Born Confused (48 page)

It was strange. It was the same face in all of those photo albums and shoe boxes and frames: the fading black-and-white childhood shots in Varad, the wedding days album, my mother garlanded like a Hawaiian hula dancer beside him, the one of him standing proudly before his first car, a used Plymouth Valiant, the coconut for his thank-you to Ganesha still uncracked in his hands.

And then I realized. It was the same face…but it was not. These other smiles were full either of expectation or disappointment. The corn muffin smile was a smile that showed a soul happy to be exactly where he was.

And a smile unabashedly happy with me.

—Daddy, I said, and I rested my head on the wheel so he couldn’t see my face.

—Yes, beta?

—Remember you used to tell me a guy would be crazy to not want to marry me?

—Yes.

—Do you still think it’s true?

—Of course it’s still true! More than ever now, bacchoodi.

I was terrified to go there, but I had to ask.

—Then why are you doing so much wishing for a husband for me? I blurted.

—What are you talking about?

—You know, all that extra time praying in the morning. To the Saraswati.

—A husband? said my father, genuinely surprised.—I haven’t been praying for a husband for you, beta. Though I suppose that could be one interpretation of jeevansaathi.

—Jeevan sutthy?

—Jeevan
saa
thi, he corrected my pronunciation.—That means life companion. Soul mate. Jeevan, life; saathi, companion. Someone to share the world with, this life with. That’s what I’ve been praying for, for you. That’s all.

My breath caught in my chest. Was I so warped in my interpretation of things? What else had I been wrong about? All this while I’d been pegging my father as a control freak obsessed with barbaric medieval rituals and all this while he’d been asking for something so wonderful and at the same time so humble and beyond judgment. A life companion. Not even the gender was specified; Kavita would appreciate this. And then it came together the way things do sometimes: It wasn’t so odd she was opting for the chicas after all, that you could love with your body what you could love with your heart and mind. A life companion could be someone like Gwyn, except with kisses. Or someone like Karsh. Except with kisses. At the same time a great understanding filled me, I felt a profound emptiness, that very understanding swiveling me around to face unexplored rooms in a house I thought I knew by heart.

I was very happy and very sad and my father’s face was too kind and concerned and comprehending to behold. I suddenly realized he’d had all this time that most unimaginable of things: a clue.

I was sobbing, and he pressed a hand down on my shuddering shoulder, steadying me; I collapsed on the horn, which let out a sympathetic toot. The hands that had drawn the fever from me when I was sick, warm even in winter and nutmeg smelling, like gingerbread cookie dough spreading into happy people in the oven, the same ones I’d ironically thought about to still the pounding in my head after the date with Julian. I felt him catch a tear off my cheek.

—Beta, I hope I didn’t upset you, he said, alarmed.—I always seem to say the wrong thing these days. I suppose I am no replacement for your mother, isn’t it. Do you want to go home?

—No, I said.—I don’t.

I made an attempt to swashbuckle up, pushed my hair back behind my ear and turned the key. The motor wheezed to life. I exited the parking lot and turned down the street. Then I had a better idea, and executed a three-point when all was clear.

—Where are we going? asked my father looking from the road back to me.

—I’m having a certain craving, I said.

He looked surprised for a moment, then grinned, loose and uninhibited. It was the corn muffin grin.

Late that night, well after ending on a chocolate note, I crept into the study. There, on the floor of the slatted closet, I found it. The hard suitcase, now mottled grey in a coating of house dust. I ran my finger along the surface and watched the ebony rise, a black river on barren land. The latch creaked open, and I carried the old ma
chine to the dining room table, wound the page in. Clicked the color switch. The chair height was just right now and, softly, I lay my fingers on the keys, taking a breath as if I were about to launch into that long-awaited rendition of “Für Elise.” But this was for someone else.

***Dear Bapuji***

Thank you for A Lovely Day. I didn’t realize before how much I miss Replacing the Vanillas with You. If your Schedule permits, maybe We could do this again sometime? Soon?

I Love You.

***Your Bacchoodi***

I was cleaning out my room when I came across some childhood photographs of Rabbit and me, at the bottom of my crate of all things Gwyn (from notes passed in class and self-penned horoscopes to valentines and secret-crush journals). Class pictures in which we’d leapt flagrantly out of alphabetical order to be beside each other. Birthday shots with both of us tiara’d so you couldn’t tell whose day it actually was. Moving back in time, the passage of it marked by piggybacks and pajama parties, forgotten dolls, and in nearly every photograph nearly audible giggles over who knew what anymore.

A snap of us that Halloween we’d put aside Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White (me) and Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mowgli-ette (her) to celebrate our supertwin status. We’d gotten an extra-large hot pink sweatshirt, widening the neckhole to allow both our heads through (which we then loosely conjoined with one of my mother’s dupattas) and belting in both our waists over the fabric to turn it to a minidress. Matching striped tights on both sets of legs, but the middle two—one of hers and one of mine—we’d swathed together with black fabric, so the joint limb could blend into the night and vanish. My arm out one sleeve, hers out the other; jute bag in my hand and shopping bag in hers, and our inner arms wound securely around each other’s waists to allow us to stand as close as possible. We were both grinning with toothy optimism.

But posing for a photo as Siamese twins in my bedroom proved to be much easier than actually trick-or-treating with our new conjoined status. Fortunately we were closer to being the same height
then, and though dangerous curves lay ahead, this was prepubescence, too, or we wouldn’t have even made it out my front door. The first few houses, we bumped into each other the whole way, accidentally ramming one another into curbs, potholes, trippingly over sewer gratings, one of us always striding too quickly or too slow. We held on too tightly, were, in fact, banded together too tightly, and moved stumblingly, the weight of the extra person difficult to carry. The candy was slow coming, as it took us much longer than usual to navigate Lancaster Road alone.

But as the night went on, the fabric binding our inner legs together stretched just a smidge, the belt around our doubled waist loosened a notch, and my mother’s scarf gently unknotted. We learned to listen to each other’s breath and footfalls to gauge whether the speed was all right, to look out for two instead of one when scanning the street for bumps and slopes. Our inner arms unlocked from around the doubled waists to lie tensionless on our nascent hips. And when we let go some, we went a lot farther. When we learned to walk beside each other without holding on, we found we were less tired, our baskets crackling with sweets in no time at all.

It seemed fitting, and in any case, I had no choice now but to let Gwyn go, at least a little. It was holding on so tightly that was hurting my heart. Who knew a picture taken so many years ago could show me a way to live my life today?

I wondered if looking at a photograph of Karsh might elucidate me, too, teach me how to deal with his absence. And then I realized: I had no pictures of Karsh. Yes, I had a shot of the ladder leading up and disappearing into the darkness of the HotPot balcony, as if into a lightless heaven. Yes, I had taken the magical place on the porch where his shoes had been the night of my heart’s revelation, and even a zoom-in of the sheet music. But no Karsh. Still, it was funny how these spaces where he was not took on his shape nonetheless.

This made me want to look at other pictures again. What was missing, and what was not? Would they appear different now, tell a new story? I began digging through the shoe boxes in the study cabinets, poring over the images of my family. And indeed the photographs looked different now. I had always viewed their subjects as simply youthful versions of the parents I now shared a home with; today I began to see them as visions of young people who’d never imagined getting old, nor what their lives might one day become.

People like me.

A couple of months ago I would never have seen the connection, but today it was tangible as the photographs themselves. A small but certain weight: the weight of a moment. But a moment contained the whole, perhaps not a stolen but offered soul. My parents’ wedding photos now seemed inextricably linked to everything that had come before to bring them there, together—my mother’s posed studio shot with her brother Sharad at the age of five or six, in which she appears both terrified and mesmerized by the camera and clings to his, I now noticed, rakhi’d wrist, and my father’s baby picture, his eyes lavishly lined with kajal, as was the tradition, looking like infant Krishna on the peepul leaf—all retrospectively but irrefutably part of the whole design. And in the same way it was linked even then—that day the two took the seven steps round the spousal fire—to me, here, beholding them. The images looked different now that I felt connected to them, now that I was looking at them differently. But that changed them. Maybe there was no such thing as simply observing after all. In the same way I could see the tiny convex me in Chica Tikka’s third eye, I was perhaps inextricably in the photographs she took.

In one of the shoe boxes I came across an old black-and-white
of my saried mother, the corners curled as fallen petals. She must have been a teenager in it, and she was looking out and up from under her lids in much the same way Kavita did. A secret smile danced on her mouth; she seemed at once shy and thrilled by what she saw. It appeared she was looking right at me, right into this room, and I smiled at the idea of the young Shilpa Kulkarni having this kind of prophetic vision, perhaps that day experienced simply as a slight tingle up the spine, or momentary warming of her skin. And then I realized she held a camera in her hands, a clunkily beautiful contraption, lens aiming out from just above her belly. Upon closer scrutiny I saw the make of the machine, the white print across the front of it legible only to inverted eyes. It was a mirror image, my young unmother taking a self-portrait. Sitting here and contemplating the image today, it seemed to me that she was looking in that mirror to lay eyes on me. And my gazing at her reversed image was also like looking in a mirror from the other side. And I had a strange sensation of time, not so much as standing still, but the eternity capsulated in a single moment.

I wondered what that day had been like for her, tried to fill in the moments around the actual click of the camera. The delight she was clearly experiencing from what she saw—herself—made me happy-sad. Happy that she had felt it; sad that I wasn’t sure whether she did anymore.

Had she danced that day?

Most of the images of my parents in these boxes at least overlapped somewhat with stories I had heard, information I vaguely recalled about their histories together and apart. But there was one glaring omission from my mother’s tale. I wasn’t sure if I should ask, but now I knew I had to; I’d been pussyfooting around it all summer.

I found her in front of Oprah, doodling the names of deities and celebrity guests in the
TV Guide.

—Mom, I said tentatively. I took a breath.—Why are there no photos of you as a dancer anywhere?

Gwyneth Krishna Prabhu Madonna…

—What do you mean? she finally replied. I could see she was trying to act casual, but she was doodling harder.—Why should there be photos of me as a dancer?

—Because…you were a dancer.

—That Radha, filling your head with stories.

—It’s not true? But even Bapuji said.

—I suppose it
was
true, she said, now starring sitcoms.—But it was a long time ago.

The hushed fret of pen to paper.

—And there is no point in discussing it now, she added, a little loudly.

I was doing that thing again,
shutupshutupshutup,
but my mouth voted independent.

—Yes, but that still doesn’t explain why there isn’t a single picture of…

The pen stilled.

—I burned them.

I was stunned.

—You
what?

She was silent a moment, and the pen rolled soundlessly into the fold of the magazine.

—It hurt too much to see them, she said softly.

I dropped down beside her and wrapped my arms around her.

—Why do you never talk about it then? I asked gently.—Wouldn’t it help?

—Who was there to talk to, Dimple? she said, trying to shrug. But it caught on the uptake, turned to a hunching of her shoulders. She averted her eyes.—Your father was working night and day to
make a living for us. My parents—I was not able to speak to them for six years after coming here, until my first visit back to India, since they had no telephone. When I think back to that I can hardly imagine it—if I had to spend six years without talking to you I would simply…well…I would never allow it.

—But before, in India, why did you stop? Radha said—

—They didn’t let me. Well, they didn’t actually hold a dagger to my heart to stop me—but they said it wasn’t practical, what if I didn’t get married, how would I make a living like that, what was I doing with my life. I had to be a good example to my sister, I had to. Be rational.

—Even Dadaji?

She was staring straight ahead now, as if she could see it all before her on the flickering television screen.

—He was different as a father than as a grandfather, Dimple. Though he always wanted what was best for us, and for you.