Blue Boy Read online

  In crafting my talent show act, I need to be as fluent as possible in Dance, and so I ignore Sarah and Melissa for the rest of today’s lesson and focus on the picture of a graceful Krishna that I have in my mind. I imagine Him drawing His blue left foot through the dust of a sylvan pathway, and I know that I need to create an act that melds His mind and His body with my mind and my body. With that goal at the forefront of my thoughts, I decide to learn as much as I can about my past incarnation and fashion a ballet based on Him.

  Choosing My Religion

  I think the reason I’ve always read at a higher level is because I recognized my true friends from the get-go. Subconsciously, I always knew that I belonged with Frances Hodgson Burnett more than I belonged with pigtailed harlots. Therefore, just as my bed and the dance studio became sanctuaries, the local library became a safe haven.

  It’s an austere building to most people. It is as if the city officials want to scare the citizens into illiteracy (a tactic that seems to have worked, considering the number of kids in my school who have trouble reading). It is composed of three domed, brown brick edifices of different heights that have mildewy stripes of green growth wedged into the seams, and although the library was never a church, its windows are stained glass. Inside, stacks of books lie covered in dust and rainbow patches that the sunlight throws through the colored panes. The floor is wooden, knotted, and the sounds of feet, coughs, and turning pages echo easily. The librarians are so stereotypically librarian that they may have singlehandedly given rise to the stereotype: they are all female; they wear cardigans in earth tones; they wear spectacles; their hair is curly and gray; their long fingers are entwined in pulsing veins as they grasp a black stamp and press the due date in the back of the books.

  The library is drafty, and when you pull a book from a shelf, an exhalation of wind greets you. There is a children’s section located on the second floor, in a small corner in which the librarians have plastered various READ posters that feature random celebrities—Tom Selleck, Oprah Winfrey, LeVar Burton—but there are never any children there. In fact, the only people under eighteen who seem to enter this library are high school students. And me.

  The fact that other children my age do not come here is comforting. The library is the only place in this city where I feel completely free from the usual classroom calumny. Books are much better companions to me than people. A book’s content never changes, and yet it is always intriguing; something you read can mean something completely different to you at a different time. This is not the case with my classmates. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people can be devastating at any moment.

  The Eastern Religions section of the library is, not surprisingly, rather small, and it is tucked away in one of the dankest corners of the building, right next to a forbidding stone doorway that leads to the bathrooms (which emit a mixed odor of must, urinal cakes, and soap). Doreen, one of the librarians, walks me to the section with extra-defiant, annoyed steps. Her beige pantyhose wrinkles at the ankles, and her olive, school-marmish skirt is loud in its polyester swishing. Doreen motions to the three shelves that house the “extensive” collection and turns on her cushioned heel without a word.

  The books, unlike those in most other sections of the library, are not categorized alphabetically or even by subject, although most of them seem to be about Buddhism. I flip through books by Thich Naht Hahn, the Dalai Lama, and, terrifyingly enough, that guy from Highlander. On the bottom shelf, squeezed between The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet, I find three fat books on Hinduism that, contrary to their A. A. Milne knockoff counterparts, are in pristine condition. I pull this trio of books off the shelf and tote the small stack to the nearest table, which is round and wide and looks like it might have come from the court of King Arthur. I open the first one, A Journey Through Hinduism, which is about five hundred pages long and bears a picture of the “Om symbol”—in essence, the number 30 with a swish over it. I flip to the index and look up “Krishna.” There are several entries. I hum excitedly and flip to the section that seems the longest. A beautiful portrait of Krishna playing the flute greets me. Instinctively, my hand reaches up to my hair to fix it, as if this picture is the master bathroom mirror. The image on the page may not mimic my movement, but all the same, I sense a slight wink of a blue-lidded eye as I begin to pore over the information inside.

  As I amass more and more information from the library, the desk in my bedroom becomes a maelstrom of papers. I have taken to drawing pictures of myself, which acts as an ample substitute for putting on makeup when I can’t sneak into the master bathroom. I have spent so much time looking at my face in the mirror that I have learned every last detail: The roundness of my eyes, the whites so visible all around that the only reason one can tell I have eyelids at all is because my lashes are so long. My cute button of a nose, the tip of it rounded in a very un-Indian way. My high cheekbones. Every time I start a new drawing, I place my face on the page first, then use my markers to create a new outfit for myself. In one picture, I wear nothing but a headdress and a gown made of peacock feathers. In another, I wear a garment made out of sari-like material—bright red and magenta with frayed gold embroidery—but make certain that it does not look like a sari; as lost as I am in my art, I do not forget the fact that my parents might see my handiwork. In yet another picture, I am naked, although I stop the drawing at my waist, giving the impression that I am merely bare-chested.

  In this picture, as in all the others, my skin is blue. My blue Crayola marker runs out of ink because I use it so much. After a while, instead of starting my drawings in black marker, using that dark color as the outline—a kajol of the body—I use only dark blue to do the outlines. I have an epiphany and excavate my pastel markers from the bottom of my large crafts bin. I pull out the sky blue marker and from then on use this marker to shade my skin. I do the outlines in dark blue, then fill in the curve of a shoulder or the shield of a pectoral with the lighter, peaceful blue. In one hasty move, I tear up the drawings I have done before, for the earlier blue seems too blunt. I am blue, but I am not a tough, hard, dark, frightening blue. My blueness is melodic.

  Only after I have created a thick stack of drawings do I realize what I have been doing. I lift my pen off of the page, sit back in my chair, and realize that all along I have been designing my costume for the talent show ballet. I haven’t started choreographing. I haven’t even thought of the plot. But here I am, drawing intricate costumes for myself.

  I put my pen down. You should move in order, I tell myself. I should be thinking of what the story is going to be, which particular episode or episodes of my past life I want to reenact, not crafting clothes for scenes I haven’t even conceived. But no sooner have I put down my pen than I find myself drawing again, crafting my face, then surrounding it in a swath of orange flames. Never mind that I don’t know how to rig a flaming costume. Never mind that I don’t even know if this picture is supposed to be a costume. I draw what I feel.

  I begin to tape my pictures on the wall in front of my desk. The prime spot is a few inches above the desk, center, and I have a featured drawing there every day. Meanwhile, I have the books I’ve checked out from the library stacked on one end of the desk, various pages sticking out where I have made Xeroxes and bookmarked their original pages with the copies.

  My drawing habit follows me out of my bedroom into the classroom, as I find myself doodling all of the time. When we do problems in math class, I print my name and Mrs. Nevins’s name neatly in the top right corner as instructed, then, once she begins talking into the blackboard, I lose myself. My thoughts become so ornate that even my numbers have curlicues. The curlicues evolve into peacock feathers, jars of butter, and when I am writing a “6” as part of a math problem, it will become one of my round eyes, wrapped in lashes. An equation is a body, the equal sign the stretch of its tummy.

  One day, Mrs. Nevins teaches us a very grown-up word, especially for sixth graders; she learned the word, she says, fro
m reading her “favorite book ever,” Jurassic Park. The word is “iteration”—when something mutates into something else but retains something of its original form. In the same vein—in the same blue vein—my world becomes a series of iterated bodies. Or, to be more exact, one body. Mine is one body, iterated, like a god’s.

  From my studies, I discover that Vishnu has ten incarnations—from a bull to a tortoise to a lion to even a powerful midget. But it is Krishna who is the most memorable of these figures, even more memorable than Rama, the hero of the Ramayana. Krishna beats Rama because of all of his talents—his flute-playing, his ability to charm cowherdesses, and of course his skin. The most important thing I discover is that Krishna has an incarnation that has yet to appear. The tenth one is still waiting to happen. Not anymore, I think. I am the tenth incarnation.

  I read about myself in the Mahabharata. As Doreen walks by my table in the library, she gives a worried glance at the huge tome before me, and I huddle over it and give her a dirty look. Her shoes scuffle away, and as I lean over the table again, I feel like they are the musical overture to the story happening on the pages before me, like the lion roaring before a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie. I pull out a Butterfinger from my bookbag and unwrap it quietly, seeing as eating is not allowed in here. I nibble it in secretive bites as I lean back over the book.

  Continuing the ages-long battle between good and evil, the demons of the world chose to infiltrate the ancient kingdoms of India by disguising themselves as rulers of the land. The most evil of these rulers, Kamsa, heard tell of a young woman named Devaki who, a sage foretold, would give birth to eight sons. The eighth, the sage said, would rise against Kamsa and kill him. Ruthlessly, the king had Devaki imprisoned and killed her first six children. Herlast two sons, however, were switched with children from another town. One of the children who was switched to safety was Krishna, who was really Vishnu descended to Earth as a human child. Eventually, Krishna was taken to Gokula, where he was able to grow up without being hunted. All the same, he encountered trouble around every corner—often because he went looking for it. In fact, he seemed to invite it wherever he went, fighting with serpents and angry animals and killing demons along the way.

  I tell Cody the findings of my studies during lunch, but as usual he’s full of criticism.

  “Keern, yer rippin’ that story off of the Bible.” He’s eating cafeteria food again, a hamburger with orange cheese oozing from under the bun, which looks like a baseball mitt.

  “I am not ripping anything off. The stories are there, in the Upanishads.”

  “I’m punishing you?”

  “The Upanishads. The ancient Indian texts. The Indian Bible, basically.”

  “See—there! Ya just admitted it. The Indian Bible.”

  “No, I mean—how else am I supposed to explain things to you? I have to use the words of your religion to explain mine to you.”

  “Why do ya have to explain it to me in the first place?”

  “Will you just listen to me? It’s a cool story. He escaped the hand of a king who wanted to kill him. The child could do anything.”

  “But that’s the story of Moses.”

  “Well, I don’t remember the story of Moses, but I know this isn’t made up.”

  Cody proceeds to tell me the story of Moses, how he survived the wrath of Ramses, how he was sent out from Israel to escape the Pharaoh’s blood-seeking soldiers. I smile during the whole story.

  “What are you smilin’ about?” Cody asks.

  “Cody, Hinduism is much older than Christianity. We got there first. It’s the Bible that ripped off the Hindus.”

  “It was not! Ya don’ know what yer talkin’ about. And listen to what yer sayin’. Snakes? Demons? Weirdos with blue skin? It sounds like a cartoon.”

  “Oh, but a man who walks on water—before turning it into wine—and heals the blind and dies only to come back to life is believable? It sounds more like an episode of Captain Planet.”

  With this, Cody picks up his tray, slides out of the cafeteria table bench, and harrumphs away, my fingers still frozen in the act of counting Jesus’ achievements. He almost bumps into Sarah and Melissa, who giggle meanly at him as he lurches away.

  For the rest of the day, I regret what I have said to Cody. I don’t have anything against Jesus. In fact, Jesus is cool, as so many bumper stickers in this town would attest. He is a loving figure, a man of billowing white robes and white skin. In my studies, I have discovered that certain warriors, like Bharat, Rama’s brother, had very white skin, a sign of purity and loyalty. So Jesus is pure and loyal. What is more, the feats that I numbered off to Cody are more Hindu than anything else; what could be more Hindu than controlling the elements, performing magical actions, transforming a normal human setting into a carnival of wonder and awe? Hinduism did come before Christianity, but why separate the two, anyway? In terms of vitality and spirit, isn’t Hinduism Christianity and Christianity Hinduism? Our houses of worship may be vastly different, but there is a shared movement toward life, light, jubilance.

  This is religion for me: jubilance. And so I go, again and again, into my sanctuaries, my bedroom, a blank page, and the library, where jubilant light from the stained glass oversees my new faith.

  The Early Bird Catches the Squirm

  A fledgling god has to be fluent not only in dance and mirth but in speech. Eloquence and godliness go hand in hand. Or, more precisely, hand in hands. So it’s no small benefit that one person who is entirely supportive of my act is Mrs. Goldberg, the teacher with whom I study language arts after school every Tuesday and Thursday.

  Mrs. Goldberg is about as normal-looking a woman as you could ever see. She is not too thin or too fat; her skin is not too fair or too red; her brown hair is shoulder-length and partly curly, caught between short and long. The only makeup she ever wears is a muted shade of maroon lipstick. Her outfits consist of cotton skirt-and-sweater sets and a modestly placed gold brooch at her right breast. Her gray eyes are kind, with a middling number of wrinkles surrounding them, and she smells of nice perfume.

  I started studying with Mrs. Goldberg because other teachers didn’t have the time to teach me. At least that is the reason I was given. In truth, I think it’s because they just don’t know enough to be able to teach me advanced language arts. One day, when we were all going to read Roald Dahl’s Matilda together in class, Mrs. Nevins told us, “Class, we don’t have a large amount of books, so we’ll have to share,” and it took every last fiber of my being not to slug her over the head for saying “amount” instead of “number.” Oftentimes, with Mrs. Nevins, I feel like Roald Dahl’s leading lady; Matilda was too brilliant a talent for the rest of her school, too, and had to best a hefty behemoth of a principal to find happiness. But she had Miss Honey, her demure and pretty schoolteacher, to help her. That is how I see Mrs. Goldberg, who always greets me by looking up from the papers she’s grading, then gets up and pulls a chair close to her desk so we can study together.

  “Hi, Kiran,” she says when I enter her classroom today. She is the only person in this school who says my name properly. She even puts a small roll of the tongue at the “r,” sounding altogether Indian when she does so. She pulls a chair next to hers and motions for me to sit down.

  “How is everything going?” she asks, picking up her stack of graded papers and tapping it against the table to straighten it.

  “Everything’s great,” I say, not wanting to share how unbearable the past few weeks have been.

  “Kiran, I know that everything isn’t great. Is there anything you want to talk about? Any, um, splintery situations?”

  “Mrs. Goldberg!” I say. “How did you find out?”

  “Oh, Kiran, word gets around. Believe me, no place is home to more rumors than the teachers’ lounge. So what really happened?”

  I proceed to tell Mrs. Goldberg everything, how Sarah and Melissa lured me to the fitness course, how they pushed me down and told me they wanted to see me naked, how I had to
make up different stories to cover up the real reason I had a splinter in my butt. The whole time, Mrs. Goldberg listens quietly, nodding her head, the slight curls of her brown hair drooping as if expressing pity.

  After I finish my story, Mrs. Goldberg sighs heavily and sits back in her chair. “Well, Kiran, the girls’ behavior is totally unacceptable. I will be certain to speak with Principal Taylor about this. These girls must receive some form of punishment.”

  “No!” I say. “No, Mrs. Goldberg, please. Don’t punish Sarah and Melissa. You don’t understand: if you punish them, they’ll only hate me more. They’ll only find other ways to make fun of me and hurt me. Please don’t punish them.”

  “Kiran, running from the problem is no solution. You have to take a stand for yourself and prevent such things from happening again. If you run from Sarah and Melissa now, they won’t only feel like they can make fun of you again—they’ll feel it is right to make fun of other kids. And that is just not right! This is the opportunity to do something meaningful, Kiran.”

  “Mrs. Goldberg,” I say, clasping my hands on the table and assuming my own teacher-like pose. “Let me teach you something now. If you tell Principal Taylor about what these girls did and Principal Taylor punishes them, then I look like a tattletale. And being a tattletale is the worst thing you can be.”