Born Confused (56 page)

—And what else? I said, nudging him.—What else?

—That’s all I’m allowed to read today, he smiled. But he didn’t let go of my hand. Looking at our intertwined fingers—knuckles separating the thirty-day months from the thirty-one, counting out a doubled year together—I saw we weren’t the same color at all. Gold panned under his skin; umber layered mine. Even brown wasn’t merely brown.

—I can’t believe we’re here like this, I said.—That all this time.

—Yes, all this time. How could you not know?

—So many things. Like that time you came over and out of all the pictures I’d taken chose the one of her for the one you wanted, the one you wanted to keep.

—Dimple, he said, and he looked at me first surprised then very soberly.—Of course I picked that one.

—Of course?

—That was the only one with you in it, he said.

I looked up at him, into his coal and campfire eyes and it was funny, but I think he might have had tears in them, or maybe I did and they were making his look wet. It was bittersweet, but there was nowhere else I’d rather have been than here, and I couldn’t believe that this summer journey had led to my being here at all, in the song-boughed sky with him. With him. The most unsuitable suitable boy in my ever expanding universe. Which, as it turned out, suited me just fine.

Karsh was on in five, and I came back down to the bar, my bag and spirits lightened somewhat. Kavita was there now, and though not technically on duty tonight, seemed to have been co-opted into lending her expertise. She was at the other end of the bar, standing on a stool rung and gesturing passionately to indicate a more efficient arrangement to the new girl.

The music began to crackle like candy wrappers. She caught sight of me and came over.

—How is it going, cowgirl? she smiled. She climbed on the prattling stool beside me.—The pictures, they are amazing! Looks like you did have a tale to tell after all, isn’t it?

—Thanks, Kavity, I said. A zithering dhol dum-dum notched up the air now.—Did you have a good chat with my parents?

—Chat? Those three were guzzling Boozeflash like you wouldn’t believe—they hardly had time to talk!

My eyes followed her finger to that risky red fish tank. The name had changed, but the punch looked as potent as ever.

—Oh no! I cried, laughing. I looked out to the crowd, but couldn’t see them. Maybe they’d gone on to the restaurant?

Kavita and I ordered a drink, and I caught her up a little on the goings-on of late and above.

We toasted, and by the time I turned around, the music was magnetic, the dance floor was packed, and I couldn’t believe it.

—Go Aunty! Go Uncle! Kavita hollered.

My parents were leading a mass of people—including what seemed to be the entire eager-to-be-authentic
Flash!
mass—in that same bhangric Garbhic version of Macarena-meets-Jackson they’d been practicing at home. And it was like the Pied Piper effect: The more they got into it, the more people joined in, till there was literally a mass movement on the floor, rendered hypnotically and hungering by the rompy lung-bung thirst-quench sea beat. Razz-a-
tazz-skat,
ba
doomph
-kitschy-grrring, DHA-dhin trika-DUM, bow-wow-waah, chitty-
brrring!
—and a voice like a seashell song from a faraway place, brush-breathing you into a curled-upon-itselfness, a resonant hollow emptily full of distant waves and nearer sand.

There was so much life in the song somehow; it was sung and played and sang us like a last breath. A dark underbelly underpinned the music, but a sky soared above it, raining a spangled shower down onto the bass-full flesh. And the tiny convex me seemed to be bobbing in this joyful rain, and you could ride the joy into the scary part and find a strangely safe footing in the center of the fear if you became one with it, like a surfer in the tunnel. I was sitting, but I felt like I was atop a live animal, balanced on the back of a city so dynamic, and that city on a world so wingingly fluxen, that no wonder we needed a little piece of gravity to keep from flying off.

Knowing Karsh was drawing me tidal to the dance floor, I let myself go, right into the heart of it.

And then I was dancing.

Itchy itchy I—ho ho!
Once again, the entire place was spilling
over. All the boundaries broken, melted away in sweat and song. People leapt on the stage and off, mingling with what seemed like the millions of people flickering on brick and a real tomtomeer and a real sitarista whose strum-thuks blended at times into the music, at others thrusting out like the pages of a pop-up book.

And then
itchy itchy I
again and drums everywhere: above, below, beating in my big toe. Caught like a heart between my legs, inside my throat and emerging, and I was calling
ho ho!
with the chorus of voices, the music dropping out just that moment, and then back in a rush
itchy itchy I
and I was singing with the rest of them
hi hi
I could hear my voice in the mix, a thread unique in a tapestry of sound, and I was dancing with myself and with every motherfrocker on the planet and it was not a lonely number where there was you.

Climbing now, onto the stage and shimmying towards the millions of echoing people, and someone was approaching me from the other side, from the screen side, and I sped up and she did too, both of us skipping now, and I slowed as did she, and then I could see her beautiful black-eyed-bean waves and glittery dupatta and bell bottoms and a trace of her mother’s mother’s tikka between her smiling eyes, and I was just before her now, close enough to touch, and I was face-to-face with: myself.

I turned away from the video screen and leapt off into the sea of upturned palms. And as I landed, I began to distinguish one set of hands that stayed upon me, milky-wayed and manicured.

—May I have this dance, supertwin?

I turned. And couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Gwyn! She stood before me in some kind of Roaring Twenties number, the blues of her eyes piercing in a face where the hair was swept off and only the mouth was made up, and turned up, too.

—Gwyn! I cried.—You came!

—I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, she smiled.—Are you kidding? It’s your big night. In a lot of ways.

—But it wouldn’t have been without you, I said.—Thank you so much for organizing
…all
this. For getting my photos out there.

—Don’t mention it, for the pictures. And as far as the party goes, it wasn’t my idea, she said.—You know that. But I know a good idea to steal when I see one. Look, I’m so sorry. I—I can’t stay away from you, Dimple. I love you.

I pounced upon her, and hugged her close.

—I love you, too, Gwyn, I told her.—Always have. Always will.

She smiled back at me, and I danced in her pupils.

—Listen, I have something for you and Karsh, she said.—To kind of let you know my new position on things. Can we go up right now?

—Go up?

—We’re family. Family’s allowed, right?

I took her arm in mine and nodded.

—We are definitely family, I said.—Let’s go.

One hand over the other, I ascended. It felt like the side of a boat, the way the entire club was undulating, and even though I’d been there once already tonight a sense of anticipation laddered higher in me with every step.

—Karsh looked happily surprised to see Gwyn climbing up on my tail, and reached down to help her up, too.

—Hey, he said.

—Hey, she said. She took a breath then and faced us, handing each of us an envelope pulled from the beaded pouch gold-chained
off her hip. I could feel a small soft shape-changing lump in the paper, wedged in the bottom corner.

—Open them together, she instructed.

He ripped, then I did. I jostled the little mass out into the palm of my hand, beside his hand where one already lay, making two. Two rakhis, like two tiny flower-float rivers coming together.

—You see, a wise woman once told me a story, said Gwyn, and she took one in her hand, unsnarling the thread. She began to tie it around my wrist.—A story of how she once made it clear to someone that he was like a brother to her.

She was on the second rakhi now, tying it around Karsh’s wrist.

—And that she would be like a sister to this person, she said.

She stood back and observed our newly rakhi’d wrists.

—To cut the cord, so to speak. Even though I suppose technically, it’s tying the cord. Anyways, Dimple, you’re the closest thing to a sister I’ve got. And Karsh. You’re the closest to a brother. And I just want to say I’m sorry about the way I’ve been acting and all, and I’m not going to walk out on either of you, and I hope you might have room for me now and then in your happiness, and I will be there for whenever that moment might crop up. So happy Rakshabandhan.

—Room for you? I said, and I was crying. I took her in my arms, and Karsh stood shyly back, but we pulled him in and we were in a group huddle.

—Well, you know what I mean, she spoke into my hair.—Who needs a third wheel?

—A tricycle, I whispered back, smacking a kiss on her cheek.—As
another
very wise woman once said.

We held each other for a happy while. And then Gwyn disentangled herself.

—And now that the cord is cut, I’ve got some business of my own to handle down there, she said, smiling her cavity confessional.
—You did say I’m inspiration for a DJ once, didn’t you, Karsh? Well, I’ve got a job to do.

She slid over to descend the ladder, her face disappearing strip by strip over the edge, one pool-blue eye winking before vanishing down. And from above we watched her go, stepping over the boxes of records, the tangled wires, the spinning platters to follow her mazey path through the dance floor.

Karsh turned it all up a notch, and she was down there, her gold haloed head swinging in view, turning up the charm and getting down and dirty on the dance floor with anyone and everyone: fast waltzing my father, mirror dancing with Zara, and eventually landing in the center of the energy-dense circle of Trilok (Jimmy) Singh, who was currently break-dancing to his heart’s content on a patch of plank. We watched Gwyn wind her way in and get right down on her flapper back beside him, mimicking his moves, and well; the competition mounted, leading them from on-the-back swirlie-whirlies all the way around the world to Russian kickboxing calfflicks and salsa and sevillanas and strange blends of tree pose and Step moves and the Lindy, and the circle around the two grew to accommodate them.

—I think Tree may have finally met his match, I smiled.

I felt I was looking over the edge of the world. And it was a moment when all was right with the world: The music was all around and inside us. Below, a sea of people were grooving in multiplicitous harmony. All together like this the dancing bodies looked like part of the same organism, the very blood in its veins, and my photos were windows into the multieyed animal; even inanimate objects souled up, chairs jittering to the bass and glasses spinning light.

I had never felt in my whole life like I did then: Zen. Suddenly the Miss America wish for world peace seemed brilliant. Maybe if
enough people made that wish we could do huge things, make things happen just from our thoughts and good intentions and all be shiny happy people. And this much was clear now: It was no passive homogenous creature, identity, but rather diversity, a thrashing, grinding, and all-out dirty dancing together. It moved and it grooved and it might even sleep with you before marriage. You were the dancer and the dance, and you could shape yourself through a riff, or a shrug, or an on-the-back spin, adapt to new rhythms without losing a sense of harmony with yourself. And harmony, that was no static thing either, but many different parts coming together to sing the same song.

And the beat, well. The beat you had to follow was your own heart.

These were all ever-changing things, which made people everadapting creatures. You could call it confusion on a bad day—or just a call to dance on a good. In any case, I no longer felt confused—well, a lot less confused. And I certainly wasn’t confused about The Boy now taking my hand. Standing here, tonight, with Karsh, I had the sense we were at the beginning of our own once upon a time. I had the feeling I was home at last.

—See? he said, tracing that same tributary off my lifeline.—What did I tell you? That she would be back. And that he would wait.

Our eyes met now and we were alone among so many, in a temple all our own.

—You read palms? was all I could manage.

—No, he said, smiling. That smile I so loved now. He hadn’t let go of my hand. Below everybody was dancing; he listened for a moment through his phones, and lifted the needle off the record.—But I read lips.

Everybody dancing. And then I couldn’t see anything because, finally, his mouth came to mine like a moon winding back into orbit, and there was no place I would rather have been.

We kissed until we tasted the same. Until I couldn’t tell where he left off and I began.

It was only when we came up we realized: There was dead silence in the club.

And it was only when we looked over the edge of the world we saw:

Everyone was still dancing.

—Oh, man, Karsh whispered.—I lifted the wrong needle.

He busied himself with a quick save, a low thumping number that crept stealthily up out of nowhere, a humblebee honey-drone becoming a sound of its own, the way the song of an empty room reveals itself upon closer listening, the way the room is not empty at all.

And then Sole Mate was up, to carry through closing. Karsh was set for the night.

—Come on, he said, turning to me.—Do you want to dance?

—I’d love to, I said.

It was difficult to imagine summer was already almost officially over. But summer itself didn’t seem to think so, hanging on a little longer, hesitant to let go. What had felt like a chill setting in on the tail of the seemingly eternal heat wave of the past months now, after a small period of adjustment, revealed itself to be surprisingly mild weather. Warm enough to swim in, cool enough to wear a sweater.