How a pedicab driver and a Citibank branch manager built a life crossing continents and boroughs, as halal butchers to Sunset Park.

This is the first time Ahmet Benk has been out of Giresun, a port town on the eastern coast of the Black Sea in Turkey. He is an Imam there. Every night for the last six months he has been visiting his son, Osman, at the Brooklyn market and butcher shop he opened last October. Osman runs the store with his wife, Melinda, an outspoken Latina just as proud of her Bronx upbringing as Osman is of his in agricultural Giresun. If you ask him to, he might sketch you the municipal flag with three symbols: a giant green triangle in the background, followed by a castle keep and finally, an emblem of a red cherry at the center of the keep. The triangle outlines the shape its hazelnuts form growing in threes, the keep stands in for the castle on a hill overlooking the city, and a cherry for the groves of cherry trees that grow on one of its many agricultural tracks. “Do you know Giresun? Near Trabzon? There are many cherry trees there,” Osman explains, clarifying in English what his dad could not. He stops to listen to what Ahmet has added before translating, “also hazelnuts.”

Osman and Melinda’s market is hidden deep in Sunset Park, providing for a pocket of Albanian, Arab and Turkish Muslims living on the blocks between the avenues of a continually swelling Chinatown. Just upstairs is Fatih Camii Mosque, established in 1981 by a Turkish Muslim. The mosque, hidden from street view on the second floor, has kept the building like a stronghold for the past 27 years. You won’t find any kind of sign marking its existence. Instead, mountains of produce pour out of Osman and Melinda’s store, protected by plastic sheets that begin hanging from just beside the front door and wrap around the corner. “Birlik Market—Taste the Best at Birlik—Halal Meats,” reads the red and white pinstriped awning, accented by Arabic characters that spell out “Halal” beside the English. Written there side by side, “Halal” and “Birlik” are like a flashing light signaling the existence of Chinatown’s hidden population. “Halal” is an Islamic standard for food, while the Turkish word “Birlik” translates loosely to unity. Many of the neighborhood’s Turkish Muslim residents walking up and down the avenue may not be able to look at Birlik Market without thinking of Turkiye Birlik Partisi, for instance, Turkey’s nationalist Islamic political party.

Eighth Avenue stretches uphill to meet the horizon and a pillar of the Verrazano Bridge, which looms over the neighborhood like a giant domino. Long past sundown, when the night has rendered the pillar invisible, Osman makes his way over to sit by Melinda, rubbing his tired eyes and looking repeatedly at the clock behind him, not paying much attention to his father who has picked up another Turkish newspaper from the stand near the register. When the clock strikes one, the three of them can think about going home together to their Kingsbridge neighborhood in the northwest section of the Bronx.

Melinda waits on most of the customers this time of night with Osman sitting by her side, passing the time speaking to Turkish residents of the area in their shared language or leaping up on Melinda’s orders to help a customer find a product buried in one of the three cherry wood shelves in the back of the store. He watches each customer carefully as they make their way out the door, regarding them not so much with suspicion as with curiosity, waiting to nod goodbye should they look his way.

At about 5’7” Melinda is not much shorter than Osman. She can thank her Dominican father for her dark complexion, which perplexes those who know her much lighter-skinned Puerto Rican mother. Osman, on the other hand, has skin that could be described as porcelain were it not for the layer of black scruff that descends from in front of his ears to the middle of his neck. His angular, almond-shaped eyes look all the larger next to Melinda’s pea-sized ones, magnified a little by the frameless glasses she wears. Dressed in a sports jacket, orange t-shirt, and a baseball cap, Melinda insists that she doesn’t wear makeup at all. Her straightened, thick black hair runs from under her cap past her shoulders, where it bunches up in the back of her jacket’s collar. The style seems to have rubbed off on Osman, who, when he’s at leisure, wears blue slacks, a t-shirt and worn out white tennis shoes. Behind the butcher’s counter though, he’ll probably be wearing a white apron stained with a bit of blood. When he first met Melinda, she was dressed quite differently, in a starched formal shirt and a business suit more appropriate for the bank-managing job she then held.

Melinda managed a Citigroup branch when she came across Osman, who was living solely off the money he made running a pedicab business on West End Avenue. “I was walking just outside of Rockefeller Center and noticed all these pedicabs,” Melinda explains. “And I wondered why they were there, what was going on. I had never seen them there before. So I asked a driver. And he didn’t know any English. So he called Osman over.” She may have been as up front then as she is now, but it was Osman who, after offering her a ride in one of his pedicabs, asked her for her number. She refused the ride, but took his number because, as she says, “You never know what friends you’re going to keep.”

Melinda speaks about how easily Osman eventually fit into her own family, revealing a warm and outgoing man behind the cold stone stare. “He may as well be Latino.” she says. “‘Cause he loves Spanish food. We call him the pseudo-Latino.” She speaks about how he’s won the hearts of her older sister and her mother. “My sister loves him. Loves. Him. She was like his coach on how to get me.”

A forty-something Turkish man, a regular here, walks in and talks with an accent that makes Osman’s sound all-American by comparison. He throws his head back upon hearing the ring of his cell, “My wife is calling again. She thinks she’s the boss, you know, forcing me to come home.” Melinda smiles, thinking about all the times this episode has been repeated every night. “It’s like she’s got a radar on you. “she says. “It’s amazing, always calling when you come in here.” The customer turns to Osman and poses a question to him. “Well, you tell me. Who’s the boss?” Osman resists answering, but eventually leans back and points a finger at Melinda before admitting, “Right here.”