Aerogrammes (14 page)

So to appease her niece, Minal Auntie has positioned Aarti in the front and center, just for the opening of the dance. It is the simplest section of the whole routine, the part they have drilled the most.

From five rows away, Minal Auntie can see Aarti’s pleats all atremble.

The girls begin the
jatiswaram
with only their necks ticking from side to side. To Minal Auntie’s great relief, every neck is on point, not one lazy neck among them. The girls open their arms, palms stiff and arched. All right arms move like the oars of a mighty ship, circling the air to the held note of a woman’s voice. Thirteen left arms sweep another circle with equal precision.

Soon enough, the ship breaks down. Twelve of the girls gather speed along with the beat, their gazes following the motions of their hands, their feet striking out and stamping to a single rhythm. Aarti is obeying the same rhythm, but with steps that belong to a later sequence. At first, it seems that her peers are her backup dancers, and she has come up with a solo of her own. She soldiers on, her eyes kohl-lined and blank, her lips a wide, terrified smear of red.

Pinky mutters something at Aarti, who looks over her shoulder and slows, like a robot powering down, then falls in
step with the rest. By now, her smile is long gone. Minal Auntie knows the feeling: there is no lonelier place in the world than where Aarti is standing now. The girls disperse into the next formation, and Aarti shuttles to the back, where she will remain for the rest of the dance.

At home, Minal Auntie maps out the formations of the next dance she will teach to her class, for the India Day Festival two months from now. She pencils X’s and O’s on a yellow legal pad and intricate arrows between them. One of the O’s is underlined. Every X and O has a chance in the front, except for the O, who will enjoy one brief moment in a middle line but otherwise will be relegated to the back. This O is Aarti.

Had Minal Auntie known that Aarti was the sort of student who needed underlining, she would have placed her in the beginner class. But Lata claimed that her daughter had attended a number of excellent dance camps in Ohio, under the auspices of some midwestern charlatan who refused to teach her students the proper names for each hand gesture. Instead of
Pathaka
,
Alapadma
, and
Katakamukha
, Aarti calls them Flat Hand, Flower Hand, and Deer Hand. She has never learned to hold her knees out when she bends them; after only a minute of
aramandi
, her knees cave in. At the school where Minal Auntie trained as a girl, Aarti’s calves would have suffered enough raps to mottle them black and blue.

“That’s terrible,” Lata says when Minal Auntie brags about her old bruises and blisters. “Thank god we don’t live in Chennai.”

Lata utters these remarks and frowns at her watch, disappointed, as always, by the time. She has just arrived to pick up Aarti from dance class, but already she has to run. In fact,
it is rare for Lata to enter the house at all; she usually beeps and waves from her minivan as the door slides shut behind Aarti. But today Lata has a favor to ask: Can Minal Auntie babysit Aarti two afternoons a week? Lata is taking an income tax course and doesn’t want to waste ten bucks an hour on a babysitter.

“I don’t know,” Minal Auntie hedges, “I’m very busy these days.”

“Oh, if you have another class, she’ll sit upstairs and read or something.”

Minal Auntie plucks at the frayed edge of her sari pallu. “I am in a book club. We get together in different-different houses. Members only.”

“A book club?” Lata’s eyes grow round and curious. “With who?”

Lata asks question after question, which Minal Auntie deflects with short answers. (Neighbors … Weekly … Whatever Oprah suggests.) “That’s wonderful,” Lata says, with a cloying delight that barely hides her disbelief. Just to end the conversation, Minal Auntie agrees to Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The most popular magazines at Foodfest are the ones that offer help. The experts grin from every cover, beaming with the belief that anyone can drop fifty pounds or build their own patio or achieve a positive outlook. Minal Auntie turns her back on her register and clutches her arms against the chill gusting from the air conditioners. In passing, the manager taps his own name tag,
BILL
, and lifts his eyebrows expectantly. She takes the button out of her pocket and pins it to her red Foodfest smock, just above her own name tag.
AM I SMILING?
the button reads.
IF NOT, YOU GET HALF OFF
.

There is little to smile about at Foodfest, where the automated registers are always beeping with customers eager to scan and bag their own items. Half the time, they jab the wrong buttons and stand there bleating for help until Minal Auntie comes to the rescue.

The cashiers have been reduced to two per shift. Minal Auntie usually finds herself paired with Krista, a black college student with the flawless air of a pageant queen, every hair slicked flat and in place. Even her eyebrows are perfect. “I get them threaded at Devon Avenue,” she says, when Minal Auntie asks if she plucks. “How come you don’t go to them? That’s your people.”

“Where is the time?” Minal Auntie says. Truthfully, she could care less about threading. Bushy eyebrows are the least of her problems.

Yesterday evening, another student quit her school in favor of Little Star Studios. Over the phone, Mrs. Tajudeen had babbled on and on about the “fun and frolic” in folk dance. “Your
bharata natyam
classes are becoming too serious for Tikku!” she chided lightly, while Minal Auntie paced the small square of her linoleum kitchen floor. She came close to confessing everything if only to hold on to one more student—how she had trouble making her mortgage payments last year, how she was forced to find a second income, how the employment agency had deemed her unskilled.

Now here she is at Foodfest, a half hour away from her home, a safe distance from the friends and acquaintances who would never guess what she has become. She punches numbers in the register and shoves the cash drawer closed when it lunges out at her. She tries to avert her gaze from the lunch station opposite, where headless chickens in a glass coffin are spinning torpidly on spits. Directly above the coffin is the
clock, which moves even more slowly. After work, she will have to speed all the way back and pick up Aarti.

Krista unscrews a small gold tin of lip gloss and holds it out to Minal Auntie. “Try this. It’ll look good on you.”

Minal Auntie frowns. “It makes your lips look wet.”

“That’s the point. It’s called Wetslicks.”

Out of boredom, Minal Auntie dabs some balm over her lips. “I’m probably too old for those things.”

“How old?”

“Forty-eight.” Minal Auntie smacks her lips together. “So? How is it?”

“Sexy,” Krista says, working her eyebrows up and down. She hands Minal Auntie a compact from her purse. In the little round mirror, Minal Auntie’s lips look glazed with Krispy Kreme frosting.

“Right?” Krista says.

Minal Auntie nods. When Krista isn’t looking, she wipes her lips against the back of her hand, leaving a gooey streak of glitter.

Minal Auntie screeches up to Aarti’s house and beeps twice. Lata and Aarti tumble out the door, Lata bolting for her car with a hasty wave in Minal Auntie’s direction. “Sorry, Auntie! Can’t talk, I’m late!” Before Minal Auntie can apologize, Lata has shut the door of her minivan.

Aarti climbs into Minal Auntie’s car with a laminated library book on her lap, her finger holding her place. Her face looks ghostly pale, as if covered in a film of dust, a different color from her throat. “What happened to you?” Minal Auntie asks.

“Nothing,” Aarti mumbles defensively. She cracks open her
book and doesn’t look up. The car has filled with the scent of Pond’s talcum powder, and though Minal Auntie is sure that its source is sitting next to her, she hasn’t the energy to question the girl. For the past thirty minutes, Minal Auntie has been gripping the wheel, weaving and speeding to get here. Now she feels drained, distant from the world reeling past her window, a chicken spinning around on a stick.

“Does it look bad?” Aarti asks suddenly.

Minal Auntie blinks at her; the world draws focus. She tries a tactful approach: “You don’t look like you,
raja
.” She gives the girl a sideways smile, but Aarti is squinting at something on Minal Auntie’s shoulder.

“What’s your button say, Auntie?”

Minal Auntie glances down at the thing. How did she pin it to her sweater when she has always, always pinned it to her smock? Next time she sees Bill, she will pin it to his forehead. “I found it on the ground. I liked the message.”

Aarti leans in to read it. “Am I smiling …?”

“Let’s stop at the IndoPak store. Do you like eating
idli-sambar
?” Aarti begins a polite refusal, while Minal Auntie wrenches the pin from her shoulder so hastily she knows she’s pulled a thread.

Like a pro, Minal Auntie enters at one end of the IndoPak Grocery and snakes her way up and down the dusty aisles without once doubling back, filling her jute bag with masalas, chai powder, and
masoor dal
, until she reaches the produce section, where no bruise or tenderness escapes her appraisal of okra. She arrives in the last aisle, the toiletries section, to find Aarti with a box of Light & Luminous in her hand.

Minal Auntie knows the commercial. Two girls, one fair-skinned and one nut-brown, go to a perfume counter. Brown
Girl catches her reflection in the mirror and looks away with the disappointment of a girl forbidden to play outside. Fair Girl confides that her own skin used to be similarly afflicted until she tried Light & Luminous. The commercial shows a brown patch of skin, its brownness lifted away in a whirlwind of flaky debris to reveal a paler shade beneath. Sometime later, the two girls joyfully reunite at the perfume counter, their skin so china white one can hardly be distinguished from the other.

“What do you want with that?” Minal Auntie asks.

Aarti looks up with a nervous laugh. “Do you think it works?”

“It’s all chemicals. Put it back.”

Aarti obeys but not without one last glance at the name on the box. She follows Minal Auntie through the checkout counter, helps carry the bags to the car, and says nothing until they are halfway home.

“A kid at school started calling me Well Done,” Aarti says. “I asked him why, and he goes, ‘Cause your mom left you in the oven too long.’ ”

Aarti plucks at the laminated plastic of her book. Minal Auntie can think of nothing to say.

“I’m not saying I wanna be super pale. I just want, you know, a normal color.”

Minal Auntie studies the road for a while. At last, she says, “Your color is your color. There is nothing to do about it.” She speaks from a place of impatience and experience, having wasted years on a similar quest for an antidote. She has smeared the skin of boiled milk onto her cheeks; she has stirred pinches of gold dust into her tea. When she was a child, a neighbor boy, Velu, insisted that if she stood outside at night, he could see only her teeth and the whites of her eyes.

For a moment, Minal Auntie feels these secrets on the brink of release—the milk skin, the desperation, the sound of Velu’s
voice in her ears—but a pickup truck in front of her brakes suddenly. She honks. The moment is gone.

Class begins as always, students trickling through the sliding door at the back of Minal Auntie’s basement. They shuck their shoes outside. They knot their shawls around their waists.

Minal Auntie is seated directly in front of the mirrors with a wood block and a stick in her hands, next to an electronic box that makes harmonium vibrations. The harmonium box, the block, and the stick are the most hallowed objects in the room. Once, when the stick fell out of Minal Auntie’s hand and Niva Patel absently toed it back to her, Niva was ordered to sit out the next three exercises.

After Minal Auntie pounds the block three times, the girls do
namaste
, a girl in the back sloppy in scooping forgiveness from the carpet. Afterward, Minal Auntie balances her stick on the block and instructs everyone to be seated. She can always pick out the naturals by the way they hold themselves even in unaware moments, how they stand with their shoulders back, their spines at attention, feet turned out. Overdoing it, Pinky Shahi sinks to the floor with one knee propped up, mimicking a movie courtesan. The graceless ones, like Aarti, collapse and hunch against the walls.

Minal Auntie stands to demonstrate the next sequence in the dance she has been teaching them, set to a
bhajan
celebrating the devotion of the poet Meerabai to Lord Krishna. Departing from her usual routines, Minal Auntie has choreographed a dance that contains an elaborate drama as its centerpiece, a tale of devotion, poison, and miracle.

There are only four roles—the beautiful Meerabai, her husband the cruel king, and two servants. To show the drama in its entirety, Minal Auntie inhabits all four roles, twirling
between avatars. First she is Meerabai fingering her sitar, swaying in ecstatic worship to Lord Krishna, whom she considers her true husband, much to the irritation of her living husband, the king. Then she is the king, spying on his wife’s worship, curling the corner of his mustache between two fingers before stalking away to his rooms. He stirs poison into a bowl of warm milk and summons his two servants. With a spin, Minal Auntie inhabits the servants, who come to the king, bowing; he points the bowl in Meerabai’s direction. They bring the bowl to her. Finally, Minal Auntie is Meerabai, setting her sitar aside. Sensing that her death lies in the bottom of the bowl, Meerabai takes it and looks to the heavens, in fear not of death but of a lifetime of worship cut short. She drinks the poison, and by the intercession of Lord Krishna, she rises, immune to pain, vivified and radiant.

“Okay?” Minal Auntie says, herself again, hands on hips.

“Auntie, that was
so good
,” Pinky says, the other girls rallying around with affirmations of “Yeah” and “Really good.” “Who gets to be the queen?”

Minal Auntie assigns the roles: Pinky as the king, Neha and Niva as the servants, and—she braces herself for an uprising—Aarti as Meerabai.