Born Confused (50 page)

—It’s amazing, I whispered.

—Well, it’s nice you think so, isn’t it? said Kavita. Her voice wound a cool river through the hushed room.—Because she looks just like you.

This was news to me; I was actually so stunned that I forgot to say something self-deprecating. Kavita came and stood behind me. She put both hands on my shoulders and her chin on the right one.

—The nose, she said, tracing my own with her index finger then pointing to the dancing girl’s. I half-expected a marbly virescent version of Kavita to spring out from behind the statue’s shoulder, pointing back at me.—The eyes. The definition of the lids, of the upper lip. The proportions of the body. Even the hair. Well, minus this tiara business.

She looked like me? Geekmeister me, always the last picked for teams, the only one in the school that had to walk off the last lap of the 600-yard dash for the President’s Fitness Exam? I tensed up a little waiting for the laugh track, the ha portion of the evening to begin, but nothing happened.

—Yes, you, Kavita laughed, as if reading my mind from the back of my head. But it wasn’t a mean laugh; it was one that spilled champagne down my bones, bubbled and unlaced all my doubts. She gave my shoulders a squeeze.—Except you’ve got better posture. Now come on, I am starving.

I turned to look at my cousin twinkling before me. And I knew what we were going to eat.

Later that afternoon, two bottles of wine and resoundingly carnivorous pizzas later (pepperoni, sausage, hamburger, bacon, hold
all
veggies, easy on the cheese) we lay back on the dislocated cushions of the sofa bed, bellies plunging skyward, digesting.

Kavita breathed in deep.

—Sandalwood, she sighed.—Much nicer than Sabinawood.

—Kavita, I said.—Don’t be offended, but I can’t believe you were with a woman at all. I mean, you wear kajal, you have long hair. And you’re always in salvars and chaniya cholis. You’re so feminine. You’re so
Indian.

I was gazing at the ceiling. If you looked long enough, white wasn’t merely white, but you could pull the pink from it, the greyblack in the shadowed areas, even yellow and blue.

—Being with a woman doesn’t make me less Indian! she laughed.

—But it just seems like, like such a loss to, I don’t know—to
men
to have you going for the girls.

—But then it would be a loss to women if I went for the boys, isn’t it?

I had to admit that was true.

—And more important, I would be even more lost if I were not true to myself—no matter how I may appear to others, even to my own family.

—So that’s what you meant about pressure being on Sangita? I asked.

Kavita nodded.

—But does Maasi know?

—Oh, I don’t know if she
knows
she knows. But she is certainly aware I have always been a little off center.
Her
center. And that I will probably continue to be. Just not with Sabina. But who needs Sabina? She was always interrupting me, never letting me speak.

—Yeah, I hate when people do that, I said.—Gwyn was always
doing that, or stealing my ideas. Or quoting me at exactly the wrong moment.

—And Sabina was so bossy about what I ate. I mean, please be giving me a break!

—Well, Gwyn never
let
me eat—half the proteins on my plate were being broken down in her stomach before I even put my napkin on my lap.

—And Sabina always had to be the star, the center of attention—like that whole debate situation.

—Yeah, I know someone like that, too.

The fridge hummed as we mulled this over.

—But there was something, I don’t know.
Exciting
being around her, Kavita said finally.—Like she was always just about to discover something. Like
you
were about to discover something, not only about her but yourself.

—Yes, I said.—A familiar mystery. A mystery you know by heart.

—A buzz, a pulse, she nodded.—And then she could be so tender—whenever I would be studying late, she would try to stay awake with me so I wouldn’t feel too alone in the middle of the night. Half of the time she was dozing behind a propped-up textbook. But still. And whenever I would come out of the shower she’d be waiting with a towel to wrap me in so I wouldn’t catch cold—she knew how easily I catch cold.

I thought of Karsh draping his shirt around me on our walk home that needling night, the way he worried about Julian, said a person with me should want to be nowhere else. And Gwyn’s EFCs, her insistence on making my birthdays special, the long-stemmeds she sent me to infuriate Bobby last year.

—I always felt I could tell her anything, said Kavita.—Or say nothing at all.

She made an angel in the rug and then stopped, curling into herself, knees to stomach.

—I miss her, she said.

—Yeah, I said.—I miss her, too.

—And him, she said, staring unerringly into my eyes. But it wasn’t really a question.

—And him, I admitted.—Though I never really had him at all.

I was amazed at the parallels between how Kavita felt about Sabina and how I was feeling—not only about Karsh, but about Gwyn as well. I suppose love was love, ultimately, whether it was straight, curving, or crooked. Kavita and I had even more in common than I’d once imagined; in fact when I thought back to those days when I felt otherwise it was as if it was an entirely different person I was talking about. It was as if I’d been a different person, too.

—But have you ever really tried? Dimple, you must be honest with Karsh and with Gwyn, Kavita was saying.—You must take authority for your feelings.

—But I’ll look like a fool.

—There is nothing to lose. There is nothing to be ashamed of. This is how you feel, and if you tell it like it is at the very least it is true. And if it changes later? At least it was true once. But now you must express yourself so that everyone is playing with a full deck of cards, heh? And if it does not work out when all is said and done, you must come to terms with the fact that if you cannot have him, you cannot have him. That does not mean you can’t be his friend; who can’t use an extra one of those from time to time, isn’t it?

—Isn’t it, I agreed. I certainly didn’t want to lose him, either of them, as a friend. They both meant more to me than even I’d realized till talking about it. But somehow I felt better, too, just talking about it. Like asking the question was part of finding the answer.

—And in the meantime and always, she counseled me.—Focus on your strength.

—Which is?

—Taking pictures, yaar! You are very lucky to have a passion like this, and to be so good at it. Now use it. You know what you want to do. Now do it. Acts of love will lead you to more love. Turn your pain and confusion into beauty and power, like I am trying to do with this breakup. I did learn a lot from her.

—You know, it’s funny, but Sabina told me almost the same thing once, I said.

—Case in point, said Kavita. Then she turned a sideways face to me, half her grin cut off by carpet.

—You see? she added proudly.—You can even learn something good from a no-good hanky-panky bitcheswallah!

I was laughing, too, then. But I’d never felt more serious.

When Kavita hit the books, I hit the streets, gear in hand, on back, and in arms.

I have seen photographs of Paris and the snow-lit steps of Montmartre leading up to the Sacré Coeur. I have seen the craggy belly of El Capitan shuddering feverish light off the dawn of a postcard. I have witnessed perfect summer days without a care in the world. I have viewed lunar eclipses and (through special glasses) solar eclipses and once, even, a fatly lusting moon over the water in Baja so huge it had seemed an abruptly emerging planet that had all the time before been hidden by an accident of astronomical alignment.

But there is nothing like Tribeca light at sundown.

If my bedroom could be lit with this, if offices could order Tribeca bulbs and apartments Tribeca track lights, life would always have a night-before-Christmas feeling, a charged but peaceful expectancy, and for wondrous things at that.

When I left Kavita’s the sun was runging down and I followed it only to lose it, then come upon it again on Spring Street, a block from the river. Buildings flushed like blood just before it breaks through skin; the cobblestones distinguished themselves, thinly iced cupcake flowers tinkering together with an almost audible echo. In the near distance the water went steely pink with the great fire nesting over it, the burning ball of flame that always seemed so much nearer when it fell in New York’s choppy sky than from the uncharted heights of New Jersey, as if there really wasn’t that much distance between us and it, as if there really wasn’t that far to fall.

There was nothing much happening on this street, but one pub,
the Wife of Bath, was crowded with life, people spilling out with mugs, panning gold from the day; they plonked on the curb, on streetside school chairs with folded-down desks and dilapidated couches. The pub beckoned like the rickety kitchen of a house of a big family, and I gravitated towards it.

And when I got there I did something I had never done in my life. I ordered a ginger ale and sat down by myself on a lovably ornery stool and I didn’t pretend to be reading a book or checking my watch for an extraordinarily late person. I was right on time, and I sat back and watched the sun go down. We all seemed on some level to be there for that miracle, and no matter what was going on the moment before—whoever was hitting on or splitting with whom, or quitting their job or getting fired or breaking their lease, seeking asylum, or trying drugs, or coming off them—as that fireball gained speed going down, conversations dulled to a hush, cigarettes stemmed to confounding lengths of ash that mysteriously did not fall, and we were tiny creatures in a great universe and it never felt so good.

To the blues, the violet blues and slowly, quickly: darkness. So many colors only moments from being something else; day and night not two ends of the spectrum but two moments in a life. Nothing was merely black and white—not even a black-and-white photograph. It was all about the in-between, the grading shades. And maybe I’d just been—as everyone was, I was beginning to think—inhabiting not the outside, nor the edge, nor the nowhere, but the inbetween in all its vast variety all along. And if a group of strangers could hush to a sunset together, there was a chance we could all meet there.

I stacked my tip into a silver turret and left. Walking, listening to my breath. I could hardly feel my feet below me. Through the des
olate parking lot parts of Ninth Avenue, dotted occasionally with delis selling dirt-cheap and beautiful flowers under plastic rainshield awnings, angling out abruptly into the overactivity of Times Square. There: a colossal soda bottle in the sky emptying through a straw, world headlines running an electric current around the periphery of a building, larger-than-life women in smaller-than-life underwear spanning the rooftop lengths, carnivalesque.

I followed the tall buildings with illuminated clocks all the way to the park, and studied the huge shadowy sweep of it, vanishing out of my view into a complex darkness. The sight of it made me long for light again—all that unlidded life had been addictive. And I descended onto the train.

An almost pleasurable sense of loneliness drew me from stop to stop. And because I felt like that, it didn’t make sense to get out at the HotPot, pause, and relive any of this anymore. To torture myself watching the two of them come together under the swaggering lights, missing them both right before my eyes; I’d rather miss them from afar. And so I let it come and go and then go. I had to find my own path.

I exited with the next gusting halt of the train. I wasn’t sure where I was exactly; I think I’d traveled full circle and then some, but this time everything was different. Coming up from the subway I thought:
This is how vampires are born.
From a swift tunnel of cut blackness and counterfeit light through a yellowy pool of candle wax turnstiled, metal still muggy to the touch from that rush of hungering hands and up the stairs and out the narrow door into that greater darkness but this one enormously ongoing and violently adorned.

Steam fumed rollingly upwards out of manholes in the uneven street, as if genies were trapped just below the surface. Coming out into it all, my heart began to beat wildly; I was sure it would poke a
hole through the fabric. It was a city where anything could happen. And a city where maybe nothing would happen at all; a light on in every viewable window, but no one at home.

I had already gone through a serious stash of film; my Kavita supply was happily dwindling. I walked and I clicked and I clacked, feet easy in sneaks. Onto Bleecker. Bedford, Hudson. Morton, Barrow, Weehawkan. West Tenth and its mathematically baffling intersection with West Fourth; Charles and Perry. West Eleventh. Filling the frames with the jumble of signs so I’d know where I’d been: Greenwich Street. Bank, West Twelfth, Jane. Gansevoort. Little West Twelfth.

I was heading farther west with each step, and the area was becoming more desolate, gnarls of cobblestone streets echoing tinnily against the broad expanses of empty warehouses. Even the streetlamps grew few and far between; lighthouselike, I used them to guide my path.

A metallic smell of flesh hit me like a knife slid from sinew as I turned the corner. Coming around the bend I could see sizeable trucks parked by the back of a line of buildings, reflectors flashing and hubcaps, too, unloading their cargo through thrown-open cooler doors. I could hear the blood before I saw it, the way you can hear snow or unspilled tears, and when I looked down, the street was running with it, a nearly black river percolating down from the loading platforms and into the crevices wound round each stepsmoothened stone. I caught a small glimpse of their cargo—a pang of matted brawn and bone—and realized where I was: the Meatpacking District. I stared in fascination; I felt I was observing an ancient sacrifice. At first my nostrils sealed against the smell and then, breath by breath, they budded open. And strangely, it didn’t kill my appetite, as Sabina had said it would. In fact, it kindled my desire. To take a step towards it and in so doing, understand it. To photograph
it. In blocks of light sliced and fallen from the insides of these secret sacrificial kitchens, I loaded Chica Tikka and went to it.