Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (9780674070400) by Bald Vivek

Author:Bald, Vivek [Bald, Vivek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

CHAPTER 5

Bengali Harlem

There are West Indian, low class Mexican, low class Argentineans, low class Peruvians. They also come from East India. All of them, however, when arrested, invariably [say they] are “Porto Rican.” In fact the incoming of these people is responsible for a new racket.… We have come across groups lately in Harlem who are selling fake Porto Rican birth certificates for $30 each.

—New York City Police Commissioner Mulrooney, the New York Age, March 9, 1932

IF YOU HAD VISITED NEW YORK CITY in the spring of 1949, taken in a Broadway show—say, Death of a Salesman or South Pacific—and then happened to stroll along West Forty-Sixth Street looking to grab a meal at one of the neighborhood’s many and varied restaurants, you may well have been tempted up a flight of stairs at number 144 to try the Indian food at the Bengal Garden. The Bengal Garden was one of a handful of Indian restaurants that had popped up in the theater district in recent years. On entering this small, simple, rectangular space, you would have likely been greeted and seen to your table by a Puerto Rican woman in her midforties. This was Victoria Echevarria Ullah. She ran the front of the restaurant and was stationed near the door. At a far corner table near the back of the restaurant, you may have noticed a well-dressed and distinguished-looking South Asian man, seated as if he were in his office, speaking to one or more other men. He might have been speaking in Bengali or Urdu or English, or switching between the languages, depending on his companions. This was Ibrahim Choudry, one of the owners of the Bengal Garden, and a founder and officer of multiple community-based organizations, some East Pakistani, some Muslim American, and some interfaith. If you peeked into the back, you would have seen another South Asian man—solidly built, serious, and focused—doing everything from prepping to cooking to plating each dish, moving from one part of the kitchen to the next, sometimes swearing, and making the whole operation work. This was Habib Ullah, the restaurant’s founder and other co-owner, and Victoria’s husband. At the end of each night, after closing, all three headed uptown to go home. Habib and Victoria lived on the second floor of a five-story tenement building on a predominantly Puerto Rican block of East 102nd Street. Ibrahim Choudry had recently moved to a place on the other side of town, a ground-floor apartment on West Ninety-eighth Street, where his neighbors were Puerto Rican and Jewish.1

All three came to New York City between 1920 and 1935, and their lives intersected in Harlem. Choudry was likely the first to arrive in the city. He had been a student leader in East Bengal, had come to the attention of British colonial authorities, and had to flee India. He secured a job as a serang on an outgoing steamship, worked as a seafarer for a time, and deserted in New York City. Habib Ullah came to the city around the same time as Choudry.

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