Aerogrammes

by Tania James

  As Minal Auntie dries her hands on a towel, the doorbell rings. It is Lata, flushed and cheery, with her hands in the pockets of a sweatshirt. “Chachy, could I bother you for a glass of water?”

  “What bother?” Minal Auntie waves her into the kitchen, offering other beverages and snacks. Lata declines them all, but Minal Auntie puts a plate of Nilla Wafers in front of her anyway. Rummaging around for clean glasses, Minal Auntie hears Aarti muttering with urgency about the amount of homework she has. “Then go sit in the car,” Lata says sharply. Aarti storms away in a huff.

  Lata takes the glass of water from Minal Auntie and swishes the ice around. “So, six classes left until India Day, chachy. Are you nervous?”

  “Oh, what is there to be nervous.”

  “I hear they’re bringing in a politician.”

  “That’s nothing new.” Last year, the India Day Festival was introduced by a small but peppy state congressman who commended the Indian community for its many contributions in fields as diverse as literature (Tagore), mathematics (the number zero), and language (words like pajamas and nabob), then left after the first act. “I’ve performed for all sorts of politician-type people.”

  “But have you ever been on Asianet?” For the first time ever, Lata says, Asianet will be taping the competition and broadcasting the highlights worldwide. “If you guys win, it’ll be amazing exposure for the school. Who knows, maybe student enrollment will go up.”

  “On TV?” Her stomach drops at the thought of what a television camera will mean. How it will take her picture and beam it into homes all over the world. Into Velu’s home, possibly the very same one in which he grew up. What if the camera zooms in? What will it see? And who else will see her?

  Lata takes a small sip of her water and says she better take off before Aarti starts honking. “But you barely drank your water,” Minal Auntie says. “Take a biscuit at least.” Lata makes her way down the hall, claiming that she binged on granola this morning.

  At the door, Lata pulls a small, folded paper from her pocket and gives it to Minal Auntie. She opens it, bewildered. It is a check made out to Minal Raman, in the amount of three hundred dollars.

  “It’s no big deal, really,” Lata says. “I should be paying you a lot more, what with all the hours she spends over here.”

  “Podi pennae!” Minal Auntie scolds her, half-mockingly. “I can’t take money from my sister’s daughter.”

  “Please, Auntie.” Lata looks pained. She glances at her sneakers with none of her usual breeziness. It is then that Minal Auntie understands: Lata has heard all about Foodfest. This accounts for her sudden desire to pay, her new interest in student enrollment. “Really. You have no idea how much I’d have to pay for a nanny service. Plus there’s the money you spend on gas—”

  “Take it back.” Minal Auntie speaks with the low control of an elder, Lata’s elder. “I don’t want your money.”

  Minal Auntie holds out the check between two fingers. Lata takes it and folds it twice, her head bowed like a scolded child. Minal Auntie remembers chasing Lata when she was just a baby toddling around her mother’s legs, wearing a sun hat and sandals and nothing else. “I’m sorry if I …,” Lata says, then shakes her head and flashes a weak smile. “See you next week.”

  Arms crossed, Minal Auntie watches the car pull away but does not wave. She returns to the kitchen and sits at the table, trying to reactivate the elation that came of Aarti’s words—even the clock stopped to watch. They taunt her now. The clock on the wall ticks on without pause, its noise interrupted by the occasional rattle of the icebox.

  With a week until the show, Minal Auntie goes to an Indian beauty salon on Devon Avenue. She sits in the waiting area with a magazine in front of her face, sure that Twinkle Sharma will walk in at any moment and give her that same false smile of surprise and compassion. You? Here?

  And why not? Over the magazine, Minal Auntie watches a stylist furl a long hank of hair around a brush, twisting her wrist at the end to sculpt a soft curve. The client stares vacantly at her reflection, spellbound by what she sees.

  Moments later, Minal Auntie is lying back in a barber chair while a threader attacks her eyebrows, upper lip, chin, and sideburns. Her eyebrow hairs will not go easily, the roots a torture to rip out. Minal Auntie clenches her armrests, a stray tear squeezing out the corner of her eye. The stylist continues without pity.

  After this is a cleansing process of rose water and soap, the cool burn of witch hazel. At last Minal Auntie sits up and looks in the mirror, pressing her fingertips to the tender contours of her face. The thin skin beneath her arching eyebrows and the space between them, the smooth plane of her cheek. It is an improvement, and yet, not enough.

  The stylist points to the cashier and says, “Pay there.”

  Minal Auntie musters the courage to quietly ask, “Have you heard of Light & Luminous?”

  “Hah, yes, we use this in the Fairness Facial. You want to have the Fairness Facial?”

  Does she? The stylist stands over Minal Auntie, hands on hips, waiting impatiently for an answer.

  “Okay,” says Minal Auntie.

  The stylist leads her to a corner of the salon, where Minal Auntie lies back in another chair and closes her eyes. The process begins peacefully, with warm towels draped over her face. Once the towels are removed, the stylist scratches at her pores with something sharp, a process so painful that Minal Auntie forgets to ask about the toxicity of Light & Luminous. A smell of sulfur assaults her nose as the stylist spackles a cool, grainy cream across her cheeks, her jaw, her forehead. She is told to wait within that stinking mask, so she waits. She feels foolish, all these young women circling her, chattering in Gujarati as if she is of no more consequence than a potted plant.

  Gradually, the bleach begins to tingle under her skin. She listens for the stylist’s footsteps to return. Just when the tingle begins to burn, the stylist comes back and scrapes away the cream with a warm, wet towel.

  The stylist gives Minal Auntie a hand mirror. “See?”

  Her color is only a slight shade lighter, just a hint of cream to her coffee, but unmistakable. There is a glow to her face, a lively radiance from within. The stylist is nodding, the others gathering around in a chorus of wonder and affirmation. Buoyed by these voices, she believes them. Her new self has expanded to fill the frame of the old, fresh and resplendent, immune to pain.

  At the India Day competition, the debris from performances past are strewn all across the dressing room floor: sprays of bobby pins and rubber bands, mirrors spattered with round red bindis and their sticky entrails. The air smells of waxy cosmetics and metallic aerosols. Throngs of girls fill the room, dressed in punjabis or chaniya cholis or classical costumes, except for Twinkle’s girls, who wear sequined black nighties over red satin pants, their outfits as simple as their routines. Twinkle remains nowhere to be seen, perhaps sealed off in a dressing room of her own. One hour until stage call. There are always more flowers to add, more hooks and eyes to fasten, enough details to quickly whittle two hours down to twenty minutes.

  Minal Auntie spends only a few minutes in the dressing room to inspect her dancers and give them last-minute tips. “Reshma and Rashmi, don’t confuse left and right. Pinky, when you call to Krishna, don’t make that sexy face. Backs curved. Knees bent. Fingers stiff. Okay?”

  They nod mechanically, absorbing nothing but in need of her attentions all the same. She has applied every faceful of makeup, has held each of their sharp little chins in her hand while lining their eyes with kohl. They stand around her like a pack of wide-eyed marmots.

  Minal Auntie tells her students to finish up their costumes, and she will return in thirty minutes to practice once more. Dismissed, the girls head to whatever space their mothers have staked out with garment bags and plastic Caboodles.

  Minal Auntie slings her costume over her shoulder and climbs the fire-exit stairs. The chaos of the dressing room fades behind to a distant echo. Earlier in the evening, she had
searched for a secluded space in which to change; the second-floor bathroom will do. Here the tiles are free of mildew, the mirrors clean, unlike the dressing room mirrors faintly gauzed with streaks.

  She hangs her garment bag on the bathroom door and draws down the zipper, releasing a wave of cedar scent, anxiety, adrenaline. She pinches the pleats, the gold still stiff though the wine-red silk has softened with washings and wear. She fingers each deliberate stitch her mother made along the shoulder in mismatching red thread. One by one, she fastens each of six separate pieces around her body, and though some of the hooks strain against the eyes, the costume hugs her as close as it should.

  Before tackling her hair, Minal Auntie drapes a towel over her chest and unscrews the tube of Light & Luminous. A week has passed since she left the salon with a brand-new face, and her old one has crept back into the mirror. She was planning to touch herself up in the morning, but with the whirlwind of bells and nail polish and bindis, she couldn’t find fifteen minutes for herself.

  She prepares the mixture, pauses, then taps in a bit more powder. Holding her nose, she frosts her face thickly. The sulfur smell fills her mouth.

  As the cream sets, Minal Auntie braids her hair, injecting bobby pins. Her skin begins to tingle. To distract herself, she thinks of Twinkle. Is she wearing the same outfit as her students, black sequins and red satin, a frayed scrap of red georgette pinned over her head? A warmth prickles across Minal Auntie’s skin. She draws deep breaths of air.

  Before she has a chance to rinse the cream from her face, she hears the jingling of footsteps down the hall, the lazy chatter of girls. She shoves her makeup into her bag and locks herself in the handicapped stall, moments before they burst through the door.

  Voices and the slap of bare, belled feet. “I told you guys there’s an open bathroom,” says Pinky. Minal Auntie nearly backs into the toilet, holds her breath. “We can practice in private here.”

  “What’s this white stuff?” Rashmi says.

  “Ew. It smells like pee.” A pause. “What’s ‘Light & Luminous’?”

  Minal Auntie’s eyes are stinging. Waves of cold seethe across her skin.

  “Dude,” Pinky says. “Is this what Minal Auntie’s been using?”

  “No way,” says Aarti. “She wouldn’t touch that stuff.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I wanted to buy some one time, but she wouldn’t let me. She said it was stupid.” Aarti hesitates. “She said your color is your color, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “She said it like that?”

  “Whatever,” Aarti says. “It’s true.”

  Minal Auntie is jolted by the sound of her own words in Aarti’s mouth, spoken with such flat resignation. It seemed, at the time, like honesty, meant to equip the girl with a tougher skin.

  “Oh, please,” Pinky says. “She obviously uses it. Her face looks all chalky and stuff. A facial doesn’t make you look chalky. I’ve had them before.”

  “Pinky, come on—”

  “No, I’m sick of this new Minal Auntie! She acts like our dance is her diva moment. She’s supposed to be our teacher.”

  “Twinkle Auntie’s dancing with her girls.”

  “I watched them rehearse,” Pinky says. “Twinkle Auntie goes on at the end for, like, a minute, and she’s in the back the whole time. She didn’t make herself the star. What Minal Auntie’s doing, it’s …” Pinky falters. “It’s embarrassing.”

  Minal Auntie waits for Aarti to defend her, but no one does.

  “So should we practice or what?” Rashmi asks.

  Minal Auntie can bear the stinging cream no longer. She unlocks the stall door, and aside from a few small gasps, the girls go dead quiet. She looks straight ahead as she strides to the counter. Turns on the faucet. Throws handfuls of water over her face. Gritty white dollops plop onto the porcelain of the sink.

  “Auntie, we didn’t know you were in there,” Pinky says weakly. Minal Auntie scrubs her cheeks in slow, mechanical circles. She feels spent, as though she’s been dancing for days and has nothing left. She can’t go onstage, knowing what everyone thinks of her. But she must. She has made herself the star.

  Minal Auntie dries off her face with a paper towel. In the mirror, her old face looks back at her, only the slightest shade lighter than her tamarind brown. With trembling fingers, she brushes her own cheek, just as she did at nine years old, when she snuck out of her house at nightfall, the hand mirror in her fist, to see if Velu was right. And here she thought she had outgrown that little girl, had shed her like an old, dead skin.

  “Auntie,” Aarti says. “Are you okay?”

  The gazes of the girls press against her on every side, their silence far louder than any noise they could make all together. She opens her mouth to speak, but a shiver passes through her as if she is still stranded in the middle of a night so dark, she has all but disappeared.

  Escape Key

  • • •

  All throughout childhood, my older brother refused to jump from the high dive, a phobia for which I gave him constant hell. “Amit is a chickenshit!” I’d yell, while leaping flamboyantly off the board. At twenty-nine, he dove off the roof of his buddy’s three-story condo. Later, he couldn’t recall his reasons or the fifth of whiskey in his system or the ER, where he lay with his neck locked in a collar, while my dad called to give me the news: He can’t move his legs. With my dad talking into one ear, I looked around my room. All my belongings were stuffed in a few distended boxes, words like FRAGILE and THIS SIDE UP scrawled on the sides.

  I rushed to the airport, feeling oddly calm even as I shuffled from ticket desk to ticket desk, even as I sat elbow to elbow at the gate, inhaling the intimate odor of my neighbor’s egg roll but lacking the will to rise and lose my seat. I opened my laptop and typed an e-mail to Katie, my roommate, asking her to post my boxes home. I wrote: My brother had an accident. He’s in the hospital.

  I hit send just as I realized that I’d sent the e-mail to the wrong Katie. I’d e-mailed Katie the bartender from Fiddlesticks, whom I’d gone out with a lifetime ago and never called back. I spent a few minutes trying in vain to un-send my e-mail. I held down the escape key, but it jammed, and in trying to jimmy it loose, I plucked it out. It lay like a tooth in my palm. That was when I closed my fist and lost it. A sudden silence piled up around me. I heard a little girl ask her mommy if I was crying. After a few moments of this, the egg roll guy gave me two of his napkins, and I blew my nose into his grease.

  I’d spent the past nine months as a writer-in-residence at a private boarding school outside of Boston, where I taught a creative writing class and occasionally messed around with Caryn, the English teacher. Teaching hadn’t come easily to me. For one thing, I hated most of my students, chief among them Judy Grubich, who called Mark Twain a douche for his scathing takedown of The Leatherstocking Tales. She couldn’t let a day go by without cussing out an author I loved. I thought I’d be molding young minds, but by the end of the semester, all I had molded was one very prickly critic who would be gunning for my first book, should it ever be published.

  Caryn told me not to feel bad. She said that she’d studied with some brilliant writers who were terrible teachers. “How do you know I’m not terrible at both?” I asked. She’d never read my novel, though she had casually offered to, more than once.

  “Not possible,” Caryn said. “You won that Prague thing.”

  The Prague thing: my first taste of recognition. I had submitted the opening chapters of my novel to a contest in which the winner would be flown to Prague for a two-week master class, followed by a six-month stint at an artists’ colony. I didn’t tell my brother or my dad about the prize. I knew what they’d say—“Did you get any money?”—leaving me annoyed and a little embarrassed.

  For the time being, I was content to imagine myself in Prague, typing by pallid moonlight, stone bridges and spires out my window. I’d always lived in relatively small, static towns. Prague seemed just
the place to bridge the person I was with the writer I wanted to be: traveled, ambitious, alone.

  A few days after the surgery, Dr. Tehrani showed us a series of X-rays. The rods that had been planted in Amit’s back looked like railroad tracks, blazing white against the ghostly outlines of his bones. “It’s too early to know what functions you’ll regain,” Dr. Tehrani said. “We’ll have to keep up with the physical therapy, take it one day at a time.” In the silence after his statement, I remembered how I knew Dr. Tehrani—from my parents’ dinner parties, his pouchy eyes perpetually apologetic, even when asking me, a little boy, where he should discard his paper plate.

  I half-expected my dad to argue with him, as if the fact that they were both doctors could lead them to bargain down the verdict. But no one spoke. Dr. Tehrani left. My brother, my dad, and I stayed very still.

  “Neel, hand me my phone,” Amit said. Before long, he was deep into a game of poker. My dad stared at the blank TV screen. We were lacking the kind of direction my mother would have provided if she were alive. She would have been sobbing or interrogating a nurse or tugging me by the sleeve to the hospital chapel. My mother had been the only religious one in the family. She died when I was ten, and I was pretty sure that no one had been praying for us since.