Authors: Rakesh Satyal
“This is Kiran,” Mrs. Goldberg says. “He’s a star student of mine and—well, I would assume that you’ve met Kiran already, Mrs. Buchanan, since he must have been in your art class. Surely you must realize that he is a very talented artist.”
Mrs. Buchanan smiles that same bemused smile and looks down at me for a second. Or pretends to look at me. She looks instead at the patch of cement floor to my right, then looks back up at Mrs. Goldberg. “Yes, I seem to recall having this young fellow in my class. A good artist, but he could use some more discipline.”
Mrs. Goldberg is unfazed by this criticism. “Well, it seems that Kiran benefits most from his own study,” she says. “He recently showed me some drawings that he did, and I think they are spectacular. So spectacular, in fact, that I think they deserve to be displayed in the lobby.”
Here is where Mrs. Buchanan flinches a little bit, but she is saved: a group of students scurries by the doorway, and she uses the distraction of their passing as a way to conceal her distaste. She rallies, however. “Well, Mrs. Goldberg,” she chimes, “how lovely! And what exciting project does this young fellow have in store for us?”
Stop calling me “this young fellow,” you ignorant excuse for a teacher.
Mrs. Goldberg insists that we take my stack of drawings to Mrs. Buchanan’s desk. Mrs. Goldberg points out the things that she likes, remarking how she loves the peacock feathers in particular. I stand by, flattered at how much Mrs. Goldberg is gushing. It is such a vindication to see someone so enthusiastic about my work at the very desk where Mrs. Buchanan gave me such a stern talking-to. In the middle of another of Mrs. Goldberg’s effusive statements, I look to the wall where my Early Bird might have once hung. Right now, Mrs. Buchanan has displayed the crayon drawings of rainbows that her first graders have done. My first grade rainbow had been the most brilliant and eye-catching, folding over itself into a bow tie shape.
There is a slight shift of Mrs. Buchanan’s shoulders that gives away her rejection before it even occurs. She says, “I’m sorry, Linda, but I can’t put these drawings out there.”
“And why not?” Mrs. Goldberg says, truly surprised. She crosses her arms in front of her. “They’re spectacular drawings, Barbara.”
Whoa—now Linda’s pulling out the first name!
Mrs. Buchanan stands up and crosses her arms, too. “I’m sorry, Linda, but these are religious drawings. I have an order from Glenda specifically saying that we cannot assign or display religious drawings. I’m sorry, but that’s my final word.”
Glenda is Principal Taylor. It’s over.
Mrs. Goldberg and I head back to her classroom, leaving a smug Mrs. Buchanan in her classroom exactly the way she was when we entered—arms crossed in the middle of the room. Mrs. Goldberg is visibly upset when we get to her desk, but her students are starting to filter in, so she cannot keep the conversation going too long.
“I’m so sorry, Kiran,” she says. “If I had known she was going to be such a—such a stickler, I would never have tried anything. I just thought this might be a nice change for you, given the whole…splinter thing. Mrs. Buchanan does have a point, though. These are religious drawings, and that’s not a point you want to press.” Then she says, under her breath, “
Believe me
.”
I ask her what she means.
“Oh, well, let’s just say that it’s not always the easiest thing being ‘Mrs. Goldberg’ around here….”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. I mull it over all day, as well as the next morning. As usual, it is Cody who puts two and two together for me at lunch.
“She’s Jewish,” he says. Today, he’s eating a delicacy that the cafeteria calls “hot turkey on bun.” It looks like woodchips sautéed in mayonnaise and squeezed between two waffles. “Goldberg is a Jewish last name.”
“How do you know that?”
“How
don’t
you know that?” Cody says. He chomps through the off-white slime in his sandwich.
I don’t want to upset Cody again, but I’m too intrigued by Mrs. Goldberg to stop. “No one knows that,” I say. “There aren’t even any Jewish people in this school.”
“Sure, there are. I think there are nine. Rachel Goldstein, Hannah Schwartz, Beth Meister.” He thinks for a second. “I know there are more.”
“But how do you know they’re Jewish?”
“Their last names. They have Jewish last names.”
Cody goes on to explain to me how this works, how people with “stein” or “berg” at the end of their names are Jewish and how there are other, more subtle names that you can peg as Jewish if you think about it. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of such a thing. I’ve always felt that I’m the only person who has a different-sounding name, but it turns out that these other kids know what it’s like to feel out of place, too.
So Mrs. Goldberg’s Jewish! It endears her to me more than ever before because it means she knows where I’m coming from. I have a thought: if Mrs. Goldberg knows what it feels like to be an outcast, then she would truly appreciate my talent show act. It’s my duty to show Mrs. Goldberg, and everyone else, that you can stand up for yourself in subtle but meaningful ways. Like papier mâché, we might be fragile, but we can also be things of beauty.
Krishna is gregarious. He is full of merriment and goodwill, and he is the center of attention. In folktales, he assumes a Scheherazade-like status, beguiling people with his charm and sending both yogis and milkmaids running his way in party-hearty delight.
To that end, neo-Krishna is headed tonight to a good ole-fashioned hub of Indian chicanery.
Every weekend, our circle of Indian families has a party. It never fails—every Saturday night, there will be one, and no one ever makes plans for Saturday night because it is just a given that you will have to load up the family in the Mercedes, drive twenty miles to the house of choice—the mother of the family carrying a potluck dish—and mingle from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. with the Indian subset in your region. Very rarely do different Indian social circles mix and mingle with each other outside of the temple. At parties, North Indians mix with North Indians; South Indians mix with South Indians. On the rare occasion when the two subsets coincide, it is in small doses: one South Indian family, a little darker-skinned, will be in the midst of a room of caramel-skinned Punjabis, like a chewy chocolate center. Or a North Indian family, used to lighter, more delicate food, will stand in the corner and gorge itself on decadent South Indian treats like
dosai
. But for the most part, the various groups stay split, and sometimes I amuse myself by imagining how many different types of Indians are moving like so many marbles on hardwood to their respective fetes. I imagine a wide-pan shot like they do in the movies sometimes, like in
Rain Man
—part of which was shot in this Cincinnati paradise—when Tom Cruise is living up to his surname and cruising down the highway, and the camera, like a robin, glides down from the sky, lowers itself to the car, and zooms into the plush vehicular upholstery to reveal the actions inside. Instead of Tom, there is my dad, one hand on the wheel, my mother, a tangy-smelling fireball of curry in her lap, and I, staring out the window above the red and white lights on the highway and imagining cameras zooming into carfuls of Indians.
Tonight, the Family Sharma is heading to a “get-together” at the house of Neha Singh, the young beauty who has temporarily fallen prey to her braces. Her mother, Nisha, is a slender beauty, save for the enormous bags she has under her eyes from serving her husband day and night. The Singhs run a very tight ship: their house is absolutely spotless, with marble floors and plastic over everything that can have it: the sofas, the remote controls (of which there are many—TV, VCR, stereo, satellite), even some of the brass door handles. Nisha Auntie reuses Ziploc bags. Harsh Uncle is known for conserving electricity, and he’ll turn off the lights in empty rooms and yell, “Vhat is this—
Diwali
?!” referring to the annual Hindu festival of light. There are entire sections of the Singhs’ house that are never open to guests and are barely open to the Singhs themselves—Harsh Uncle’s study, one of the house’s parlors (which is “just for show,” they say), the master bedroom, the laundry room adjacent to the garage. Considering the abbreviated space that remains after this No Trespassing mentality, it is a marvel that the Singhs can keep their house so neat and clean, especially considering that Neha has a ten-year-old sister, Kirti, who spends most of her time in her room reading but who turns into a whirling dervish when she’s not studying. When their parents are in sight, these children are two of the most obedient people you could ever imagine. When the parents disappear, the children become just plain rude. They never learned proper manners from their parents, only forced reticence, and there is no more surefire way to engender impoliteness in children than this method.
The Harshness, then, is one of the reasons why I am not looking forward to this evening. The other, though, is the armada of kids from the temple Sunday school.
One blessing that I have in my life is that none of the other kids from our set goes to my school. We kids are split among four or five different school districts, our parents living in different suburbs of Cincinnati. Therefore, the only Indian kids with whom I interact on a normal basis are the Punjabi kids at these parties.
“Normal” is a troubling word, though. I have never been able to decide which life of mine is normal, my school-bound American one or my party-bound Indian one. On the whole, I seem to think of my school life as my real life. I spend five days out of the week at school, and the people there, since they are part of my everyday life and part of my hometown and people that I see at the supermarket or at local restaurants (on the rare occasions when we eat out), are the ones that matter on a regular basis. I do not, on the contrary, think of Indian kids as my reality. I just don’t see them all that often, so I feel like I always have to learn them again. When you are used to seeing a lunch line at the cafeteria that ends with trays loaded with pizza, milk, and sandwiches, it is hard to think of a dinner line of rice, curry, and yogurt as “regular.” When you are used to expending most of your energy on living with the difference of your skin, it is hard to think of people whose skin is the same as yours as “regular.”
Whenever our families get together, they render suburban streets virtually unusable. The cars line both ends of the street, sometimes not even facing the direction in which cars are supposed to move. After all, people drive on the left in India, and since we are here, walking into the Singhs’ behemoth of a house with a desire to be wholly Indian all evening, it is only fitting that we should drive as they drive. When in Delhi, do as the Delhians do.
When Nisha Singh opens the door, she is wearing a stunning orange-yellow sari, a group of gold bangles encircling each of her forearms. The bags under her eyes are grayer than ever, but she has pulled her hair back into a bun and fastened it with a lovely gold barrette. When Nisha Singh opens the door, what she sees in the doorway is an odd trio. Under his beige wind-breaker, which he wears open, my father is wearing a frayed, maroon sweater with the collar of a white dress shirt popping out limply at the neckline. Even though he has tried to comb his hair and part it firmly to one side, it is a storm, tangled and tousled, attempting perfection but missing its target. My mother is wearing a pistachio-colored
salwaar kameez
with her white cardigan over it, and her hair is in a ponytail, streaks of gray at her temples, over the crest of her head, in the knot of her pink scrunchie, and down her back. I am dressed in a Cincinnati Reds sweatshirt that my dad got for free at the supermarket during a special promotion, and I am wearing a pair of baggy Skidz jeans, a luxury for which I begged my mother in an attempt to be cool like the other kids in my class.
“
Namaste
, Shashi,” Nisha says, putting her palms together and bowing her head slightly.
“
Namaste
,” my mom says, stepping through the doorway and bowing with her dish of curry held in front of her, as if Nisha Auntie is a bouncer and this dish our ticket to enter the house.
“
Namaste
,
ji
,” Nisha Auntie says to my father, who returns her nod a little too enthusiastically—as all men in our circle do, so taken are they with Nisha Auntie’s looks.
She closes the door, and the three of us Sharmas proceed to take our shoes off and leave them by the doorway with a battalion of other shoes. It looks like we’re all French children leaving our shoes out for Father Christmas. The three of us walk through a small hallway into the Singhs’ kitchen, which is grand. In the center of it is an island that could be a sacrificial table in biblical times. Around the island, all of the aunties are arranging their potluck dishes, a chorus of crinkling foil resounding. Every dish is in a stainless steel container, and the arrangement of the containers looks like a futuristic city. In one squat pan is a steaming pile of rice, dyed yellow with turmeric. In another is a stack of oily
roti
, insulated with a layer of soft paper towels. Dishes of curried peas, potatoes, okra, cauliflower. Bowls of yogurt, butter, and chutney (tamarind, mint, coconut). In a discreet corner of the kitchen counter sits a large tin of assam tea leaves and a full tea serving set; Indians need their tea, or at least the promise of it, as soon as they finish eating.
“
Arre
, Kiran
Beta
,
kya hall hai
?” asks the heavy Rashmi Govind when I walk in. She bounds toward me, and before I can turn my head, she has pulled me into her cleavage.
“Hello, Neha,” says my mother in addressing the little princess, who has entered in a demure beige
salwaar kameez
and who takes my father’s jacket and my mother’s cardigan with a garbled “
Na-mush-te
,” the result of her metal mouth. Her hair is clasped behind her head in the same style as her mother’s. As always, despite her tooth gear, she is lovely. The way she slings the jacket and the cardigan over her arm, the way she scurries out of the kitchen and into the foyer, up the stairs to her room, where she will put the outerwear with the rest of the visitors’ coats and things on her bed—it is graceful, ladylike. The bitchy ones always seem to master this grace so well.
I say hello to all of the aunties, my palms together, my head bowing dutifully. My mother once told me that the Indian child who always says hello to every elder in the room will forever be well-loved, and so far as I can see, her advice was sound. The aunties always greet me enthusiastically because I know how to observe decorum. Anita Gupta screeches laryngitically when I ask if she has brought her spicy
channa
again. Ratika Auntie dryly offers some murky Hindi as I say hello, and Kavita Auntie expounds on it with more Hindi. Here, in the crucial opening moments of this get-together, my eye for ostentation serves me well.
Next, I head into the den, where the men are comfy on sofas. Each of them sits with one leg crossed over the other, ankle resting on knee. As in temple, most of them wear a white dress shirt, the fabric thin as a shroud, the outline of a white V-neck T-shirt visible from underneath. Some of them, like my father, augment this look with a sweater or a blazer from the seventies—not to make a retro statement but to make a vocational one. These are men who do not usually change before they come to parties; they like working, they like looking like they work, and they like looking like they just came from work. When I say hello to them, they eye me with caution, as if they can see me becoming more American, and less Indian, each moment. Naveen Uncle’s stutters upon seeing me pretty much sum up all of these men’s unsure feelings about my presence here.
The mothers hang out in the kitchen. The fathers hang out in the den. The kids hang out in the basement.
Indian kids very rarely hang out in each other’s bedrooms. Hanging out in bedrooms means that we are having sex, so we are relegated to the basement. This is somewhat true of American families, but on the Indian end, everything is done ten times more vehemently. Every Indian house that we go to has a well-finished basement—a huge investment, in the sense that it basically means paying for a third level of the house. But if tons of money—extra rolls of plush carpet, wide, white drywall, and shiny brass fixtures—can ensure that the kids will avoid a bed, Indian parents are more than glad to cough up the dollars. Indeed, during this early ’90s boom, most Indian families, like mine, have graduated from their first, split-level, ’70s-style homes and have built their own homes. Not with their own two hands, of course, but they have provided the sturdy, glint-eyed, firm-handshaked American men in this area with homes to build and money for those homes. And so, in this stage of the Indian domestic evolution, the finished basement has become as standard an amenity as a study where the Man of the House can take calls from frantic patients/review investment accounts/worry about the next twenty years/avoid his wife.
As I walk to the basement door, I can hear the sounds of the other kids playing. The loudest noise is that of a Ping-Pong ball being slammed against rubber-sheathed paddles. The boys love Ping-Pong so much that it is hard for me to picture any of them without seeing a wide, green table in front of him. The smack of the ball resonates throughout the basement and into the air ducts that cross the basement ceiling. The echoes are
so loud
, and I think the only reason why they don’t drive the parents crazy is because the mothers have the hum of the stove fan and the fathers have their laughter and booze to drown them out.
In addition to the ball, I can hear squeals, the boys’ and girls’ almost indistinguishable from each other. As I open the basement door, I find myself wishing the room were full of only girls. Even though I have endured some difficult situations with females recently, I identify better with the way they express themselves. The girls talk of things that interest me, things like
Saved by the Bell
and
Full House
and Barbie. To me, they are more than just girls. They are a manner of speaking, peppered with slang and cast in a joyous lilt. But the boys talk of cars, of video games, of sports. I don’t like those things. Or, on the rare instances when I do, it’s for other reasons. I like cars when I can dance on them. I like video games when I get to save the damsel in distress, like hopping to the rescue of Princess Toadstool in
Super Mario Brothers
. And I like sports when—