Blue Boy (8 page)

My father appears from his office, his face wrinkled in worry.

“Vhat is going on,” he asks, and the fire in his eyes from the fight earlier in the day dissipates, replaced with genuine concern. Upon seeing me, he realizes it’s another one of my migraines and comes to my mother’s side, helping me into a chair and saying soothing words, his voice calm and comforting. “It’s okay,
beta
, just drink some vater—here.” He hands me a glass of water my mother has presented to him.

I heave out a few sighs. The only thing I can feel is the water down my throat—and the prick of plastic limbs from SS, who is stuffed in my sweatpants pocket. I think of her, of us lounging in a patch of strawberries like we’re Krishna and Radha, and something about this brings me back. My vision blurs back in, like the opening of an old black-and-white Indian movie starring Raj Kapoor, and the image of my father and mother becomes half clear.

“Kiran
Beta
, are you okay?” my father asks. He puts one hand on my shoulder.

A mixture of smoke and steam rises from the burning rice behind him.

Krishna’s great weakness was butter. Mine is headaches.

A few years ago, I started having migraines. Every once in a while, something sends my head into throbbing pain, and it isn’t predictable as to what that catalyst will be. I feel a flash of heat inside of me, and then my vision becomes crowded with light.

People who’ve had near-death experiences describe a warm, white light creeping into their vision. This is sort of what I see when I have a migraine, except I see light in splashes of different colors. Each headache, then, is like a little death.

I tell my mother this after I come to and am lying in bed, but she shakes her head no. “
Arre
,
beta
, don’t be so dramatic. Just keep the towvel on your forehead. You don’t want to miss school tomorrow.”

But I
do
want to miss school tomorrow. I still have to contend with Sarah, Melissa, and Co. every day, and I’d much rather stay home and spend the day rummaging through Estée and looking at porn. And there’s the terrifying thought of having my migraine return at school. Luckily, to this day, I’ve never had one there, although I’ve felt them creeping up on me before. Once, when John Griffin put a worm on my chair after recess, I felt my face getting hot and quickly rushed to the bathroom, where I hid in a stall and took deep breaths until I felt a normal body temperature again.

Luckily, I have a mother who insists on feeding me bodybuilding vitamins. She has put me in the habit of taking a Centrum tablet every day, like I’m seventy instead of twelve. She also insists that I take gingko biloba and echinacea pills, and three times a week, she mixes me a glass of a supplement called colloidal silver, which an American friend of hers has taken for years and which is apparently amazing for your immune system. My mother makes this concoction as methodically as she makes everything else on her stove; she uses the same wide stainless steel pot in which she makes
daal
. I have yet to see her various remedies make a huge difference in my health, but I appreciate her diligence all the same.

I wish there were some medicine that could make my headaches productive, perhaps giving me a huge burst of intelligence every time I have one. Some way to transform my headaches from debilitating to empowering. Until then, I focus on Krishna’s downfall instead.

I, like Krishna, have always loved butter. But I usually like it
in
things, not just by itself. I like when my mom makes
roti
because she uses a long, thin brush to spread a warm layer of Land O’ Lakes on the circular bread, the stuff softening the dough. I like butter pecan ice cream, mostly for its peaceful color. I love Butterfinger candy bars, the shock of orange they send through me. I love butternut squash, which my mom likes to mash into a paste, mixing in masala, salt, pepper, and butter. I scoop it up in one oily, buttery, soft
roti
.

But it’s an altogether different thing to eat butter by itself.

It’s 1992, and people these days have become obsessed with butter and its various forms—and, specifically, the cholesterol they all carry. This is the most sumptuous of times for people who have warring, sadomasochistic personalities, the type of people who love depriving themselves of creaminess. A chief member of this group—a doggedly dedicated member—is my father. His two halves—the nutritionist sadist and the starved masochist—are a match made in Heaven.

As we sit at lunch, my father extols the benefits of playing the butter assassin.

“Vhat you eat now vill affect your whole life,” he says, tearing a dry
roti
and popping a paperlike sliver into his mouth. “All these people think, ‘Oh, I am young and strong. Nothing can hurt me.’ But they are all idiots. You guys have to cut out all of this rubbish.” He gestures at our oily
roti
, the small, stainless steel dishes full of plain yogurt, the tall glasses of buttermilk infused with pepper and lemon juice that we concoct to simulate
lassi
. “Or you vill be noplace.”

But he doesn’t take all of our oily food away. Despite his personal nutritional battle, I think he sees the food before me and my mom as a necessary part of our Indianness, as if somewhere amidst the sour dairy swirls there is a secret potion that keeps us as Eastern as possible. All the same, he keeps tabs on whatever we eat, switching our boxes of Corn Pops and Apple Jacks with Shredded Wheat and Fiber One—unaware that he’s merely exchanging loads of crap with cereals that make your crap plentiful. He banished the cookie jar he got for my mother one Valentine’s Day—one of those mail-order affairs where you can choose what is written on the side of the jar. The ad displayed a sample jar whose side read “Mary’s Homemade Cookies,” but my father changed it to “Shashi’s Homemade Chum Chum,” overlooking the fact that
chum chum
(aka Indian desserts) have to be kept in the refrigerator—or as my parents call it, “REFrigerator”—or they’ll be as crumbly as a mummy. Now, via a stepstool, my father has consigned the jar to the highest shelf in the pantry, along with a candy dish of rainbow-colored, sugar-coated fennel seeds.

But I will not be deterred, despite my fright. The Sunday after my fainting spell, I go grocery shopping with my mother. I wait until she is busy selecting the perfect bouquet of coriander before I disappear into the refrigerated strip of dairy goods. Skipping the small armada of blue-, red-, and purple-capped milk cartons, I survey the vast stacks of butter products: the tubs of margarine; the little brick boxes of butter, each containing four wax-papered bars; the new, circus-like product exclaiming its incredulity that the substance inside is really butter. I grab the biggest contestant, a tub of Country Crock, and head for the cashiers. I plan to pay this time. I don’t want to risk shoplifting again, considering the bad karma that happened with Mrs. Nevins right after I stole that magazine. I must make a truly weird sight: a small Indian boy hoisting a tub of processed butter product onto the checkout line, puffing my exertion into the heavily rouged face of THELMA, as her matte black name tag announces. I pay in change, the guts of my piggy bank clattering a chorus as I dump them onto the steel counter, like they did when I bought my SS dolls. Thelma groans, then counts the coins one by one, holding them in one hand and sliding them into the other as she registers the amount in her head. It is a process not unlike the way my mother screens uncooked lentil seeds when cooking, dropping deformed shapes into the receptacle of her left palm. Once I’ve purchased the product, I wrap the plastic bag tightly around the butter and retreat back into the store. Thelma sends another puzzled groan my way.

I find my mother nose-deep in produce. I slide my load of Crock onto the little shelf under the shopping cart, a place my mother would never think to look, no matter how low to the ground her five-foot-tall body is. I’m the one who pushes the cart anyway, an activity I do with gusto, adding a few pas de bourrée as I move along.

When we check out, Thelma thankfully does not say anything about the butter because she is too nonplussed by the mammoth cornucopia my mother has set on the conveyer belt: an Amazon of greenery: coriander, lettuce, green beans, lentils, peppers; three large cartons of plain yogurt, proof that my mother is single-handedly keeping Dannon in business; bottles of Wesson cooking oil standing as rigidly and gravely as bishops; cylinders of Morton salt, bottles of crushed black and red pepper, bags of sugar the size of infants. And this is only the American stop; after this, we have to take a twenty-minute drive to Asian Bazaar, a small store that feels like a speakeasy, where smelly Indian men, their mustaches like ink blots, sell my mother enormous bags of durum flour, corn flour, masala, and turmeric. Sam Walton would shit his linen pants if he knew that two tiny Punjabi men had innovated bulk food purchases this adeptly.

Come to think of it, I guess I could have just asked my mother to buy the Country Crock, but I am so used to sneaking around these days that such a thought never even crosses my mind until this instant.

When we get home from Asian Bazaar—my body aching from carrying everything into the house and my mother’s hands covered in coupon paper cuts—I tuck the Country Crock under my arm and dash to my room. I yell “Homework!”, shut and lock the door, and sit on the floor in hasty tribute to my blue-skinned past incarnation.

At first, when I open the lid and peel back the wrapper, the butter, swirled so that one point sticks straight up in the center, intimidates me. But there it is again—that disarming, light yellow, the type of color that mothers paint nurseries when they are trying to be different from the usual blue and pink. I scoop a fingerful of butter out and roll it into the skin of my fingers, then smear a smidge into my cheek to see if it makes an adequate moisturizer. Oily, but it seems to do the trick.

I’m stalling. I know that it’s going to be gross, but I have to do it. It’s in my blood. Actually, it’s in my soul. I take a deep breath and then gobble up a teaspoon’s worth.

Surprise of surprises—well, I guess the surprise of surprises would be if my current behavior were considered sane—but surprise of surprises, it tastes good. It tastes mildly sweet; I feel like I’ve discovered an albino fudge. As I scoop more and more butter into my mouth, I come to a fuller realization of just what is happening here: I am a genius rediscovering the roots of his genius. It’s like picking up a piece of writing that you wrote years ago; you have forgotten everything you wrote down—be it a book report from school or those first song lyrics you composed at the age of eight—because you were in that moment and the art was merely using you as a vessel, passing through you and leaving little of itself on your memory. You feel the tiniest stab of recollection when you rediscover it, but mostly you are in awe of how it was
you
who wrote down these words and felt something so creative in that moment. Or it’s like picking up an old, lost photo and remembering faintly the joy or apprehension you felt at that moment, but also remarking that this was you, this was a person, this was someone doing something and it escaped you. This butter, though processed and preserved and probably not even yellow until a high-tech food coloring is thrown into its folds, joins my present self to my past self. As I cap the butter and put it back in the plastic bag, as I tiptoe downstairs to the basement, to the old fridge whose freezer my mom stuffs full of tomato puree she’s made in our blender, as I open the “Crisp” drawer and stash the tub, as I rush back up the stairs and pant heavily in the kitchen, I feel like a crown of peacock feathers has grown from my temples, which are again, after centuries, as blue as vein.

I must wear this crown tentatively, though. My father has set himself the task of eradicating all butter from his diet, while I have set myself the task of slurping fistfuls of Country Crock. This is a problem.

Somehow I think he knows what I am up to. I worry that he can smell the butter on my breath. My lips start to chap because I instinctively wipe my mouth again and again to make sure there is no more greasy shine left. Krishna certainly never had chapped lips. In every picture I’ve seen of Him, His lips are plump, as well as shiny with lipstick. So I start to take extra-special care of my lips, pilfering one of my mother’s many tubes of ChapStick and using it often.

Once I have managed to eat the butter without any detection from my father, I feel like I have triumphed over him in the same way that I have over my mother. Just as I have managed to put on her makeup, I have managed to eat my father’s nutritional enemy. Something I have never felt before becomes clear to me: I am taking a sort of hurtful pride in being devious to them. I am transforming my weaknesses into ruses, and in doing so, I am becoming surer of myself. I am the calm in the middle of the battle.

On Saturday, I practice my ballet exercises in the kitchen. I am listening to a tape of ballet commands that Marcy, my teacher, gave each of us students. The instructions are enunciated by a nasal-voiced man who sounds like Richard Simmons. I assent, gripping the counter with my left hand and moving my right arm according to the position I am in. In third position, I curve it in front of me as if I’m Snow White catching a dove on her forearm. In fifth position, I curve it over my head and feel taller. I do every step perfectly until my father walks into the kitchen—dripping with sweat and smelling of grass. He has just mowed the lawn. The remnants of grass give off a pungent smell, but at least it’s not the type of grass that Tiffany Myers smells like when she comes to school. Her father works in “produce,” but his best goods are not on display under a miniature sprinkler system.

“Press, point, toe-ball-heel,” says the faux Richard, and I press my foot into the floor, lift it, and melt it back onto the ground, staring over my father’s head.

“
Beta
, could you stop for von minute.” My father reaches down and takes off his sneakers, and I’m surprised not to see a cloud of odor rising from them.

“I can’t stop,” I say quickly, afraid that I’ll miss one of faux Richard’s words, which I take as Gospel. My biggest goal in life right now is to dance my God-driven way across the school stage in November, so my practice time is precious. Only two months left.