Indie Girl (6 page)

Just then, I heard a key in the door. Juno and Aaralyn were standing right in front of me.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Where’s my child?”

At that moment, a piercing wail came from upstairs.

“Crap,” I said under my breath, hanging up the phone without saying good-bye to Kim.

The three of us, followed by Blanca, raced back up the flight of steps and toward Kyle’s room. He was squatting on the floor, bright blue paint around his mouth, red fingerprints all over the walls and, if that wasn’t bad
enough, overturned pots of yellow and green liquid in a basket of clean clothes.

“What on
earth
happened here?” Aaralyn screamed. Her face was as red as the paint on the wall, her eyes ablaze. “You left my child a
lone?!
You left a toddler
alone?!
What were you
thinking?
”

Blanca had covered her face with her hands. I started to cry. Kyle, realizing that his parents were now in front of him, was now gurgling gleefully, spitting out paint.

“At least that stuff isn’t toxic. I’m all about vegetable dyes,” Juno said, grinning at me. “Look, let’s just all calm down. No harm done, and no mess that a bit of Ajax won’t take out. Right, Blanca?”

“Still, she left Kyle alone so she could talk on the phone!” Aaralyn yelled. “Blanca, pick Kyle up and clean him off. I don’t want him getting paint all over my clothes.”

“Honey, calm down,” Juno said, stroking his wife’s back. Then his eyes fell upon the old newspapers spread out on the floor.

“Where did you get those?” he asked, now frowning.

“I found them outside, in the corridor,” I stammered.

“Jesus,” he said softly. “I was saving those. There were some important things in there I needed to clip. I wish you had checked with me first.”

I cried even more. I wasn’t even thinking about the intern job anymore. I had messed this up royally.

“I think you’d better call your parents and have them come and pick you up,” Aaralyn said, her voice frosty. “You can wait downstairs until they get here. We’ll take care of Kyle now.”

Sheepishly, I went back downstairs to use my cell phone. I called my dad, who told me he had decided to visit some friends of his not too far from where I was, and said he would be there in fifteen minutes. He could obviously hear the distress in my voice, because he immediately asked me what was wrong. I whispered that it was nothing, but I just wanted to leave.

I picked up my bag, and told Aaralyn and Juno that I would wait outside. Aaralyn reached into a drawer and pulled out some money.

“Oh please, no,” I said, holding up my hands. “I can’t take that. I did a terrible job. I’m really sorry about everything.”

Just then, Blanca came back downstairs with a cleaned up and happy Kyle. She put him down on the floor and he toddled toward me.

“Bye-bye,” I said, smiling for the first time in the past twenty minutes.

He grabbed my pant leg and suddenly started crying.

“No go,” he said through tears. “You no go.”

A look of surprise crossed Aaralyn’s face.

“Well,
that’s
a first,” she said, glancing over at her husband. “Usually, Kyle could care less.”

“Maybe we should listen to him then,” Juno said, looking at me sympathetically. “She seems like a sweet girl. And it wasn’t her fault about the newspapers—I probably shouldn’t have left them lying around. Maybe our son has good instincts.”

“She doesn’t have enough experience,” Aaralyn said, talking about me as if I wasn’t there. “Kyle might like her, but I just won’t have peace of mind leaving him with her again.” She looked at me again. My body was hot and tingling. I felt small and stupid.

Then I heard the honk of my father’s car outside.

I was so miserable I wanted to stay home, to cry on the phone with Kim while moping around in my favorite pink drawstring pants with the big red hearts printed on them. Despite the sunshine earlier today, the late afternoon had turned overcast and soggy. I wanted to drown my sorrows in a chocolate milk shake covered in a froth of whipped cream. For tonight, I didn’t want to think about calories. I just wanted to languish in bed like a fallen television starlet. And I knew that I could count on Kim to not just sympathize, but to be available to me. Unless she was out with her parents, she was
always
home on Saturday night. In that sense, she and I were very alike.

But my parents had included me in their plans without even asking me if I was interested. I hadn’t told them how badly my day had gone, because I didn’t want to see the smug grin that would no doubt emerge on my father’s face, to hear the “I told you so’s” that I knew were just waiting for me on the tip of his tongue. When he had asked me why I looked upset, I replied that I had had a hard time keeping Kyle happy because he didn’t know me.

“Babies are like that,” he said, oddly trying to comfort me. “You can’t take it personally.”

So I had had absolutely no excuse for not accompanying them tonight.

“It is your uncle’s birthday and we are all going!” my father had said sternly, even though I started to protest and told him I was tired.

“And yes, my dear child, may I inquire what it is you have done today that has caused such fatigue to come over you?”

Whenever my father felt the need to be sarcastic, he would often lapse into the very formal English he learned at boarding school in Calcutta. After twenty years in America, he still wasn’t able to shake that off.

“Dad, do you
have
to sound like a science professor from the 1800s?” I asked, realizing that unless I was careful, this would escalate into a real conflict. But my nerves were already frayed and I was counting the minutes till I could delve into that rich chocolate shake.

My father took a deep breath.

“You played with a small child for a few hours with the assistance of a housekeeper in a fancy house. Get a
real
job, and maybe then you can complain of fatigue! I have been operating on people’s brains all week. Do you see me complaining? No!”

“Dad, Uncle Mohit isn’t even my real uncle.”

My father couldn’t argue that point, but it didn’t make a difference. I knew that all my dad’s random friends had to be called “uncle” by my brother and me, whether they were related by blood or not. And I knew just what kind of a party it would be: all the men clustered around the bar, talking about low-interest rates and high property prices, and all the women in the living room, discussing Saif Ali Khan’s latest film, and whether frozen
parathas
could ever be as good as the freshly made ones.

But I could see even at the outset of the disagreement that there was no getting out of tonight’s engagement. We were going as a family, my father had intoned. My staying home was not part of the plan. I mentally kissed my milk shake good-bye and headed for the shower.

Fifteen minutes later, I was wrapped in a towel, my hair still dripping wet. I stood in front of my closet, its mirrored panels slid all the way back, gazing at my clothes, like I always did before I was getting ready to go anywhere.

“Don’t wear those trendy-bendy-type clothes,” my mother said, stopping briefly as she walked past my room. “Last time we met with Uncle and Aunty they wondered why you had on a hat the whole time and that long long scarf that went past your knees. Remember, they were asking you if you had just returned from a trip to Antarctica?” she laughed.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Long scarves are so last season anyway.”

I looked back at the racks and shelves of clothes, and moaned under my breath about having nothing to wear. My favorite tweed pleated skirt was at the dry cleaner’s, although my mother especially hated that one, complaining that I looked like a convent school student. She also disliked my cargo pants, wondering each time I wore them why I needed that many pockets in anything, and was horrified at my distressed and whiskered denim jacket, convinced that I looked like I was homeless.

“Wear something Indian,” she insisted, calling out from her room. “Tunic, pants,
dupatta.
So easy. No fuss-muss.”

I sighed. I had plenty of those, but hated wearing them on their own, always preferring to team a long silk
salwar
top with a pair of faded jeans, or my
churidar
pants with a soft layered T-shirt. My mother always thought I was a bit disrespectful when I dressed like that, telling me that I was diluting the beauty of our native garb and, consequently, the purity of our culture.

“This is not how your grandmothers would dress,” she would say to me.

“Mom, that’s kinda the point,” I would say back.

But tonight, I gave in. I pulled out a claret-colored silk top that came down to my knees, and which was printed with tiny gold flecks. It came with matching pants and a soft chiffon scarf that wound around my neck. From a
box in a drawer I took out matching glass bangles and a
bindi,
and slipped into beige
kohlapuri
sandals. I looked in the mirror, and let out a “yecch.”

“Mom, I look like a village bride!” I yelled out.

“Nothing wrong in that,” she yelled back, not even bothering to come and see for herself. “It is just for one night.”

I turned to gaze at myself in the mirror again and wondered what Aaralyn Taylor would do—reminding myself that I would never find out because she wanted to have nothing to do with me ever again. I imagined her talking to the next babysitter the way she had talked to me this morning, ridiculing all the girls who had come before, and then mentioning me as another example of someone who could do nothing right. I would be the totally inept one, the one who left her child alone long enough for him to do serious damage to his nursery.

I cocked my head to one side and pulled the scarf off my neck, replacing it with a chunky choker. I kicked off my boring sandals and found a pair of fake snakeskin high-heeled pumps I had picked up on sale at the mall the previous week. I turned up the cuffs of my long-sleeved top, and removed the set of glass bangles, replacing it with a thick red-strapped watch instead. I ran a dollop of gel through my hair. Then I stepped back and took another look.

Much better,
I thought to myself.

·   ·   ·

Uncle Mohit’s house was not far from ours. He and his wife, Meena, lived with their three daughters in a colonial house in a gated community less than fifteen minutes away. They were prominent members of what my father kept referring to as “the community,” meaning that they were very good about attending religious festivals at the temple, arranging fund-raisers whenever some calamity hit the subcontinent, and generally being a great source of information on anything and everything that affected Indians in the Valley. Like my father, Uncle Mohit was a doctor, although he worked in emergency medicine at a nearby hospital. He and his wife had had their daughters just a year apart and had given them cutesy names that might have been fun if they had been born in Mumbai a couple of decades ago, but were just too silly for words in modern Los Angeles. Rinky was sixteen, Pinky was seventeen, and Tinky was eighteen, and they were, without a doubt, among the most annoying girls I had ever met.

When we walked in, I forced a smile as the trio of “inkys” stepped forward to kiss me on the cheek. They were all in Indian outfits too, but worn in the traditional way, and all in similar shades of green. Long golden earrings dangled from their pretty earlobes.

“How
are
you?” Pinky asked, staring at my spiky, shiny hair, while her older sister gazed down at my python shoes.

“Interesting outfit,” Rinky chimed in, a ring of sarcasm in her voice.

This was going to be a long night.

I stepped into the living room, and, as I predicted, saw a sea of women dressed in saris or tunic-pants outfits like mine—worn conventionally—helping themselves to freshly fried
pakodas
and plates of
bhel.
My father had already made his way into an adjacent room, which had been converted into a bar, and my brother had disappeared upstairs, where some of the other boys his age were experimenting with someone’s Nintendo Wii.

My mother squeezed into a small space on the sofa next to Aunt Meena, and I hoisted myself onto the armrest next to her. I had been here only five minutes, but was already mind-numbingly bored. From what I could gather, there didn’t seem to be anybody here for me to talk to. The only people here my age were the “inkys,” and, well, enough said.

The “inkys” came into the living room, smiling and holding plates of spicy appetizers and paper napkins to pass around. I looked at them, recalling my father’s always-complimentary remarks about them. He boasted about their abilities as if they were his own daughters—their straight A’s, their skill at
Bharatanatyam
dancing, the fact that they could sing the latest crop of Hindi film songs as well as something from forty years ago. They only watched Zee TV, which covered news and music
from India, and had never even switched channels to the CW. My parents, for all their mostly modern outlook on life, thought that I should be more like the “inkys,” closer to “the community” and less involved in what they often described as “American nonsense.” The “inkys,” they would often remind me, could read, write, and speak fluent Hindi, had learned all the lyrics to
Om Fai Fagdish,
the devotional song that many religious Hindus sang every morning, and knew how to perfectly work a pressure cooker. The only way I could ever make
dal
was if I microwaved it right in the packet.

As dinner was being served, Rinky found me, even though I attempted to hide behind my mother.

“So, what are your plans for the summer?” she asked, though we just finished spring break. “Will you be looking for a job somewhere?”

“I hope to,” I replied, having learned from experience to keep my conversations with these girls as brief as possible, knowing that they interpreted things in the weirdest way and told their parents everything.

“Yes, Pinky and Tinky and I have already lined things up,” she said, laying down a big platter filled with steaming
biryani.
“The three of us are returning to India for a couple of months, and will divide our time between yoga workshops in Karnataka, working with Mother Teresa’s missions in Calcutta, and assisting with a charity in Delhi that is still raising money for the tsunami
victims. Still such suffering after all this time. Can you believe it?” she asked, tut-tutting quietly. “Hey, Indie, maybe you should come with us!” she said, her eyes suddenly brightening. “You’ll
love
it! It’s
so
fulfilling!”