Excerpt from the chapter Lost in Los Gatos
He noticed an advertisement for a walk-in interview for cruise ship crew. There were several roles listed in the ad, and he didn’t have the experience to apply for any of them. However, a trainer at the night institute helped him with a neatly printed resume, and he showed up for the interview with multiple copies of it in a plastic folder.
That was Thomas’s first serious attempt to land a proper job, and he wanted to give it everything he had. The trainer had told him to dress to impress, so he could stand out among the crowd. That got him past the receptionist unlike a lot of candidates who were rejected immediately.
Once inside the hall, Thomas was directed to the desk of one of the interviewers. She was a good-looking middle-aged Filipino woman with a friendly smile. He hovered hesitantly beside the chair and only sat down when she pointed to it.
“Tom, I’m Liza Reyes, a Fleet Operations Manager with Carnival Cruise Lines.” The interviewer was quick to get started and offered to shake hands with him across the narrow span of the table.
“Madam, I am not Tom, my name is Thomas,” he responded while shaking hands with the interviewer, rising from his seat a little clumsily.
She started laughing uncontrollably as if he had cracked a very funny joke. Thomas turned nervous thinking that there was something stupid about him correcting her.
“I am so sorry for messing up your name Thomas. Which position are you applying for?” Liza quickly regained her composure as if she took a quick break from the boredom of meeting with an unending line of people. It appeared that she liked his frankness and she tried to make him comfortable.
“I’m working as a caretaker at a garment exporting company, and I have good typing skills on the computer. Madam, I can take up any suitable job available on the ship, and I can learn on the job.” Thomas managed to say all that somehow quickly, but not smoothly, and he didn’t feel all that good at the end. He knew that he had no useful cruise-ship skills to speak of, but he paused and looked at Liza’s face pleadingly. She felt a twinge of sympathy for him.
“We don’t have any jobs open right now that fit your skills. Do you know any other things that you do well?” Thomas wondered whether Liza was simply extending the conversation to have a little fun chatting with him.
He was almost six feet tall, and though he looked thin and lanky, he turned heads at times on the streets and at work, even in a large city like Bombay, with his broad shoulders, decent looks, and a full head of slightly curly hair. When he leapt to meet an aerial pass, usually from Abbas, and headed it forcefully into the net, he seemed to hang in the air in an elegant tableau. The women and girls near the field held their breath as he floated like an angel, and when the ball slipped past the hapless goalkeeper, they crooned while the men and boys roared. When he traveled on the local trains in Bombay, walked on Marine Drive, or visited Mount Saint Mary Church in Bandra, he often received admiring smiles from passing women. He wanted to talk to them, but he didn’t have the courage or the language skills to strike up a conversation with them.
“I know how to cook well. I cook for my friends every day because I like to do it.” Up until then, Thomas didn’t consider it a skill for getting a job, and for him it was just a life skill that he thoroughly enjoyed doing.
“Can you describe how to make two dishes that you make the best?”
To that question Thomas responded eloquently, especially when describing the black pepper crab curry he had perfected based on his mother’s original recipe. He didn’t know that he could speak English that well, but he was very happy to talk about cooking, and the words simply flowed.