Authors: Rakesh Satyal
As we pass through the kitchen this afternoon, my mother tells me to go take a nap. I gladly comply, knowing that every minute I spend sleeping is a minute I don’t have to spend around that gaping hole in the wall.
When I get to my bedroom, I do something that I haven’t done in days: I reach under my bed and pull out SS. Her bonnet is covered in a couple of dust bunnies, and I wipe them off lovingly. As sometimes happens with the icons in the master bedroom, I feel like her expression has changed a little bit. I am almost positive of it—the curl of her smile has drooped slightly, not as joyous or as cheeky as it once was. SS is aging just like me. She is becoming aware of the harsher realities of life. I think of all the other SS dolls in the world. There must be thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. How in the world did this particular one end up with me? Does this SS ever wonder what life would have been like to end up with someone like Sarah or Melissa,
girls
for whom she was really made who would brush her hair and keep her on a shelf, not under a bed? Does this SS feel abused, neglected, depressed? For certain, Sarah and Melissa’s dads wouldn’t have taken their daughters’ best friend in the world and thrown her into a trash bin.
When I wake up from my nap, it is dark outside, the sun having made its early fall descent. Through the curtains, I can make out the deep purple of the sky, a tangle of black branches silhouetted against it. Something about this time of the day makes me feel queasy, and when I sit up, I realize that I have an awful headache. SS has fallen off the bed, landing on her head, even more proof that I am as dangerous an owner as she could ever have had. I slide off my bed and head to the bathroom. My bathroom is not as grand as my parents’—it is barely big enough to fit the shower, the sink, the toilet, and a hamper—but it does have a bright pink bathmat, which I begged my mother for when I saw it at the mall.
After relieving myself, I wash my hands and splash water on my face. The cold water against my hot face doesn’t feel good; instead, it makes me feel depressed. It is a Tuesday evening in a dusky house in Ohio. My mother is cooking and my father is probably down in his study. The only thing that this cold water does is bring me back to this evening—this unexciting, boring evening. I look up at the mirror and pat my face with a small white hand towel.
I drop the towel into the sink. I touch my face, then shake my head, blink, and look again to make sure what I’ve seen is real. Sure enough, when I look back, I see it again. My skin—very faintly but undeniably—has turned blue.
Even after looking at myself for a solid half hour in the mirror, ignoring my mother’s first call to dinner as I have done in the past when making myself up, even after sitting on my bed for another five minutes, almost cackling with laughter because of my ecstasy, I still cannot quite wrap my head around what has happened. The blue pallor of my face is so subtle, so much so that I don’t even know if I would detect it if I didn’t stare at myself in mirrors all of the time—but I am certain of what I have seen. My skin looks the same shade it does after I’ve wiped the eyeshadow from my face, a few miniscule particles of blue still wedged into the curve of my nose or a corner of my eye.
My heart is beating so hard against my ribs that it feels like a cardinal is trapped inside of me, fighting to get out. The little hairs inside my ears pulse with its energy. I have knotted my toes into the carpet at my feet. My hands clutch the side of my bed and squeeze it tightly. What was earlier an uncomfortable blush on my face is now an exhilarating warmth. How did this happen? A giggle escapes me when I realize that the only possible explanation is that God has proven to me that I am His reincarnation. This is why I have had to suffer so much. Sitting here, giddy with this knowledge, I know that it has all been worth it.
“Kiran!” my mother calls again. I panic, wondering how I can hide such a thing from her and my father. But then I remember how neither my mother nor Mrs. Goldberg said anything. They just said I looked different, but they didn’t say my face had turned blue. Perhaps my parents won’t even notice.
I go downstairs and expect my parents to be seated at the kitchen table, where we normally eat dinner. They are in the dining room instead. Obviously. My father would rather eat dirt than sit next to that monstrosity in the kitchen wall. The dining room is a much brighter room than our kitchen, with a huge crystal light fixture that tosses rainbow prisms and solid white beams all over the walls. I walk straight to my seat, sit down, and bow my head in prayer to detract from any attention that might otherwise be brought to my face.
“Are you feeling better, Kiran?” my mother asks as she sets my father’s food in front of him. She has made
rajma
—curried red beans—along with soft basmati rice and fried okra. In the center of the table she places the casserole dish full of yogurt that she had in the oven the other night. When she opens the dish, I can see that two big spoonfuls have been scooped out, probably by my mother herself, who loves to snack on yogurt sprinkled with sugar when she watches the evening news on the couch.
“I feel much better,” I respond. My mother nods approvingly as she goes back into the kitchen to get my food. My dad is silent at his end of the table, tearing off a bite of his
roti
, wrapping some of the
rajma
in it, and popping it in his mouth. He frowns, and I know it’s because he doesn’t think there’s enough salt in it. Despite his recent efforts to eat healthier, my father cannot live without flavor, and so I say, “I’ll get the salt,” walk to the kitchen, and take it to him. I place it right beside his plate and go back to my seat. He says, “Thanks,
beta
,” quietly, politely, and I feel much better hearing some kindness come from him.
He opens up a little bit. “How was school,
beta
?” As my mom comes back into the dining room, I notice for the first time how quiet it is. Normally when we eat dinner, we sit in the kitchen and watch news on the neighboring living room’s television. Tonight, we have our conversation to get us by.
“School is fine. I got an A on my math test.” This is a lie. I actually got an A-, but I feel the obligation to kick the grade up a notch to stay in my father’s good graces.
“
Good
job,
beta
,” he says. Math is his profession, after all, and it’s the subject that he thinks is the most important for me to learn. One time, he asked me why I couldn’t study math after school instead of language arts. I told him that math was a universal language whereas English was a specific one, so I obviously needed to focus on that specific language more. He didn’t really understand that explanation and, frankly, neither did I. I was only extemporizing because I hate math and would have rather eaten cyanide than study it more.
“I thought…” I stop myself, afraid.
“You thought vhat?” my mother asks, taking a sip of water.
“I thought that…maybe because I did so well on my test…I could still do the talent show.” It’s my new skin talking. My recent discovery has emboldened me, and I say these words without thinking.
“Kiran. Ve already talked about this.”
“But Mom! I’ve been working so hard—”
“Kiran.”
I glance over at my dad and catch him making angry eyes at my mother. He tries to avert his stare once I look over, but I catch it just in time. I was wrong to think that he had loosened up. Of course—there is still several hundred dollars’ worth of damage in the kitchen. I should have waited for the wall to heal, if not the emotional scars, before pressing my luck.
We finish the rest of dinner in relative silence. My mother can never sit down for long during dinner; she is always bringing us more
roti
or water, and so she contributes little to the conversation on most nights anyway. I begin to miss Peter Jennings so much; if he were on right now, he would make this whole situation much less awkward. Instead, I have only my father’s eating to keep me company.
After dinner, I go to the bathroom and stare at my face again. It’s not surprising that they should have missed the change; when I look at it again up here, I almost can’t see it. For a second, I think that I made the whole thing up in my head and it never happened. I press my face close to the glass and examine my pores, trying to see the sparkling blue but seeing only brown. Then, when I step back, it pops out again. It’s strange, but from certain angles, it appears bluer than it does in others. It’s chameleonic.
I don’t sleep a wink that night. When I catch the bus the next day, sitting in the front seat like I normally do to avoid the other kids, I am simultaneously so tired and excited that I want to fall asleep and dance at the same time. All throughout the school day, I keep thinking that someone will notice how different I look, but if my own parents weren’t able to see the difference, these people certainly will not. By the end of the day, I am so tired that I forget I have ballet rehearsal in the multipurpose room. I am five minutes late, and Marcy has an annoyed face when I show up.
I don’t care, though. Marcy teaches us a complicated sequence of pas de bourrée, pas de chat, and a
jetté
, and I perform it flawlessly, landing after the
jetté
in a soundless pounce. As I hit the ground, I decide not to listen to my mother’s admonition. I am doing the talent show whether she likes it or not. Behold the stealthy blue god.
The next day, Thursday morning, I ask my mother if she can take me to the library after I’m finished studying with Mrs. Goldberg. I tell her that I have to do a book report on
Bridge to Terabithia
for Mrs. Nevins’s class by Monday and that I need to use three resources from the library in the course of writing the paper. She is watching a rerun of
Rhoda
on TV and nods approvingly over her cup of tea. She doesn’t suspect what I am going to be up to there—sewing my costume for the show. Last night, while she and my father were watching CNN
Headline News
, I crept upstairs, went straight to her closet, and fished out that old magenta sari and an old gold
dupatta
, or sash, then rummaged through the bottom of the closet to extract two spools of yellow thread and a needle from the sewing notions she keeps down there.
One thing I didn’t expect to find at the bottom of mother’s closet was a pair of ankle bells—tiny, tarnished metal bells strung together on red velvet ribbon. They were the bells she was wearing in that photo album. They tinkled as I pulled them out, and I had to steady them as I ran back to my room so that they didn’t give me away.
After my mother gives me her head nod this morning, I leave the house with the fruits of my reaping tucked into my backpack (save the ankle bells, which would have been impossible to keep quiet while my backpack shifted). I had to take out a couple of textbooks to fit them in, and on my desk I’ve left the plain gray chunk of
Mathematical Puzzles
and the thick volume
Adventures in Reading
, which bears a picture of teddy bears dressed like Renaissance scribes waving red ribbons on its front. I had to struggle to fit in my recorder and
Warriner’s English Grammar
.
I start to sense that something is amiss during math class. Since I left my book at home, I don’t look at the diagrams in the book as instructed but spend more time looking at the people around me. I notice that Cody and Donny keep looking at each other, giggling, and Sarah and Melissa, sitting in back of me, laugh more than usual. Twice, Mrs. Nevins has to ask the girls to quiet down. It becomes clear to me that Cody, Donny, Sarah, and Melissa have all connected on something, and I assume that what they’ve connected on is little ole me.
Perhaps it is better to be really, really different from people instead of being simply different. This way, you don’t need to worry about conforming or trying to act normal. With my new skin, I don’t have to worry about being like everyone else because it is virtually impossible now. I don’t have to be part of Sarah and Melissa’s clique, nor do I have to try to get in with Cody and Donny’s good graces. Even if they form a supergroup now, it is of no consequence to me. Now that I don’t have any hope of being ordinary ever again, I don’t need to worry about my looks or my opinions or how to fit in. It’s the most liberating feeling I’ve ever had.
I show up at my session with Mrs. Goldberg the least prepared that I’ve ever been. I haven’t done any practice exercises. Mrs. Goldberg is understandably confused by this, but I make up for my delinquency by suggesting alternative exercises that we might try—as if I’m the one who is supposed to create the curriculum—then work on them avidly. Mrs. Goldberg softens a bit and soon enough is offering her usual encouragement. By the end, she gives me a whole sheet of stickers as a reward. They are “Stickers of the World” and show cartoon people in different countries. A girl with a headdress resembling a gravy boat stands in front of an oversize windmill: Holland. A copper-skinned woman turned sideways, her arms forming a Z, stands in front of a lopsided pyramid: Egypt. A man in a black suit and red kerchief, a bull about to rear-end him, stands in front of a Spanish-style church; the sticker reads “New Mexico,” but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. These stickers were not made by the sharpest tool in the shed.
After my session with Mrs. Goldberg, I go outside to wait for my mother. There are a couple of girls waiting for their parents, too. They are younger than I am and have tiny pom-poms in their hands. Cheerleaders. Or future cheerleaders. They are chewing gum and laughing together. Both of them have their hair in ponytails, and they are wrapped in nylon jackets. Their faces are red from the chill. At their age, I had no idea what would become of me or what I would have seen by now. I wonder if they’ll grow up to know what I know.
Our Mercedes appears outside the building, but it’s not my mom. I make out the serious figure of my dad, who pulls up with a slight halt. My heart mimics this movement. I open the door and get in.
“Hi,
beta
,” he says, and we don’t talk for the next couple of minutes, as he drives down the residential road that I myself walked down a couple of weeks before on my way to the park. When we get to Yates Avenue, I expect us to turn and head to our own subdivision, but my father gets into the lane that heads to the park. The light is red, and for a moment, I think he’s made a mistake.
“I know, Kiran. I am taking you to the park.”
“But I have to go to the library tonight. I have a book report due on Monday and I need to use three—”
“Not tonight, Kiran. If it’s due on Monday, you vill go this weekend. Ve need to talk.”
The backpack on my lap seems to exhale depressingly when he says this.
I’m so upset about not being able to construct my costume at the library that I don’t realize how bizarre it is that I am going to the park with my father. It is not bright outside as it was during my first scandalous visit, nor is it dark like the nighttime discovery of Rodney. It is orange outside, the trees and blades of grass glazed in sunset. In all the debauchery, I’d forgotten what a beautiful place this is, a peaceful, restful place. All the same, I am with my dad, and as we drive up the roadway and stop near a large willow tree, I feel the usual nervous pangs.
When my father turns off the car, I reach for the door handle, thinking that we are going to take a walk, perhaps sit under the tree. Its long, leafy tresses sway gently in the breeze, a thick carpet of shed branches at its trunk, and it looks like the sort of calm conversational spot in
Winnie the Pooh
or
The Wind in the Willows
. My father doesn’t reach for his handle, though, so I retract my gesture and look at the keys dangling from the ignition.
We sit there for a minute not talking at all. My heart is pounding in my ears again, and for a second I think that I might have a migraine. The usual cosmic cruelty continues, however, and I remain possessed of my senses.
“I vork very hard for you and your mom, Kiran,” he says. “I always have. Vhen your mom and I immigrated here in 1975, I knew that I vould have to vork hard to make it in this country. Your mom and I passed by the Statue of Liberty vith forty dollars in our pockets. And look at everything ve have today. Look at everything you have. You have alvays gotten vhat you vanted, vhen you vanted it. Vhen you vanted to take ballet, ve let you take ballet. Vhen you vanted a new backpack or a new book, ve let you buy those things. Ve’ve made sacrifices—so many sacrifices—so that you can be happy and do vell in school and make something of yourself here.
“Vhen I grew up in Delhi, I lived in a bungalow vith my parents and Gita Massi.”
Gita Auntie, my father’s sister, lives in Houston with her husband and my cousin Jaideep.
“I never got to do anything besides my schoolvork. I alvays vanted to learn how to play the
tabla
, but I never even asked my parents if I could because I knew that ve did not have enough money. And because I vorked all the time at my uncle’s bicycle shop. I alvays hoped that one day I vould have enough money to let my own kids do vhat they vanted to do, and I have seen that happen.”
He pauses here and swallows. His voice is still hoarse from the other night, and I can hear the saliva catching in his throat. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a handkerchief into which he dispenses a loud burst of air and snot. It sounds like a rubber nose that a clown might pinch. I want to laugh, but while my father is bending over to blow his horn, I happen to glance over at him and notice what I noticed about my mother the other day: he looks tired. Not only that, but he has aged. I’ve always thought of my father as the same way he’s always looked; in fact, when I picture him, I imagine him as he is in the Olan Mills portrait that we had taken three years ago—he in a gray, ’70s-style suit and red tie, my mother in a subdued black
salwaar kameez
, and I, age nine, in my own miniature gray blazer and clip-on red tie. In that picture, my father is thirty-seven, his smile rather white, his eyes, behind oversized plastic glasses, not necessarily happy or jolly but full of purpose. Up until this moment, my mental default has always imagined his teeth just as starkly white, his eyes just as active, but I see in the car, under this shedding willow, how much wear and tear his features have taken. His teeth, which are bared as he blows his nose, have turned off-white, even yellow around the edges, and his skin is somewhat patchy, darker just under the cheekbone, at his temples, and under his bottom lip.
“Vhen your mom and I first came to this country, ve both had to vork to put ourselves through college at the University of Cincinnati. I vould vork as a security guard at a bank, and she vould vork as a part-time nanny. Ve lived in a small apartment in a dangerous part of town, and ve vould have to valk straight to vork and back because the neighbors vould give us dirty looks. Men vould say bad things to your mom, and once some men almost attacked her.”
Neither my father nor my mother has ever told me this, and I imagine the fear on my mother’s face. I envision her running away from a band of hoodlums, and I crumple slightly in my seat as I see that darling woman’s face, contorted in terror as she runs to a tiny house with a crumbling porch roof and a spare light gleaming from its front window. In my mind, the house looks very much like the front of our temple—the pundit’s Upanishad-furnished residence—and then I remember my mother telling me years ago over a spontaneous batch of
idli
and
sambar
that she and my dad used to live close to the temple.
“Your mom and I put ourselves through college. Ve did not have a TV. Ve did not even have a phone for the first year that ve lived here. Ve knew nobody at first, but then ve met all of the uncles and aunties you know. Rashmi Auntie and Sanjay Uncle vere our first friends, and they really made the effort to introduce us to others.” Then he adds, “Probably because Rashmi Auntie loves to make food for people.” He chuckles, and suddenly I realize that this might just be a real bonding session instead of a showdown. I laugh, too.
My father pauses. If we were in our kitchen right now, this would be the moment when he would pull his teacup close to his lips, holding it in both hands, extracting warmth from it while staring pensively at the refrigerator. Instead, we are in this car, which is starting to become cold as the heat slinks away and the chill from outside starts to set in. As if echoing this transformation, my father’s sudden cheerfulness disappears.
“Your mom and I tried to have a baby for a few years. A few times,” he pauses again, “she did get pregnant, but…” This time, he stops. I am totally baffled. I do not understand how someone can be pregnant and not have a baby, but I don’t say anything.
“Then ve had you, Kiran. Do you know vhat the name ‘Kiran’ means?”
I don’t. How have I not thought to ask before? “No, I don’t,” I say. My voice sounds so small.
“It means ‘light.’ ‘Ray of light.’ Your mom thought it vas the perfect name. I vasn’t totally sure because ‘Kiran’ is sometimes a girl’s name.” His voice catches here. “But you veren’t a girl.”
He pauses.
“You aren’t a girl.”
I feel a buildup in my bladder, as if I’m going to wet the car seat. I wish the willow would erupt in flames, that the whole world would explode so that this moment would end.
“Your mom and I did not vork so hard for so many years so that ve could raise a son who vould act the vay you do. Ve have given you everything, and you are ruining vhat ve have done for you. So you need to think about vhat you vant to do vith all our hard vork. You have to think about how every time you play vith your mom’s things, you are hurting us. You are making our lives difficult.”
I burst into tears right as I hear this last sentence. My crying does not resemble the way people cry in movies. There is no full wail or graceful trickling of tears. My crying is choppy, broken up by unseemly heaves. My voice sounds like a goose squawking.
I have never felt so ineffective as a boy. My crying proves right everything that my father is accusing me of.
He continues, unfazed. “I do not vant to have this conversation again, Kiran. I am tired. Your mom is tired. Don’t make us tired anymore.”
With this, he starts the car and backs out of the lot. He switches gears and coasts back toward the entrance. Or exit. Dusk has fallen fast, and the sky is navy blue. The trees and the grass, the wind and the chill, the autumn—they are all still doing their thing, oblivious to the passing by of this father and son. As Krishna, did I not sit in a field and bend them to my will? How, then, can they ignore me?