by SJ Sindu
“Jesse,” the woman greets me. She extends a hand and I shake it. “Welcome to the Wellesley rugby house.” She moves aside and points the way.
The house is even older from the inside. Exposed beams crisscross the ceiling around a rainbow American flag. Deep cracks spread over dark blue walls like varicose veins. An open hallway leads to two cherrywood doors and a yellow-tiled kitchen. There’s a musty smell I can’t place, like weeks-old sweat. Three women around my age cluster on low couches around a TV. In a corner underneath a bookcase that holds artwork, two people snooze on a single-person bed, covered in a rainbow tie-dyed quilt.
All the women are dressed in polos, black biking shorts, and gym shorts with the same blue and yellow checkerboard pattern as the mailbox outside. Some have cleats hung over their shoulders.
Someone stirs on the bed and says, “We have new people.” A dark head with kinky black hair pokes out of the sheets and looks at me.
The women introduce themselves one by one and shake hands with me, their grips strong like mine. How the hell is Nisha friends with these women?
The curly-haired black woman wiggles out of the bed and introduces herself as Tasha.
“We’re playing in the park today,” she says. “Are you playing?”
“Not me,” Nisha says.
Tasha turns to me. “How about you, handsome? Fancy some rugby?”
Handsome. No one’s ever used that word to describe me before.
“I don’t play rugby,” I say.
Everyone gathers their things and tromps out to a park down the hill. The women spread out on the field in between the fenced-in playground equipment and the brick subway station, scouring the grass, picking up sticks and cigarette butts. They change into their cleats and mark the four corners of a rectangle with their shoes.
I sit on a cold wire bench with Nisha and Tasha, whose cleats still dangle on her shoulder and smell like a hundred feet.
The women jog around the rectangle they’ve marked. One pulls out a ball from a backpack—big and oblong like a swollen football. They form a circle with their backs facing the center and pass the ball to each other. Step to the side and pass. Step and pass. Step, pass.
“Why don’t you play?” Tasha asks me. “Do you want to?” She has sharp eyes and a long, hooked nose like a songbird. She unzips the backpack at her feet, pulls out another rugby ball, and walks over to the corner of the field. She has a slight limp.
I follow. She looks at Nisha, but Nisha’s intently watching the other women as they lift each other up by their shorts.
Tasha teaches me how to throw the ball by stepping to the side. We pass the ball back and forth. “You’re pretty good,” she says. She waves her arms at the women on the field. “Yo! Lucky here should play with you.”
“I don’t know the rules.” I hope I’m not blushing. I never was a sports kid. I may have been a good dancer, but team sports made me uncoordinated and awkward.
“The best way to learn rugby is by playing. Our feet look about the same size.” She holds out her cleats.
Jesse takes me aside and narrates the rules to me while the others play. “This is a scrimmage,” she says. “Or scrum.”
Two women face each other and hook arms over shoulders. Someone calls “go” and they push against each other, the ball on the ground beneath them.
“A scrum restarts play. Usually you’ll have all the forwards stacked against each other. In rugby sevens, you have three against three. In rugby league laws, you get six on six. Rugby union, eight on eight.”
One of the women pushes the other backward. The ball emerges.
“Want to try?” Jesse doesn’t wait for me to answer. She holds up an arm and the others stop playing. We walk out onto the field.
Jesse faces me, tips forward, hooks her arm around me, and presses the top of her head on my shoulder. I imitate her, get a lung-full of sweat smell. We’re locked. I feel steady in this position, solid. Someone puts the ball underneath us.
“Now push with your legs,” she says.
Before I’m ready, she pushes forward. My legs skid back. I push.
“Keep pushing.”
I’m out of shape, and no match for her. She’s twice my size, and probably four times my muscle density. She pushes me backward until someone picks up the ball from behind her.
“Not bad,” Jesse says. “With some practice you could play for real.”
“I couldn’t push you back.”
“Yeah, but I’m a beast. Against someone smaller you’ll be fine.”
We play three on three. Tasha shouts the rules to me while I run from one side of the field to the other and try to keep track of who’s on my team. I don’t fumble the ball. Sometimes it’s cradled against my side. I run down the field and it’s like I haven’t breathed properly for ages. My legs run despite the ache in my muscles. Whenever someone gets close to me I can smell the sweat caked into her uniform, old and stale. I can feel the blood in my skin, the tendons pushing and pulling at my limbs. The others tackle each other, crashing to the ground all limbs and skin. I want to be part of the mess, wonderful chaos and movement, a purpose I haven’t felt in my muscles for much too long. I haven’t danced in ages and this is like scratching an itch deep under the skin. I remember what it’s like to move—like something ballooning inside of me, like I’m going to expand and expand and become the air.
We play until we can’t see each other’s faces in the darkening night. Goosebumps coat my legs and the back of my neck. I shiver even in my jeans and long-sleeved shirt. On the walk home, Tasha pats me on the back and says, “You should play more with us.”
Nisha saunters past Jesse, laughing and tossing her hair.
“I see,” Tasha says, watching me. “You and Nisha.”
I nod and hope it looks nonchalant. I watch Nisha out of the corner of my eye.
Tasha drapes an arm over my shoulder. “You’re welcome at the rugby house anytime you feel like coming.”
We buy beer from a liquor store with large windows and wooden racks of wine bottles. “It’s not rugby without a social,” Jesse says. When I try to give her money she waves it away. “You played a damn good game.”
At the house we pass around a laptop and pick music—mostly obscure girl-with-guitar melodies that collapse over syncopated strumming. I want something with stronger, more regular bass, something I can keep inside my bones. Every once in a while someone picks hip-hop or punk and I can feel it like a heartbeat inside of me.
Nisha sits back against the wall and drinks a wine cooler. I still can’t believe that she knows these women. I scoot closer. She pulls me by the collar and kisses me. The women hoot and raise their drinks. Nisha pushes me away and laughs, like it’s all a joke.
Tasha clinks her beer bottle and the music turns off. Jesse stands up and sings, one hand on her heart and the other raised in the air toward the ceiling and the rainbow American flag. “Oh, my lover’s a lawyer, a lawyer, a lawyer, a mighty fine lawyer is she-ee!” The women laugh and join in. Their voices rise in a drunken heap. “All day long she fucks you, she fucks you, she fucks you”—Jesse points at each of us in turn—“and when she gets home she fucks me.”
They all stand up and make a line behind Jesse. Tasha motions for me to join them but Nisha’s holding my hand and I don’t ever want to move. The women march to the beat and sing. “You’ve got to live a little bit, love a little bit, follow the band. Follow the band with your tits in your hand—wah wah!”
And Nisha watches all this like she’s seen it before. Nisha, who at Sri Lankan parties says all the right things and moves like a Bollywood princess, who has perfected the coy downward glance of a proper brown woman. She lets me kiss her.
Once or twice during the night, the rugby girls get into brawls, holding each other in headlocks or wrestling on the floor. Tasha keeps inviting me to join in, and
just when I’m starting to relax enough to try, Nisha stands up to leave.
“My parents texted,” she says. “They’re wondering where I am.”
•••
Forty minutes later, she pulls up to the end of Emerson Drive where the road turns into a makeshift driveway. Was this a date? She waits for me to get out.
I feel like I should say something. “Thanks for taking me. I had fun. Are you sure you can’t come in?” I touch her wrist on the steering wheel. She tenses and I draw away. “Sorry,” I say.
“I can’t.” She looks at the house and its lit upstairs windows.
I start to get out.
“Wait.” She gives me a peck on the mouth.
I watch her drive off. The moon waxes full and eerie. If I were someone else, in some other story, I’d take a midnight walk with my wife.
Amma’s waiting up for me. I hope she won’t notice the beer on my breath, or the lip gloss from Nisha’s kiss. I go straight to bed, ignoring Amma at the kitchen table reading her favorite swami’s scripture.
Appa wants me over for dinner. I change three times before Amma finally gives my outfit a nod. She pulls my hair into a tiny, frizzy ponytail and makes me wear jewelry.
“A woman should never go bare,” she says. “A woman should always wear gold.”
Grandmother watches Tamil soap operas from her folding chair in the living room. Every once in a while she glances at the deck.
I drink tea in the kitchen and try to prepare myself for the lemon disinfectant and vinyl sofa covers of Laila Aunty’s house.
“Be good,” Amma says.
Grandmother opens the sliding glass doors. A cold breeze sucks itself into the vacuum of the house.
“Close the door,” Amma says.
Grandmother hobbles to the kitchen and picks up her tea from the counter. Amma goes to close the door.
“We need to prepare for the baby,” Grandmother says. She coughs and smiles.
Amma freezes.
“The baby is coming soon.”
“What baby?” Amma asks.
“Vidya’s baby.”
Amma’s flesh tenses. Her face goes rigid like it does whenever someone mentions Vidya. She shuts the sliding glass doors with a snap.
Grandmother points at me. “Vidya is having a baby.”
Amma walks back to the kitchen and picks up her chipped mug of tea. “That’s Lucky.” Her voice rises on my name. “What’s this about a baby?”
I take a big gulp of too-hot tea.
“You’re having a baby?”
“Yes, yes,” Grandmother says.
“No,” I say.
“You should be thinking about it,” Amma says.
“About what?”
“Having a baby.”
If this is the conversation we’re going to have, I’d rather be at Laila Aunty’s lemon-disinfectant house. I push my way to the foyer and throw on my jacket.
“I’m serious, Lucky.”
I kneel and tie my shoes.
“You need to throw those away.” Amma points to the faded blue high tops on my feet.
I make a double knot in my shoelaces.
“Kris is a good-looking man,” she says. “You need to give him a baby soon.”
I get up and head for the door without looking at her. I make sure to slam it just a little harder than I need to.
•••
Laila Aunty and Appa live in a renovated yellow colonial that dwarfs Amma’s house, though it’s considered small for their neighborhood. The house is set back from the road, obscured by old trees that make you feel like you’re completely alone inside.
Laila Aunty opens the door half-dressed in a silk saree and plants a sticky kiss on my cheek.
“Come, come.” She walks toward the living room where Appa is reading the Boston Globe from his favorite chair. “We’re going to temple, dear,” she says. “I’m just getting ready.”
“I didn’t bring any clothes for temple.”
“I got you something from that new store in New Jersey. You can wear that.” She disappears down the hallway.
I sit on the hard, powder-green sofa. The cleanliness of the house is unnerving. Thick brown draperies block out the light, fleurs-de-lis dot the thick white carpet, wooden sculptures of dancing women crowd every flat surface—I feel like there’s not enough oxygen in the room. Amma is minimalist by comparison. Dealing only in necessities is a habit she cultivated from her poor childhood.
My mother’s family came here on a lottery visa, back when the U.S. had compassion for Sri Lankan refugees. Her name came out of a hat, so she survived the war. Her two older brothers were detained at the airport in Sri Lanka, suspected of being terrorists, so it was a little family of three that landed at JFK airport, via Dubai, via Hong Kong.
My father came here on a graduate student visa. Immigration policies re-create heightened natural selection. The smartest and those with the most resources make it out, along with a handful of those who just get lucky. Amma’s luck ran out, but Appa’s resources stayed intact.
Laila Aunty comes back with a bag that smells of sandalwood, and dumps the contents next to me on the couch: a baby-pink mirrored tunic with pale-yellow drawstring pants, a necklace, and matching pink and yellow bangles. Of course she’d buy me such dainty colors. Everyone does.
I dress in their guest bedroom. The new churidar scratches against my ribcage. Laila Aunty irons her saree into knifelike pleats, then combs and pulls my hair into something resembling a bun, held together with a thousand bobby pins because it isn’t long enough.
The Sri Lakshmi temple is a half hour away. When I was little I always called it my temple because the main deity is my namesake. I am named after a Hindu goddess sometimes pictured massaging her husband’s shins as he sleeps. Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and beauty, but I wasn’t born into either one. Every time Lakshmi’s husband Vishnu takes a human form, she does too. But sometimes Vishnu incarnates as a woman, usually in order to seduce men. And then what does Lakshmi do? Sit up in heaven and try not to watch? Or maybe she does, maybe she finds herself drawn to his new soft curves. Maybe she wants to unwrap him and fit her hand into the fold of his waist.
Appa drives while Laila Aunty fusses with her saree. Somewhere near the exit for Ashland, she whips around in her seat. “You don’t have a pottu,” she says. “We can’t go to temple with you looking like that.” She digs in her purse and pulls out red lipstick. She spins a dot in between my eyebrows and turns back around.
Set sharply off the road, the stark white temple overlooks suburban sprawl from atop a hill. It grows from the tops of trees as we turn onto a side street. White plaster sculptures pose inside the walls. In Sri Lanka and India, temples are painted bright and clashing colors, but this one is frozen in perpetual construction, its three white spires just recently topped with gold cones that jut into the sky.
Appa circles the parking lot twice before he pulls his BMW into an empty spot at the bottom of the hill. It’s Saturday, meaning everyone is here. Laila Aunty thrives on the crowded energy. I’d rather avoid it. She steps out of the car with her back straight and her stomach sucked in. She pulls up the pleats of her saree so that the drape of cotton covers her chest.
We walk slowly up the hill to the temple. Laila Aunty struggles behind us because of her net-ball-player knee problems from college. Or because she is now as soft and wifelike as Amma wants me to be. We wait for her under the carport where people park new cars to be blessed. The asphalt underneath is littered with smashed limes that were placed under car tires to be run over for luck. Appa holds the door open and I can tell his back has give to it now, not as straight as I remember it.
I know my way around this temple by heart, know that there are two cement steps up to the landing before the doors where everyone takes off their shoes, the white marb
le antechamber where people hang coats in messy rows, the floor sink with the motion detector faucet where the truly religious wash their hands and feet before stepping inside the main temple. The interior unfolds into an airy main chamber with cool marble floors. Small shrines line the walls, each under their own plaster canopy. The idols wear miniature silk clothes and regular-sized jewelry that hangs down to their knees. Every once in a while a worshipper rings the bell hanging by the main shrine. The sound echoes on the marble and makes babies cry. Fathers pick up their children so they can ring the bell. No one pays me any mind.
The main shrine stands tall and center, completely enclosed. Lakshmi’s chamber is probably around the size of Laila Aunty’s walk-in closet, separated from the worshippers by two sets of thick wooden doors. Only priests are allowed inside.
I watch the women as they circle around the shrines. Women aren’t allowed to be priests, but they seem more saintly than the men inside the white walls of the temple, wrapped up like many beautiful presents—the exposed expanses of their backs, the flesh that ripples over their shoulders, the way their spines curve and dip into their lower backs. In ancient India, before the British outlawed the practice, temples employed and housed dancers. Families pledged their daughters to the temple to be given an education in the arts after a marriage ceremony where a god statue stood in for the groom. These devdasis enjoyed the privileges of a married woman in society but answered to no man. They weren’t expected to remain chaste or give up their careers to become housewives.
Children chase each other around, silent at their parents’ scolding looks, like little muted movies. Infants sleep in carriers near the support columns at the corners of the temple. The air fills with spicy sweet incense that my white friends in high school told me smelled like weed—they had huddled around the doorway of my parents’ prayer room, sniffing the air with round eyes and smiles at the corners of their mouths. Many of them asked me to take them to temple. I never did.