The Beauty of the Moment

by Tanaz Bhathena

  “Look at that. Now he’s breaking into lockers,” another voice calls out from behind me. “What are you gonna do, Malc? Leave your heart in it?”

  I snap Susan’s lock back in place and scatter the numerals before facing my old friend Justin Singh, who’s arm in arm with—surprise, surprise—my old girlfriend.

  “Making your way around the group are you, Afrin?” Steve says sarcastically. “Weren’t you sitting on Jerry’s lap in English?”

  “Stop being a hypocrite, Stevie,” Afrin replies with a toss of her silky hair. “You’d never say that to a boy, would you?”

  The answer is trademark take-no-guff-from-anyone Godafrin. The sort that would’ve made me push her up against her locker when we were dating and press my mouth to her clavicle.

  Afrin watches me now, as if hoping for a similar reaction and then, after getting nothing, plays with Justin’s collar.

  To Afrin, there was nothing more thrilling than to pit one guy against another, to see which one would get pissed off on her behalf and get into fights for her. For a long time, I used to be that guy. It was how we met the first time. At one of Justin’s parties, when Afrin’s ex-boyfriend began calling her every insulting name he could think of. Tipsy from my first few beers and a little belligerent, I stepped in, bent on rescuing her from a guy who looked like a reincarnation of the Hulk. I still have old scars on my arm from that fight, though it didn’t make Afrin fall for me.

  It took several more months and a couple more girlfriends in between before Afrin finally agreed to go out with me in eleventh grade. Back then, I thought she was the best thing that ever happened to me, the one girl I’d chosen to go out with for myself and not to spite my old man.

  Ahmed said that what happened with Afrin was bound to happen at some point. “You gave her too much of yourself,” he said. “And she gave you nothing in return.”

  I can feel his gaze boring into the side of my head now, can almost hear him warning me: Don’t take her bait.

  “We hooked up this summer,” Justin tells me. His hold on Afrin tightens. “Sorry, man. But it looks like you’re moving on already, aren’t you? With that new girl.”

  I still say nothing, not knowing why they both are here. There’s a hard glint in Afrin’s brown eyes. I saw it a couple of times in the past, once while we were playing beer pong with Justin’s nineteen-year-old university friends, once when a girl at a party showed up looking prettier than her.

  Only now it makes no sense. Afrin moved on after we broke up. She doesn’t love me. I don’t think she even liked me as much as she liked the idea of me fighting some other guy over her. I pull the strap of my backpack higher over my shoulder.

  “Gotta go,” I say. “Detention with Han.”

  Fingers latch on to the elbow of my jacket, hold me in place before I can leave.

  “Hey.” Justin smells of Pall Malls and mint gum and Afrin’s powdery perfume. “We miss you, man. You never show up. You always showed up before. Always.”

  There’s a hint of sincerity in his voice and I feel guilt creeping up on me, even though I know my decision to cut ties with Justin was the right one and I no longer want to spend my Friday nights passed out on a couch or the floor of his basement, smelling like vomit, vodka, and weed.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Busy doing what? Studying?” He sneers. “Looks to me like you’re just hanging around with these two losers. You think you’re too good for the rest of us now, eh?”

  “Justin, go easy, man.” Ahmed’s deep voice is as soothing as balm on injured skin. “You know I’ll be at your party next week. And so will Steve. Malc’s got work and everything. He’s busy now. That’s it.”

  Justin raises an eyebrow and snorts. “Looks like Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber are still rescuing you, Malc. You’re a sissy, aren’t you? You always have been. No wonder Afrin left you.”

  I feel the words under my skin, boiling along with my blood. I am about to respond with my fist when Steve grabs hold of my arm. And just in time.

  “What’s this?” a voice calls out. “Why are you loitering in the hallway?”

  Vice Principal Han stands a few feet away, the fluorescent light shining on his bald head, arms folded over his chest. “And you three.” His beady eyes zero in on me, Ahmed, and Steve. “Have you forgotten you have detention?”

  Behind me, I hear Steve heave a sigh of relief.

  “See you losers.” Justin turns his back to Han and gives me the one-finger salute. “C’mon, babe.”

  But instead of following, Afrin stays a moment longer. I feel her gaze on my back, all the way down the hall, where Han waits, and into an empty classroom.

  * * *

  “Where were you?” The voice that greets me when I step back into our house doesn’t belong to Mahtab.

  I ignore it and kick off my sneakers without bothering to untie them.

  “I asked, where were you?”

  My old man always tends to boom when he’s angry, his voice echoing impressively in the small hallway. It would’ve scared me when I was younger. But I’m not eleven anymore.

  “In detention,” I say calmly, looking right into his face.

  Mom always used to call our father handsome. Freddie Mercury handsome with high cheekbones, broad forehead, thick mustache, and strong chin. Age has done little to change that reality except add silver to his eyebrows, a layer of fat to his belly, and a receding hairline.

  Physically, Tehmtun Vakil and I have nothing in common, except for our matching height and eyes. Dark brown with gray shooting from the pupils. Centrally heterochromatic, he taught me when I was nine. A tiny gold Asho Farohar pendant hangs around his thick neck on a delicate gold chain. It’s the only thing he wears from his past with my mother, and probably only because it’s twenty-four karat.

  Red shoots up the pale skin of his neck and curls around his ears. A sure sign that he’ll raise a fist or two if I get close enough, the way he did when I was fifteen. I inch forward. My knuckles strain against my skin. Let the old man try. This time Mahtab isn’t here to stop me.

  But maybe he sees something different in my eyes today, something that makes him take a step back and cross his muscular arms in front of him. Physically, I am no match for my father, who is built like a wrestler and fought professionally as one for the Indian Railways team in his twenties. But he does not have my anger, built up over years of waiting for him to come visit me and Mahtab, over the years of seeing my mother waste away from bone cancer and the complications that came with the surgeries, while he stayed in Detroit, wrapped up in work and the arms of other women.

  Now that Mom’s gone, he’s back here with one of them: a woman he expects Mahtab and me to eventually accept as a replacement. Like anyone could be.

  Mahtab says that I should give our stepmom a chance. That Freny isn’t as bad as I think. I’ve never cared to find out. My father likes to pretend otherwise, but I know my mother didn’t die of a broken body so much as she died of a broken heart. Tenth grade was the year I first met Justin Singh. It’s also known as the Year Mom Died, Freny Cama Moved in, and the Universe Collapsed Around Me.

  The old man now switches over from anger to calculation. “Are you still going to work?”

  “Every day. But you should know. You keep checking in with my boss.”

  So much that Jay wanted to know if I was planning to die on him and leave him short one barista at the coffeehouse.

  His mouth tightens. “I’m only doing what a father should do.”

  “The way you should have when it mattered? Well, guess what? Time’s up. Only a year left before I turn eighteen and get out of here.”

  Something flickers across his face, an expression that another person might have mistaken for sadness. I twist my shoulders to the side and slip past, leaving him in the hallway as I head up to my room.

  Susan

  My father says no to art school, which shouldn’t surprise or disappoint me. Theoretically.

  “
Susan, do you know why we decided to immigrate to Canada?”

  My stomach begins to fold inward. I don’t want to hear this. Not now, when all I can see of him is on a computer screen, from thousands of miles away in another country. But before I can say yes and cut him off, Appa continues: “We came here so that you can have the chances we never did.”

  By we Appa means himself—the impoverished son of a municipal clerk in Kochi. A man who had little to no chance of finishing school, let alone of becoming a doctor and marrying the daughter of a district magistrate.

  “I was working from the age of ten—delivering tea and snacks to office buildings to make some money and help my family. There were so many days when we had no electricity. I still had to study for my exams.” His face softens and then hardens a moment later. “Here, you will never have to pay some bureaucrat under the table to get admission into a university; you will never have to prove anything except your own merit. And you have so much of it! Art is a hobby, kanna. Not a career.”

  From the background, I can feel Amma watching.

  “Suzy, are you listening to me?”

  “Amma wants to talk to you.” I hear my voice coming from a distance, as if it doesn’t quite belong to me. I reach up to take off my headphones, belatedly realize I’m not wearing any, that I never wear any when we Skype my father, that my mother has heard every word he’s spoken, and probably even co-written half the speech.

  I ignore her indignant “Say bye to Appa, at least!” and head to my room. There’s a strange feeling in my throat, like I’ve swallowed a fish bone. It’s not until now that I realize how much I was counting on Appa. How I expected him to back me up in this one big thing the way he often did for me with the small things in Jeddah: secretly buying me the candy I wanted even when Amma said it would spoil my appetite, calming her down when she got especially angry with me, praising me when she went overboard with her criticism.

  I open my sketchbook, pausing at a page I must have drawn sometime in Class IX, when my parents and I were on vacation in India, spending time in the backwaters of Alappuzha and the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Thekkady. I’d drawn a tiger. A wolf. An elephant. A clouded leopard. A Nilgiri tahr. A kingfisher perched on a stump next to a houseboat floating on a lake of water lilies. I didn’t see every animal on the trip—the clouded leopard isn’t native to the state of Kerala and the wolf was from a magazine I’d found at our hotel. I’d added them to fill the blank spaces on the page, and then created a border at the edges with peacock feathers and lotuses.

  Appa had admired the drawings back then, calling them clever. Your old appa would never be able to do something like this, he’d said.

  I recall the smile on his face, the spark in his eyes—reassess them now based on the conversation we just had. Did he truly think I was good or was the compliment simply a formality? The type parents reserved for their children’s efforts, no matter how good or bad.

  I look at the page again. Flaws that I’d dismissed as minor back then—the kingfisher’s misshapen claw, the slight disproportion of the elephant’s head and body—appear magnified. Even the border, which I’d spent hours on and thought so lovely at the time, looks cheesy. Clichéd. I toss the book aside.

  I text Alisha: They said no. About art school. I asked.

  Barely a minute goes by before Alisha responds: I’m sorry

  Then: At least you tried

  The lack of argument from Alisha’s end (the real Alisha, not the one in my mind) and the quickness of her responses makes me wonder if there really had been any chance. If she really did think my parents would say yes or if she’d only been saying those things to make me happy. After a long pause, I type back: Yeah.

  Another text pops up: Sorry, Suze. It’s a little busy here with debate practice at my house. Can we talk later?

  Busy. Always busy.

  Well don’t let me disturb you.

  Alisha writes: What’s that supposed to mean???

  This time I don’t bother responding, letting her messages flash on-screen one after another, before shutting off the phone.

  Tests. Exams. Debate practice. Tutoring sessions. Perfectly legitimate excuses in Alisha’s book to avoid life’s stickier discussions. What makes things worse is that I understand perfectly. If I was still in Jeddah and Alisha and I had switched positions, I would have reacted in the same way, probably with a similar kind of excuse. Alisha and I have been best friends since kindergarten, but we’ve never been the sort of friends who put each other before school stuff—your first and foremost priority, our parents and teachers always told us.

  For the first time in my life, I begin to wonder why.

  “I can’t believe this.” Amma’s voice rises, floats through my open bedroom door. “Another month? How many times is this going to happen? Rensil, you were supposed to be here by now!”

  I tune out Appa’s excuse; it’s another consolation for my mother to bear. Instead of reading the next chapter in physics the way I’d been planning to, I check my emails for the tenth time that day, and then Facebook. Right below a notification for someone’s birthday, an ad for an Arabic restaurant nearby pops up, bringing to mind the conversation I had this week with Malcolm. Partly out of curiosity, partly boredom, I click on it, and this leads to several minutes of googling and looking up more restaurants.

  Intermittently—and again, purely out of curiosity—I type Malcolm Vakil into the search bar on Facebook. Several Malcolm Vakils appear, mostly in India and Pakistan. I even find one in Australia and a few others with no location or photo. There’s no sign of spiky black hair or that all-too-knowing grin.

  “What are you doing?”

  My mother’s voice nearly makes me leap out of my skin. I shut the browser and turn around, automatically positioning my head and shoulders in front of the laptop screen.

  Amma is pale today, the dark circles around her eyes more prominent than usual. “What is it? What are you hiding?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me, no!” Amma gives me the wide awkward smile of adults who have suddenly realized that their children have grown older and aren’t exactly sure how to behave around them.

  “I was researching.” Not exactly a lie.

  “Was it a boy?” She waggles her eyebrows. “Were you sexting?”

  “Amma!” It creeps me out that my mother even knows of the term, let alone what it means. “It’s nothing like that!”

  “Well, if it was nothing, you should have no problems showing it to me.” Her voice grows hard.

  “God!” I reopen the browser and show her the results of my last Google search. “Here! This is what I was looking at.”

  “Best place to eat a shawarma in Mississauga?” I swear my mother sounds disappointed. “That’s all?”

  “Yes,” I say, emphasizing the word in a way that will hopefully underline it thrice in her head.

  After our conversation last week, Malcolm and I haven’t talked again even though now he gives me a half smile whenever he passes my desk in English. It’s getting easier for me to smile back in return.

  My mother gives me a suspicious look, but then gets distracted by something more important: my hair, which she declares is an utter mess. I feel her fingers sift through the locks, parting them better than any comb. She digs through my dresser and finds my hairbrush, running it through a few knotted ends, smoothing them out, before starting to brush my shoulder-length hair from scalp to end, the bristles stiff and soothing, her hands tugging, plaiting, but never painful.

  Once, when I was five, Amma made me sit on the floor and, after picking out a variety of colorful ribbons, wove them into my hair. Back then, I could tell her anything: about the funny way my science teacher scratched her nose, about the games we played during recess. Now I have a strong urge to do what I did then: only this time I want to close my eyes and speak about how I can’t sleep either. About Appa and how much I miss him. About school and how strange everything feels here. About—

 
“Kanna”—Amma tugs at the braid and ties it off with a plain black elastic—“I called the driving school to ask about your progress. Joseph thinks that you still need more preparation if you intend to give your road test in December. Since there’s still time, I think you should book three or four extra driving lessons with him for practice.”

  Panic tightens my chest. Driving. Again. “I don’t think the lessons are working.”

  “What nonsense!” The braid falls over my shoulder, hitting my collarbone. “Who said they aren’t?”

  “Joseph did! He keeps yelling at me. Half the time I’m afraid of getting into an accident!”

  I think back to my lesson last Sunday: Joseph’s shouts and his constant braking, his insinuations that I was not only his worst student, but also entirely useless.

  “If you keep driving like this, it’s just a waste of your parents’ money,” he told me. “Better for you to go home, tell your mother to teach you how to cook and understand how to take care of a household.”

  The trouble with Joseph Kuruvilla is that he comes highly recommended—the best, they call him, not only in the driving school’s online Google reviews, but also at the Jacobite church Amma and I attended a couple of times when we first arrived here. As furious as I am about Joseph’s misogyny, a part of me—the part that worked successfully with the toughest teachers at Qala Academy and scored high grades—still wants to prove him wrong.

  I didn’t realize that as I worked on doing so, Joseph’s haphazard instructions would settle in my brain, would affect me every time I got behind the wheel of his car. I think uneasily about the Corolla Appa bought for us before returning to Jeddah. A car that now sits in the condo’s underground garage, untouched.