Pooja's New Tiffin Wallah
Title: Pooja's New Tiffin Wallah
Author: blacktop
Rating: G
Characters: John Reese, OC
Word count: 2,000
Warnings: Mild spoilers for "Baby Blue"
Note: Tiffin is an old English word for a light meal. The word eventually became the term used on the Indian sub-continent for a multi-compartment metal lunch box, usually a stack of two or three tiers secured by a locking handle to keep the sections in place. In India, tiffin wallahs are the men who carry these lunch boxes to workers in their offices.
You can see what a tiffin box looks like here:
.com/Grand-Trunk-Stainless-Steel-Food-Storage-5.?refid=GPA49-GTK1042&gclid=CK_ekdb06a4CFUZN4AodQk1IJA
Reading my earlier story, The Room Above Pooja's, will give some background to this story, but I think you can also take this one as a stand-alone. You can find the The Room Above Pooja's at .com/2012/02/28/
This story is set a short time after the events of "Baby Blue," so spoilers for that episode.
After three days, Mrs. Soni had had enough.
She did not mind that her tenant, Mr. Reese, was in the habit of sneaking through the restaurant kitchen at all hours of the night to enter his apartment. He stepped like a cat, so she hardly heard his footfalls in the square room above her parlor as he prepared himself for sleep.
She knew that there were stretches of time when he failed to come home at all. And occasional days when he refused to eat the two meals which were part of his rental arrangement with her. He simply left the food in its stainless steel tiffin box on the floor outside his door, untouched, until she sent up a waiter to take it away.
Mrs. Soni was aware also that some nights the pain of his wounds overcame him and she could hear the groans or sighs even after she closed her bedroom door.
But three days of lying silently in his bed without moving or eating was really too much.
Mrs. Soni selected one of her better saris, the blue and fuchsia one, for the expedition to the third floor. She knocked (it was polite, after all) and entered without waiting for a response (the room belonged to her, after all).
Reese was stretched out on the bed fully dressed, on top of the orange patterned coverlet. His hands were folded behind his head as he stared at the still ceiling fan. He did not move his eyes or acknowledge her presence when she entered.
Mrs. Soni was shocked to see black shoes and socks strewn across the room and two wrinkled black suit jackets draped across the yellow chair next to the window. White shirts and trouser pants were balled up in a corner next to the bathroom door.
The air was humid and stale, but no alcohol stench was present, she noted. Clucking at the unusual disarray, but otherwise silent, Mrs. Soni gathered up the clothing and folded the items into stacks on the table.
"You don't need to do that."
"No, I don't need to, but I am doing it just the same."
"I mean: Don't do it."
She finished the task and turned on her tenant. She intended to be loud, but unthreatening, so she stayed next to the table several feet from the bed.
"You have been silent in this room for too many days now. Not eating, not greeting me, you don't receive calls on your cell phone; you don't comb your hair. This is not like yourself, John."
"It's not your business." He closed his remarkable eyes and rolled away to face the wall.
"Just get out."
Mrs. Soni studied his back, noted the sweat stained pillow and the way his hair clumped in damp strands at the nape of his neck. Red abrasions encircling his wrists were raw and weeping. She clicked her tongue again, gathered her sari's skirts in the crook of her arm, and padded from the room.
That evening, Reese carried his tiffin box down to Mrs. Soni's parlor and sat on the flowered sofa without saying a word. She eyed him from her overstuffed chair, picked up the remote control and raised the sound on the pre-season baseball game she was watching. He opened the pails and ate his meal on his lap.
The hapless Mets were her team, and she remained faithful to them despite repeated betrayals and disappointments over the years. The return of spring training was a balm to the restlessness she had felt in her heart as she struggled to understand the Knicks, or basketball in general, through the long winter.
Mrs. Soni and her tenant watched the game in peaceable silence until the Mets, surging from behind in the bottom of the ninth inning, won the contest. She muted the television and waited.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Soni. I shouldn't have spoken to you the way I did this morning."
"Yes, you are right, you shouldn't have." She paused to soften her response. "But you did.
"Can you say what is troubling you, John?"
"Just trouble at work." He studied the riot of flowers on the carpet at his feet.
"Your work is dangerous and hard. I've known that for many months now."
"Yeah, well it got harder, that's all."
"No, it did not."
He raised his head and his eyes flashed like the steel vessel in his hands as he met her gaze.
"What do you mean by that?"
"I don't know what you do, John. You don't need to tell me. I do know that what you do is difficult. Sometimes you have bruises on your body and cuts on your face. Mr. Lee tells me every time he washes blood from one of your shirts. But you get the job done all the same and that gives you great satisfaction. You hold your head up, you eat well, and you sleep through the night."
He blinked but said nothing.
"But these past three days have been different. Why?"
"Yeah, well. I got the job done alright. The client is safe now. But I broke a trust. There was no way around it, but it hurt just the same."
"Can you repair it?"
"I don't see how."
"You can talk."
"She won't take my calls."
"Does she work with you?"
"No."
"But she works in an office?"
"Yes."
"Then here is what we will do. We will help her in a way she can't resist." Mrs. Soni leaned forward in her chair and clasped her hands in front of her deep bosom.
"A working lady is always tired at the end of the day. If she has to prepare a meal for her family after she gets home, she is even more tired by the time she goes to bed. I can tell you for sure that her husband will never lift a finger to help with the dinner no matter how late she arrives at home.
"So, John, you will help her.
"You will deliver a hot cooked superior vegetarian meal from Pooja's Restaurant to her front door every evening until she agrees to talk with you.
"You will be her tiffin wallah."
Reese argued listlessly. The plan seemed foolish. But a resolute Mrs. Soni was not to be denied. The plot was set, the operation launched. She gave him a thumb-sized tin of ointment to apply twice daily to his injured wrists and sent him off to bed.
…
The next morning, Reese was commandeered by his landlady to drive her to an Indian supermarket for produce. The job would have belonged to one of her sons, but they all were occupied: Anand had a sudden dentist appointment, Vinay was very busy with the tax accountant, and Anil needed to attend the piano recital of his oldest daughter.
So Reese dutifully trudged behind Mrs. Soni, pushing a cart through the exuberant aisles of foodstuffs in search of perfection.
She methodically stopped and weighed, probed and moved on, an expert in full command of her resources. The Basmati rice, the onions, green and gunpowder chillies, potatoes, peppers, three kinds of peas, tomatoes, lentils, eggplant, cauliflower, and yams tumbled into the cart like the clashing patterned fabrics in Mrs. Soni's parlor.
Mrs. Soni seemed to know most of the female customers in the store and stopped to speak with many. Reese didn't understand what the women were saying, but their frank glances indicated he was the main topic of conversation.
As he loaded the bags into the trunk of her sedan, he asked Mrs. Soni what her friends had spoken about.
"Oh, they all admired your eyes."
"That's it? You seemed to talk for a long time to each one."
"Well, they wanted to know if you were my new husband."
"What did you tell them?"
A raised brow made the twinkle in her luminous brown eyes dance.
"I said we weren't married."
….
Reese was good with knives. He hoped to hide this skill from Mrs. Soni to avoid KP duty that afternoon. But given the grim alternative of helping Antonio and the Patel boy with the dish washing, Reese chose to chop vegetables.
He was embarrassed by the marks on his wrists, but wearing a long-sleeved shirt in the hot kitchen soon became impossible, so Reese stripped to his t-shirt. He spent the rest of the day perched on a stool at a corner of the eight foot steel counter turning the potatoes, onions, eggplants, and green peppers into gleaming piles of mosaic chips. As he worked, his commanding officer shelled a mound of chick peas and lentils on the other side of the counter.
When they were done, Reese drew his stool into a corner of the kitchen near the stove. He watched Mrs. Soni transform his knife work into the fragrant mush she would serve that evening to the restaurant's lucky customers.
She fried seeds of cumin and mustard and dried chili peppers in sizzling oil. When she added the ginger, garlic, and onion to the pan, Reese saw a few drops of hot oil pop over her forearms and hands, but Mrs. Soni never flinched or stopped working. Then she let fall a cascade of ground spices - tumeric, coriander, black pepper - to finish the garnish.
His head swam with the lush hues and pungent scents. The jumble of human languages blended into the music of clashing pans to engulf him. The complex smells of the meal Mrs. Soni had made were entrancing. The textures were intoxicating. This could work.
While he showered and changed, Mrs. Soni packed a three-tiered tiffin box with rice, curry, vegetables, chapati and dal.
Reese decided to place the tiffin box directly in front of the door to Carter's second floor apartment. He had jimmied the brownstone's front door lock on several occasions over the past months, but this time he lost precious minutes fumbling with his tools before he broke in. He knew the exact hour when she and Taylor would arrive home and so was safely out and away from the building unseen.
….
For the next five nights, at hours varying with her schedule, Reese picked up the empty tiffin box from Carter's door and deposited a new one, filled with a fresh concoction from Mrs. Soni's kitchen.
Twice that week, the machine's numbers called Reese away from Pooja's to resolve deadly disputes. An ornery Melville scholar who insisted on giving out Cs to everyone in his seminar had to be saved from the poisonous conspiracy of a pair of grad students afraid of losing their grants. A crooked city building inspector needed protection from a victimized landlord who ran out of patience and cash.
To prevent any lapse in service, Reese enlisted Mrs. Soni's son Kiran, at home on spring break from Rutgers, to substitute as tiffin wallah if needed. But his cases were easily closed before nightfall, and Reese avoided having to give Carter's address to anyone.
On the morning of the sixth day, Mrs. Soni visited Reese's room again. This time she waited to enter until he gave permission. She paused in front of the open windows that looked out on the street in front of her restaurant.
He stood at the open door of the bathroom in jeans, a yellow towel draped across his shoulders, jaw covered in shaving cream, razor poised in mid-air.
He knew what she would ask.
"No call yet?"
"No."
"She is strong." Mrs. Soni sighed and searched Reese's eyes for confirmation.
"Yes. And she is stubborn."
"She will call you eventually, you know."
"Yes, I know she will."
A burst of wind from spring's first morning lifted the yellow curtains until they billowed around Mrs. Soni's shoulders. Reese held his breath as he watched her turn away from the window; the breeze held the bright panels aloft for another moment. He exhaled.
A fresh day had begun.