Born Confused (39 page)

—Like someone from above Fourteenth Street going to see someone from below Fourteenth Street, said Karsh, which made Radha laugh, but I didn’t really get it.

—Or better—from East Eighty-sixth to West Eighty-sixth, she said, and they laughed even harder.

—So then what happened? I asked impatiently.

—When your bapu broke it to her that he was already committed to another, Sita maintained her dignity and in an act of utter poetic perfection asked if she could at least have the shoes on his feet to take home with her.

—She wanted his shoes? I asked. How about train fare, pronto?

—Of course.

—Well, maybe if they were Nike high-tops, yeah, but chappals?

Karsh was grinning. I suddenly remembered he’d been in Nikes and felt shy.

—Oh, bacchoodi, it’s because you don’t understand what this
means in Indian culture, said my father gently.—The shoes and feet are…well, you know that in India children touch the feet of their elders to show
respect.

—You were that much older than her?

—No, no, I’m not saying that. It’s just that you have to understand what a moving request it was.

—Sounds more like a stalker request to me.

—This girl was not dangerous. She was simply deeply in love, he said with complete seriousness. But before I could tease him he went on.—Not even necessarily because it was me. It was just the way it was in those times. She grew up in our little village and never left and it was too small a space for all of those emotions. And when you grow up reading the great Indian epics—the
Ramayana,
the
Mahabharata—
you cannot help but read a little of them into your life. In fact, they
pervade
your life, perhaps as the Bible does here.

—Oh, yes, Ram’s padukas, Karsh nodded. So even he got it? I must have appeared baffled, because he continued as if clued in to invisible cue cards:

—When Ram, heir to the kingdom of Dasaratha, was unjustly banished to the forest by his stepmother—in order to clear the title for her own son, Bharata—this son kept Ram’s padukas, his wooden clogs, on the throne as a sign of his love and respect and devotion for his elder brother, who he himself felt was the rightful heir. Bharata sat beside the throne, beside these shoes, looking after the kingdom and guarding Ram’s place until his return—fourteen years later.

This was an incredible story; Karsh looked truly moved when he told it, as did Radha and my parents. It was like some kind of cult that everyone was in on but me. But there was one thing I still had to know. I turned back to my father.

—So did you give them to her?

—Of course not, he said.—It was touching, it was poetic, yes. It was resonant of a great epic. But let’s not get carried away.

After they left it was nice to see the small mess in the kitchen, the teacups ringed with tea stains, a sugar spill on the tabletop. Crowded with life, all that laughter still ringing off the walls clear as the ring of cup to saucer.

That night, I just couldn’t get to sleep. This glimpse of my parents in love had been as much of a shock and stimulant to my system as all that chai. Four teaspoons of sugar per cup—overload in the beginning, but I have to admit by cup five it was starting to taste pretty good. And as much as the tale of my parents’ courtship startled me, it was also a delicious one, perfumed my mouth like a bit of clove caught between the teeth.

My parents in love. Did they get butterflies when they looked at each other then? Did they now? It was funny imagining my mother shy and sari-swathed, iridescent threads illuminating briefly the dust motes stirred by passing rickshaws and Fiats, Ambassador taxis. There, on a Bombay bus bench, easing laddoos into my father’s mouth with a little smile playing on her own, all thoughts of good versus bad cholesterol gone with the wind, or not even there yet. For the first time in a while I had an overwhelming desire to see this land that sent such an ache deep through me, a river pushing up through stone, if only for a glimpse of that bench. Lying here in my Springfield bedroom I could smell the dung fires as you stepped off the plane, the way you thought you’d choke on them but didn’t, pungent as if they were burning in our backyard; I could see all those children, children carrying children as if the house were indeed as full as my parents had meant it to be. I recalled that my mother had told me the first time I ever went there I gave away everything I had till I was standing by the fishmonger’s
in just your chudees!,
naked as they’d been.

It was strange reconsidering things and conceiving of my parents as normal teenagers. Translate the laddoos into fries, the bhangra to pop, the street bench to the school bus, and the caste problem to the country/culture one and, it occurred to me, we were talking pretty much the same issues, whether it was over there or here, back then or this night.

Now summer was pressing its face to my window screen, coming through the sieve of it in concentrate, seeping into me. Fresh-cut grass, chlorine clean in a pool of night swimmers, whose occasional laughter and splashter trickled this way. It was the laughter of skinnydippers, I was quite sure. The wistful remains of a barbecue, that mouthwatering scent of wood and grease and hot stone. Silence began to distinguish itself into the cacophony of cricket, the nightbird’s wing wisp? And if you listened closely and separated out the bees and the birds, still more sounds played, below them, in the blade brush of the wind. Keening your ears still more: a bass line buzz of water suctioning up through root, of burrowed soil, the stars rotating like diamonds on a girl’s craning neck.

Maybe that was what DJing was like. Layering sound upon sound and creating a complete summer night, where if you listened close enough or danced lost enough you could even hear the bugs and stars in the mix.

Some photographs are like that. In some photographs you can almost hear the held-back phrase as the smile catches it for the camera, or feel the sun on that shoulder and all the laughter in this room. Sometimes someone’s happiness is so enormous it pushes right out of the four-by-six glossy to touch you. Or their loneliness. Or destiny. An entire life coming at you through one perfectly caught detail. A photograph of the uncle I never knew, Sharad, my mother’s brother, is like that. In it he is crossfired in
black-and-white sunshine on a cricket field, puffing up his chest in all his youthful pride for the lens. But his eyes are somewhere beyond the camera and afraid, a shadow over their light. He died only days later.

I was in the hallway now, trying to listen down to the room tone. In the kitchen, the start-stop drone of the refrigerator and a delicate tap drip like rain falling off a petal edge, a tear off the tip of a nose. Away, up the stairs, behind a door, my father’s splitzy snore—and my mother’s wistful sigh, the bedspring creak of her toss and turn.

It was all nearly beat-matched. So much music everywhere, I nearly felt an urge to dance.

I moved quietly through the house, catching the screen door before the clack, and out to the steps. On the second from the top I sat, the stair above not quite touching the small of my back, and hugged my knees to my chest. Summer storm air pinned and needled along my arms and neck, bare in the tank top. The sky was loaded with too many stars to wish on. It was hard to think some of them were dead, not even there anymore. I hoped these weren’t the ones I’d wished on before. That would explain things. Or perhaps it still counted, just took longer for the wish to travel down and be realized.

I liked to think Dadaji was an inside-out star; you couldn’t see him but he was there, and you could wish on him. When I used to pray I would picture Dadaji on a fat cumulus throne, his ear hair grown out like twisted antennae wired to the sky, in my father’s plaid shirt and a lungi, blowing his tea cool in a saucer. Maybe the sun was just not hitting him at the right angle.

Dadaji would always tell me we weren’t so far apart; he drew holes that led directly through the grass and dirt and bedrock and magma, connecting him to me. He sketched us watching the same moon from different sides of the planet. We made moon dates with
each other. Our choices were somewhat limited by the ten-hour time difference, but occasionally he was up early and I late and it felt good going through the sky hole together like this.

He could still be looking at the same moon, just from another side of that aperture. Perhaps it was all connected, constellated, I thought, gazing down the stone-pebbled path poured with painstaking care by my father to the drive and then the street stretching away into darkness as if off the edge of the world when the world was flat. I ached suddenly for company, for my laddoo partner on my porch bench. But I felt hopeful somehow. Maybe things didn’t have to fit together perfectly to be connected. Maybe this path linked my driveway to street and then highway through perhaps lake and sea, all the way to that exit and route and road and then driveway to the house where my soul mate was right now at this very moment thinking the same thought, high on too-sweet tea. Maybe we were on a moon date without even knowing it. It was the most confident thought I’d had in a while. (When taken in certain proportions, night and caffeine could do that to me.)

I felt reassured. I mean, he had to be out there somewhere, right? The sheer number of streets and exits proved the probability of this theorem being true, didn’t it? And every day new roads were being built. Every day, extra lanes were squiggling their white-dotted yellow-striped way onto them. Was he in France? Zanzibar? Antarctica? Retracing my steps, I tried to picture him traversing that long valleyed path, following the street to the drive to the stone path to the bottom step to walk right up before me now.

My eyes fell on something, a shape like a curled-up cat on the bottom step of the porch. I leaned down. It was a pair of sneakers.

My heart plunged into itself and out. For a moment I had the completely illogical thought that he was standing right there before me, gone inside-out-starred from the shoes up. Then I remembered
his penchant for being barefoot. He must have forgotten them when they left.

They were still pointed leading into the house and I felt calm. I leaned in closer. The red was fading; they must have been a fiery number when he first bought them.

I picked one of the shoes up. He could definitely use a new pair of laces; one end was chewed ragged as if a zealous pup had gone to town on it. And then the other. He had biggish feet, I realized now that I was holding them in my hands. They hadn’t seemed so big on our family room floor though I had noticed he had a lot of space between his toes. Not like my feet; my renegade big toes hung out on their own, then the others cliqued together, the little ones shoving their heads all the way behind the second-to-lasts, as if too shy to be seen. Sometimes when I looked at them I felt something like compassion for myself.

Karsh had brave feet. Toes that could strike out on their own without caving in together for confidence. His laces were all still tied and the back top lip of the shoe was dented down. So he clearly pulled them on and off without opening them. A lazy streak!

I stuck my feet in them now and felt a little Richter of naughtiness.

They smelled slightly of cedar closet and mown grass, cinders and overripe things. They were warm inside, and I had plenty of wiggling room. A little sand or something grainy dusted the bottom.

His heels were evenly scuffed (mine usually wore down on the inside). And a pale pink pebble wedged firmly in the sole of his left sneak.

Mud was caked onto one side of it but not the other.

I wondered what he’d been doing, walking with one foot in the rain and one out. And where had he picked up that pebble? It was so clean, so perfectly round.

It felt funny being in his shoes. Cozy and creepy and intrepid and protected all at once. It blew away being in somebody’s football jacket, not that I ever had been, but it seemed a lot less territorial. And funnily it also felt a little like an honor, too, as if I were touching the Lladros in the mall’s locked glass cases or a beautiful drowsing endangered species.

And then I understood how mundane things could be sacred. People were embodied in everything they wore or touched; traces were everywhere, clues to entire lives. And shoes—well, they held the person up, and even empty insinuated the whole. That was why Rama’s brother kept his padukas on the throne beside him. That was why my father’s own Sita asked only for his worn chappals; it didn’t seem so strange now she’d wanted to keep a trace of him with her if she couldn’t have the rest. It was the next best thing.

I pushed the tongues up to make them easier to get into. The Nikes looked funny like that, as if they were chatting or lapping up breath, perking their ears like dogs out windows of moving cars, picking up signals. I brought them up so they were on the porch proper—you never knew with summer showers. Set them down still leading into the house. Feeling strangely comforted, I went back inside. And with comfort came a wave of fatigue.

And with the wave of fatigue came an unhindered thought at the border of sleep, just as I rolled into fetal position, my heels coming up into my palms, head nesting down.

I was falling in love with Karsh.

My mother says if you think really hard about something before you fall asleep your mind works on it in slumberland and you may even find the problem solved by morning. Well, if that thought about Karsh I’d had was a problem—and it was—I don’t know what had gone on during the REM portion of the evening: If I’d been falling for him before, when I woke I’d fallen. Splat, to the pavement. A feeling that had been a safe one to doze to became a scary one awake, my Dimple demolition team calling to alert and calling me crazy. I had a new organ in my body, or had become aware of an old, unused one; a new heavenly body in my solar system. But what to do with it? It could never work. He could never feel the same about me. And then there was Gwyn.

I longed to sustain the sleepy feeling, to womb away in a dark timeless space unhindered by other people’s realities. To be safe the way in dream you can be safe in strangeness.