A House Is a Body

by Shruti Swamy

  Three days until her cousin’s wedding, and the whole family was too busy to show them around, which was just as well. At other times, Tejas had been passed around from aunt to cousin to distant cousin, never allowed to handle money or direct the day, often left for hours in rooms full of relatives who talked rapidly in a language she did not speak. The wandering with Al felt illicit and dangerous, though Al seemed oblivious to it.

  At night, they slept in the only bedroom in her aunt and uncle’s flat, while her aunt and uncle slept on the floor and sofa in the living room, respectively: no persuading them otherwise. The air conditioning was on, and the sounds from the street came in, even this high up, the endless firecrackers from the political rallies, day and night.

  “I feel like I’ve smoked three packs of cigarettes,” Al said, whispering on instinct. Tejas felt tired, but her mind was buzzing. She kept her body against Al’s nervously, wondering what it would look like to her family if they came in. She had her arms around her, and her nose and cheek pressed to her hair. Did sisters sleep like this?

  “Delhi’s worse.”

  “Delhi’s the worst.”

  “That’s right. We’re Bombay girls.”

  It made Al smile. “That’s right.”

  “It’s strange being with you in this room. It’s strange thinking that this room looks unfamiliar to you.”

  “What does it look like to you?”

  “This is where my grandparents used to live. There used to be a swing over there. And a Murphy bed. We came here every summer when I was a kid. I wish I knew what it felt like to see it for the first time.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t imagine it, I guess. But I wonder if it scares you.”

  “Not feeling familiar? Of course not, why would it?”

  “Nothing scares you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You have bigger muscles than me.”

  “But smaller boobs.”

  “So what. I like them.”

  Al turned in her arms and brought her face close. Tejas put her fingers on the ridges of her spine, which she could feel through her T-shirt, and made Al seem like a creature, a stranger. Al’s skin bruised and burned very easily, but Tejas’ was thick and tough and spread the heat of the sun to her blood and muscles. She wondered so often what it would be like to be in Al’s skin, in her body, to use her muscular arms, to look down at her small, sweet breasts. This lack of imagination made her feel so far away from Al. To look at a white leg in the shower going red with the heat of the water and think: me, my leg. What did India look like to Al? What did Tejas look like? She wanted to see, and couldn’t, and never would.

  “Do you ever think of telling your family here?”

  “About what?”

  “About me.”

  “No, never. What’s the use? They wouldn’t understand.”

  “You just act so different around them.”

  “Everybody does around family, don’t they?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You never told your grandma.”

  “She’s almost dead,” said Al. “It would just confuse her. You know that.”

  “Yes,” Tejas said. She rested her hand against Al’s left breast, where her heart thudded, feeling the vibration like her own. Al’s parents were professors, and had happily introduced Tejas as their daughter’s partner to the extended family at Thanksgiving before Al’s Nana arrived. Tejas’ dad had required a little more explaining, but he put up no protest, and played chess with Al after dinner while Tejas washed up. Their game was quiet but very long, and Tejas lay in bed listening to the shimmering the crickets made out of the summer night, imagining the click of the pieces moving across the board. The game was close, but she won, Al reported as she crawled into bed. Next to Al, Tejas could close her eyes and forget where she was, if only for a moment. But there was the rubbery smell of the Indian mattress and camphor from the sheets. Al’s smell, the smell of her breath, the fennel seeds she had chewed after dinner. And then, sleep.

  Eight of them went out to dinner: the groom-to-be, Tejas’ cousin V; his mother; the aunt and uncle who were hosting Tejas and Al; two more cousins. Greetings were awkward—who to hug, who to shake hands with, whose feet to touch. She pushed Al out in front of her and made her say the phrase of practiced Hindi. Then it seemed easier. The mother of the groom clucked affectionately, and patted Al’s cheek. The cousins smiled, shyly, at Al, who had dressed in a rush and still had wet hair. Tejas too, and her hands went up to her short hair uncertainly. They walked to a restaurant just across the street, still it took them a while to find a gap in the traffic. The aunts took the longest. Tejas sat next to V at dinner, and quickly ran out of things to ask him. Work was good. He was tired. His fiancée was smart and worked for a phone company, she was shy—they’d meet her tomorrow, at the wedding. How was life in America? Trying to put words to it seemed futile. She lived with and fucked a woman, spent weekends in parks and libraries, reading novels, she worked at an advocacy group for homeless youth, she drank beer on weeknights and went dancing. She told him things were good, they were fine. Her father was fine, sorry he couldn’t make it. Her work was fine.

  Across the table from her, Al was receiving an impromptu Hindi lesson from the uncle, which consisted of saying short phrases to her in a loud voice, and grinning at her response. Al soldiered through the meal with a kind of determined calm, finishing everything on her plate like Tejas instructed so as not to be rude. Yes, she liked the food, spicy food, though it made her nose run, and her face redden, yes, she liked India, she thought it was beautiful, she accepted their compliments on her own beauty and sweetness with a deepening blush, redder still than her sunburn. Then the conversation switched to Gujarati and Tejas tuned out. She studied V, his gentle hands that looked so much like her mother’s. He had a round face pearled with sweat, and a satisfied smile. The food took her right to the limit of how much spice she could manage, it embarrassed her to struggle so much. She wiped her face.

  “Next, your turn!” said an aunt to Tejas, suddenly in English. “When you get married?”

  “Not soon,” said Tejas, glancing over at her two unmarried cousins. But they were younger, and boys, so it could be years before they’d take the pressure off.

  “Must be soon,” said her uncle. “It’s time for you.”

  “We find you a husband,” said the other aunt.

  “No,” said Tejas. Her ears burned. “I don’t need help.”

  “You need help, beti! Look at your hair. Who cut your hair off like that? Like a boy.” The aunt, the groom’s mother, clucked her tongue. She was round, the more talkative of the two, with smooth, fine, infinitely soft-looking skin, plump with age. “You tell her, Halberta.”

  “I think your hair looks lovely,” said Al.

  “No, no,” said the aunt. “You tell her!”

  “Maybe you should think about getting married,” said Al. She looked amused. Her hair had dried with the thick evening air in no time. She looked tan and easy.

  “Hanh,” said the aunt, satisfied. “You see what I mean?”

  They slept deeply that night, tired from the day’s walking and the attention that listening to relatives requires, though once, in the middle of the night, Tejas woke disoriented, and blundered into Al’s soft body as she got up to use the bathroom. Al’s mouth opened, she let out a small sound. “Al?” said Tejas, now awake.

  “Mmm?”

  Tejas kissed her warm face. Al reached for her. It was like home. They kissed, mouths closed, Tejas climbed on top. Al’s eyes came open, gray-blue in the thin light. Her face on the pillow was immensely large, soft with sweat and sleep. The more Tejas looked at her face, the larger and less familiar it seemed, like a word said over and over again until it loses meaning. Then it was just one thing next to another, the gentle curve of a nose, all shadow, the pits of shadows where eyes go, wet and reflective, blue cheeks, an open mouth. Tejas put a hand on Al’s lips. Her breath huffed
out of her, and warmed the fingers. They moved against each other, being quiet. Tejas closed her eyes. They had been holding tense and apart for weeks, it felt sweet to let night touch everything with forgetting. Then Tejas began to forget everything. Her closed eyes colored everything black, as though she were in a pit with herself, or submerged in warm ocean, swimming against it, and tightening, feeling herself rise and build. She was building herself, out of nothing, it felt urgent. Her eyes came open. The body was the plainest truth, it was everything. What was her own name? The core came alive. Alberta, Alberta.

  The wedding was noisy; they danced in the procession together in front of the horse. Al was clapping, laughing, sweating, in a gold sari and jewels in her hair, hands stained with fresh henna. Everything about her seemed pale and out of place, and Tejas, tugging at her own sari, leaf green and endlessly sequined, felt a strange, leaping feeling start at the pit of her, and move upward. There were drums, a trumpet, the music was thick and overpowering as they moved through the narrow street, pressed on both sides by buildings lined in every place by centuries of dirt, still beautiful, almost trembling with the noise and crowd. The family loved to see Al dance; she took it up gamely, laughing with them. It was too loud to speak. They arrived at the hall, and the bride was there, shining from every part of her, glittering even at the fingernails. Her cheeks were pale and fawny, her lips carefully made, red. Someone anointed V’s face with sandalwood paste. Pictures, pictures, pictures, then the groom went with the family into the hall to await the official arrival of his bride. He sat on the decorated seat in front of the fire and checked his phone.

  Al and Tejas watched the bride carried in, sitting in a covered palanquin, red and spangled, carried in on the backs of her cousins and brothers. The drum felt like a shared heartbeat, racing with the excitement of the moment she would step out, eyes lowered, and be looked at by all the eyes, shining for them like a divine thing. She looked so calm, downcast, radiant, her shyness, it felt as though they should ask for her blessing. This would never be hers—Tejas’s—none of it. To have family come and carry you on their backs to the next place. For a moment it made her want to cry: she had not chosen it. And as the ceremony dragged, the monotonous Sanskrit, the thousand flowered offerings, Tejas let her eyes fall upon the bride, again and again. Now V dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief, now touched hands with the bride over an offering, saying a phrase in his mouth and then giving it to her to say. All around them the guests were gossiping, and greeting one another, and laughing, the children raced around the hall, screaming, ignored. The heat from the day mixed with the heat from the fire and the smoke.

  Al shifted in her seat. She wiped at her eye, there was something in it. Then she took up Tejas’s hand and kissed it, quick, when nobody was looking.

  The Neighbors

  At that time my daughter was eight, and my son had just been born. I sat on the front lawn with him and stopped him from putting fists of grass into his mouth. It was late July, and hot, a rich, thick heat that reminded me of the descent into summers of my childhood in India. My son gazed up at the trees in wonder. Still small enough to look slightly absurd, almost like a fish with the gaping mouth and eyes, but then he would move his head a little bit, wave his arms, and he would look suddenly, startlingly human.

  My daughter came running down the street with no shoes on. Only this morning I had combed her hair, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her.

  “Mom, someone’s moving in to Mrs. Hildebrandt’s house.”

  There was a moving truck pulled up in the driveway of the empty house at the end of the street. We could see them through the trees. A girl—then two—emerged from the passenger’s side of the cab, from the driver’s a tall man, then a short-haired woman.

  “Where are your shoes?” I said. I watched the family as they opened the door to their new house. In fact I had been keeping an eye on the place since it became vacant. It had a similar floor plan to ours, all the houses on the street were Eichlers, but better sun in the yard, and the last owner, an elderly woman who had died some months ago, planted roses that bloomed even in her absence, and not one but two fruit trees, lemon and orange. The girls ran in first. The woman stood a few paces away from the door, and the man behind her. She turned to the man to say something to him. She was much smaller than him, and had to lean up to do it. The man put his hand on her head, right at the nape of her neck. She looked so vulnerable there, at the back of the head, with her hair so short, short like a baby’s, so close to the soft skull. His hand there was familiar to me, the gesture full of the brutal tenderness of husbands. I couldn’t see her face to tell if she was happy or sad.

  That evening I lay my son down in his crib and went to the bathroom to comb my hair. Almost as soon as I put him down he began to cry, and the door didn’t blunt the noise. I wanted to comb my hair. When I was younger, my hair was thick and rich and scented, after washing I used to spread it on a wicker basket under which burned a lump of frangipani. Once as a girl, finishing the thread I was using to sew a dress for my home crafts class, I had plucked a strand of my own hair and threaded the needle with it. It was long enough and it held.

  Of course I lost quite a bit of my hair after my two pregnancies, which my gynecologist told me is common. For a while I thought my hair would grow back, but it never did. Then I began to comb it less frequently, sometimes I forgot for days. I had remembered today because of the woman and her short hair, which had shocked me. But she had seemed beautiful, even from such a distance. I could hear the mewling cries of my son, rising in pitch and frequency. The reflection in the mirror surprised me. Who was that woman? I thought of myself as young, a girl, and hardly ever looked at myself anymore. Then I began to comb my hair, tugging hard at the snarls, so hard that my scalp bled. When I was finished it lay flat and shining against my skull.

  It was three days later when I opened the door to the neighbor woman. She had baked a batch of pale cookies and seemed to be visiting the entire neighborhood with them. Up close she was older than I expected, older than me, her face all angles, as well as her body, which was so slender it was boney. She wore a pale blue dress that left her legs and freckled arms bare. Under the right eye the skin was slightly darkened, the ghost of a bruise. Her two girls stood behind her. The elder was surely my daughter’s age, the younger, no more than three, plump, with bright gold hair, like a little doll.

  “God it’s hot as anything out here,” the woman said, handing me the cookies. A bit of hair stuck to her damp forehead. “I didn’t feel like baking, but when you move you should always bake something for the neighbors, I think. Anyway, I hope you’re not allergic to anything or vegan, they’re lemon cookies—lemons from the tree—” she pointed to her yard, “I didn’t want them to go to waste. I’m making marmalade with the rest of them—the oranges are too sour to eat. I don’t know anything about orange trees.”

  The sound of the sprinkler, two houses down, hissed up between us. The woman smelled of flowers, yellow flowers I imagined. Other neighbors had made similar overtures over the years. But after a little while, they left me alone. “I don’t know anything either about orange trees,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t even say my name,” she said. She was older than me, but her face looked young, and flushed slightly like a girl’s. “I’m Luisa. And this is Camille and Geenie. My husband, Richard, is at work. We moved in to the house down the street. They’re shy, the girls are. Say hi, girls.”

  “Hi,” they said. The elder’s voice sounded bored, the younger’s was a whisper.

  “Would you like to come in?” I said. “My husband is also at work.”

  Luisa looked down at her two girls, then looked back at me. A strand of gold, terminating in a tiny star, hung from each ear. “That would be wonderful.”

  I led them inside—seeing the shoes at the door, they took theirs off on instinct—and sat them down in the living room, where the baby, in his swing, had began to bunch up his face, but he relaxed
when he saw me, held out his arms. I carried him so much in those days that my body had gotten used to the extra weight. When I put him down, there was a feeling that came over me, almost like vertigo, a mixture of dizziness and exhilaration, of terrible, terrific lightness. It wasn’t like this with my daughter, who was always independent and self-contained as a cat, and who had learned to read when she was five, which was when I lost her to her mind’s vast interior. She was her father’s child.

  “A baby!” said Luisa, “He’s beautiful. How old is he?”

  “Four months,” I said. He smelled of milk, my baby, and he grasped my shirt in his hands and wiped his nose against my shoulder. “His name is Manoj. I’ll get my daughter, I think she’s your age, Geenie.”

  Then I went to the bottom of the stairs and called her, sweetly and urgently, so they would think I was a good mother. “Manisha!”

  She took a while to appear. Backlit by the window at the top of the stairs, there was a crown of hair frizzed around her head, and I couldn’t see her eyes. The soles of her feet were also out of my vision, but their state I could guess; black from her barefoot summer, black and leathery, like the child of a beggar. “What.”

  I spoke to her in Hindi. “The neighbors are downstairs. The new neighbors. Will you come down?”

  Her body held the heaviness of a sleepwalker, but she came, and followed me back into the living room. Luisa sat on the sofa with a girl on either side of her, and they were talking in low voices. I could hear the unmistakable sound of whining, and the equally unmistakable sound of stern hushing. “Manisha?” said Luisa, she said it like an Indian, with a soft uh sound instead of a hard a Americans put in the first syllable. Manisha, my daughter came home crying with anger her first day at school from the cruel mispronunciation. “This is Geenie, and Camille, and I’m Luisa. Geenie’s going to be starting fifth grade in the fall.”