Born Confused (2 page)

I had just put my eye to the viewfinder to shoot the inside of the locker door when a voice like blue sky sailed in.

—Is that a supertwin I see on the loose?

Marilyn dropped through the grating as I shifted my camera back out to the hallway. Through the cross of the screen, dead-center and Dylan-less, I now saw my number one diva of the dramatic entrance swinging up, lunchbox purse in one hand, shades atop a shiny blond chignoned head, and sleek blue mini turning purple as her fishnetted legs slunk around underneath, activating its iridescence. She was in a tight black tank studded with a heart within a heart, and as she reared up she fluttered the air before her with a big silver envelope as if to beat the unremitting heat of the corridor, then handed
it to me, pool blue eyes unblinking. It was Magic-Markered
To The Birthday Girl!

—What is it? I said, fingering the paper tentatively as if it might go off in my hands. I could feel something small and squarish inside, sliding around in all that clean space.

—See for yourself, she said.

I tore it open, half-expecting a letter for a Lilliputian to skid out. But instead, a scant piece of plastic tapped out into my palm. I picked it up—a black strip on one side and a mash of text defining Class D vehicles and an organ donor stamp—and turned it over to come face-to-face with: myself.

At first I was confused. It was definitely me, yes, appearing as ever the headlit deer. My hair was knitting madly out, brown eyes wide, and a jarringly pale hand seemed to be stroking my chin. I had the initial illogical impression I’d dropped my license somewhere and Gwyn was simply returning it to me. But I didn’t even have my license yet; I only had a permit, and my driver’s test, which I was already willing to wager I’d fail, was a good couple months away.

Below the image: a signature that looked more like Gwyn’s bubbling semi-print script (full-circle dot over the i) than my own microscopic cursive. I scanned the rest of the card. Dimple Rohitbhai Lala. Check. Lancaster Road, Springfield, NJ, and zip. Check. Sex: F. Check. Height: Five foot one—well, one and a half, and I would have preferred rounding up, but good enough. Class D; Social Security number. Birth day (tomorrow), month (this one). Year—year? The year was off by four. This wasn’t me but some genetically modified precursor.

—A fake ID! I cried.

Now I recognized the picture as one in the various sets of trilogies we’d taken in the mall photo booth in the corner of the camera
store, ages ago it seemed. Gwyn had insisted on making a shop-stop there—as she always did when we passed any photographic medium or even any remotely reflective surface, for that matter. She’d pulled me into her lap suddenly on the last shot, squeezing out of frame and turning my face to the lens with her own hand (hence my fair extremity, I now realized). And she’d insisted on keeping all the pics, since I already had more than enough of my own with Chica Tikka’s insatiable appetite.

Gwyn looked abundantly pleased with herself. She sent the purple fringe of her mini flying as she did a little pirouette.

—Courtesy of Dyl, she smiled.—And we’re going to use it tomorrow night! We have a lot to celebrate: School’s out, a summer in the city lies ahead. And, of course, your
date.

—My
date?

She let me suffer a moment, then seemed unable to contain herself any longer.

—Do you remember Julian Rothschild? Dylan’s partner in crime here at Lenne Lenape, he graduated the same year?

Did I remember Julian Rothschild? Of course I remembered. The much-coveted, recently collegiate Julian Rothschild to be precise. Girls passed whispering notes about him in study hall, where he’d read books by people with unpronounceable names like Deleuze and Derrida scripted flagrantly across the cover. Julian’s hair curled down the nape of his neck, winging out at the bottom, a little shorter than Dylan’s. He wore green lizardskin cowboy boots; Dylan wore snake. And he was an atheist, or something cool like that (Dylan was agnostic, which was, of course, cooler, since no one knew exactly what it meant). In general, Julian was Dylan’s slightly less-tall, less-cute, less-smart, less-motivated partner in crime—I guess a match made in math for Gwyn’s lesser half (me)—but in my eyes he was more like four-fifths of the way to hotness himself and at
NYU to top it off. Everybody wanted him. Which was enough of an argument for me.

—Yeah, I think I
vaaaguely
remember, I said, unable to suppress a smile.

—Well, then, I hope you like what you remember—because he’s all yours tomorrow night!

—But he doesn’t even know who I am, I said.

—Oh, believe me, he knows who you are. I told him you were the
Indian
girl. I mean,
the
Indian girl.

I guess that pretty much narrowed it down.

—Dimple, she said firmly.—It’s a new ID. You can be whoever you want to be. You can be, as the army has failed to inform us, all that you can’t be.

She left me to mull that over, adjusting her double-looped snake belts to hangle just so off her slight hips. She did have a point, I supposed. It was my opportunity to be the older, wiser, bubblierscripted, white-armed Dimple Lala. And maybe this Dimple could truly be all I couldn’t.

—You think it over, she said.—I have to make like tic-tac-toe and exit—Dyl’s in idle. You go do your family thing or whatever it is you do. But tomorrow night. Tomorrow night will be ours.

Through my viewfinder she left now, dragging out all the color and speed and life with her like a bridal train that sweeps up any confettied hopes with it on its way to the honeymoon. I clicked and the counter ran to zero. And when I lifted my eyes, she was already gone, leaving in her wake the grey linoleum and steel lockers, starkened still more by the fluorescent dentist-office lights. The opaque classroom windows; a scent of chalk and rubber. My own drab reality fell upon me then; whenever Gwyn made her exit I realized how much I relied on her to bring magic to the picture.

Next year we’re going to be seniors—and then what? It was this
summer that could make all the difference. I stared down at the new image of me, the plastic fantasy in my hand. This could be my ticket. I could be her.

The corridor clock jumped two minutes forward.

It was the first day of the rest of my life.

I kicked off my shoes on the porch, then dropped off my books on one of the twin beds. Looking at the second twin I wondered how long it had been since Gwyn had slept over. Felt like ages. Felt like Dylan.

I didn’t have too long, but went to leave the roll I’d just finished off in my favorite place in the whole house, perhaps the world: my darkroom. Or, my darkening room, as my mother mistakenly called it. (This had led to much alarm for Meera Maasi—my aunt, her sister—who felt I should instead be coating myself in turmeric, or at least exfoliating on a regular basis to lighten my skin rather than pass too much time in a darkening room; I think she feared we had tanning beds installed in the nether parts of our home.)

Down the stairs, through the basement, and into the small sacred space at the back.

My parents had helped me set it up last year. The room used to be a sort of bathroom area. I think my folks had in mind another bedroom area for the burgeoning family we never ended up being, or that it could be used as spare space if we ever brought Dadaji or any other relative to live with us, which we never ended up doing. And so they figured since no one was using the basement anyways it couldn’t hurt if I were to pursue my hobby tucked away in the closet. Which suited me just fine. No one bothered me here; I was in an exclusive club of one, with the only password. And I actually spent more time down here than in my bedroom, beginning pretty much from the moment I’d converted it.

I looked now at the space: my enlarger, protected from sink
splash by a sheet of cardboard off the box the household computer had come in. The developer trays. Stop bath and fixer trays, hose coiled up serpentine in the sink; whenever the safelight was on it looked like a tiny anaconda, waiting to strike. The print washing tray lodged by the sink and my paper stash. The focus finders, which made me feel like Nancy Drew hot on a case. Stirrers, squeegee. Masking easel.

And, finally, the pictures on the line.

Everywhere: Gwyn. She was all over the photographs hanging to dry. Gwyn in A Hall, a Beginner’s Philosophy book in focus in hand, her partial head blurred like a spinning top. Gwyn in an empty classroom, pledging to the flag with one hand and adjusting her bra strap behind her back with the other. Gwyn giving off double peace signs in a tiny-teed, pleathered pose on the scintillating hood of Dylan’s car.

My memory filled in the early sunburn below the pseudo-punk safety-pinned gashes in her white tee, the unabashed red of the pleather, the blinding azure sun of that day and the way it had made her eyes burn like liquid metal. Looking at this black-and-white of a red, white, and blue moment, Gwyn appeared the very image of the American Dream itself, the blond-rooted, blond-haired, blue-eyed Marilyn for the skinny generation. And if I was her reverse twin—the negative to her positive—that made me? The Indian nightmare? The American scream?

She’d told him I was the
Indian
girl.
The
Indian girl. Somehow neither description rang completely true to me in terms of how I felt inside, but the thing was I’d never really consciously thought of myself as American, either. Of course I did the Pledge, too, along with everybody else for years of mornings, but like everyone else I wasn’t really thinking about the words. I mean, I definitely wanted liberty, like Gwyn had with the car keys and no curfew, and justice for all
would be great, especially in high school where people were definitely not created equal (proof: cheerleaders). But I didn’t know if that had so much to do with the stars and stripes; it seemed to be more about the jeans and teams.

So not quite Indian, and not quite American. Usually I felt more along the lines of Alien (however legal, as my Jersey birth certificate attests to). The only times I retreated to one or the other description were when my peers didn’t understand me (then I figured it was because I was too Indian) or when my family didn’t get it (clearly because I was too American). And in India. Sometimes I was too Indian in America, yes, but in India, I was definitely not Indian enough.

India. I had few memories of the place, but the ones I held were dream clear: Bathing in a bucket as a little girl. The unnerving richness of buffalo milk drunk from a pewter cup. My Dadaji pouring tea into a saucer so it would cool faster, sipping from the edge of the thin dish, never spilling a drop. A whole host of kitchen gods (looking so at home in the undishwashered unmicrowaved room). Meera Maasi crouching on the floor to sift the stones from rice. Cows huddled in the middle of the vegetable market, sparrows nesting on their backs. Hibiscus so brilliant they looked like they’d caught fire. Children with red hair living in tires. A perpetual squint against sun and dust. The most delicious orange soda I’d ever drunk—the cap-split hiss, and then the bubbling jetstream down a parched throat.

But mainly all my memories of India were memories of Dadaji. When he died the entire country seemed to come unhitched, floated off my mental map of the world and fell off the edge, to mean nothing anymore, just a gaping hole fast filling with water. And at the same time the place I had known grew fixed in my imagination, rooted in memory. When my grandfather saw me that last time, he beheld me like he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. He called
me by my mother’s name, Shilpa, and then when she stepped in behind me and it all fell into place, the weight of all those years in between visits was visible in his slumped shoulders. To me he’d looked the same, wearing low over a white lungi a familiar moss-and-maroonplaid shirt that I realized later had been my father’s.

In fact all sorts of items that mysteriously disappeared from our Springfield home seemed to pop up all over the little flat where Dadaji had lived with Meera Maasi and Dilip Kaka and my cousins. It had been a fuller household at one time: Dadaji had lit the flame to the pyre for his wife, the grandmother I summoned up only as a warmly glinting climate. Then he had to do the same for his son, Sharad, the Mama uncle I also remembered faintly in physical detail, though lushly in atmosphere: an ashy dusk, the page-turn of wings, half-whistle half-hum. Dadaji made it through all these things still standing, until he slipped on his chappals coming home from the garden with marigold for the morning pooja, falling hard, his hip crushed against the petals; how a tiny thing could still create a big hurt.

My cousins were a little older than me: Sangita, the quiet one, sporting soda-bottle glasses from very early on; her eyes receded behind the thick lenses to rain-stilled crater depths, and the rest of her pretty much vanished behind Kavita. Kavita—the one who was buried in the books at NYU now, making up premed credits in an intensive summer program—used to be pretty boisterous: a chairtipper, a tree-climber, her whooping laugh shaking the branches as she monkey-jumped about. The two were always dressed in clothes I’d forgotten I had, or that I’d been searching frustratedly for through all the closets of the house.

Meera Maasi called these dresses
frocks,
which sounded like an expletive the way it spat forth from her thin mouth—and which I preferred to the actual expletive it resembled because the F-word
still didn’t come naturally to me. She put the word to vipid use when she chided me, in my Osh Kosh B’Goshes, for not being properly attired, which I found ironic considering her own daughters were so often to be found garbed in my duds—the dress with the megaradiied purple polka dots, the blue-jean skirt with the rainbow patterns on the back pockets, stiff pink-and-white taffeta numbers that looked like the result of some inadvisable union between a balle-rina’s tutu and a first communion dress, the cumulus of fabric floating around my young sister-cousins’ rail-thin bodies.

I was the American cousin, the princess, the plumped-up one: Kavita never tired of pinching my cheeks, which I hated; they both giggled even when I’d said nothing funny and hovered around me, serving me first from the pots of fluffy rice and the silver thalis; they were always hungry to hear stories about America. Had I ever been on an escalator? Did girls talk to boys at my school? (Wide eyes when I said yes.) Was it true the stores stayed lit all night and supermarkets had aisles of just one thing and doors that slid miraculously open before you? Had I ever met a cowboy? (Kavita began to call me her cowgirl cousin when I told her I’d once ridden a horse.) They marveled at how much I ate, how quickly I spoke. At night, they gathered with homemade pista kulfi and the rest of the household to watch reruns of
I Love Lucy
on the remote-uncontrolled television (which also looked vaguely familiar to me), laughing uproariously and slapping their knees at things I found cheesy at best. They sang “I Want to Be in America” from
West Side Story—
well, just that one line, over and over, but with surprisingly authentic Spanish accents. They begged me to teach them new songs.