Blue Boy Read online

  There it is again—the mini-temple, the shrine on top of the bookcase. In each painting, the gods glow; each limb is like a shaft of light, each body like a quietly fiery star. There is Krishna again, made up and smiling and ostentatiously blue, a star of the stage that is this bookcase top. For a solid ten minutes, until my mother calls me down to have some tea, I braid my physical desires with this vision of godlike beauty. My fascination is becoming a real quest: a quest to find and live up to my lost Krishna self. This way—and this way alone—I can achieve the sort of nirvana that I’ve heard the pundit speak of. The religious paintings are ordaining me to be this glowing man of lust. Perhaps, I think, it is not a question of getting affection from other people, being desired, but understanding the pull of your own desires that should fuel us. I have spent too much time trying to earn the respect of others when I should be focusing on my own potential.

  A path of smut has led me to a higher level of edification than I could have ever imagined. From this moment onward, I will not discount lust as an extraordinary force. I will let it grip my body and lead me the rest of the way.

  This is all an elegant way of saying that I start jerking off like it’s my job.

  Radhas to My Left, Ragamuffins to My Right

  For several years, I have been in love with Strawberry Shortcake.

  Whoever created that ragamuffin princess knew exactly what they were doing. Most toys rely simply on beauty and pastels to make them desirable. Barbie—glamorous, pink. My Little Pony—foal-cute, pink. Jem—rockstarry, glittery pink. But Strawberry Shortcake has the extra advantage of sweets. Not just candy, but sweets. Not just Skittles and Starbursts and Milky Ways but luscious cakes and pastries and fruits. Incidentally, “sweets” is the word that my parents use to describe desserts. It’s one of the few Anglo-Indian verbal tics of theirs that says exactly what I want it to say.

  But back to SS, as I like to call her. I like everything about her. Her wacky sense of style, those green-and-white-striped leggings that fit snugly around her toes and all the way up around her tiny waist. The red-and-white apron-cum-dress she wears, which conveys culinary adeptness and chic leisure at the same time. The enormous puffy pink hat with a strawberry decal on the front of it, so big that SS could easily pull it down over herself and disappear into a world sunlit pink. This is what I do many weekend afternoons in my bed: pull my pink blanket all around myself and look at the light pastel tent it makes around me, all the while munching on a little treat I’ve brought to enjoy—a handful of Cocoa Puffs, a few Fig Newtons, or a piece of leftover bakery cake from the Indian wedding, graduation, or engagement parties we attend frequently. I lie in my bed with SS on one side and my sweet treat on the other, and I think about marriage.

  This morning, my mother sat me down and gave me her monthly marriage talk. She crossed her hands on the table as if she were both a presiding judge and a plaintiff bringing a case against me.

  “Beta, this is tough time for you. Not only do you have to look out for the American girls anymore. Now you have to vatch the Indian ones. It used to be just the American girls who vanted a little hanky-panky, but now the Indian girls vant to hank and pank, too. And then there are these Indian girls who marry Indian men just to get their visas. And then vonce they’re over here, they start going to the Gap and run off vith all of your money.”

  Now she was blaming the Gap for the downfall of the good Indian wife.

  “Still, I vill find you a good girl,” she continued. I opened my mouth to complain. “Quiet, beta. Indians don’t just meet each other and have everything go all hanky-panky and start dancing to loud music. Girls are trouble. Your dad and I vill keep you out of trouble.”

  “But Mom,” I ask, “weren’t you once a girl?”

  “Homevork time.”

  I lie in bed now with SS at my side and wonder why I can’t find a girl like her to be my girlfriend. I think about my mom’s rules:

  “First, she must be good to me. Indian girls must always respect Indian mothers. Second, she must be able to cook. Not these instant foods—idli powder and dosai mix and that nonsense. I mean real food vith real ingredients. Third, she must be pretty. Those are the only requirements. And of course, she should be vell-educated and Punjabi and have parents ve know and like.”

  Vell, SS has got most of these things down. She’s well-dressed and she’s a good cook, and she must be well-educated because her strawberries are always fresh: Tanya Gibbons, a girl in my class whose parents are corn farmers, boasts that being a good farmer is a lot harder than people think because it takes a lot of planning and hard work.

  SS always fends off the Purple Pieman, so she clearly has street smarts, too. And even though she doesn’t have any family, per se, she does have all of her fruit friends, which I also own—Blueberry Muffin, Apricot, Apple Dumplin’, Huckleberry—and they are all nice and could get along with anybody, even my parents. And she could clearly be a good mother because she always takes care of her cat, Custard, who is also pink and fruit-scented. Being a good mother isn’t even directly in my mom’s requests, so it’s like extra credit for SS.

  But there’s the problem of her not being Indian. Even though I know SS is perfect in almost every other way, I know this is a big flaw of hers.

  Of course I know that SS is only a doll. And I know that I shouldn’t even be playing with dolls in the first place—not just because I’m a boy but because I’m probably getting too old to play with dolls anyway. But this is my fantasy, and I wrap myself up in it like I do my pink blanket, leaving reality and maturity behind. My fantasy may have big flaws, but lots of relationships have big flaws. Mr. and Mrs. Doyle, our neighbors, always yell at each other, and I once heard Mr. Doyle say to Mrs. Doyle, “A million cars park in your garage!” At the time, I didn’t know what he meant, thinking, “A million cars? They only have one old Impala.”

  Take my parents, for instance. They’re both Indian, yet they have their share of problems. When I was really little, the fights would occur right in front of me. I will never forget the first time I walked in on my parents arguing in the living room. This was in our old place, the one we lived in until I was seven, a tiny split-level house. The inside of the house was stiflingly tight, ten stairs shared among three floors. It was when I was four years old, in a room with dirty white carpet and one of those walls that’s one big mirror, that I saw my father throw a cushion at my mom, who was sobbing on the sofa. Who knows what they were arguing about—it could have been my mom’s shopping sprees—but the point wasn’t what they were arguing about so much as the fact that they were arguing. The rounded hunch of my father’s pose, the mixture of sternness and fire in his eyes, his irises surrounded by white all around, like a cartoon villain. The small figure of my mother, in her pink floral nightgown, and the way the tears on her face transformed her pale brown face into a beet. The way she clutched the cushion he had thrown at her, which didn’t hit her and bounce off but was caught in her pleading hands, her fingers pushing grooves into its red velvet. I stumbled in, descending from my room to the TV room downstairs; the cushion was thrown; I took the mental snapshot; and then averting my eyes from my father, who turned to look at me, I caught the reflection of all three of us in the mirror wall—my father’s hefty stance, made all the larger since he was closer to the mirror, my mother half-obscured by the potted plant that stood in the corner, and me in between them, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, nonplussed and frightened and so small that I looked like a clay doll.

  Four years later, we moved into a newly built house, the one where we live now, a resplendent, grand affair. My tight-fisted Certified Public Accountant father’s penny-pinching had paid off, and instead of ten steps, our house had stairways everywhere: that split staircase in the foyer that leads “up-a-stair,” as my father calls it; a triple-decker, carpeted staircase leading into our finished basement, which holds a Ping-Pong table—a staple of any Indian household even if its one kid doesn’t play Ping-Pong—and another large-scr
een TV. Gone is the mirror wall; now there are gold-framed mirrors everywhere, along with a motley crew of furniture. Indians are never able to throw anything away, and so my mother and father have insisted on using as much of their old furniture as possible. Therefore, though our sitting room has cathedral ceilings and tan plush carpeting, in it sits, almost boastingly, the blue couch from our old house, the back of it faded and sunburned from where it used to sit against the window; two rocking chairs that are straight out of an old Mother Goose picture book; and one “new” peach couch that still has the plastic wrapped on it a year after purchase. The walls are decorated with various photos that my dad has taken, with an occasional peacock feather tacked to the wall for no ostensible purpose. It is in this living room that I sit these days, doodling a picture of SS with Crayola markers, and hear the echoes of shouts from the master bedroom. It is worse this way, I think—with them out of sight. Who knows what is going on up there? What strange things are thrown…? I imagine my mother sitting on the bed, weeping, and my father grabbing things from her dresser—a bottle of lotion, a powder puff, a hand mirror—and chucking them into my mother’s strong-reflexed hands, which spring up and catch them as they once caught that blood-red pillow.

  Only after the fights have subsided for the morning does my mother reappear, positioning herself in front of the stove and cooking with a newly sharpened vengeance, her fingers pecking into dough. If I interrupt this state, she responds with something bitter like

  “I’ll show him who makes this house run.”

  or

  “I didn’t come to this country for this.”

  or even, one time, startling me so much I was convinced for a week that my mother had been possessed,

  “Oh, go to Hell,” which, not being able to enter the gates of Hades so easily, I took as meaning “go to your room” and locked myself away with SS on one side and a big bag full of depression on the other.

  The day after my mom’s lecture, I am in the kitchen with her, helping to make dinner. I sit at the kitchen table with a big tub full of boiled potatoes that I peel happily, the softened whiteness sticking under my fingernails. At first the potatoes are so hot that the steam starts to numb my palms, but after a few minutes the burning turns to warmth and I am soothed.

  “Mom,” I say. “Tell me about Krishna and Radha.”

  My mother, in the process of throwing cumin seeds into popping oil, mimics the effervescent sizzle upon hearing this request.

  “Bahut acha, beta”—very good—“Okay. Radha vas Krishna’s great love. Now there’s a good Indian girl. She vas a daughter of a yogi in Krishna’s town. She vas very beautiful—”

  “Yes, with long black hair, and kajol around her eyes,” I chime in.

  “Acha, beta! You remember the meaning of kajol.”

  She opens the cupboard and pulls out an Old El Paso salsa bottle whose contents she has replaced with masala. She opens the bottle and dumps some of the masala into the seeds and oil, a soft searing sound issuing forth.

  “Yes, she vore kajol, and everyday Krishna vould try to voo her by playing his silver flute. Every day he vould play and try to make her come hear him, and then vone day she came and fell under the spell of his playing.”

  “He had her in a spell? Isn’t that cheating?”

  “No, beta. She vas moved by the powver of the Almighty. Together, Krishna and Radha became the highest example of love.”

  As she talks about the Krishna-Radha paragon of romance, she pours a few cups of water into the seed-oil-masala mixture, and a deep rumble accompanied by a cloud of steam arises from the pot. I pull out another potato and peel a sliver around its contour, the newly sliced skin curling around my finger. A small stream of steam, like a forked tongue, escapes.

  And then, as she adds fistfuls of rice to her pot, my mother says, “In Hindi the vord for ‘lover’ and ‘Krishna’ is often the same. And I’ve alvays thought that your name sounds like Krishna’s. I think maybe that’s vhy I named you Kiran.”

  Sometimes I feel like my mind works like a Bollywood movie: I see the world as a fast sequence of colorful and even disturbing images. In my mind, I imagine an army of me fanning out across a dirty Bombay street, each Kiran dressed in a different pastel color but all of them united in their blue skin. Then I see those tiny Kirans running into forests and lying under bamboo trees, lotus flowers like pillows under their heads, reclining with beautiful Indian women with huge breasts, bigger breasts than the women in Penthouse. And I imagine every tiny Krishna Kiran romancing these women, gods and lovers united.

  Here at the kitchen table, I swear that a pink bubble erupts through me, and I imagine my blue feet, my blue legs, my blue waist, my blue torso and arms and neck and face turning lavender as the pink bubble passes through them. And then, in a gush, the blue returns, brighter than ever, as if having swallowed the pink bubble. Blue splotches appear like sapphires in my vision, and suddenly the potatoes are sliding all over the floor, wobbling and naked without their brown coats. The floor is wet with the still-warm water, and I am looking up at the ceiling. Rather, I would be looking at the ceiling, if I could see anything. I have gone blind. The blue has turned black.

  “Arre!” my mom exclaims, then kneels down. Her hands are still covered in the scent of spices, but she helps me to sit upright anyway. She leans me against the island in the kitchen, then takes a towel from the cupboard, soaks it in cold water, and puts it on my forehead.

  My father appears from his office, his face wrinkled in worry.

  “Vhat is going on,” he asks, and the fire in his eyes from the fight earlier in the day dissipates, replaced with genuine concern. Upon seeing me, he realizes it’s another one of my migraines and comes to my mother’s side, helping me into a chair and saying soothing words, his voice calm and comforting. “It’s okay, beta, just drink some vater—here.” He hands me a glass of water my mother has presented to him.

  I heave out a few sighs. The only thing I can feel is the water down my throat—and the prick of plastic limbs from SS, who is stuffed in my sweatpants pocket. I think of her, of us lounging in a patch of strawberries like we’re Krishna and Radha, and something about this brings me back. My vision blurs back in, like the opening of an old black-and-white Indian movie starring Raj Kapoor, and the image of my father and mother becomes half clear.

  “Kiran Beta, are you okay?” my father asks. He puts one hand on my shoulder.

  A mixture of smoke and steam rises from the burning rice behind him.

  A Dairy Downfall

  Krishna’s great weakness was butter. Mine is headaches.

  A few years ago, I started having migraines. Every once in a while, something sends my head into throbbing pain, and it isn’t predictable as to what that catalyst will be. I feel a flash of heat inside of me, and then my vision becomes crowded with light.

  People who’ve had near-death experiences describe a warm, white light creeping into their vision. This is sort of what I see when I have a migraine, except I see light in splashes of different colors. Each headache, then, is like a little death.

  I tell my mother this after I come to and am lying in bed, but she shakes her head no. “Arre, beta, don’t be so dramatic. Just keep the towvel on your forehead. You don’t want to miss school tomorrow.”

  But I do want to miss school tomorrow. I still have to contend with Sarah, Melissa, and Co. every day, and I’d much rather stay home and spend the day rummaging through Estée and looking at porn. And there’s the terrifying thought of having my migraine return at school. Luckily, to this day, I’ve never had one there, although I’ve felt them creeping up on me before. Once, when John Griffin put a worm on my chair after recess, I felt my face getting hot and quickly rushed to the bathroom, where I hid in a stall and took deep breaths until I felt a normal body temperature again.

  Luckily, I have a mother who insists on feeding me bodybuilding vitamins. She has put me in the habit of taking a Centrum tablet every day, like I’m seventy instea
d of twelve. She also insists that I take gingko biloba and echinacea pills, and three times a week, she mixes me a glass of a supplement called colloidal silver, which an American friend of hers has taken for years and which is apparently amazing for your immune system. My mother makes this concoction as methodically as she makes everything else on her stove; she uses the same wide stainless steel pot in which she makes daal. I have yet to see her various remedies make a huge difference in my health, but I appreciate her diligence all the same.

  I wish there were some medicine that could make my headaches productive, perhaps giving me a huge burst of intelligence every time I have one. Some way to transform my headaches from debilitating to empowering. Until then, I focus on Krishna’s downfall instead.

  I, like Krishna, have always loved butter. But I usually like it in things, not just by itself. I like when my mom makes roti because she uses a long, thin brush to spread a warm layer of Land O’ Lakes on the circular bread, the stuff softening the dough. I like butter pecan ice cream, mostly for its peaceful color. I love Butterfinger candy bars, the shock of orange they send through me. I love butternut squash, which my mom likes to mash into a paste, mixing in masala, salt, pepper, and butter. I scoop it up in one oily, buttery, soft roti.

  But it’s an altogether different thing to eat butter by itself.

  It’s 1992, and people these days have become obsessed with butter and its various forms—and, specifically, the cholesterol they all carry. This is the most sumptuous of times for people who have warring, sadomasochistic personalities, the type of people who love depriving themselves of creaminess. A chief member of this group—a doggedly dedicated member—is my father. His two halves—the nutritionist sadist and the starved masochist—are a match made in Heaven.