Wipe my face dry with the back of my hand.
Unlock the door.
Paati casts a look at the crumpled heap of clothing.
Picks up a skirt. Examines it.
“I could let out the hems,” she offers.
“Your skirts can be lengthened quite a bit.”
“Thanks, Paati. Thanks so much. Thank you.”
She pats my cheek. “You tell me
when I should shorten them back.”
I nod
sure she’ll never need
to shorten my skirts again.
CRIPPLED
Pa begs to escort me to the bus stop
although I’ve been riding the public bus to school
alone every day since I was ten.
He worries
drivers won’t stop long enough
for me to get safely in and out.
He wonders if we should arrange a taxi.
As if we can afford taxis on a daily basis.
I reason with him. “We’re at the end of the bus route.
The bus is always empty when I get in.”
Ma says, “Veda, please, we don’t want you—”
“You don’t want me doing things by myself anymore?”
That gets me my way.
When I arrive at the bus stop,
a little girl bounces over, her pigtails bobbing.
She addresses me politely,
calling me older sister—akka.
“What happened to your leg, akka?”
She looks too young
to realize her question is rude.
“Accident.” I thrust my crutches as far ahead as I can,
distancing myself from her wide-eyed curiosity.
A man with a pencil-thin black mustache
leans out of a window.
“What happened to your leg?”
My throat hurts as if a thorn’s stuck in it and I ignore him.
The bus’s steps look steeper than I remember.
I hesitate on the ground,
trying to picture Jim standing next to me,
his cheerful voice teaching me how to climb on crutches.
An old woman
greets me from her usual place in front,
“Girl? How did you lose your leg?
An accident? Or a disease?”
“She’s not telling,” the man says.
“So rude she is being. In our day we always
answered our elders.”
The woman sighs. “Very true. Very true.”
As fast as I can,
I get away from them, to the back of the bus.
Stare out the window,
sensing innumerable eyes staring at me.
Someone taps me on the shoulder.
The khaki-clad bus conductor.
He’s seen me in his bus nearly every school day.
I wait for him to ask
the question.
He only says, “Good to have you back.”
Hands me my ticket and moves on.
I want to hug him.
The bus jerks onto the road.
A temple elephant lumbering along in a procession
obstructs traffic.
I’m thankful it slows the bus down
at least for a short while.
Soon the bus is hurtling madly
through crowded streets.
I press back into my seat,
clutching my schoolbag.
Sweat plasters my skirt to my thighs.
My stop feels light-years away.
By the time we arrive, the bus is packed.
“Let the lame girl through,” a lady shouts as I struggle to push
through the crowd.
She sounds as though she’s trying to be helpful.
My face flushes
hot with shame
as I navigate carefully
down the steep steps
and out of the bus.
LOOKS
Clunking along the bleak school corridors,
I must look as asymmetric
as a heron balancing on one leg.
I wish it wouldn’t take Jim so long to make my prosthesis.
I hate announcing my arrival on crutches
—stomp, clomp, stomp, clomp—
loud enough to make every head turn in my direction.
When lessons are over
everyone pours out onto the sports field.
“You could coach us, Veda. Please? Come?” Chandra pleads.
So I go.
The other girls from the cricket team gather around me.
A few mumble that they’re sorry,
their nervous eyes politely stuck to my face,
wary of accidentally straying too low and catching a glimpse
of the space beneath my right knee.
Some welcome me back in extra-bright voices,
saying it’s nice I’m back
though they hardly know me.
Silent, shy, following Chandra,
at school, I was her shadow.
Only at dance did I shine in my own light.
Listlessly
I listen to girls whack at the red cork ball with willow bats.
Mekha, a vicious girl, who plays so well
Chandra’s forced to keep her on the team,
walks past me.
“Hey, Veda, I was pretty lame today. Wasn’t I?” She giggles.
Her twin, Meghna, peals with laughter.
As they walk away, I hear Mekha say,
“Veda’s so sensitive!
Are we supposed to stop using certain words
because she’s handicapped?
Should we give cricket stumps
a new name now that she has a stump?”
The girls fall on each other, laughing some more,
and their taunts echo loudly in my head
long after I leave the field.
NAMES
Chandra stops by in the evening. “Why did you leave early? Without telling me?
What happened? I was worried.”
Words spill out of me, fierce as tears.
“I’m sick of being a cripple.
I hate hearing people talk about me.
And even when they’re not talking about me,
ugly words are always around:
stump, lame, handicap.”
“If people are calling you names, I’ll take care of them.”
Chandra makes fists.
“You’re just more advanced than we are.
I saw this TV show about how, maybe, in a hundred years,
we’ll all have implants to make our bodies stronger.”
I slap at a crutch. “This isn’t an implant.
It only enhances my weakness.
I’m going to drop out of school.”
“Veda, you never give up.
Not even at cricket,
which you don’t care much about.
You know why our team won so often?
Because you inspired me.
However desperate a match seemed,
I could read in your face
that you refused to accept defeat.”
She’s right, but her words surprise me.
“How do you know?”
“Maybe others can’t see your feelings.
I, however, have X-ray vision.” Chandra makes a funny face,
sucking her cheeks in and rolling her eyes.
My teeth feel stuck together
like I’ve been chewing cashew candy,
except my mouth tastes bitter, not caramel sweet.
It’s work to get my j
aws unstuck and laugh
but I’m used to challenging the muscles of my body.
I do it for Chandra’s sake. Because friendship is about laughing
when the other person is joking to make you feel better.
Even if you don’t find her joke all that funny.
EXPOSED
Dr. Murali removes my stitches.
I make myself stare
at my
bare
residual leg.
As healed as it ever will be.
Below my knee, above where my leg now ends,
a grotesque smiley mouth leers at me:
a C-shaped scar.
Looking at my uneven skin
exposed
hurts
worse than salting a fresh wound.
Closing my eyes, I turn
away.
Dr. Murali sings the praises of prostheses so enthusiastically,
it’s as if he’s encouraging
Ma and Pa to cut off their legs and replace them
with “marvelous” artificial limbs
that are “so much stronger” than our own.
Dr. Murali says, “We will give you a shrinker sock
to compress your limb
into a conical shape so it’ll fit easily into your prosthesis.
Wear it as much as you can over the next month
so your limb doesn’t become
dog-eared or bulbous.
Roll antiperspirant on the skin beneath your sock
so the area stays dry. Keep it clean.
We don’t want it getting infected and smelly.”
My cheeks burn with embarrassment,
as if I’ve been playing cricket in the heat.
Bad enough having Jim
see this part of me, naked,
without imagining it
dog-eared, bulbous,
stinking, swollen, disgusting.
Jim kneels by my foot
so close I could rest my chin on his golden head.
“Hey there.” Jim’s normally buoyant voice is soft.
One of his knuckles, rough as a cat’s tongue,
brushes against my inner thigh
as he helps me pull on my “shrinker sock.”
His accidental touch tickles,
sending an uncomfortable flutter through my stomach.
“Veda? I’ll make you a leg you can dance on.”
I feel dizzy as if I’d stood up too fast,
though I get up slowly on my crutches.
Dizzy at the sight of him kneeling by my foot,
dizzy at the thought of Jim and me alone in his office,
his dazzling eyes watching me dance
on the leg he’s promised he’ll make me.
IN
the
EYE
I’m at the table finishing my homework
when I glimpse Paati in our kitchen
wiping beads of sweat off her brow
with the edge of her white sari.
“Paati, let me help.”
“I was going to make you some uppuma.”
“I’ll cook my own snack. You do too much for someone your age.
Chandra’s grandmother sits in front of the TV all day.”
“Don’t criticize your elders,” Paati says, but her eyes twinkle.
“Paati, I’d never criticize you. You’ve done so much in life.”
“Didn’t you tell me Chandra’s grandmother
raised eight children? I only had one.”
“You raised Pa all on your own!
You became a schoolteacher!
Most widows of your time didn’t dare leave home!”
“Finish your homework.”
“Done.” I stuff my books into my schoolbag,
clunk over to help her.
“Veda, you look tired. Go and rest. I enjoy cooking.”
“I’m not tired,” I lie.
“I’m old, not blind,” she says.
“I wish my classmates were blind.
And the people who ride my bus, too.”
I warm a blob of clarified butter in a pan.
The smell of melting butter fills our kitchen.
I toss in some black mustard seeds.
They crackle. The sound reminds me
of Mekha and Meghna cackling. “Everyone stares at me.
All the time.
Everyone looks at Chandra, too,
except that’s because she’s pretty.
In my case, it’s because I’m not.”
“Chandra’s pretty,” Paati says. “And so are you.”
“Only if I’m dancing.”
“Veda, onstage you sparkle with confidence.
But your body doesn’t transform
offstage.
Your curls are just as long,
your back just as straight,
your figure and face just as lovely.
Your hands flutter whenever you talk. And you
move so elegantly.
As delicately as a butterfly flitting between flowers.”
“Not on crutches, I don’t.”
“All
the
time,” Paati says.
She’s my grandmother.
No wonder she believes I’m always graceful.
Beauty, as the proverb says, I now understand,
is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.
WHO DANCED Ahead
OF ME
“Did you get those just because of me?”
I motion at the rows and rows
of books on Bharatanatyam
stacked on Jim’s bookshelf,
in his sunny workroom on the third floor of a redbrick building
on the forested campus of the technology institute
right in the middle of the tar-and-concrete maze of Chennai city.
“You bet, kiddo.”
The hair on Jim’s hands is powdered white
from the plaster of Paris
he’s mixing with water
to make a mold of my residual limb.
I can’t believe he’s taking so much time to learn
about what I most love.
I feel flattered—more than flattered—by his interest.
I want to say how deeply
his care and dedication touch me.
Instead, all I do is sneeze from the dust Jim is stirring up.
Jim motions at a wall.
“Got those in your honor, too.”
Posters of three dancers, all
one-legged.
“Let me introduce them to you, ma’am.” Jim points
at a handsome man wearing a suit and shoes.
“He’s an African-American tap dancer.
They called him Peg Leg Bates. He danced with a wooden leg. Way back in the 1920s and ’30s.”
Next, Jim shows me an Indian man named Nityananda,
dancing a classical style similar to Bharatanatyam.
Nityananda balances on one leg, his residual limb hidden
beneath the graceful drapes of his white veshti,
his upper body naked except for his golden dance jewels,
his arms raised, palms together above his head,
eyes closed.
But it’s the third dancer
off whom I can’t take my eyes:
a dark-haired, round-faced Indian lady.
“Sudha Chandran,” Jim says.
“She danced your own beloved Bharatanatyam
with a simple, inexpensive artificial limb
created in India: the Jaipur foot.
The prosthesis I saw on my first tr
ip to India
that inspired me to design artificial limbs.
We’ll be making you a far more modern leg
with greater flexibility and range of motion.”
I dream of my picture
hanging next to Sudha Chandran’s on Jim’s wall.
As if he can read my mind, Jim says,
“One day, kiddo, I’ll add your poster to my collection.”
I love hearing the pride in his tone,
love his certainty,
love how he
hears my unspoken words.
BEGGAR
Paati and I go to the Shiva temple near our home.
She walks slower than usual.
We pause in front of a small vacant lot
so she can catch her breath.
“Paati, are you feeling unwell?”
“Just age catching up with me,” she says.
An old beggar, almost bent in two,
shuffles out of a ragged tent in one corner of the lot.
He holds out hands skinny as a chicken’s feet.
Paati drops a coin into his palms.
“God bless you,” he says to her.
Then he turns to me. “And you, too,
so you aren’t a cripple in your next life.”
Outside the temple wall,
Paati takes off her slippers.
I don’t.
I’m not sure I want to limp in.
“Angry with God?” Paati says.
“Why shouldn’t I be, Paati?
Why did He take away my leg?
Why did He make that man so poor?
Is God punishing us for sins we committed
and bad Karma we built up in a past life?”
“I don’t believe in a punishing God,” Paati says.
“I believe in a compassionate God.
To me, Karma isn’t about divine reward or retribution.
Karma is about making wise choices to create a better future.
It’s taking responsibility for your actions.
Karma helps me see every hurdle as a chance to grow
into a stronger, kinder soul.
When I was widowed, I was angry and scared
but I used my anger to act braver than I felt.
Everyone believed my act and soon I believed it, too.
A Time to Dance Page 5