Blue Boy (10 page)

“But some kids were a little confused…” Melinda said.

Immediately, there was a close-up of little Kiran, yellow shirt aglow, asking—almost pleading—“Why couldn’t he catch the bus like everyone else?”

It turned out that Melinda Maines
was
diabolical. In one cleverly rendered sound bite, I had fallen farther down than I already was. She had some nerve, Judas-kissing Honest Abe with a bald-faced lie.

Needless to say, History Day was transformed into a day of social crumbling. Every time I got on the bus to go to school, snickers would erupt like a chorus of cicadas, and any time Abe Lincoln came up in our social studies—you can’t believe the number of times he does—someone would inevitably deliver that line, “Why couldn’t he just catch the bus like everyone else?”

This fall’s talent show is one big bus of acceptance, a bus that all the other kids are riding. Despite whatever successes I’ve had in the past, the last “performance” I’ve given is marred with shame, and the only solution is to do the best act of my career this year. Maybe, just maybe, if I perform my routine flawlessly, as electric blue as Melinda’s satanic eyes, I’ll finally be able to catch that bus of acceptance. Just like everyone else.

“Do ya have Ballerina Barbie, Keern? Because you could always wear her tutu.”

Sarah and Melissa’s badgering of me has permeated not only my daily doings at school but one of my true safe havens: ballet class. Our school offers an hour-long class on Wednesday afternoons that makes this “hump” day the highlight of my week, and I usually rely on the swift movements of my body for a weekly burst of happiness. But as I slide my leg in a
rond de jambe
, I feel like I’m back at my desk in the classroom, peeling off more Barbie smiles.

Our ballet class is not in a fancy dance studio. It takes place in the school’s multipurpose room, a smallish rectangle with mirrors on one side of it and a floor made of large, white tiles with black specks in them. A makeshift barre has been affixed to the mirrored wall with small, clear reinforcements that look like quartz. We stand at the barre, reflections of ourselves in our periphery. But since the girls are behind me, they can look at my reflection without me being able to look at theirs. Still, I know what they see: everyone else wearing leotards, a couple of the extra-chic girls like Sarah and Melissa wearing leg warmers, while I wear a black T-shirt, black tights, black slippers. Black hair, brown skin.

Marcy, who gave me the Richard Simmons-esque practice tape, is our teacher—and a high schooler. She has become obsessed with Kenny G, so much so that she has plastered at least a quarter of the wall opposite the barre with magazine pictures of him. Right now, the stereo is switching from one glossy jazz tune to the next. Marcy has a mass of permed hair. The grape-like smell of her hairspray pervades the entire “studio,” and it is as if we kids are put under its spell as she instructs us. We oblige, entirely silent and expressionless. Well, aside from Sarah and Melissa, who continue to hiss at me when Marcy is busy instructing someone else.

“Key-ran, is that a splinter sticking out of yer ass?” Melissa says. Sarah giggles, then reaches forward and pinches my butt cheek.

I squeal. “Marcy! Sarah is touching me!”

Marcy rolls her eyes and says, “Sarah, stop,” but her warning is so limp that I can tell she doesn’t believe me. This is probably why she gave me the lamest award at last year’s end-of-the-year ceremony. Instead of “Best Arabesque,” which I was
dying
to receive, she gave me “Best Attendance.” Attendance isn’t even a ballet technique.

“What are ya doin’ for the talent show?” Sarah continues. “Dressin’ like Madonna?” I can hear her shaggy hair flopping as she shakes her head in mockery.

I stay silent.

“
We’re
doin’ a dance to Janet Jackson,” Melissa brags. “To ‘Rhythm Nation.’”

“I can’t wait to see that,” I say, “since you two have the worst rhythm in our entire class.”

“Kye-run!” Marcy yells. “Please stop talking!”

I frown and growl quietly. I wish I could give Marcy an award for “Best Awful Dance Teacher.”

“Yeah, stop talking, Key-ran,” Sarah taunts. “Just keep doing yer
ballet
.”

As I slide my left foot in another circle, I feel that it is making the retort I want to make. What those girls don’t understand is that dancing and talking are one and the same for me. If I were Kenny G, dancing would be my saxophone.

I get my penchant for dancing from my mother. She once showed me an old photo album filled with black-and-white pictures of her as a little girl performing
khatak
, a form of classical Indian dance, a mixture of foot patterns and mysterious hand gestures—and ankle bells, always ankle bells—that conveys stories from the Ramayana and other Indian texts. Every good Indian girl studies dance, and my mother was no different: in each photo, she wore an intricate sari with shiny frazzles forming its hem; garlands of carnations crossed her torso; gold jewelry encircled her wrists, ankles, half her nose. All the while, my mother was dutifully fulfilling her role as an Indian girl, carrying on her face a look of enjoyment coupled with obligation. (Incidentally, her expression was the same in a separate album—a barely opened, dust-encased brick labeled “Wedding” that I excavated from the bottom of my father’s bookcase.) My mother became quite a success, charming onlookers all over Delhi with her foot-pounding and sharp features—the slightly hooked nose, the hairpin-wide gap between her straight front teeth, the almond-shaped eyes locked in
kajol
, the delicate hands painted with
mendhi
. When flipping through the plastic-covered pages of that photo album with me, a different smile crept across her face, the sort of distanced reaction that occurs when you look at photos of other people’s adorable offspring. It was as if my mother were admiring someone else’s child. Or someone else’s childhood.

My mother’s
khatak
past instilled in her the desire to make dance a part of my life. Of course, I had a natural ability for artistic movement. When I was four, summer afternoons often found me clad in my Fruit of the Loom underpants and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt striking poses on top of the black Toyota Corolla that we had before my father could afford to buy us a beige Mercedes. Its hood, a shiny mirror, afforded me a flattering view of myself. I had a white, Duracell-operated Casio radio that I would plop down next to the car and use as a vessel to ferry Cyndi Lauper’s voice all over the cul-de-sac. While Cyndi hiccupped her way through songs, I would put my arms over my head and mimic Farrah Fawcett in her
Charlie’s Angels
pose, or alternate with kicks à la those by Lynda Carter in
Wonder Woman
. I did this whenever my father said he needed to wash the car. He would never have let me dance on top of it, but he had a tendency to announce his household chores a few days before he did them, as if the sheer announcement would will him into doing his part. Whenever I heard him utter, between bites of
roti
and curried cauliflower at dinner, “
Arre
, I need to vash that stupid car,” I knew the next day would be my time to shine. As soon as my father left the house, I would head to the car with the radio in one hand and a pair of plastic sunglasses in the other. My mother encouraged me. She would often sit on the driveway, a cup of tea in her hands, and watch me perform. A few days later, my father would set to work on the car, baffled as to how such a smudged mess could have ended up on the hood. He would sigh deeply, then wash the car in his penny-pinching way: concerned about saving on our water bill, he would spray the Corolla in one swift motion from one bumper to the other—just once—before shutting off the nozzle and then scrubbing the car with a big, soapy sponge, which he would dip into a small bucket of water between waxes. He would counteract his entire cleaning process once he took the bucket of soiled water and—to avoid the horror of having to hose the car down again and “waste” more water—poured it over the car to wash away the soap before toweling down the metal. Staggering into the kitchen from the heat outside, his years-old polo shirt a mess of suds and sweat, he would grunt, “You von’t belief those bloody birds. Not only do they do caca all over the car, but they smear up the hood, too. Eh,
bhagwan
[aka God], I need some food!”

My mother would oblige, whipping up a small stack of
roti
and a hodgepodge of curried vegetables. As she set them down in front of my father, she would sneak a glance at me and shake her head almost imperceptibly from side to side, as good
khatak
girls can do. I would acknowledge her gesture with a flourish of my still-sunglassed face like I was Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
.

My mother supposed I would take after her and study
khatak
. She certainly did her darnedest for this to be the case. Once, she dragged me to a performance in Indianapolis by a barrel-chested dancer who called himself Hanuman, after the Hindu monkey god. The resemblance, terrifyingly enough, was uncanny. The man’s upper lip was convex and snout-like, and his long limbs and hairy torso put me in mind of King Louie from
The Jungle Book
. Reportedly, he held the Guinness world record for the longest dance ever performed, a sweat-drenched
khatak
performance in Jalandhar that lasted three days and that must have put dents in the Punjabi dirt. Learning of this achievement was not exactly comforting for me. As my mother and I pushed ourselves into the narrow wooden seats of that Indiana auditorium, amidst a crowd of Indians gushing their anticipation to each other in Hindi, I doubted that the meager buffet table of food in the lobby would be enough to feed us all for three days. The performance was listed in the program as lasting “only” three hours, and in my mind, I imagined this three-hour tour veering as horribly off course as Gilligan’s cruise. When Hanuman finished his ecstatic dance not three but
five
hours later, my mother was on her feet applauding while I was plotting the quickest ways for us to get to the professional curry before everyone else.

Then there was the time that she tried to set up private dance lessons with a pockmarked woman named Hema who wore her hair in a carnation-laden ponytail. Hema must have been so busy studying dance that she forgot to change the carnations regularly, and so her hair often became a sharp-smelling mess of crinkled brown petals and split ends.

At first, my mother made me think she had simply found a friend in this woman. She would invite Hema Auntie over for tea and have me serve tiny butter cookies—or “biscuits,” to be Anglo-observant. While I served, my mother and Hema would discuss dancing.

“I used to love dancing vhen I vas young,” my mother said, sipping her tea in a half-slurp that to Indians conveys an enjoyment of food but to Americans is the most annoying sound on Earth. “The first time I met Ramesh, it was vhen ve vere little and I had just finished dancing at a
sangeet
for my cousin Geeta. She was getting married to a boy from Kerala with skin like tamarind chutney.” But then she went into Hindi, and I was lost. If it weren’t for Hema, I would have tugged at my mother’s clothing and begged her to tell me in English the story of how she met my father. But instead, I went to the counter and loaded our stainless steel serving tray with more biscuits.

“How did you start dancing, Hema?” my mother asked.

“Ess soon ess I came out of my mother! But that is nut important, Shashi,” Hema replied in her weighty accent, her teacup in one hand and a strand of oily hair twirled in the other. “Vhat is important is how Kiran vill larn, ha? Kiran
Beta
, ev’ry child should larn haw to dence
khatak
.
Beta
, I show you.”

Then she got up and led me to the open expanse of the family room, with its big Persian rug (or “Indian rug,” as my father would call it), and demonstrated certain key steps for me. The next time she came to visit, she even tried to teach me the famous pose of the Durga, the many-limbed goddess who has one leg raised and her front set of hands clasped in a bloom at her side. This, she told me, was one of the fundamental poses of Indian dance but also a rather impossible pose to strike. Indeed it was, as I wobbled for a second before losing my balance and landing facedown on the carpet.

I was always so busy trying to do what Hema told me that I didn’t notice how the tea and biscuits stopped being a part of her visits as the weeks went on. It was only a month later when I saw my mother handing Hema a check at the end of her visit—with not a drop of tea in either of their bellies—that I realized what was going on.

“Mom!” I cried after the front door closed and Hema was gone. “I didn’t ask for Hema Auntie to teach me!”

“Oh, Kiran
Beta
, it is good for you. I didn’t vant to study
khatak
vhen I first started, either, but then I grew to love it. This is vhy American children are alvays so naughty. Their parents send them clothes from the Gap instead of teaching them things. Not everything is easy,
beta
. You have to vork hard, and then you get God’s blessings later.”

“I don’t think these are God’s blessings,” I said, pulling up my shirt and showing her the collage of bruises covering my torso. Finally, the sight of my battered body made my mother desist. Even now, I wouldn’t incur bruises to turn myself Krishna blue. At least I don’t think I would.

All the same, my mother would drop in other asides about
khatak
the same way she would drop blobs of corn batter into a pot of hot oil when making
pakora
.

“You know,
beta
, good health is all in your posture. You know how I learned good posture?
Khatak
.” Plop.