Born Confused (22 page)

The night before the party I was unable to sleep. I don’t know why. It wasn’t like it was going to be a visit to thrillsville, this hangout sesh with the aunties and uncles and the rest of the Indian Marriage Mafia on a night that potentially could have been spent at home dividing pi. But still—it was New York City, and a real club, and a roomful of strangers. I stared at the beam over my head, a butterfly unwrapping from my belly and fluttering frenetically up into my throat.

Outside my window a lightning storm had started up. Tonight the rain was far; a fair gap ensued between flash and boom. It reminded me of the woman I watched from the top of a Rajasthani fortress beating her clothes clean in the lip of a river below, how the ponderous wet slap traveled to me slowly through the moondust pink air, arriving well after the act.

I counted the space between lightning and thunder in Mississippis, but still found the crash catching me off guard. So I got up to get a glass of milk (meaning: a plate of cookies).

As I was crossing back to my room a particularly brilliant flash of lightning went off and the keys of the piano went phosphorescent. I sat and skimmed my fingers over them; it had been so long I didn’t know where to begin. I pretended I was playing the thunder, flourishing my hands like I’d seen Mrs. Lamour do all those years ago. The keys felt cool and dewy, inviting to the touch.

I stood and opened the bench; if this thunder hadn’t woken anyone up yet I doubted a few moments of pedalless playing would. I could just make out the familiar stack of sheet music, untouched for
so long. I pulled off the top set. Another flash of lightning and I saw the title.

I sat there, dumbly leafing through the pages. The words were bold and big as a Broadway marquee on the cover sheet. I didn’t get it. Was he blind? Had he taken the muddled name of the song my father had requested literally? But no: He’d said the bench was empty, with a capital M. Did he really like only Indian music—so much so that he didn’t even want to hear this piece?

But I had a feeling it wasn’t any of that.

Would he be there tomorrow night?

I felt tense, the feathery pages of “Für Elise” strangely weighty in my hands. I wished it would rain, just make up its mind.

The moment the doors of the subway hissed open, spilling a drunken sea of love-hungry people onto the steaming platform, you could hear the music. The swung thump of the bass, like the heart of an enormous, waiting beast—the heart of the very city—and scattered over it, the shimmering artery of a melody line, a voice far and felt as memory.

It was all wide angle at first. And then it was only Gwyn. I turned to her and she was so beautiful, just standing there on the sea-bream smeared-dream tiles of the platform, perfectly poised in her impossibly slopey heels, as elegant as if it were the end of a catwalk. Twilight wound round her waist in the hues of the dupatta, sewn over so many days by twenty stitching fingers and straining eyes somewhere in Jaipur. She flung a twist of it back now, sari-like, over the pomegranate “tiny top,” sending the mirrors winking. She was radiant.

Earlier, loading my camera, I had watched her before my dresser mirror as her lips deepened to garnet. Zoomed to the eyes as she used wet violet liner to pull off a perfect imitation of Kavita’s Cleopatra look and then, with surgical steadiness, toothpick, and cosmetic glue, applied tiny drugstore gems to the tips of the lashes. Snapped just the strands as she drew the scintillating choker in place, worked the hair-clip earrings from lobes to coruscating cornrows, adjusted the rakhis into armlets. She had looked like a doll too precious to make and too priceless to sell. And she had looked so beautiful I knew I had to stop feeling like less because she was more
and just enjoy her for the wonder that she was. I stood behind her then, to get a fully Gwyn-faced frame, trying to get as close as possible without putting too much of myself in the mirror. And as she pressed the glitzy teardrop between her brows, Chica Tikka flashed, the last shot.

It had also been my last roll of black and white, I’d realized when I’d unloaded it to wind in some fast-speed color film.

We squeezed then slid through one slot, turnstiled together, hipbone humming against hip and metal cool through the cloth. But the moment we’d traversed the stone’s throw from subway to club, my dreams of a quick entry into the open arms of the motherland vanished. The line of glitter-garbed dark-haired denizens of the night literally wrapped all the way around the block to the HotPot entrance. I wouldn’t have even known where the entrance was if it weren’t for the fact that the bouncer was about seven feet tall with a foot more of hair piled up under a rainbow knit hat. No one was moving an inch in this mile. I prepared to settle in for a long evening of watching my cuticles grow.

—Frock, look at all these people, I said.—By the time we get in, the whole thing’ll be history.

Gwyn gave me an exasperated look.

—Do you remember who you’re dealing with here? she said.—Carp and dee ‘em. You know nothing ever falls into your hands unless you reach for it.

—Carpe diem, I corrected.

—Capiche, she said.

So Gwyn put her seize-the-day tactics to work and marched right up alongside the line, me a bit behind to allow her full vamping radius. I could see now—out of the corner of my eye, as I didn’t like to look dead on at people when I was ripping them off (the opposite of Gwyn’s approach)—that this line was ninety-nine percent
Indian. The faces were all in a golden row against brick like a cheerful decked-out subcontinental criminal lineup—though the crime would be what? Eating with the left hand, smelling the flowers before offering them to the gods, touching someone else’s food while on the rag? But upon a closer sidelong glance I realized this was a breed of Indian I had never seen before in my life: Though Gwyn would have to win the mix-and-match East-and-West award for the evening, these other girls weren’t too far off, and were studded and salvar’d and pleathered and nose-ringed to the max themselves. Even the more conservatively dressed ones had snazzy platforms poking out from under their sari hems, or chappals and twisted silver toe rings on their feet, tattoos and body jewels littered across the soft stretches of exposed flesh. There was long hair, cropped hair, braided hair, highlighted hair, dreadlocked hair—even no hair. In fact, I felt quite outdated next to them all in my highly old-school outfit. (Despite my groans of protest, Gwyn had insisted I don the birthday khamees—minus the dupatta, which she’d snagged—and a pair of her too-high, too-narrow, size-too-big ruby pumps, claiming that everyone would be dressed likewise.)

The boys were a little less extravagant and fell mostly into one of two style categories: banker preppie in suits and polished shoes, or something sort of hip-hop but Indian—baggily low-hanging jeans and turned-around baseball caps and retro-looking T-shirts with numbers on them or names of teams I’d never heard of. In a flash I remembered the hip-hop boy I’d seen in Queens that day, the one I’d taken to be Dominican. I wondered if he’d been Indian all along.

These were definitely not the aunties.

Where had they been hiding all this time? These Indians who looked somewhat present in the twenty-first century? Why hadn’t I seen them at Garbha and Diwali parties and the occasional wedding? Or had I—and they’d been as disguised in those contexts as I’d
been? Or was their disguise one and the same, I was beginning to wonder, looking at a saried girl with blue-tipped porcupinal hair and a scintillating lip-ringed face; after all, a sari at a pooja looked traditional, but donned with a gelled-up hispid ‘do at the leading melting pot music club of New York City (as this was, according to Kavita) it became something altogether different.

I could feel indignant hisses and livid eyes denting our profiles as we marched along, shamelessly cutting the queue.

—Think you’re something special? cried out one enraged voice, I think belonging to the blue-tipped punk girl.

—Thank you! Gwyn cried cheerily, waving at her fans. Then she winked at a smiling boy with a tie insouciantly flipped back over his shoulder and a seashell cap, enraged the dark dryadic girl just behind him in line, charmed the bouncer, and walked into the first foyer.

But when I got to the entry it was a different story.

—Just where do you think you’re going? the bouncer demanded.

—But I’m with her!

He didn’t budge but turned to Gwyn, who was just inside the doorway, for confirmation.

—She’s with us, Abraham, Gwyn kindly translated.

—All right. But I’ll need to see some ID.

—You brought
it
right? said Gwyn, shooting me a meaningful look.

Wait a minute! Here I was three months closer to being legal than Gwyn, and probably even than some of these other folk, and I was the only one getting carded? Hello! My whole body screamed puberty and well beyond. Was there no justice in this world? I was five feet tall not five years old. Indignant, I handed him my card. He perused it, expression unchanging.

—It’s nice to know you’re literate, but this won’t do.

In my quietly fuming haste I’d given him my Springfield public library card. I quickly grabbed it back and handed him the quack ID, courtesy of Dylan. Abe looked suspiciously down at it. Then suspiciously down at me. I tried to coax my posture up, vertebra by vertebra, but he was a tall man and there was no meeting eye to eye on this one; I wished I’d been taking my calcium. Oh flying frock, was it that obvious it was a dupe?

—But you don’t even have a dimple, he said, finally. Then he gave me a smile, handing back the piece of plastic and bending down to look me in the iris.

—All right, in you go. And happy belated birthday.

He, however, as I now had the opportunity to see, had a dimple, deep in his left cheek. His whole face changed when he smiled, light clefting into it. And when he bent down, I saw the gold chain with
Abraham
in slanty caps glinting on his chest. So that’s how she’d known.

Inside the first set of doors was a small foyer where people were paying and getting stamped on the wrist.

—Are you Dimple Lala? the girl in the ticket booth asked, checking out a Post-it on her desk.

Gwyn looked at me, stunned. I nodded, even more flabbergasted—was I known here?

—Yeah, you’re listed plus one. Kavita Pradhan put you down as guests and said to tell you she’ll be by in a couple hours to pick you up; she’s caught up with work. But Sabz is here in any case.

As we were turning to go in, I thanked the girl.

—How did you know it was me, in this whole crowd of people?
I asked her, happily amazed considering every female I’d seen here so far was pretty much the same coloring as me in terms of hair, skin, and eyes, and even around the same height.

—Her, said the girl, jerking her head in Gwyn’s direction.—She said I wouldn’t be able to miss her.

I tried not to let that get me down. After all, it made sense, right? Gwyn was the only blonde I’d seen on the sidewalk moat.

The second set of doors throbbed with music. I could feel it when I set my palm against the metal to push, even before they swung open and in we went.

We filtered into the room, which was fairly full, though not too many people were getting down on the parquet dance floor—just a couple slow dancing, and a guy who looked like he was definitely tripping, cutting out shapes in the air with soothsaying hands. A lazy R&B beat was playing, which probably accounted for the slow dancing, though I’m not sure what accounted for the shape cutting. From the looks of it, it seemed the party was either over or hadn’t yet begun.

—Okay, location-scouting time, said Gwyn. We began to wind our way through the space, taking in the scene.

There wasn’t much of one, though I had to admit the venue was far cooler than our gym could ever be, even if they lowered the ropes and let you swing and shoot baskets during dances.

From what I could see, the room was roughly shaped like a hand, splaying out from the palm that was the dance floor. I saw now that the couple there was actually two girls who appeared to be gazing down their own shirts as they danced with each other. The cookie cutter guy was sashaying around like the Pink Panther on glue, occasionally flinging his arms upward, as if invoking the rain god.

I followed his gaze to the high ceiling. It was covered in glow-in-
the-dark stars arranged in various constellations. Hanging from the center of all this was what at a first glance appeared to be a sort of disco globe, and it swung low over the dance floor. Looking closer, though, it seemed to be a papier-mâché sculpture of a dozen or so leering black demon heads. These visages flashed with iridescent glitter, stricken in the lazy wave of the crisscrossing strobes.

The lights briefly washed over a couple of loungey areas, one beside us—past the foyer fish tank full of no fish and yes, perplexingly, drowned Barbie heads—and another kittycorner, at the shadow-dunked end where, from the incandescent signs, it seemed the back exit and bathrooms were. The area right by us consisted of low bamboo tables decked out with fat waxy candles and too many glasses. A few people, Indian again, lounged around eating crunchy things from wooden bowls and drinking drinks with little umbrellas in them like in the Chinese restaurant near Chimichanga’s. They were going all slouchy from the low level of the furniture.

Flanking the dance floor on the left was a small stage with a couple of microphone stands and amps and techie-looking stuff hanging out on it; the floor snaked with wires. The exposed brick wall behind the stage winked indolently with what looked like garbled satellite messages—an image of Gandhi, and then an emaciated child, and then a roly-poly one. An elephant rooting out a plant and slapping the dust off against its ankles. A woman in flowing robes with a sweltering line of people in front of her, hugging them one by one. All the images were filtered in blues and reds. It was like CNN on acid.

And finally, directly across from the video wall, the bar, which was where we were heading, wading through the snowdrop patterns now sweeping the floor. The shelves behind the counter gleamed toothily. Amber and sapphire bottles stacked like smashed jewels to well above head level; ice clinked and glasses cut the light and sent
it shooting, turning limpid the wooden ladder leading up, up to a high-walled runaround balcony area, which must have been storage space.