Notes From The Hermitage
Are You Hungry?
The local falafel store is wall-to-wall mirrors, expensively beveled, with hints of ugly, green plastic lighting fixtures stuck here and there. I like this better than most of the falafel restaurants in the city with their ragged palm trees painted onto sloppy walls and hanging, half-dead plants. Here I sit on solid wooden chairs, the kind they have in libraries. The ends of the legs are cupped by scuffed, white rubber protectors to shield the stone floors. I could sit here all day, pretending I was doing something if I wanted. There's a heavy chrome machine behind the counter that makes the falafel balls. It spits them out with ugly regularity.
The guy behind the counter moves slowly and often ignores the customers for long minutes on end. When he does this, and someone casts him an irate glance, he smiles broadly, showing all his teeth, and says, "Are you hungry ?" in a high-pitched voice that ends with the hint of a giggle. Often when he passes my table, still not having brought my food, though the restaurant is empty, he smiles his toothy, all-knowing smile, and offers, "Are you hungry ?" He says it with such open-hearted warmness and conviviality that I'm sure he hates me, and that he hates everyone who comes into his restaurant. I wonder if he is a terrorist, a sly Al Qaeda operative who had learned the great weakness of the New Yorker: his fathomless stomach for cheap, bad food. He is not a suicide chef, it"s pure homicide he"s after, murder with a grin. I ask him one day if he"s thinking of expanding, maybe a franchise. He looks at me suspiciously for a moment, then transforms again, as if realizing for a moment his cover was blown, and says those magic words, "Are you hungry ?"
Whenever he says his favorite phrase, the food he produces is always more awful than usual. I may like the restaurant, but it's never been because of the cuisine. The sandwiches are served on stale pita and a host of incongruent fillings, and all this is packed around the falafel balls themselves, little more than crushed lumps of cold and dispirited chickpeas painted a sickly brown. When I eat I chew slowly as though doing penance. At night, in bed, his voice circles in my head, ever repeating those awful words, "Are you hungry ?"
No, I"m not hungry, I want to tell him, at least not for his brand of off-color food. I want something else from him, a nod, an acknowledgement, I want to know. Why does he do it? Why does he open every day to cook this, the worst food I"ve ever eaten? And what is it he mixes into his falafel that draws me back, and others, almost every day? There are familiar faces here. Each time I come back I recognize more and more, haggard, sleepy-eyed, they look at me with the suspicion I must study them with. We are all creatures bound to the falafel maker, we are mesmerized by the mirrored walls, the stale smell, that dreadful voice when he says that terrible phrase. We must all be hungry, I think, we must all be craving something, and in its place we take this, not even a simulacrum of food, but something that mocks the very idea of sustenance. Each day, as he poisons us, we accept it with ever and greater resignation.
One night I wake in a sweat. My heart thumping fast and my fingers and toes tingling. He is poisoning me, I think. I"m sure of it now and my heart goes out to him, not for what he is doing to me but because I am unable to imagine anything else, I have lost the ability to even dream of good food. I hear his words and all that false, Disney-fied warmth. He wants nothing more than my death. When I had gone by today he served me first even though there was someone in line ahead of me. My falafel arrived with strange rapidity. He had been waiting for me with his poisoned balls. I caught a sight of myself in the mirrors and what I saw terrified me. My cheeks were sunken, my hair thinning, my jacket hung on my shoulders like a rag. There is some ancient grudge between us, born of another life. He was a beggar and I a wealthy merchant passing him by in the souks of old Baghdad when I heard his whiny demand. His wife and children were too hungry to beg. They hadn't eaten in a week. I stopped, looked down at him, and said, "Are you hungry ?" with all the warmth of a true benefactor. He nodded readily, surprised at his luck. Then, naturally, I started laughing, mocking him, and walked away.
The poison must be working, I think. The sheets are drenched in my sweat and I can no longer feel my legs. A beggar"s whine rattles my ears.
Ranbir Sidhu
Ranbir Sidhu is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize in fiction and his work has appeared in
The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Zyzzyva, Other Voices, Press and a Houghton-Mifflin
college reader among other publications. Trained as an archaeologist, he has worked in
California, Nevada, Israel and France. One of his finds, a 3000 year old woman,
made cover skeleton of Biblical Archaeology Review. Most recently, he worked for
the United Nations in Sri Lanka. Recently, he received his first royalty check.
It was for 99 cents and for a story published over ten years ago.
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