Born Confused (47 page)

—Dimple, I know you are not developing, he said.—You cannot fool me—your camera has not moved an inch for days, and you do not have that…that darkening
glow
about you. Maybe you need a dose of light—you know that people truly suffer without sufficient light? We are like the plants. Or photos, I suppose. So I was thinking—if you are free—how about that temple date we talked about?

He was right. I needed to get out. So later that day, while my mother was lunching with Radha, in fact, I drove us to Signs Central.

The Shree Ganesha Temple’s almost librarial exterior completely belied the raucous ruckus—on every level, assaulting every sense—going on full speed inside the square brick structure. Little did I suspect any of this, however, as we stepped out of the car (impeccable parallel parking job on my part; I was definitely improving), the double clack of the doors and the soft tarred thud of my sneaks and my father’s loafers the only sound in the world. Even the blare of highway traffic wasn’t making much headway through the thick barrier of oak and elm, shimmying with jewel-green leaves in the summer breeze.

The foyer doors were marked, unsurprisingly, with a sign imploring all who entered to refrain from various inappropriate activities, and then a short list of friendly recommendations for appropriate behavior, the first of these commandments being “please remove footwear thank you” (punctuated authentically vis à vis India, where commas were often dropped before niceties). My father kept smiling at me and ruffling my hair. He looked so chirpy. It occurred to me that I’d never considered hanging out with him of my own free will on a post-pubescent free day, and it was a lot less painful than I’d imagined.

The foyer was stacked with cubicled shelves in which you could stash your shoes thank you before entering. Karsh would definitely appreciate this, with his penchant for barefootedness.

When we entered the room, I was stunned to receive several surprised, censuring and grinning stares—all from men. Because that’s all there seemed to be seated on the carpeted floor. A beat, then I realized the women were on the other side of the room.

—Uh, you’ll have to go over there, said my father.—Is that okay? We can stay close to the barrier so we’re still somewhat near each other.

He squeezed my shoulder and sat down on his side of the bar
rier (a small table where for a smaller donation you were handed plastic bags of home-fried nibbles, like duck-feeding packets, or movie food). I moved tentatively to the women’s side, swept up on the droning tide; a harmonium was blasting from the speakers and a drove of warbling dissonant voices was chanting something over and over in Sanskrit (I guessed; it was incomprehensible to me save for the Ganesha part).

I felt shy as I sought out a sitting space on the floor: Everyone was in a sari, or at least a salvar, the older women in gym socks and cardigans, too, with sometimes jarringly trendy hair accessories glitter-pinning their buns or securing their braids in vivid plasticsunflowered place. Even many of the young girls were in saris, but some of them had painted toenails, which gave me hope. I don’t know why but I felt even more of a mistfit here, like I could distinctly see the disappointment of the older women at my literal unsuitability (blue jeans and tee); the slightly smiling younger girls appeared merely to be laughing at me. Seemed my tee screamed out Failed Indian Girl rather than My Parents Went to Cancun and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. Was that what an ABCD was? Or was that just me, I thought, recalling the with-it crowd at the Desicreate events. I felt I didn’t belong, but as if that wasn’t enough, was experiencing serious pressure to connect nevertheless; after all, these peeps could be (and maybe even were) my own relatives. Under the silks and salvars, they looked enough like me.

Even though there were actually plenty of people getting up and walking around, I felt too self-conscious to do so myself, especially while some, or all, were praying. I plunked down almost immediately, almost afraid to look up and meet the surely vituperative regards of my new neighbors. But then one elderly lady with skin soft as the pages of a much-loved book turned to me and smiled so kindly it brought tears of gratitude to my prodigal-daughter eyes.

I decided to revert to observing. Trying to participate was too risky, achy-breaky.

Everyone was seated facing front, which had led me to believe the main event was taking place there—but in fact there was no main event happening anywhere. To some extent people seemed to be doing their own thing, while the speakers blared popped-corncrackle out in surround sound. On the other side, a man would occasionally fling forward and prostrate himself, touching his forehead repeatedly to the beige carpeting. This surprised me, as I thought only Muslims touched their foreheads to beige carpeting. None of the women seemed to be doing that. But I guess catapulting yourself was a little more difficult when you were sari-bound. Maybe saris had been invented to keep women from escaping from temples and marriages in the first place—after all, how fast can you run when you’re in one? The chicas were barely shifting position, save to clap, and I felt a wave of sympathy just thinking about the severe cases of pins and needles they’d be experiencing soon enough.

I tore my eyes away from the templegoers to take in the temple itself. Christmas lights were tacked all around the room (well, perhaps, it occurred to me now, they weren’t really Christmas lights, just festive ones) and some kinky bulbs like in the boho store blinked seedily along the ceiling’s perimeter. Three of the four walls were decorated with large square paintings depicting Krishna and sundry gopies, and Hanuman, and scenes from the
Ramayana
and
Mahabharata.
The front wall was made up of a few sort of boxy mixed media assemblages, like you find particularly in post-Thanksgiving department store windows. Enshrined in the glass case before me: an adorable rotund gold Ganesha. One of those silver-magnet twopiece sculptures—this one of dolphins on either end of a thin metal arc—bobbed and balanced itself before him. Strewn by the elephant god’s feet was an eden of fresh flowers and apples and pears.
Upon closer examination I could see tiny white blotches on the fruit. The price tags!

I sat back and made like an aperture. I took it all in. The hues, the croons, the unbelievable mix of sacred and everyday. The scent of incense and hair oil and sleep and fried food. The sounds: At first the chant had seemed and, well,
was
repetitive, but it began to feel strangely intoxicating, to grow more powerful as it repeated, the way choruses to great songs only gain momentum as the song goes on. These people were completely lost in the music, in the lights, in their worship. The atmosphere was drunken, heady with blinking bulbs and blasting beats, and it reminded me of something.

HotPot.

I wondered why nobody just got up and started dancing. I imagined these women undoing their braids and springing into whirling dervishes. The place had all the elements of a discotheque—right down and up and panning to the speaker system! I wondered who the DJ was, stringing along the harmonium. I felt my cheeks condense and realized I was smiling; I was swept with such a sense of peace at having found a way to connect to it all, even if most of the folk around me might beg to differ with the disco analogy. And it now occurred to me that maybe the whole point was, in fact, to lose yourself. But not in the sense of confusion—in the sense of connection to something bigger than yourself. HotPot certainly had felt that way: Getting lost to be found.

When I came out of my musings I noted my father gesturing to me, and we rose to meet in the nongendered foyer.

—Sorry, beta, he said as we slipped our shoes back on.—I can’t sit like that too long—my legs fall asleep.

When we got to the car, we slid in and snapped on the belts, but my dad didn’t shut his door. He paused, smiling at the front window, as if particularly pleased with the windshield wipers, then turned to me.

—Isn’t this so nice, beta? he said.—Like our Millburn Diner dates when you were little, when you used to leap out of bed at the crack of dawn every day…

I was sure this was heading towards a reproach regarding my laziness, but then I saw he was somewhere else, his face soft as a dreamer’s.

—Remember, beta? And we’d leave the coffee on for your mother and sneak out, just the two of us.

Of course I remembered.

—Two corn muffins split with butter one egg fried extra pepper please and a junior hot fudge sundae with extra fudge and chocolate sprinkles, but only after, I said.

—And could you replace the vanilla with one scoop cookies and cream one pistachio and two spoons, thanking you very much? my father finished.

He winked at the memory of our innocent outings. Our last one would have to have been about seven years ago. I remembered never being able to stifle my giggles as the two of us would tiptoe exaggeratedly through the house, stage-shushing each other, index fingers so firmly against our noses they snubbed upwards, so as not to wake my mother, who slept deeply in those days despite all that Maxwell House. Now I realized she must have known what was up all along, maybe even orchestrated it—she was big on father-daughter time, even though, to tell the truth, I’d never ever felt he hadn’t been there for me, no matter what his call schedule had been. But back then I thought we were really pulling the synthetic comforter over her eyes.

We used to have this Smith Corona typewriter in the house, a relic my father bought before I was born, when my parents first came to America. He used it to make things look official: complaints to the telephone company, invoices, thank-you notes. I’d adored the
ting!
it would make at line’s end, which never failed to get my mom double-checking the microwave or drying her hands anxiously on her slacks, glancing doorwards for unannounced visitors. After I started writing and reading, my father would boost me up on a stack of the yellow pages so I could reach, guide my fingers over the keys. A switch allowed you to go from black to red ink, and we both always opted for vermillion, decorating the sheet with scores of shift key symbols: ruby asterisks and apple ampersands, bleeding pound signs, chokecherry copyrights, percents.

The Smith Corona played a vital role in how we would organize our corn muffin escapades, my father and I. I would be casually strolling through the dining room, and there it would be, lifted out of its hard black suitcase and positioned carefully before the head chair, a piece of paper rolled neatly in its mouth, still crisp. I would bounce to my knees on the seat, my heart a hummingbird in my wrists. The paper would usually read something like this:

@$% My Dearest Miss Bacchoodi
%&#

I was thinking that it has been a Very Long Time since we had a Corn Muffin Date. What do you think? I have an Idea: If you do not have anything else on your Schedule, and you might be available this Sunday at 8. The Two of Us could sneak out for Breakfast (and maybe a Hot Fudge Sundae with Extra Fudge)? Do let me know. (We can replace the Vanillas.)

I Love You Very Much.

**%@%Your Bapuji%&%**

He wrote like the offspring of Pooh and a cursing cartoon character. And, one finger at a time, my rose-red response:
Let me check my Schedule: Of course! And Chocolate Sprinkles!
I could never
sleep the night before, dreaming dreams of our favorite waitress Ilene’s crinkling smile and surreally spotless apron, the butter melting in all the nooks and crannies of the muffin tops, the way the whipped cream stayed cool and the fudge hot, the little puddle of it at the bottom of the dish that I would find when all the ice cream was gone, that Ilene always poured in first, so I could “end on a chocolate note.”

—How I cherished those mornings, said my father, shaking his head and smiling sadly to himself.

—You did? I said. It sounded immediately silly: Of course he had. As had I. And even my mother, who greeted us with open arms and feigned surprise when we got back sticky grinned, probably enjoyed it all immensely as well. I had just forgotten, that’s all. Forgotten how fabulous it could be to be with my dad. And how it used to be enough to be with my dad and a hot fudge sundae on the horizon, with my father, the first man I ever wanted to marry.

—It’s just then you got so busy, with school, your friends, your life, he continued now. It sounded like the way I felt sometimes about Gwyn.—And now you are all grown up. I know it took years, but I still can’t help feeling it happened in the blink of an eye. Sometimes an expression will come to your face that I was knowing when you were only months old, when you saw a puppy for the first time, or when your diaper was ready to go. But now it is not for puppies and diapers. I suppose that’s what happens; it is only natural, especially in America. But it’s funny—if someone had told me before we left India that I might lose my daughter even more quickly in the process, I would not have budged one inch.

He grinned suddenly, and frantically rubbed his thigh, the itch that wasn’t there that popped up at moments like these, embarrassed by his sudden display of emotion. He didn’t usually talk like this.

—And been a farmer in Varad today…not!

He was trying to make a joke of it, but I knew it was no joke. I don’t know why but I wanted to cry. I looked at my father and I saw for the first time, it seemed, the silver spreading at his temples, a wave breaking on a black sea of hair, and that just discernible bald spot creeping up reeflike underneath it all. The wiry strand curling out from his ear. There was a jaggery-colored cluster of spots on his forearm I didn’t remember being there before. I saw that familiar smile stretching too tight against too many teeth and for the first time in what seemed a long time it didn’t irritate me. For the first time I saw that it was a beautiful smile, one that was trying to enjoy something so that somebody else could, to not say the wrong thing, to not spoil the moment, a smile stretched tight to not let that wish escape. Or maybe it already had escaped, that wish, and it was to not let one in again, to not let one grow again, like a dandelion gone gauzy to be blown bare by a passing wind.