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his teeth when through the sunlit door of his angry-green-colored store in a crowd of nine, he saw a Caucasian-looking man elevating a shiny object as he approached the shop. Babu always saw the Caucasians first. It was his way of connecting to an England he had imagined, loved, but never experienced directly. Willful journeying to and displacement in a foreign landscape had turned his Brahmin family into merchants. But clinging to sapless straws of caste, Babu Chaudhari had contented himself with assigning his geographical compatriots the place of the panchamas while he settled into amorphous, self-stranded being in a Not-England African space. Babu Chaudhari’s father’s father had set up supply shops through the Kenyan northern lands and then gone to Ethiopia. He lingers with the memory, wondering, as he often did, why he had not joined the rest of the family after they left East Africa for Rushey Mead, Leicester, England, in 1962. He had been left behind to sell the family shops, but when he reached this one, the seventh of seven, a customer and then five more had shown up. He had served each one, intending to close shop at the end of the day. To assure himself that he was only transiting, every January he handcrafted a recruitment notice for a shop manager, which he glued to the door: Salary negotiable. Accommodation and food provided. Only Hindi, Urdu, or Gujarati speakers should apply with certificate of higher education . He had not received one suitable applicant. Forty-six years later he was still in the same place.
    A fly hovers over a sack of five-year-old turmeric.
    “Shhh. Shhh.” Babu urges the fly away.
    He props up his chin.
    Babu barely moved. Gout and gallstones. Glowering was his normal expression. It concealed disenchantment. Settling into his tubbiness, he noted the Caucasian man’s carriage—it was proper, the way he felt English posture should be. He frowned at the double-strapped haversack the man carried, relented when he saw it was made of pebble-grain leather and not Chinese plastic. Expensive dark-green army-style cargotrousers, a beige jacket over a loose-fitting cream shirt, all of which, Babu knew, would become red and brown with dyelike dust by the end of that day. The large man was clean-shaven, broad-shouldered, finely muscled, with shaggy dark-gray-flecked hair plastering his forehead. Babu bet to himself that after five days the man would let his beard grow wild. As he waited for the man to speak, his eyes alive, Babu did a mental scan of goods to offload: expired Malariaquin, 1970s curries and spices. He would blend these and hint that the result healed tick fever. If he attached a mantra to the package and proposed that it be consumed while wild sage was being burned, he could imply that this ritual would reveal the image of God. Caucasians appreciated that kind of thing. It would also explain the cost.
    Babu chewed on his gums, glared at an aged donkey. Its distressed braying afflicted his days and most of his nights.
    Isaiah William Bolton slipped his suddenly dead cell phone into his pocket and strode into the shop, straightening out the creases on his coat, the result of a cramped flight in a four-seater that he suspected was a crop duster. He took in the sardines, garlic, pepper, and Cadbury’s chocolate. A giggle behind him. He turned. Two kohl-eyed women looked back. One of them winked as a camel would—long lashes, slow, blink, blink. Isaiah gave a half-grin. This was definitely a world he could get to know.
    “Shhh. Shhhh.” Babu Chaudhari shooed flies and women away, his mouth downturned. Vile, this threat of tainting genealogies.
    Babu Chaudhari’s skin was blotched in most of the shades of brown now, but in his prime, he had been cherished for his blond-streaked hair, fair sunburning skin, and almost blue eyes. He was especially fond of his narrow nose—its stern symmetry. From the moment of his emergence from the womb with his golden curls, he had been a favored