Born Confused (13 page)

Was that why Meera Maasi was so wary of the darkening room? I was sitting up now, too.

—So they give up on the entire advertising method and go to this sort of singles night for CKPs—you know, our mothers’ caste, Kshatriya. Okay, I suppose you do not know. Basically, a group of boys and girls are in a big room. All of them have a number. The girls sit on one side of a table. And then the boys line up each before a girl and present a card with their details on it.

—Like their e-mail?

—No, no—their birth sign, salary, number of brothers and sisters. Each pair has a few minutes to talk until someone rings a bell,
and then the boys have to all move one over to the next girl. Now, everything being on IST as usual…

—IST?

—Indian Standard Time. You know—late. Being late as usual, the rental on the room is nearly over and they have to speed things up, so the bell is ringing faster and faster, till the last boys in line have less than a minute each. So of course, up strolls Deepak. And after a thirty-second conversation that consists of him asking Sangz why she’s still staring at the guy who’s gone just before—my sister picks him.

—You did
not
just say that! So she tells him right then and there?

Wait’ll Gwyn heard this!

—No, no. What you do at the end is write down the numbers of the boys who have interested you, and they do the same. Wherever there is a match both parties are notified and it goes from there. So she picked Deepak, and Deepak picked her.

—That sounds almost romantic.

Frock, if the boys I crushed on ever crushed back on me, we’d be in business!

—Well, I should also mention that of course, after what happened, Sangita wasn’t wearing her glasses at this meeting. Which is not, if you ask me, the best way to go about choosing a husband.

—Or it’s the only way, I said, imagining the dork density of the place with all those computer programmers in one room.

Kavita laughed sadly.

—It really is quite awful, she said.

—So you’re not going to have an arranged marriage, Kavity? I asked.

—No, I’m not, she said.—I’m as Indian, if you will, as the rest of them. But I’ll arrange my marriage myself, thank you.

—They’ll let you do that in India?

—I’m not going back to India.

She sat up even straighter, all silhouette. She was gazing out the window.

—You know, Dimple, they say in the East you love the person you marry and in the West you marry the person you love. But maybe it’s a lot simpler than that. Maybe you just love the person you love.

A long silence ensued. My lids began drifting despite myself, but through my lashes she was luminous in the near dark, moonbathing. And so natural. I wondered suddenly through the heaviness of approaching sleep whether she had an American boyfriend. This kind of mixed-couple thing happened all the time—I’d heard my parents’ friends complaining about it at poker parties: how their own flesh and blood had fallen into the grip of Western corruption. (And this during poker parties.)

I’d never felt the way she looked now about Julian, or even Bobby: easily taking up space, loose with her voice, moonlit. I’d always felt tight, fat, clueless. In the dark. Maybe I’d never been in love. I wondered whether she was.

—Yes, very much, she answered.

I hadn’t realized I’d asked out loud.

—With an Indian?

—With an ABCD! Funny, isn’t it.

I could hear her smile.

—ABCD?

—You’ve never heard this? It’s a term we have in India for second-generation South Asians from the States. It stands for American Born Confused Desi.

—They see what?

—Not
they see,
she said.
—Desi.
Desh meaning country in
Hindi. It’s a person who comes from South Asia, ancestrally at least. The alphabet goes all the way to Z—not always a nice alphabet, but there you have it.

I couldn’t believe it. Someone had made an alphabet about that? I was wired again.

—So you’re in love with an American Born Confused Desi?

—Well, an American Born Desi, at least.

She flopped back like she was falling into a pool.

—That wine must have gone to my head! I feel like I’ve been talking nonstop.

And turned away from me, seashelling up on the sheet.

—It is good to be with you again, Dimple, she said. Her voice sounded far away now.—I’m sorry I’ve been so out of touch. It was a really tough year. But you know I’ve always thought of you as my little sister. Even though you’re not so little now.

For some reason, I didn’t think she meant fat.

—Dream sweet, she said.

Her curls skidded off her shoulder and fanned out over the pillow. It was then that I saw something on the nape of her neck, dark like dried blood, but not accidental; there was a pattern to it. I squinted. I couldn’t tell what it was, this strange flower.

It was the last thing I saw before I sandmanned into sleep.

Kavita was gone by the time I woke up (I was still on
the L.A. time,
apparently). Her bed was perfectly made up, dime-bounceable, with the cover turned down and tucked in to expose the pillow. A fresh glass of Sprite sparkled on my nightstand through a partly drawn shade (hangover helper, she’d informed me when she inkled out what my infamous “adventure” had been). I hadn’t heard her
leave, but I vaguely recalled someone pulling the sheet to my chin. The shimmer-clank of bangles as a hand lay gently on my forehead. A scent of caramel and cashew and salted skin that still lingered.

Now that she’d been there and was gone I had a funny feeling. Empty. It had been nice having her in the room, like when Gwyn used to sleep over, before Dylan entered the picture.

I sat up. And there at the foot of my bed I saw the Hindi-scripted shopping bag, which she must have forgotten. But poking out the edge of it was an undulating tide of ribbon, which made me look again. A big blue box lay inside, elaborately frescoed with paper roses, the stem edges likely pulled with a scissor’s edge till they rippled. My second salvar, I thought, reaching over to open it; a folded paper fell off as I did. My hands tangled in all the bows, but after that it was easy: She’d wrapped the lid separately from the bottom, and I lifted it off now and peered inside.

At first I didn’t know what I was looking at, the gibbous nest of black-and-yellow tubes in magenta tissue, dozens of them, the bright labels. And then it hit me and tears sprang to my eyes. I pried a lid off one of the tubes. Shook out the contents. The perfect weight, the curling edge like a mischievous smile, of a roll of film in my hand.

But that wasn’t all. As my hand dug through the 200s and 400s and colors and black-and-whites, it hit upon something hard and flat on the box bottom. I pulled that something out.

In my hands was a heavy black book, the word
Memories
printed simply in gold lettering on the cover. An album to use once I’d gone through all the film, I guessed, carefully turning the leather cover.

But, no, it was already full, this book. Plastered on its pages were not only photographs, tons of them, but scraps of paper, too, some
times decked with green and red type and stars, sometimes slanting in a very familiar cursive.

Pressed down next to a photo of a sandbox cut off at the corners:
Dear Dadaji, This is where Kevin Dunst told me I was the color of dog doo and Gwyn stuffed his mouth full with dirt.
Below a picture of a street under construction, the street where Bobby and I had shared our first kiss, a caption:
Some shots of the neighborhood.

I turned the pages, astounded. The pages of the book of all the letters and photos I’d sent to Dadaji over the years. He’d saved it all. And she’d put it together. She must have collected the pieces in India and then assembled it all here, judging from the American label on the album, sitting and cutting and pasting even in the middle of all her busyness. I didn’t know how I would ever thank her.

And then I realized: I’d always thought we had nothing in common, Kavita and me. But we had an enormous, immeasurably precious thing in common: Dadaji. It was strange thinking of her as his granddaughter. I thought of Dadaji as all mine, I suppose because I was here and they were there and our letters created a private universe of two between us. But it was true—Kavita and Sangita did live with him, they did know him on a daily basis. A different kind of knowing, but maybe they shared moments as sacred as our letters, as telling as these pictures.

I picked up the page I’d pulled off with the ribbons and flowers; it had been torn from a notebook, the edge still fringed. On it, in a small bubbly script:

I didn’t want to give this to you in front of Aunty. It might make her too sad. But many happy returns, cowgirl. He loved you very much. As do I. Yours fondly, Kavita.

I slipped the book under my pillow and crawled back into bed and got all the way under the sheets and cried longer and harder
than I ever had for losing Dadaji. And for always having had Kavita, and never realizing it.

On the back of the envelope, in the same champagne script, a P.S. F.Y.I.

American Born Confused Desi Emigrated From Gujarat House In Jersey Keeping Lotsa Motels Named Omkarnath Patel Quickly Reaching Success Through Underhanded Vicious Ways Xenophobic Yet Zestful

or

American Born Confused Desi Emigrated From Gujarat House In Jersey Kids Learning Medicine Now Owning Property Quite Reasonable Salary Two Uncles Visiting White Xenophobia Yet Zestful

Now you know your ABCDs.

So I was an ABCD. Why hadn’t anyone told me? Why didn’t they put this in those spots where they say race doesn’t matter but please check one of the following? Growing up, I was always exing Asian/Pacific Islander, even though I didn’t understand why they were treated as the same thing. It would have been so much easier to check an ABCD slot.

American Born Confused Desi. So was I not alone in my confusion? Admittedly, my own C was a capital one at this point. Kavita had surprised me, made me think about my parents, my home,
everything all over again—even myself. And of course, she’d made me do a double take on her as well.

Were hers taunting eyes, or just not afraid of looking? Was that a giggle that ridiculed or rather the ballad of uninhibited pleasure? Like me, Kavita ended all her sentences in a question mark, but unlike me, it still sounded as if she knew all the answers and was just acting like she was asking so you wouldn’t feel too clueless. Which I definitely did. I got so much wrong these days, it seemed. I wondered if I’d ever be an ABD, like her secret boyfriend.

But for now I was an ABCD. I didn’t really know what that meant. But I suppose that was the point.

The next day the sun suffused my room as usual, the automatic sprinkler system rainbowed the air, and the moment I emerged to put the water on my mother chided me for sleeping so late. As if it was life as usual, a typical morning. But not for a House In Jersey girl in my condition.

I awoke with the conviction that my new status as ABCD showed, the same way they say your walk goes funny after you lose it. And frankly, I was overwhelmed. Kavita’s gift had turned me to jelly and this fact combined with my parents’ suddenly going cupid on me had reduced me to a quivering state of capital C. Was I really so hopeless a case that they were going to have to arrange my love life for me?

But there was one thing I knew even in the midst of all this confusion. No matter what else had changed, one thing had not: Gwyn was the one who would understand, the only one with a comeback in crisis.

So as soon as I got a moment solo I rang up on her cell. But it was only after a couple hours of going directly into voice mail that I finally heard her breathy hello sift through the telephone holes.

—Gwyn! I cried.—Are you all right? Where have you been?

—Oh, I’m sorry, honey, she said giddily.—Manicure. Reverse French, and confetti tips—I just had to run by to show Dyl before my shift! He loves when I go glam—he told me I put the Joy into Joysey. Isn’t that sweet?

I couldn’t tell if it was sweet, but I could tell she was smiling just thinking about it.

—Gwyn—frock! Why didn’t you call me?

—I just explained, I was—

—No, I mean, you know, on my birthday. I really wanted to talk to you.

—Oh, I’m sorry, Dimps. I must have spaced. Anyways, I knew you were doing the family thing, so I hardly thought you’d mind. I guess Dyl and I just got wrapped up in. Things.

—Things?

I shouldn’t have asked. I (and probably the rest of the entire staff of the Springfield Starbucks where Gwyn syruped and steamed part-time) then received a little more information than I needed, about how she and Dylan had bumped around like amorous amusement park cars in her basement that night.

—Thanks for sharing, I mumbled.

—Well, if you’re going to be that way about it, I suppose I shouldn’t have, she said a little testily. I realized then how much I was misdirecting my bad mood, and promptly burst into tears.

—I’m sorry, Rabbit, I sobbed.—It’s not that.

Gwyn’s voice came undone with concern.

—Hey-hey, honey, are you okay?

—I don’t know, Gwyn, I’m just feeling so
emotional.

—Are you PMSing?

Pre, Post, and Pretty Much always.

—My father, I whispered, even though my mom was out, making a trip to the Jain grocer’s and then Shop Rite.—He organized a meeting for me.

—Like for a job?

—More like to make sure I never get a job in my life! A meeting with a
man,
if you know what I mean.

This got her attention.

—Your father’s pimping you out?

—No, no—a meeting with someone who could maybe be a good husband for me!

—You mean a meeting with, like, a suitable boy?

Finally, she was getting it.

—Yes!

—Wow! Gwyn squealed.—Is he cute?

—What? I said, stunned.—Is he cute? Gwyn, I have no intention of meeting him!

—Excuse me? she cried.—Are you out of your mind? You’re a free woman—what the hello’s holding you back?