Born Confused Page 2

  Next year we’re going to be seniors—and then what? It was this summer that could make all the difference. I stared down at the new image of me, the plastic fantasy in my hand. This could be my ticket. I could be her.

  The corridor clock jumped two minutes forward.

  It was the first day of the rest of my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  third eye

  I kicked off my shoes on the porch, then dropped off my books on one of the twin beds. Looking at the second twin I wondered how long it had been since Gwyn had slept over. Felt like ages. Felt like Dylan.

  I didn’t have too long, but went to leave the roll I’d just finished off in my favorite place in the whole house, perhaps the world: my darkroom. Or, my darkening room, as my mother mistakenly called it. (This had led to much alarm for Meera Maasi—my aunt, her sister—who felt I should instead be coating myself in turmeric, or at least exfoliating on a regular basis to lighten my skin rather than pass too much time in a darkening room; I think she feared we had tanning beds installed in the nether parts of our home.)

  Down the stairs, through the basement, and into the small sacred space at the back.

  My parents had helped me set it up last year. The room used to be a sort of bathroom area. I think my folks had in mind another bedroom area for the burgeoning family we never ended up being, or that it could be used as spare space if we ever brought Dadaji or any other relative to live with us, which we never ended up doing. And so they figured since no one was using the basement anyways it couldn’t hurt if I were to pursue my hobby tucked away in the closet. Which suited me just fine. No one bothered me here; I was in an exclusive club of one, with the only password. And I actually spent more time down here than in my bedroom, beginning pretty much from the moment I’d converted it.

  I looked now at the space: my enlarger, protected from sink splash by a sheet of cardboard off the box the household computer had come in. The developer trays. Stop bath and fixer trays, hose coiled up serpentine in the sink; whenever the safelight was on it looked like a tiny anaconda, waiting to strike. The print washing tray lodged by the sink and my paper stash. The focus finders, which made me feel like Nancy Drew hot on a case. Stirrers, squeegee. Masking easel.

  And, finally, the pictures on the line.

  Everywhere: Gwyn. She was all over the photographs hanging to dry. Gwyn in A Hall, a Beginner’s Philosophy book in focus in hand, her partial head blurred like a spinning top. Gwyn in an empty classroom, pledging to the flag with one hand and adjusting her bra strap behind her back with the other. Gwyn giving off double peace signs in a tiny-teed, pleathered pose on the scintillating hood of Dylan’s car.

  My memory filled in the early sunburn below the pseudo-punk safety-pinned gashes in her white tee, the unabashed red of the pleather, the blinding azure sun of that day and the way it had made her eyes burn like liquid metal. Looking at this black-and-white of a red, white, and blue moment, Gwyn appeared the very image of the American Dream itself, the blond-rooted, blond-haired, blue-eyed Marilyn for the skinny generation. And if I was her reverse twin—the negative to her positive—that made me? The Indian nightmare? The American scream?

  She’d told him I was the Indian girl. The Indian girl. Somehow neither description rang completely true to me in terms of how I felt inside, but the thing was I’d never really consciously thought of myself as American, either. Of course I did the Pledge, too, along with everybody else for years of mornings, but like everyone else I wasn’t really thinking about the words. I mean, I definitely wanted liberty, like Gwyn had with the car keys and no curfew, and justice for all would be great, especially in high school where people were definitely not created equal (proof: cheerleaders). But I didn’t know if that had so much to do with the stars and stripes; it seemed to be more about the jeans and teams.

  So not quite Indian, and not quite American. Usually I felt more along the lines of Alien (however legal, as my Jersey birth certificate attests to). The only times I retreated to one or the other description were when my peers didn’t understand me (then I figured it was because I was too Indian) or when my family didn’t get it (clearly because I was too American). And in India. Sometimes I was too Indian in America, yes, but in India, I was definitely not Indian enough.

  India. I had few memories of the place, but the ones I held were dream clear: Bathing in a bucket as a little girl. The unnerving richness of buffalo milk drunk from a pewter cup. My Dadaji pouring tea into a saucer so it would cool faster, sipping from the edge of the thin dish, never spilling a drop. A whole host of kitchen gods (looking so at home in the undishwashered unmicrowaved room). Meera Maasi crouching on the floor to sift the stones from rice. Cows huddled in the middle of the vegetable market, sparrows nesting on their backs. Hibiscus so brilliant they looked like they’d caught fire. Children with red hair living in tires. A perpetual squint against sun and dust. The most delicious orange soda I’d ever drunk—the cap-split hiss, and then the bubbling jetstream down a parched throat.

  But mainly all my memories of India were memories of Dadaji. When he died the entire country seemed to come unhitched, floated off my mental map of the world and fell off the edge, to mean nothing anymore, just a gaping hole fast filling with water. And at the same time the place I had known grew fixed in my imagination, rooted in memory. When my grandfather saw me that last time, he beheld me like he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. He called me by my mother’s name, Shilpa, and then when she stepped in behind me and it all fell into place, the weight of all those years in between visits was visible in his slumped shoulders. To me he’d looked the same, wearing low over a white lungi a familiar moss-and-maroonplaid shirt that I realized later had been my father’s.

  In fact all sorts of items that mysteriously disappeared from our Springfield home seemed to pop up all over the little flat where Dadaji had lived with Meera Maasi and Dilip Kaka and my cousins. It had been a fuller household at one time: Dadaji had lit the flame to the pyre for his wife, the grandmother I summoned up only as a warmly glinting climate. Then he had to do the same for his son, Sharad, the Mama uncle I also remembered faintly in physical detail, though lushly in atmosphere: an ashy dusk, the page-turn of wings, half-whistle half-hum. Dadaji made it through all these things still standing, until he slipped on his chappals coming home from the garden with marigold for the morning pooja, falling hard, his hip crushed against the petals; how a tiny thing could still create a big hurt.

  My cousins were a little older than me: Sangita, the quiet one, sporting soda-bottle glasses from very early on; her eyes receded behind the thick lenses to rain-stilled crater depths, and the rest of her pretty much vanished behind Kavita. Kavita—the one who was buried in the books at NYU now, making up premed credits in an intensive summer program—used to be pretty boisterous: a chairtipper, a tree-climber, her whooping laugh shaking the branches as she monkey-jumped about. The two were always dressed in clothes I’d forgotten I had, or that I’d been searching frustratedly for through all the closets of the house.

  Meera Maasi called these dresses frocks, which sounded like an expletive the way it spat forth from her thin mouth—and which I preferred to the actual expletive it resembled because the F-word still didn’t come naturally to me. She put the word to vipid use when she chided me, in my Osh Kosh B’Goshes, for not being properly attired, which I found ironic considering her own daughters were so often to be found garbed in my duds—the dress with the megaradiied purple polka dots, the blue-jean skirt with the rainbow patterns on the back pockets, stiff pink-and-white taffeta numbers that looked like the result of some inadvisable union between a balle-rina’s tutu and a first communion dress, the cumulus of fabric floating around my young sister-cousins’ rail-thin bodies.

  I was the American cousin, the princess, the plumped-up one: Kavita never tired of pinching my cheeks, which I hated; they both giggled even when I’d said nothing funny and hovered around me, serving me first from the pots of fluffy rice and the silver thal
is; they were always hungry to hear stories about America. Had I ever been on an escalator? Did girls talk to boys at my school? (Wide eyes when I said yes.) Was it true the stores stayed lit all night and supermarkets had aisles of just one thing and doors that slid miraculously open before you? Had I ever met a cowboy? (Kavita began to call me her cowgirl cousin when I told her I’d once ridden a horse.) They marveled at how much I ate, how quickly I spoke. At night, they gathered with homemade pista kulfi and the rest of the household to watch reruns of I Love Lucy on the remote-uncontrolled television (which also looked vaguely familiar to me), laughing uproariously and slapping their knees at things I found cheesy at best. They sang “I Want to Be in America” from West Side Story—well, just that one line, over and over, but with surprisingly authentic Spanish accents. They begged me to teach them new songs.

  Dadaji could sit for hours listening to me, too, but I didn’t feel like such a circus freak around him, even though—or perhaps because—he didn’t understand a word of English. And me and Marathi—well, I didn’t know enough to get me to the other side of the room; sure, when I was a baby those few months in India I’d spoken it in jigsaw pieces with him. But not since America, where I must have checked any memory of the language at customs. This was Dadaji’s constant sore point with my parents: Aaray Ram, Krishna, and anyone else who cared to listen, how could they have been so cruel as to cut off their own flesh and blood from one another through this ultimate act of linguistic negligence?

  —This America you speak of is like a dream, he told me one time, Kavita casually translating.—I am too old to travel. And it breaks my heart I cannot picture your life there. Make it real to me, rani.

  Rani, I understood; he was the one in the world who called me this. My princess, my queen. I’d been lying next to him on the bed, drifting into jet-lagged sleep. Gusts of sweet tobacco-smelling air skimmed my dreams. When I opened my eyes later, disoriented and dazed, I could hear the slap of wet laundry on concrete in the other room and Kavita’s high merry voice, teasing someone as usual. Out the slatted window, children were playing cricket and making cricket noises; sparrows convened noisily in the grill. And next to me, in a faded pair of my father’s pajamas, was Dadaji; I realized then he’d stayed beside me the whole time, his hand inches from my forehead, waving the flies from my face before they touched down so I could sleep undisturbed. He was watching me with eyes full of questions.

  When I got back to America I started taking photographs for him. He was my number one fan: eager, insatiable. And he responded to everything, often with sketches and shots of his own, the pale blue airmail stationery addressed in his tiny slanty script turning the inside of our mailbox azure with a faraway sky. We were going to get around this language thing! It seemed so simple: We’d use pictures to talk. So I sent him pictures of any and everything. Even the most inconsequential snap (i.e., my locker door) he would gobble up as if it were straight off the wall of a museum.

  After Bobby O’Malley broke up with me, I sent Dadaji pictures of the street-in-progress where we’d pulled our first kisses from each other, a lone lamp burning in the distance. They were all dark, grainy, a little underexposed; I think I’d used the wrong ASA. I’d labeled them: Some shots of the neighborhood. When he wrote back, his reply was: You don’t need him. You just need a better camera. Focus on the light next time. I couldn’t figure out how he’d known. My parents asked me about that one when they’d translated the letter, but I played dumb at the time; the last thing I’d wanted to do then was talk about Bobby O’Malley.

  In the same letter, Dadaji sent a money order to my parents, the equivalent of too many rupees, with the specific instructions that it was to be used only for the purchase of a “serious” camera for my birthday.

  And that’s how I got her, my third eye, which is why I call her Chica Tikka, for the powder my mother keeps in a little pot in the kitchen temple—the scarlet dust her own mother pressed between her brows the morning she left for America. Chica Tikka, I imagined, could see far far away, even to where Dadaji was now. Whenever I took a shot, loaded a roll, I felt that hand inches from my face, safeguarding the dream. Whenever I peered through the lens I could nearly see him looking back at me from the other end—from a lamppost, a flower bed, even Gwyn’s ever-ready grin—and with so much love in his eyes I had to click to keep the tears from coming.

  I haven’t gone back to India so I haven’t really seen the way in which he is not there, how that singing space has surely taken on his shape. All I knew was the pale blue letters stopped coming to me, though there seemed to be more from Meera Maasi to my mother now, especially since Sangita’s wedding preparations began. I missed the letters, but I had the camera. No one truly understood why I was so attached to it, or why I liked spending so much time in the darkening room. But it was in this world where chemicals collided to coax images suddenly up out of sheer darkness that I felt most he was just beside me, abeyant, and all it would take to bring him out of shadow would be a single moment of the right chemistry.

  —Beta! Your father’s home! my mother called.—Are you ready, birthday girl?

  I stepped out of darkness. My eyes always throbbed when I did this too abruptly; maybe that’s why babies keep theirs squeezed shut for a while after entering the world. Too much light.

  —Coming, I said.

  CHAPTER 3

  the wish in your mouth

  The birthday shopping thing had been a ritual ever since I crashlanded into puberty. Basically, what would happen was my parents would take me to the mall and let me pick out a few of my own presents, and then they’d make me not look while they purchased some of these items, which would then mysteriously appear wrapped in oddly shaped boxes and last year’s Christmas paper on my actual birthday.

  It wasn’t really a statement of my newfound independence, my crossing that department store boundary from the child to adult section, this choosing-for-myself-since-puberty deal. This was simply around the time my parents stopped understanding what I wanted and I stopped understanding what they wanted me to want.

  The ritual usually worked according to an unspoken barter system: one proper item for every errant-ways one. For example, last year I’d received a “nice” dress (white, long sleeves, with a sort of pinafore that seemed ideal for bobbing for apples) and a pair of hiphugger bell bottoms that my mother told me made me look like those hippy-hop boys who’s dhugrees are always sneaking up on them.

  The mall ritual usually followed the same pattern, and today was no different. When we got there, following my mom’s instructions, my dad spent an enormous amount of time circling around the parking lot trying to get a spot two inches away from Macy’s, even though half the lot was empty just a little farther back.

  (I should mention that my mother didn’t like for me to drive when she was in the car. She said she didn’t have the stomach for it—this coming from a woman who’d worked the intensive-care unit and delivered babies, but it was true: The few times she’d been in this unfortunate scenario she’d gripped the edge of the seat so hard her knuckles blanched like almonds, and began invoking gods from all sorts of religions under her breath. Hare Ram, Allah, Jesus. Calling upon other faiths was something she did only when she was very nervous.)

  My father’s reverse parking job was followed by a stroll through Macy’s complete with my mother aaraying and ahhing with equal enthusiasm at anything diamond or cubic zirconia, and graciously accepting every scent sample that fluttered her way from the perfectly eyelined girls swaying around beachily on high heels; she would thank them with a girlish giggle, as if they spritzed for her alone. By the time we exited the cosmetics department she smelled of Obsession on her left wrist (even though she owned it, fittingly, she could never resist), Trésor on her right, and Samsara on her neck—a discordant bouquet coming together to create something more along the lines of eau de nail polish remover than anything else.

  On to clothing, where my dad pointed out what he considered to be a “pl
easant” nightgown for me (a Victorian contraption that even Jane Eyre might find constraining). Meanwhile, I was longingly eyeing two-sizes-too-small jeans on mannequins with impossibly slim, nippleless bodies that had nothing to do with my own. By which point my father was already bored and took off to check out spy gadgets, with a plan to meet us in forty-five minutes by the potted palms—thereby liberating me to manipulate my mother, by now woozy and pliable from inhaling all those fumes, into going places she wouldn’t have dared moments before.

  —Ma? I said. We were passing the one way-out store in the mall, which sold T-shirts with Bob Marley pictures on them and incense like we bought in India but much more expensive.

  —I suppose you want to go look at the camera schamera business now? she said.

  —Well, actually I wanted to know if we can go to Style Child.

  That was Gwyn’s favorite store; it had just opened, and there was even a Manhattan branch in one of the Villages, so it had to be cool.

  My mother’s face lit up.

  —Clothes! she said.—Now that is the normal teenage girl thing. Let’s go find you a nice outfit!

  The moment we approached Style Child, with its androgynous pink-haired punk rock mannequins reining in (and stepping on) stuffed Dalmatian puppies with snake belt leashes, my mother’s face fell.

  —Are you sure this is where you want to look? she said.—How about somewhere feminine, like the Ann Taylor or Laura Ashley?

  —I’m sure, I said.

  One mannequin was in a white mini with zips all the way up both sides. A studded metallic belt that was itself half the width of the mini (we were getting into nano-fractions here) slunk anglingly down the front. The top was a white skintight one-shoulder-bare deal with a single sleeve. It was the kind of outfit Gwyn could pull off sans problem but that set alarm bells off through my head.