Blue Boy (3 page)

I want you to remember how I described Sarah and Melissa. Please imagine it. Please imagine the saccharine smiles on their faces. Imagine the countless sleepovers they must have, the boys they discuss with open-jawed squeals, the dress-ups and the dolls and the compacts of makeup, the slam books and kisses against their arms. Imagine the conspiratorial wickedness, the cunning plotting, the yearbook searches, seeking out that perfect victim. Imagine them settling on the foreign kid, the one who wears bright, primary-colored sweatsuits, the one who sings to himself, moves his hips and dances when he thinks no one is looking, who draws intricate pictures of pretty girls, sometimes, even, of these conniving girls. Imagine the “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” scene from
Grease
, that bevy of tough chicks, smoking and boozing and stuffing their bras with quilted Kleenex, then think of what those girls were like in elementary school, what Rizzo did with her biting sarcasm and animalistic instincts before sexing them away in the back of secondhand convertibles.

Got that picture? Can you see those girls? Now imagine what those heartless hussies would do if they saw the foreign kid get a splinter up his ass.

Hear that banshee wail of laughter? Now imagine being the squashed cherry tomato on the beam, realizing you need to modify your moniker for your “best friends”: they are not really best friends, but, rather, the best friends
you can get
. The best friends you can get are two girls who laugh at the grimace of pain you make; laugh at the way you wobble your way off the beam—
the splinter coming with you
; laugh as you hop, wincing, across The Clearing, which seems all the more enormous now; laugh at how you have to go up to Mrs. Moehlman, the teacher on duty, and tell her you have to go to the nurse’s office for…

“For what, honey?”

“For…I got a…I got a tummyache.”

“A
tummy
ache? Honey, then why are you grabbing your behind?”

It really doesn’t help that Mrs. Moehlman is wearing sunglasses from which two mini-Kirans look back at you, grimacing and looking mortally constipated.

Over the next few days, the beautiful girls I once deemed my saviors lead the anti-Kiran rally. They’re like political muckrakers to the Kiran Sharma campaign, whispering to people about the extraordinary flamboyances of my schoolgoing career. They bring up the time I went to Principal Taylor and asked her if I could go home to see if the cabbage I had planted in the backyard had grown into a Cabbage Patch Kid yet. They unearth the fact that for three days in third grade, I showed up to class wearing a heavy fog of my mom’s Elizabeth Arden Red Door perfume until Mrs. Walters had to pull me aside and tell me it was causing my next-desk neighbor Chris Johnson to break out in hives. Then they uncover the time I had a copy of Judy Blume’s
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
, that hearty tribute to burgeoning female pubescence, in my desk. I even wanted to do a book report on it, but Mrs. Fisher told me it was too advanced a reading level for second grade, though I suspected this was not the real reason, a) because I was already attempting Sherlock Holmes stories by then, and b) because she asked to borrow the book and never gave it back.

The masses react to these rumors just as fervently as Sarah and Melissa, although the two girls seem to have assumed lordship over them.

We sit in class now, and the giggles happening behind me between the two of them—who, of course, sit side by side—are maddening. This morning, I walked into the classroom, hung up my neon orange coat on my usual hook in the back, and sat down to find my desk plastered with Barbie stickers. Instead of complaining to Mrs. Nevins, and therefore putting a spotlight on the situation, I tried my hardest to scratch them off, but the result was white-paper residue interspersed with a glinting doll eye or a heart-shaped mouth, a white vein of teeth running between its lips. Sarah and Melissa giggle and giggle, and I stare down at the mess and wonder why I can’t be happy like Barbie, bearing her Twizzler’s-makes-mouths-happy smile.

This is when Mrs. Nevins announces the talent show—the one light at the end of this crumbling-friendship tunnel.

The mere mention of the show has potential acts running through my mind, acts that are several stories and worlds above that talentless circle of lip-synching. I know that my act will involve dancing and singing. Singing for real. I will dance and sing so well that I will forget splinters and swings and gravel and the whispers, whispers, whispers.

“Maybe you can sing us some Whitney Houston at the talent show!” Sarah whispers from behind me as I scrape one more Barbie smile from the desktop.

I think of Whitney and how beautiful she is, how poised, how revered, and I worry that I will never be any of those things. And if Whitney is just a pop star, a mere mortal, then what does it take to be Krishna, the most beautiful of gods? I dig a thumbnail deep into the dirt-collecting stickiness, and I wonder what I can do to ensure that I’m never whispered about again. When even sweet-looking, tiny girls can deceive me, how will I know when I’m ready to reign?

How will I know, Whitney? How will I know?

I know only a few phrases in Hindi. So you tell me how the hell I’m supposed to understand Sanskrit.

Sanskrit. That’s what the pundit speaks most of the time. My friend Cody, whose parents make him attend church every Sunday, once said to me, “Stop complainin’, ya sissy. Our priest says a lot of our prayers in Latin, and ya don’t see
me
complainin’. Just take a nap.”

But Cody is wrong on two counts. First of all, Sanskrit is nothing like Latin. Latin was spoken by Romans; Sanskrit was spoken by really ancient Indians. After all, even though Ancient Rome was forever ago, do we not remember that before there was a Rome, there had already been an India for a thousand years or more? And at least English shares several words with Latin. Unless you’re a yoga instructor, when was the last time you used a Sanskrit word? When was the last time you even used a Hindi word outside of an Indian restaurant?

Second of all, you can’t take a nap in temple. It’s physically impossible. In church, you have pews, and although there are all these families arranged like Easter Island monoliths on them, smelling of musky perfume and sweat and the woodiness of Bible pages, at least you have those seat backs to support you and your sleep-bobbing head. And when you do have to be awake, at least you get cues, like the first chord of each hymn heaved out of an organ, or a bellowing incantation from the priest.

Not so in temple. I sit on the floor in that manner called Indian-style, men on the left, women on the right, struggling to keep my composure while screaming inside about how God could put me in such an uncomfortable position—made all the more uncomfortable due to the soreness the splinter has left in my cheek. (Nurse Gifford Band-Aided it for me with an unspoken understanding between us that notifying my parents was out of the question.) I know that if I shut my eyes for one instant, I’ll pitch backward into the lap of the man behind me. And the pundit continues chanting, his syllables sometimes purring like a tiger, sometimes slippery like
ghee
, the melted butter that coats the scented wood chips he throws into an open flame after each verse.

The one true redemption of temple is that it is full of colors, fragrances, and flames. In short, theater. Which Christians have, yes, with their rosaries and wine and candles and Nativities. But we Indians whip even Catholics in terms of mystery. Their incense is sweet and subtle. Ours is spicier, tangier, like a masala versus a marsala. Their icons are stately, polite, gilding sometimes their only brash embellishment. Our icons are veritable statues, marble, five and a half feet high, wreathed in flashy carnation garlands and smoke.

Okay, so maybe the priests at Cody’s church are dressed a little better than our pundit, who wears a too-loose white
kurtha pajama
, the soles of his feet as cracked as dry earth. He has an obsidian comb-over. And he transitions from Hindi to Sanskrit to English so quickly that I often don’t know which he is trying to speak. It’s Hinglishskrit.

But what Punditji lacks in physical appearance he makes up for in gusto. He smiles cheerily, pulls his cracked feet closer toward him like a little child listening to his own story. And although I can’t understand a word of the story, I can understand that the raconteur is jubilant.

Our temple is a pretty ramshackle affair. It is not even a temple, really; it is an old two-story house with gray wood paneling on the outside. It sits on a heavily trafficked road near downtown Cincinnati, squeezed among so many other old, wood-paneled houses that it is almost lost in the shuffle. The main floor of the house is not even used for the temple; it is where the pundit and his wife live, amid numerous framed pictures of Hindu gods, countless incense holders, and so many religious tomes that, aside from one orange couch bursting fluff at the seams and a TV so old it could have contained the first episode of
The Honeymooners
within its walls, the furniture is formed solely out of stacks of books—a Ramayana desk, a Mahabharata coffee table.

But I shouldn’t badmouth my temple today. I am having fun. I am sitting just a few paces away from the pundit, who, just before this service, gifted to me a pair of hand cymbals. I eagerly await the end of his speech, when he cues Mrs. Jindal—a squat woman who always wears the same brown
salwaar kameez
and a pair of tinted eyeglasses—to play her harmonium, which she keeps at her side like a pet pooch. Cued, she moves the instrument in front of her and tickles the tiny ivories of her half-accordion, mini-organ of an instrument.

It is to match the verve of the pundit-Jindal duo that, once their musical interlude begins, I start to use those hand cymbals as deftly as I can. The more Mrs. Jindal pumps out breathy chords from the harmonium, the more I
jing jing jing
, the peals bouncing off the peeling paint of the walls and into the ears of the men and women. The blessed thing about temple-going, immigrant Indian adults is that they appreciate the nuances of the ceremony, and it doesn’t take much for them to acknowledge the virtuosic nature of my playing. Between slides of my hands, I look up to see smiling affirmation from the men, most of whom are dressed in a white dress shirt buttoned over a V-neck undershirt. Or I look to the ladies’ side and see women just as plump as Mrs. Jindal lightly tapping one palm against the other in their laps.

After the musical interlude, it’s back to the pundit’s droning, back to my confusion. I sit looking at the hand cymbals, enthralled by their gold. I hear a
psssst
from the women’s side: it’s my mother motioning for me to pay attention. She has perfected the skill of being able to hiss at me across the temple without disturbing anyone else. It is up there with talents like being able to touch her fingers to a hot pan without flinching; being able to tell, by how I say good night, whether or not I’ve brushed my teeth; and being able to remember random American celebrity names like Mary Stuart Masterson and Tony Goldwyn. In response to my multitalented mother’s admonition, I roll my eyes and try to focus on the pundit again. I know that I should be listening to his words, heeding whatever advice I can glean from his garbled Hinglishskrit, but it is not my nature to listen that way. Listening for me concerns very little actual listening and more the attention my eyes can pay. Nothing the pundit says sticks with me more than the trellis made by the cracks on his feet.

A wave of guilt flows through me as I begin to space out again, and in that moment I feel even more Catholic than an altar boy.

Soon it is time for
aarti
, which marks the end of temple. Everyone stands up, eager to sing “
Om Jai Jagdish Hare
”—that is, to stretch their legs. It is time for us all to walk to the altar, take one of the small gold trays that bear candles, and move it in a circle a few times before dropping a dollar bill onto the tray in a dual offering—one to lotus-borne Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and wealth, the other to the bevy of plump women who cook the after-temple
prasad
, an assortment of marzipan treats, sweet rice, and oil-glistening
puri
.

Two lines form along the aisle—a plastic throw rug, one that digs into the carpet with myriad pointy teeth. Parents push their children to the front of the lines. I dawdle, trying to avoid being at the front of the line, mainly because I suddenly can’t remember which way we are supposed to circle the tray. Clockwise? Counterclockwise? And wait—which way is clockwise anyway? And how many circles to make? Two? Three? Ten?

There is another reason I dawdle. I look up at the ceiling, from which hang, at different corners of the room, steel bells the size of heads. At three of the four bells, the tallest of the Indian men—correction: the anomalous Indian men who happen to be anything over 5'9"—are reaching up and clanging the clappers against the sides of the bell, complementing the pundit, who leads the singing at the front of the room from an old but effective silver microphone. I look up at the bell in my corner, the only one left alone. How I wish I could reach up there and ring the bell, how I wish I could translate my acuity at the hand cymbals to that louder instrument. And just when I am at the height of my wishing, I feel someone rush behind me and grab my legs. I squeal, terrified, but my squeal is unheard due to the peals filling the room. I nearly topple due to the force moving below me, but suddenly I am hoisted within inches of the bell, and when I look down I see my dad’s head.

“Ring the bell, Kiran,” he encourages, and I am so surprised that I do so right away, as if somewhere among the ringing there will be an explanation of where this burst of affection has come from. Literally bolstered by my father’s mirth, I give the other three ringers a run for their gold-tray-borne money. I ring and clang with a virtuosity never before heard in these parts, any of the physical and emotional pain I was feeling beforehand disappearing. The men gathered in our corner look at the tiny totem pole my father and I have made and smile the same serene smiles they aimed toward me during my hand-cymbal performance. From the corner at the other end of the room, Mrs. Jindal looks up from her Elysium Harmonium and acknowledges my music with a grin.

At the end of
aarti
, everyone in the room kneels down and touches his or her forehead—a dot of red powder pushed onto it by the pundit’s middle finger—to the orange, frayed, flat carpet in a silent kowtow finale. The ring of the bells, though technically over, is somehow louder during this. The negation of their sound seems to make that sound all the more important, as if for a brief moment I’m a deaf person longing desperately for any mundane noise that used to fall on my ears.

My father is kneeling right next to me. This has never happened before. Usually, he is back with the men while I sit with the children near the front. But now he is arched next to me in the same position as mine, and in this position he doesn’t seem all that much bigger than I am. In fact, when I dare a look over, he seems to be scrunching himself as small as he can, his knees almost touching his chin. I come close to laughing—or, I think about what I would look like laughing at him, for I would never have the courage to laugh openly in front of my father. Still, a wave of sadness rushes through me. I am smart enough to realize that this laughter, this perception of his ridiculousness, must be exactly what my father feels every time he looks at me and gives me That Stare—the one that makes me think, immediately, I am wrong. There is something wrong with me.

Just thinking of That Stare makes anything magical that has happened to me in these past several minutes vanish, and the wound from the playground seems to throb again. I am a ball of disappointment, and as everyone stands up and releases the penitence they’ve mustered for this service, my father is once again tall.

“
Beta
, vhat’s wrong,” he “asks,” although his tone gives no hint of questioning.

“Nothing,” I say, stepping back and shrugging.

“
Beta
, vhat is the matter.”

“Nothing,” I repeat, scurrying away, reminded that there is a language even harder to master than Sanskrit.

After we kids eat our
prasad
, teetering as we try to sit cross-legged and balance sectioned foam plates of food on our knees, it is time for us to have our version of Sunday school. Our mothers make us put on our shoes, which everyone has to take off before entering the temple, then push us out of the basement door, which lets onto the parking lot. From there we Hansel-and-Gretel our way along flat, round stepping-stones to the front door of the house, then enter the main floor—taking off our shoes again—and seat ourselves on the spongy brown carpet of the pundit’s main sitting room. We use his book-furniture to lean on.

The class is taught by the pundit’s wife, a woman with an enormous nose that is augmented by her bull-worthy nose ring. She is the only balding woman I have ever seen, a saucer-sized circle of hair missing at the back of her head.

The kids that make up the Sunday school are all celebrities from my childhood. Meaning: they are the core group of Indian friends I have in my life, even if they are more like enemies.

There is Neha Singh, at twelve years old already a great Indian beauty, with eyes as brown as chocolate cake and hair so black you want to fill a Bic pen with it. Too bad those eyes are hidden right now behind enormous, plastic-rimmed glasses. And just two months back, Neha had braces slapped on her perfect teeth, her parents making sure that any potential misalignment was stopped before it began. Still, everyone affords her complete submission, knowing that the moment the glasses and braces come off, the beauty will be back full throttle.

Seated with Neha are the rest of the powerful prepubescent Punjabis:

Shelley Aggarwal, whose real name is Shalini, but her TOEFL-impaired parents are trying hard to make up for their accents by giving her an American nickname. She is a very thin girl with an equally thin, long nose, which is almost hooked at the end. (“Almost hooked” meaning that there is no actual curving under; rather, the point is so fine that it casts a shadow under the tip that gives the illusion of hooking.) She likes to wear saris as much as possible, probably because they make her look older and wiser.