Authors: Rakesh Satyal
When we get home, my mother is sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. The TV is on—more news. She looks up as we enter, and I expect her face to be hardened. Instead, she smiles sweetly and asks how my day was. Her eyes are compassionate. Maybe she realizes that she had something to do with the way I turned out. The photo album of her in
khatak
garb and the way she made me adore it—does she remember that?
My father goes into the hall to hang up his coat, then goes to his study and starts working. I can hear the usual rhythmic sounds of his work—the turning of pages, the quick clack of his fingers on the calculator, his throat-clearing. My mother serves me
pakora
with tangy coconut chutney. I am finishing them when my father appears with his camcorder.
“Vhat are you eating, Kiran?” he asks happily. It is as if the park moment happened months ago. He has expected me to take it in as a piece of information, the way his calculator takes in figures. He does not seem to remember my tears, but all I can hear is that squawking. Looking into the small screen that he turns to me as usual, I swear that
I
look older, too.
We will never be like each other. I will never respond emotionally the way he does. We will never be more than two containers, full of the same blood but different in size, shape, owners. His belongs to the mind, and mine belongs to the heart.
Some mornings you just wake up feeling a little evil.
Not that I slept for very long. I decided last night that instead of trying to sew my costume together in the library, where a prim librarian might find me out and banish me from the premises forever, I would do it at night when my parents were snoring and fast asleep. They are a loud pair, a couple of sleepy tigers in the jungle of their master bedroom, and I have a theory that you could blow up my end of the house and they would sleep through it. The thing that baffles me is how each of them is even capable of sleeping with the other snoring so loud alongside. I guess their sounds cancel each other out.
While my parents’ noses rumbled, I turned on my bedside lamp, which has a shade with stars and moons all over it. I didn’t turn on the main light in the room, lest the snore balance in my parents’ room shift and send one to find the crack of light under my door. (A kiran giving away a Kiran, as it were.) I spread my mother’s old magenta sari on the floor of my room and sized it up. I had torn up my sketch that day when my mother told me that I was not going to participate in the talent show, but recreating the design was easy, and I found that something guided me last night and made me a more capable seamstress than usual.
“Tailor,” I heard a ghost of my father say, in the same stern tone he had used with me that evening in the park. Not that he would want me to be a tailor, either. The only needle it would have been acceptable for me to hold was a syringe while administering a vaccine to some patient—every Indian parent’s dream.
It wasn’t until I had my pink-handled scissors in my hands that I realized I was cutting up the sari. It might have made more sense for me to just wear it the way it was, or perhaps as a different sort of wrap, crisscrossing it through my legs. But as I tried to envision my drawing in my head again, I noticed that the sweep of the costume was much grander than a simple wrap around my body. The costume I had fashioned in that drawing was made of many different parts—a cinched top with gold trim, a pant-skirt combination edged with gold, a headdress of ribbons. In order to make those different things, I would have to divvy up this swath of fabric and make each component separately. So I cut the fabric up and sewed in a frenzy. It all happened more easily than I could have imagined. By the time the sun was beginning to creep back into the sky, I had finished the basic parts of the outfit.
So I am headed to school with my backpack full of cloth again, telling my mother that I have a last-minute ballet rehearsal after school and asking if she can pick me up at seven. She gives me a suspicious look, as well she should, but for some miraculous reason lets me go on my merry way all the same.
The costume still needs some smoothing out and some extra adornment. And I know exactly where I am going to get those things. I just have to wait until the end of the school day. Then I will make my move.
Nothing else would have brought Cody, Donny, Sarah, and Melissa together but me. The four of them have taken to greeting each other whenever they see each other, and at recess, they actually spend time playing together instead of staying on opposite ends of the playground. The four of them chat at the border of the blacktop, before it meets the grass. They giggle and look my way from time to time. I have made the mistake of staying within their line of sight and not taking my recorder to The Clearing. The thing is, I can’t help but observe the four of them. How did Sarah and Melissa, otherwise “cool” girls, end up with a hunchback like Cody and an ostrich like Donny?
Then again, Donny isn’t
that
miscast as their friend. He is showing signs of becoming a true man, and given that he can pass for an actual basketball player, it is only a matter of time before Sarah and Melissa become basketball cheerleaders and start vying for his affections. For these girls, a boy’s early-onset acne is nothing compared to the promise of sports stardom.
But Cody. How did Cody make it past the social barrier? He is scrawny, and sometimes I think that Donny only entertains his desire to play basketball so that he can look large next to his opponent. All the same, Cody, in his extra-baggy hooded sweatshirts and oversize jeans—billowy monstrosities of fabric with the sole aim of concealing his deformity—gets to laugh with Sarah and Melissa and be part of their clique.
But why am I dwelling on such trifles in the first place? I have a plan in motion that I should be focusing on, and a giddiness comes over me as I get closer to its execution. There is only a week until the talent show, and the next few days are going to be crucial to giving my predecessor His due on stage.
The last bell of the day finally rings, and students pour outside to the blacktop again, this time to pile onto their respective buses, which pull up alongside the building like whinnying horses at Churchill Downs. Most of the teachers are outside ushering children while the rest are scurrying around the building, gathering their things as quickly as possible so they can get out of this hellhole for the weekend. Principal Taylor herself, in a crisp black power suit with shoulder pads the size of Portobello mushrooms, paces between the main entrance to the school, where the parents of afternoon kindergarten students pick them up, and the back entrance, where the buses are ready to leave.
I stand in a small nook of drinking fountains between the entrances. People rarely use these fountains because there is another pair right beside the back entrance, and so I am able to stall here while most people push past. A couple of times, someone gives me a baffled expression, wondering why I’ve stuffed myself back here, but in those cases, I simply lean over as if I’m having a sip of water. Some kids give me a smirk, assuming that I ended up back here because I’m too defenseless to make it down the hall without getting pushed to the side. I respond with the weak expression they want to see.
Soon the school begins to quiet down, and the last of the buses pulls away, a whimpering cloud of exhaust left in its wake. Principal Taylor’s massive figure darkens the doorway as she comes back inside, and I duck into the nook, hiding myself from her view. I hear her high heels clop down the hallway back to her office, and soon there is nothing left but the chugging sound of the school’s shoddy heating system and the swish of an errant piece of paper here and there.
I walk down the hall, passing a few doorways where teachers are still packing up their things. I tiptoe past, trying not to make any noise. Usually there are children walking about like this on weekdays because there is some sort of class or event going on—like my dance class, or the latchkey program. But Fridays are different. On Fridays, our latchkey program is virtually empty. I’ve heard that sometimes Camille Huff, a doe-faced black girl with wispy hair and a wardrobe that includes about twenty different striped sweaters, is the only person there. But aside from her and Principal Taylor, who must eventually trot down to her pink Mary Kay Cadillac in the parking lot and speed home, there are very few people left here. In fact, I am pretty certain that the one person whom I want gone is gone by now.
I approach the art room carefully. It dawns on me that perhaps I’ve waited too long to come down here. Mrs. Buchanan might have already locked up for the weekend, preventing me from entering her room. I tiptoe closer and tuck myself into a small crack behind an art display case, which has a collection of Thanksgiving dioramas. Or at least that’s what it seems the assignment was. There are very few Indians in the proceedings from what I can see. There are plenty of deranged pilgrims—some of them are colored green and purple and gray. Then I realize that those are the Indians. I swear I can see a tiny dot of red crayon on one of their foreheads, but I avert my eyes, trying not to think about this garbled cultural interpretation.
Someone is moving around inside the art room. Not just someone—Mrs. Buchanan. I can hear her massive shoes stomping around. At one point, I hear a bunch of keys jingling, and I identify the sound as Mrs. Buchanan’s enormous mitt scooping them up and putting them in her cardigan. I should have thought this plan through a little better. How am I supposed to get into the classroom before Mrs. Buchanan locks the door? Then I hear her shoes coming to the door and realize that she’s coming out. She’ll lock the door and I’ll have missed my chance.
A miracle happens, though. Mrs. Buchanan leaves the room wearing a fir green cardigan and a driftwood-rough skirt and heads down the hallway to the ladies’ room. The door to her room is wide open. I scurry into it the way I used to scurry to the basement to get my Country Crock. I try not to think of the way that ended up, although I
have
been eating Butterfingers and other buttery things to tide me over, so anything’s solvable.
The art room is sort of scary at the end of the day. It might have been bustling before, but now it’s ghostly. Nothing is more terrifying than a bunch of half-finished turkeys made out of two-liter Coke bottles, and that is exactly what sits on one of the large workman tables. They are faceless at this point, only their torsos painted brown and their tails sprouting primary-colored feathers. I crawl behind their table and wait on all fours. Part of me wants to watch the doorway so that I can see Mrs. Buchanan return, but it’s better to stay entirely hidden until she has left. Not looking at her ugly mug is clearly the better option.
Soon enough, Mrs. Buchanan comes into the room. She makes strange noises to herself. She grumbles a lot, and I can’t tell if she’s actually saying words or if it’s gibberish that comes forth of its own accord. Her legs make a scratchy, swishy sound due to her stockings. Every time her feet hit the ground, it sounds like she’s dropped something. She moves around a lot, and at one point I think she’s headed for the turkey table I’m under. Thankfully, she swerves and goes to the marker wall, an intricate patchwork of cubby holes that have all the different kinds of markers we use in class. She spends more time than is sane organizing the markers, making sure they’re all in their right places. I can tell every time she finds a marker out of place because she makes yet another grumbling noise—a gurgle, really. I get so tired of waiting on my hands and knees that I end up sprawling myself on the ground, eventually resting my chin on my hands like an angel in the Raphael painting that women in this town wear silkscreened on white T-shirts.
Finally
, she walks over to her desk and hoists up what I can only assume to be an elephant. In other words, her bag. There is a quiet click as she turns out the lights, and then there is the turning of her key in the door. She departs down the hallway, the sound of her shoes like a stampede passing in the distance.
For the first few minutes, I stay under the desk. Not because I think that Mrs. Buchanan might return—although the thought does cross my mind—but because I am temporarily paralyzed at how exciting a feeling it is to be in this room after hours. No sentinel Buchanan, no castigating Sarah and Melissa, Cody and Donny. It dawns on me that this school is not such an awful place when the awful people are taken out of it. It’s a place where I come to learn, where I’ve built my intelligence—especially with Mrs. Goldberg, who is one of the only nonawful people.
Still, I have a feeling that Saraswati Herself, goddess of education and learning, would not appreciate how I eventually wriggle myself out from under the desk and look around the room with a wicked grin.
I spread my costume out on one of the tables not covered with pop poultry. Although my sewing—
tailoring
—is not too shabby, the fabric still looks a little bare. So I set out to find what I came here for: ostentatious ornamentation. Mrs. Buchanan’s room is full of viable materials: rainbow-colored beads (fat ones, thin ones, bright ones, dark ones), glitter (which comes in long plastic bottles with white twist-on tops), colored glue (either fluorescent or dark like chocolate and caramel), yarn (some of it braided with silver or gold threads to give it extra shimmer), paint (some in tiny little jars with black caps, some in little tubes that have been squeezed and twisted by reckless little hands, some in large plastic bottles that show how thick and brightly colored the liquid they bear actually is), construction paper (regular-sized or legal-sized, every pile composed of different-colored sheets so that from the side they look like a rainbow that’s been ironed). These materials are scattered all over the room, as if in stations, since Mrs. Buchanan doesn’t have a proper supply closet. So I have to take a handful of each type of material and bring it to the table where I’ve spread my garment, as if I’m the sole doctor performing a complex surgical procedure on a patient.
By the time I’ve finished gluing and weaving everything together, I hold an assortment of shining armor in my hands. I realize that I haven’t just crafted something that Krishna would wear. I’ve fashioned a conglomerate of all the garments that I’ve seen the gods and goddesses wear in those paintings. There is something of Lakshmi and Saraswati’s saris in the way that the “shirt” falls, but there is also something of the puffy pants that Krishna and his warrior friends wear in their pursuits through hills, fields, jungles, battlefields. I even have the idea to thread together a large number of beads that I can wear like long chains around my neck. They look like the large carnation garland that the elephant-headed Ganesh wears in His portraits or like a be-jeweled version of the cobra around Shiva’s neck. They also resemble the necklaces that Madonna used to wear in her early videos. As I start putting away all of the materials and wait for the glue to dry, I start humming “Dress You Up in My Love.”