Born Confused (52 page)

She closed her eyes while she chewed. Then she opened them, slowly, like women in mascara commercials, women who wash the grey right out of their hair and meet their husbands in elevators, in Levi’s. Their inky black poured over me. She stretched out her solidly bangled arm, the dupatta skittering down and gathering auroral in the crook, and that hand—that gold-bangled, ringed-and-thinged hand unfurled towards me, revealing patterns of fate and smatterings of henna and then my own nail-bitten fingers interlinked in hers.

We went outside.

As the weighty door of BNBB closed upon our heels, I was stunned to be met with birdsong and the thinning fleece of daybreak. I hadn’t even seen it coming; it had seemed the night would go on forever. But the neighborhood was still enchanting at this hour, a something tangible following you out of your dream into your waking day.

We wandered. And I tracked her with my viewfinder, chimeric in the moorish morning streets leading riverside, dragging her gold light along brick and stone, from her laughing profile down to her jaunty shoes.

And by the time we were upon the river, with its bordering
stretch of park grass, the sun was up and it was the beginning of a new day. And the sight of water did something to Zara. Before I knew it, she had kicked off one shoe, and then the other, and was loping waterwards, her dupatta and sari, the long false braid unraveling behind her, trailing off as she ran to reveal the head of cropped hair, the body far less curvaceous than it had appeared in the pinned and tufted layers of fabric.

I was following, photographing her manically as she dissembled into the hazy distance. Then I zoomed in close and closer to where I was till I landed upon the first fallen shoe several feet away, glittering a hidden treasure, a crushed corner of the city in the raveled grass.

—Jalfreezi! she called from the distance.

—Jalfreezi, I waved back, capping my lens and running to catch up with her. We stood and watched as the sun burned the film off the water and the boated day hummed open.

—How can I ever thank you? I said.

—How can
I
? she said.—Do you know Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, Dimple?

I shook my head.

—Well, I hardly understand it myself, to be honest. But I have pulled an easily applicable day-to-day rule from it that always gets me out of a jam: You must live every moment of your life in such a way that if you had to live it over and over again till infinity, this would be a good thing.

I couldn’t quite wrap around that yet.

—I know, she empathized.—It’s a tall order. But it’s not a shabby thing to aspire to. And I just wanted you to know that thanks to you, my night has been just like this.

I was moved.

—Thank you, Zara, I said.—Man, this Nietzsche guy must be a National Merit Scholar to have come up with that.

—Oh, he was just dumped like the rest of us, she shrugged.

—Really?

—His main flame had the hots for a poet friend of his.

Before we parted ways in the commuterized morning, I noted her telephone number, and she handed me the second paper bag. I opened it after she turned the corner.

French fries, on the burnt side, to the top.

The magic of the evening did not fade with morning. I’d hardly noticed day go to night and then to day again. Like that Pondicherry dawn, grading into becoming, no beginning and no end.

I couldn’t wait to get home and get to work. Kavita was still sleeping when I returned to the apartment, so I left her a note to tell her what a tale I had to tell and put the coffee on the timer so she wouldn’t miss her class. Birds gathered at her window grating, chattering boisterously, and there was a chill to the sun—just a touch, but it was enough to remind you the days would start to crouch now, squeeze into smaller spaces.

The entire train ride home I kept my sack full of rolls gathered to my chest like a sleeping child. I didn’t even have to close my eyes to see it all before me. It was as if a little bit of Zara had infiltrated me and the world was a more glitter-filled place because of it. If I had to relive last night again till eternity, I was happily surprised to realize, I would do so with pleasure. It was good to feel that way about my life.

At home, it was early enough that I could still hear my father in the shower. He hadn’t even had his pre-rounds tea yet; the World’s Greatest Dad mug was still by the stove, alongside the silver spoon, cane sugar, and sachet of Earl Grey my mother always left out for him the night before. The sight of this tendered me. I put the water to boil, fixed up two steaming cups, and went out to wait on the back porch steps.

He was stunned to say the least when he saw me through the screen door.

—Good morning, Bapuji, I said, handing him his cup.

—Aaray baapray, beta! he cried.—But—is this possible? Why are you not at Kavita’s?

I assured him that all was fine with my cousin-sister and told him I’d just wanted to come home.

—But why are you not asleep at this hour?

—Because, if it makes any sense, I said.—I finally woke up.

He had tears in his eyes when he sat beside me on the redpainted porch step. I could see now why this was such a precious moment to him. The birds had just begun their day; the ground sparkled dropped diamonds and an expectant hush hung over everything, like a bridal dress rustling on a rack. Mist cloaked the trees, made them seem farther away; it accentuated the sun’s rays, turning them into shining playground slides from heaven.

He clinked my cup before sipping.

—Well, to waking up then, he said.

I drank to that.

Once my father had pulled out of the drive I beelined for the basement, slipped on my magician gloves, and set to work. While the film dried on the line I joined my sleepily surprised mother upstairs for a second cup of tea, this time steeping the sachet in hot chocolate, a favorite variation for her.

—Are you on the IST? she asked me. She’d clearly been talking to Kavita, with this new lingo.

—Ma, Indian Standard Time means late, I said.

—Not in America! she said.—You are ten hours ahead of usual.

—I guess I’m not in the L.A. anymore, I smiled.

When I returned to the darkening room, the first glimpse of the first negative strip through the enlarger took my breath away. I dialed in the filters. Safelight on, then my first test strip; the wait was ago
nizingly delicious, counting out the five-second increments, like a countup to a new year.

I was pleased by how comfortable I felt with it all. Just a few weeks ago—which seemed much further away, considering what this summer had shaped up to be—it had been another story.

I shook the stop bath, thirty Mississippis to the percussive beat of the stopwatch. Karsh had been right—it
was
all about the timing, but in the end it was all about having it so down you could lose your sense of time. The way wondrous dancers make tough moves look easy. Being so prepared for beauty that beauty comes naturally—I suppose you could call that a state of grace.

It was indeed all about the chemistry as well—and I went to town with it: balancing, imbalancing, the red bias, the green. Adding magenta, removing yellow, adding yellow and magenta, removing yellow and magenta, like the bass, the treble, the strands of different songs coming and going in fused sound.

Lights strobed from safe to full-on, depending on whether I was loading or unloading. Dodging and burning, my hands spinning like Karsh’s over his magical records, I realized: It was a dance of sorts, my own little subterranean disco. I stood with the final sheet and cupped my palms to shift the exposed area for this last shot—an old-sole fabulist shoe, grassed in a toss, a slowly dismantling figure ghosting away in the distance. I hung it up to dry on the line and surveyed my work.

Today, in my little darkening room, it was amazing to see all these color prints where once had only been black and white; one by one they’d slipped in, nearly replaced them. Not that I disliked black and white, but now, oddly enough, I was learning from color how to stop seeing black and white in, well, black and white, how to begin seeing all the nuances of shadow and light.

A tear tracking down a face shot so close the pores breathed through. A hot dog o’ boudin riding into a mouth glisteningly crimson as inner fruit, Adam’s apple bulging and jeweled wink.

They looked like what it had felt like, all of them. Which, considering it had been the evening of a day I’d redo till eternity, was a pretty good thing. Larger-than-life prints (I’d used a bigger processing dish) for larger-than-life subjects. All the stages of the city’s slide into night and then day, and Zara’s own seamless transformation. The making of a woman; the creating of a person. And, I dared imagine now, the making of a photographer.

I realized now how much these images summed up so much of the summer to me. The sadness and beauty of this metropolis of lost and found souls. The making and breaking of identity—what was in your hands and what was not. A stranger becoming familiar despite her strangeness, because of it, over a hot cup of coffee and a night touched by the season’s first chill. Lips flowering to a flame. Wings sprouting from a sewer; starbursts from skid marks—the way there was no such thing as a false star: You could wish on anything as long as you meant it.

There would be rain and there would be sun, I knew now, and the big picture was much bigger than all that: It was the minutest detail—a callus on a foot in a stylish shoe, a tear in the duct of a smiling eye. And then it clicked. Better late than never: I knew now what to give Karsh for his birthday. These photos were the closest to my soul, were the first tangible way I was beginning to understand this summer, and, through this summer, life. In a way, they’d been a way for me to understand him, allowing me my own form of DJing. Maybe I couldn’t have him the way I’d hoped, but sun and rain, I could share with him what I was proudest of; these images were perhaps the best way for me to explain myself to him, better than all my
fumbling words and awkward silences and moody moments, at least. I would leave them in a book on his doorstep, with the one of Gwyn he’d asked for, so long ago it seemed.

For whatever it was worth. Just to express myself, as Kavita said. To take authority for my vision.

To take a chance.

The day I got my bona fide certified driver’s license my parents nervously rewarded me with a day of unlimited access to the car. My instinct, of course, was to immediately swing by Gwyn’s and pick her up for a crazy day out. But then I remembered I couldn’t. It would have all been so much sweeter if I could have shared this with her, or the Zara adventure. But perhaps that adventure was one that needed to be undertaken alone.

I hadn’t seen her for a long time, Gwyn. Miles had sprung up overnight between my house and hers, a distance that had seemed a mere half-step before. I hadn’t even rounded her dead-end circle since our whole falling out. It hurt too much, and I didn’t know what I would say if she caught me just hanging around like that. I doubted she was home much at all these days, anyways. As the Disorientation party drew closer, I imagined she and Karsh were drawing closer, too, for more than organizational reasons.

Still, it was hard, knowing that we were to stay away from each other. We still knew so much about each other: I could picture what she would be wearing on a day like this, where it might rain or not (hair in braids to beat frizz, vinyl tee, waterproof pleather pants, no bottom-lash eye makeup). I knew how she would eat an Oreo, were she to eat an Oreo (the entire thing in a go), how she would stop to scratch behind the ears of a golden retriever were she to see a golden retriever (in the middle of oncoming traffic if necessary), the way she would turn a snort to a sneeze if she lost control at a really funny joke in public. The way her mouth would look like her eyes were crying if she heard a sad story. Her dentist appointments, mother/
daughter non-appointments, and entire personal calendar took up hard drive space in my head perhaps as much as in her own.

I drove along, very slowly as the sky grew fumy around me. I’d decided to go downtown to take some more photographs. I’d considered Manhattan but today I was afraid of the city again. Afraid of how alone in it you could be—how obscure, indistinct, lost, even in the midst of all the usual shiny speedy plethora of Things. How alone I would feel knowing Gwyn was somewhere in it today. The day, as my hard drive reminded me, of her modeling debut: the
Flash!
shoot.

I parked and got out, walking around as if in a dream, as if behind a curtain in my own hometown. I zoomed in and out, but for the most part just held Chica Tikka close and went on. Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself in the plaza, the farmers still holding their hazy summer market, just across the street from Gwyn’s Starbucks.

Well, not just across the street. It only looked that way as I spied on the world through Chica Tikka’s zoom, but in reality I was quite a ways back, just one in this smoggy crowd of cheese-shoppers and bread bakers, the tart queens and the flower kings.

My eyes ached with knowing she wasn’t there. But I suppose that was why I’d felt safe enough to come myself. I could picture her uptown ethereal, posing wraithlike in Central Park as mist rambled over the rocks jagging into the water, phantom swans in the foreground, and I crossed all my fingers and then even my thumbs that it would all work out of her.

But then I didn’t need to picture her at all. Because she’d just come out of the Starbucks and slumped down on the paint-chipped bench, on the end away from the panhandler there on the sidewalk.

My heart lifted, struggled at the sight of her. I lowered Chica
Tikka and began to duck behind a stall, but then realized I was too far for her to see me, and even if I were closer, it would be tough on a day as veiled as this. Maybe she had already finished the shoot? No—doubtful she would have even accepted a shift with something like that going on. Doubtful she would be wearing her green fogcutting smock if she had any modeling to do. I wondered what had happened.