Born Confused (14 page)

I was dismayed. I knew I was a free woman, but it didn’t fill me with a sense of gratitude to the fighters of the revolution or anything; it made me feel like a class A zero. The energy drained out of me like a punctured tea bag and I gave in to the call of the couch, slumping back with a soft thud.

—So you’re on his side, I sighed.

—I’m not on his side, honey, she said.—You know you’re my number one funky diva. But let’s just say I’m on his
wavelength.
And if you ask me, you should hop on, too. Don’t you see how perfect this is?

I didn’t know what to say, and she began to zealously fill up my blank.

—Dimple, what’s the harm in any of it, honestly? If I were you I’d be jumping at the opportunity. Claude, I can barely even imagine it in my situation—the Lillian would be far more likely to hit on my man than introduce me to one.

This was probably true of her mother, but that didn’t seem like an argument to head
to
the motherland.

—I know it’s a nontraditional way to go about it, Gwyn continued.—Or, I guess, a traditional way, depending on how you look at it—but don’t you see? Your parents would never choose someone
who could hurt you—there’s nothing to be scared of. And bonus: You won’t even have to go through the whole meet-the-’rents ordeal! Even
better,
you’ll get to connect with your culture. You’re so lucky you even have one—all those beautiful things in your house, those princess dresses. I don’t know why you don’t wear them more.

—Princess? I said. That word hardly seemed like it belonged in the same zip code as me.

—Princess, Gwyn said firmly.—Dimple, you know when we were little, just after I met you, I used to stare for hours at our atlas and where you came from, your family, halfway across the world. I couldn’t believe my luck—or maybe your lack of it—that you ended up in plain old Springfield despite all those mountains and oceans and unpronounceable places in between. You’re so lucky that you have more than one part of the map that means something to you. I wish I had something like that. A culture, a country.

I was amazed. She was the uncontested queen of any place she walked into, as far as I was concerned.

—Are you kidding? You have Gwyndom!

—No, no. All kidding aside, Dimple. You’ve got choices.

—Choices? To do what?

—To be traditional or not to be, said Gwyn.

That seemed an easy pick. Who wanted traditional? First of all, if my parents approved of Karsh, there was already something wrong, wasn’t there? If there was nothing to disapprove of in a boy then what was there to approve of? Just look at Dylan. And Julian. Who I now thought of with a pang. I didn’t want to be with someone who would probably remind me more of the brother I never had than a love object. Half the fun in being with a guy was talking to Gwyn about it. If I were with a suitable boy, what would there ever be to talk about?

—You see, Gwyn said slowly, reverse-twinning my thoughts.
—With an Indian boy maybe you can, you know, explore all that stuff. Go kamasutronic, so to speak.

I nodded, but I was feeling battle fatigue and was now thinking the tip of another thought: Or maybe an Indian boy would get that most of us don’t know that stuff. That it was a lot of hype. It was the bindi blondes who were all over this scene, not the holelessly nosed Indian girls. Maybe with an Indian boy we could stay at home and eat smelly samosas without Love’s Baby Soft and draw moustaches on the milky-skinned girls in the pictures of the pocket Kama Sutra. I could wear chappals instead of pumps and my feet wouldn’t hurt anymore. And more than anything, he would understand my photographs, why it was so much easier to make the world black and white than brown. In fact, maybe with an Indian boy nothing would hurt anymore.

But then why did even the thought of it hurt so much? Frock, I wasn’t ready for either option. Stuck in the middle with me seemed to be more like where I was at.

—Let me put it this way, Dimpledom, she concluded.—You’ve got nothing to lose.

I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or news to make me seek a hole to crawl into and crunch up in forever. It was probably better to think of it as a good thing, I figured. To be an optimist. After all, though my Earl Grey was three-quarters empty, I could always think of that as being one-quarter full.

Gwyn had shut up, I guess to let the full effect of her advice sink in, but even through the wire I could feel her blue eyes like a new sky on me.

You know how sometimes you’re having a nightmare that’s so real you actually feel the brick grate against your skin as you fall from edge to pavement? You open your mouth to scream, lungs heaving against the thin barrier of skin that separates you from that treacherous world and the waking one, but nothing comes out; you try to run but the sidewalk quicksands, suctioning you heel first. And then—you jolt awake. Reality settles upon you like a comforter and you breathe a sigh of relief as it dawns on you that it was all just a bad dream.

It was precisely like this on the morning of my meeting with The Boy. Except without the waking-up-and-realizing-it-was-all-just-a-bad-dream part.

When I went back to my room from my shower (I’d used only Ivory; The Boy didn’t deserve the loofah), laid out on my now-made bed was the dreaded birthday khamees, shamelessly spangling morning all over the room.

So my mother wanted me to wear this? Immediately flinging open my closet I put on the pair of secondhand jeans that Gwyn insisted I buy to wear during the SATs (since all college kids wore them, which would positively affect my test scores) and that I once caught my parents, in a rare act of creative collaboration, attempting
to burn. (My father:
Aaray, why are you paying more to be in something somebody else has worn?
My mother:
You do not know where they’ve been, what things they have been doing in it, what kind of karma they are having! And people will call in for child abuse, saying we are not properly clothing our only daughter!)
My folks loathed these jeans with a passion; to them they symbolized all that was backwards and unethically casual and mo’ money mo’ problem about Western culture. I completed my pay-to-look-poor look with a My Parents Went to Cancun and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt (my parents had never been to Cancun, but Bobby’s had, which had led to several after-school kissing sessions on his Ping-Pong table and an attempt at below-the-bra-ing that turned into a push-you-pull-me session of not-quite-past-the-ribs-ing). Thus attired for combat, I tentatively opened the door, expecting a bomb to go off as I did.

I could smell the vapors before I even followed my nose into the hallway. Chemical warfare was in full force already: a pungent mix of turmeric and onions and pine-scented cleaners missiled up my nostrils. It was war, I had to remember, and all in war was fair, even more so if love was being so unfair. My ears tintinnabulated with the wall of sound that had slammed me in the face as soon as I’d opened my door. And what met my eyes was nearly a battlefield.

A tornado was wending pell-mellingly through the room. And at its epicenter, whirling madly with the vacuum cleaner in a dervish of such pulsating energy that I was left unclear as to who exactly was leading whom: my mother. The cappuccino peacocks on her housedress tangoed tempestuously around her legs, the trim of tiny bells tinkering in vain against the thunderous roar of the Hoover, like a dropped tea party. Most oddly, her head was wrapped in a plastic bag, all her hair sheathed. Her face bunched, a large brain nervy with stress and excitement.

She was so occupied with taming the bucking vacuum, giddy
upping in her domestic rodeo, that she hardly noticed me. When she finally stamped the pedal and looked up, she squinted and put a hand to her lower back and rubbed.

—You’re not going out like that, are you? she asked, all
of course, you and I both know this is a joke.
The machine made sybaritic sounds as it purred into submission.

—I’m not even going out, I reminded her.—In case you’ve forgotten.

—Well, you’re not staying
in
like that, I hope.

—Well, are you staying in like
that?

I hated when I got like this, but I couldn’t stop myself. In my head sometimes when I was talking to my parents this weird thing happened where I’d be telling myself to
shutupshutupshutup,
but my mouth would meanwhile connect to a power source all its own and run with it, shorting all my better, kinder impulses.

—Like what? my mother said.

—I mean, what’s with the Saran Wrap hat?

My mother touched her head, like people touch their earlobes when you compliment their earrings and they’ve forgotten which ones they’re wearing. Her eyes clacked open.

—Oh! Thanks for reminding me—I’ve got to go rinse the dye out.

—Dye? Mom, you never dye your hair!

—I know, but there was a two-for-one on L’Oréal and the girl on the package was looking so lovely—such wonderful skin and perfect teeth. I’ll show you the box later.

She started scuttling to the bedroom, then turned and eyed me sideways, still moving, like a beach crab.

—I’ll be back. Can you turn the stove to low? And for goodness sake, please do me one thing in this life and go change out of those dirty shirty arsty wartsy clothes!

What was up with my mother? Since when did she color her hair? I didn’t know if she even had any grey hairs, and certainly not enough to warrant a box of dye. Wasn’t she overdoing it just a tad?

Well, if I thought the cleaning was on the overdone side, wait till I got to the kitchen. On the four-range stove at least six pots clamored for attention. An economy bottle of Mazola corn oil—one that could be confused sizewise with a tank of super-unleaded—irradiated to the side, perilously lidless. A high pile of pakoras lay cooling, oil drenching the paper towels between them and plate; in close proximity, a billiard of balls of sesame-flecked kachori awaited the same deep-fried fate. The dubba, the round tin with its heady autumnal rainbow of spices all arranged in doll-sized stainless steel thali dishes, was out and open. A jar of chevda—a sort of Indian trail mix of fried lentil and chickpea crisps mingled with Froot Loops and golden raisins (at least in our home)—had been refilled to the brim. And paper boxes flowery with crimson Hindi script strained at the seams like tight bras, overflowing with laddoos and coconut cutlets from the Jain grocer two towns away.

And I thought this was for “just a cup of tea, nothing fancy schmancy.”

I tracked my father down and out in the garden, only to find him in a similar state of hyperbole, though his target was of a horticultural nature: He was pulling weeds with a nearly religious fervor, as if a sack of doubloons was to be found beneath their insidious roots. He wove madly among the marigolds and roses, the gladiolas and geraniums. The first were my mother’s favorite; she told me they reminded her of childhood walks with Dadaji to pick fresh flowers for the temple, flowers that had to remain unsmelled until they were offered to the gods in the morning pooja. When she’d place them in the kitchen temple in Bombay (not yet Mumbai),
they left a brilliant powdery stain on her hands, as if a butterfly had been caught and clasped there.

Only problem was, in my father’s fervor, he was plucking the beloved blooms alongside the weeds. In fact, his overly eager hands were heading towards one unsuspecting petal head right now.

—Daddy, watch it! I cried, with an urgency that surprised me, as if an eighteen-wheeler were headed fast in his direction.

Shaken out of his reverie a moment too late, my father blinked twice at the plucked flower in his hands and suddenly seemed to come to his senses.

—Bacchoodi, he said.—I believe your mother is contagious. I, too, am losing my mind.

The marigold wound up floating in a shallow bowl of water on the kitchen counter, where my father was now mixing the spices for the tea masala. He had that exacting scientific expression on his face that was a sure sign whatever he was doing was totally random. But tea was the point, the pretext, after all; it played a principal role in the Indian social ceremony and what would happen during it, and I now eyed the cayenne pepper powder in the dubba and wondered if there was any way I could casually tip it into The Boy’s cup, and his mother’s, too.

By the time my own mother emerged from her cosmetic experimentations to join us, her hair had taken on a vibrant copper hue. That model must have had
really
good skin for her to choose this titian shade. I figured she didn’t even know, since the lighting in her bathroom was more appropriate for outings of a vampiric nature than a light-of-day rendezvous, and I chose not to say anything. I
knew my father had some questions of his own; his mouth dropped open, but I think he thought better of letting anything come out of it. My mother seemed pleased; she must have figured we were speechless with amazement, which was true in a sense.

—So, what do you think? she said, doing a demiturn and running a confident hand through her auburn locks.—Do I look all right?

Did
she
look all right? Whose date was this anyways? My father and I nodded dumbly. She looked more than all right. But she was hardly recognizable. The ‘do wasn’t the only new element to her look: She was definitely wearing base, though in a shade fortuitously closer to her skin tone than the dye was to her hair; it was probably my base, come to think of it. Her lips were lined and lipsticked. A scent of one of her If You Like Gio You’ll Love perfumes filled the air. Diamonds flashed like rock candy in her ears; her forearms were gold-plated with bangles, seven to a side. And she was dressed to the T in, nonplussingly, some kind of slinky black wraparound skirt-and-top combo. She looked like a divorcee who’d just gotten her second wind, but my father was beside her, which was reassuring. He opened his mouth again.

—What? she said in a tone that made him shut it.

—Nothing, nothing, he said wisely.—It’s just. It’s different, that’s all.