Born Confused (57 page)

I slipped one on now, Karsh’s blue knit number that he’d left here last night after I’d wrapped up Gwyn’s birthday project in the darkening room (which, incidentally, had turned out to be the perfect place to kiss under the same roof as my parents). My bathing suit was on under my jeans when I went out the door for our moon date, a blue moon date with the way I was dressed, and a full one at that.

I passed the playhouse, which Karsh and I had sneaked into earlier to empty of the holy crew—who were now positioned in scrubbed-down shininess just before it—and fill with balloons and presents for Gwyn: a bona fide fringed vintage minidress to equip her for her current flapper phase, a series of some aboveground Asian underground CDs, and a replacement tape for that Dead recording I’d destroyed several weeks before. I’d also just finished a photo collage for her: I’d pasted her oversized bindi’d face from the HotPot shot onto a photograph of a photograph of Marilyn’s subway-flung dress. As a final touch, I’d rubber cemented on wide-spanning windbent, light-rent, glitter-veined wings that I’d created from a photo of star-explosion taxi-fast rain in the city one day; they bent up and off the actual page.

Tomorrow she would be seventeen, and we would be the same age again; ever since we were little we’d waited eagerly for that summer-long gap that set us a year apart to seal up, bring us back to supertwin status. And the day was nearly here.

I tucked the treasure hunt clue directing her back to the ovary office into the mailbox now, and continued on through the dried forest floor, across the bridge and to the other side. I went left onto Lake View Road.

Walking down the street now it felt like another planet. Houses had sprung up from the once lunar surface like massive manicured shrubs, gravel paths rattled through grass and marigold, driveways serpentined gardens. The streets were slick and new, no first love fumbling stick etchings in sight. In fact, I had no idea where Bobby O’Malley had written our names that lost summer day. The tar was black and clean as a river, a washed slate.

I’d always thought it would hurt too much to be here, but it was actually all right revisiting the scene of the crime. Because the scene of the crime had changed. And I had, too. It was like the time I went back to visit my elementary school to show Ketan Kaka, and I was amazed at how small everything was—the little desks, the rooms, the building itself—when in my memory my feet had barely reached the ground, the hallways stretched frighteningly far, and the whole place seemed like a labyrinth designed specifically to confuse me.

I was coming around the bend where the last house on Lake View nestled, jutting out to a thin strip of remaining pines that feathered out over the water. This house was cozily tucked half in tree shadow. In the front shone a huge window paved with light, yellow as if it had been rolled on with paint. In fact, the entire place hummed with light. Another house of eternal Diwali.

I was drawn mothlike to this house. As I approached the drive
the clack of my footsteps multiplied, as if I’d suddenly sported another pair of feet. I halted. A pause, and then the second set of feet continued padding along, like a lazy echo.

Moving closer, the ghostly stroller grew a bit louder, and I discovered its path: Music strained through the screen in the cracked window, where I could now see two figures. Two women, a shared silhouette swathed in sheer scintillating fabric, spinning and swooshing. Their hair whirled short shadows across their faces and they moved with the intensity of worshippers, all in time to that phantom promenader, those double drums, soft and steady as a heart beating through silk.

The tinkling, twiney window music sounded distantly familiar, like a face you see in passing on a train that speaks to you and is gone. Through it, the drums jabbed out three-dimensional, and they were playing a funky rhythm, offbeat, but still on the pulse—like a photo that clips the cheek but catches the wink.

These drums sounded as if they were being struck underwater; they made me feel I was underwater, too, a pod floating in a safe place. Just then a percussive roll shuddered forth sinuous and thick as a fat fish fin, all scaly light and jelly weight, and tickled my spine. I rose up, buoyant, kicking off my shoes. My feet flipped up as if I were dancing around hot coals.

Dheeta Dheeta Kita Taka Teeta Teeta Kita Taka

Teeta Teeta Kita Taka Dheeta Dheeta Kita Taka

The music was viscous, then liquid. It slaked me, dripped into my fingers and toes and activated me. I began to sway, dancing in the dark with my secret partner. I forgot myself; I recognized myself.

Dhage na Dha Teeta Dhage na Dhage Tin na Gi na

Tage na Ta Teeta Dhage na Dhage Dhin na Gina

I found myself dancing with and without the silhouetted win
dow genies, spinning an invisible Hula Hoop around my waist, plucking fruit from imagined trees, twirling my hair, insouciant, off my face.

Dhage na Dha tira kita Dhati Dhage Tin na Gi na

Tage na Dha tiri kita Dhati Dhage Dhin na Gi na

I was closer now.

One woman slowed, and the other bent to touch something. The music faded. Window shut, lights dimmed. And the drums kept going.

Wishing pennies lake blinking.

They seemed to move the very clouds, which were scuttling off the moon.

And that’s when I saw him. Up on the roof, the figure hunched in the shadows, thighs squeezed around the tablas, swathed in white. And if I could see him—I realized as the last cloud peeled off, fully untucking the moon—he could see me.

Light flooded the street like a cosmic river. The player’s face shone with sweat and he was staring right at me.

—Hi, you, he said.

—Hi, I smiled. And I realized: This had never been the last house, but the first.

Moments later, Karsh was in the driveway, a very punctual moon date indeed. He smiled and brushed my hair up off my forehead and kissed me there, smack upon my third eye, where the bindi would be. He wove my hand in his and we made our way back, retracing my steps.

On the bridge, he glowed slightly, the triangle of flushed moon
cast light on the black-wine water ricocheting up to his figure and then onto me.

—Are you sure you want to do this?

—Never been more, I said.

We walked, stumbling and grass grasping down the rocky side slope that led to the water. I shed my jeans and chappals on the bottom of the bank, skin melding effortlessly into sky. His T-shirt was off, and then we were holding hands, wading into the inky goldtipped liquid.

Once we’d moved away from the water sifting through to the other side of the bridge, the only sound in the universe was us, the summer cicada symphony on hiatus. First the pushed trickle-drip as we walked as far as we could go, calves creasing, knees cutting water, and then the slosh of thigh and waist till the drowned silence grew chest deep, then neck, and we could walk no more, thin plinks coming off the lashes, caught by cheek drops before the fall, nearly noiseless, like rain joining rain, the doubled drop tadpoling with accumulated speed down a windowpane.

And then the music of our staggered strokes as we began swimming, and the water lifted us, heels out of mudsuck and wet sand, now feet not touching ground; it was safe and secret at the same time. We swam up through gilded crests that looked like a blown glass dawn till you touched them and they gave without breaking, out towards our makeshift ship, our titanic romance.

When we got to the raft, I clutched the wet dark rail of the ladder dropping down and disappearing to that imaginary doused dance floor, and felt the raft tip towards me. This used to frighten me, the tilting, but tonight it felt as if it might be leaning in to help me up, and I climbed a glistened way to the deck, rungs rolling their shape achily into the soles of my feet and Karsh a moment behind
me, creating an even greater tilt and then an even greater sense of balance.

We crouched there a moment, till the rocking subsided. He pulled me in a squatting fetal position into his warmth. Before we’d touched, I’d always thought the electricity lay in the thin space between us. But touching, it was galvanized, a drowned current.

—Now you told me you knew once how to do it, he said.

—It’s just when I started thinking about it too much, I explained.—The whole idea of my feet being where my head was—that terrified me.

—But think of the upside-down chandeliers, he told me in the secret cove of my ear.—How they turned to flowers. And know that you won’t be alone now. You’re not alone. At least not in a scary way. Trust your body to protect you—everything you need to know is inside you already, rani. Always has been.

I turned and rested on my knees and lay both my hands on his cheeks, so his face was a prayer between them, stroked his fiery damp eyebrows. I was rocking gently in the centers of his eyes, in the openings that dilated, led straight into him.

—Are you ready? he whispered.

—I’m ready.

I rose and stepped onto the base of the board. Slowly I walked out to the edge of it, pulsing down a little with my heels on the way, to get a sense of spring in them. I hung my toes just over and looked down. The moon was out full force now, mirrored in the water, upside down and right side up and something else altogether at the same time.

The water wasn’t far—a short space to get head over heels. But one summer was a seemingly short space, too. And that was all it had taken for me to get as head over heels as you could without walking through the world on your hands. Now I knew firsthand that having
my universe turned upside down didn’t have to be a bad thing: He’d already done that to me; I’d already done that to me.

I turned back and he was on the edge of the raft, feet in water, at the ready and nodding at me. Yes.

And I dove.

Slow-swimming mermaid percussions…mirror slake deep diving…shellfish sunken treasure song…bubble drunk…stoneskip water-ringing…wishing pennies lake blinking.

Dha Dhin Trika Dha Dha Dhin Trika…Ta Tin Trika Dha Dha Dhin Trika…Dha Dhin Trika Dha Ti Dha Ge Tin Na Gi Na…Ta Tin Trika Dha Ti Dha Ge Dhin Na Gi Na…

A reverse birth, my ears filling up, breathing percussive; I could hear my heart here. Winging down, down to run my hands in the seaweeden rock-ridden sand at the bottom before kicking off and then rising up, effortlessly, following my heard stream of bubbles, up up, and, with a surge of sound, like the disco filter effect he’d played me today: into air.

I gasped. And Karsh was already in the water beside me.

We were lying on our backs on the raft now, staring at a sky with too many stars to count. It was hard to believe it was September. Karsh’s hand rested gently on my belly; it made a safe place there and I watched it rise up and down with my breathing.

Tomorrow would be my first day of senior year. It was funny imagining it: the same building, bustling with the same teachers and pretty much the same group of kids—but after this summer I had no doubt it would be an entirely new place. A place where Jimmy (Trilok) Singh would be Trilok (Jimmy) Singh and I would join him for lunch and maybe even bring along my own (defrosted) samosas.
Where I might take a different route through the corridors to a new class, where I might take the bus or even walk. And sometimes my boyfriend—no, perhaps my jeevansaathi—would meet me after in his midnight Golf with my bindi riding over his mirrored eyes and we would merge into the city and look at where we’d been from the water’s second side. It would be a place where a postcard on a locker door would have a story behind it and my best friend in the world would be a somewhere glued together and I would love her all the more for the cracks we’d allowed, then sealed.

And I would keep Chica Tikka with me at all times, and I would have someone to share all these pictures with, these bits and pieces of so many lives. Of my own life. I was eager to see what the tale would be. It was a lot like the darkening room—the same way the pictures floated up, there, coalescing element by element, the way you never really knew what story you were telling till you filtered and heightened its color, dodged its shadow, shifted its light, and with your own hands. Everyone had a story. Everyone was making a story, all the time. And this was only the beginning of mine.

I remembered that rainbow I had seen once as a girl, that nearly full-circle Ferris wheel arching its array of breathtaking color over this pond and disappearing somewhere secret on the other side, bringing what had seemed then to be two different and distant lands together.

I knew where it ended now.

He was spinning his finger, making a deepening circle in my belly button.

—They say it’s going to be an Indian summer, he said.

Immeasurable-and-one thanks to Bapuji and Shashikala Desai, for all that time at the Saraswati. For your bravery, beauty, and superlative sense of humor. For you. You are my first and forever hero and heroine, and I want to be just like you when I grow up. Happy Birthday.

Many mercis to my brother, Rajiv, for all those powwows: fourteen miles around the reservoir and at “the place” and always. You have been my support and inspiration from the day I was AB.

To David Levithan, dream editor and one-in-a-million person, whose belief in this project from its inception and guiding graceful hands were vital to bringing it to fruition. Thank gods we met!

To Liz Szabla, for letting her beautiful eyes fall upon the proposal that day, and linger.

To Laurelyn Douglas, for her perspectives on this project—and so much more: seventeen years of friendship. You make this life a garden.

Big thank you to Jaikumar Ramaswamy. Thanks to Sreenath Sreenivasan and the SAJA Stylebook from the South Asian Journalists Association, http://www.saja.org/stylebook. Also to Nutan Christine Shah (Bollywood ben!), Poonam Ahuja Banerjee, Smita Gadher (wedding makeup and dress); Vena Ramphal, Vanisha Kumar, Dipty “Bhabi” Desai, Karishma Patel (Bharat Natyam); Shreyas Ma vani (tablas); Mike Kobal, Srinivas Kuruganti (photography); and Arvind Devalia (connection).