Born Confused (9 page)

Once I had caught a rainbow that began in my own backyard; I followed it out to this bridge and saw how it stretched all the way to the other side of the pond, as far as India perhaps, I thought then, disappearing into what was then still forest, before all the construction began. The rainbow reflected so clearly in the water it went nearly full circle, like a Ferris wheel whirling with sheer speed into simple circumferences of vivid color. It was gone by the time I got home, blown away by the sun-dried wind. I’d always wondered where it had ended on the other side.

Now the clouds glowed opaquely with the force of the moon behind them. A raft with a diving board swanned through the water, scepterlike. I stood on the bridge a moment and stared down, imagined diving. What it must feel like to turn your world upside down, let go, give yourself up to something. Fortunately I wasn’t wasted enough to try it, being more a practitioner of the belly flop, the slamming-against-the-world way of navigating it, than anything so graceful as a dive. I’d once known how to take the plunge when I was younger, but the more my brain started breaking down this con
cept of putting your head where your feet were supposed to be and vice versa, the more blocked I became.

I crossed over, mounted the strip of woods where Bobby and I used to meet, and came out on the other side. It felt cooler here. To the right was the Fields, with not a field in sight, a neighborhood named, I suppose, for what it had knocked down to go up. That’s where Bobby lived and lusted. To the left, where once had been forest, were the newer streets, a neighborhood called Lake View. It was a bit of a misnomer, considering Mirror Lake was actually a pond, small and man-made, and unless you had eyes that could permeate bark, Pine View was much more along the lines of what you’d be buying into.

I guess it was somewhat surprising I’d spent a sizeable amount of time in New York City already considering I hardly ever even crossed over to the other side of the pond. I hadn’t been here since a couple of years ago, in the beginning with Bobby, when the streets were all new, not even the house foundations down yet. One night, after hours of furtive first-basing, Bobby took a stick and carved our names in the still soft tar:
Bobby O
+
Dimple Lala.
It was juvenile, maybe, but strangely reassuring to have it there in writing. Like I really was someone. It wasn’t the same seeing my name on pop quizzes and report cards, even in the yearbook below my usually mortified face and overly sprayed hair; in these cases it seemed random, and if I stared too long the words started to sound funny in my head and lose their sense (not that my name makes much sense to begin with—I don’t even have a dimple). But here, paired up with someone else’s, my own appellation looked rock-solid. Like it had been picked for a team. It didn’t even bother me that night the way Bobby did his L’s like small h’s so that in the end it read more like
Bobby O
+
Dimple haha,
or that it never equaled anything.

I’d gone far enough.

I don’t know why, but I was sobbing the whole way home, and my stomach climbed into my throat all over again. I rounded the dead end, being careful not to set foot on the curbside sand. (When I was little I thought it was called a dead end because the sand was actually cremated bodies, and I guess the myth stuck.)

At my house, a single light still burned. The house of eternal Diwali: That was the symbolic bulb, the vigil we left on in the study to deter burglars when we were out, and, I guess, when we were in, too. Amazed at my sudden onslaught of lucidity I managed to dig the key out of the hippo planter on the porch. I opened the door just enough to push through, catching it with my hand before the mini bang. I tiptoed through the kitchen, which at this hour was filled with strange, shifty shadows—I must have been quite buzzed still, because I couldn’t even identify to what objects these belonged. The shadows bumped and swung all along my swaying path; I even thought I felt one glistening a cool knobby shoulder against my burning back.

Stepping over the weak fourth floorboard, I made my ungraceful moonshine way to the downstairs toilet, where I genuflected like a Nativity statue before the already pushed-up seat (thanks, Dad) and made an extra-spicy nacho prayer to the white porcelain god. At least I figured it was that—but what was I even throwing up at this point?

To flush or not to flush? That was the question. Not to flush was to leave a spectacular proof in the pot for all to see and send to the lab for testing. To flush risked my mother’s thinking it was a burglar. But then again, my father’s snoring would be louder in her ear than a momentary hallway rumble. So I pushed the lever.

The mechanism went off like Niagara Falls in my ear. From inside the barrel. I guess it was pretty loud because I didn’t hear the
fourth floorboard creak; I didn’t even hear the slight whine of the door. But I did see the lights flick on again. And when I turned, there in the doorway was my mother. She was staring at me with an expression I had never seen before on her face, and for a moment I felt I was dreaming it looked so unlike her.

It occurred to me that I wasn’t even supposed to be home tonight. So much for lucidity. Frock, now I was really going to get it.

But it was even worse than that.

—Happy birthday, Dimple, she said in a voice as lifeless as a sold house. Then she turned and walked away. I heard her climb the stairs. I heard the door shut.

And I knew what the look on her face had been: disappointment.

It wasn’t until I stepped into the now lit hall that I realized what all those shifting shadows in the kitchen had been. The entire room was decked out in pink and red and orange balloons, translucent and gleaming, and dreamily floating streamers. I could see which parts my mother had done (left wall, lower down and straining to be higher) and which my father had hung up (not much higher). There was even Christmas tinsel on the plants. And on the table, a litter of packages, big and small, wrapped and ribboned in gilded colors. Through the loosening corner of one of the bigger ones I could just see the familiar smiley face logo from the camera store.

I felt something rise in my throat, but it wasn’t something that would come out even if pushed, even if I drank myself to drowning; it was full of tears and shame and life and it was my heart. I looked to the cereal shelf Saraswati, but she was lost in shadow. Krishna, too. Even Ganesha. I looked to the kitchen clock. 12:01
A.M.

I was seventeen.

Well, things were definitely getting worse before they got worse. If I thought I was illing last night—my room did spins like a windmill on a merry-go-round balanced just barely on a top—waking up this morning made all that seem like a day at the beach. Seventeen was off to a scary start indeed: An entire construction team was at work in my head, and a funky rhythm hammered on behind my right eye, turning blinking into an Olympic sport. I took a very long shower, downed a liter of water from the spout, and brushed my teeth repeatedly, but I could still taste the hootch.

I’ll never drink again.

When I finally exited my room, my brain was pounding so hard I was sure everyone could hear it in the pin-drop silence of the house. My heart was still firmly lodged in my throat as I turned the corner and came into the kitchen.

The party was not only clearly over—it had never begun. The balloons were already deflating, floating halfheartedly off the streams of crepe paper, which now sagged wearily in the middle. My mother was standing before the stove, stirring a huge pot. From the milky-sweet newborn scent I knew it was kheer—my favorite Indian dessert, I suppose because it was so American: rice pudding, basically, with saffron and cardamom, a pistachio crown.

—Good morning, Ma, I said. Her shoulders stiffened but she didn’t turn around.

My father was beside her, praying to Saraswati. That was my goddess, the one he focused on to make his prayer for me. (He’d organized all the deities like this; being in the medical profession he
was a practitioner of specialization.) His bare toes curled up and down on the tiles. I usually didn’t talk while he was praying, and now I kidded myself that this was what all the silence was about. But I knew the DL: Zilch rules regarding silence-during-worship existed in our house—India was a hustle-bustle place, my mother always said, you couldn’t just sit around forever waiting for a quiet moment to crop up to meditate. It worked the other way around: You found your peace though prayer.

I sat down at the table, chair squeaking against the floor. Sunlight flooded the room, flashing off the glitzy wrapping paper on all the presents; I felt guilty just looking at them. My father was still standing before the Saraswati. Was I imagining it or was he praying even longer than unusual? It made me nervous.

I didn’t remember my father ever praying when I was little, but out of nowhere the gods seemed to have sprung up all over our house: in the kitchen alone, the ivory Krishna in the temple (formerly the cabinet that held the can opener and blender, its door now removed), a bright orange trunk-smiling Titwala Ganesha sweetly removing obstacles from the stove top, and the jamming sandalwood cereal-shelf Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and music, strumming blithely away on her veena over myriad boxes of Cream of Wheat and cornflakes. My father paused before each of them for a couple of minutes at a time after his morning shower, waltzing through a prayer circuit that led him through the various rooms of the house with intent glowing eyes and clasped hands, like an enlighted ballroom-dancing real estate agent.

My mother, on the other hand, had stopped praying at about the same time my father had begun. It was as if they were taking shifts:
I’ll cover the nineties, then you go.

When I was much younger she’d meditated every day, going so still I’d get frightened. This daily ritual of hers made me intensely
lonely, and I was always relieved when she’d finished. She would clutch a fake ruby rosary in her hands, sitting quietly, eyes closed, in the dining room corner for what seemed like hours. No one actually ever dined in our dining room, though my mother’s sewing machine was located there in what Gwyn, years ago, had at first believed to be a liquor cabinet (“Just like the Lillian’s!”) and I’d often bundled up under the table in games of hide-and-seek, staring at the dizzying patterns on the Persian carpet till my eyes ached and I realized Gwyn had given up looking and was most likely sifting through my elephant collection upstairs (from ceramic bookends to fist-fitting quartz to the miniature myriad ivory flecks that tumbled out of iris-sized apples, turning to tuskers under the alchemical eye of a magnifying glass). Once, from under the table, I watched as my mother entered the room, slipped out of her house chappals, and sat softly with her beads. I could see her bare feet, callused talc white on the bottom, slowly settle out of their twitching and come to rest peacefully, one atop the other. When I emerged from under the cloth she’d opened her eyes, very calmly, and looked right at me. But it was strange, it was as if she didn’t see me, or thought I was someone else. I’d felt like the floor was going to drop out from under my feet and swallow up the world as I knew it. And then she’d smiled.
My beta,
she’d said.

But now she had stopped praying, entering the dining room only occasionally to sew a hem or water the palm plant. I’d never thought much about it, figuring it meant she’d gotten everything she’d wanted. But now, it occurred to me, maybe it meant she’d given up hope.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, my father moved beside my mother, to pray to the Ganesha keeping watch over the kheer. This was the area he used for extended family, like Sangita and Kavita, and Ketan Kaka out in California with his Route One motel,
always filled with Harley-Davidson gangs and trekkers who’d underestimated the distance to the next Big Sur campsite. From behind it looked like a postcard for Domestic Blissville: man and wife collaborating, choreographed, over the stove together. The two were engaged in a wordless dance; without a glance they gracefully sashayed and sidestepped one another as if at a hoedown till my father padded on into the hallway to finish up with Kashmir and the West Bank. (My parents were very into world peace—sincerely so.)

My dad had only spent a few seconds at the Ganesha. I timed it on the kitchen clock. And he’d definitely committed a good fiver to me via the veena’d one, and god time is kind of like dog years—much longer than, say, the same number of minutes on the phone with Gwyn. I didn’t think I was being paranoid, but how did that saying go again? You’re only paranoid if they’re
not
spending too much time at your cereal-shelf Saraswati?

—Good morning, Ma, I tried again.

—Morning? Your cousin will be here in just a few hours for your birthday dinner and you call this morning? Where are you living, in the L.A.?

I’d completely spaced on the fact Kavita was coming over. Brillo—now they could compare me to her. Another Hindi-, Gujarati-, and Marathi-speaking doctor in the making. And better yet, they could also line me up next to Sangita, who I was sure would be with us in prenuptial spirit, for a little round of dos and don’ts (guess who’d symbolize which one) for How to Get Your Daughter Married to the Indian Man of Your Dreams.

—Thanks for all the balloons, I said lamely.

—We thought we’d surprise you when you came home from your
slumber
party, said my mother.—But I think it is we who have been being surprised.

—Yeah, uh. Well, happy birthday, I said.

—Happy schmappy, she said.

—Well, I’ve got to give you the credit, right?

I was reaching for anything.

—We should really be celebrating you, right? You’re the one who did all the work—the labor, the delivery, all that. You had me.

—That was the easy part, she said.—It is now that I am needing the epidural.

I noticed her accent had thickened slightly; she was definitely pissed.

—Anyways, stop trying to ghee me up, my mom continued.—You and I both know exactly what is happening here. I wasn’t born yesterday.