Blue Boy (4 page)

There’s Shruti Gupta. Of all the girls, she’s the biggest bitch, and if Sarah and Melissa ever wanted to make an Indian friend—not that they ever
would
—Shruti would fit right in with them. She speaks rarely, but when she does, it’s usually to show how superior she is. She is in the fifth grade but takes seventh grade math, which she studies at home with her doctor parents. Her parents are so conservative—they conserve so much—that Shruti, though born and raised here, has the same Anglo-accented English they do. The Guptas really do construct the perfect paradox: they practically keep their daughter locked up in a (gold-plated) cage, and yet they both practice very progressive forms of medicine, her father being an internist, her mother a cosmetic surgeon. One day I’ll have to solicit both of their services—a cure to prevent me from retching whenever I see Shruti and plastic surgery to get rid of the rock-hard frown she etches onto my face.

Completing Neha’s sidekick trio is Neelam Govind. She is a morbidly obese girl with skin so dark she could be Aretha Franklin’s twin sister. Her big mouth doesn’t just take in food, though; the loudest voice in the world comes out of it frequently.

There are a dozen other Indian girls in the room, ranging from two to twelve, but whether they are older or younger than the quartet, they know they are inferior. There is always one bitch posse in a group, and they reign supreme and alone.

The only people who can match the bitch posse for intimidation are a quartet of boys. Of which, of course, I am not a member.

There is the dreamy Ashok Gupta. He is not related to Shruti; they share the same last name, but “Gupta” is the “Smith” of Indian last names. He is the most adept tennis player of all of the boys and, even at twelve, is a total hunk. The border of his hair, where the women at Supercuts use their clippers to even out the edge, meeting the even brown skin of the back of his neck—it is a perfect thing to me, and I always make it a point to sit behind him, or as close to him as the boys will let me, so that I can stare at his neck and the one tiny beauty mark located over the small bump of his first vertebra.

There is Ajay Govind, Neelam’s brother. Though not morbidly obese like Neelam, he still has a paunch like a flesh life-saver around his waist. He is a study in how nappy Indian hair can get. His hair has gotten long, which is to say that instead of hanging down to his shoulders as would happen to an American boy, it curves around his head into a black cotton candy.

There’s Ashish Aggarwal, Shelley’s younger-by-one-year brother. He is the closest thing to an Indian Albert Einstein. He has already won the state science fair twice—once in fourth grade and once in fifth grade—both times for finding the freezing point of saltwater. I have no idea what that means, but it earned him a $1,000 savings bond the first year and an invitation to a private grade school the second year (which his parents declined because they, like Shruti’s parents, felt that they could teach him better).

And rounding out the quartet—literally—is the male version of Neelam, Arun Gupta. He belongs to Shruti’s Guptas, not Ashok’s, though he really looks unrelated to either child due to his weight. Every lesson, he is oblivious to the fact that the milk chocolate, chubby inlet of his butt crack is visible to all who sit behind him. This is because he is usually too busy eating his stolen bounty from the
prasad
line—a handful of
jalabi
, a type of neon orange funnel cake so sticky you can see fragments of your reflection when looking at it.

There are a dozen or so other boys, also ranging from two to twelve, but yet again, they all look to this posse.

I’ve always entertained the idea that both quartets have a hope—which, of course, they would rather die than express—that one day they will pair off as was meant to be, handsome Ashok taking the braces-freed Neha by the thin, gold-bangled wrist; Shelley affectionately burying the mirage hook of her nose into Ajay’s thick fro; Ashish and Shruti rapt in ecstasy as they review quadratic equations; and Neelam and Arun devouring a platter of syrupy desserts before devouring each other.

And then there is Kiran.

Here we are, gathered in the only Hindu temple for over a hundred miles—literally, the closest temple is the one in Columbus, a two-hour drive away—leaning against furniture made of paper instead of wood, while our parents pick at the crumbs of their
prasad
downstairs and remember the intricate open-air temples of their youth.

Today, the pundit’s wife is wearing an ill-fitting, peach-colored sari, the dough-like protrusion of her bare stomach like a big uncooked cinnamon roll.

“My children, vas today’s temple to your likink?” she asks in her thick accent, and I am terrified to hear words of affirmation from the kids around me, as if they actually understood what the pundit was saying this morning.

“Are there any particular qvestions you hef?” she asks, and I feel a little better when no one asks any.

“Come on, children, some qvestions, pleece.”

Silence.

Silence is maddening to me. I can’t deal with hearing nothing, especially in a classroom setting—and especially in a classroom setting where disembodied Barbie smiles aren’t distorting my view. And so, even though I feel a pang of
No, Kiran, you shouldn’t talk
, I venture a question.

“Can you tell us about reincarnation?”

I ask this even though I already know what it is.
Reincarnation is when someone has several lives. When they die, they are reborn as another person. And if they did something bad in their past life, they come back as something terrible, like an ant or a retarded person or someone really, really fat. Like Neelam and Arun.
But I ask this particular question because I want her to talk about my new Krishna theory.

“
Beta
, that has nothink to do vith today’s temple.”

Dammit. I knew she was going to say that.

Thus commences today’s derision:

I hear Shruti mutter to Neha, “Neha, what happens when you kill someone?”

Neha says, “I don’t know. What?”

“You come back as Kiran in your next life.”

Ashish, managing to stop playing games on his Texas Instruments calculator for one second, says to Ajay, “Yo, Ajay, what’s the difference between Ganesh and Kiran?”

“I don’t know, man. What?”

“Ganeshji has an elephant’s head, and Kiran is retarded.”

Truly witty repartee, let me tell you, yet biting wit is not necessary to break my heart. My ears burn, and I focus on my sock-clad feet for the next several minutes. I hold back my tears, so instead of the salty stuff dripping out of my eyes, I feel a well of snot build up in my throat. I swallow it in one lump. The only thing that pulls me out of my depression is hearing the word
Krishna
.

“So Krishnaji vas varrior, too, children. Even gods sometimes hef to deal vith var. But notice that Krishnaji does not just atteck. He says that ve should seek inner peace, and then ve’ll make others vant peace. So vhat Punditji is saying is not to be scared about Iraq. Sometimes var is necessary, but from it comes peace.”

They are obviously talking about the Persian Gulf, even though the war ended a year ago now. But the neon lime explosions on TV, a stunning shower of green fireballs over nighttime Baghdad, cannot be forgotten. It was all well and good until I realized what I was looking at wasn’t a new Nintendo game. Here in the pundit’s living room, venturing to look away from my feet, I see that the other kids all have a look of true unrest on their faces, proof that they have the same scary thought I do: bombs were dropped in the world, and people died. Which, when you’re a kid, means
Someone is going to drop a bomb on us
.

“Why is Krishnaji blue?” I blurt out. Not entirely relevant, but at least it’s on the right subject. The other kids laugh, then stop, wondering, “Wait—why
is
he blue?”

“He vas born blue,
beta
,” the pundit’s wife says, dismissively. She opens her mouth to speak again, but I’m already shooting more words at her.

“But
why
was he born blue?” I ask.

“Vat do you mean,
beta
? He vas born blue.”

“But what does that
mean
?”

“It means he vas born blue. He vas born god. He vas different.”

“But didn’t the other kids make fun of him for being blue?”

“Kids making fun of Krishnaji?
Beta
, enough. Nobody made fun of Krishnaji! He vas God!”

“But let’s say that, uh, Ashok had blue skin,” I say, motioning to Ashok gently and smiling in a friendly way. He sits back in surprise, a grin curling into his mouth. Sweat pricks at my skin; I am not dumb enough to interpret his smile as affirmative. “Even though everyone likes Ashok, he’d still be made fun of if his skin were blue!” The boys chuckle; they wonder what the word “like” means coming from me.

“
Beta
, Ashok is not a god,” she says, then adds, “Even though we all love you, Ashok
Beta
.” Ashok beams.

“He’s also not a fag,” Ashish whispers to the boys, putting away his calculator in sudden interest.

I press on now, having nothing to lose.

“I still don’t understand why he is blue. And why blue? Why not red or green or orange?” I imagine a red Krishna, his skin the color of roses.

“Vell,
beta
, he just vas. Now, as I vas saying, var…”

The only thing that keeps me going as the class ends is the realization that I am even more like Krishna than I thought. He was blue and different but had no real explanation of why. I am so different from everyone, and yet there doesn’t seem to be an explanation of my oddity, either. Krishna was different but had the fortune of being a god. He was destined for great things—war-defying, cosmic things.

Again, the thought comes into my head: what if I were simply a reincarnation of Krishna? If so, what those kids don’t know—what those derisive posses can’t get their thickly black-haired heads around—is that I am destined for great things, too. I am blue, too. You just can’t see it yet.

After our Sunday School, we kids wend our way back on the stepping-stones and into the bustling hives of our respective parents. Since I am avoiding all contact with my fellow kids after my embarrassment, I observe their parents as I always do, trying to situate my own mom and dad somewhere in the group.

There are five core aunties in our circle of friends. They are as follows:

1)
Nisha Singh, brace-teethed Neha’s mother
—a stunning beauty with a collection of saris so blinding in their brightness that her closet must look like a sunrise made of cloth.


2)
Ratika Aggarwal, hook-nosed Shelley’s mother
—a business-savvy woman who runs a financial-planning office with her husband. She has bushy eyebrows and a manner of speaking so dry that it seems as if she once knew perfect English but was so insouciant about life that her accent relapsed.


3)
Anita Gupta, brainy Shruti and chubby Arun’s mother
—a woman as tiny as my mother but very thin, with a high-pitched voice that sounds like a bird’s squawk.


4)
Kavita Gupta, dreamy Ashok’s mother
—the most traditional of the Indian women. I have never seen her wide forehead not adorned with a large red bindi. She speaks only Hindi, except when she’s feeling especially conservative and speaks Punjabi.


5)
Rashmi Govind, fat Neelam and fro-bearing Ashish’s mother
—the really large, jolly one. There’s one in every group.

My mother occupies a very interesting place in this bevy. She is, by far, the most Americanized of these mothers. Whereas most of the Indian mothers speak mainly in Hindi, inserting an English word here and there when they can’t remember the Hindi word, my mother does the opposite. She speaks in English, and it is only the occasional slang phrase that she says in Hindi. She is always the one who introduces new American fads into the group. It was only a matter of time after my mom got her Gap card that each of these women had one, with the exception of Kavita Gupta.

My mother is a plump woman, but she falls in the middle of the spectrum, somewhere between Anita Gupta’s rail of a frame and Rashmi Govind’s centripetal force.

Here, then, is the counterpart quintet of husbands:

1)
Harsh Singh, husband of Nisha and father of Neha
—It’s really pronounced “Hersh,” but, in its English phonetic version, it is the most fitting name I can imagine for him. 5'5", with a fuzzy mustache and a crescent of hair on an otherwise bald head, he is one hundred and fifty pounds of sheer strictness, a heart surgeon who ironically seems to be living without a heart.


2)
Naveen Aggarwal, husband of Ratika and father of Shelley
—a stuttering, stumbling man who wears oversize glasses that make his eyes look like eight balls. He needs them because he’s spent his entire life looking at fine print on all the investment documents he and his dry-humored wife peruse.


3)
Amish Gupta, husband of Anita, father of Shruti and Arun
—He is a pleasant foil to the scratchy-voiced Anita in that he is mild-mannered and soft-spoken. This is probably why he is an internist.


4)
Sachin Gupta, husband of Kavita, father of Ashok
—I have never understood a word this man says. The greatest bafflement is that he’s an ear, nose, and throat doctor. How on earth do his patients understand his instructions? Somewhere out there, dozens of men and women with sinus problems are backing up with mucus because of Sachin Gupta’s mystery tongue.


5)
Sanjay Govind, husband of Rashmi, father of Neelam and Ashish
—It never fails: the really fat Indian wife will have a really thin husband. Another internist. Now if he could only prevent his wife from filling her innards with more curry.