Aerogrammes

by Tania James

She slapped spoon after spoon of rice onto his plate, building a hot white heap he couldn’t possibly finish, then stuck the ladle in the colander and went to her room. Moments later, I could hear water gushing from her bathroom. She always took a shower when she wanted to cry.

  My grandfather picked up each grain of rice that had scattered onto the table and placed them in a neat row on the edge of his plate. I stood and spooned some rice off his plate and into mine.

  After dinner, I trimmed my grandfather’s nails. He sat on the edge of the tub, staring drably at the drain, while I sat on the closed toilet, newspaper spread across my lap. Normally, I prided myself on my lapidary nail-cutting style, but today I made quick work of each finger, three brisk bites and on to the next.

  He sniffed the air. “I can smell the nishagandhis. It’s the midnight hour, when they bloom.”

  I maintained a pointed silence. All I smelled was a plug-in air freshener.

  “Why am I here?” he asked the drain. His hand began to rattle in my own. His was flat and pale, limp as a glove. “Your mother never liked me. That’s no surprise. I just wish I had some other place to go.”

  I wanted him to stop, for once. Dinner had left me shaken and guilty. I picked up a shard off the floor, a thick gray crescent. “There is nowhere else to go,” I told him.

  “Except down the drain. Remember?” I didn’t respond. “Oh, you never remember. Should I explain it again?”

  He blinked at me with his small, merry eyes, so much like my mother’s.

  “I know where you can go,” I said in English.

  It always unnerved my grandfather when I spoke to him in English. His smile faded and his face grew cloudy. His eyes moved from left to right across my face, as if he were trying to read my features.

  “To a nuthouse,” I said. “That’s where you belong.”

  He looked away. He began cracking his knuckles, methodically, up one hand and down the next, wincing as if he were causing himself pain, which filled me with a different sort of pain, awful and eviscerating, that helplessness.

  I clapped my hands over his knuckles. “Okay, it’s okay. Tell again about the drain.”

  He took up where he’d left off, mostly repeating the details he’d already told me many times before. I cradled his hand and finished the rest of his nails.

  In homeroom, Mrs. Main sorted through the Toy Drive box and singled out the gifts she liked best: the seven-piece tea set, the pair of badminton racquets, the plastic sewing machine that punched yarn through paper. She dangled a silver pistol between two fingers and called it “inappropriate.”

  I was half-hoping that Mrs. Main would call my gift “inappropriate” too, and that she would return it to me as she had returned the toy gun to an indignant Randy Porter. Instead she deemed my donation “excellent.” She said it was thoughtful of me to gift the children with an ethnic doll.

  Of course I wasn’t planning to leave Ethnic Ken in the Toy Drive box. I thought about sneaking in during recess or getting a detention, pulling off the heist, and keeping him under my lint-ridden bed for all eternity. What could I do to get a detention? Walk barefoot to the bathroom? Say shithead with the authority of an eighth grader? Public disobedience didn’t come easily to me, like a side ponytail I couldn’t really pull off.

  I was still hatching plans when Newt twisted around and whispered, “Which part of him glows in the dark?”

  “His Afro,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “No. Just his vest.”

  Newt grinned, paused in a way that seemed to mean he was sorry. I knew Lydia Coe was giving me massive amounts of stink eye, but I couldn’t help smiling privately at my desk. That was how much I missed him.

  By recess, Newt had abandoned me again. I sat on the front step of the kindergarten building, at the top of a tall concrete flight of stairs, trying to concentrate on my library book, Amazing Myths from Around the World. I kept eyeing Newt in the distance, merenguing on the asphalt with his little fan club. It was hard not to watch. Even Mrs. Main came over, arms crossed, impressed. He glided from step to step, his feet always moving but his face relaxed, twirling a girl behind his back or looping her arms over his head—flirty, surprising moves. The girls always looked a little stiff, smiling anxiously as if trying to guess his next step, but Newt seemed to discover the dance as he went along. They kept time to the Gloria Estefan music pulsing from Lydia Coe’s mini-stereo.

  Lydia Coe was bopping along, off the beat. At one point, she released her ponytail, flipped her head over, and gathered up her hay-straight hair into an even higher ponytail—one of those elegant, thoughtless gestures that I’d never be able to make with my own fuzzy curls. The other day, I’d heard her in the bathroom with Betsy, saying that Daniel was super close to asking her out. I wanted to tell her that her calculations were off by miles.

  At some point during his dance, I caught Newt’s eye, then went back to scanning “Loki’s Quarrel.” I tried to look engrossed in Loki, whoever he was.

  At some point, Newt climbed the stairs and asked what I was reading. I clapped the book shut. “Nothing.”

  He sat down beside me. We watched the flock of girls he had left behind. They were still shuffling around, using each other as partners, not one of them as natural as Newt. “I can teach you, if you want,” he said.

  “I dunno. Salsa isn’t really my thing.”

  “Merengue,” he corrected me.

  I rolled my head around my neck, like my mother did when annoyed. “How can you dance so long with Lydia Coe? She smells like a coconut.”

  “Coconut lime verbena. It’s a body spray.”

  “I bet she can’t do the Running Man.”

  “Can you?”

  I shrugged like it was no big thing and picked at some pebbles between my feet. I could see him smirking out of the corner of my eye. “So who came up with Cotillion anyway?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds French.”

  “Like French people know about dancing,” I said.

  “They probably know more than you.”

  As he got up and walked away, I pitched a pebble down the stairs. “Yeah, well, you look like a total fruit out there.”

  At the top of the steps, he turned. I’d gone too far. My words cut close to the truth or what I had always perceived might be the truth. Last year, someone had penciled Fag Newton on the back of his chair, and I’d erased it, hoping he hadn’t seen.

  “At least I don’t play with dolls,” he said loudly.

  “I don’t play with dolls. I collect them.”

  But Newt was on a roll. He raised his voice to a yell. “And at least I have friends! All you have is your crazy grandfather!”

  I dropped the book and charged at him; he raced down the stairs. Halfway down, he tripped and fell forward, rolling the rest of the way in two or three thuds. I stopped on the stairs. Newt was no more than a crumple at the bottom, his cheek against the concrete, his foot at an odd angle. I couldn’t move.

  Newt twitched, whimpered. I hurried the rest of the way down. He shifted, just slightly, and told me to go get someone.

  I sprinted across the grass, past some of the girls, who were already running toward him. Lydia Coe shrieked above them all: “Amy, what did you do?” Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. I yelled for Mrs. Main, who, in her cowrie necklace, seemed suddenly a savior. With one glance at me, she started jogging in my direction, her shells chattering like teeth.

  “Newt,” I hyperventilated, pointing. “Fell down the stairs.”

  She uttered one word with total control—“Where”—and sprinted toward the crowd of girls, pumping her arms, as unaccustomed to running as I was to merengue.

  I watched from a careful distance. By the time Mrs. Main knelt down beside Newt, Lydia Coe was helping him sit up. His mouth was moving. He was telling them what had happened, how I’d raged at him like a rabid animal. Or maybe he wasn’t. No one looked my way.

  I went inside and put my head down on my desk, exhaling
frothy rings of vapor onto the Formica. My head felt tight and clogged. Through the window I could see Newt limping along, flanked by two boys, Mrs. Main, and several more girls helping shepherd him across the grass. It wouldn’t be long before Lydia Coe would come bursting through the double doors in search of ice packs. For now, it was just me and Ethnic Ken, stuck straight up in the pile of toys. The possibility of theft flashed and faded. It had never occurred to me that I could grow out of Ken in a matter of minutes, that “5 & Up” had a ceiling after all, and running straight into it left a lasting bruise.

  That night, I hovered in the doorway of the bathroom. My grandfather was squatting over the drain, probing each hole with a toothbrush whose bristles were splayed and gray. “I can’t get it clean,” he said. He dropped the toothbrush and folded his arms over his knees, shaking his head. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

  I sat on the ledge of the tub. Before he came to live with us, the tub was always speckled and laced with grime. Now it was a spotless, astonishing white, even the veins between the tiles scraped clean.

  He put his face on his forearms.

  “Look.” I dangled a red mesh bag of marbles in front of him. I’d felt a little guilty about lifting the little bag from the Toy Drive box, but those kids weren’t the only needy ones.

  He drew a quick, ecstatic breath. “Where did you find them, Ammu?”

  “Somewhere under my bed.”

  I expected him to question the label, which read, “Classic Marbles, $2.” Instead, his hand closed around the bag, clenched as tightly as every tale my grandmother had told him. “See, I remembered,” he said. “I remember everything.”

  I tore open the bag and emptied them into his palm. He fingered the different marbles—blues, yellows, reds, and clear ones ribboned with white—each a precious, painted planet. I rested my hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s hard, Ammu.” His chin trembled. “It’s hard being here.”

  I nodded and took the big cloudy blue from his hand, rolled it between my fingertips. I asked him to show me how to play.

  Light & Luminous

  • • •

  Minal Auntie didn’t sleep last night, imagining the moment she would be called to the stage and handed the trophy that has eluded her for the past four years. But now, as the competition wears on and one routine follows another, she grows drowsy. Her eyelids feel leaden. Next to her, a mother slings a towel over her shoulder and begins breast-feeding her baby beneath it, a bored look on her face.

  Minal Auntie leans away from the suckling sounds and opens the program. She finds her school—“Illinois Academy of Indian Classical Dance”—and beneath it: “Minal Raman, director.” Her girls are up next.

  Every year, Minal Auntie ponders whether to withdraw her students from the All-India Talent Showcase, an annual event that is thick with Indians and thin on talent. In her opinion, there are far too many routines featuring untrained folk and “fusion” dancers, like the six girls currently taking up space on the stage, shimmying and writhing to a tabla-laced rap song. Last year Minal Auntie complained about a similarly indecent number whose song included the lines “He fills my cup. / I like it rough.” To no avail. The worst part is watching tubby little Sanjali Kapoor thrust her hips this way and that, utterly unconvinced by her own sex appeal.

  For the past two years, the trophy for Best Group Dance has gone to Twinkle Sharma of Little Star Studios. When Little Star opened three years ago, Minal Auntie predicted a quick and happy collapse; who needed a teacher for raas and bhangra and Bollywood when one could so easily mimic those dances from movies or cousins? Somehow, Little Star swelled with more students every year, all of them deluded by Twinkle’s oft-repeated claim to having danced in Bollywood movies with the likes of Madhuri and Sri Devi. Whole legions have danced with Madhuri and Sri Devi, if “behind” is the same as “with.”

  At last, the belly dancers scuttle into the wings. After a dramatic pause, Minal Auntie’s thirteen girls file across the stage, hands tucked at their waists, their ghungroo jingling at their ankles. Minal Auntie sits up and buries her hands in her lap.

  First the girls do namaste, ceremoniously apologizing to the earth for the mistakes of their feet, touching fingertips to floor to eyelids. The gilded pleats of their costumes blossom open when they bend, close as they rise with their palms pressed together. They stand straight, knees locked, and wait. A few cheerful screams shoot through the dark: “Pinky! … Reshma! … Aarti!”

  Aarti is Minal Auntie’s grandniece, a new student, and the worst in the class. Minal Auntie can pick her out of the group at a glance: a dark, big-boned girl who copes with her size by slouching. Such a shame, to be born that dark. Minal Auntie knows, because she is equally dark, the black-brown of tamarind, a hue that surpasses the spectrum of foundation colors sold at Walmart, even those under the brand called Nubian Queen.

  But this is where the similarities end; Aarti has no grace, no confidence, no future on the stage. Her mother still maintains the belief that somewhere in the twisted ladder of her little girl’s DNA are the traits of a dancer. “What she needs is encouragement, chachy,” said Lata to Minal Auntie, leaning on a term of endearment she employs in times of need.

  So to appease her niece, Minal Auntie has positioned Aarti in the front and center, just for the opening of the dance. It is the simplest section of the whole routine, the part they have drilled the most.

  From five rows away, Minal Auntie can see Aarti’s pleats all atremble.

  The girls begin the jatiswaram with only their necks ticking from side to side. To Minal Auntie’s great relief, every neck is on point, not one lazy neck among them. The girls open their arms, palms stiff and arched. All right arms move like the oars of a mighty ship, circling the air to the held note of a woman’s voice. Thirteen left arms sweep another circle with equal precision.

  Soon enough, the ship breaks down. Twelve of the girls gather speed along with the beat, their gazes following the motions of their hands, their feet striking out and stamping to a single rhythm. Aarti is obeying the same rhythm, but with steps that belong to a later sequence. At first, it seems that her peers are her backup dancers, and she has come up with a solo of her own. She soldiers on, her eyes kohl-lined and blank, her lips a wide, terrified smear of red.

  Pinky mutters something at Aarti, who looks over her shoulder and slows, like a robot powering down, then falls in step with the rest. By now, her smile is long gone. Minal Auntie knows the feeling: there is no lonelier place in the world than where Aarti is standing now. The girls disperse into the next formation, and Aarti shuttles to the back, where she will remain for the rest of the dance.

  At home, Minal Auntie maps out the formations of the next dance she will teach to her class, for the India Day Festival two months from now. She pencils X’s and O’s on a yellow legal pad and intricate arrows between them. One of the O’s is underlined. Every X and O has a chance in the front, except for the O, who will enjoy one brief moment in a middle line but otherwise will be relegated to the back. This O is Aarti.

  Had Minal Auntie known that Aarti was the sort of student who needed underlining, she would have placed her in the beginner class. But Lata claimed that her daughter had attended a number of excellent dance camps in Ohio, under the auspices of some midwestern charlatan who refused to teach her students the proper names for each hand gesture. Instead of Pathaka, Alapadma, and Katakamukha, Aarti calls them Flat Hand, Flower Hand, and Deer Hand. She has never learned to hold her knees out when she bends them; after only a minute of aramandi, her knees cave in. At the school where Minal Auntie trained as a girl, Aarti’s calves would have suffered enough raps to mottle them black and blue.

  “That’s terrible,” Lata says when Minal Auntie brags about her old bruises and blisters. “Thank god we don’t live in Chennai.”

  Lata utters these remarks and frowns at her watch, disappointed, as always, by the time. She has just arrived to pick up Aarti from dance class, but already she h
as to run. In fact, it is rare for Lata to enter the house at all; she usually beeps and waves from her minivan as the door slides shut behind Aarti. But today Lata has a favor to ask: Can Minal Auntie babysit Aarti two afternoons a week? Lata is taking an income tax course and doesn’t want to waste ten bucks an hour on a babysitter.

  “I don’t know,” Minal Auntie hedges, “I’m very busy these days.”

  “Oh, if you have another class, she’ll sit upstairs and read or something.”

  Minal Auntie plucks at the frayed edge of her sari pallu. “I am in a book club. We get together in different-different houses. Members only.”

  “A book club?” Lata’s eyes grow round and curious. “With who?”

  Lata asks question after question, which Minal Auntie deflects with short answers. (Neighbors … Weekly … Whatever Oprah suggests.) “That’s wonderful,” Lata says, with a cloying delight that barely hides her disbelief. Just to end the conversation, Minal Auntie agrees to Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  The most popular magazines at Foodfest are the ones that offer help. The experts grin from every cover, beaming with the belief that anyone can drop fifty pounds or build their own patio or achieve a positive outlook. Minal Auntie turns her back on her register and clutches her arms against the chill gusting from the air conditioners. In passing, the manager taps his own name tag, BILL, and lifts his eyebrows expectantly. She takes the button out of her pocket and pins it to her red Foodfest smock, just above her own name tag. AM I SMILING? the button reads. IF NOT, YOU GET HALF OFF.

  There is little to smile about at Foodfest, where the automated registers are always beeping with customers eager to scan and bag their own items. Half the time, they jab the wrong buttons and stand there bleating for help until Minal Auntie comes to the rescue.

  The cashiers have been reduced to two per shift. Minal Auntie usually finds herself paired with Krista, a black college student with the flawless air of a pageant queen, every hair slicked flat and in place. Even her eyebrows are perfect. “I get them threaded at Devon Avenue,” she says, when Minal Auntie asks if she plucks. “How come you don’t go to them? That’s your people.”