Born Confused (49 page)

I couldn’t believe it. That what he could have thought was best for my mother could be so off, and that what he thought was good for me was so
on.
Maybe age really did bring on wisdom. I considered Mrs. Sexton. Well, in some cases.

—That is so strange when I think of how much he supported my dream to be a photographer, I said.—Created it, in fact.

Now she turned to me.

—What do you mean, created it?

At first I thought she was joking. And then I realized she really didn’t know. And of course she didn’t know: I’d always foolishly assumed she wouldn’t understand, that she didn’t have an artistic bone in her body. And so I’d never told her. Gesturing for her to wait, I went into my bedroom. I tugged the photo album Kavita had made me from between the mattresses and brought it out.

She looked at me quizzically, taking it into her hands. Word
lessly she turned the pages. And then the tremored silence of her crying.

—Oh no, Mom, I didn’t mean to make you cry, I whispered, touching her cheek.—I didn’t mean to make you sad.

—They are such beautiful photographs, she said through her tears.—Why didn’t you ever show me?

—I don’t know. I guess I thought—

—That I wouldn’t understand.

I nodded, wishing I didn’t have to.

—Dimple, I am so sorry. My beta, my daughter. I don’t know what I have been doing to make you feel this way, but it is true, you have seemed so stressed, especially lately. I suppose I have been repeating history—although looking at these pictures I’m not even sure I know what that is anymore.

She ran her finger along the border of a page, as if to work off the dust that wasn’t there yet.

—It is peculiar seeing our house, our friends, you, me. It is like a completely different story than the one I thought was going on, she said.—It is like a rewritten history.

She lingered over the pages, smiling sadly over Dadaji’s smooth script.

—So this is why you love so much your darkening room, she said.

—Yes. Yes, it is. When I’m in there, when I’m taking pictures, I feel like there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing, nowhere in the world I’d rather be.

—I suppose that is how I felt dancing, my mother said quietly.—Perhaps we’re not so different, Dimple, you and me. Even in romance—I fell in love with someone out of caste. You have dated boys out of…well…outlaws. And I suppose without even realiz
ing it I have been quashing your dream, just like my parents tried to talk me out of mine.

She closed the book gently.

—What a funny summer this has been, she said, now taking my hand in both of hers.—You know, I have to admit, it was hard for me to see Radha after so long—she reminds me of all the roads not overtaken, all the things I stopped doing when I got married. All those things it is too late to do now.

—Mom, it’s not too late. You just said so yourself. That even now you can rewrite history.

—Easier said, Dimple, she sighed.

But then I had an idea.

—Will you do me a favor? I asked, knowing her unequivocal answer before she even nodded.—Come with me.

I don’t think she realized what I was up to when I loaded Chica Tikka. Even when we got to the study. But when I opened the trunk and she heard the jingling, the ghosted child steps as I plunged my hands into the silken sea, understanding dusked her face.

—Oh no…I couldn’t possibly…

But I was already handing her the pieces.

—The choli, it will never…

—Then don’t hook it all the way; just hang the sari part over it.

—The pallu, and this…they will never…

But she couldn’t fool me here, and I called her on it.

—Mom, these always fit—they’re just pieces of fabric, there’s no size!

She had run out of excuses. And the moment she did, pleasure bared her face; she touched the silk so lovingly, like she had that evening, the sadness stripped down now. She held it up to herself, rustling it open to the floor.

—Okay, I will do it, for
you,
she sighed dramatically. Still, I could sense the eagerness in her fidgeting hands.—But only because you are so stubborn.

—Like a certain other Kshatriya I know, I said.—And I’m only half Kshatriya!

She had to smile at that.

And I waited.

When she returned she was a vision.

A sunset over a night sea as slow burning as any I’d ever seen, the choli stretching at the hooks but still flamingly on, deep purple sari stitched gold as summer waves cresting, creased fabric fanning between her knees, and the final piece of cloth knotted round her waist, hanging over her backside. Upon her clavicles the jutting necklace lay, the chunky pendants not quite flat, and the chain hanging still lower around it. Earrings swung to nearly her shoulders, thin links trickling up from them to clip into her hair; the ponderous waist chain sloped angling down a hip. Anklets, which I now realized that density of bells on black-brown fabric were, shimmered gigglingly thick halos above her bare feet; bangles swum her arms glidingly gold. The tiara flashed in her now fade-to-black hair, sun and moon clipped on either side of the parting. She had even put a touch of lipstick on.

She bowed down now to touch the ground—an apology to the gods in advance for treading on it. And when she ascended—weight in front black-legginged leg, back one strongly extended, an imaginary spear spanning from hand to ringed and mudra’d hand (Durga killing the demon, she explained, the power of all the gods in her grip)—must gone, all roses, she was the dancing girl come to life.

—One…two…
teen!

Click. And it was definitely not too late.

In just a few days, my parents had gone from being a couple who I thought could never understand me to two individuals together who got it beyond former imagination. And it had come about, I realized, from my taking a moment to try to understand
them.
Why had I never done that before? Now I could not believe the hitherto unappreciated beauty of that single light left on for me, and the way it could give your life shape in, even with, all the darkness.

But there was one person who needed to make her move now from this house of eternal Diwali, and much as it saddened me to open our arms and let her go, it was the right thing to do.

After several days living with us, Kavita decided it was time she face her Manhattan apartment again and deal head-on with the new state of things. I offered to go along to help her make the transition.

In India, whenever you come upon a new beginning you invoke the god Ganesha, remover of obstacles, and have a pooja, which was, in this case, a sort of Hindu housewarming. So the plan was this: Kavita and I would poojaficate her “new” home, and then have a girls’ day out. Neither of us was too keen to hit the club that night for the Indian Independence Day meltdown/Flashball warm-up—and deal with seeing our beloveds melting down and warming up in the arms of another (Karsh with Gwyn; Sabina with Upma).

So fairly early that morning my parents drove us to the station. My mother had supplied us with a packet of tea rose incense and a sandalwood peacock incense holder (the sticks slotted in like feathers). She’d also equipped us with, well, Ganesha, since Kavita had lost him in the split.

When we got downtown, we bought flowers from a deli by Waverly and Waverly before entering the apartment. It looked strange with its other half gone, and so tidily so: one set of bookshelves bare, the next packed; one kitchen cabinet full, the next, ringed with dustcutting circles where glasses had been. It was amazing to see how evenly they’d shared everything, but how separate they’d kept their spaces.

I had never actually held a pooja before, nor paid attention to the few I’d attended (been dragged to) by my family; it had all been Kavita’s idea. But I was really excited for some reason. At first I thought it was simply my joy at seeing my cousin her old-now-new self again. But then I realized I was excited for myself as well: It seemed a great idea, in no small part to celebrate all the positive things that had been happening with me and my parents lately. And as far as the new duo of Karsh and Gwyn was concerned, who couldn’t use a new beginning now and then? Maybe it would help me cut the cord.

—So, I said, looking to Kavita.—How do we begin a pooja?

—Well, first we are having to wash our hands, isn’t it?

So we did, in the kitchen, drying them on paper towels.

—You did not smell the flowers, heh? Okay, no. Good.

We kicked off our shoes and kneeled at Ganesha’s feet, there on the hearth of the nonworking fireplace where we’d placed him. We lay before him the carnations with a dish of sugar cubes and cashews and a Bounty bar (coconut was always used in Indian ceremonies and we didn’t have one lying around). We lit the incense in the peacock holder. The scent of tea rose mixed with sandalwood, plumes of smoke rising and dispersing through the apartment.

—Now what? I said.

—Um, what do you mean?

—Don’t you have to say something? The priest always says something.

—Yes, but I don’t know what he is saying.

—Kavita! And Sabina thinks you’re too
Indian?

—Well, nobody is even paying attention during these ceremonies, isn’t it? The aunties are always discussing whose son is achieving higher grades and their husbands’ promotions and the children are shooting marbles and the uncles sleep with their eyes open—and even closed! Sometimes I ask myself if the pundit is speaking gibberish just to see if he gets caught.

All this was true.

—Shouldn’t we at least throw rice in the fire or something?

That always seemed to happen at Indian weddings.

Kavita agreed, but she didn’t have any rice on hand (that had been on a Sabina shelf) so we threw penne instead, till all the hearth needed was a little parmesan and the dons could have dinner. And finally, as she couldn’t find any tikka powder, she stripped off her own bindi and placed it in the center of Ganesha’s forehead; it appeared enormous, the third eye even bigger than the two he used for the visible world. But Ganesha didn’t look like he minded, nor considered this cross-dressing; he simply grinned back at us from the midst of his tea rose halo.

Kavita took my hand.

—To new beginnings, she said.

—To new beginnings, I said.

And fairy tale endings, I added silently.

Kavita fed me a cashew. I fed her a sugar cube. Then she tore open the Bounty bar and we carried our ashing peacock through the apartment, burning out the old smells with a fresh perfume.

I liked the way this little ceremony marked what otherwise might have eventually disappeared as an ordinary moment. It was
sheer genius, actually, to treat transitions with care like this, as times to be celebrated rather than feared. And it certainly seemed my life had entered a new phase—even from the simple fact that I was participating in a pooja; I would never have done that at the beginning of the summer. In fact, I wouldn’t have done much of anything then; I hadn’t yet realized how much my life was in my own hands, had felt merely a victim of forces out of my control. And there were some, of course. But you certainly couldn’t go around acting like that, could you?

Tradition—what an innovative idea! It was like catching up with an old friend.

Once we’d wrapped up our second-generation pooja, Kavita and I launched into our new beginning. (I seemed to be having a lot of those these days.) We headed out, and over the course of the next few hours managed to: eat ice cream for breakfast (a second breakfast, since my mother had insisted on making us her red hot chili pepper and boursin omelets before we’d left); get our caricatures sketched near the Plaza; paint each of our nails a different color in Sheep’s Meadow. We then promptly mangled these manicures in our haste to ride the Central Park merry-go-round.

When we got back downtown late afternoon we finished off the day with a surprise, grace of Kavita. She led me into a slypey gallery near NYU where an exposition entitled East/West was running.

—I noticed it the other day on my way to the library, she smiled, pushing the frosted door.

The exposition was mainly photographs—of the Ganges, the Ajanta and Elora caves. Margaret Bourke-White’s images of Gandhi and Partition. But there were also shots of Indians in America doing pretty Indian things: the rearview of a cabbie’s car, decorated with a swinging glitterball Laxmi, the driver’s dark disembodied eyes pitched over a dashboard of fresh flowers. Or American things: a
blue-jeaned bustiered brunette who looked a little like Shailly lighting a cigar on a candle. Or doing neither Indian nor American things (or both): a girl-child benched outside a store with a two-for-one sign propped in the window, a goldfish in a plastic bag by her feet; the light caught the water and turned it glassy, to a chunk of ice in which the goldfish’s image refracted into two. Light ran up the girl’s kneesocks and dappled her brown knees, the fish burning sunorange, a small caught universe.

We moved on to stand before a photograph of a sculpture of an Indian classical dancer. It reminded me of the statue in our house, and it was stillingly beautiful, the way the light was skidding in to touch her, her skin silvered pistachio, a pale wash as if she’d just jingled up from the sea. She twisted at her tiny waist, muskmelon breasts wisting forward, nearly one atop the other, the massive apple of her bottom as well. Her thighs were definitely the kind that stuck together and her belly rounded out voluptuous over the carved necklace draped round her rolling hips. There would be no clean view to the toes for this woman—and it didn’t matter. She breathed grace, her almond eyes capacious, open but irisless, which gave the impression she was wakefully dreaming. Her ringletted hair chiseled up into a sort of crown and her lips played a smile as enigmatically knowing as that of pregnant women, of people in love, of children with visions. As if she were really onto something.

I felt so complete just looking at her, even with her missing arms, cut off at the armlets by invading Islamic armies aiming to desecrate her and thus the temple she had once been a part of. But she seemed even more sacred somehow, more imminent, despite the twice-removedness of being a sculpture within a photograph within a room in which we were now standing utterly close. As with Zara, I got lost in her beauty, and only after a moment realized with a start that I was not feeling too short, chubby, geeky, clumsy, clueless. I
didn’t feel like I had to say something brilliant; I didn’t feel any pressure at all. Funny what paying attention to something outside of yourself can do for your self-image.