The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (62 page)

“Is that high enough?” he asked, panting.

She looked up. “Maybe like a foot more?”

“You’re insane.”

“I mean, can you believe this?” She turned the camera toward him, showing him the tiny picture of his own hands.

The digital camera was a present from Sajeev, who had arrived the day before to a flurry of cheek pinchings from the women and handshakes from the men (with the exception of Chacko, who nodded stiffly at him and then left to walk the perimeter of the yard, as though checking for intruders). Amina had promised to familiarize herself with the new camera before the wedding though Dimple was adamant that she not use it.

“Oh my God!” her cousin said now, coming around the side of the house with two potted plants. “Is that the light thing? That one we’re standing under?”

“You like it?” Jamie asked, his arms shaking. They hadn’t exactly been fast friends, Jamie and Dimple, sniffing around each other with a fair amount of suspicion, but they were making an effort, more enthusiastic with each other than they’d ever been alone with Amina.

“It’s amazing! How did you get it to do that? All those clusters?”

“Don’t ask,” he grunted, tying the end of the rope to the stake. “Or not unless you want to hear Amina’s dad talk about it for a really, really long time.”

“Speaking of,” Dimple said, looking over her shoulder. “Someone should really get him out of the kitchen before Raj and your mother kill him. And then someone should get Raj out, too.”

“That bad?” Amina pulled the lens tight on her cousin’s face, liking how the marigolds threw ochre at her cheeks and chin. She showed Dimple the result.

“Ugh! Stop with that. It’s so annoying.”

“It’s instant gratification!”

“Gratification should be delayed.”

“Whatever, single mom.”

“Shht!” Dimple glanced over her shoulder for the Roys, who had flown in that morning, befuddled but well mannered as ever, and who, the family had decided, did not actually need to know about Dimple’s
pregnancy until the wedding was over and everyone was safely back in their separate states. (“And even then,” Bala had said over dinner the night before, “babies come early all the time, no? Who’s to say this one didn’t?”)

“I thought your mom had the Roys working on the flower garlands,” Amina said.

“She did. And like most normal people, Sajeev’s dad decided he’d rather shoot himself. Last I saw him, he was looking at some weird sign in the back with a cat on it.”

“Raccoon,” Amina said. “It’s the Raccooner.”

“Okay,” Jamie said, wiping his hands across his shirt and checking the raw marks on them. “Should we try it out?”

Amina began backing into the field, camera pressed to her face. “Go.” He bent over, head down, and suddenly the lanterns blazed above him, circles upon circles of light bouncing off one another. Jamie and Dimple stood under it, heads turned up. They looked like a fairy tale, a giant, an imp, and a bubbling moon hovering over them.

“Come here. You’ve got to see this.”

“Who?” Dimple asked.

“Both of you,” Amina said, and they came, picking their way across the grass, turning around to look back.

It was not the most beautiful wedding she had ever photographed. For one, the potted marigolds didn’t hold quite the same amount of romance as other, traditional bouquets, say, calla lilies or white roses. For another, the mismatched tablecloths, folding dining chairs, and rainbow of napkins made the dinner setup look like a deranged child’s tea party. But that evening, as Dimple and Sajeev said their vows under Thomas’s constellation, as Sanji fanned her face hard enough to keep her dry-eyed, and all the other adults (save Kamala) gave in to a quiet weep, Amina understood that these pictures would be the ones she would never tire of looking at.

Dimple, standing in Amina’s bedroom in a towel, bony-shouldered and frazzled with excitement. Bala running down the driveway with flowers so that the Roys would not enter the property without something
of beauty to welcome them. Thomas and Chacko, heads bent over the fuse box, trying to figure out what had tripped the outage in the back half of the house. Kamala sprinkling more chili powder into Raj’s sambar while he looked in the fridge. Sanji, sneaking a cigarette out on the Stoop because “What are you girls, if not my very own heart growing up once and for all?”

Later, there would be the arrival of the Roys, Sajeev shaking hands with Chacko at last, the fumbling of rings, the dinner. Prince Philip would make off with a leg of tandoori, Chacko and Dimple would have the pined-for father-daughter dance, and Amina and Thomas would join in at the end, at the beckoning of the others.

At nine o’clock, just when it looked like the Roys were getting ready to announce their departure for their hotel, Amina put on “At Last” and waited for it to work its magic. It did not disappoint. Couple by couple went to the dance floor until all five were dancing. Sanji and Raj clung to each other, exhausted, while the Roys floated by. Dimple and Sajeev swayed, her head tucked firmly under his chin. Bala kept talking to everyone, no matter which way Chacko turned her. Kamala and Thomas barely moved, foreheads pressed together, hands clasped around each other’s waist. Amina stepped onto a dining chair to get a shot of everyone, while Jamie steadied her hips.

The talking started sometime after midnight. Amina knew because it didn’t seem like that long since she’d fallen asleep, and then suddenly there was Thomas’s voice in the dark, as sonorous and insistent as a ringing phone, dragging her back from her dreams. She sat up in bed. Made her way to the window.

The wedding lanterns were still on, casting a faint golden glow into the fields and defining the back ridge of the sofa and the light smudge of Thomas’s head, so that when the breeze parted the grass he looked like a rafter awash in a green-black sea. His words floated up in patches. Amina leaned forward. What was he saying? Nothing she could make sense of so far away. She went downstairs.

The kitchen was dark, drying china spread out on every countertop
like the bones of some prehistoric animal. She walked carefully past them, through the laundry room and onto the dark back porch. She pressed her face to the screen door.

“The bow and arrow,” Thomas said. “For concentration.”

Next to him in the grass, Prince Philip’s tail thumped in reply.

“Hey, Dad—” Amina yelped as a hand slammed over her mouth.

“No!” Kamala hissed, dragging her backward and down. “No talking!”

“Mmph!” Amina tried to stand straight, but Kamala clung to her, eyes gleaming like a feral monkey’s until Amina forced herself to take a deep breath and nod at her mother to signify she understood.
Yes. Fine. No talking
. Kamala slowly loosened her grip. Outside, Thomas rocked back and forth in his seat, excited about something.

“You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Is it—?” Amina started, but she didn’t need to finish. There was really no one else it could be.

It was an outpouring, a monsoon. The entire night and into the dawn, Thomas sat on the couch, a deluge falling from his lips. While much of what he said to Akhil was spoken too softly to be understood from their spot on the porch, the tiny bits that Amina could make sense of—how a shunt works, why cricket games could last so long and still be exciting, what it was like to bring Akhil home from the hospital as a baby—seemed to be equally unrelated and urgent, as if there was a list of subjects he’d sworn to cover before the day was over.

By midmorning he showed no signs of slowing down, and Kamala made tea and toast, stepping around a disapproving Amina to deliver it to him.

“I thought you said no talking.”

“What talking, dummy? This is
eating
.”

Amina followed her mother out to the couch, where her father greeted both of them with a preemptively raised hand, as though he was on a phone call.

“Tea!” Kamala announced. “Toast!”

“But he won the Oscar,” Thomas said, motioning for her to leave the tray. “And the Padma Shri! You think the Indian government goes around giving honors to people who insult the integrity of the country?”

“Ben Kingsley?” Amina couldn’t help asking, and her father nodded irritably, shooing her away.

By the late afternoon they were back, taking turns sitting on the couch with him. Kamala darned socks for the better part of an hour, while Amina shot three rolls of close-ups. It wasn’t that she needed to know what he was saying, Amina told herself, taking a picture of Thomas’s much thinned profile, but rather that the rambling was renewing in some way, the
rat-tat-tat-tat
of a soft summer rain on a tin roof, washing off the heat and misery they had endured.

Her father was finally happy. It was not hard to see this. Joy blossomed across his face, filling his cheeks and eyes with an intensity not seen since he had performed his last surgery. His hands flew around as if reaping the air for sentences. He laughed on occasion. Once, he even turned and winked at her, making her feel like she was in on an elaborate, goofy conspiracy.

“Maybe it’s healing him?” Raj asked when he arrived the next morning to retrieve his dishes, and the hope in his voice nipped at Amina’s heart even before he went to sit on the couch himself, listening and nodding along.

That afternoon, the family came in shifts, first Sanji, then Bala, and at last Chacko, who surprised everyone by showing remarkable endurance for the natter, sitting for an eight-hour stretch before dismissing himself to go home and sleep.

“Still?” Jamie asked that night.

“Still,” Amina confirmed. She held the phone close to her bedroom window, where Thomas’s voice droned in like a swarm of bees. “You hear that?”

“Nope.”

“Oh. Well, he’s still there.”

It wasn’t until the fourth day, when Thomas stopped eating, that she began to really worry. Sanji, Kamala, and Amina sat in the kitchen, staring at the rejected bowl of chicken and rice like it was a bowl of snakes.

“Nothing for breakfast either?” Sanji asked, and Amina pointed to
the toast she’d left on the counter hopefully, as though he might come look for it.

“Probably just queasy or something,” Sanji said, but called Chacko at the office anyway.

“Eda,”
Chacko said that evening, kneeling in front of Thomas so he’d be forced to make eye contact, to stop talking. “You have to eat.”

“Later,” Thomas said.

Chacko patted his leg. “You need your strength. You’re getting depleted.”

“Later,” he repeated, ignoring further entreaties from everyone, including Raj, who brought down a box of every single one of Thomas’s favorite foods by dinnertime. That night the family sat in the kitchen, the uneasy silence between them emphasized by Thomas’s increasingly frenetic chatter. Contrary to what Chacko had warned, he was growing more animated than ever, jumping breathlessly from subject to subject like a man auctioning off entire areas of thought.

“The exodus is subsiding,” he said.

“You mother didn’t think so.”

“Slingshots!”

On the sixth morning, he skipped his tea and juice.

“You have to drink,” Amina said, bringing him a plain glass of water, just in case that was the problem.

“But some narcolepsy responds to norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors,” Thomas said, and a tendril of panic curled around her lungs.

“Dad, you’re getting dehydrated.”

Thomas looked up. His pupils dilated and retracted, finding her for the first time in days.

“I’m coming to your show,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier.” His breath was sweet and rotten, like bread fermenting in a bag. “Your mother will love it.”

She found Kamala in the laundry room washing bedsheets.

“Yes,” her mother said after she’d been dragged to the porch to look at him. “I see.”

“So what now?” Amina clenched and unclenched her hands, wiping them on her jeans. How would they get him all the way out to the
car? They needed to get him into the car. Chacko and Raj would both have to come down to help—there was no other way to manage.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve got to get him to the hospital,” Amina repeated, annoyed. Had Kamala gone soft, too? Taken tranquilizers? Her mother’s eyelashes beat slowly in consideration, butterfly wings testing the wind.

“Not yet,” she said.

But when? That day, as Thomas’s voice went from hoarse to ragged, as his lips dried into twin strips of beef jerky and the sun dawdled across the sky, Amina paced the field, unable to sit next to her father or to let him out of her sight. He was still talking, or at least trying to talk, his voice a low, droning motor. It looked painful now, his tongue dry and dark in his mouth, the corners of his lips crusted with white. He grimaced as he shifted, and Amina realized that he must have been skipping his pain medication, too.

“Please,” she said, sitting down next to him with the pills, and when he didn’t even acknowledge her, a voice that must have been hers screamed, “PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!”

“Amina?” Kamala came running from the house. “What is it? What happened?”

“He’s not drinking!” Amina said, her voice breaking, and her mother sat next to her on the couch, taking the pills and water from her hand.

“Go,” she told Amina. “Sleep.”

That night, Thomas’s words crawled like insects into Amina’s dreams, filling them with a low, humming buzz that kept her tossing and did not fade as she woke up. It was the seventh day. Her brain hurt. If Thomas were Creation, he’d be making Man by now. Amina got up and looked out the window. He was still on the couch.

Kamala was plucking coriander leaves from the stems when she entered the kitchen.

“Did he drink anything?” Amina asked, and when her mother shook her head, it came to her finally, something so obvious and unimaginable that it clattered through her body, rearranging her bones to make space for a grief so large it felt like a new organ. She clutched the counter, panting.

Kamala was standing in front of her, saying her name, pushing her hair behind her ear.
Koche
, she was saying.
Baby. My girl
. She kissed Amina’s hands, one by one, and then each cheek, her eyes blazing. “You’re going to be okay,” she said.