Born Confused (17 page)

This time my mother unpursed a millisecond.

My father was already filling the glasses—milk glasses, but that was cool; it meant they’d hold more. He even put a toast-adequate serving in Karsh’s and in mine. And when he raised his glass—

To the beginning of a beautiful old friendship!

—even my mother took a sip.

Then an interesting thing happened. A full-on trip down memory lane ensued, filled with remember-the-times and whatever-happened-to-so-and-sos. The emptier the glasses got, the further they went, the more visibly relaxed my mother became—and the less I knew what the frock they were talking about. This was also due to the fact that more and more Hindi and Marathi and Gujarati words began to nest in the conversation, like lost birds migrating home, until there was hardly any English left.

It felt strange listening to them, like they’d all shared another time, another planet, and you really had to have been there to get it. They were nearly giddy, in fact, all three of them. When they laughed it was together now. It was gut-clutch laughter. It almost reminded me of Gwyn and me.

Their voices became a constant comforting drone in my ears, like a fridge in a room when you’re just getting hungry or the whirring summer night itself, now beginning to unleash its insect orchestra. But Karsh was watching them intently, drinking up every word. And I was watching Karsh. He was so interested in them and everything they were saying he almost didn’t look average anymore. There was a flame in his face.

He must have felt my eyes on him because he looked up at me and smiled, rolling his own eyes in the reminiscers’ direction. But I knew he wasn’t really making fun of them. And I rolled my eyes back, but I wasn’t really making fun of him. And he didn’t look away.
I wasn’t used to being stared at, except by myself, critically, in the mirror. He wasn’t looking at me critically, though. I don’t know how he was looking at me, but it didn’t make me feel bad. It made me feel funny, but it didn’t make me feel bad.

The grandfather clock chimed nine. For a day I wished had never begun, it suddenly seemed it had all gone by too fast.

—Blistering brimstone, look at the time! Radha cried, stretching her arms, then following them up. She got halfway there before slumping back onto the couch. On a re-try she made it to vertical (well, seventy-five degrees).—All that wine. All those memories. And all that
wine.
Bloody hell, I definitely need a smoke now.

Smoke? I couldn’t believe it. It was just one thing after another with these people. Smoking was a sin more dire than premarital—or even marital—sex in our home.

—Oh, I’m sorry, Radha, this is a nonsmoking house, said my mother.

—No don’t worry, Shilpz, I remember your bidi policies, Radha said, her words sluicing off the edge of her smile.—Though unless I am going senile there
was
a time you were a bit more lenient now and again…

She chortled, sluggishly big-winking my mother, a strange thing to see at this speed; she already had a cigarette in her wavering hand, unlit. My mother looked startled.

—In any case, we’ve got to hit the road,
Jack.
But thank you once more—this has been bloody
fantastic.
Seeing you two again, and meeting you at last, Dimple—that was the
pista
on my
kulfi,
the
keshar
in my
lassi,
the—

—Come on, Ma, said Karsh, laughing and putting an arm around her to steady her.—What’s say we get your
head
on the
pillow.

In the foyer, as they were saying their aawjos, Karsh’s eyes fell upon the gruesomely exhibited display-rack photos. For an unblinking moment it seemed he was contemplating the sheer horror of it all, and my spirits lifted. So maybe there was
one
thing we could have in common—and actually, this was a pretty important one. Perhaps
the
most important, as far as I was concerned.

—Now
that,
he said finally, lifting his palms and gesturing at the shelf.
—That’s
what I call a picture, Dimple.

—How
sweeeet,
yaar, Radha slurred, taking a stumbling peek over his shoulder.—Puppies and babies and husbands with wives. Aaray, Baba—if only the world were like
this.

She looked alarmingly close to tears, and Karsh gripped her more strongly.

The golden retriever nearly woofed. The bride and groom came close to consummation. And I was about to spew my vital organs. Could it get any worse?

No. This time, it really couldn’t.

Of course my parents, triumphantly nudging each other, looked inordinately pleased at these shiny happy people we didn’t know and dog we didn’t own brightening up our home, casting an auspicious glow on the events of today’s tea.

—Yes! my father cried.—Karsh, you are making my day. I told Dimple myself, the same very thing—now
that’s
what I call a picture. Enough with the black-and-white kachra—the world isn’t black and white.

—I’d have to agree there, said Karsh. He was now so far into the negative pointage I couldn’t keep up. Or down.

—Yeah, who needs Ansel Adams, right? I said caustically.

—That’s right! Karsh concurred, quite forcefully.—Who needs Ansel Adams?

For some reason, this really depressed me.

—Yes, you see? my mother piped in.—See how pleasing this is to the eye? Pictures with colors in them. Pictures with
people
in them.
Glossy
pictures. Not like that matte splat tomfoolery with the heads chopped off—and they wonder why there is so much violence in this society!

This was an unmistakable reference to that shot of Gwyn and the philosophy book. (“Even when you have the beautiful Gwyndolyne in your photograph you focus on the book—I just don’t get it.”)

Now I was on the verge of tears.

When they were on the porch, sneaked and muled up, Karsh did his yogic thing again, clasping his hands together.

—Aunty and Uncle, the pleasure was all mine, he said.—And that goes for you, too, Ms. Lala.

—Did you
really
and
truly
like those photographs? I said, nearly pleadingly. I needed to know the entire world was not insane.

He looked me in the eyes, then gave me the sure staccato nod that sent my heart plummeting.

—Loved
them, he said.

My parents waved them off. I watched through the screen as a little way down the path—to the rhythm of my mother’s tongueclucking
And a doctor, too! She should know better by now—
they stopped and Karsh pulled out a matchbook with one hand, the other still in his pocket, and in a two-fingered flick of the stick into flame lit Radha’s cigarette for her. I couldn’t believe it. This was taking mother/son bonding too far. Granted, that two-finger flick could have been pretty cool if, say, Julian did it. Julian was an artist. He
knew the difference between a film and a movie. He appreciated Ansel Adams. And therefore he had had the potential to appreciate, if not the whole, at least a smidgenny modicum of me.

In theory.

They were in the car. And then—in a puff of smoke and sputter—they were gone.

It was only after they’d left and the three of us went into the kitchen that we saw all the cups on the counter, raring to go.

—Oh no, my mother said.

We’d never drunk the tea.

And then my parents did something they never did at moments like this: They burst out laughing. My mother even laughed so hard she started crying. So much so that I went over and hugged her, and then my father came and took us both in his arms, so that we were like a football huddle before the big game. And she just kept crying like this, her laughter hiccupping out through her tears, a smell of salt and sadness and faraway places mixing with the perfume of the marigold, fully open, unafraid, blazing a small fire on our kitchen counter.

I was itching to declare the all-cons no-pros mental list I’d now compiled to anyone who cared to listen to make clear beyond unreasonable doubt that there was no way in hello I’d ever date Karsh. But after the utterly unsuitable boy and the whimsical woman who birthed him left, my father was in his own impenetrable world; he had returned to the living room with the remainder of the Beaujolais and was blasting Lata after Lata through the house like a rebellious teenager—except the rebellion was, in American terms, more Gilbert and Sullivan than thrash. And in the kitchen a tangible sense of gloom settled over my mother like a thickening layer of dust after a desert windstorm; it was a mood she seemed to guard carefully. At first I figured she was just exhausted from all her frying and trying, and the crying, but she even refused to let me help her clean up.

—No, no, Dimple, it will be more efficient if I do it alone. You don’t even know where half the things go.

—Of course I do, Ma! Why don’t you take a break and hang out with Daddy? You must be spent.

She looked it; her skin was almost pale, wet sand gone dry.

—Just…I need to be alone a minute. Can I please be alone a minute?

A shrill voice seemed to echo my mother’s request, translating it into a squall of sitar-studded veena-thrummed Hindi accompanied by a drumbeat like a cloudburst window. My mother threw her hands over her ears, the way Hear No Evil Uncle, an old friend of
the family from Bangalore, did whenever Hush-Hush Aunty (that one-woman information superhighway) gave my mother the scoop on the neighborhood.

—That music is giving me a migraine. Could you go tell your father to turn it down? And please just stay out of my way. I have a lot to do.

So I stayed out of her way. I went into the living room, wondering what she was so upset about. Shouldn’t she have been on cloud nine? Her dream guests had come over, her cooking had been a hit, and as far as she knew I wasn’t internally hurling at the thought of hooking up with Karsh. She did often stress when we had visitors over, as if they might hold a smudge on the bathroom mirror against us, but this was extreme.

It saddened me, how unreachable she could suddenly become; it was like those times she reverted to Marathi when shouting to be heard through the wire to the family in India. Sometimes she used Hindi or Gujarati with my father, too, though usually only when it was serious business that needed discussing, like when Dadaji fell. At these moments I felt she was leaving me, tongue first—not only leaving me, but that perhaps she had never fully been with me in the first place. And the times we couldn’t seem to connect even in English were the worst by far. They reminded me of how when things got bad with Bobby it had been more lonely in his arms than when I was all by myself.

My father was lying feet up on the tasseled armrest of the sofa, lids down, face loose in a good dream. His expression floated just above the skin. I tiptoed to the stereo to lower the volume. The second I did, he opened his eyes with a start.

—Sorry, Dad, I said.

—Oh, no worries, bacchoodi, he sighed, stretching like a cat
who’s slept in a warm place.—I wasn’t asleep—I was just enjoying the afternoon all over again in my mind. That Karsh is simply fantastic, don’t you think?

—Oh, Daddy, don’t get started, okay, I said.—I agreed to meet him, I met him, and now my duty’s done, right? Wasn’t that the deal?

—Deal? You talk about it like this is some kind of Brando-Pacino arrangement. There is no Indian mafia. Well, at least not in New Jersey.

As far as I could see the Indian Marriage Mafia—that chain of garishly attired aunties and uncles who placed ads in insider papers and gathered at weddings, holding up tiny Instamatics and aiming just past the bride and groom to their single siblings and cohorts—was alive and kicking, spreading the word nationwide and 24/7 through a fastidiously organized network of cab drivers and poojas, newspaper kiosks and Garbhas. Information was encoded everywhere: trapped in the airy center of the puri, the photocopied cover of a bootleg Bollywood video, the proportion of spices in the pot of masala tea—and sent to every end of America and India, resulting in all sorts of so-called destined unions, including the recent mysterious reunion of a mother with a single son and med school friends with a single daughter in a small New Jersey town just after said daughter was caught nacho-handed in her first full-on hang-over.

Coincidence? I thought not. It was definitely a conspiracy.

The music ended and hissed in that secret space between song and needle lift; the arm settled into place and the record spun slowly to a stop, like a tire on a fallen bicycle.

I needed to talk to Gwyn pronto—once she heard all the grisly details she’d hardly be into Project Motherland anymore. But when I left the room, unspiraling the cord straight into the hallway and
called her, the phone just kept ringing and even the machine with her breathy Marilyn message didn’t click on. Incommunicado. Maybe she was on call waiting and not picking up (something I’d gotten used to relatively recently; Dylan apparently didn’t like to be interrupted when he was talking to her—time was money and money was scarce enough, yadda ya).

It was difficult to breathe in the bristling quiet of the house, a silence more acute after having had Radha and Karsh over. So I took a walk around the block to Gwyn’s, but no lights there, the double drive doubly empty.

I didn’t feel like going home just yet, so I crossed through the strip of pine and fern and went out to the bridge and sat down, dangling my legs off the edge. It felt funny being back here; after my crazy afternoon, the world on the other side seemed miles away. The day was closing down now; a sliver of it danced on the water and I could see the raft, board bobbing as if someone had just dived off. But I waited and waited and no one came up for air.

I guess I’d have to wait till tomorrow to talk to her.

When I got home there was just that one light burning in the study. I kicked off my shoes and went inside. In the family room a laundry basket of ghostly white handkerchiefs and undershirts banked silently high as night snow.