Authors: Rakesh Satyal
“Auntie, I saw Neha and Ashok doing something in the poolhouse. Something…bad.”
Nisha Auntie’s expression takes a few seconds to crack, but gradually, the meaning of what I’m saying sinks in and the cocktail of shock, anger, and disgust in her eyes is my first prize. The second is the way she almost throws the cup and saucer onto the table, so firmly do they leave her hands, so firmly does she stand up and march out of the kitchen, almost tripping over her sari. “Neha!” she is calling out repeatedly.
“Kiran!” my own mother is calling out. I look over at her. Her glare is not so much a cocktail as a shot of anger on icy rocks. She has stood up, too, and Ratika and Kavita Aunties, also seated at the table, form a tribunal that is castigating me with its eyes instead of words. I return their looks with a haughty disdain. I do not care what these ladies think. More than usual, I feel somewhere deep down that they don’t “count.” They have nothing to do with the kids I see at school, the place where I am five days a week, the place where I have to watch my every last move. I see these ladies once, sometimes twice, a week, and we exchange quick salutations or good-byes before I go slump in a basement, stare at myself in a bathroom, or get back into my parents’ car to go home. I owe them nothing, and they can give nothing to me but a reason to feel less Indian, less like the rest of their privileged kids. Less like Neha and Ashok—who must be cowering as they are found out in the poolhouse. I can’t wait to see them brought into this kitchen, their ears pinched by their mothers’ firm grips, shoved before the tribunal, the judgment directed at them instead of me. Me, who never hurt a fly because I never realized that I
was
that annoying fly all along.
Then, like a slideshow of terror, I see it all fall apart. Neha is in the kitchen with her mother, all buttoned up and prim, her eyes stunned to everyone else but vengeful to me, who has seen that look too often on the faces of little girls to mistake it for confusion. Then Ashok is there, hockey paddle in hand, equally collected, concealing his eyes even better than Neha; manliness, however fledgling, is his veil. Neha and Ashok must have spotted me spying, and they stealthily returned to their respective circles. Anita Auntie has now joined the tribunal, and soon a few of the uncles have appeared, too. Somewhere behind the gathering crowd, I can sense my father. I cannot see him, but I can sense him fiercely. And then, perhaps worst of all, the pundit appears, clearly unable to register what is going on.
Everyone’s focus is on me. I am again a clay doll, tiny, unimportant. Then Neha speaks.
“Kiran likesh to play with makeup,” she says. Out it comes—no warning or buildup. Heard by itself, this statement actually doesn’t make any sense. Nisha Auntie’s face scrunches up in confusion, and she turns to Neha and asks, “Vhat?”
“Kiran likesh to put on makeup, Mom,” Neha repeats. “I caught him putting it on in your bedroom a couple of weeksh ago. He was jusht ushing all of your makeup without ashking. Not that he should be ushing it anyway because only
girlsh
ush makeup!” Neha is grinning evilly, and she gives me a sharp, haughty jab of her eyes.
“
Arre?
I don’t understand,” Rashmi Auntie says, stepping forward with a Styrofoam plate full of
saag paneer
. The fingers of her right hand are stained with the spinach goo and hover over it to pinch up another bite. She looks at my mother.
While Neha explains more thoroughly, I look at my mother, too. Immediately, her face gives her away. She is looking down, not at me, her eyes zapped with recognition and guilt. In that instant, I see that she has known all along what I’ve been up to with her makeup. It was as I always feared: she has seen the powder disappearing little by little, has caught the tiny flecks of color that must have been left on her counter. She must have realized after hearing my Krishna confession that I was stalling, covering up my deviant deed as frivolously as I covered my face in blue. My bathroom self has never been alone. My mother has always been in there, too.
The Indian parents are all in the kitchen now. The uncles, as one might expect, are at a complete loss as to how to handle a situation like this. They cup their tumblers lined with Johnny Walker Black Label with one hand and stare into the murky orange liquid. A couple of them saunter away, picking up their conversation. A few of them—Harsh Uncle in particular—stare at me as intently as Nisha Auntie is now staring at me. And my father…my father. He does not hold a tumbler. His hands, instead, are clasped in front of him, and he is staring at the floor. He does not look up, and yet I can feel his stare. It practically ricochets off the shiny linoleum of this kitchen floor and stabs into my eyes, which are welling up with tears.
“But Neha and Ashok…” I quaver. “I saw them…they’re the bad ones. They have been fooling around with each other.”
Instantaneously, all of the aunties step forward, gasping. Nisha Auntie yells, “You shut up!
Tum karab larka ho
.”
You
are a bad boy
. She looks up at my mother, a quick castigation of my mother’s parenting. “Shashi,
kya hogiya?
”
What is happening?
“Kiran tried to lie and shay that I wash doing shomething bad sho that you wouldn’t find out,” Neha continues. Behind her, I spot Kirti, another Baby-sitters Club book in her hand. She is wide-eyed, taking in the entire situation. Any familiarity she may have seen in me has dissipated and I am back to what I always was, an object of laughter to her. I am Kiran Bhaiyya no more. She is my Radha no more.
Now it is my time to lunge. I see my right hand claw at the air, just missing Neha’s face as she screams and steps back. I feel a couple of hands pull me back and am so furious that I don’t even notice that I’m being turned around or that a hand is swinging through the air to slap me. It stings badly, and I scream out “Fuck!” This obviously solicits another round of gasps from the aunties, and when thinking about this later, I think how glorious it would have been to keep on cursing until Rashmi Auntie fainted into her
saag
. In the moment, though, all I can think of is how weak I feel under Nisha Auntie’s wrath, under the forceful slap that her hand has made against my cheek. I’ve seen that same gold-bangled hand slap against its twin at many a wedding, when Nisha Auntie joins her bevy for a dance of
garba
, a circular assortment of women twirling and clapping and laughing.
But it’s not Nisha Auntie’s hand. It’s a hand that I’ve seen dusted in flour more times than I can count, that I’ve seen clutching the papered twine of shopping bags after being manicured in shiny red. It is my mother’s hand, and it is my mother’s face that now hovers over me, tears in her eyes.
The party does not end after this episode—at least, for everyone else. As for us Sharmas, the rest of our time in the Govinds’ house is a carefully staged slinking away. After my mother strikes me, she leads me away to the foyer, where she instructs me to run upstairs and retrieve our three coats from the coat room. As I mentioned before, the coat room in an Indian house is not an actual vestibule but rather a designated bedroom on the top floor where one of the household’s kids is expected to take everyone’s poofy fall or winter layers. Soon enough, a tall, wide pile of faux fur, faux wool, and nylon appears, and somehow, everyone’s scarves and gloves and mittens and those stitched, long, serpentine belts that circumnavigate women’s coats via a series of thick loops become all tangled and head-scratchingly lost. Lost like That Sock in a laundry machine. It takes me a good five to ten minutes to recover all of the components of our coats. I find my brilliant neon one easily enough and put it on, but I underestimate the time it takes to get the other things—the belt to my mother’s gray coat, the two matching black gloves that have fallen out from being tucked into my father’s sleeves. By the time I find them, I have sweated rather profusely because of the heat of having my coat on and the stress of my search. I realize as I stagger out of the bedroom with our collective family mess that my eyes are still wet with tears.
As I descend the stairs in the large foyer, I am struck by the consternation in my mother’s face. She is not making any effort to talk to any of the aunties before we leave. Perhaps even odder, they aren’t attempting to communicate with her, either. Somehow, in an unspoken way, it seems that everyone has agreed that the only possible solution is for the three of us to simply take our leave, extricate ourselves. My mother gives my father his coat, which he takes silently. She wraps her own coat around herself and doesn’t even try to thread the belt back through its loops. She holds the belt in her hand instead, not even coiling it, so that it dangles limply. She opens the door and doesn’t move. I realize that I am expected to leave first. It is fall, almost winter—it is cold outside. I cannot feel the heat of my flame right now. I can feel only the frigid night air and the coldness of my parents, who sit in silence with me as we drive back to the house. This time, there is no breaking of the silence as there is on our way back from temple. There is only the sound of the engine, my father’s deft hands against the steering wheel, the faint sound of air blowing through my mother’s nostrils.
It is the last party that the three of us attend for two months.
When we get home, my parents walk straight to the kitchen,
our
tribunal room. As we walk into it, I imagine all of the aunties gathered here. They have refilled their teacups and hover expectantly over the curls of steam like excited moviegoers over popcorn. But no one else is in here, just my parents. My mother takes the teakettle and goes to the sink to fill it up. She sets it on the stove and flicks on the switch. She takes down two mugs, not three. She reaches for the tea bags, which she keeps in a tiny tin jar next to the stove.
Without even a hint of warning, my father grabs one of the mugs and throws it across the room. I don’t even have time to think of ducking before it hits the opposite wall. One might have expected it to smash against the wall, porcelain shards flying through the air, hailing over the linoleum, but that is not what happens. Instead, the sheer force of the mug punches a foot-wide hole into the wall, and the mug falls into the narrow passage between that wall and the one behind it. My father gasps and runs to the hole, peering into it and clutching his chest as if he’s having a heart attack. He keeps gasping for air, each gasp seeming as if to say, in a crescendo,
This is going to cost a fortune!
I want to burst out laughing and run away at the same time, and when I look at my mom, I assume that she’ll have the same conflicted expression on her face that I do. She has her head in her hands, and I assume that she is trying to stifle her laughter.
That’s not the case. When she removes her hands, her consternation persists, and if anything, it hardens when I look at her. I search her face, hoping to find the old mom who would have conspired with me, held me close and patted my head. That Mom is gone now. That Mom barely flinches as my father yells and screams in Hindi, stomping on the ground, pointing a finger at me while he yells at my mom what I can only assume to be a renunciation of my “weirdness.” He continues for several minutes, only once in a while looking at me. I gladly avoid his stare. Only a couple of times does my mother respond to my father, but each time she does, he cuts her off and continues screaming. His voice becomes hoarse.
This is a delinquent outburst that has been simmering for the past week since Rodney brought me back home in the middle of the night. The next thing I remembered after passing out in the park was being back in his jeep, coming to and hearing my recently awakened feet crunching candy wrappers beneath them. Somehow, while emerging from the blackness, I answered Rodney’s inquiry about where I lived by telling him my actual address instead of Cody’s, and so he showed up at my house almost tugging me by the back of my coat. He did me at least the favor of saying he found me in the park, not telling them what I was observing, although he clearly couldn’t tell them what that was for his own personal reasons. My mother greeted him with the expected confusion, and when she questioned me about why I was there, I simply told her that I went there with Cody and Donny to play.
“But vhy?” she asked. “Vhat vas in the park?”
“We just thought it would be cool.”
“But there is nothing in the park at night! And vhere vere Cody and Donny, anyway?”
“They…they were there.”
“The ranger said he found you alone.”
“Well, they were there. They must have run away when they saw the cop. Why are you even questioning me about this? I did a bad thing, and I’m sorry. But at least I’m okay!”
“You are not okay, Kiran,” my mother said, getting up from the kitchen table. She went to the oven and cracked it open. Inside was a porcelain casserole full of milk; she was making a batch of yogurt. For years, she has used the same culture to make her yogurt. One tiny teaspoon of culture has lived throughout the years, giving birth to creamy dish after creamy dish. Perhaps that culture existed before I was even born, just like Indian culture.
What I did not tell her about—what I can hardly tell myself about even now—is how, just before he took me into the house, Rodney smiled at me, more with his eyes than with his mouth, and put his hand on my stomach. He let it stay there briefly, his face a smiling knot of concentration, then suddenly came to, pulled his hand away, and looked at me with a frightened clarity. The rousing of my groin, as in the past, told me that something sexual had just eluded me. But then we were outside, then he was tugging me, and it was over.