by Sejal Shah
I didn’t realize I would feel drawn to other Indians in Italy, nor that we might mutually wonder about each other’s stories of emigration or immigration, and any link we might have beyond a shared sense of having left some place. I remember these exchanges from time to time with the brief sharpness of guilt. After returning to Massachusetts, I got caught up with papers to grade, papers to write. I never organized the pictures and receipts and ticket stubs into a scrapbook or album. I never sent those photos.
[2000, 2019]
Married
We were in the airport. You were sweating so much you needed to find paper towels. You found the usual symbol indicating the usual room. I waited for you, by your bags, watched the people on the rolling walk, standing or walking. Here was all of it: the travel and tiredness. The rolling black suitcases and the pale green suits. The families, the women shuffling in saris, in socks-and-chappals, holding the hands of their grandsons. Everyone and everything was there: people who worked there, the racks of magazines, the packages of dried fruit. I counseled myself not to buy a magazine that I could finish off before the flight. I bought two instead. I wondered where the bride was, and the groom. We had finished a wedding. Were they also in an airport or in a plane? We saw the band from the wedding, waiting for the same flight. They waved us over. “You danced,” they said. “A lot,” they said. “Have some coffee,” they said. “Yes,” I said. “I do like to dance.” (I wondered then: had I danced too much?)
We were in the small airport. A one-terminal, the kind where it was impossible to miss anyone. We were waiting to get to Detroit, to take the connections back to DC, New York, and the rest. We took the vouchers when the flight was overbooked, and thought about where we could go next. None of us was in a hurry to get back.
We ate some breakfast, the bass player and the trombone player, the groomsman and I. He was not the groomsman I had been carefully seated next to at the rehearsal dinner, nor the one who escorted me back after the service. I was glad to wait for him, but then I wondered why I was waiting. He had his tiny pills for sleep and for no-sleep, and his wife on the East Coast and the silver-gray laptop; he had the noticeably lengthy conversation with a woman at the wedding. The leaning in, the extra drink. I suppose I shrugged; it seemed easier to walk in the airport next to someone, if we were going in the same direction for a while. I wondered, too, about all the people we don’t marry.
I composed a postcard to the one groomsman I had been seated not next to, but close by. I wrote it out in my head, then in a notebook, then on the postcard. He called me after he got the card, and I called him back. That was it. We talked about visiting, but that was it: only talk. I can recognize it for what it is. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a good time at the wedding, or at the dinner afterward, but what I am remembering is how we went swimming in Lake Michigan after, and we weren’t quite drunk enough. Someone had brought a cooler of drinks to encourage the usual behaviors. The water was warm, the floor pebbly, but still, I was cold. We kept walking out, but the floor never dropped, the water never got deeper. It was strange that way. We crab-walked out, in order to keep ourselves submerged in the water. We stripped to underwear, or underwear and bras, or nothing at all. Some people sat in the gazebo and watched and talked.
Someone I had known in college picked me up and threw me over his shoulder. When we sat down in the lounge chairs on the porch, he sat on me. I was Raggedy-Ann. He said, “I didn’t know you could dance like that.” His wife said, “Are you comfortable? You can tell him to get off you.” Another person sat on top of him; we were tired and silly. I didn’t mind the weight of them, of us splayed out on the porch. I didn’t mind him seeing me as he had not seen me before. I thought perhaps he should have gone up to their room when his wife went. I thought about all the unspoken things between people. Not everything needs to be said. She knew he’d go swimming and they would travel back to their city on the East Coast.
I went back to my room afterward. Before that, I allowed you, the one I had been carefully seated next to, to think I had fallen asleep on your shoulder in the gazebo. I was as disingenuous as a child who doesn’t want to leave. We walked back to the inn, a blanket wrapped around us, and in my room, I gave you my address. I started the water for a bath. I was startled when you came back: perhaps you were bolder than I had imagined. I thought we were both a bit shy. You had left the address I had written out for you on the bed. You came by to get it. We talked a little longer and then you went back to your room. I waited up for another bridesmaid, who would be coming by with someone else from the wedding party. (I had the room key.) They slept on the floor. The next day, we were all tired at breakfast, and traveling back to all the places we had come from and were resigned to returning to. No one, I thought, had found anyone else. Only the couple we had gathered to toast, to surround, to join. I hadn’t been thinking of them at all, on their way to sun.
The best line I heard that night: a friend of the groom I had met once before came up to me after several gin and tonics. “Here,” he said, “is a string tied around my finger. I tied this string around my finger,” he said, “because I wanted to remember to hit on you.” I laughed; we danced. The usual songs, in the usual order. He was so ebullient that I wondered. He was kind, and I said, “I have to dance with this other one, the one they’ve seated me next to. But I will dance this dance with you.”
Here is the truth: I wasn’t seated directly next to him (too obvious). To you. I mean you. You were at my table, though. What I remember: how you mentioned the punk bands you liked. How you didn’t think of yourself as Indian much, but then, you had grown up in New Jersey. Everyone I knew from there thought of other things: I had a cousin who had been into Wicca, another who was briefly interested in NASA, one who dated a Puerto Rican girl, several others who went to NYU.
We had known each other in college, but then, the fact of our Indianness must have been awkward. I liked that you played the guitar. We each did what we did then: went out with other people. You had a Gujarati girlfriend, though, and I couldn’t decide if that would make you more likely to want to go out with me, or less. I know one thing should not have to do with the other, but I have always thought of the way each relationship revises the one before. You were finishing one residency and thinking about doing another. I think you had stopped playing in a band, but that you still played sometimes, at home.
I thought about all this, and then we had our few conversations. I called you the way I called everyone I knew in New York that September. Perhaps it would have been smarter to invite you to come visit. An entire weekend of eating out, unfolding the futon, a weekend away from New York. Would I take out my Indian decorations or hide them? Nothing ever came of it. You lived far away from the towers, and you were fine. We talked about the media coverage, we talked about the smoke. I think you had been working in the hospital that day and, like so many others, waited for people who never came.
My mother reminds me of the next one. He is the son of family friends. It is only a reception; the wedding already took place in Bombay. She asks what she should mark on the card: braised vegetables and rice pilaf or the Indian vegetarian dinner? I imagine another round of dancing, toasting, seeing who we are seated next to. I can imagine the cards they will give me. How they will stay in my wallet. (I still have three from the last one. Perhaps I have not been focused enough in following up.) How I will imagine or they will imagine, but we have known each other for years. Calculations. We are getting older. Some of the talk at the tables is always about who is next. Who has a boyfriend or a girlfriend; which ones are not Indian.
At the last wedding, over Columbus Day weekend, I saw my best friend from the time that girls have best friends. She mentioned weekend setups and no one who was working out. “I’m working on it,” she said. I said, “I can’t seem to do it.” In December, her family threw a small engagement party. In the photo she emailed me, she and her fiancé are smiling. I watched the image appear, moment by moment; how it
filled the screen.
In one of my mother’s small purses I borrow for such occasions are collections of email addresses on smudged napkins or the backs of name cards, which directed us where to sit, and spelled out our names in gold, or silver, in careful sans serif black. I find them, occasionally, when I am looking for other things.
[2002]
Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib
In the books I read growing up, there were always words I couldn’t quite imagine. I remember, with a specificity that surprises me, the foreignness of certain colors: kelly green, strawberry blonde. These were books about girls with doting fathers and best friends named George, books about an adopted boy named Jim and his sister, Honey. A series about two best friends from the same street who made room for a third. No one felt alone past the second chapter. A series about twins, one good and one slightly more interesting. Like every girl, I wanted a twin or a best friend. Like every girl, I wanted both.
Another series: four girls away at camp—it was in truth a boarding school, but I could scarcely imagine such a thing. That’s what I mouthed to myself, then: scarcely. I tried these words on in my head, alone in my room, the bedside lamp on, folded under the covers, escaping into the pages of a book. And isn’t that what all writers want? Falling into a book, each one a kind of Narnia, and feeling that exquisite edge of aloneness, honed almost to happiness?
Nearly everything that happened in my life when I was twelve took place at home, or at some close distance from home. My mother would say to me, “Will you get the matching blouse from my drawer? It’s popti-colored. Parrot green.” In my head, this was the same color as kelly green, but I never found out. I never knew for sure. There were certain colors that bloomed normal on the palette of Indian saris, hanging in rows in the guest bedroom / youngest daughter’s closet. The way I’d seen in all of my friends’ houses, too—the saris couldn’t fit into the parents’ closets. Saris and American clothes would not coexist in the same shallow closet of these first homes.
How these series come back to haunt me now, with their sense of ownership over the world, with the ways in which they defined a world. Kelly green. With all the ways in which they owned words. Strawberry blonde. We read these books, but there was no one like us in any of them. Did we think of writing our own? I want to see us. To see the girl I was, the girls we were, back when we lived at home.
Something like Nancy Drew: The Secret of the Old Clock, The Clue of the Leaning Chimney. The Mystery of the Girl Who Lives at Home.
Sejal Shah lived alone with her parents on Pelham Road in western New York State, in a city that had seen better days (“Young Lion of the West”), that had housed stops on the Underground Railroad. She became a late only child, her older brother having jumped ship for college, Brown University, where many of the students were of color, mixed race, radical, or in some other way Third World, yet wanting to begin their training to be doctors, investment bankers, nonprofit organizers, painters, members of the educated elite.
Sejal, when not solving mysteries (“The Case of the Unfinished Homework”) or staying away from those less fortunate and more maligned than herself (resource room kids, kids born in India who now faced the horrors of gym class and enforced classroom pairing), spent her days in the company of Esprit-wearing white kids (Jessica, Tara, Amity, Kathleen), trying to avoid the ball in volleyball, running fast in track.
They were incredulous over the obvious: three others in town shared her first name, two shared both her names. It was necessary to use middle initials so as not to confuse the library system and the eye doctor’s office: Sejal A., Sejal B., Sejal N. Shah (there was no C.). On the weekend, Sejal A. was joined by her trio of friends. They were all girls with glasses: Sonal, Mini, and Rupali. As you might expect, there were also two boys: Nitin and Manish. Nicky and Max. Even their parents called them by these names, the nicknames an improvement for their junior high lives. Their secret Indian lives—this is what bound them, the Secret Six, together.
During the week, they tried to look like everyone else. On the weekends, they stopped trying. On the weekends, they headed to each other’s houses. The girls took turns hosting sleepovers, figuring out which boy they liked. All of them parodied their parents’ accents; then they repeated the joke about how their parents ordered a cheeseburger without the burger at McDonald’s and asked to talk to the manager, Ronald McDonald, when they were not understood; then they taught each other how to use curling irons to fix their bangs without making awkward cowlick angles.
In each other’s kitchens, they ate Hot Mix (Rice Krispies, potato sticks, peanuts, lemon juice, and murchu); practiced moonwalking; kept secret track of who got her period first, watched their mothers making chaa and finding the crushed red pepper to sprinkle on pizza, and their fathers debating something or playing carom. In each other’s bedrooms and bathrooms, the girls experimented with hair-removal systems—that noxious cream, Nair, which only sometimes worked, and hydrogen peroxide (sure, some Indians have blonde hair, Sejal tried to tell her brother). In each other’s bedrooms, Sejal and Mini gingerly tried out Sally Hansen Natural Cold Wax Kit for Face/Leg/Body/Bikini. Sonal and Sejal tried hot wax with cloth strips and gave themselves minor burns across their legs. Their sensible mothers had warned them about how using a razor would only mean the hair would grow back thicker. Finally, the girls gave up and found the plastic bag of Bic disposable razors one of their fathers used. Then it was time to find Band-Aids and introduce the real topic of conversation: tampons—just how exactly did that work?
In each other’s houses, they could relax. No explanations were necessary about why their mothers did or did not wear saris, about what that dot meant (how were they supposed to know?), about the difference between Hindu and Hindi, about why their parents were stricter than American parents, about why they always took their shoes off in the house. They were four girls and two boys. They could have fit neatly into a book.
Boy #1 was the nice one. Boy #2 played the drums. Girl #1 went to school west of the city. She was the only Indian in her school, no small cross to bear in the early ’80s. Sonal’s mother, Nalini Auntie, was best friends with Sejal’s mother, Shobhana Auntie. Girl #2 went to Catholic school—a whole different world from the other girls’ schools. Mini wore a uniform, and her school had dress-down days. She and her sister were also the only Indians there. Girl #3 lent Sejal her dress for the eighth-grade formal (“A Night in Paris”). It was a silky gray dress with puffed sleeves. Without Rupali’s help, Sejal might have been forced to wear a dress her mother liked. Sejal’s mother often said, “School is not a fashion parade!” and Sejal, Sonal, Rupali, and Mini would laugh, because all of their parents said it. And, of course, school was a fashion parade. The girls had to know what to wear. This mattered even more if you looked different.
Rupali’s father, Sumant Uncle, always drove the kids to the multiplex. The girls watched their little sisters and stayed at the movies for hours, slipping from one theater to another, thrilling at seeing even the last fifteen minutes of a movie they didn’t like, just to stay a little longer.
Three of the four girls had at least one parent who had grown up in Africa. Sejal wondered if her own parents and her friends’ parents somehow felt more comfortable with each other than with other Indians. They, like the girls, had grown up outside of India. They had to approximate India, too. They were playacting, too: outdated gestures, films, food. Some of them must have read the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton, a British series, but all of the kids in that series were white. Sejal and her brother read comic books, Archie, Veronica, and Betty right next to stacks of Amar Chitra Katha books. Arjuna’s dilemma over whether or not to fight his cousins on the battlefield held their interest as much as Archie’s never-ending struggle between Betty and Veronica. It was a tough choice: Betty was blonde, but Veronica was rich.
I remember us, think back to us, to the dilemmas of any middle-school girl: the mysteries of the notes we wrote each other. Four girls, and someone was al
ways the odd one out. Of the strategies we deployed to catch the boys’ attention: HCP = hard, cold, polite. Alternating with F+F: friendly and flirtatious. Those were the only strategies we had. We also tried to learn how to throw a football, how to hit a baseball, how to play pool, how to swim. Who had the words to talk about that other mystery: how to be American, how not to be American?
I wonder if the other girls felt the way I did. That we needed a series portraying fathers who said no dating till college (or ever), with characters eating pani puri and prasaad, emptying out dresser drawers for the cousin who had come to stay for three months or two years. Did they also wonder when peacock blue, henna red, and popti green would appear in those books? When the names Shalini, Neelu, Ajay, and Sunil would appear? There would be no need to describe the color of the characters’ hair: all of them would have black hair, maybe with brown highlights as they got older.
And maybe I would have to remember to mention the green and blue and hazel contact lenses the girls began to wear as they got older. I see them still, see all of us still, wearing our glasses. How awkward and beautiful we were, in our fake Izods, in our Sears. How mysterious and cruel we were, how kind and belly-laughable.
I wanted them all: pulp paperbacks, spines broken, or hardbacks in plastic jackets, the slip of paper on the inside page with all of the library stamps, date after date after date. The covers of the older series were painted the brown and red of the late ’70s. Muted colors—olive, that weathered Margaret Thatcher blue-gray, lilac-heather on the hardbacks of Anne of Green Gables. It is how I think of those summer evenings, those Sunday afternoons. The days Sonal and I used brown paper grocery bags to bring back a stack of books from either of our town libraries. How we stretched out in her room on Avocado Lane, reading, before roller-skating down the driveway, before it was time to set the table for dinner.