The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (2 page)

“I listened from the laundry room.”

To live in the Eapens’ house was to acknowledge the sharpness of invisible borders, the separations that had divided it like two countries since 1983. It had been years since Amina had seen her mother wade into the yellow light of her father’s porch, and as far as she knew, Thomas had never once crossed the gate into Kamala’s garden.

“And you’re sure it was Ammachy?”

Kamala hesitated for a moment. “He could see her.”

Amina straightened. “What are you talking about?”

“He told her to go sit somewhere else.”

“What?”

“Yes. And then I think he maybe saw …” Kamala’s voice trailed off into silence, the world of grief that lived invisibly between all the Eapens revealing itself like a face waiting behind the curtains.

“Who?” Amina’s voice pinched in her throat. “Who else did he see?”

“I don’t know.” Her mother sounded far away.

Silence.

“Mom,” Amina said, worried now, “is he depressed?”

“Don’t be dumb!” Kamala huffed. A flurry of activity released over the phone line in what sounded like something heavy being dragged. “No one is
depressed
. I’m just telling you is all, like that. I’m sure you’re right, it’s fine. It’s nothing.”

“But if he thinks he’s seeing—”

“Okay! Talk to you later.”

“No! Wait!”

“What?”

“Well, is Dad around? Can I talk to him?”

“He’s at the hospital. Big case. Some young mother hit her head on the bottom of a pool two days ago and hasn’t woken up.” The Eapens had never spared their daughter the details of her father’s work, so
even at five years of age Amina heard things like
Her medulla has a ski pole lodged into it or His wife shot him in the face, but he should live
.

“Are you sure he should be working right now?” Amina had gone into surgery with her father once, in second grade. She remembered the sharp, bitter smell of the operating room, the glint of her father’s eyes over his face mask, the way the floor rushed up to greet her when his scalpel ran a red seam down the back of his first patient’s head. She had spent the rest of the day eating candy at the nurses’ station.

“He’s
fine
,” Kamala said. “It’s not like that. You’re not listening.”

“I am listening! You just told me he’s delusional, and I’m asking—”

“I DID NOT SAY HE IS DELUSIONAL. I SAID HE WAS TALKING TO HIS MOTHER.”

“Who is dead,” Amina said gently.

“Obvious.”

“And that’s not delusional?”

“There are
choices
, Amina! Choices we make as human beings on this planet Earth. If someone decides to let the devil in, then of course they will see demons everywhere they look. This is not
delusional
. This is
weakness
.”

“You can’t really think that.” It was a wish more than a statement of fact, as Amina was well aware that Kamala, with her Jesus, religious radio shows, and ability to misquote the Bible at random, could and did believe anything she wanted to.

“I am just reporting the facts,” her mother said.

“Right. Okay. Listen, I’ve got to get going.”

“You just came home! Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Now? With who?”

“Dimple.”

“Dimple,”
her mother repeated, like a curse. According to Kamala, Dimple Kurian had been afflicted with low morality since the day her parents gave her
that ridiculous name for giggly Gujarati starlets
. According to Dimple, Kamala had
a Jesus complex where her heart should be
. “Is she still opening relationships?”

“Open relationships, they’re called—never mind. Yes.”

“So she can be with one boy then another, all in one week.”

“Dating.”

“
Chi!
Dirty thing. No wonder they had to send her to reform school! You run around with everyone and then cry ‘Oh no, he thinks I’m a whore, he thinks I’m a whore,’ when he thinks you’re a whore.”

“When have you seen Dimple cry about anything?”

“I’ve seen it in the movies.
Henry Meets Sally
.”

“
When Harry Met Sally …
?”

“Yes! This stupid girl is with too many men and crying about ‘Nobody loves me,’ and then she goes with that poor boy and expects him to love her!”

“That’s what you think
When Harry Met Sally
 … is about?”

“And then what is he supposed to do? Commit with her?”

“He
does
commit to her, Ma. That’s how the movie ends.”

“Not afterward! Afterward, he leaves her.” Her mother’s conviction that movies continue in some private offscreen world had always been as baffling as it was irrefutable. Whole plots had found themselves victims to Kamala’s reimagining, happy endings derailed, tragedies righted. “And anyway,
someone
should tell Dimple to call home. How can her parents know she is okay if she doesn’t call?”

“Because I see her every day and I would tell them if she wasn’t.”

“Inconsiderate so-and-so. Bala gets so worried about her, you know.”

“Tell Bala Auntie she’s fine. And I’ll call Dad tomorrow.”

There was a round silence on the other end of the line. Had she hung up?

“Ma?”

“Don’t call.”

“What?”

“It’s not something for on the phone.”

Amina blinked at her cabinets in disbelief. “So, what, I’ve got to wait until I fly home to talk to him?”

“Oh,” Kamala said, voice rich with feigned surprise. “Sure, if you think it’s best.”

“What?”

“When can you come?”

“You want … I should … wait, really?” Amina looked in a panic
at the kitchen wall, where a bright list of to-dos for the Beale wedding hung like an accusation. “It’s June.”

“It’s some big thing? So don’t come.”

“It’s just a bad time. It’s my busiest time.”

“Yes, I understand. It’s just your father.”

“Oh, stop. I mean, if you really need me to come out, then of course I’ll come, but …” Amina pressed her fingers to her eyelids. Leaving work in the high season? Insane.

Her mother took a deep breath. “Yes. That would very nice, if you could manage it.”

Amina pulled the receiver away from her ear, staring at it. She had never heard a sentence sound less like it could have come from Kamala’s mouth, but there it was, her mother’s attempt at accommodation as discordant as the hidden message in a record played backward.
Something is wrong. Something is really wrong
.

“I’ll get a ticket out next week,” Amina found herself saying. She paused hopefully, waiting for a
Never mind
, a
Don’t bother
. Instead she heard a long, strained grunt and the satisfying chorus of roots popping up from the ground. The muffled
thwack
of palms against pants beat through the phone line, and Amina saw her mother as she would be in that moment—standing in the garden, tiny puffs of cottonwood dander floating around her dark hair like dusk fairies.

“Okay, then,” Kamala said. “Come home.”

BOOK 1
WHAT HAPPENS IN INDIA DOES NOT STAY IN INDIA

SALEM, INDIA, 1979

CHAPTER 1

“T
raitors! Cowards! Good-for-nothings!” Ammachy had yelled in 1979, finishing the conversation that would finish her relationship with her son, as Thomas would only come back to India to bury her.

But what a calamity! An abomination! Divorced from the mother and the motherland in one fell swoop? Who could have seen such a thing coming? Certainly not Amina, who by age eleven was well versed enough in tragedy (she had seen
The Champ
and
Kramer vs. Kramer
) to understand that it came with tinkling music and bad weather.

And what was there to fear from the sunlight that dappled the Salem train station the morning of their arrival, making everything—the packed luggage and the red-shirted coolies and even the beggars—seem sweet and full of promise? Nothing, Amina thought, stepping down onto the platform and into the funk of other people’s armpits. Plump arms sheathed in sari blouses brushed her cheeks, chai-wallahs shouted into car windows, and a coolie reached impatiently for bags
she was not carrying. Somewhere above the din she heard someone calling her father’s name.

“Over there, Dad,” Akhil said, pointing at something Amina couldn’t see, and Thomas gripped her by the shoulders and propelled her forward.

“Babu!” He clapped an old man on the back. “Good to see you!”

Wrapped in a bulky dhobi and skinny as ever, Babu smiled a toothless smile, his resemblance to a malnourished baby belying his ability to toss large objects onto his head and carry them through crowds, as he did with all four of the family suitcases. Outside the station, Preetham, the driver, loaded the freshly polished Ambassador, while beggars surrounded them, pointing to the children’s sneakers and then to their own hungry mouths, as if their appetites could be satisfied by Nikes.

“Ami, come!” Kamala called, opening the car door, and once everyone else had taken their places (Preetham and Thomas in the front seat, Akhil, Kamala, and Amina in the back, Babu standing proudly on the back fender), they began the four-block ride home.

Unlike the rest of the family, Thomas’s parents had long ago left Kerala for the drier plains of Tamil Nadu. Settling in a large house at the edge of town, Ammachy and Appachen had opened a combined clinic (she was an ophthalmologist; he was an ENT), and before his sudden death by heart attack at the age of forty-five, they saw 70 percent of the heads in Salem.

“A golden time,” Ammachy would spit at anyone within distance, going on to list everything since that had disappointed her. Top of her list: her eldest son choosing to marry “the darkie” and move to America when she had arranged for him to marry Kamala’s much lighter cousin and live in Madras; her youngest son becoming a dentist producing “the no-brains” instead of becoming a doctor and producing another doctor; the many movie theaters and hospitals that had since sprung up around the house, penetrating it with noise and smells.

“Bloody Christ,” Thomas breathed as they turned onto Tamarind Road, and Amina followed his gaze. “You can’t even see the house anymore!”

This was true. It was also true that what could be seen, or rather,
what could not be ignored, was the Wall, Ammachy’s solution to the changing world around her. Built of plaster and broken bottles, the Wall grew crooked and taller and more yellowed with every visit, until it resembled nothing as much as a set of monster’s dentures fallen from some other world and forgotten on the dusty side of the thoroughfare.

“It’s not so bad,” Kamala said unconvincingly.

“It’s creepy,” Akhil said.

“New gate!” Preetham beeped the horn, and the family fell silent as the gate swung open from the inside, pulling the car and its contents down the driveway.

The house, for its part, had not changed at all, its two stories painted pink and yellow and slanting in the heat like a melting birthday cake. A small crowd had gathered in front of it, and Amina watched them through the window—Sunil Uncle, dark and paunchy; his wife, the wheatish and wimpy Divya Auntie; their son, Itty, head weaving from side to side like a skinny Stevie Wonder; Mary-the-Cook, the cook; and two new servant girls. Christmas lights and tinsel twinkled in the pomegranate trees.

“Mikhil! Mittack!” Itty gurgled as the car pulled in, arm hooking frantically into the air. He had grown as tall as Sunil since their last visit, and Amina waved back, full of dread.
Mittack
was her name, according to Itty, and
excitability
was the condition that made him bite her on occasion, according to the family. Amina fingered the faint half-moon on her forearm, sinking a little in her seat.

“Hullohullohullo!” Sunil shouted as the car parked. “Welcome, welcome!”

“Hey, Sunil.” Thomas opened the door, taking long strides across the lawn to shake hands. “Good to see you.”

This was a lie, of course, as neither of the brothers was ever particularly glad to see the other, but it was the only way to properly start a visit.

Sunil fixed a blazing smile on Kamala. “Lovely as a rose, my dear!” He bestowed cologney kisses on her cheek and then Amina’s before turning and clutching his heart. “And who is this ruddy tiger? My God, Akhil? Is that you? Blossoming into a king of the jungle, are we?”