ANIL CS RAO : WRITER - ARTIST - POET (ENGINEER) - Manhattanville: Current W-I-P

ANIL CS RAO : WRITER - ARTIST - POET (ENGINEER)

60K+ word count novel based on a short story of the same title written in 2004

MANHATTANVILLE
Chapter 1
Arun Gupta could not sleep. The digital clock on his nightstand—a cheap Casio he'd bought at the Canal Street electronics bazaar—blinked 3:47 AM in angry red numerals that seemed to pulse with his heartbeat. Outside his bedroom window, the pre-dawn darkness of Queens pressed against the glass like something living, something waiting. He had tried everything: counting backward from one hundred, reciting the periodic table he'd memorized for his materials science final, even attempting the deep breathing exercises his mother had taught him from her yoga classes at the Bronx Community Center. Nothing worked. His mind raced with the excitement—and if he was honest with himself, the terror—of today's pending work: the first concrete pour at the Manhattanville Bus Depot construction site where he had just two weeks ago been appointed as a junior construction inspector.
He threw off the thin cotton sheet and sat up on the edge of his futon, the springs creaking in protest. The certificate hung there on the wall opposite his bed, just visible in the ambient light filtering through the window from the streetlamps below. He could make out the Gothic lettering even in the darkness—he'd stared at it so many times he'd memorized every flourish, every serif: "Pratt Institute hereby confers upon Arun Gupta the degree of Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering upon satisfactory completion of the course of study."
Satisfactory. Not "with honors." Not "with distinction." Not even "magna cum laude" like his dormmate Eric Smithers had received for his Bachelor of Architecture. Just... satisfactory. The word was a judgment, a prophecy, a weight he carried into every room he entered.
The certificate represented five years of his life in Brooklyn, New York—though if he was being truthful, most of that time had been spent in ways that had little to do with civil engineering. There were the Thursday night parties in the Willoughby Hall common room, where someone always had a bootleg tape of the latest Talking Heads or Prince album. The long weekends he'd worked at the campus bookstore, restocking shelves and flirting unsuccessfully with the sophomore art students who came in for charcoal and sketch pads. The bleary Sunday mornings when he'd wake up on someone's floor, mouth tasting like stale beer and regret, knowing he had a structures exam in six hours and hadn't even opened the textbook.
His father had paid for all of it. Every semester's tuition, every dorm fee, every meal plan charge. The money had come from his consulting work with Stone & Webster, from projects that took him to places Arun had never seen—power plants in the Midwest, water treatment facilities in the South. His father would return from these trips exhausted, his already graying hair a little more silver, his shoulders carrying a weight that Arun was only now beginning to understand.
And what had Arun given him in return? A certificate that said "satisfactory."
He stood up and walked to the window, his bare feet cold on the worn linoleum floor. Below, Ridgewood was still sleeping. The German delicatessen on the ground floor of his building—Mueller's, run by an ancient couple who spoke to each other in a dialect so thick Arun could barely understand them—was dark. Across the street, the Orthodox Jewish family's lights were off. In a few hours, the father would emerge in his long black coat and wide-brimmed hat, walking briskly toward the synagogue on Forest Avenue. Arun had learned the rhythms of this neighborhood in the six months since he'd moved in. It was a place of immigrants and children of immigrants, of people who worked with their hands and their backs, who sent money home to the old country, who dreamed in accented English.
He had his own dream, and it had started with his father.
Arun walked back to the bed and sat down, reaching under the futon to pull out a shoebox he kept there. Inside were photographs, letters, and newspaper clippings his mother had given him over the years. He knew he should try to sleep—he had to be at the site by six-thirty—but his hands moved of their own accord, removing the lid and pulling out the contents.
The first photograph showed his father as a young man, impossibly young, standing in front of what looked like a modernist building under construction. The image was black and white, slightly faded, but Arun could see the pride in his father's posture, the way he stood with his shoulders back and his chin up. On the back, in his grandmother's handwriting: "Chandigarh, 1956. Your papa's first big project."
Chandigarh. The city designed by Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect whose name every architecture and engineering student knew. After India's Partition in 1947, the new state of Punjab needed a capital, and Prime Minister Nehru had commissioned Le Corbusier to build a modern city, a symbol of India's progressive future. Arun's father, fresh out of an R.E.C.—a Regional Engineering College—with his civil engineering degree, had been selected for the battalion of young Indian engineers and architects who would work under Le Corbusier's vision.
His father rarely spoke about those days. Arun had to extract the stories piece by piece over the years, usually late at night when his father had returned from a long trip and sat in the kitchen drinking chai, too tired to put up his usual reserve.
"We thought we were building the future," his father had said once, staring into his teacup. "Le Corbusier walked around the site like a god. He would point and say, 'Here, a plaza for the people. Here, a capitol complex to inspire greatness.' We were so young, Arun. We thought concrete and steel could solve everything. We thought we could design away poverty, superstition, caste. We thought we could make India modern."
"Did it work?" Arun had asked.
His father had smiled, a sad smile that made him look much older. "Chandigarh is beautiful. The buildings are magnificent. But people are still people. They bring their problems with them, no matter how clean the streets are, no matter how straight the boulevards."
Arun put the photograph back and pulled out another. This one showed his father, mother, and himself as a small child, standing in front of what Arun now recognized as the Taj Mahal. It must have been 1970 or 1971, just before they'd left for America. His mother was wearing a sari, his father in a Western-style suit, and Arun—he couldn't have been more than two or three—was squirming in his mother's arms, reaching toward something outside the frame.
The green card had come through in 1968, his father had told him. It was like winning a lottery—hundreds of thousands of Indians applied, but only a handful were selected each year. His father's engineering credentials had helped, as had the shortage of qualified engineers in America during the space race and the building boom. But even with the green card approved, it had taken two more years to arrange everything—selling their flat in Ahmedabad, saying goodbye to family, packing their lives into the few suitcases the airlines would allow.
They had arrived at JFK on a humid August day in 1970. Arun barely remembered it, but his mother had described it so many times it had become his own memory: the crowds, the noise, the confusion of customs, the taxi ride through Queens with the driver shouting in an accent they couldn't understand. And then Co-op City in the Bronx, their new home—a massive complex of brown brick towers, thirty-five buildings containing fifteen thousand apartments, sixty thousand residents. It was a city within a city, and it had felt like another planet.
Arun pulled out more photographs. Here was one of him as a child in Co-op City, standing in the courtyard between the buildings, dwarfed by the towers around him. Here was one from his trip to India in 1978, staying with his grandmother in Ahmedabad—he was wearing a kurta-pajama and grinning at the camera, gap-toothed and sunburned. Here was one from his high school graduation, standing between his parents, his mother beaming, his father's expression unreadable.
He'd been an undistinguished student at the Co-op City public school, he knew that now. Not bad, exactly, but not particularly good either. He'd gotten Bs and occasional Cs, enough to graduate without distinction, enough to get into City College's civil engineering program. His parents had been thrilled—City College was free, part of the CUNY system, and its engineering program had a solid reputation. His father had taken him to dinner at an Indian restaurant in Murray Hill to celebrate, ordering expensive dishes Arun couldn't even pronounce.
"You're going to be an engineer," his father had said, raising his mango lassi in a toast. "Like me. Like your grandfather. It's in the blood, beta."
But it wasn't in the blood. Or if it was, Arun's blood had been diluted somehow, thinned out by too much American television, too many afternoons playing stickball in the Co-op City courtyards instead of studying, too many hours dreaming about girls who barely knew he existed.
City College had destroyed him. The academics—differential equations, fluid mechanics, structural analysis—had overwhelmed him completely. He'd sit in lectures taking notes he didn't understand, copying equations from the blackboard without comprehending what they meant. His classmates, many of them immigrants from India, China, and Korea who'd attended rigorous high schools in their home countries, seemed to grasp everything instantly. They'd form study groups, speaking in their native languages, solving problem sets in half the time it took Arun to even understand the questions.
He'd failed everything. Every single class. When the grades came in the mail that December, he'd hidden the envelope for three days before finally showing his parents. His mother had cried. His father had been silent, which was somehow worse.
"I'm sorry, Papa," Arun had said, his voice breaking. "I tried. I really tried."
His father had looked at him for a long moment. "I know you did," he'd finally said. "But trying isn't always enough. You need to be honest with yourself about what you can do."
It was the closest his father had ever come to calling him a failure.
But his father hadn't given up on him. Instead, he'd done research, made phone calls, pulled strings. Within a month, Arun was enrolled at New York City Technical College, a two-year school with a more practical, hands-on engineering technology program. It was less theoretical than City College, more focused on real-world applications. And crucially, it was slower-paced, designed for working adults and students who needed more time to absorb the material.
Arun had thrived there. Or at least, he'd done well enough to get above-par marks, to make the dean's list twice, to earn the respect of his instructors. The classes were smaller. The professors actually knew his name. He'd learned to use transits and levels, to read blueprints, to calculate loads and stresses not just with equations but with understanding.
After two years at City Tech, he'd transferred to Pratt Institute. Pratt was a private school, expensive, but it had been accepting transfer students from local technical colleges because its engineering enrollment was declining. The school was much better known for its architecture and design programs, and the engineering students were often treated like second-class citizens, tucked away in dated buildings while the architecture students got the new facilities and the famous visiting lecturers.
But Arun hadn't cared. He was at Pratt, a real college, a school with a name that meant something. He'd worked hard—harder than he'd ever worked at anything. He'd gone to every class, done every assignment, sought help when he needed it. He'd made friends, including Eric Smithers, his dormmate in Willoughby Hall, an architecture student from Connecticut who had seemed impossibly sophisticated with his wire-rimmed glasses and his collection of Frank Lloyd Wright coffee table books.
And in the end, he'd graduated. Not with honors, but he'd graduated. The certificate was proof. "Satisfactory completion of the course of study."
It would have to be enough.
Arun carefully placed the photographs back in the shoebox and slid it under the futon. The clock now read 4:23 AM. In just over two hours, he'd need to leave for the subway. The concrete pour was scheduled for seven o'clock, once the delivery trucks could navigate the Manhattan morning traffic. He should try to sleep, even if just for an hour.
He lay back down, pulling the sheet up to his chin. But instead of closing his eyes, he found himself staring again at the certificate on the wall. His goal was clear, had always been clear from the moment he'd decided to pursue engineering: to work for the City of New York in the capacity of an engineer, following in his father's footsteps.
Not the exact footsteps, perhaps. His father had never worked for the city government—he'd always been in the private sector, moving from project to project with consulting firms. But the principle was the same: to build things, to create infrastructure, to contribute to the functioning of society in some tangible way. To make a mark that would last beyond his own lifetime.
The City job had come through almost miraculously. Arun had sent out dozens of applications in his final semester at Pratt—to consulting firms, to contractors, to the Port Authority, to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. Most hadn't even responded. A few had sent polite rejections. One small firm in New Jersey had brought him in for an interview, during which the owner had looked at his resume and asked, "You're Indian, right? You good at math?" Arun had left without finishing the interview.
But then the City had called. The Department of Design and Construction needed junior construction inspectors for several ongoing projects. The pay wasn't great—$28,000 a year, barely enough to live on in New York—but it was a City job, with benefits, with job security, with a pension. And more importantly, it was real engineering work, supervising actual construction, watching buildings and infrastructure rise from blueprints to reality.
The interview had been brief. The hiring manager, a tired-looking man named Tom Chen, had glanced at Arun's transcript and asked a few basic questions about concrete and steel. "You'll be working under Pete Ritter at the Manhattanville Bus Depot project," Chen had said. "It's a big job, couple years of work left. You'll start as an assistant inspector, basically taking notes and measurements. Think you can handle it?"
"Yes, sir," Arun had said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. "Absolutely."
"Good. You start in two weeks. Welcome to the City of New York."
That had been it. No background check, no drug test, no elaborate interview process. Just a handshake and a start date. Arun later learned that the City was having trouble finding qualified engineers willing to work for government salaries when private firms were paying twice as much. They were taking whoever they could get.
He was whoever they could get. It should have bothered him more than it did.
The certificate hung there in the darkness, a reminder of everything he'd struggled through, everything he'd barely achieved. His father had built Chandigarh—or at least helped build it. He'd worked alongside Le Corbusier, one of the masters of modern architecture. What would Arun build? What would his legacy be?
A bus depot in Harlem. That's what he had. A bus depot in Manhattanville.
It wasn't Chandigarh. But it was something. It was a beginning.
Arun finally closed his eyes. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the first trains of the morning beginning their runs, the M train rumbling along the elevated tracks. The sound was oddly comforting, a reminder that the city never really slept, that there were always people moving, working, striving.
Tomorrow—no, today—he would be one of them. He would stand on a construction site and watch concrete being poured. He would take notes and measurements. He would learn from the senior engineers. He would do his job satisfactorily.
And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.
When the alarm finally went off at 5:30 AM, Arun felt like he'd barely closed his eyes. But the adrenaline was back, surging through his veins, pushing away the exhaustion. Today was the day. His first real concrete pour. His first day as a real engineer.
He swung his legs out of bed and stood up, stretching. His back cracked—he was too young to have back problems, but the futon was terrible, barely more than a glorified mat on the floor. He'd bought it at a going-out-of-business sale at a furniture store on Roosevelt Avenue, the cheapest option available, and it showed.
The apartment was small, just one bedroom with a cramped kitchen and a bathroom that had clearly been installed sometime in the 1940s and never updated. But it was his, and more importantly, it was in New York City, in a neighborhood with character, with immigrants from Germany and Poland and Italy, with delis and corner stores and bars where men in work boots drank after their shifts.
He'd found it through a notice on a bulletin board at Pratt. "1BR, Ridgewood, $450/month, above deli, available immediately." He'd called from a payphone in the student union, and the landlord—an elderly German man named Mr. Mueller who owned the delicatessen downstairs—had agreed to meet him that evening.
The apartment had been worse than Arun had imagined. The kitchen window looked directly at the Fresh Pond Road elevated subway station, close enough that you could see into the train cars as they passed. The bathroom had a toilet that ran constantly and a tub with rust stains. The bedroom was barely large enough for a bed and a small dresser. The whole place smelled like sauerkraut and smoked meat from the deli below.
"I take it," Arun had said immediately.
Mr. Mueller had looked surprised. "You don't want to think about it?"
"No, sir. It's perfect."
It wasn't perfect. But it was available, and it was cheap, and most importantly, it was close to the M train, which would take him into Manhattan. Arun had learned long ago that in New York, location wasn't everything—it was the only thing. You could live in a palace in Staten Island and spend four hours a day commuting, or you could live in a closet in Manhattan and walk to work. He'd chosen something in between: a dump in Queens that was well-connected to the transit system.
Now, standing in that dump in the pre-dawn darkness, Arun made his way to the bathroom. The floor was cold beneath his feet, and he could hear Mrs. Mueller's voice drifting up from the deli below, speaking rapid German to her husband. They started work at four o'clock every morning, baking bread and preparing the cases of cold cuts and cheeses. Sometimes Arun would wake to the smell of fresh rye bread and his stomach would growl, but he never went downstairs to buy anything. A sandwich at Mueller's cost $3.50, and he was trying to save money.
The bathroom was exactly as depressing as he remembered. The mirror above the sink was cracked in one corner, and the fluorescent light buzzed and flickered before finally coming on. Arun looked at himself in the mirror and barely recognized the face staring back.
When had he started looking so old? He was only twenty-one, but there were already worry lines forming around his eyes, and his hair—which he'd always worn a bit long, trying for a fashionable look—was getting thin at the temples. He looked tired, worn out, like someone twice his age.
"This is what engineering does to you," he said to his reflection. "Welcome to the rest of your life."
He needed to shave. His beard grew in patchy and uneven, and his father had taught him that an engineer should always look professional, always be clean-shaven, always wear a tie. "People judge you by your appearance," his father had said. "Right or wrong, that's how the world works. Especially for us. Especially for Indians in America. We have to work twice as hard and look twice as professional to get half as far."
The shaving cream was almost empty, and Arun squeezed the can hard to get out the last bit of foam. His razor was dull—he'd been using the same blade for three weeks, trying to make it last—and it pulled at his skin, leaving small nicks that stung when he splashed cold water on his face.
He took a shower in the ancient tub, the water alternating between scalding hot and ice cold as someone else in the building flushed a toilet or ran a faucet. The water pressure was terrible, barely more than a trickle, and it took forever to rinse the cheap drugstore shampoo from his hair.
When he finally stepped out, shivering, reaching for the thin towel hanging on the door hook, he could hear the trains running more frequently now. The city was waking up. In an hour, the streets would be filled with people heading to work—office workers in suits, construction workers in boots, delivery men pushing carts, students heading to early classes.
And he would be one of them. An engineer. A professional. Someone with a job and a purpose.
The thought made him stand a little straighter as he dried himself off.
Back in the bedroom—really just an extension of the main room, separated by a thin partition wall—Arun opened his walk-in closet. "Walk-in" was generous; it was more like a "step-in," barely three feet deep and four feet wide. But it held his meager wardrobe: three pairs of pants, five shirts, two ties, the blue blazer his father had given him, and his winter coat.
He'd laid out his clothes the night before, like a child preparing for the first day of school. White linen shirt, freshly washed at the laundromat on the corner. Yellow and blue striped tie, purchased for three dollars from a street hawker in Flushing who'd assured him it was "genuine silk" (it obviously wasn't). Khaki pants with clip-on suspenders—he'd never learned to tie a proper belt with suspenders, so he'd bought the clip-on kind at a discount store. And the Brookes Brothers blue blazer, the most expensive piece of clothing he owned, a gift from his father for his twenty-first birthday just two months ago.
His father had taken him to the Brookes Brothers store in Midtown for that gift. Arun had protested—he knew how expensive the store was, knew his father couldn't really afford it—but his father had insisted.
"Every professional needs at least one good jacket," his father had said, running his hand along a rack of blazers. "Something you can wear to interviews, to important meetings, to court if you ever have to testify as an expert witness. This is an investment."
The salesman, a snooty white man with a thin mustache, had looked at them skeptically when they'd entered. But when Arun's father had pulled out his credit card—American Express, gold—the man's attitude had changed immediately.
"Of course, sir. What are we looking for today?"
"A blazer for my son. Navy blue, I think. Classic style. He's just graduated from engineering school and is starting his career."
The salesman had measured Arun, tutting at his narrow shoulders and slight frame. "We'll need to take this in a bit," he'd said, pinning the fabric. "The young gentleman is quite slim."
The final cost had been $280, more than Arun's first week's salary at his new job. He'd watched his father sign the receipt without flinching, but Arun knew what that money meant—that was groceries for a month, or the electric bill, or a payment on the car his father drove to project sites.
"Thank you, Papa," Arun had said quietly as they'd left the store, the blazer in a fancy garment bag over Arun's arm.
His father had smiled. "You earned it, beta. You finished school. Now make me proud at your new job."
Now, pulling on that blazer in his dingy Ridgewood apartment, Arun felt the weight of that expectation. Make me proud. Don't be satisfactory—be exceptional. Be the engineer I trained you to be. Be the engineer I wanted to be.
He straightened his tie in the cracked mirror, smoothed down his hair, and grabbed his leather briefcase—another gift, this one from his mother, purchased at a discount store in the Bronx but still real leather, still professional-looking.
It was 5:55 AM. Time to go.
Outside, the September air was cool and crisp, carrying just a hint of the autumn that would arrive in a few weeks. The sky was beginning to lighten, the darkness giving way to a deep blue that would eventually brighten to the hazy gray of a New York morning.
Arun walked briskly down the street toward the subway station, his footsteps echoing on the empty sidewalk. A few other early risers were out—a man walking a dog, a woman in nurse's scrubs heading home from the night shift, a teenager delivering newspapers from a canvas bag slung over his shoulder.
As he passed the stairwell of his building, he saw her—the young German girl from the third floor who he often encountered in the narrow stairwell. She was probably seventeen or eighteen, with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and blue eyes that seemed impossibly bright in the morning gloom. She was wearing a coat over what looked like a school uniform, carrying a bookbag that looked too heavy for her slim frame.
Their eyes met, and she smiled—a coy, knowing smile that made Arun's heart skip a beat.
He smiled back, trying for casual but probably landing somewhere near desperate.
They'd never spoken, but they'd passed each other dozens of times on the stairs, in the hallway, on the street. Sometimes she'd say "Guten Morgen" in a soft voice. Sometimes she'd just nod. But always, there was that smile.
Arun had fantasized about asking her out, about striking up a conversation, about somehow bridging the gap between them. But he never did. What would he say? Hi, I'm your neighbor, I'm an engineer, want to get coffee? She probably had a boyfriend, probably some tall German kid from the neighborhood who played soccer and spoke multiple languages.
And besides, Arun had a job now, a career. He couldn't afford distractions. That's what he told himself, anyway.
The girl walked past him, still smiling, and Arun continued toward the subway station, cursing himself for his cowardice, his eternal inability to take action when it came to women.
"Some guys have all the luck," he muttered to himself, thinking of Eric Smithers and his endless string of girlfriends, his confidence, his ease with women.
The Fresh Pond Road station loomed ahead, the elevated tracks creating a tunnel of shadow beneath them. Arun climbed the stairs to the platform, his briefcase banging against his leg with each step. A few other commuters were already waiting—mostly working-class people heading to early shifts, cleaning ladies in their uniforms, maintenance workers with tool belts, one man in a suit who looked as tired as Arun felt.
The platform smelled like urine and rust and something indefinably urban. Pigeons roosted in the rafters, cooing and occasionally swooping down to peck at discarded food wrappers. Someone had spray-painted graffiti on the far wall: "TAKI 183" in elaborate letters.
Arun stood near the edge of the platform, watching for the train. In the distance, he could see the sun beginning to rise over the buildings of Queens, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink. It was beautiful, in its way—the kind of beauty you only noticed when you were exhausted and overwhelmed and not really paying attention.
The M train arrived five minutes later, screeching to a halt with a squeal of brakes that made everyone on the platform wince. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss, and Arun stepped inside, finding a seat near the back of the car.
The train was mostly empty at this hour, just a handful of tired workers slumped in their seats, some sleeping, some staring blankly at nothing. Arun pulled out his small brown "chop book"—a field notebook where he'd been taking notes and sketches for the past two weeks—and opened it to yesterday's page.
The handwriting was rushed, barely legible even to him: "Foundation formwork inspection—check alignment, check rebar placement, check for proper spacing. Verify concrete order—5000 PSI, slump 4-5 inches. Weather forecast—clear, 68 degrees, perfect for pour."
Today would be the real thing. No more inspections of empty formwork, no more theoretical discussions of concrete specifications. Today, tons of concrete would be poured, thousands of gallons of the gray mixture that would harden into the foundation of the Manhattanville Bus Depot. It was exciting and terrifying in equal measure.
The train rumbled through Queens, stopping at each station to pick up more passengers. By the time they reached the East River and prepared to enter Manhattan through the tunnel, the car was half full. Arun kept his head down, reviewing his notes, trying to look like someone who knew what he was doing.
An hour later—the M train was frustratingly slow during the morning rush—he emerged at the City College station on the West Side of Manhattan. It was 6:30 AM, exactly as planned. The air in Manhattan smelled different than in Queens—cleaner somehow, crisper, with less of the industrial grime and more of the scent of expensive coffee and fresh pastries from the upscale bakeries.
Arun walked quickly, his briefcase swinging at his side. The construction site was only three blocks away, but he wanted to stop first at the bodega on the corner for breakfast. His stomach was growling—he'd been too nervous to eat before leaving the apartment.
The bodega was run by a Hispanic family, and at this hour, the father was behind the counter while his teenage son restocked the shelves. The smell of fresh coffee filled the small space, mixing with the scent of plantains frying in the back.
"Good morning, my friend," the father said in accented English. "You want the usual?"
Arun had been stopping here every morning for two weeks. "Yes, please. Bagel with cream cheese, black coffee."
"You got it. Big day today, yes? The concrete?"
Word traveled fast in a neighborhood. "Yes, sir. The first big pour."
"You be careful out there. I see the trucks going by this morning already. Very big trucks."
Arun paid for his breakfast—$2.50, which felt like highway robbery but was apparently the going rate in Manhattan—and continued toward the site.
The General Contractor had provided the City with a field office trailer outside of which his co-worker and senior engineer for the City, Harshad Patel, was puffing furiously on a cigarette and eyeing the headlines in the New York Post.
Harshad was in his mid-forties, with graying hair and a comfortable paunch that spoke of too many samosas and not enough exercise. He'd been with the City for twenty years, working his way up from assistant inspector to senior inspector, and he knew every trick, every shortcut, every way to navigate the byzantine bureaucracy of city government.
He'd also taken Arun under his wing from day one, perhaps seeing something of his younger self in the nervous new hire.
"Jaysri Krsna," Harshad said, smiling as Arun approached.
Arun returned the smile, though he'd never quite understood the meaning of the Gujarati greeting. "Good morning, Harshad."
"It means 'I see God in your eyes,'" Harshad said, as he had every morning for two weeks.
"Oh yes...I remember that from mummy," Arun replied, smiling again. His mother had tried to teach him Gujarati when he was young, but he'd resisted, wanting to be American, wanting to fit in at school. Now he regretted it—he could understand maybe half of what Harshad and the other Gujarati engineers said when they switched to their native language, but he couldn't speak it fluently.
"Pete Ritter is inside, and Don Gorne from Carson will be in shortly to oversee the concrete pour," Harshad continued, taking a long drag on his cigarette. "The night inspectors have checked the formwork in preparation and it all seems OK. You just have the easy job of standing around and looking like you're someone important!"
"Heh, heh, heh," Arun replied sarcastically, his smile ironic.
But inside, he was nervous. Very nervous. This was real now. This was engineering in action. And if something went wrong, if the concrete wasn't mixed properly, if the pour wasn't done correctly, the foundation could fail. The entire building could be compromised.
No pressure.
Arun took a deep breath and headed toward the trailer, ready to begin his first real day as an engineer.