Aerogrammes

by Tania James

  “Where is the time?” Minal Auntie says. Truthfully, she could care less about threading. Bushy eyebrows are the least of her problems.

  Yesterday evening, another student quit her school in favor of Little Star Studios. Over the phone, Mrs. Tajudeen had babbled on and on about the “fun and frolic” in folk dance. “Your bharata natyam classes are becoming too serious for Tikku!” she chided lightly, while Minal Auntie paced the small square of her linoleum kitchen floor. She came close to confessing everything if only to hold on to one more student—how she had trouble making her mortgage payments last year, how she was forced to find a second income, how the employment agency had deemed her unskilled.

  Now here she is at Foodfest, a half hour away from her home, a safe distance from the friends and acquaintances who would never guess what she has become. She punches numbers in the register and shoves the cash drawer closed when it lunges out at her. She tries to avert her gaze from the lunch station opposite, where headless chickens in a glass coffin are spinning torpidly on spits. Directly above the coffin is the clock, which moves even more slowly. After work, she will have to speed all the way back and pick up Aarti.

  Krista unscrews a small gold tin of lip gloss and holds it out to Minal Auntie. “Try this. It’ll look good on you.”

  Minal Auntie frowns. “It makes your lips look wet.”

  “That’s the point. It’s called Wetslicks.”

  Out of boredom, Minal Auntie dabs some balm over her lips. “I’m probably too old for those things.”

  “How old?”

  “Forty-eight.” Minal Auntie smacks her lips together. “So? How is it?”

  “Sexy,” Krista says, working her eyebrows up and down. She hands Minal Auntie a compact from her purse. In the little round mirror, Minal Auntie’s lips look glazed with Krispy Kreme frosting.

  “Right?” Krista says.

  Minal Auntie nods. When Krista isn’t looking, she wipes her lips against the back of her hand, leaving a gooey streak of glitter.

  Minal Auntie screeches up to Aarti’s house and beeps twice. Lata and Aarti tumble out the door, Lata bolting for her car with a hasty wave in Minal Auntie’s direction. “Sorry, Auntie! Can’t talk, I’m late!” Before Minal Auntie can apologize, Lata has shut the door of her minivan.

  Aarti climbs into Minal Auntie’s car with a laminated library book on her lap, her finger holding her place. Her face looks ghostly pale, as if covered in a film of dust, a different color from her throat. “What happened to you?” Minal Auntie asks.

  “Nothing,” Aarti mumbles defensively. She cracks open her book and doesn’t look up. The car has filled with the scent of Pond’s talcum powder, and though Minal Auntie is sure that its source is sitting next to her, she hasn’t the energy to question the girl. For the past thirty minutes, Minal Auntie has been gripping the wheel, weaving and speeding to get here. Now she feels drained, distant from the world reeling past her window, a chicken spinning around on a stick.

  “Does it look bad?” Aarti asks suddenly.

  Minal Auntie blinks at her; the world draws focus. She tries a tactful approach: “You don’t look like you, raja.” She gives the girl a sideways smile, but Aarti is squinting at something on Minal Auntie’s shoulder.

  “What’s your button say, Auntie?”

  Minal Auntie glances down at the thing. How did she pin it to her sweater when she has always, always pinned it to her smock? Next time she sees Bill, she will pin it to his forehead. “I found it on the ground. I liked the message.”

  Aarti leans in to read it. “Am I smiling …?”

  “Let’s stop at the IndoPak store. Do you like eating idli-sambar?” Aarti begins a polite refusal, while Minal Auntie wrenches the pin from her shoulder so hastily she knows she’s pulled a thread.

  Like a pro, Minal Auntie enters at one end of the IndoPak Grocery and snakes her way up and down the dusty aisles without once doubling back, filling her jute bag with masalas, chai powder, and masoor dal, until she reaches the produce section, where no bruise or tenderness escapes her appraisal of okra. She arrives in the last aisle, the toiletries section, to find Aarti with a box of Light & Luminous in her hand.

  Minal Auntie knows the commercial. Two girls, one fair-skinned and one nut-brown, go to a perfume counter. Brown Girl catches her reflection in the mirror and looks away with the disappointment of a girl forbidden to play outside. Fair Girl confides that her own skin used to be similarly afflicted until she tried Light & Luminous. The commercial shows a brown patch of skin, its brownness lifted away in a whirlwind of flaky debris to reveal a paler shade beneath. Sometime later, the two girls joyfully reunite at the perfume counter, their skin so china white one can hardly be distinguished from the other.

  “What do you want with that?” Minal Auntie asks.

  Aarti looks up with a nervous laugh. “Do you think it works?”

  “It’s all chemicals. Put it back.”

  Aarti obeys but not without one last glance at the name on the box. She follows Minal Auntie through the checkout counter, helps carry the bags to the car, and says nothing until they are halfway home.

  “A kid at school started calling me Well Done,” Aarti says. “I asked him why, and he goes, ‘Cause your mom left you in the oven too long.’ ”

  Aarti plucks at the laminated plastic of her book. Minal Auntie can think of nothing to say.

  “I’m not saying I wanna be super pale. I just want, you know, a normal color.”

  Minal Auntie studies the road for a while. At last, she says, “Your color is your color. There is nothing to do about it.” She speaks from a place of impatience and experience, having wasted years on a similar quest for an antidote. She has smeared the skin of boiled milk onto her cheeks; she has stirred pinches of gold dust into her tea. When she was a child, a neighbor boy, Velu, insisted that if she stood outside at night, he could see only her teeth and the whites of her eyes.

  For a moment, Minal Auntie feels these secrets on the brink of release—the milk skin, the desperation, the sound of Velu’s voice in her ears—but a pickup truck in front of her brakes suddenly. She honks. The moment is gone.

  Class begins as always, students trickling through the sliding door at the back of Minal Auntie’s basement. They shuck their shoes outside. They knot their shawls around their waists.

  Minal Auntie is seated directly in front of the mirrors with a wood block and a stick in her hands, next to an electronic box that makes harmonium vibrations. The harmonium box, the block, and the stick are the most hallowed objects in the room. Once, when the stick fell out of Minal Auntie’s hand and Niva Patel absently toed it back to her, Niva was ordered to sit out the next three exercises.

  After Minal Auntie pounds the block three times, the girls do namaste, a girl in the back sloppy in scooping forgiveness from the carpet. Afterward, Minal Auntie balances her stick on the block and instructs everyone to be seated. She can always pick out the naturals by the way they hold themselves even in unaware moments, how they stand with their shoulders back, their spines at attention, feet turned out. Overdoing it, Pinky Shahi sinks to the floor with one knee propped up, mimicking a movie courtesan. The graceless ones, like Aarti, collapse and hunch against the walls.

  Minal Auntie stands to demonstrate the next sequence in the dance she has been teaching them, set to a bhajan celebrating the devotion of the poet Meerabai to Lord Krishna. Departing from her usual routines, Minal Auntie has choreographed a dance that contains an elaborate drama as its centerpiece, a tale of devotion, poison, and miracle.

  There are only four roles—the beautiful Meerabai, her husband the cruel king, and two servants. To show the drama in its entirety, Minal Auntie inhabits all four roles, twirling between avatars. First she is Meerabai fingering her sitar, swaying in ecstatic worship to Lord Krishna, whom she considers her true husband, much to the irritation of her living husband, the king. Then she is the king, spying on his wife’s worship, curling the corner of his mustache between two
fingers before stalking away to his rooms. He stirs poison into a bowl of warm milk and summons his two servants. With a spin, Minal Auntie inhabits the servants, who come to the king, bowing; he points the bowl in Meerabai’s direction. They bring the bowl to her. Finally, Minal Auntie is Meerabai, setting her sitar aside. Sensing that her death lies in the bottom of the bowl, Meerabai takes it and looks to the heavens, in fear not of death but of a lifetime of worship cut short. She drinks the poison, and by the intercession of Lord Krishna, she rises, immune to pain, vivified and radiant.

  “Okay?” Minal Auntie says, herself again, hands on hips.

  “Auntie, that was so good,” Pinky says, the other girls rallying around with affirmations of “Yeah” and “Really good.” “Who gets to be the queen?”

  Minal Auntie assigns the roles: Pinky as the king, Neha and Niva as the servants, and—she braces herself for an uprising—Aarti as Meerabai.

  The girls look back and forth between Minal Auntie and Aarti, as if to decode the silent conspiracies of blood relations. But Minal Auntie can’t very well explain to them that there is no footwork involved in the Meerabai role, no strict rhythm to obey, and that she will never hear the end of it from Lata if she doesn’t give Aarti a brief, easy moment in the limelight. “Really?” Aarti says, without much gratitude, hugging her knees to her chest.

  “What about the rest of us?” asks Nidhi Kulkarni. “Where do we stand?”

  “In a semicircle around the actors. Posing as Krishna.” Making a reed flute of her hands, Minal Auntie sweeps the room with a meaningful gaze. “You are all Lord Krishna.”

  They stare at her dully.

  Nidhi rests her chin in her hand and Reshma picks at her fingernails, but the protest goes no further. Most likely it will carry on once they stuff their feet into their sneakers and shuffle away without tying their laces.

  Today, for one day only, Foodfest has put a coupon in the Sunday circular for a sale on plantains—two pounds for the price of one. In the bottom left corner of the coupon, in tiny letters, are the words “Only applicable at the Downers Grove Foodfest.” Additionally crippling to Minal Auntie is the fact that South Indians know at least five ways to consume a plantain: raw, fried, curried, breaded, and steamed.

  And so her secret life at Foodfest has come to end.

  Mrs. Namboodiri, Mrs. Markose, and Dr. Varghese are among the many Indian acquaintances who inch past Minal Auntie’s cash register that day. They give her, along with their plantains, looks of surprise masked in cheery greeting.

  “My cousin,” Minal Auntie keeps saying. “He owns this place.”

  They pretend to believe her. Dr. Varghese pats the back of her hand. Each pitying smile is a blow to her heart.

  Though she keeps her head down and focuses on the conveyor belt, Minal Auntie cannot ignore the tinkling babble of bracelets that can only belong to Twinkle Sharma.

  At first, Twinkle places item after item on the belt without seeming to notice her cashier. They are barely acquaintances but mutually compliant with certain rules of competition, which demand that they speak warmly to each other, like old, intimate friends.

  “Good price on the plantains,” Minal Auntie says.

  Twinkle stands there, staring, her fingers still wrapped around the handle of a milk jug. “What’s this …?” The question trails off as Twinkle glances down at Minal Auntie’s name tag.

  “I am here part-time.”

  Twinkle hesitates. “Okay, great!” She places the milk jug on the belt with care. “And how is your school?”

  “Great.” Minal Auntie takes the milk and slides the bar code over the red light, sliding it again and again until it beeps. “We will miss Tikku.”

  “Yes, she came to see me. Tikku has excellent form.” In earnest, Twinkle adds, “You taught her well, Minal.”

  “I had her from when she was small.”

  “I know. She’s always saying, ‘But, Twinkle, that’s not the way Minal Auntie does it!’ ”

  “You let them call you Twinkle?”

  Twinkle shrugs. “I just want them to feel comfortable with me. So they won’t be intimidated when we share the stage.”

  “Share what stage?”

  “Ah!” Twinkle smacks her forehead. “Stupid me. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “You are the teacher. How can you be in the dance?”

  “It’s okay, Minal.”

  “But there must be a rule against a teacher being in the dance—”

  “I didn’t have a choice. One of my girls dropped out, and we needed an even number, so …” Twinkle waves away all concern. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  Taking a bag in each hand, Twinkle remarks on how wonderful it is, running into each other. She clicks away in silver slingbacks, her heels pumiced smooth, her soles soft and uncallused, her toenails pale pink. Those are not the feet of a dancer, Minal Auntie decides, a thought that brings little comfort. She fingers a wedge of lemon she keeps in a plastic cup by her register, to mask the scent of money on her skin.

  That afternoon, Minal Auntie installs Aarti in the master bedroom, where she can do her homework in privacy. Minal Auntie opens the curtains so the light falls thick and warm over her walnut desk. Just as Aarti settles into the chair, Minal Auntie notices the yellow sticky note on the corner of the desk (Stay positive, in her own handwriting) and crumples it into her pocket.

  Aarti offers to work in the basement, but Minal Auntie says she will be busy choreographing the last portion of the dance. “About that,” Aarti says, wiping her arm back and forth across the desk. “I’m nervous about being Meerabai. I don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “If you practice, you can get good at the facial expressions.”

  “Nowhere near as good as you.” Minal Auntie hovers in the doorway, suddenly reluctant to leave. “My mom told me what you were like when you were young. She said, ‘When Minal Auntie danced, even the clock stopped to watch.’ ”

  Minal Auntie stands still, absorbing those words. They seem to apply to another person altogether, not the woman who drove home from Foodfest earlier today, benumbed by heat and shame. If only, in her youth, she had known how to stand and receive a compliment, rather than ducking below it with self-effacing humility, as if her future would hold an infinite supply of praise. She chants this one in her head—even the clock stopped to watch—and it awakens in her a mild euphoria.

  But the feeling dissolves when she descends the basement stairs and stands before the paneled mirrors. Here is her reflection: a flat nose, raisin-colored lips, eyebrows that have never seen a tweezer, and, of course, her skin. She turns her back on the mirrors.

  Minal Auntie slides a cassette tape into the stereo. The tape has been re-recorded so many times that the first few sounds are the chaotic remnants of earlier songs. Abruptly the bhajan begins. Minal Auntie closes her eyes and taps her foot as Subbulakshmi’s voice cascades across the opening notes, coursing through the cold air of the basement.

  Instead of laying down steps for the ending, Minal Auntie dances through the drama portion. Whatever she did to impress Aarti, she can do better. She can inhabit the ecstasy of Meerabai at her sitar, the innocence with which she presses her hand to her heart when presented with the poison and asks, For me? She can be the king, can sense the hurt behind his anger when he sees his wife praying to her divine husband above. She can even give life to the servants, in whose pitying eyes Meerabai can read her own death.

  Over and over, Minal Auntie rewinds the tape and practices with the single-minded purpose that served her well in her youth. Her guru noticed and invited her to perform on a two-week tour through Rajasthan and Delhi. She returned to hear from her cousin that the neighbor boy Velu had gotten engaged. “I always thought he liked you,” her cousin said, and Minal Auntie blushed, several sensations blooming within her—surprise, pride, and, obscurely, hope. Thinking of Velu, from time to time she finds herself ambused by the same emotions, but try as she might, she can barely remember his
face.

  Minal Auntie decides to play all four roles—the king, Meerabai, and both servants—for the upcoming competition.

  “You?” Pinky blurts, crestfallen.

  Minal Auntie pins her with a look of quiet authority. “Yes. Me.”

  The rest of the class seem a bit puzzled at first, but they carry on without complaint. Aarti is the only one beaming with relief.

  Minal Auntie teaches the rest of the dance and has them practice at full tilt. When someone makes a mistake, she strikes the block, wags her stick at the offender, and starts the whole dance over again. She allows only a few minutes of rest between each run-through. Every girl slides to the floor except for Pinky, who sits in a butterfly stretch and brings her forehead down to her feet.

  Halfway through practice, Minal Auntie allows a two-minute break. The girls trudge upstairs and drink cupfuls of water from the tap. Through the vent, she can hear their high, girlish chatter, mostly nonsense, until they arrive at the topic of Twinkle Auntie: “Did you see her at the Unnikrishnan party?” “The one with the halter blouse?” “She gets her saris from Benzer World.” Minal Auntie listens for the word “Foodfest,” and thankfully it never comes.

  Minal Auntie called to quit the day before. She kept her excuses vague, suspecting that Bill would beg her to stay. To her surprise, he wished her well and asked her to return the smock. It was only after she hung up that her relief made way for dismay. He had taken the news very smoothly, so smoothly that he might have been hoping for it all these months while she worked her register, oblivious to her own expendability. She lingered by the phone, wondering if she’d made a mistake.

  After dance class, Minal Auntie washes the crowd of dirty cups the girls left behind in the sink. “Who raised these children?” she asks aloud, though the only other person in the kitchen is Aarti, sitting at the table and hiding behind a book.

  “I washed my cup,” she says, but Minal Auntie only grunts in response.

  The house used to belong to her brother, and seeing all these dirty glasses revives the old resentments that came of living with his family. He was the one who filled out her greencard application, and so in exchange, she was expected to wash up after the whole family—all those empty mugs and bowls ringed with grime. She taught dance from their basement, careful of her sister-in-law’s rules: no students upstairs, all shoes outside, and private lessons for her son in Carnatic singing—or cackling in Sagar’s case, which only made him a moving target after his school’s talent show. A year later, Minal Auntie’s brother announced that the family would be moving to Michigan. He expected her to go with them. Instead, Minal Auntie chose to rent the house until she could take over the mortgage. What a pleasure it was in those first few days after his departure, to sit in his favorite armchair and absorb the quiet hum of a house she could now call her own.