Authors: Rakesh Satyal
I don’t know what possesses me, but I take the picture of Lakshmi off its pedestal, kiss it, then switch it with the portrait of me. Then I switch the corresponding statues, kissing the porcelain Lakshmi, so small that I basically engulf Her crowned head. I make sure my portrait is centered, my statue as well, then flick off the light and continue my wandering.
As I expected, Neha’s sister, Kirti, is in her room reading. She has spread herself widthwise across the bed with a book in her hands. I wander in, half-expecting Kirti to throw a fit, but she hardly makes a noise when I enter. She’s one of those whiny brats who goes through manic-depressive nadirs when she has so fully exhausted herself that she no longer possesses the strength to be the bitch she is meant to be.
Kirti is a tiny girl, with a narrow face and thick eyebrows that could stand a tweezing or two. She could go either way when she grows up—she could develop into a presentable Indian girl or an ugly hag. (My mother has four terms to describe the looks of young Indian girls: “ugly,” “passable,” “presentable,” and “That is the type of girl you vant to marry, Kiran.”) I look at the pastel green cover of Kirti’s book and see that it’s a Baby-sitters Club book. I have read my share of those books—a short rainbow of them takes up half a shelf on one of the bookcases in my bedroom—so I begin to talk to Kirti about the characters. I talk about Kristy and Dawn and how much I love the name Stacey. The book slowly droops down as Kirti listens more intently to me, surprised that I know as much about these girls as she does. Girls always seem so surprised about how much I know about things like this, and yet I don’t see anything all that crazy about it. These are great books, and there’s no shame in knowing a lot about them. Just because they’re about girls doesn’t mean they’re only for girls. How do boys expect to understand girls unless they learn their manners? The best way to get to know a girl is to read her books, play with her toys, like her TV shows—that way, you link your interests to hers. And you prime yourself to find a girlfriend.
Kirti changes during our conversation. This is the girl who once cut off another girl’s hair with a butter knife at a wedding because the girl said her sari was wrapped wrong. But Kirti engages in our discussion with great gusto. As the conversation progresses, she starts calling me Kiran Sahib,
sahib
being a term that Indian kids use to address an elder. I feel proud to have touched someone like this; it’s the first time in a long while that I feel heartened by someone at one of these parties, and for a second it actually makes me feel guilty for having tampered with the Singhs’ icons. At one point, Kirti lifts herself up and hugs me, burying her head in my chest, and I feel for a second that she loves me. I feel for a second that…she is my Radha.
Girlfriend
. Pride sifts into my chest as Kirti continues to hug me. The peacock feathers at my crown multiply.
Finally, I pull away and take my leave, waving heartily to Kirti. I do not want to tread too heavily on such a delicate courtship. She smiles, then returns to her book with more energy than before, a Cheshire cat grin on her thin face.
From downstairs, I can hear Rashmi Auntie calling, “Dinner! Dinner’s ready, everyvone!” her voice trembling with excitement. She sounds as if she’s a citizen of a water-starved town in a Texas gulch and the first raindrop in a month has just plopped onto the powdery dirt of Main Street. I can hear the scrape of a metal ladle against a stainless-steel pot—most likely Nisha Auntie stirring her famed
pakora kurdi
, a yellow stew of spices and dumplings garnished with cilantro, ginger, and onions. I can hear the pouring of water into stainless-steel cups, which makes tinkles along the marble countertop as the line of eaters forms around the island in the kitchen. I can even hear Neha giggling. She is probably standing obediently aside, letting the guests take their share first before loading her plate up. But above this, I hear the collective rumble of Indians babbling and laughing, their gregariousness heightened by the steaming, redolent promise of food in front of them.
I am starving, yet I can’t bear the thought of going down there right now. After the small treat of having Kirti fawn over me, I don’t want to return to the social trauma of being amidst the other Indians. So while they enjoy their food downstairs, I walk to the massive master bedroom doors and try to slide one open. I am prepared for it to be locked, but it slides open unhindered. I enter the darkness of the Singhs’ bedroom, then slide the door closed behind me.
The Singhs’ bedroom smells strange. There is the stale scent of past spice mixed with the smell of laundered bedding and a faint wisp of perfume, rose water, and dress socks. When I find the light switch and flick it on, I see that the bedroom is almost empty except for a few things: a shiny wooden dresser, a heavy-looking mirror arching above it; the neat slab of the master bed, an end table on each side of it bearing a fat, rust-colored lamp; and an ironing board, the iron still perched on top of it like a metal penguin. In the far left corner of the bedroom is the cave of a walk-in closet. In the far right corner of the bedroom is the darkened master bathroom.
I walk to the bathroom doorway and flick on the master bathroom light. The bathroom is a lot larger than ours at home. It is another shrine of marble and porcelain, but there are about ten yards between its pair of sinks and a closed door that presumably hides the toilet and shower area. The mirror above the sinks glimmers and sparkles with light, and when I look at myself in it, I seem prettier than I ever have been. Before I can register what I am doing, I have locked the bathroom door, and my wrists are being caressed by the cool plastic of Nisha Auntie’s makeup compacts, lipsticks, and mascaras.
Nisha Auntie’s cosmetics look eerily like my mother’s; even though the two woman could not look more different in person, it seems that the instruments of their decoration are exactly the same. Nisha Auntie even has the same Mulberry lipstick that my mom has, and when I put it on, I feel relieved, like I’ve discovered an old friend. I discover yet another friend when I see the lovely girl in the mirror, her face halfway covered in blue eyeshadow, her index finger rounding over her still-brown left cheek and drawing a stripe of blue across it. She jumps gaily from foot to foot, hums gently, and it is only when she hears a sound across the room that she stops, her blue face falling.
The door to the toilet has opened, and from its darkness emerge Neha and Ashok, their faces just as nervous and worried as mine. Ashok’s dress shirt is untucked, and Neha’s hair is tousled and wispy. I have never seen either of them look so disheveled. Then I realize that no matter how odd they look to me, I look odder than anything they could have ever imagined.
“Kiran?” Neha says, still managing to giggle as she comes forward, Ashok trailing behind. “Kiran, what are you doing? That’sh my mom’sh makeup! What in the world—?” Her words are still smushy from her braces, but they are nevertheless strong.
“I don’t know,” I say. There is a pause. “I’m dressing up as Krishnaji.” This time when I say it, it does not at all seem convincing. In my head, an image of Cody appears, his head capped in a wig of long, brown hair. He looks at me and says, “I’m dressing up as Jesus!”
“What are
you
doing?” I ask, bending over the sink and splashing my face with cold water to remove my incomplete job. I turn back to Neha and Ashok, who look at each other, nonplussed.
“Um,” Ashok says. “Neha was just showing me where the bathroom was because, um, the other ones were full.” He looks at me timidly, flustered. Oddly enough, he is more handsome to me like this, the pleading in his eyes making them rounder, more pronounced, more piercing. Even Neha looks prettier, despite her messy appearance. I know why. Disarmed and reduced to this state of quiet begging, they are—for the first time—on my plane.
Aware of this, I stick my chest out and say, “If Neha was showing you where the bathroom was, why is it dark in there? Why did she have to go in with you? And why are your clothes messed up?” I feel strong and magnificent; the girl in the mirror is living in me, haughty and hot.
Neha counters with a heft in her step and one strong index finger pointed at me. “Look, Kiran, thish ish a tricky shituation for all of ush.” She licks her braces softly. Her agitation is making her salivate in an animalistic way. “How about we jusht call it a draw? We won’t tell if you won’t tell.”
I consider, for a second, the pleasure of running downstairs and announcing my discovery to the rest of the household, Neha and Ashok clutching each other on the stairwell like a panic-stricken Romeo and Juliet. I consider the pleasure of seeing Neha shamed in front of everyone, the clacking of her braces, the loosening of Nisha Auntie’s face as she is saddled with a wanton hussy for a daughter.
I could be so cruel
, I think, standing here and sizing up this panting duo. Cruelty sends a shiver up my spine and steels me.
I am just about to naysay their suggestion when I think of them countering my announcement with handfuls of cosmetics. It’s true—Neha’s is the best solution. If one side of this argument is ridiculed, the other half has to come with it. There is no emotion stronger in this marble and porcelain corridor than shared vengeance.
“Fine,” I say, stepping back. “But you two better watch out. I’ll be watching.” Quickly, I return the cosmetics to the drawer and leave the bathroom, giving one last look at Neha and Ashok. When I turn away, they sigh.
Parties are about linking with others socially, but they are also about evolution—the evolution of relationships. Tonight my experimentation has evolved into blackmail, culpability, complicity. And more than anything, the structure of these parties has evolved: the basement can no longer contain the rising lust of us Indian kids.
My parents spend their time at home as if they can’t stand each other’s presence but as if long ago, during their wedding, right after they tied their sashes together and walked around a fire, they signed a pact that physically bound them to each other. While I sit on the couch in the shorts and T-shirt I used as pajamas last night, eating masala-spiced Chex Mix and watching CNN on our monstrous TV, I notice that they move in a give-and-take manner that contrasts with their verbal spats. My mother will get up from the loveseat to make some
chai
, and when she does so, my father will get up from the kitchen table, where he’s peeled a grapefruit and left a pile of citrus skin, and push back in the recliner. After making the tea, my mother pours three cups—very little milk and no sugar for herself, very little milk and two sugars for my father, and a lot of milk and a lot of sugar for me—gives me mine first and then offers a cup to my sprawled father, who takes the small china cylinder without looking at her. The zaniness of it is the silence, the pure silence, the unmeeting of eyes, the carelessness of the heat that passes between them.
In the Urdu
quewwali
songs that my father likes to play on our stereo, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sing-shouts stories about women with hands as hot as fire, women whose softest touch can render a man aflame. Although my mother is the one who translates these songs for me, there seems to be no such fire left in her hands. Even in restaurants, waiters say something when they serve you, you acknowledge their presence with a polite, if barely audible, thank you. They don’t just present you with something amid a cloud of impenetrable nothingness, you don’t just take their food and turn away, without a word. Yet the decorum here seems delicately calibrated, the way in which she comes up from the basement while he steps outside with a glass of
lassi
, in which he goes upstairs for a nap and she comes downstairs for a snack, in which he settles into his office and rustles papers while she unwraps the ball of curdled, milky sourness that will be tomorrow’s
paneer
. This all seems fragile yet impressive, the result of years of normal Indian being. When, I wonder, did my mother stop being my father’s Radha?
As I’ve mentioned, silence has never been my bag. As smooth as my parents’ cool interaction may be, the silence of it gives me only one option: to think of a companion who would not allow such a silence. I sit on the couch and watch Wolf Blitzer and wonder what it would be like to live with a man like him. Wolf: his eloquence, his style, his wit—they are so undeniably un-Ohioan, and these qualities—the lilt of Wolf’s voice, the poetic phrases he forms with this voice, using words like “essentially,” “Shi’ite,” “
jihad
”—they are powerful in this noiseless land of moping parents, crabapples, and hometown chili contests.
It is a lazy Sunday. The delicate rhythm of my parents’ movement downstairs is the perfect soundtrack. With each new hour, a certain tension grows, marked periodically by another plate of steaming, cotton-fluffy rice or another cup of
chai
or
another cup of chai
or another block of
Headline News
or a long nap, interrupted once in a while by the telephone ringing. I go upstairs, roll over in bed, and look longingly at SS, who stares up at the ceiling, arms splayed, feet pointing straight upward. Today, she seems unmoving, inanimate, the un-alive self that most people think she is. Today is a sterile day. I don’t feel like drawing or dancing or singing or tiptoeing to the master bedroom. I simply listen to my parents’ plodding choregraphy downstairs, hide SS from view, and jerk off, Ashok’s face in the bathroom assaulting me. Then I roll back over into a tea-and boredom-drunk sleep.
When I get up from my latest nap, the house is awash in dusk and there is the faint smell of incense burning downstairs. My heartbeat freezes. My mother usually burns incense at five o’clock every morning, right after she has showered and her hair hangs black and wet in tangles to her shoulders; I once got up too early for school and walked in on her bowed in prayer over the kitchen sink, the incense curling up over her head, my mother inhaling as if to breathe it in. I was only seven, but when my mother turned around and I saw her completely disarmed, her face fresh and pale from shower moisture, it was the first time I realized that she was something besides a mother and a wife—she was her own person, who could get up and do whatever she wanted before my father and I fumbled awake and needed scrambled eggs, tea, a drive to school. This usually happens in the morning, however. The only time my mother ever burns incense in the evening is when there has been a fight.
I steel myself as I descend the steps. There is not a single light switch flicked on, but when I tiptoe into the kitchen, there stands my mother in a lavender nightgown, her back to me but her hunched posture suggesting that she is praying over the sink. A putter of Sanskrit escapes from her mouth. Smoke from the thin stick of incense seems to fill the entire kitchen.
I watch her for a few minutes, and it is more because I am choked up than because I revere her religious rites that I keep from speaking. I wait to say anything until she turns around. I offer an ineloquent “Hi.”
“Hi,
beta
,” my mother says, stepping forward to give me a hug. I just now notice that her hair is wet: a nighttime shower. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” I say. My mother turns to wash the few dishes that are in the sink. She uses one flat palm under the stream of water to massage the crumbs and streaks of grease from the plates, then places them gently in the blue skeleton of the dishwasher rack. I seat myself at the kitchen table, unsure how to broach the topic.
“Mom, is everything okay?”
“Everything is fine,
beta
.” She turns around and looks at me with what she thinks is genuine surprise on her face.
“Mom, your mouth is quivering. Something is up.”
“
Beta
, it’s nothing to vorry about. You know how these things are.”
“No, Mom, I don’t,” I say softly. “What’s going on?”
She turns off the sink and walks over to the table, clasping the back of one of the chairs with her tiny, pink-bellied fingers. “It’s just the same thing as alvays, Kiran. Nothing changes here.”
I stare.
She sits. “It’s nothing to vorry about. You know, sometimes things just don’t vork out.” She rubs the pads of her thumbs and forefingers together, and I see that she is rolling a small piece of dough between them. Dough is like an Indian mom’s stress ball.
Squeeze, squeeze, roll, roll.
She pushes the two rounded pieces together and then flattens the big ball against the table into a flat disk.
“Mom, what are you doing?” I laugh. This is why I love my mother—these altogether random but endearing childish habits of hers. Here I am, trying my best to remedy her ennui, and all she is doing is carving an “Om” into a doughy circle with one long fingernail. She returns my laugh, and we sit here for the next five minutes just laughing, trading the dough back and forth. I make a miniature version of her, which is basically one fat doughy ball. She slaps my arm in amused offense, then crafts a whip by rubbing the stuff into one long, spaghetti-like cord.
There is a lull after this diverting distraction, but my mother breaks the silence gently.
“Everything is fine,
beta
. Your dad just does some things from time to time that bother me.”
“What—the gas station notebook?”
Another round of laughter ensues. She mentions the way he saves UPC symbols from all of the food they eat, as if someday Nabisco will announce to the public that bringing in an enormous trash bag full of Cheez-It barcodes will guarantee a $100,000 prize. I mention the way he keeps a record of all the letters he’s mailed, as if years from now we’ll all just need to know when he mailed in that $1 rebate to Crest on May 10, 1985.
Talking about my father causes me a lot of worry. He is obviously not at home, otherwise my mom would not be speaking so freely and loudly, but the act of making fun of him feels criminal, especially when I can imagine him sitting at the kitchen table with us, his brow furrowed with consternation and hurt. As I imagine him, the tension in my body feels like a row of insistent worker ants is marching its way up my spine, up and down each vertebra.
“I just vant you to be happy, Kiran.”
It is a sort of odd thing for her to say, but I say, “I just want you to be happy, too, Mom.”
“I am happy,” she says.
“Me, too,” I say.
“Now take your medicine.”
Just as the dusk dissipates, so does our time here. My father comes back just as the two of us have sat down to watch another block of CNN, another series of bombings reported across seas. He has a bag of groceries whose contents he empties into the appropriate places in the refrigerator and the pantry, then sits down to join us. My mother gets up to make some tea. I slide away to my room, still unable to look at my father without seeing Blueberry Muffin clutched in his hand.
When I am at last asleep, I dream in
quewwali
, with high-pitched, strained vocals cascading through my mind as severed hands
enflambé
encircle me. From this emerges a mess of all the incense-igniting matches my mother has used over the years—cold, coallike lumps of burnt cardboard and tiny anthills of gray ash.