The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

by Mira Jacob

  “Oh, you know. Treatment. Tumors, medications, prognoses. Eating, sleeping. Akhil, but I guess that was always the case, although now if you talk about him, you’ll hear all sorts of stuff.”

  “Like everyone comes back looking like they did on their best day?”

  “Like clocks make it harder to see them.”

  “Wow.”

  They watched Thomas and Kamala walk away from the tomato plants, toward the back of the garden.

  “You know what I don’t get?” Dimple said. “How do you know what your best day is? I mean, aren’t some of them tied?”

  Amina smiled, nudging her cousin gently. “So are you going to do this or what?”

  Dimple nodded but didn’t move.

  “He’s the same person,” Amina lied, unsure if it was cruel to do so, but distinctly thankful as Dimple finally pushed the screen door open, stepping into the sunlight. Thomas looked over as it banged shut, his dark face lightening into a blur of teeth.

  “Dimpledimpledimple!” he called, and held his arms open as she ran to him.

  “Lunacy!” Chacko shouted an hour later, finger jammed into the air. “Idiocy!”

  “Who is asking him?” Thomas shouted back. “Did anyone ask him?”

  That afternoon, while the rest of the family cringed and Kamala shelled peas like she was being timed for an Olympic event, Thomas and Chacko went at it in the living room with renewed gusto, as if they’d been doing nothing but storing up counterarguments for the last five days.

  “Even a child knows this, Thomas! My own daughter has come home to beg you to just—”

  “Do I come in his house and yell at him over his decisions? No, I do not! Why? Because it’s HIS HOUSE.”

  “Ho!” Sanji flapped around them like an anxious parrot. “Hey! Indoor voices! Let’s be discussing this like adults, no?”

  “Well, if I was acting like you, I’d hope you’d be MAN ENOUGH to come to my house and face me!”

  “Sit,” Raj pleaded. “Let’s all just—”

  “Oh no, let him keep going, please! Perhaps Chacko can kill me himself with his superiority complex!”

  “Please!” Bala cried. “The girls!”

  It took a moment, but this appeared to be the right tactic as the two men backed away from each other, hunch-shouldered, razor-eyed. Thomas lowered himself shakily into one of the few remaining chairs, and Chacko backed himself into an actual corner, his shoulders squeezed in by the walls. Sanji, Bala, and Raj hovered over the spot of carpet where the couch used to be. Kamala shelled peas.

  “Christ.” Dimple’s voice shook. “Is this how you guys have been the whole time? No wonder everyone looks like shit.”

  “No Christ, no shit!” Kamala snapped, not looking up.

  “You haven’t been here,” Chacko sulked. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what? That yelling at Thomas Uncle isn’t going to change his mind? Yeah, Dad, I’m pretty clear on that one. And if you guys can’t talk about something else, then maybe you should just go home and not see each other for a while.”

  “Okay, okay.” Sanji waggled her head. “No need to go for extremes.”

  “No, this girl is right!” Chacko said. “If we’re not here to be honest, then why be here at all? What else is there to talk about?”

  “Chackoji,” Raj said, the please inherent in his voice. “Let’s just settle down for a moment.”

  No one said anything for a long time. Raj looked at Sanji, Bala looked at Dimple, and Amina dropped her eyes to the floor, both irritated and amazed by the steady plink! plink! of the peas hitting the metal bowl. So this was it? Thirty years of no one getting a word in edgewise, and they’d run out of things to say?

  “I’m getting married,” Dimple said.

  Amina’s mouth dropped open.

  “What?” Chacko’s face fell.

  “To Sajeev.”

  “What?” Bala whispered, like saying anything louder might trigger a bomb that would detonate the entire future.

  “Sajeev and I are getting married.”

  Kamala made a strangling noise from the floor, her hands frozen in midair.

  “OH MY GOD!” Sanji jumped up, her arms swinging through the air until they pinioned Dimple, swung her from side to side. “You see? You see? All this time I’ve been telling you to be patient and you will find the right one and have your babies before your uterus dries up like one Turkish apricot, and look! It’s happened!”

  “Sajeev Roy?” Bala asked, trembling.

  “Yes, Mom. God, what other Sajeev do we know?”

  “He knows?” Kamala frowned. “He is wanting this?”

  “Ma.” Amina rolled her eyes. “He asked her.”

  “SAJEEV ROY?” Bala screamed, and then began jumping up and down, bangles and sari and face a blur of green and gold, and everyone went nuts. Thomas bellowed. Kamala muttered. Raj and Sanji hugged each other and the girls, while Chacko blinked with the stunned disorientation of a man who’d gone to sleep in one country and woken up in another.

  “Come here, you little rat!” Thomas shouted, and Dimple went to him, bending down so he could hug her.

  “All this time!” Sanji scolded the rest of them. “All this time you people are worried about how will Dimple ever find someone you like and here this girl picks Sajeev Roy himself!”

  “You’re getting married?” Chacko asked.

  “Oh, Dimple, he’s going to cry,” Thomas said, nudging her toward him. “Look what you’ve done to your poor father’s heart!”

  “We will have to go to Mumbai to get the proper lehenga and jewelry!” Bala yelled at nobody in particular. “Three outfits at least!”

  “No, wait, Mom, we’re not—”

  “What time of year? Winter? Summer? Then only we’ll know the right gown, nah? Someone call the Roys!”

  “Not yet! Sajeev should tell them first, okay? But listen, we’re not—”

  “They will want to do the engagement party in Wyoming, nah? Fine with me, right, Chacko? Party at the groom’s, wedding at the bride’s?”

  “No!” Dimple yelled. “Stop!”

  Bala frowned. “Wedding in Seattle?”

  “No wedding! We’re eloping.”

  Bala blinked, bludgeoned with confusion.

  “We’ve already planned it,” Dimple explained. “We’re going to the courthouse in Seattle in three weeks, just the two of us. You know, keep it simple.”

  The family catapulted into silence. They did not know. Bala especially did not know, her eyes pinging around the room feverishly like there was a punch line to be found somewhere.

  “But not even us?” Sanji’s face was rigid with dismay.

  “We already planned it,” Dimple repeated, looking to Amina for help. “It’s really not that big of a deal. People do it all the time.”

  “Who?” Sanji demanded. “Americans? Orphans?”

  “It will just be so much simpler. And cheap! Cheap, Dad. Don’t pretend you’re not excited about that.”

  “No wedding?” Chacko asked sadly. And then, even more sadly, “No father-daughter dance?”

  “You want a father-daughter dance?”

  “Of course he wants!” Thomas huffed. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Mad,” Sanji said, wagging a finger. “Absolutely bonkers nutso. Fine-fine not coming home and all, busy girl with a busy life, but a wedding? Without family? Might as well have a zoo without animals!” Dimple gave Amina a pleading look as Bala’s crying filled the room, soft and pervasive as humidity.

  “What about a simple court ceremony and a small-small reception of only one hundred?” Raj waggled his head from side to side like this was really no different from eloping.

  “No,” Dimple sighed. “That’s going to take too much planning. We just want to do this and—”

  “I can plan!” Bala said, seizing on this like a lifesaver thrown into an ocean. “All the details only, okay? Flowers and dresses and guest list and food and cake—nothing will be left to you
, nah?”

  “No, that’s not—listen, Mom, it’s a nice offer, but I don’t want to.”

  “But a dress!” Bala whimpered. “Surely you want something beautiful? We don’t even have to go ourselves, I can have my sister order one simple neemzari lehenga and it can be here in just six weeks and—”

  “NO. It’s not happening, okay? I’m not waiting six goddamn weeks and inviting a hundred people to sit around and squeeze me! And I’m definitely not wearing some hoochie ghagra choli stomach-baring atrocity!”

  Sanji squinted hard at her. “You’re pregnant.”

  “Oh my God,” Amina said, finally moving to jump in. “Seriously, you guys, it’s not like it’s some huge surprise, is it? This is Dimple. And anyway, she’s still marrying Sajeev, so it’s still a great thing, right?”

  “I’m pregnant,” Dimple said.

  “Ho!” Kamala shouted as Chacko’s face paled to gray. “Ho, ho, ho! Now we see!”

  “See what?” Dimple glared.

  “Choo!” Sanji stared at the floor, looking awfully surprised for having been so prescient just moments before. She thumped her palms against her sides, as if resurrecting circulation. “So there it is. So now we know.”

  “Pregnant?” Amina asked.

  “I’m sorry.” Dimple looked at her, wide-eyed. “I wanted to tell you first. I should have told you first. I tried, on the porch this morning. I just couldn’t.”

  “Do the Roys know?” Kamala asked.

  “Ma.”

  “What? Just asking!”

  “Oh my God,” Bala moaned, clutching her bangles as if to protect them. “It’s a scandal. We will be scandalized.”

  “Oh, come on.” Dimple rolled her eyes. “Do you even know what a scandal is? I’m in love and I’m having a kid and we’re getting married. Big deal.”

  “But everyone will know when the baby comes! What will the Roys think of us? Ach!”

  “Who cares what they think!” Chacko snarled, finally recovering. “What do we think? What kind of a family does this? I’m going to have a talk with this boy! Set him straight!”

  “Dad, stop. This isn’t the 1950s.”

  But wasn’t it always the 1950s for Chacko? And not even the American 1950s, but the Indian 1950s, in which a pregnant unmarried daughter in her thirties was as inconceivable as a unicorn in heat? His face sweltered with the indignity of it.

  “Hey,” Thomas said, trying to catch Chacko’s eye. “She’s right, you know. It’s not so bad.”

  “What do you know about it?” Chacko glared.

  “So then, let’s just do it as soon as possible,” Sanji said, as though coming to the end of a conversation with herself. “Right, Dimple? That’s why you wanted it alone, nah? Not because you don’t want us there, but to get it done fast?”

  “I don’t … I mean, mostly, yes.”

  “So how about this weekend?”

  “What?”

  “In four days’ time! You are staying until Sunday anyway. That is enough for us to make the party. Wedding is just a party, nah? We make parties all the time.”

  “Yes!” Raj clapped. “It’s a good idea, actually. So simple for us to pull something together, right, Bala?”

  Dimple looked nervously around the room. “We don’t need to do that. I mean, Thomas Uncle has plenty to deal with right now, we don’t need to—”

  “Judge Montano is an old patient; he can perform the ceremony! And the backyard is so nice at this time of year, no?” Thomas said. “And if you do it here, I won’t have to travel, which would be so wonderful. And the Roys can come down easily from Wyoming, and Kamala can cook!”

  “I can?”

  “We’ll both cook,” Raj said, nodding eagerly.

  “What do you think?” Amina asked Dimple quietly, as though the others weren’t listening, and her cousin instinctively patted her pockets, looking for the assurance of a cigarette pack before remembering why it was gone.

  She chewed her nail. “I mean, Sajeev would have to agree, obviously.”

  “So call him already!” Sanji said. “What else do you need?”

  What else did she need? Dimple turned to Chacko, her face disconcertingly blank, a vault holding in three decades of disappointment. From her periphery, Amina could see Bala nodding, willing him to concede, to not make the breach between them any more permanent than it already was.

  “Hey,” Thomas said softly, and this time Chacko looked at him. “You will see your daughter married. You will know her children. Isn’t that enough?”

  His question hung in the air, a gentle missive. And then what was it that Chacko said, what did he do to bring the soft collapse of relief to the room? Amina did not know because she was no longer looking at her uncle but at the empty spot of floor where the couch used to be, the full weight of the future she was losing with Thomas falling through her like a rock. The air current shifted, the family swishing and dipping and spooling toward one another, Dimple heading to the phone while the rest started making the kinds of plans they loved to make, where everyone had something to deliver. Amina held her breath, rigid, waiting for the worst to pass. She, Kamala, and Raj would handle the food. Bala would take care of decorations. Sanji would keep a running list of everything that needed to get done and make all the trips to the store. Thomas’s hand clasped the back of Amina’s neck, warm and dry. She looked over, surprised to find him standing, to have him so close. How much strength had it cost him to shuffle over? He pulled her to him, and she pressed her hot face into his shoulder, relieved to have a place to hide it.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Tell me again,” Jamie puffed, hoisting an enormous chandelier made of at least twenty round white paper lanterns into the sturdy branches of a cottonwood, “why this is a good idea?”

  “Because if we put these up, we can get rid of most of the other lights and the house will stop looking like a Broadway show mental ward.”

  “So there’s a light quota?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  He grunted and dug his heels into the foldout linoleum dance floor Thomas had dug up from some corner of the porch. Poor Jamie. They had really put him to work once they realized the advantage of his size, making him Thomas’s proxy. So far he had repositioned the couch in the field, added another length to the dining table, handed Kamala every single dish from the top shelves of her cabinets, and emptied the truck of bags of sod (not a wedding duty per se, but something Kamala and Thomas had been so excited about, he couldn’t really say no). Amina zoomed in on his hands on the rope, then lowered the camera, looking at the instant replica of him in the viewfinder.

  “Is that high enough?” he asked, panting.

  She looked up. “Maybe like a foot more?”

  “You’re insane.”

  “I mean, can you believe this?” She turned the camera toward him, showing him the tiny picture of his own hands.

  The digital camera was a present from Sajeev, who had arrived the day before to a flurry of cheek pinchings from the women and handshakes from the men (with the exception of Chacko, who nodded stiffly at him and then left to walk the perimeter of the yard, as though checking for intruders). Amina had promised to familiarize herself with the new camera before the wedding though Dimple was adamant that she not use it.

  “Oh my God!” her cousin said now, coming around the side of the house with two potted plants. “Is that the light thing? That one we’re standing under?”

  “You like it?” Jamie asked, his arms shaking. They hadn’t exactly been fast friends, Jamie and Dimple, sniffing around each other with a fair amount of suspicion, but they were making an effort, more enthusiastic with each other than they’d ever been alone with Amina.

  “It’s amazing! How did you get it to do that? All those clusters?”

  “Don’t ask,” he grunted, tying the end of the rope to the stake. “Or not unless you want to hear Amina’s dad talk about it for a really, really long time.”

  “Speaking of,” Dimple said, lo
oking over her shoulder. “Someone should really get him out of the kitchen before Raj and your mother kill him. And then someone should get Raj out, too.”

  “That bad?” Amina pulled the lens tight on her cousin’s face, liking how the marigolds threw ochre at her cheeks and chin. She showed Dimple the result.

  “Ugh! Stop with that. It’s so annoying.”

  “It’s instant gratification!”

  “Gratification should be delayed.”

  “Whatever, single mom.”

  “Shht!” Dimple glanced over her shoulder for the Roys, who had flown in that morning, befuddled but well mannered as ever, and who, the family had decided, did not actually need to know about Dimple’s pregnancy until the wedding was over and everyone was safely back in their separate states. (“And even then,” Bala had said over dinner the night before, “babies come early all the time, no? Who’s to say this one didn’t?”)

  “I thought your mom had the Roys working on the flower garlands,” Amina said.

  “She did. And like most normal people, Sajeev’s dad decided he’d rather shoot himself. Last I saw him, he was looking at some weird sign in the back with a cat on it.”

  “Raccoon,” Amina said. “It’s the Raccooner.”

  “Okay,” Jamie said, wiping his hands across his shirt and checking the raw marks on them. “Should we try it out?”

  Amina began backing into the field, camera pressed to her face. “Go.” He bent over, head down, and suddenly the lanterns blazed above him, circles upon circles of light bouncing off one another. Jamie and Dimple stood under it, heads turned up. They looked like a fairy tale, a giant, an imp, and a bubbling moon hovering over them.

  “Come here. You’ve got to see this.”

  “Who?” Dimple asked.

  “Both of you,” Amina said, and they came, picking their way across the grass, turning around to look back.

  It was not the most beautiful wedding she had ever photographed. For one, the potted marigolds didn’t hold quite the same amount of romance as other, traditional bouquets, say, calla lilies or white roses. For another, the mismatched tablecloths, folding dining chairs, and rainbow of napkins made the dinner setup look like a deranged child’s tea party. But that evening, as Dimple and Sajeev said their vows under Thomas’s constellation, as Sanji fanned her face hard enough to keep her dry-eyed, and all the other adults (save Kamala) gave in to a quiet weep, Amina understood that these pictures would be the ones she would never tire of looking at.