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  My mother’s khatak past instilled in her the desire to make dance a part of my life. Of course, I had a natural ability for artistic movement. When I was four, summer afternoons often found me clad in my Fruit of the Loom underpants and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt striking poses on top of the black Toyota Corolla that we had before my father could afford to buy us a beige Mercedes. Its hood, a shiny mirror, afforded me a flattering view of myself. I had a white, Duracell-operated Casio radio that I would plop down next to the car and use as a vessel to ferry Cyndi Lauper’s voice all over the cul-de-sac. While Cyndi hiccupped her way through songs, I would put my arms over my head and mimic Farrah Fawcett in her Charlie’s Angels pose, or alternate with kicks à la those by Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman. I did this whenever my father said he needed to wash the car. He would never have let me dance on top of it, but he had a tendency to announce his household chores a few days before he did them, as if the sheer announcement would will him into doing his part. Whenever I heard him utter, between bites of roti and curried cauliflower at dinner, “Arre, I need to vash that stupid car,” I knew the next day would be my time to shine. As soon as my father left the house, I would head to the car with the radio in one hand and a pair of plastic sunglasses in the other. My mother encouraged me. She would often sit on the driveway, a cup of tea in her hands, and watch me perform. A few days later, my father would set to work on the car, baffled as to how such a smudged mess could have ended up on the hood. He would sigh deeply, then wash the car in his penny-pinching way: concerned about saving on our water bill, he would spray the Corolla in one swift motion from one bumper to the other—just once—before shutting off the nozzle and then scrubbing the car with a big, soapy sponge, which he would dip into a small bucket of water between waxes. He would counteract his entire cleaning process once he took the bucket of soiled water and—to avoid the horror of having to hose the car down again and “waste” more water—poured it over the car to wash away the soap before toweling down the metal. Staggering into the kitchen from the heat outside, his years-old polo shirt a mess of suds and sweat, he would grunt, “You von’t belief those bloody birds. Not only do they do caca all over the car, but they smear up the hood, too. Eh, bhagwan [aka God], I need some food!”

  My mother would oblige, whipping up a small stack of roti and a hodgepodge of curried vegetables. As she set them down in front of my father, she would sneak a glance at me and shake her head almost imperceptibly from side to side, as good khatak girls can do. I would acknowledge her gesture with a flourish of my still-sunglassed face like I was Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

  My mother supposed I would take after her and study khatak. She certainly did her darnedest for this to be the case. Once, she dragged me to a performance in Indianapolis by a barrel-chested dancer who called himself Hanuman, after the Hindu monkey god. The resemblance, terrifyingly enough, was uncanny. The man’s upper lip was convex and snout-like, and his long limbs and hairy torso put me in mind of King Louie from The Jungle Book. Reportedly, he held the Guinness world record for the longest dance ever performed, a sweat-drenched khatak performance in Jalandhar that lasted three days and that must have put dents in the Punjabi dirt. Learning of this achievement was not exactly comforting for me. As my mother and I pushed ourselves into the narrow wooden seats of that Indiana auditorium, amidst a crowd of Indians gushing their anticipation to each other in Hindi, I doubted that the meager buffet table of food in the lobby would be enough to feed us all for three days. The performance was listed in the program as lasting “only” three hours, and in my mind, I imagined this three-hour tour veering as horribly off course as Gilligan’s cruise. When Hanuman finished his ecstatic dance not three but five hours later, my mother was on her feet applauding while I was plotting the quickest ways for us to get to the professional curry before everyone else.

  Then there was the time that she tried to set up private dance lessons with a pockmarked woman named Hema who wore her hair in a carnation-laden ponytail. Hema must have been so busy studying dance that she forgot to change the carnations regularly, and so her hair often became a sharp-smelling mess of crinkled brown petals and split ends.

  At first, my mother made me think she had simply found a friend in this woman. She would invite Hema Auntie over for tea and have me serve tiny butter cookies—or “biscuits,” to be Anglo-observant. While I served, my mother and Hema would discuss dancing.

  “I used to love dancing vhen I vas young,” my mother said, sipping her tea in a half-slurp that to Indians conveys an enjoyment of food but to Americans is the most annoying sound on Earth. “The first time I met Ramesh, it was vhen ve vere little and I had just finished dancing at a sangeet for my cousin Geeta. She was getting married to a boy from Kerala with skin like tamarind chutney.” But then she went into Hindi, and I was lost. If it weren’t for Hema, I would have tugged at my mother’s clothing and begged her to tell me in English the story of how she met my father. But instead, I went to the counter and loaded our stainless steel serving tray with more biscuits.

  “How did you start dancing, Hema?” my mother asked.

  “Ess soon ess I came out of my mother! But that is nut important, Shashi,” Hema replied in her weighty accent, her teacup in one hand and a strand of oily hair twirled in the other. “Vhat is important is how Kiran vill larn, ha? Kiran Beta, ev’ry child should larn haw to dence khatak. Beta, I show you.”

  Then she got up and led me to the open expanse of the family room, with its big Persian rug (or “Indian rug,” as my father would call it), and demonstrated certain key steps for me. The next time she came to visit, she even tried to teach me the famous pose of the Durga, the many-limbed goddess who has one leg raised and her front set of hands clasped in a bloom at her side. This, she told me, was one of the fundamental poses of Indian dance but also a rather impossible pose to strike. Indeed it was, as I wobbled for a second before losing my balance and landing facedown on the carpet.

  I was always so busy trying to do what Hema told me that I didn’t notice how the tea and biscuits stopped being a part of her visits as the weeks went on. It was only a month later when I saw my mother handing Hema a check at the end of her visit—with not a drop of tea in either of their bellies—that I realized what was going on.

  “Mom!” I cried after the front door closed and Hema was gone. “I didn’t ask for Hema Auntie to teach me!”

  “Oh, Kiran Beta, it is good for you. I didn’t vant to study khatak vhen I first started, either, but then I grew to love it. This is vhy American children are alvays so naughty. Their parents send them clothes from the Gap instead of teaching them things. Not everything is easy, beta. You have to vork hard, and then you get God’s blessings later.”

  “I don’t think these are God’s blessings,” I said, pulling up my shirt and showing her the collage of bruises covering my torso. Finally, the sight of my battered body made my mother desist. Even now, I wouldn’t incur bruises to turn myself Krishna blue. At least I don’t think I would.

  All the same, my mother would drop in other asides about khatak the same way she would drop blobs of corn batter into a pot of hot oil when making pakora.

  “You know, beta, good health is all in your posture. You know how I learned good posture? Khatak.” Plop.

  Or, one particularly odd time, when heading out the front door to go shopping, she said, “I never vore such beautiful saris as I did vhen I danced.” It was as if she knew the promise of luxurious fabric would perk my ears up. But I was too deep in concentration to think about her words carefully; I was waiting for her to go shopping so that I could play with her makeup again.

  In the end, it was inevitable that I would choose ballet.

  It was in third grade that they began to offer the ballet class at my school. Mrs. Fisher gave us all a sheet that specified the after-school programs available to us. There were karate, basketball, ceramics, Tee Ball, and ballet. Most of the boys went for the basketball class, which made no sense—most of t
hem played basketball after school on the blacktop anyway, even when it was chilly outside, so why they chose an indoor league was beyond me. To the girls, ballet was the best option, of course. And I wanted to be near the girls. I wanted to be in the world of tights and pastels and fleet feet.

  I was the only boy. Even when I turned in my sign-up sheet—which had been encouragingly signed by my mother, who thought ballet “a graceful dance that can prepare you for khatak”—Mrs. Fisher, her forehead crinkling under a poof of Clairol-hued bangs, asked if I was sure.

  “Keern, honey, I think you checked the wrong box.” She leaned over her desk, covering the tests she was grading as if afraid my balletic cooties would get all over them. “Why don’t you join the basketball league, honey?” she whispered. “Or at least ceramics. You could make a nice pot.”

  “But I like ballet!” I said—too loudly, it turned out, because the boys in the classroom started calling me “Ballerina.”

  Shuddering off the name-calling, I went with my mother that afternoon to buy the supplies listed on a sheet that Mrs. Fisher finally handed over to me. The store of choice was a tiny place called Pansy’s, a small wooden box—knobby hardwood floors, wood-paneled walls speckled with the silver heads of tiny nails, wood benches and wooden cubbies full of salmon-colored boxes that contained different styles and sizes of ballet slippers. The owner, Pansy, was an overweight woman in her mid-forties who wore zebra-print spandex pants and a faded black KISS T-shirt that could have clothed all four members of that band. Her hair looked like orange yarn, and she took a hit of a Virginia Slim every ten seconds.

  “This is a ballet store, hon,” she puffed at my mother, who was an odd blast of color in the middle of the store—she was wearing a pool-bottom-blue salwaar kameez topped with her white cardigan, and her hair fell in one fat black braid, cinched by a silver scrunchie.

  “Oh, this is a ballet store? Oh, dear, forgive me, ma’am. I thought it vas a bar,” said my mother, in one of those wacky moments when I looked up at her and wondered who she really was. “My son is starting ballet class and needs to buy a pair of shoes.”

  “Yer son?”

  “Yes, my son,” my mother said, cradling my head in her hand instead of pushing me forward. Her hand felt cold but comforting, the nails long and manicured and scraping softly against my cheek. “Can you help us?”

  “Well, of course I can help ya, honey,” Pansy said. She took a deep hit from her cigarette, dropped it onto the dusty wooden floor, and put it out with her shoe, which was a cross between a bathroom slipper and a ballet slipper. “Come over here, kid.” She gave an exasperated glance at the cashier, who looked like a less-pretty Geena Davis and whose register looked like it had come out of Frosty’s, the closed-down ’50s diner on Route 4. My mother must have noticed the glance between the two ladies, but she had apparently decided to ignore it. She crossed her hands in front of her—her gold bangles jingled—and I sat down on a bench as Pansy motioned for me to do.

  “What size shoe are ya, hon?” Pansy asked, her arms akimbo on fleshy hips.

  “He’s a size five,” my mother said.

  “Wow—tiny little guy. Okay, hon, take off your shoes and socks so we can try these babies on. I gotta go into the back room for those teensy-weensy feet.”

  I unstuck the two Velcro strips holding each sneaker together and slid the shoes onto the floor. I had to wear the Velcro kind because I still wasn’t particularly good at tying my shoes; it should have been easy enough for a smart kid like me, but I had just never gotten the rhythm of it down right. I always ended up tying a huge, garbled knot that would take me twenty minutes to untie or that would lead me to slide the constricted shoes off my feet with a grimace on my face. One time, I had to throw out a pair of sneakers because I had knotted them so tightly that not even my father could untie them, try as he may have to undo the knot with a Phillips screwdriver. Whose handle, now that I think of my eating fad, looked like butterscotch.

  Pansy emerged from behind a black velvet curtain. She had a stack of slim boxes in her hands, and although it didn’t look like her load was particularly heavy, she was grunting as if she were carrying an elephant.

  “It’s been ages since I had a boy in here,” she said, attempting to set the entire stack onto the bench but dropping the top three boxes. “Had to blow dust off these black slippers.”

  “Black slippers?” I said.

  “Yeah, black slippers, toots. Unless ya wanted pink ones like the girls!” She laughed an emphysemic laugh, happy enough to make me want to slug her.

  “Well, I…”

  “Oh, ya want the pink ones, hon?” She laughed again, and the movement of the snot in her throat sounded like a car wash.

  “No,” I said quickly, and I looked behind me to see my mom’s reaction to this exchange. Not surprisingly, she was too busy examining a tableful of fancy, satin-covered shoes, tongue pinched between her lips.

  My heart did a bungee jump in my torso, plummeting almost through my butt, then retracted, ending up somewhere just below where it had been previously. To think that I would not be able to wear pink slippers! The cheekiness in Pansy’s stare, the smirk in her fat lips, told me that choosing pink was forbidden, an instant path to ridicule. And so, although sad I couldn’t get the type of pink slippers that would match SS’s hat, I said nothing as Pansy opened one of the boxes on the bench and pulled out a pair of nice-smelling black slippers that were crinkled at the toe, a tiny bow protruding from the crinkle. She slid the slipper onto my right foot. A thin elastic black band crossed over the delicate bones of my foot. The leather was cold and comforting, but it was also the charred version of my pink dreams.

  All the same, it seemed like kismet when Pansy told me, in a bedtime story tone, that the first pair I tried on was juuuuust riiiiight. My mother looked on with a cheerful expression. I hopped over to her and placed my arms around her waist, then buried my head just a bit into her stomach. She cradled me, and we stood like this as Ugly Geena Davis rang up our order.

  “You have a pretty boy,” Pansy said to my mother as we turned to leave the store.

  “Thank you, Ms. Pansy,” my mother said, pulling me closer to her side as we left. It was only just before the door to the store squeezed shut and I heard Pansy and Ugly Geena Davis cackling that I realized “Ms. Pansy” was being ironic.

  When I arrived at the first ballet class, the girls all giggled. I was too busy being excited to pay much attention to their reactions. (Had I paid attention, I might have seen a younger Sarah and Melissa making fun of me, which would have precluded the splinter situation from ever happening.) I was now in love with my slippers, regardless of their color; I had held them in my hands before going to bed every night, and when I finally had occasion to put them on in class, I felt like a legitimate dancer. I wanted to run up and down the room, wanted to tumble, wanted to flail my arms about and leap. I had once caught a quick glimpse of Flashdance (before my mother walked into the room and turned the TV off), and I wanted to be like Jennifer Beals, dancing like a maniac up and down shiny hardwood.

  I thought we would be wild in action from the get-go, but everything was so slow, so measured. Learn this position, start from the toes up, position your leg this way, bend your wrist like this, focus on your hips, align your body like building blocks. We practiced the five fundamental ballet positions so many times that I thought my body would forget how to perform any other action. The more that Marcy walked past, correcting our poses, the woozier I became from the grape fog of her lacquered hair; there were several times when I thought I might pass out. The only thing that prevented me from doing so was knowing that I would never hear the end of it.

  But I slowly came to understand the graceful wisdom of Marcy’s teachings. I worked hard in her class, and it seemed like ballet was the first physical activity that used my energy effectively. Once I learned arabesques, jettés, attitudes, and pirouettes, I felt that I had a physical vocabulary for myself. There were, of course, incr
eased jeers when the school found out that I was a danseur—or a “ballerina,” they still called me, not knowing the proper term for a male ballet dancer—but for the first time, I felt that I had the upper hand. When Timmy Justice asked me for the millionth time why I hadn’t worn my tutu to math class, I about-faced from him with the grace of a piqué turn. When Gary Martin leaped past me flapping his hands like wings while I tried to read on the playground, I jettéd away and finished with a pirouette on another bench. My backtalk became more physical than verbal. It was as if I could stop the nervous stammers when I spoke by finding another form of communication. Through dance, I could craft sentences that didn’t falter, ideas that moved swiftly instead of bumping into the rickety machine of my mouth. And over time, I felt that when I did have to speak, my dancing informed my speech. In time, I learned to make words dance.

  I want you to see the world the way that I see it. I want you to feel the lift of my body when I see the beauty of a pirouette or the ecstatic fact of a swishing sari. I want you to see the beauty in locking your face in colorful makeup and the beauty in twirling around and puckering your lips. I want you to know the meaning of dance, the things you do when no one is home, when you grab your ballet slippers and slap them on your feet and fly around the house, leaping over footrests and spinning around the island in the kitchen. I want you to understand the joy of pulling out several sheets from a paper towel roll and running around the empty house with it trailing behind you, then letting it go, letting yourself fall to the ground, and then letting the white streamer float onto you. I want you to understand how fluent my feet are, how they kiss the linoleum, the carpet, the kitchen table, armchairs, desks, beds. I want you to understand that this is the world, this is the acceptance, this is the big bear hug and the gold-star sticker. There is such beauty in the world, despite all of the harsh realities about it, and they are contained here for me. They are contained in a plié, in a rond de jambe. I have my own language. I am my own language.