelets on Mrs. Jain’s cap were starting to take shape. It would take a truly heartless knitter to abandon them at such a promising stage of their development.

  “Why doesn’t he just eat leftovers from last night?” asked Mrs. Chang. “You said you made a large casserole.”

  “He has never been a fan of leftovers,” Mrs. Jain said. “Do you know what he says about leftovers? He says that they make life predictable and boring. He says that they make a man repeat yesterday’s journey, and that, while eating a leftover meal, he feels as though he is commuting.”

  “That’s crazy talk,” said Mrs. Chang.

  But there was nothing that could be done about it. Men would be men. Nobody could stop them from thinking crazy thoughts or saying crazy things.

  “If only it weren’t snowing so hard,” Mrs. Chang said. “He could go to that vegetarian restaurant on 37th Avenue.”

  “If only,” said Mrs. Jain.

  It was at that moment that Mrs. Jain had the idea that would spark the ensuing catastrophe.

  “Mrs. Chang,” she said, “if a man cannot go to the restaurant, then the restaurant can go to the man. I’ll order in some delivery.”

  “But that’s such a small place. I don’t know if they deliver.”

  “They don’t,” said Mrs. Jain. “But I know someone who will.”

  Like many schoolteachers, Mrs. Jain had students who had long since been graduated from both middle and high school and were now involved in the pursuit of promising careers. Many of them still romanticized their school years, especially those spent with her, and celebrated the role their education had played in their success. They had particularly fond memories of Mrs. Jain, who had helped them understand polynomial equations of the second degree without resorting to the use of harsh words or painful barbs.

  Mr. Singh, proprietor of the Nan Violence restaurant, was one of Mrs. Jain’s appreciative former students. Mrs. Jain had also eaten at his restaurant in the past and thought highly of her student’s culinary skills. And, apparently, so did a large portion of Queens. The Zagat guide had said that Nan Violence was “authentic,” and “the last word in Indian cooking,” and “located conveniently outside the Roosevelt Avenue station.”

  Mrs. Jain knew that Mr. Singh had no doubt in his mind that he served the best North Indian food in all of New York City. Confidence is an expansive emotion. It spills readily into other areas. At the age of thirty-five, Mr. Singh had begun to fancy himself a great singer who hadn’t made it “there” (Bombay) only because he was “here.” His ex-wife had once pointed out that he wasn’t that good a singer and that his voice broke on the higher notes. Even if she were right (which she obviously wasn’t), Mr. Singh had reasoned, it was nothing that couldn’t be concealed by turning up the volume on his synthesizer.

  He had begun to sing for his guests every night. His American visitors found the performances ironic and delightful. The Indians worked their way through their meals by philosophically reasoning that great flavor required great sacrifice.

  Mrs. Jain called Nan Violence and asked to speak to Mr. Singh. She asked him if he would be kind enough to deliver a Jain meal to her husband.

  “No meat, obviously,” she said. “Also, please don’t make anything that has onions or any other root vegetable.”

  Hearing the voice that had coaxed him through quadratic equations, Mr. Singh felt warm and nostalgic. He assured Mrs. Jain that he would prepare the order himself and, what’s more, deliver it to Mr. Jain.

  As a child, Mr. Singh had often forgotten to carry over the remainders on long-division problems. He had grown up to be a careless man.

  While preparing the order for Mr. Jain, Mr. Singh began to sing a song that celebrated childhood. It wasn’t an easy song. Mr. Singh found that he had to close his eyes and raise his hands toward the ceiling as he reached for the higher notes. Focused on the song instead of the meal, Mr. Singh committed three acts of carelessness. He forgot to include the salad. He forgot to seal the nan. And, in the most grievous of all the errors,he packed a goat dish instead of the cauliflower.