Born Confused (3 page)

Dadaji could sit for hours listening to me, too, but I didn’t feel like such a circus freak around him, even though—or perhaps because—he didn’t understand a word of English. And me and Marathi—well, I didn’t know enough to get me to the other side of
the room; sure, when I was a baby those few months in India I’d spoken it in jigsaw pieces with him. But not since America, where I must have checked any memory of the language at customs. This was Dadaji’s constant sore point with my parents: Aaray Ram, Krishna, and anyone else who cared to listen, how could they have been so cruel as to cut off their own flesh and blood from one another through this ultimate act of linguistic negligence?

—This America you speak of is like a dream, he told me one time, Kavita casually translating.—I am too old to travel. And it breaks my heart I cannot picture your life there. Make it real to me, rani.

Rani, I understood; he was the one in the world who called me this. My princess, my queen. I’d been lying next to him on the bed, drifting into jet-lagged sleep. Gusts of sweet tobacco-smelling air skimmed my dreams. When I opened my eyes later, disoriented and dazed, I could hear the slap of wet laundry on concrete in the other room and Kavita’s high merry voice, teasing someone as usual. Out the slatted window, children were playing cricket and making cricket noises; sparrows convened noisily in the grill. And next to me, in a faded pair of my father’s pajamas, was Dadaji; I realized then he’d stayed beside me the whole time, his hand inches from my forehead, waving the flies from my face before they touched down so I could sleep undisturbed. He was watching me with eyes full of questions.

When I got back to America I started taking photographs for him. He was my number one fan: eager, insatiable. And he responded to everything, often with sketches and shots of his own, the pale blue airmail stationery addressed in his tiny slanty script turning the inside of our mailbox azure with a faraway sky. We were going to get around this language thing! It seemed so simple: We’d use pictures to talk. So I sent him pictures of any and everything. Even
the most inconsequential snap (i.e., my locker door) he would gobble up as if it were straight off the wall of a museum.

After Bobby O’Malley broke up with me, I sent Dadaji pictures of the street-in-progress where we’d pulled our first kisses from each other, a lone lamp burning in the distance. They were all dark, grainy, a little underexposed; I think I’d used the wrong ASA. I’d labeled them:
Some shots of the neighborhood.
When he wrote back, his reply was:
You don’t need him. You just need a better camera. Focus on the light next time.
I couldn’t figure out how he’d known. My parents asked me about that one when they’d translated the letter, but I played dumb at the time; the last thing I’d wanted to do then was talk about Bobby O’Malley.

In the same letter, Dadaji sent a money order to my parents, the equivalent of too many rupees, with the specific instructions that it was to be used only for the purchase of a “serious” camera for my birthday.

And that’s how I got her, my third eye, which is why I call her Chica Tikka, for the powder my mother keeps in a little pot in the kitchen temple—the scarlet dust her own mother pressed between her brows the morning she left for America. Chica Tikka, I imagined, could see far far away, even to where Dadaji was now. Whenever I took a shot, loaded a roll, I felt that hand inches from my face, safeguarding the dream. Whenever I peered through the lens I could nearly see him looking back at me from the other end—from a lamppost, a flower bed, even Gwyn’s ever-ready grin—and with so much love in his eyes I had to click to keep the tears from coming.

I haven’t gone back to India so I haven’t really seen the way in which he is not there, how that singing space has surely taken on his shape. All I knew was the pale blue letters stopped coming to me, though there seemed to be more from Meera Maasi to my mother now, especially since Sangita’s wedding preparations began. I missed
the letters, but I had the camera. No one truly understood why I was so attached to it, or why I liked spending so much time in the darkening room. But it was in this world where chemicals collided to coax images suddenly up out of sheer darkness that I felt most he was just beside me, abeyant, and all it would take to bring him out of shadow would be a single moment of the right chemistry.

—Beta! Your father’s home! my mother called.—Are you ready, birthday girl?

I stepped out of darkness. My eyes always throbbed when I did this too abruptly; maybe that’s why babies keep theirs squeezed shut for a while after entering the world. Too much light.

—Coming, I said.

The birthday shopping thing had been a ritual ever since I crashlanded into puberty. Basically, what would happen was my parents would take me to the mall and let me pick out a few of my own presents, and then they’d make me not look while they purchased some of these items, which would then mysteriously appear wrapped in oddly shaped boxes and last year’s Christmas paper on my actual birthday.

It wasn’t really a statement of my newfound independence, my crossing that department store boundary from the child to adult section, this choosing-for-myself-since-puberty deal. This was simply around the time my parents stopped understanding what I wanted and I stopped understanding what they wanted me to want.

The ritual usually worked according to an unspoken barter system: one proper item for every errant-ways one. For example, last year I’d received a “nice” dress (white, long sleeves, with a sort of pinafore that seemed ideal for bobbing for apples) and a pair of hiphugger bell bottoms that my mother told me made me look like those hippy-hop boys who’s dhugrees are always sneaking up on them.

The mall ritual usually followed the same pattern, and today was no different. When we got there, following my mom’s instructions, my dad spent an enormous amount of time circling around the parking lot trying to get a spot two inches away from Macy’s, even though half the lot was empty just a little farther back.

(I should mention that my mother didn’t like for me to drive when she was in the car. She said she didn’t have the stomach for
it—this coming from a woman who’d worked the intensive-care unit and delivered babies, but it was true: The few times she’d been in this unfortunate scenario she’d gripped the edge of the seat so hard her knuckles blanched like almonds, and began invoking gods from all sorts of religions under her breath.
Hare Ram, Allah, Jesus.
Calling upon other faiths was something she did only when she was
very
nervous.)

My father’s reverse parking job was followed by a stroll through Macy’s complete with my mother aaraying and ahhing with equal enthusiasm at anything diamond or cubic zirconia, and graciously accepting every scent sample that fluttered her way from the perfectly eyelined girls swaying around beachily on high heels; she would thank them with a girlish giggle, as if they spritzed for her alone. By the time we exited the cosmetics department she smelled of Obsession on her left wrist (even though she owned it, fittingly, she could never resist), Trésor on her right, and Samsara on her neck—a discordant bouquet coming together to create something more along the lines of
eau de nail polish remover
than anything else.

On to clothing, where my dad pointed out what he considered to be a “pleasant” nightgown for me (a Victorian contraption that even Jane Eyre might find constraining). Meanwhile, I was longingly eyeing two-sizes-too-small jeans on mannequins with impossibly slim, nippleless bodies that had nothing to do with my own. By which point my father was already bored and took off to check out spy gadgets, with a plan to meet us in forty-five minutes by the potted palms—thereby liberating me to manipulate my mother, by now woozy and pliable from inhaling all those fumes, into going places she wouldn’t have dared moments before.

—Ma? I said. We were passing the one way-out store in the
mall, which sold T-shirts with Bob Marley pictures on them and incense like we bought in India but much more expensive.

—I suppose you want to go look at the camera schamera business now? she said.

—Well, actually I wanted to know if we can go to Style Child.

That was Gwyn’s favorite store; it had just opened, and there was even a Manhattan branch in one of the Villages, so it had to be cool.

My mother’s face lit up.

—Clothes! she said.—Now that is the normal teenage girl thing. Let’s go find you a nice outfit!

The moment we approached Style Child, with its androgynous pink-haired punk rock mannequins reining in (and stepping on) stuffed Dalmatian puppies with snake belt leashes, my mother’s face fell.

—Are you sure this is where you want to look? she said.—How about somewhere feminine, like the Ann Taylor or Laura Ashley?

—I’m sure, I said.

One mannequin was in a white mini with zips all the way up both sides. A studded metallic belt that was itself half the width of the mini (we were getting into nano-fractions here) slunk anglingly down the front. The top was a white skintight one-shoulder-bare deal with a single sleeve. It was the kind of outfit Gwyn could pull off sans problem but that set alarm bells off through my head.

One step into Style Child and everything changed. My alarm bells were drowned out by the music blaring from the speakers and the general disco inferno ambiance. And I lost all sense; it was a doomed visit from there. I don’t know what it was but when I was in a brightly lit storeroom with a techno soundtrack pumping I felt several sizes smaller than I really was. I began scooping up tiny tees,
body-hugger boot-cut jeans, and bustiers with reckless abandon, acting like I was Gwyn. When my mom and I were finally standing with the maximum-allowed five items each (really twelve; I’d sneaked a skimpy crochet halter in my pile and a faux fur tube top in hers) she glanced at the goods.

—Have you checked the sizes, beta? she asked, lifting and dangling the halter off her finger as if it were a steeped tea bag.

—What are you implying? I said, already upset. The music wasn’t so loud in here, and a herd of multiply pierced salesgirls was staring at me menacingly, as if they knew there were six items in my hands and none would fit.

—I am not implying anything, beta, but if you insist on trying on these naggudy-faggudy things you might as well get the right size rather than try to be…I don’t know…
Gwyn.

—I’m not trying to be Gwyn! I picked these because I like them! All by myself! Come on, give me a little credit. I’m almost seventeen already, hello.

—But they’re not your size.

—But I refuse to fit in a bigger size than that, I said with end-ofdiscussion authority.

By this point we were in the dressing room. At the entrance to our changing stall, the salesgirl, a frizzy-haired, twiggy creature with Taffy on her nametag, hung all the clothes on the hook after asking if we’d be going in together. She had a low-tying halter on and the bones of her back stuck out and rippled as she moved. When she was finished, she turned and gave me the once-over, then the clothes, then me again.

—These are for you? she asked. I nodded warily.—Looks like you need a bigger size.

—In what?

—In everything.

—How do you know? I said, trying to remain calm. Hadn’t she read the salesgirl handbook?
Never
tell a potential customer
bigger.
In fact, delete word from vocabulary entirely.

—I can tell just looking at you. The ones you have are way wrong. Want me to switch ’em?

—This is the size I want, I said slowly.—I’ll fit in it.

—Whatever, she said, snapping her gum and strutting off. She called back over her shoulder.—Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The room was inhospitably adorned with a massive three-way mirror. Before I even embarked on my Olympian quest to lose weight in the next two minutes, I scanned the glass to see if it was a skinny mirror. I still looked sufficiently harpoonable, so I figured (and prayed) it was not. My mom sat on the bench, exhausted. And I set to work.

The jeans didn’t make it past the knees. I could see my butt poking lavishly out of my underwear in the three-way. Frock, I could make granny panties look like a G-string!

—It’s just a number, no one can see it, said my mother.—It doesn’t mean anything.

—Yeah, said Taffy, popping her head over the stall.—The numbers really don’t mean a thing.

That was a relief!

—They all read lower anyway, she added.

—
Lower?
I cried in horror. In the mirror I could see my mother waving frantically at her to shut the frock up. But it was too late.

—Yeah, we’ve done some studies and, you know, they sell way better that way. So we’ve knocked everything down a couple sizes. Like, you know, normally I’m a zero, but in Style Child sizes, that would be a negative four. It’s really boosted sales.

—I need to fit into these, I whispered desperately. Didn’t anyone get that I was going to be hanging with an NYU filmmaker in a few short hours?

—Well, in any case, those hot pink militia pants look really great. You should
definitely
get them.

—How do you know? They’re not even on.

—Well, I can see them, can’t I? And I’ve got a pair and they’re jammin’. Anyways, your top is way fab. You should
totally
get it.

—Uh, this is my bra, I said.

—See? said my mother.—Even
she
does not know the difference.

Taffy’s head was perched perfectly on top of our dressing room door as if it had found just where it belonged in this wacky world. I didn’t get this thing with salesgirls. They always stuck their head right in before you’d even changed, like you didn’t need to be alone to endure what you were about to endure—even when you were trying on bikinis, which could be a very emotional experience, bringing up all sorts of memories (like kids who insulted you on the playground twelve years before). And then they’d tell you everything looked great with about as much conviction as a nonbeliever with a wafer in her mouth.