Blue Boy (7 page)

Two gruff-looking guys walk up to the rack. One of them has a coffee-colored goatee around his mouth and a backward Reds cap on his head; the other has a shaved head and is wearing a plain blue mesh jersey with a long-sleeve white T-shirt under it. The goatee guy reaches up and takes the very copy of
Penthouse
that I wanted. He looks briefly at the front cover, a short but tough grunt escaping him, then tips the cover so that his friend can see it. The friend grunts his assent. A seasoned pro, the goatee guy flips straight to the center, and both men blow air through their nostrils in acknowledgment of the content.

The irony that these guys are looking at a glossy titfest while I’m nose-deep in Mickey Mouse is not lost on me.

From where I stand, I can see bent refractions of tit, but I am not afforded anything more than my usual viewings with Cody. The goateed guy flips through the pages, each time tipping the magazine friendward as if to say it’s his handiwork.

“How ’bout that?” Goatee says, and I glimpse four tits rippled on a two-page spread.

“I’m there, I’m there,” says the other, sliding one hand up and over his bald head.

They communicate this way for minutes on end, always with these tough-guy expressions, “How ’bout that?” and “I’m there, I’m there,” and all I want to scream is “No, you’re
not
there! You’re
here
, and you’re stealing my tits!” I am seething so much at the way they have inserted themselves between me and the magazine that I almost forget my original goal: I am not here to see tits. I am here to see sex. And they seem to be looking only at the former. Blasphemy.

Then I glimpse it: the wax-like chest of a man, two brunettes licking it with bubblegum tongues, and at the base of this shiny flesh, a well-cropped square of pubic hair and the solid cylinder of his penis. I see this for just a moment before the page flips again, and there is the man again, standing behind one of the women, gripping her waist from behind, the other woman licking his ear as if salivating sex into it.

“I’m there, I’m there.”

A collage of bodies wafts into my mind. I cannot dismiss the strength of the man’s body, the way his head is thrown back, mouth slack-jawed as he pushes himself against the woman in front of him. He seems to be pushing himself against her with every last bit of his strength, and as I look at the two men staring at the magazine, there is a longing in their eyes to do the same thing. Their breathing has become tough, and the grunts come now without their bidding. The more the rumble of their arousal couples with the sexy sheen of the magazine, the harder I become down below and in my mind. The sex—the sheer, mad, throbbing sex of this mundane mall bookstore—fills my head and becomes something huge. My head throbs, and I begin to see spots.
Oh, no.
I have to put out one hand to steady myself.

I drop my magazine.

I kneel down quickly and pick it back up. I look at the men as I rise. They have smirks on their faces, their posture uncomfortable due to their boners and the sight of a clumsy Indian child next to them. They chuckle and stuff the
Penthouse
back into the top of the rack, then swagger out of the store laughing. Their backs now turned to me, I look at them unabashedly, trying to capture every detail of their ragged appearance. My face is throbbing, and I turn back to the rack and look at the issue, which is still crinkling from the hasty way in which Goatee returned it to its smutty place on high. Without thinking twice, I swing up, almost rock climbing, grab the issue, and head for the cash register.

In the back of the store, the cashier is arguing with the lady who had the Danielle Steel book.

“M’am, I’m sorry, but you can’t just come in here and read a book like it’s your own. Look what you’ve done to it! You’re going to have to buy it.”

“I forgot my wallet at home,” the lady says unconvincingly, trying to bypass the cashier and make her exit. But he persists, blocking her way and presenting to her the newly enjoyed, green-and-gold paperback.

The more they argue, the more frantic I become. I am standing at the cash register with a dirty magazine that looks like someone just had sex with it instead of a person. I look around me to make sure no one is looking, and the usual white noise of the weeknight mall greets me. I look back again at the quarreling couple and decide that I have no choice. I reach across the desk, grab one of the store’s brown paper bags, and rush out, stuffing my bounty into it and never looking back.

Then the fates come into play.

In front of the pillar where I was lingering before, I run into Mrs. Nevins.

“Well, hi, Key-ran,” she is in the middle of saying, when she notices the enormous block lettering on the magazine I am shoving into the bag. She blushes, her brows furrowing, and she stutters out something that is half pity, half censure: “Oh, no, Key-ran…”

“I—it’s not what you think, Mrs.—” I start, and then the unthinkable, yet inevitable, occurs. Behind me, I hear the ardent waddle-step of my mother’s Keds against the marble floor and the crunching of her many shopping bags as they slap against her leg.

“Kiran,
beta
,” she says as I manage to slip the magazine fully in the bag and clutch it to my stomach. “Who is this?” she asks, concerned, afraid that Mrs. Nevins might be some wacko who’s come up to kidnap me.

“I’m Sheila Nevins,” she says, extending her hand and continuing to frown. “Mrs. Sharma, I’m sorry to be rude, but I hope you know what your son is holding.”

“Rude? Vhy vould that be a rude thing to say? Kiran is a smart child. I am proud of him. He buys magazines like that all the time.”

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Nevins says, her eyes widening in shock. She is still wearing what she wore at school today: a green sweatshirt with an appliqué red apple stitched onto its front, a white turtleneck, and very blue jeans. “Mrs. Sharma, apologies again, but you don’t take issue with the sort of garbage that your son is carrying?”

“Garbage! Vell, excuse me, but aren’t you a teacher? I can’t believe you vould object to poetry!”

“Poetry! Is that what you call it? Unbelievable! Good night, Mrs. Sharma. And good night, Key-ran. God help you.”

She storms away, giving one disgusted look back. I recognize in her posture the same unease that Mrs. Moehlman exuded as I confessed to her about the splinter.

My mother reacts with a cough-like huff. “Vhat a buffoon,” she says. “Maybe ve should have you svitch classrooms. Let’s go,
beta
.”

She slides two bags into my arms and heads for the exit. I follow, nonplussed, a mixture of skin, horror, and guilt weighing me down.

My guilt is very strong, but my lust overrides my guilt.

When my mother and I get home, I push away the encounter with Mrs. Nevins as I have learned to push away all of my other school-related humiliations. I focus on the task at hand. As my mother gets a quick talk from my father in his study (“Vhy do you need ten blouses at once? For each of your incarnations?”), I run upstairs with my magazine, go into my room, shut the door, and lock it. It is exhilarating to have a new thrill, a new pursuit. Yes, the makeup and dolls have yielded fun and fulfilling experiences, but the carnal delight of what I hold in my hands, the limbs that are wedged into the binding of this slippery magazine, carry more promise than anything I have undertaken before—as the pressure in my groin attests.

I unwrap the magazine from the brown paper bag and flip to its center again. The dueling tits greet me once more, but it is the man’s body that I can’t shake out of my head. I turn the page to see it again. This man’s penis does not seem consistent with the rest of his body. It seems like it belongs to someone or something else; it has a life of its own. I am at attention like this man; like his, my dick seems to be stretching into some other space. I grip my dick, and the heartbeat I can feel through it seems separate from my own, like the time I held a chinchilla in science class and felt the rough beat of her tiny heart against her rib cage. Until now, I have thought of my privates as a part of my body, as simply an extension of myself. But the throbbing I feel, coupled with the way in which this man swaggers around, despite being frozen in pictures—the way he holds his dick up to the full, sticky, Fire Engine lips of one of the women, the way he pushes it into her, the way he places one hand on his hip as he stands over the other woman, who lies sprawled on a table, and lets it work its magic—makes me realize that my desires are a bubble around me, my body encased in another throbbing heart. Somehow, in the pages of this dirty magazine, I have discovered that we do not hold our sexuality but that our sexuality holds us.

Over the next week, every time I pull out the magazine, which grows dog-eared, the ink on the cover smudged with my fingerprints—as if I am making as big of an impression on the magazine as it is making on me—the women’s bodies change. I can see not just their sexiness but the
beauty
of them. There is less of a desire to fondle the tits, to call them “tits” at all. As Cody continues to unload numerous epithets for the pendulous balls of flesh, I simply look at them as a lovely appetizer before turning the page and marveling at the ripe, searching penis of the latest charlatan that has swaggered onto the scene, and the ways in which he satisfies his girls.

The man’s body, the ripples of his chest, remind me of something. The weight of these women’s breasts—
that’s what they are,
breasts!
Not tits
—remind me of something: their limbs glow. I stash the magazine, dash from my room, make sure both of my parents are downstairs—the sounds of a midday tea being made, my mother taking out the cups, my father grunting as he places the kettle on the stove—and go into the master bedroom.

There it is again—the mini-temple, the shrine on top of the bookcase. In each painting, the gods glow; each limb is like a shaft of light, each body like a quietly fiery star. There is Krishna again, made up and smiling and ostentatiously blue, a star of the stage that is this bookcase top. For a solid ten minutes, until my mother calls me down to have some tea, I braid my physical desires with this vision of godlike beauty. My fascination is becoming a real quest: a quest to find and live up to my lost Krishna self. This way—and this way alone—I can achieve the sort of nirvana that I’ve heard the pundit speak of. The religious paintings are ordaining me to be this glowing man of lust. Perhaps, I think, it is not a question of getting affection from other people, being desired, but understanding the pull of your own desires that should fuel us. I have spent too much time trying to earn the respect of others when I should be focusing on my own potential.

A path of smut has led me to a higher level of edification than I could have ever imagined. From this moment onward, I will not discount lust as an extraordinary force. I will let it grip my body and lead me the rest of the way.

This is all an elegant way of saying that I start jerking off like it’s my job.

For several years, I have been in love with Strawberry Shortcake.

Whoever created that ragamuffin princess knew exactly what they were doing. Most toys rely simply on beauty and pastels to make them desirable. Barbie—glamorous, pink. My Little Pony—foal-cute, pink. Jem—rockstarry, glittery pink. But Strawberry Shortcake has the extra advantage of sweets. Not just candy, but sweets. Not just Skittles and Starbursts and Milky Ways but luscious cakes and pastries and fruits. Incidentally, “sweets” is the word that my parents use to describe desserts. It’s one of the few Anglo-Indian verbal tics of theirs that says exactly what I want it to say.

But back to SS, as I like to call her. I like everything about her. Her wacky sense of style, those green-and-white-striped leggings that fit snugly around her toes and all the way up around her tiny waist. The red-and-white apron-cum-dress she wears, which conveys culinary adeptness and chic leisure at the same time. The enormous puffy pink hat with a strawberry decal on the front of it, so big that SS could easily pull it down over herself and disappear into a world sunlit pink. This is what I do many weekend afternoons in my bed: pull my pink blanket all around myself and look at the light pastel tent it makes around me, all the while munching on a little treat I’ve brought to enjoy—a handful of Cocoa Puffs, a few Fig Newtons, or a piece of leftover bakery cake from the Indian wedding, graduation, or engagement parties we attend frequently. I lie in my bed with SS on one side and my sweet treat on the other, and I think about marriage.

This morning, my mother sat me down and gave me her monthly marriage talk. She crossed her hands on the table as if she were both a presiding judge and a plaintiff bringing a case against me.

“
Beta
, this is tough time for you. Not only do you have to look out for the American girls anymore. Now you have to vatch the Indian ones. It used to be just the American girls who vanted a little hanky-panky, but now the Indian girls vant to hank and pank, too. And then there are these Indian girls who marry Indian men just to get their visas. And then vonce they’re over here, they start going to the Gap and run off vith all of your money.”

Now she was blaming the Gap for the downfall of the good Indian wife.

“Still, I vill find you a good girl,” she continued. I opened my mouth to complain. “Quiet,
beta
. Indians don’t just meet each other and have everything go all hanky-panky and start dancing to loud music. Girls are trouble. Your dad and I vill keep you out of trouble.”

“But Mom,” I ask, “weren’t you once a girl?”

“Homevork time.”

I lie in bed now with SS at my side and wonder why I can’t find a girl like her to be my girlfriend. I think about my mom’s rules:

“First, she must be good to me. Indian girls must always respect Indian mothers. Second, she must be able to cook. Not these instant foods—
idli
powder and
dosai
mix and that nonsense. I mean
real
food vith
real
ingredients. Third, she must be pretty. Those are the only requirements. And of course, she should be vell-educated and Punjabi and have parents ve know and like.”

Vell
, SS has got most of these things down. She’s well-dressed and she’s a good cook, and she must be well-educated because her strawberries are always fresh: Tanya Gibbons, a girl in my class whose parents are corn farmers, boasts that being a good farmer is a lot harder than people think because it takes a lot of planning and hard work.

SS always fends off the Purple Pieman, so she clearly has street smarts, too. And even though she doesn’t have any family, per se, she does have all of her fruit friends, which I also own—Blueberry Muffin, Apricot, Apple Dumplin’, Huckleberry—and they are all nice and could get along with anybody, even my parents. And she could clearly be a good mother because she always takes care of her cat, Custard, who is also pink and fruit-scented. Being a good mother isn’t even directly in my mom’s requests, so it’s like extra credit for SS.

But there’s the problem of her not being Indian. Even though I know SS is perfect in almost every other way, I know this is a big flaw of hers.

Of course I know that SS is only a doll. And I know that I shouldn’t even be playing with dolls in the first place—not just because I’m a boy but because I’m probably getting too old to play with dolls anyway. But this is my fantasy, and I wrap myself up in it like I do my pink blanket, leaving reality and maturity behind. My fantasy may have big flaws, but lots of relationships have big flaws. Mr. and Mrs. Doyle, our neighbors, always yell at each other, and I once heard Mr. Doyle say to Mrs. Doyle, “A million cars park in your garage!” At the time, I didn’t know what he meant, thinking, “A million cars? They only have one old Impala.”

Take my parents, for instance. They’re both Indian, yet they have their share of problems. When I was really little, the fights would occur right in front of me. I will never forget the first time I walked in on my parents arguing in the living room. This was in our old place, the one we lived in until I was seven, a tiny split-level house. The inside of the house was stiflingly tight, ten stairs shared among three floors. It was when I was four years old, in a room with dirty white carpet and one of those walls that’s one big mirror, that I saw my father throw a cushion at my mom, who was sobbing on the sofa. Who knows what they were arguing about—it could have been my mom’s shopping sprees—but the point wasn’t what they were arguing about so much as the fact that they were arguing. The rounded hunch of my father’s pose, the mixture of sternness and fire in his eyes, his irises surrounded by white all around, like a cartoon villain. The small figure of my mother, in her pink floral nightgown, and the way the tears on her face transformed her pale brown face into a beet. The way she clutched the cushion he had thrown at her, which didn’t hit her and bounce off but was caught in her pleading hands, her fingers pushing grooves into its red velvet. I stumbled in, descending from my room to the TV room downstairs; the cushion was thrown; I took the mental snapshot; and then averting my eyes from my father, who turned to look at me, I caught the reflection of all three of us in the mirror wall—my father’s hefty stance, made all the larger since he was closer to the mirror, my mother half-obscured by the potted plant that stood in the corner, and me in between them, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, nonplussed and frightened and so small that I looked like a clay doll.

Four years later, we moved into a newly built house, the one where we live now, a resplendent, grand affair. My tight-fisted Certified Public Accountant father’s penny-pinching had paid off, and instead of ten steps, our house had stairways everywhere: that split staircase in the foyer that leads “up-a-stair,” as my father calls it; a triple-decker, carpeted staircase leading into our finished basement, which holds a Ping-Pong table—a staple of any Indian household even if its one kid doesn’t play Ping-Pong—and another large-screen TV. Gone is the mirror wall; now there are gold-framed mirrors everywhere, along with a motley crew of furniture. Indians are never able to throw anything away, and so my mother and father have insisted on using as much of their old furniture as possible. Therefore, though our sitting room has cathedral ceilings and tan plush carpeting, in it sits, almost boastingly, the blue couch from our old house, the back of it faded and sunburned from where it used to sit against the window; two rocking chairs that are straight out of an old Mother Goose picture book; and one “new” peach couch that still has the plastic wrapped on it a year after purchase. The walls are decorated with various photos that my dad has taken, with an occasional peacock feather tacked to the wall for no ostensible purpose. It is in this living room that I sit these days, doodling a picture of SS with Crayola markers, and hear the echoes of shouts from the master bedroom. It is worse this way, I think—with them out of sight. Who knows what is going on up there? What strange things are thrown…? I imagine my mother sitting on the bed, weeping, and my father grabbing things from her dresser—a bottle of lotion, a powder puff, a hand mirror—and chucking them into my mother’s strong-reflexed hands, which spring up and catch them as they once caught that blood-red pillow.

Only after the fights have subsided for the morning does my mother reappear, positioning herself in front of the stove and cooking with a newly sharpened vengeance, her fingers pecking into dough. If I interrupt this state, she responds with something bitter like

“
I’ll show him who makes this house run.
”

or

“
I didn’t come to this country for this.
”

or even, one time, startling me so much I was convinced for a week that my mother had been possessed,

“
Oh, go to Hell
,” which, not being able to enter the gates of Hades so easily, I took as meaning “go to your room” and locked myself away with SS on one side and a big bag full of depression on the other.

The day after my mom’s lecture, I am in the kitchen with her, helping to make dinner. I sit at the kitchen table with a big tub full of boiled potatoes that I peel happily, the softened whiteness sticking under my fingernails. At first the potatoes are so hot that the steam starts to numb my palms, but after a few minutes the burning turns to warmth and I am soothed.

“Mom,” I say. “Tell me about Krishna and Radha.”

My mother, in the process of throwing cumin seeds into popping oil, mimics the effervescent sizzle upon hearing this request.

“
Bahut acha, beta
”—
very good—
“Okay. Radha vas Krishna’s great love. Now
there’s
a good Indian girl. She vas a daughter of a yogi in Krishna’s town. She vas very beautiful—”

“Yes, with long black hair, and
kajol
around her eyes,” I chime in.

“
Acha, beta
! You remember the meaning of
kajol
.”

She opens the cupboard and pulls out an Old El Paso salsa bottle whose contents she has replaced with masala. She opens the bottle and dumps some of the masala into the seeds and oil, a soft searing sound issuing forth.

“Yes, she vore
kajol
, and everyday Krishna vould try to voo her by playing his silver flute. Every day he vould play and try to make her come hear him, and then vone day she came and fell under the spell of his playing.”

“He had her in a spell? Isn’t that cheating?”

“No,
beta
. She vas moved by the powver of the Almighty. Together, Krishna and Radha became the highest example of love.”

As she talks about the Krishna-Radha paragon of romance, she pours a few cups of water into the seed-oil-masala mixture, and a deep rumble accompanied by a cloud of steam arises from the pot. I pull out another potato and peel a sliver around its contour, the newly sliced skin curling around my finger. A small stream of steam, like a forked tongue, escapes.

And then, as she adds fistfuls of rice to her pot, my mother says, “In Hindi the vord for ‘lover’ and ‘Krishna’ is often the same. And I’ve alvays thought that your name sounds like Krishna’s. I think maybe that’s vhy I named you Kiran.”

Sometimes I feel like my mind works like a Bollywood movie: I see the world as a fast sequence of colorful and even disturbing images. In my mind, I imagine an army of me fanning out across a dirty Bombay street, each Kiran dressed in a different pastel color but all of them united in their blue skin. Then I see those tiny Kirans running into forests and lying under bamboo trees, lotus flowers like pillows under their heads, reclining with beautiful Indian women with huge breasts, bigger breasts than the women in
Penthouse
. And I imagine every tiny Krishna Kiran romancing these women, gods and lovers united.

Here at the kitchen table, I swear that a pink bubble erupts through me, and I imagine my blue feet, my blue legs, my blue waist, my blue torso and arms and neck and face turning lavender as the pink bubble passes through them. And then, in a gush, the blue returns, brighter than ever, as if having swallowed the pink bubble. Blue splotches appear like sapphires in my vision, and suddenly the potatoes are sliding all over the floor, wobbling and naked without their brown coats. The floor is wet with the still-warm water, and I am looking up at the ceiling. Rather, I
would
be looking at the ceiling, if I could see anything. I have gone blind. The blue has turned black.

“Arre!”
my mom exclaims, then kneels down. Her hands are still covered in the scent of spices, but she helps me to sit upright anyway. She leans me against the island in the kitchen, then takes a towel from the cupboard, soaks it in cold water, and puts it on my forehead.