Authors: Rakesh Satyal
I made sure to steal a brand-new eyeshadow compact for tonight. My mother keeps many of her unopened compacts in a separate drawer in the bathroom, and until now I have avoided opening them. But seeing as this was such an important night, I took one of them and am now opening its shrink wrap to get to the untouched blue powder inside.
I stop just before my powdered finger touches my cheek. There, in the mirror, I see that ghostly blue glow around my face. Its intensity, as it tends to do, shifts as I look at it. My cheek flashes bluer, then my forehead, then my nose. I start to cover this disco ball face with eyeshadow, but my skin still seems to glow in and out of focus. By the time I am putting on my eyeliner, I realize that I’m having another migraine. The splotches are coming in and out, and my body feels like it’s on fire. I push through, finishing my eyes perfectly, but I smudge lipstick across my face as a head cramp overtakes me. Of all the times…and yet I should have expected it to strike me here, when I am at my most stressed.
I cannot surrender now. It is as if God Himself is giving me direction to continue and is making my skin flash in anticipation of this grand coming-out. It is no longer a hobby but my
duty
to seal my lips in brightness, to sheathe my body in my costume creation, to slide the bangles on my wrists, to wrap bead necklaces around my neck, to fasten the ankle bells to both of my feet and, at last, to crown myself with the black wig. For the last step, I stick the peacock feather into the curls and step back from the mirror.
I look absolutely perfect. As opposed to the past, this time I do not mistake the image in the mirror for someone other than myself. I do not think of that reflection as separate from me, some
Twilight Zone
Kiran staring through shiny glass. It is clearly I, through the silvery, fiery splotches that turn this bathroom into a battlefield of ceramic and stars. I am no longer playing make-believe, trying to mold myself into something I am not. I am no longer a precocious child dressed in shiny rags and synthetic, colored dust, bewigged and bedazzled in pursuit of a more exotic self. What I have forgotten during my various struggles these past few weeks is that
Kiran
would have striven for such grandeur anyway, just as
Krishna
never saw it any other way than to conquer the world with his individuality. Kiran is just as great, just as godly, just as genius as Krishna because he never settles for the mundane. Kiran fights battles and has his own snakeheads to dance on. Kiran settles for nothing but a Krishna-worthy Kiran.
I pick up my silver recorder and place it by my lips. The visual it makes is a snapshot I will never be able to erase from my memory, more indelible an image than any I have ever seen printed on Kodak paper or in the tiny window of my father’s camcorder.
I return to the “greenroom” cautiously. Everyone is in the gymnacafetorium enjoying another lip-synch performance, this one by Crystal Hicks, a rambunctious young girl who moved to our town this summer from Indianapolis. She decided to break down the walls of being the “new girl” by being a kiss-slut, and I think she has smooched everyone from John Griffin to Kevin Bartlett (to Sarah Turner, for all I know). Her mother, a pretty-faced woman with big bangs, is already rumored to be the best room mother in the school because she makes killer M&M cookies with peanut butter cookie dough. As if paying homage to her mother’s tongue for sweets, Crystal’s song of choice is “Sugar Shack.” She is wearing a pink shirt with matching pink shorts, the ends of both garments rolled up. One fat ponytail, tied with a pink ribbon, loops around her head. Crystal is holding a broken-off broomstick with a Styrofoam disc shoved onto it; the disc is covered in pink Mylar paper to make it look candy-like—an instant lollipop prop. Say what you will about the Hickses, they certainly know how to have some sugary-sweet fun.
After Crystal has done her last sashay up and down the stage, it is Tiffany Myers’s turn, and the moment the speakers pump out “Jimmy Jimmy,” I am more nervous than ever. It’s such a different nervousness from the one I feel around my father, which takes my breath hostage; from the one I feel around my classmates, which makes me hang my head and pass them as quickly and quietly as I can; from the one I feel around Ashish and Ajay and Ashok and Neha and all the other Indian kids, which takes my speech and makes it awkward and misunderstood; even from the one I feel from myself, when I feel my lust overtaking my senses and better judgment at the same time. This nervousness is a culmination. All of the components of my life have been in chaos, and all the various forms of panic I’ve experienced have curled together to make my whole body pulse.
My vision is still going in and out, and now it feels like I might have a fever. Except when you have a fever, you feel chills. The world around you feels cold because you are so hot. I feel hot but the world feels hot, too. Every time the splotches come into view, I stare through them, focusing on Tiffany to steady myself. Except Tiffany is doing a hula hoop act, so the movement of her swiveling hips isn’t exactly helping things.
I realize that there is some hubbub among the performers and that, lo and behold, it’s because I’ve gone missing and I’m up next. From here, I can see Mrs. Nevins’s crazed silhouette motioning at the kids, and I know that now is the time to step forward and leave caution to the wind. Tiffany is hand-bopping downstage, really getting the crowd into her act, and neither the audience members nor the kids lined up against the wall will be able to say anything as I rush up to the stage. As I’m thinking about what it would feel like to scurry into that throng of people amidst a swish of multicolored cloth, I find that I am doing it. I am gliding toward Mrs. Nevins and seeing her face scrunch up as she tries to examine my costume in the darkness. I see her jaw fall open as she reaches for the tape deck, and for a second I step outside myself and see what I look like as I smile at her, motion for her to push Play, and continue up the small staircase that leads to the backstage area. Tiffany is bowing and waving to the audience with her free hand while her other hand clutches the hula hoop.
The moment I hit centerstage and poise my flute to my lips—the lights bright in my vision and making the splotches even bigger—the moment I hear the collective hush come over the audience, the moment I hear the cheery synthesizers of the music begin, I understand what an absolutely luxurious moment it truly is. How many times do you get to stand in front of an audience that has no other responsibility than to see you unveiled in your full glory?
The moment Whitney hits her first wailing notes—“There’s a
boy
I know…!”—I heave my body into dancing like I’ve never done before. Both Marcy and Hema-the-nappy-carnation-lady would be mortified to see the part-ballet, part-
khatak
, part-bananas technique that I employ, but I have never felt so free and easy with my body. It is as if I am channeling all of the intense devastation of this migraine into my art, and I truly feel like an artist who is sacrificing himself for his aesthetic. My costume feels like a sensuous mist around me. When I kick up my leg in an arabesque tinged with jazz, the magenta silk surrounds it, and I can feel it drop with me as I pull away and scurry to the other end of the stage. Every once in a while, I hear myself emitting a low rumble that modulates into a high-pitched note. I am not so much singing as I am growling. I can’t be sure whether the audience is even hearing these noises, but it is as if my mind keeps shifting between that mirror Kiran and the unified Kiran who is both in and
in front of
the mirror at the same time. I am onstage and watching the stage. I am surrounding me, and it as if I am very self-conscious and free at once. At one point, I do a move that I’ve never even practiced: I tumble on the stage and do a head roll, then stand up and jump, my costume swishing around me; from deep down somewhere, a part of me is telling my body to do something completely outrageous—grotesque, even—so that my mind can be shocked and then marvel in the audaciousness. It’s like hearing someone you love talk in a voice that you never knew they could make, like the time my father got a gold watch from my mother at Holi and instead of his usual lecture about why she shouldn’t spend money on gifts of any kind, he lovingly cooed, “I
looooove
it”: you feel like you know something for certain, and then it changes its colors and smacks you upside the head with its daring. At first, the change surprises and unsettles you, but then you take in the surprise and embrace it and wish life could always be so gloriously unpredictable. When I first thought of the talent show this fall—what seems like ages ago, while scratching Barbie smiles off my desk—who knew that I would be onstage doing this? Wearing this costume, this skin, choosing this song, having gleaned a life’s worth of debauchery in a few short weeks? Everything in my world, everything in
the
world, can be as capricious as this act—the way I am spinning in as fast a circle as I can, the lights, the visual muck of the crowd, the hem of my own golden-magenta creation, the strands of black hair flung across my powdered face, the entrance of a blue-flame boy into the world. What is a more beautiful thought than the one that questions everything you take for granted?
I am so caught up in my dancing that I do not realize I have stopped spinning but my vision has not. The swirls of the audience and stage in my eyes have overtaken the splotches, and now I cannot tell which way is up and which way is down. By instinct, I lay myself on the floor, knowing that if I stay standing I will lose my equilibrium and fall to the floor anyway. I am now rolling around onstage like Jennifer Beals, except I have an enormous fabric garment on me that tangles up and makes one big magenta and gold swishy mess. The wig is almost falling off now because of the sweat pouring out of me, and Whitney’s voice pierces higher as if in response to the chaos I am feeling: “Oh, how will I knooooooooow?!” To me, her voice sounds like the point just before music becomes microphone feedback—it is caterwauling and scratchy, a glorious screech. And just when her glorious screech resounds for the last time, I feel all of the swirls come crashing down on me—not solely at my eyes but all around me and on top of me. Then it all goes black.
It takes me a second to realize that I have not fainted but have simply lost my sight. I know this because after the music stops, I can hear the audience’s silence. Which is not really silence. They still make noises: the crinkling of the paper programs in their hands as they fan themselves, the scuffing of their sneakers as they teeter from foot to foot, the many errant coughs that you always hear in public places, the quiet sobbing of a baby. All the while, I cannot tell if I am imagining a wind passing through the gymnacafetorium or if it’s the large metal fans that Mrs. Nevins has had the janitors put in the back of it to cool people. I lie here for a moment and take in both the silence and the perpetual noise of this ambushed crowd.
Then the clapping begins, and before unconsciousness joins my blindness, I know—somewhere deep down I just know, regardless of what has happened these past few weeks, regardless of the fact that I didn’t think they were there—that it’s my parents who’ve begun it.
Sitting in my hospital bed feels like being in my parents’ bathroom all over again. I’m in another white room, although the brightness in here comes not from a skylight but from the humming peppermint sticks of fluorescent bulbs that line the ceiling. Although it is nighttime, a good hour since a collection of hands lifted me offstage and into an ambulance, the lights seem to act like nocturnal sunlight, tricking me into being wide-awake when I should be asleep. Or
trying
to be asleep in my bed at home.
It all happened so fast, through the veil of blackness. I kept mixing up the whispering of the fabric around me with the whisper of people’s voices. The voices of my parents—urgent but measured—soon morphed into the baritone of a doctor whose hands are cold and refreshing in their touch.
I smell him before I see him. He smells like Listerine and sweet soap, and he breathes through his nose, swatting my skin in soft, warm breaths.
My vision is still dodgy as he places his stethoscope against my chest. The touch of the cool metal, when experienced with the sensation of having his breath and hands and voice around me, makes my body temperature go into overdrive all over again. After so many days of alternating my body’s makeup—hot-blooded, cold-blooded—I can’t decide what my normal setting is.
I want so desperately to keep this man separate from those men in the magazine and from the men in the woods, but I can’t. I can see him only on a canvas of lust, not a doctor but a specimen. I can only identify the moments as he examines me as sexual, and a profound sadness comes over me because of this.
Then I hear my parents come into the room and immediately zap out of that haze, like when someone walks in on you peeing.
“It’s a classic case of fatigue, most likely from lack of sleep and dehydration,” the doctor says to my parents briefly but sympathetically. I avoid looking directly at them, mainly because I am so tired of seeing varying expressions on their faces. Will they greet me with anger, disappointment, frustration? Concern? Dare I say it—joy?
I am so busy thinking about my parents that I almost miss the next part of the conversation.
“We noticed in your son’s paperwork that you give him a rather large dosage of daily medication.”