by SJ Sindu
I cross the street to the bar and open the door. A bouncer sits on a stool. The place is darkened with thick drapes hung over the windows. Over-varnished wood tables, black leather booths, gothic chandeliers, black-and-white tile floors, a scuffed wooden stage on the far end of the room.
“I’m here for the open stage.” I grip my bag of costumes tight.
The bouncer motions to the bar. “Mr. Alan, got another one for you.”
A man in a green trench coat turns on his wooden barstool. He’s mostly bald but a few wisps of white hair still cling onto the skin above his ears. He has tiny, watery eyes. He takes the toothpick out of his martini and sucks off one brown olive.
“You from India?” He picks off the other olive with his hand and pops it in his mouth, licking his fingers clean.
I walk to the bar so I don’t have to shout.
“You know how to belly dance?” he asks. “We need a belly dancer.”
“I thought it was open stage.”
He picks his teeth with the toothpick. “I like to get a handle on what everyone’s going to perform.”
“A Bollywood song.”
He hops down from the chair, landing a full head shorter than me. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Lucky.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Lucky.”
“That won’t do. Won’t do at all.” He turns toward the back of the bar and gestures for me to follow. “Jasmine? No, too common.”
We walk through a set of curtains behind the stage into a hallway.
“Asha? Yes, Asha. Asha okay with you? I have a cousin who married an Asha.”
“My name’s Lucky.”
He points at me. “Tonight, your name’s Asha.” He opens a door to a room. “This is where the girls get dressed.”
The tiny room has a couch squeezed into one corner and full-length mirrors nailed to the wall. Three women scuttle around in various stages of undress.
Mr. Alan claps his hands and the girls turn around. “Ladies, ladies. I want you to meet Asha. She’s doing Bollywood tonight.”
He walks back through the set of curtains to the bar. I push the door open a little more and go into the dressing room. One girl with milky skin and a thin face smiles at me. Her lips are painted dark brown and her light blue eyes lined heavily with black. She wears a long quilted skirt and a fringed scarf.
She holds out her hand. “I’m Mala. You’re going to love it.”
I shake her hand. The others introduce themselves. They all have these brown-sounding stage names, but none of them are brown. I dress in a mirrored lehenga choli and drape the dupatta around me like a saree. The girls ooh and aah over the embroidery and the bangles.
Mala picks up a sheet of bindis. “Can I borrow one of these?” She plucks one off and sticks it in the middle of her forehead. She plucks another and sticks it on my forehead.
I take it off and move it down to between my eyebrows.
“You got any perfume?” Mala asks.
“No.”
She digs in one of her bags and pulls out a vial. “We always wear perfume. The men like it.” She spritzes some on me.
My eyes water. I smell like a baby hooker.
Mr. Alan brings back shots of tequila. A couple more girls join us. Most of them are doing some type of belly dance, going by the outfits. We wait in the room while the murmur of the bar gets louder. By nine thirty, there’s a steady hum of conversation. Mr. Alan comes back to decide the order of performance.
“I need to leave early,” I say.
He mimes shooting a gun at me. “Then you’re first, Asha.”
I take two more shots of tequila and follow him out to the bar area. He climbs up onstage. “This here’s our newest girl, Asha.”
I walk up onstage. Some of the men in the front hoot and shout. The place is packed and dim. I make eye contact with the back wall. That’s how Nisha taught me to overcome my stage fright when we were young. “Watch the back wall, and never look away. Everyone will think you’re looking at them.”
The music starts, and it’s easier to tune out the shouts from the men. First muted drumbeats, thaam thaam theem, thaam thaam theem, then flute arching over, low sitar plucks, a rumbling cello. I breathe steady and clear my head. It’s just another performance. I’ve done this hundreds of times. Arm waves, hip circles, spin. Nothing else exists but me and the wood under my feet. I remember the music. Thaam thaam theem. Thaam thaam theem. Step out, back, out, back, hands left and right, wrists flowing like waves.
•••
It isn’t until I’m back in the dressing room that I hear the clapping and shouting in the bar. Mr. Alan comes in. “Hear that? They like you.” He holds out another tequila shot. “A couple of guys requested private dances with you. Your choice, of course.”
I stand up too fast and the room lurches. I hold the edge of the couch.
He comes toward me like he’s going to help. My stomach spasms. If he touches me I’ll puke. I grab hold of my costume bag, and push my way past him. A couple of men call out to me as I push my way through the bar.
Tasha invites me to the rugby house. I miss its exposed beams, the cracks running along the plaster walls, Jesse with her tough posturing. I pick Tasha up after work at a bank downtown.
She throws herself into the front seat. “What are you so happy about?” But she’s grinning, too.
“Where to?”
Her smile slips off. She takes a long time with her seat belt. “I know I invited you to the rugby house. But Jesse—well, we didn’t know how to say no so—well, Nisha’s over there. Right now.”
I don’t know how much they know. I put the car in drive and head toward JP.
“I don’t care if Nisha’s there. We’re all adults, I’m sure we can be civilized.”
When we pull up the hill, Jesse and Nisha are outside on the deck with a few others, sitting on the mismatched chairs and on the railing. Nisha laughs with her hand on Jesse’s arm. I push my hands into my jean pockets and try not to scowl.
Tasha starts to climb the steep hill toward the house. “You sure you’re going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I should warn you. Nisha thinks that we’re—you and I—you know, that we’re together.”
I stop walking. “Where did she get that idea?”
Tasha kicks at a dark stain on the sidewalk. “Something I said, I think. I could’ve corrected her. But I didn’t. I let her believe it.”
“I don’t care what Nisha thinks.”
We walk up to the house in step. We’re close enough that the hairs on our arms mingle. Nisha doesn’t look at us, engrossed in a conversation with a girl I don’t know. Is everyone quieter now that we’re here? Our steps creak too loud on the porch. Tasha stands closer than she should.
Jesse crosses the deck, wraps her enormous arms around me, and claps me on the back. She raises her cigarette as if in toast and puts it in between her thin lips. The tip glows as she sucks in. She slings an arm over my shoulder.
I try not to look at Nisha, who stands directly opposite me, still with her head turned away. She talks to a girl I don’t know, every once in a while touching her dangling earrings like she’s afraid they’ve fallen off. The girl she’s talking to is feminine and Asian, pretty with long dark hair that falls around her face. I try not to stare at Nisha, try to focus on my conversation with Jesse. My eyes wander back and forth.
“You should’ve seen this talent show,” Jesse says. “We wrote the lyrics on our stomachs and spelled out the song.”
Tasha talks to another girl I don’t know—a mohawked redhead with snakebite lip piercings. She hangs on Tasha’s arm and looks at her with a dimpled smile.
“Harder, faster, stronger,” Jesse says. “You know the song, right?”
Ni
sha has her blue contacts in. I like her eyes brown, but I could never talk her out of wearing them.
When the already dark sky starts to spit down rain, the other girls leave. The mohawked girl kisses Tasha goodbye. Nisha stays behind and talks to Jesse.
Tasha comes over. Our arms brush but she doesn’t flinch away. She leans close to my ear and whispers, “I guess that wasn’t very convincing.” She smells like old cologne.
If I turn, we’d be too close. “Whatever she wants to believe.”
Nisha’s cold, glassy eyes look at me. It takes forever for her to cross the deck. I see her mouth make the words before I hear them.
“I need to talk to you.” She turns around and heads into the house.
Tasha puts a hand on my shoulder. “You don’t have to go.”
I follow Nisha into the house. She sits down on the bed in the living room—Tasha’s bed. She pats the space next to her and crosses her legs, arranging her crocheted skirt so that it reveals just one tanned kneecap. I stand near the door. She pats the bed again.
The TV plays on mute, an old movie about a Jewish lesbian in Berlin during the Holocaust, trying to fly under the radar. Unseen, hunted, dangerous.
I sit on the low couch that faces the bed. From this seat I have to look up at Nisha, framed by Tasha’s paintings on the wall.
The Jewish woman in the movie is vacationing with her lover and her lover’s children, taking pictures in wooded areas.
“I’ve been thinking.” Nisha frowns and rubs down her skirt. “I know we don’t have bridal parties, but if my wedding was a white wedding, you’d be my maid of honor.”
The woman on TV is found out—Nazi officers drag her down the stairs of her German lover’s apartment building. Dirt stains her white pantsuit.
“It’s stupid to be fighting with my maid of honor.”
I can’t feel my skin, only the heaviness and my stomach turning. I wish I’d never left Amma’s house. Behind Nisha’s head hang three square canvases. I first thought they were close-ups of tree trunks but now I see eyes staring back from the weaving colors.
“Are you listening, Lucky? I said I don’t want to fight anymore.”
I can’t find words. I nod. The Jewish woman’s German lover, now old, walks in a garden. She survived the war. Married with children. Hidden. Safe.
“Are we okay then?” Nisha says. “We can go back to normal?”
I stare at the canvases behind her head. The eyes in the wood grain stare back. I can’t feel my skin. Normal, where Nisha is engaged and we pretend like she’s not, like she’s not walking into a new life that has no space for me, where we are both in love and married, just not to each other, normal where us is an impossibility. Hidden, safe. “Yeah, sure. We can go back to normal.”
•••
“You stayed out all day.” Amma puts her hands on her hips. Several pots and pans hiss behind her on the stove. Her laptop sits open on the dining table next to a stack of dentistry journals. “What use is you staying with me to help if you go out with your friends all day?”
I take my time hanging up my coat in the front closet. “Where’s Grandmother?”
“Sleeping.” Amma turns her back to me and walks over to the stove. She stirs the contents of each pot. “I must have done something terrible in my past life.”
She did something terrible in her past life, and is cursed with daughters who don’t listen to her. One who runs away, another who never acts like a brown lady should act. Be a proper woman. Have a child. Where is your natural urge to nurture? Where did it go? Stop being a deviant. Do you have no shame?
I tune her out and rifle through the dentistry journals on the table. Dysesthesia of the mandible. The effects of beverages on plaque acidogenicity after a sugary challenge. Is it ethical to raffle off prizes in exchange for referrals?
•••
Nisha calls me crying. She won’t tell me why. “I need more outfits,” she says instead. “For the wedding.” All those pieces of ritual require outfit changes for the bride. “Will you take me?” Nisha’s voice is quiet, like she’s afraid I might refuse.
I don’t want to upset Amma, but she’s only too happy to let me go for this. Spending time with family is only important if the alternative is spending it with friends she doesn’t approve of.
I drive Nisha to Chandra’s Bridal Boutique in Cambridge. In the window of the tiny, cottage-like shop, three headless mannequins model three types of bridal wear from three different Indian states. Nisha’s eyes are still red, her face swollen from crying in the car, but she makes a brave attempt at nonchalance. A bell tinkles when we open the door. The store is small, cramped, and brightly lit, every wall filled with shelves that glitter in rainbow.
“Do you have a new saree for the wedding?” Nisha asks me.
I nod. Amma probably bought one as soon as she heard.
“It better be nice,” she says. “Not too simple, okay?”
If Amma picked it out, it definitely won’t be simple.
Nisha goes up to the woman behind the counter. “I’m looking for a churidar for the mehendi ceremony before my wedding.” If she was white, she would’ve flashed the diamond on her ring. Sri Lankan weddings don’t even have mehendi ceremonies, but Nisha insisted. When we were kids, she was the one who got new dresses and jewelry for no particular reason. My parents’ money was split among three kids.
The woman behind the counter pulls out churidars in crinkly plastic bags. Blue and white with beads, yellow and orange with stones, red and green with embroidery. “These are the newest styles. Just came in this week. Very affordable.”
Nisha looks down her nose at the churidars on the counter. She looks like Kris. He gets this way in brown stores, as if the salespeople should be bowing to him inside. I want to hold her by the waist, draw her to me.
“Do you have any unique styles?”
“These are the newest styles.” The woman pulls out some more churidars from their plastic cases and spreads them out on top of the others. “This style is in all the Indian movies now.”
Nisha touches a gold and white churidar. She takes it to the back room to try it on.
The woman turns to me. “Would you like to buy one?” Her black-lined eyes blink behind round glasses.
Nisha opens the door to the fitting room. The woman turns to the shelves and starts putting some of the churidars back. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to what goes where, but there has to be some code.
“How does it look?” Nisha asks too loudly. She has that scrunched-up face that can either lead to yelling or to tears.
I put on the best awed-by-your-beauty face I can manage. “Looks great. Turn around.”
She does a little twirl. The woman behind the counter glances at me over her shoulder.
“Looks great.”
“You already said that.”
“Just means it’s twice as true.”
Nisha goes back to the fitting room. The small store’s getting hot. I pull at the neck of my shirt to let some air in.
“If she likes that, she may like these.” The woman pulls out more churidars. “These are her size.”
“I don’t think—”
“We have matching jewelry.”
Nisha comes out of the dressing room and looks through the churidars that the woman has just pulled out. She’s walking with a sway to her hips again, which is a good sign.
“I’ll get this.” She points to the one she tried on. “And—” She sniffs loudly.
I put a hand on her shoulder but she shrugs it off. She has her back to me. I can’t tell if she’s going to cry or not.
“Nisha?”
She hides her face and shoves her purse at me. “Pay for this. I’ll be in the car.” She runs toward the door.
I feel the numbness start to spread. No. It’s Nisha. I
’m not numb to her.
I turn to the woman behind the counter. “The gold and white churidar. And some matching bangles.”
“We have these mirrored ones. Just got them in.” She opens the back of the counter and pulls out a set of shimmering bangles. She dangles them on her finger, filling the store with their clinking.
I touch the bangles lightly. They feel like sand from all the glitter, with mirrors embedded deep in the metal. Nisha is crying outside.
I pay with Nisha’s money and hurry to my car. She’s crying against the passenger door. I unlock it and she gets inside. I get in the driver’s side, stare at the steering wheel, and wait.
She’s shrunken in on herself, all curled up toward her knees. “You were flirting with her,” she says.
“Who? I wasn’t.”
“You like her.” She cries harder.
I punch the side of the steering wheel, making her jump. “You’re getting married in a month. What the fuck does anything matter.”
She doesn’t have her contacts in, her eyes dark brown now like oil. “You’re married.”
“Kris and I, we have an arrangement.”
Tears cling to her eyelashes. She doesn’t say anything.
“Nisha, our marriage isn’t real. Kris likes men.”
She puts her head in her hands. “I can’t do this. This isn’t me.” Her hair swings around her face. “I only agreed to get married because you were married. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
She reaches out and grabs my arm. I draw her to me and hold her while she sobs.
“It’ll be okay. You’ll be fine.”
She grabs hold of my wrist and squeezes hard. She looks up at me and her face is wild—her eyes large and her chin set like she’s clenching her teeth together. “Let’s go. Run away with me.”
“What?”
“We could go somewhere. We could be happy somewhere. You and me.”
I push her gently away from me. “You can’t be serious.”
She pulls my wrist. Her fingers grip like a vice. “We could go anywhere. You and me.”
I close my eyes and hold her close. The bride belongs to the man who brings her home. “Okay,” I say. “You and me.”