Born Confused (24 page)

She gestured to the wide span of the club.

—All this. You have to be ready for beauty, Dimple. That’s when it comes, that’s when you find it.

That did it. I took Chica Tikka out and gave Sabina my knapsack to stash back behind the bar. And it was true. The moment I had her in my hands I felt much better. Even without taking a picture. Just the weight of her in my palms, the sureness of the strap, the case weightless now, the way it should be, in my lap.

I looked my camera in the eye. I could see down there a tiny convex me. I watched the tiny me in the lens staring back with a piercing regard, one that seemed to arrow into my deepest part. The tiny me bobbled her head to the music, which was beginning to climb like a live animal up the legs of the barstool and into my own, massaging away the knots and lifting me on a wing out of my sadness.

A woman was singing, after all the man vocals, with a scorchingly sweet voice that sounded like India herself, mingling with the prodigy of the deer-eyed mud-caked rapper, all atop an everweaving tapestry of sitar and snare and cachunking key. Somehow the music felt exactly right. It was full of as many emotions as a bite of bhel puri; it crunched and it spilled and it lingered and was gone
in a heartbeat. It trundled down the throat, eddied in the belly and dawdled; it satiated and made you want more. It was danceable and it was lonely and it was full of fields and fruit and skyscrapers, and it was the sound of a star forming in a black hole. Somehow it was just how I was feeling. It was funny, but it felt as if the DJ was playing just for me—which eased my agony at watching Gwyn, as usual, get all the attention. I was beginning to see what Sabina meant about having to get lost to get found—if I gave myself up to the moment I forgot myself, I forgot the fact I didn’t know or understand the words, I became the tiny twiggling girl in the lens, drawing strands of light from a dark curtain.

And when I looked up to the dance floor again, startled to see all these people inhabiting a space where I’d just had such an ironically quiet moment, something happened that I couldn’t believe.

Before my very eyes, Gwyn’s position as dance-floor diva was usurped, gently but incontestably, by the most striking woman I’d ever seen.

She didn’t even look human. This creature was an Indian goddess, like something I had seen only in museums or movies or the illustrations in the gorgeously spined books on Dadaji’s shelves. Except even more fictitious and more vital, as if she’d come unclipped from the Hindi film images now brick playing, wandering multidimensionally out.

She was decked out in space-age Bollywood style in an argentine sari, and silver glitter dusted the apples of her cheeks. Her locks ran long, flawless as mannequin hair; her skin was like sunrise on sand dune. She had all the right moves and they seemed subaqueous, so flowing were they. Her face, too, danced to the beat, neck switching from side to side, seashell lids low, eyes skirting the faces before her from beneath them, like dark, slow darting fish.

She made everything around her disappear, the way the wish on
the cake can make the cake, crowd, and kitchen vanish. But more than anything it was the energy around her that was remarkable. The way it felt you could cup it in your palm and keep a piece of it for later.

Without a word, a glance, a grin, she had moved me. And the entire place: The ring had widened when she’d stepped onto the dance floor; people who had been dancing stopped to stare, people who hadn’t began, hands held to their hearts.

—Looks like your friend’s been pegged for the hi-lo instructor she truly is, Sabina tittered into my reverie.

It was true: Beside the queenly one Gwyn—still flapping around like a cheerleader—suddenly looked a bit like a bhangra buffoon. It made me sad for a moment; much as I longed to be like Gwyn, when it came down to it, I didn’t long for her to come off as foolish on the other side of the equation. But she hadn’t seemed to notice, appeared just as intoxicated as the rest of the crew, in her bounding puppy-dog enthusiasm almost eager to please this enthralling new presence.

The woman was the image of all the grace and femininity I longed for—but with the silver lining of being, in a way, within reach. No, I would never be tall, blond, and milky-skinned like Gwyn, but this petite, inky-haired, bronze-limbed being made that seem even conceivable as a good thing.

—Leave it to Zara, Sabina said, smiling to herself and shaking her head.—She puts the balls into Bollywood, that’s for sure. Now
that’s
what I call getting into character.

Before I could ask her what she meant she’d disappeared to the other end of the bar, which I now realized was packed. When had that happened?

I could have sat there staring forever. I doubted film could cap
ture why, but I figured I’d give it a try and picked up my camera. By the time I’d put my eye to the viewfinder Zara had vanished into the crowd.

But this time I was prepared to jump to it. I hopped off the stool to the quavering ground and, Chica Tikka in hand, began to navigate the maze of the club, this time riding my tipsy shoes as if they were waves on the tidal floor, soon adapting.

Dadaji, you are going to love this.

The place had really filled while I’d been lost in Zara. The drums were getting manic, percussive beats shuddering feverishly through the skin. More and more boys and girls were unshackling, taking up the dance floor. They bobbed like life buoys, shrugged with one hand twisting up in a queen’s wave to the pale plastic stars above, the other to the ear, as if straining to hear, oddly, the resounding beat. Many more girls had gathered since the last number with Zara, creating now a perhaps fifty-fifty mix, but, funnily enough, with the exception of Gwyn (who continued to hold on to her entourage), the men seemed to prefer dancing with each other.

No wallflowers in this crowd, and it felt as if at any moment the floor might cave in and roof drop down and they would just keep dancing as the pretend stars were replaced by real ones, clicking on one by one like tiny lights. Not that you could usually ever see stars in Manhattan; they were so often concealed under the dreamy purple gauze of the night sky, or turned around, the way women wore precious rings backwards on the subway.

But I had a feeling they were out wishingly tonight, and I slipped through the back doors, the ones with the embered Exit just above them.

The back of the building was fairly desolate, a few cars in the lot and a grille fence wrapped halfway around it, surrendering to the ground in parts, verdant knobs of grass choking through the wire diamonds. The sight of this gasp of green nourished me with tenderness.

Steam rose off the pavement, and I waded through all the accumulated heat of the day. Outside the air was balmy and soft and a child breeze brushed its fingers gently against my skin. I could smell the sea, the salt catching in my inhalation and filling me with an inexplicable sense of nostalgia. Plastic shovels and sand castles I hadn’t built were as real to me as if I had, other people’s memories seeming to flow into my body with the briny westward wind. The thought that the sea was close—that this was an island, and a moonwound ocean was always within minutes of your touch, connecting you to every other imaginable place in the world—teased me open with a sense of possibility. I breathed deep, and in the sky an enormous star pierced my vision. First star I see tonight, unless you counted the plastic ones. I had to make a wish.

I didn’t know how to put my wish into words. The image of a ladder trembling romantically up into a balcony, of princesses letting down their hair, of my mother’s dance costume, of Zara’s stunning grace—I had so wanted to keep her in my camera, beside the tiny me.

My star began to move, at first I thought in response to my crossed fingers and concentrating eyes. Then to blink red, white, red, a bit of blue. And then I realized it was an airplane, a celestial thread stitching a piece of sky. Could I wish on it nonetheless?

—It still counts, a smoky voice sashayed across the pavement towards me. I turned.

It was Zara. Just when I’d stopped looking I’d found her. And
she wasn’t alone, but was leaning with her back against the graffitikissed brick, the seashelled cell-phoned boy who had let us cut the line by her side, one of her hands in two of his. His jacket was off now, his striped shirt puckering slightly open.

—Go on, now, don’t waste that film, she said, nodding to my camera. She had that hillocky English accent that my parents’ friends who’d gone to nun-run schools in India had.—You’ve got a classic Kodak moment right before your eyes, yaar.

I couldn’t believe it.

—Are you sure you don’t mind? I asked.

—Mind? I would be offended if you didn’t.

That was the last thing I wanted. So I aimed, pulling the two into my small framed view. Zara glowed against the hardened lava of the written wall. I saw now that she was barefoot and on tiptoes, a pair of the most unusual shoes I’d ever seen tumbled by her feet. I zoned in on them to take a look—they were silver, the heels vertiginously high and coated with glittering bits and pieces of who knew what to create a bedlamic mosaic. I pulled back and focused on the wider frame.

They both smiled for the camera, but it was no mere camera smile: Their happiness was as tangible as the grit in the bricks and the salt in the sky tonight.

—One…two…
teen!
I said.

—Jalfreezi! she cried.

I snapped.

—Now I want a copy of that, Photo Girl.

—Dimple Lala, I said.

—Zara Thrustra, she said. Then she indicated her companion.—Ye mere dilka sangeet hain.

—How should I get it to you?

—Oh, where there’s a will, she said and turned back to face the many-named boy in a way so intimate it signified our conversation was over.

As I was leaving, heading to enter the club, I turned back for one last glimpse. And what met my eyes was the photograph I wanted but which required no film to imprint on my memory: The two were gazing, smiling at each other, the boy touching her cheek with his hand, her hand on his hand, foreheads together. Their view must have been a cyclopsian or even tryclopsian one; their eyes were so close their lashes could have brushed butterfly kisses. They imbued grace in the graffiti that slashed the wall apart behind them, brought everything together with the tenderness of their regard.

Tears blurred my vision as I passed through the doorway again.

My favorite part of
The Wizard of Oz
has always been when the film switches out of black and white, when Dorothy steps out of Kansas and into Oz and life goes Technicolor. And that’s what reentering the room was like. But what was Technicolor about it was the music; it had hit high tide and a redolent wave of it surged and crashed upon me and I realized it was a song I knew by that singer with a voice so been-there and smoked-too-many it made it hard to believe she was a preacher’s daughter but then it was all raw love she was singing about and you believed it, you believed her, you believed it could happen to you. But it was not quite the way I’d ever heard it on the radio or MTV: It was as if the song itself had taken drugs. Doying-doyinging through it were all kinds of swirly slink sounds, like Ravi Shankar and joint family were pogo-sticking through on their way to the opera. Except it wasn’t invasive. It was really upping the ante of the song and a beat like a deep slapped lake buckled heavily in it as they went. And then the preacher’s daughter, she skated somewhere else, pursuing her own dream, and the
whole bottom part of the song rose up into the space she left behind and a man’s voice was calling out
itchy itchy eye,
and then silence, and then everyone crying
oh ho!
and then
itchy itchy eye,
and silence,
hi hi!
the drums again, charging.

It reminded me of something and my head jumbled with half-thoughts and images, vivid and shorn from their original context. Like the memory of a memory of a dream. Rooftops and rungs and the stars just within reach once you got there. We were one and we were all and this DJ was playing my song.

I looked up at the plastic stars. The ten-headed demon had been smashed open and glitter-rain winked down upon the masses. It fell upon me, sticking. And it was literally raining men: stage diving and climbing up again and again, indefatigably, like children with new toys. Onstage dancers leapt this way and that, mingling with what seemed like millions of people flickering on brick. Then I realized the screen was playing the scene at hand, with its closest focus on the stage, so that each person and motion was exaggerated and amplified, echoing just behind itself in a doubled world.

The floor smack-crackled. Women in saris were bumping and grinding, hair windmilling off tawny faces. The corporate types were tearing off their ties and getting into the groove. The sea of hands had multiplied and fingers wiggled like antennae. Mad mind-bending energy pulsed through the venue. The entire space combusted, came undone, people flying through the air, on chairs, on table edges. I had never seen anything like it in my life.

Everyone was dancing.

I waded through the techno tulips, dripping languorously down the walls and pivoting pink and fuchsia on the floor. A circle had cleared just by the stage. Between every-which-way elbows and thumping hips I could make out what at first looked like a ruddy hu
man vortex whirling down a drain on the floor but without getting smaller. A moment later I realized it was a couple guys break-dancing; from the turbans I guessed they were Sikhs.

When I pushed through the human barrier to examine the faces below me I couldn’t believe it. A hawkish-nosed baby-bearded boy was down there, whizzing in and out of contortions as easily as if he were tying a shoe, his turban running color like paint. The thick silver kada bouncing light like a flash off his wrist and into his familiar high-IQ eyes clinched it for me: It was my own Jimmy (Trilok) Singh! He didn’t look so shabby tonight, doing those on-the-back swirlie-whirlies. I stood at the forefront of the human amphitheater and poised my camera just above him, leaning in. Jimmy (Trilok) looked right up, but was so lost in his sweat grace he seemed not to see me. I snapped. Now why hadn’t he mentioned
that
in his plan for world domination via fingerprint security systems? If he’d meant via the dance floor he wasn’t far off.