Bombay Blues Read online

  —This is Dimple, Karsh announced warmly. —Dimple Lala.

  —Oh, yes, you’re the famous Gujju … began Rohan (econ, specs, shipping industry dad; it was rumored his family, unimpressed with his dorm room, had simply bought him an apartment at 1 Astor Place his freshman year).

  —Half Gujarati, half Marathi, I corrected. No one leaves Mom in a corner.

  —I mean, the famous ABCD photographer, he said, not unkindly, though American Born Confused Desi couldn’t exactly be said kindly, either. —You cover all those events, na? The desi clubs?

  —You come to them? I asked, unconvinced.

  —I went to one by mistake, he explained. —I thought it was a Student Association Against Student Associations meeting.

  He laughed alone. I wondered if he was considered funny in India.

  Save Shailly, who hailed via the US and UK, a little like Karsh, the entire table seemed to consist of Indians from India — which was not the same as a tableful of Indians from America. First of all, there was a bottle of surely requested Tabasco sauce on the blue-checked cloth, as well as packs of Classic Milds and weird Marlboros and Gold Flakes with an alarming black-lunged dude on the box, even though smoking wasn’t allowed. And second, the punch line of every jokey anecdote, even if the rest was laid out in English, always seemed to involve some element of a South Asian language. (Distressingly, Patels were included in many of these punch lines, and I was related to a lot of them.)

  But mainly, no one seemed to be having a discussion about the diaspora. Most of the American desis I knew at least hit on this issue at some point, usually with self-conscious self-importance.

  Later, Karsh, who was learning Hindi in preparation for this trip, translated what Mallika had said when I’d entered: Here comes Karsh’s wife!

  I looked at my husband now: benchside, that beautiful burnished profile, long straight nose, tidy chin beard. His kind eyes were deeply shadowed. After he’d received the news of his father’s death, Karsh had thrown himself into his work. He’d always been passionate about what he did, but something had shifted in that passion — a kind of desperation underlying what had once been pure joy.

  For her part, Radha, Karsh’s ob-gyn mom, delivered more and more babies oozing thickly into the world, a furrowed nostalgia already imbuing their expressions for that safe dark ocean now crossed and lost. The first diaspora.

  She and Karsh’s dad had been estranged for years. He’d been a compulsive gambler who’d nearly shuffled and staked away their very home. The pair had been friends with my own parents in med school in Bombay — in fact, my parents had tagged along on their first date to “chaperone” them (or, more likely, provide an escape route were it all to go pear-shaped). On that muggy night composed of sidelong glances and bashful laughter, it was my parents who fell in love.

  Karsh never talked much about the years he’d lived with his father, before Radha had decamped them, leaving his dad to India. But I knew Karsh’s love of music came from him — Pandit-ji Ravi Shankar and Bollywood beats to the Stones, the Stone Roses, the blues, the Moody Blues. Zeppelin. Their home had been tipsy with spinning records, the hiss of needle touchdown synonymous with Daddy home: Boney M.’s “Brown Girl in the Rain” playing one blustery UK night, a very small Karsh half-dreaming on the sofa, his sleepy perspective aligned with his parents’ jeaned-and-salwared hands-on-hips sway, his father singing along, his mother’s hushed laughter and surely a kiss as the lyrics rose a notch higher off vinyl.

  It was one of Karsh’s earliest memories. The song was also actually “Brown Girl in the Ring,” as he later discovered, but he could never hear it that way even after standing corrected.

  A year after Karsh and I got together, the tragic tidings were conveyed: His father had toppled from the side of a train en route to Victoria Terminus (Bombay trains were notorious for being packed on both the inside and out with tenacious travelers), mowed down in commuter darklight.

  The kindly landlord had gone through his father’s spartan room in Mazagaon, found and mailed Karsh two items. Karsh conjectured that one was from their shared past, a silver baby anklet (Karsh’s own?) that had trilled out of the pale pink envelope with its carefully scripted return address: CHDB, Casa de Saudade, in Matharpacady. The second item: a small gold cross on a chain, which had led him to speculate that perhaps his father had turned to another faith in his last days, as a last resort. The landlord’s note stated simply: He left these.

  I wondered where Karsh had cached away these keepsakes. He bumped his knee gently against mine now, gave me a querying look.

  —Your father, I told him.

  He was worrying that cuticle again, staring into his coffee cup as if seeking a fortune. But all he said, so softly, was:

  —Oh.

  —For whatever it’s worth, Karsh, I think your dad would’ve been really happy to see you, hear you, play there.

  —Who knows? he said. —I mean, he wasn’t in my life all those years when he was around … so what’s different now?

  Now he never will be is what I thought.

  —Maybe something about being in India will surprise you, I replied, trying to sound infectiously optimistic.

  —I’m very scared, Dimple.

  —About what you might find?

  —About what I’m not going to find.

  We fell into a synced silence. Dadaji had always offered words of comfort when it was time for us to separate after family visits, a Marathi message I’d learned to translate over the years.

  —Rani. Remember: We’ll be watching the same moon. We are never so far as all that.

  And perhaps we still were, he from an angle I simply hadn’t learned yet. I could feel a tingle climb my spine as fear flipped onto its belly, turned into anticipation.

  As we made our way to Queens, my mother, clearly getting in the spirit, now informed us that this borough was basically invented in India: named for Catherine de Braganza, Infanta of Portugal, England’s first and trendsetting tea-drinking queen, whose dowry to Charles II had been the islands of Bombay (though he’d believed them to be in Brazil at first). The two nations had apparently concluded that this relatively blind date would be the most beneficial of unions and, very greedaciously, had arranged their marriage.

  —A statue was made of her, to be placed on the East River. But it was never cast in bronze, is just lying somewhere in an altoo faltoo upstate New York foundry, my mother rued with surprising emotion. —Demoted to a lady-in-waiting …

  —Or promoted, I suggested. —Could be she’s just bailing on her geographically challenged husband? I mean, I know guys hate checking maps, but this is a little much….

  My mother didn’t laugh, but from his flinty jet-black rearview eyes, I was pretty sure our taxi driver, Mr. Abdul Ashraf (formerly of Detroit), did.

  We arrived at JFK four hours before the recommended three hours ahead of flying time, as was to be expected when traveling with my mother.

  —Twelve o’clock on the dot, my father said gently, with the closest thing to an eye roll he was capable of. (Basically, it was a little wink, accompanied by a very sweet smile in my direction.)

  My mother intercepted the smile and grinned back triumphant.

  —Yes, twelve o’clock. Better to be waiting at the airport than at home, and then hitting a blockage on the Turnpike and delays at the Verrazano, followed by a hopefully not too harmful accident on the Belt Parkway.

  —We should’ve been just a few hours earlier than this, I remarked. —Then the time difference between our arrival at the airport and flight time would have been the same as in India, and we’d be over our jet lag as soon as we embark.

  —Dimple, this is not very mathematical, my mother sighed. —In any case, it is important to be early.

  Clearly, no one else heading to JFK got that memo, as we entered and walked straight up the non-line to the heavily lipsticked check-in lady: Shilpa Singh, as her name tag declared.

  —My namesake! my mother, Shilpa Kul
karni Lala, exclaimed.

  —Did you pack your bags yourself? Shilpa Singh replied in what I was pretty sure was a Brooklyn accent.

  My mother always got slightly offended at this question. My father could see it coming, and gave me a look.

  —It’s a standard security question, he now pointed out in unison with Shilpa (Singh).

  —Obviously! my mother huffed. —You think little elves come out at midnight and fold all my linens, too?

  Shilpa just raised her better-than-Bloomies threaded brows, which made me suddenly wonder whether she was in fact from Jackson Heights.

  After this assault on my mother’s ability to function as an independent bag-packing liberated woman, we continued on to experience the joy of our first full-body scan at the airport.

  I was already a little tense as I put my bags through. I had a couple items that I was concerned about. The first was Chica Tikka. I didn’t like people manhandling her too much. And the second was … well … the Condomania pleasure pack tucked away in the inner pocket of my camera bag.

  Though I had learned to live with and even embrace my bodaciousness since high school, as we approached the teleporteresque booth for the scan, I started to get that old familiar feeling: a thighs-stuck-together baby-belly dressing-room-hell self-conscious sensation of being a chubster. My jeans suddenly tightened around the hips, my “I Wanna Be Your Dog” Iggy Pop tee tensing across the chest.

  —Beta! my father said, alarmed. —You aren’t looking so well. Why aren’t you breathing?

  —I’m trying to suck in my stomach.

  —Dimple, he sighed. —This isn’t a contest for most attractive full-body scan. It’s a weapons check.

  The TSA dude was gesturing my mother through, but she stopped dead in her tracks.

  —Now, sir, I’ve read that I have the first option for the right of refusal as far as this full-body scanning business is concerned, she announced, rather grandly.

  —Ma’am, with all due respect, this check is for national security. If we’d had this system in place back then, we could’ve even stopped that underwear bomber from boarding.

  —Sir, do I look like I have explosives in my underwear?

  He didn’t really look like he knew how to answer that one.

  —Well? my mother insisted.

  —Ma’am, you can opt for a pat-down instead.

  She stepped aside, considering it. I was left in front.

  —Pat-down? TSA dude offered me now.

  —I’m not really looking for anything serious right now, I said. —I’ll just do the scan.

  —Dimple! Are you sure? my mother cried.

  I stepped past the magnetometer into the booth — lifting my arms above my head like some time-traveling criminal. In the end, my mother went through as well.

  After security, it was time for Mom’s required round at Swarovski, where she scoped out some gifts for Sangita and Kavita (who was already out there from NYU) and Meera Maasi. I also knew she was mentally noting the designs on some of the other items as well, to order replicas for less in India.

  —The fake ones are often the sparkliest, she commented as we exited and joined my father, who usually hovered at the entrances to stores such as these. I wondered whether our ladies of Andheri would prefer fake to diamonds, but I guessed we’d soon find out.

  After a few hours midair, my mind drifted from the ostensibly “rip-roaring” Bollywood comedy that was spectacularly (and surely exorbitantly) failing to make me laugh. I found myself thinking of my high school best friend, Gwyn, who’d often spoken to me about her yearning to go to India, her feeling she’d find home there at last. Lots of white people seemed to feel that way about my motherland, and I often wondered why for so many years I hadn’t. When we were kids, Gwyn had considered our house a treasure trove, lingering over the cans of mango pulp, unconsciously crossing herself every time she passed the kitchen temple (in a doorless cupboard): an ivory Krishna, flanked by incense, Pier One candles, a silver pot of the kumkum my grandmother pressed between my mother’s brows when she left India, the crisp Lotto ticket that was proof of my parents’ eternal optimism (or perhaps pessimism) about the American Dream, and the black-and-white photograph of Dadaji. At her own single-and-hungover-mothered home, she’d confessed, she would pore over maps, hunch over the spinning globe, willing her finger to land on that elephant trunk triangle delving gently into the Arabian Sea, predicting her future sojourns there.

  Me, I’d fled the other way. At that time, I’d wanted more than anything to have Gwyn’s blue-eyed, blue-jeaned ease in the ways of all things American. But, though it was buried beneath my fruitless quest to blend in at Lenne Lenape High School, my gut was engaged in a constant tango with India.

  Now I had Gwyn’s yearning as well, a desire nearly hormonal in its potency. I wondered if it had anything to do with my being (at least lineally) from there, or was a more general phenomenon, as so many people seemed to long for something in the Indus Valley — an unnameable but poignant sense of connection and disconnection, to be embraced by something bigger than themselves, wrapped so closely in the foreign that the usual became unusual and the strange, natural. The stranger a friend. The dream an undream.

  I’d voiced this sentiment to Gwyn once and she’d nodded pensively, then added, eyes reveried:

  —Plus, they have such amazing fabrics and jewelry. And the food …

  It made me smile now. This was typical Gwyn, operating on all levels — the most superficial as relevant as the spiritual.

  It had been ages since I’d really hung out with her, and here, away from the distractions of street-level living, I felt both her acute presence and a spiked loss. We’d had our hard times but had always managed to work through them, most notably that seventeenth summer when she’d fallen hard for Karsh, and I had as well — a split second after her declaration. We’d spent that season, sticky with watermelon and jalebi, lip gloss and bindis, engaged in a tense does he/doesn’t he, loves you/loves me not.

  We’d fallen out then. Though superficially about Karsh, the fault had run deeper, all the way to our latent longings to swap places. But in the backyard playhouse where we’d passed childhood afternoons dreaming a twin dream of sugar tea, pirates, queens, we’d laid it all out on the knee-hunching low table … and then, over the coming weeks, glued those broken bits together again.

  We’d carried on all the way through our senior year, wrapping up our time at Lenne Lenape High as valedictorian (me) and not (her). I was with Karsh much of the time, either at NYU or back Jerseyside, when he’d drive his angel-winged beat-up blue Golf home to see me. We tried to include Gwyn, but mostly she elegantly stepped aside, said she had to find her own path.

  Gwyn spent those next couple years boyfriendless — while I was pretty much glued at the hip to Karsh. My first day at NYU, I already knew my way around campus, thanks to my frequent visits to see him. Gwyn didn’t get into NYU or anywhere else in New York City; instead, she deferred state college to take on a job assistant-managing this shoot-the-worm Tex-Mex joint by the mall cinema. She saved her pennies, deciding she wanted to educate herself by seeing the world someday, while my own family clanked so many of theirs into the university boar bank.

  After all that work sealing our rift, we simply grew apart. And the most painful thing was how painlessly, how naturally, it happened.

  I switched headphones from the movie to my music, Patti Smith mounting in my ears: There’s a mare black and shining with yellow hair …

  What ambled into mind as we soared through the ether, the visual counterpart of my burgeoning bursting aeronomic feeling about India, was not an image particularly Indian … but another kind of equine winging.

  Horse in Motion.

  In 1872, with a single photographic negative, Eadweard Muybridge proved a trotting horse was airborne at one point; many had thought this to be the case, but the human eye couldn’t capture this fleeting, blink-quicker moment.

  Until Muybridge, illustrato
rs painted horses in motion with one foot always on the ground, and when they portrayed them airborne, in “unsupported transit,” it was with front legs extended forward, rear to the rear. But the amazing thing was, it turned out that when a horse was in fact fully airborne, its four legs were all pull-pushingly bundled up beneath it.

  Essentially, Muybridge stopped time. He split the second and proved a mare could fly. So maybe a cowgirl could, too?

  When I first saw that image, I was filled with a corporeal conviction, that of the possibility of the impossible, that there was no dichotomy between them, in fact — rather, one was a bridge to the other.

  Vision: Horse hues powered my mind’s eye now. Dun, brown; chestnut, grey. Black. Roan. Roanoke — a part-mythical land, like the illusory sheen of the blue roans, the bay. The chimeric brindles.

  Sound: In my ears, Patti’s horses, horses, horses …

  This split-second negative frame made you realize: If you could slow down — or speed up — time enough to see what was truly happening around you, you just might find that everything was happening.

  As I drifted into a sky-deep siesta, it struck me:

  With a little luck, light, and just the right timing, despite all the years I’d, we’d, been away, the mythical Bombay I’d always harbored in my deepest diasporic imagination could exist, too. My Bombay, where the impossible could occur as well, and I might find wings and fins and all manner of things, a kind of completion — fitting-ins; my own missing link. Or, even better, a leaping out of frame, labels, and borders, into the extraordinary.

  Woozy from precipitately interrupted sleep (and slightly redolent of eau de bug spray after a total bushwhacking cabin-dousing by the air hostesses), my parents and I worked our way through Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in a daze. During childhood trips to India, the daze had been fueled by the complete chaos found therein, but this time, it was due to a fatigued amazement at how ordered everything seemed.