Blue Boy (30 page)

“Vell, he is not often vell,” my mother says quietly. Without looking at her, I know that she has her hands deep in the pockets of her white cardigan.

“I don’t normally advise such a large dosage, and I am particularly concerned over the administration of a silver supplement, which can have some horrible side effects.”

“Such as?” my mother asks.

“Such as turning people’s skin blue.”

The doctor goes on to explain that the silver, if deposited into the bloodstream for a prolonged period of time, can become embedded in the skin. He underscores its rarity, and I, my jaw wide open, expect him to end this explanation with a dramatic hand flourish at me, proclaiming me the NEWEST MEMBER OF THE BLUE-SKIN GANG—TA-DA! His behavior never gets that intense, though. He merely walks over to me and tilts my washed, makeup-free face toward the light.

“See,” he says, his voice still calm. “It’s hard to make it out, but you can see it if you look hard enough.” I feel my parents’ faces near mine. My mother says she can’t see it. My father admits failure, too. But the doctor reiterates his warning and receives an acknowledgment from both my parents that they’ll never give me that medicine again.

Once the doctor has left—after prescribing that I drink at least eight glasses of water a day and take a nightly sedative—my parents stare at me. The doctor has left the door open, and I can hear the busy sounds of the hospital—rolling gurneys, the occasional moan, the plop of the nurses’ white shoes against the floor, the pressing of buttons and opening of filing cabinets, ringing phones, and beeping intercoms. I try to focus on those sounds instead of on my parents.

In this moment, having been told that my skin is not the result of some divine ordinance but rather the result of a faulty drug, I feel like the doctor has cruelly plucked out the feathers of my peacock crown and thrown them at the foot of my bed. I imagine leaping up from these sheets and tearing my pillowcases up to find a dirty mess of more peacock feathers inside. But then I understand that just as I never had Krishna-ordained skin, I never had peacock feathers, either. The only reason I ever felt heartened by these things was because I imagined them into being. My creativity urged them into life like a magician shoving a dove from his empty hands.

But that can be beautiful. I’ve been creating my own whimsy—or at least my heart has—and that whimsy has led me to exhibit my artistic self in its most unfettered state. The world can be as uncommonly beautiful as you want it to be as long as you give yourself over to that whimsy, however melancholy and lonely it may be sometimes.

As if coming to the same thought, my mother falls to the bed, clutches my right hand, and begins to cry. It sounds like a dog’s whimper, and for some reason, even though it’s not like she is bawling, it affects me more than any crying I’ve ever heard. Hers are tears of exhaustion; she’s tired of worrying, tired of judging, tired of walking through life on edge. It dawns on me that the last time my mother clutched my hand like this was when she discovered me covered in Estée weeks ago. It is this revelation that pushes me to look at her. Her eyes, those eyes locked in wrinkles, look as wide and impressionable as mine when she opens them, more tears sliding out and down her cheeks. She has worn
kajol
—a sign that she didn’t just attend the talent show but got dressed up, too—and its blackness has run down her face and onto the bedsheet. Under her white cardigan, the pearly fabric of her salmon-colored
salwaar kameez
shines brilliantly against the floor. My mother, the crumpled lotus.

I expect her to say something—to thank God that I am all right, to tell me how beautiful my performance was. Instead, she stands up and walks over to the tiny table in the corner of the room and pulls a tissue from a small Kleenex box, the kind decorated with blurry sea swirls. She dabs at her face and blows her nose.

All the while, my father remains standing, dressed in his tan jacket. No tears, no words, just looking at the floor where my mother was. He has combed his hair, and his forehead shines in the light. He looks handsome and put together, however solemn his mood. Then, as if penitently, he takes a step forward, places a hand on my forehead, and smoothes back my hair, which is still sweaty and matted down from the wig.

No great conversation ensues. I eventually slink away from the hospital wrapped in my mother’s winter coat, with a white paper bag of sleeping pills clutched in one hand. Our drive home almost mirrors our usual drive home from temple.

Except for a palpable feeling of tenderness. It’s not what people usually think of as tenderness—kindness mixed with affection—but a literal feeling of fragility, a tendency to bruise easily. It is as if by having one of us tumble weakly to the ground, we now understand that in our own unique ways, we are each the person in the hospital bed, alone if not for the loyal soul clutching our hand.

It’s been a whole month since my parents and I last came to the temple. Not that a month is really all that long. It’s really just four visits, one per week, and the proceedings are generally the same. The pundit is still curled up at the front of the room, speaking in his singsong voice. The men and women are still divided as they always are, and they still have those reverent smiles on their faces. In the kitchen, a few women—Rashmi Govind among them—are preparing the
prasad
. The faint aroma of fruit wafts from the counter to our noses due to the sweet but slimy cocktail of bananas, apples, mandarin oranges, and grapes that is the centerpiece of their preparation. I hear a laugh escape from the women before they realize how loud they’re being and go back to whispering. Those whispers give away the thing that is different about their otherwise ordinary procedure: my family has returned, especially the problematic Kiran, and the game of who will welcome my parents back into the fold openly—versus who will do so cautiously—begins.

My mother and father have seated themselves toward the front of the room, probably so that they don’t have to see all the people looking at them. Or perhaps they are simply pious. Indeed, my mother seems to have the same solemnity about her that she usually has when burning incense: she has her orange
dupatta
wrapped around her head and sits even more rigidly than my father does. Ever since that night just over a week ago when we came home from the hospital, my mother has been moving with a sort of peaceful grace. She has accepted some new truth, however small, and it is quietly strengthening her.

A similar aura has taken over my father, except that there is still a hard edge to him. After the hospital incident, he returned to being aloof toward me, and the tension that I thought was gone has returned a little bit. Things are obviously smoother between us, but that doesn’t mean that they are without rough edges. I did my ballet exercises in the basement on Thursday because I didn’t want him to see me. I feared that one look at me prancing about might make him regret the quiet evasion he’s been trying out. His behavior remains the way it was in the hospital room: it is as if he thinks that, by emotional telepathy, his affection will wend its way from his body to mine across a room or through a wall.

Yet, the other night while I was falling asleep—the blue, diamond-shaped pills the doctor gave me casting their sandman spell—he came into my bedroom and hovered in the doorway. He stood there for a few moments, just watching me, then quietly came over to my bed and leaned very close to me. His breath was so heavy that it would have woken me up had I been asleep. Perhaps he knew that I was only pretending to be asleep. But I got the feeling that he was staring not to find me out but to
figure
me out. For him, I was no longer a shameful thing but a ship in a bottle, something to be examined and appreciated and solved. Then, almost inaudibly, he whispered, “I love—” and then faltered, fading slowly into the house again.

At school, Mrs. Goldberg acts the same way, although I can sense an extra dose of pride coming from her. After all, due to my sudden fainting spell, neither Mrs. Nevins nor Mrs. Buchanann nor Principal Taylor could bust me for my religious display onstage, and when Mrs. Goldberg places a different kind of star sticker on my next spelling test—a blue one made of two triangles on top of each other—I understand that she is acknowledging my achievement with a religious display of her own.

The kids at school are more aloof than that. Sarah’s and Melissa’s parents famously decided last week to pull the girls out of the school and send them to Immaculate Souls, the conservative Catholic school fifteen miles from here. I remember Cody telling me a while back that it’s a terrifying school and that there’s a myth that all the nuns there are completely bald and wear necklaces made of baby skulls under their robes. The kids there also wear uniforms, stiff plaid and white garments that are probably itchy. I love the idea of Sarah and Melissa, once adorned in myriad accessories and colors, reduced to clothing as fashionable as a neck brace. Their faces are probably as grave and frowning as Mrs. Buchanan’s. I’ve taught them all what happens when you cross my path.

There are still all the other kids at my school, though, and they treat me with a new fascination when I walk down the halls and sit at my desk. I’m the kid who would have been laughed at had I not survived a little death onstage. Now there is a little bit of immortality added to my public persona, an ability to defy pain, and I giggle inside thinking that, in at least this respect, I have made myself a god.

I don’t exactly have any friends, and there will always be the John Griffins of the world who twirl around and then pretend to faint in front of me as I walk down the halls, but I have realized just how much more I know than they do. What do these bullies know of lust, of sex, of the fine line between divinity and depravity? It would be one thing if they knew what I felt and could understand it and then made fun of it. But they do not have the ability to empathize with what I feel, and that makes them completely meaningless. I live in a kingdom of one.

Cody and Donny are long gone from my life, but you would never guess that anything had changed from the way they keep at their basketball games. Whereas the time they spend on the playground bothered me so much in the past, I now look at it with a good-riddance type of relief. I know that I will never be like them, and now I don’t even want to be. I am not meant for basketball, just as they are not meant to dance and dress up. My imagination is for creating my own private world, and I’m wasting it if I try to be a part of theirs.

Why have I felt it so necessary for us to be the same? What is it about that confining, brick fortress of a school that has made me believe it is the only place that exists? I only go to this school because my parents happened to come to America, to move to Ohio, just happened to build a particular house in a particular area of this town and send me to the closest school. If any one of those steps had not happened, I would be somewhere else. I could be living in a smoky, fragrant, lush area of India if it weren’t for one decision. Why should I let one decision prevent me from living the lush life I might otherwise have had?

I sit in this temple and look around at the paintings of the deities on the walls. Lakshmi and Saraswati and Sita, Their eyes surrounded by
khajol
, Their cheeks and lipstick so red that they could be covered in Estée: They’re the pretty girls, the ones with good fashion sense and grace. They have their loyal servants and friends, the Hanumans and Ganeshes and so forth. But They also have their male equivalent, who makes music for Them and the other women, who mimics their beauty by painting His brilliantly blue face and clothing Himself in fabric as glimmering and glorious as Theirs. He was born different, but instead of lamenting his fate, He embraced it. He saw his peculiarities as unique treasures, and He saw love and admiration and luxurious, delicious grandeur come His way as a result.

From where I stand at the back of the temple, I don’t expect anyone to approach me. But I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around. It’s the pundit. Our sweet, loving pundit. Regardless of everything that has happened with the Singhs, he gives me a smile and offers me that pair of gold hand cymbals. I take them from him gently. An enormous sense of compassion comes over me, and there in the back of the temple, I drop down and touch his feet the way you are supposed to touch the feet of your elders when you want to be especially reverent. When I pull back up, I am already crying, the tears like silver chains from my eyes.

He goes to the front of the room and finishes the service, inviting everyone to join in
aarti
. Everyone stands up as the music begins. Mrs. Jindal rushes—or waddles briskly—to her harmonium to join the melee, and soon everyone is singing. All of the other kids are at the front of the room, pushed forward by their parents, as usual—and led by Ashok and Neha—but I am back here, out of sight and out of mind for a moment. I am alone with my cymbals, which I push together again and again. I experiment with rhythms, make the peals fast and then slow, play them over my head, under my legs, spinning in a circle. I make fiery music and dedicate it to the Lord, to the strength He gives us when we think we are becoming weaker. Sometimes we are so consumed by the flame, burning so painfully in its heat, that we can’t see the utter gorgeousness of the fire.