“I don’t get it.”
“Well, parts of it were quite deep—”
“No, Daddy. I don’t get it. Everything. What’s the point? If nothing I do will change anything, then why do I even try?”
“Beta, is that all you heard? You must understand that Dr. Singh was making a point. There are things that as a human we can’t control. Ultimately God decides. He chooses. But if we are faithful, all will be well.”
“How did you hear that? He said it’s futile. There’s no hope!” My voice cracked.
“You know, beta,” Daddy said, slowing to a stop at a traffic light, “sometimes things seem hopeless and we feel powerless, but we’re never alone. You have family and friends, and most importantly, you have God. Dr. Singh was just being honest. We will never have all the answers. If we had all the answers, we’d be God. It wasn’t meant to upset you. It should spur you to focus on what is important, rather than on things that don’t matter.”
Maybe I was supposed to believe that my mustache wasn’t a big deal, that it was trivial. That having a mustache wouldn’t matter when I grew old. But it did matter.
“I didn’t realize this talk meant so much to you, Karma. Maybe I’m not the best at this kind of stuff, but do you remember that story your dadima used to tell?” Daddy drove slowly through the intersection. “About the lump of clay and the potter?”
I nodded, sitting back in the seat, wanting to take the words of this familiar story and wrap them around me.
“The potter had a lump of clay and started to knead it. The kneading felt good, like a massage. But as the potter worked longer and harder, the clay started to protest. ‘Ouch, you’re hurting me. Please stop!’ The potter reassured the clay but kept kneading. Then he put the clay on the wheel and began to spin it, cupping it in his hands with a gentle grip. The clay relaxed into the potter’s hands, but the spinning got faster and faster, and he called out again, ‘I’m so dizzy. Please stop!’ But the potter kept spinning, promising the clay it was in good hands. Then the potter placed the clay into a hot kiln. The intense heat was too much for the clay. It protested again, ‘It’s too hot. Please stop!’ The potter continued, but with tears in his eyes. He waited for the correct amount of time before he took the clay out, and then he began to paint the clay. The clay liked the cool paint and the smooth bristles and relaxed, but soon the brush began to tickle. ‘It tickles,’ the clay laughed. ‘Please stop!’ The potter said to be patient and continued to work until the paint was just right. Then he put the clay back into the kiln. The clay was too weary to protest. The kiln was just as hot as before, and finally he yelled in protest, ‘It’s too hot. Please stop!’ When it was time, the potter brought the clay out and put it on a table. It was the most beautiful, perfectly formed vase with glossy paint. And do you know why the potter couldn’t stop when the clay asked him to?”
I nodded. “Because the clay would have cracked and it never would have turned into a vase,” I whispered.
“Hanji. Sometimes God lets bad things happen to us, because if life was so easy, why would we seek him? We’d all rely on ourselves and never be stretched.”
We pulled into the parking lot of the Ice Cream Parlor, an old-fashioned ice cream place. The red and white lights from the sign reflected off the car windows. I traced the letters with my eyes and willed my eyes to stay dry.
Dadima had told me the potter and clay story many times before, but it’d just been a story without any real meaning. Today the pain of that clay meant something to me. I’d been squeezed and burned. I knew how it felt to be that piece of clay, being flung around and nobody really paying attention to what the clay wanted. Everyone in my class thought I’d ruined Lacy’s cake. Ginny thought I’d lied about Lacy and that I’d ruined her posters. And I’d lost Sara for good. The difference between the piece of clay in the story and me was that I hadn’t turned into a vase. I was still hairy, unsure me.
I really wished Dadima were here to tell me the story. She always knew how to explain things to me. She made me feel sparkling and hopeful, like I could reflect everything bad and negative off me.
“Beta, I know you miss Dadima and I know it would be easier for you to have your mom around more, but if there’s anything—”
“Thanks, Daddy,” I said to cut him off then, because I didn’t want to talk about my mustache or for Daddy to think he had to say anything else. I said, “So, ice cream?”
Daddy smiled, his face softening in relief. “That’s why we’re here.”
I tossed my chunni onto the seat of the car as I got out.
Inside the Ice Cream Parlor, I inhaled the sugary air that filled the place. It had smelled the same since I’d come here after my first day at kindergarten. Watching the lady scoop the ice cream into the frosted glass dish and pour thick, fudgy sauce on top softened the hard shell of hopelessness that had formed around me. I asked for an extra cherry. The lady winked at me and added three.
I couldn’t even wait till we sat down. I took the first bite as Daddy paid. I turned around and saw Tom sitting at a table with an older boy and two adults that must have been his parents. The man had the same nose, and the woman shared Tom’s hair color. He nodded and half waved at me.
I blinked and slowly took the spoon out of my mouth. Tom looked so quiet and shy sitting with his family. I knew I was gaping, but I couldn’t understand Tom in this new way—without Derek, without school. It was too long a pause between his wave and my reaction.
My face heated up as I remembered that I was wearing a Punjabi suit. Maybe Tom’s smile was a smirk. The older boy, who must have been his brother, nudged him and said something, making Tom turn red and punch the boy in the arm.
“Shall we sit down?” Daddy asked.
His voice echoed off the tile floor and the absurdly high ceilings. I walked to the corner furthest from Tom and his family. Daddy slurped his milk shake and bounced his knee while I played with the hot fudge sauce on my spoon. I took a few bites, but it tasted too sweet.
“Beta, you’ve got something . . .” Daddy reached toward my face and wiped at my upper lip. His hand shot back like he’d been bit. The realization of what had happened hit me about three seconds after it hit Daddy. He’d jerked his hand back because he’d realized it wasn’t hot fudge sauce.
It was a mustache.
Dr. Gurwinder Singh was right—life was hopeless.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Even in the darkness of my room, the embarrassment burn and fury of Daddy finally noticing my mustache rushed through my veins in choppy surges, like Daddy pulsing tomatoes, onions, and spices in the blender for a curry.
I waited until silence filled the house and the floorboards were still and settled in their places, like they were snuggled in bed. The only noises now were a low murmur of music that pulsed under Kiran’s door, and Daddy’s snores spluttering from his bedroom.
I tiptoed across the hall to the bathroom and inched the door closed so the click would be more of a slide and less of a pop. I didn’t bother locking it, afraid doing so would be too loud. I paused and waited for any noise or movements.
Nothing changed. They were all deep in sleep. I allowed myself to exhale, but I didn’t relax for long. I had a mission.
My plan went against Dadima’s belief that a proper Sikh didn’t cut their hair. I could still picture Dadima’s legs and how the hair on them peeked out at the bottoms of her Punjabi suit pants. She even had little clusters of hair on her big toes. But I also remember finding a thread in her hair and asking if she’d been sewing something. She’d blushed a light pink, and Mom had later told me that she had been threading her eyebrows but hadn’t wanted to admit to removing hair.
If Dadima threaded her eyebrows, then shaving my mustache couldn’t be that big a deal. Plus, Dr. Singh had said that nothing I did mattered.
Mom kept her razor on the side of the bathtub with a can of creamy foam. I wasn’t sure if it was necessary to use the stuff, so I decided against it. The pipes in
our house groaned and whined, so I thought it better to do this without any water.
I grabbed the pink razor. The handle sat softly in my fingers like it should fit naturally in my palm. It didn’t. My hand shook.
I took a deep breath and leaned toward the mirror, so close that my nose nearly touched. This time I wanted to get a good look at the hair and figure out the best way to shave it. I wasn’t sure if I should go up or down with the razor. I didn’t know if I should start with my face or somewhere else that I could hide if I needed to, like maybe my legs or arms.
No, I’d do my face. It was the smallest area of hair, and it couldn’t be that bad.
I grasped the razor tightly in my right hand. I held it just above my lip and decided that I’d shave down. Start at my nose and stop at my lip. I repeated it in my head—nose, down, lip. Nose, down, lip.
Okay, I told myself, this is it. No big deal. Nice and easy. I closed my eyes, which I knew was really stupid, but I couldn’t bear to watch myself. I opened them as soon as the razor brushed the top of my lip, but I didn’t move the pink razor right away.
I closed my eyes again and lifted the razor off my face. I slowly opened my eyes so I could inspect what I’d done.
It was gone!
I only had half a mustache. I stared at myself in the mirror. It had worked! I did the other side the same way but kept my eyes open.
My mustache was gone. My body tingled with satisfaction. I thought of walking into school and seeing everyone’s reaction.
All the “Wow, you look great, Karma!” “You look so nice today,” “There’s something so mature about you,” comments.
I reached up to rub the smooth skin above my lip. The hairs on my arms seemed so bushy with my mustache gone. Shaving my arms and legs couldn’t be any worse than what I’d just done.
I closed the lid of the toilet seat and put my leg up. After resting the razor next to my ankle, I pulled up toward my knee. It went smoothly for the first third of my leg. Then it kind of got stuck. A handful of fuzz clogged the razor, so I got a tissue to wipe it off. But all I managed to do was shred the tissue and cut my finger.
I reached for more tissues, and the hair that had been stuck to the razor fell in clumps to the floor. When I walked to the sink to shake off the hair from the razor, the floor felt gritty under my feet. I lifted up my foot to look at the bottom of it. Hundreds of black hairs stuck to my heel. The bathroom had become a real mess.
I’d never realized how messy this whole shaving thing could be. It never looked that way in commercials. Maybe if I used water, it would be less messy. I tried to keep the water at a slow, steady stream, but that made the pipes whine and gurgle, so I had to turn it up more to make the pipes be quiet.
When I had finally managed to get one leg mostly shaved, my face started to burn. I ignored it and decided to focus on my other leg. I shook the razor over the sink, and most of the hair fell off. I had to keep stopping and shaking the razor. It was a slow and annoying job. Especially now that clumps of hair were clogging the sink and more clumps had fallen onto the bathroom floor around the toilet.
My legs started to burn the same as my face. I looked into the mirror. Little red dots spotted my face, and a few started sprouting on my legs, too. My knees were covered in cuts, and I’d missed an entire strip of hair down my right shin.
Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. I filled a cup with water and moved toward the bathtub. I poured the water down my right leg so that I could shave the missed strip. The razor went smoothly over the water but then dug into my skin. The skin turned completely white. Then, just as quickly as it had turned white, little beads of red leaked through, and before I knew it, blood ran halfway down my shin.
I grabbed as many tissues as I could and started dabbing at the blood. It soaked through the tissues in a matter of seconds. I tried to wet the tissues, but the water mixed with the blood and dripped across the floor. I rushed over to get more tissues. Finally I got a whole wad of tissues. They stuck to the blood like magic. Gross, but magic.
I stood in the middle of the bathroom and stared at the mess I’d made. The sight of hair, shreds of tissues and toilet paper, and drips of blood littered all over the floor made me sweat. My skin still burned. I wiped my upper lip, and a red streak smeared across the back of my hand. I leaned closer to the mirror. The little beads of blood mingled with sweat over tiny red bumps where I’d shaved.
Did shaving give you pimples? I pulled at the skin above my lips and felt tears puddle behind my eyes as the rest of me filled with an anxious sense of dread. What had I done? There was nothing I could do now. It was worse than before I’d started. My thoughts of being hairless and stunning as I walked into school on Monday vanished.
I turned around to start cleaning up. The bloodstained tissues fell off my leg in a heap. I grabbed them and tried to blot up the drips from the floor, just as the bathroom door creaked open.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I froze, standing with a wad of bloodied tissues in one hand. Daddy made a strangled yelp noise. “Karma! You’re awake.” He half covered his eyes and turned his back to me. “I was just going to . . .”
Everything else happened so fast, but somehow also so slowly and detailed too that every sound inside and outside my body echoed in my ears. A gurgle rose from my stomach, up into my throat, and choked out of my mouth. The floorboards moaned by the bathroom door just before Mom’s face appeared beside Daddy’s.
They both stared at the tissues wadded in my hand. I watched as they slowly took in the rest of the scene around me. The water coming in a slow steady stream from the sink faucet, the small piles of hair scattered all over the floor.
Mom pushed her way past Daddy into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
“Go back to bed. I’ve got this.” She turned to me and whispered, “Are you okay? Is it your period?”
“Mom!”
“What?” She cupped my face in her hands and turned it toward the light above the sink. “Why is your face bleeding?”
I pushed her hand off my face more forcefully than I’d meant to. “I’m fine. It’s fine. I’ll clean everything up.” I bent down to grab some tissues. My eyes burned and everything went blurry. I started to cry. Not just a normal cry but the embarrassing, sobbing kind of crying when you can’t even talk, you’re too busy making sure you’re getting enough oxygen to your brain.
Mom was a blurry outline through my tears, but I could tell from how her hand patted my back in short, stiff movements as she pulled me toward the edge of the tub to sit that she was surprised at my outburst. That made me cry even harder.
“Karma, do you want to tell me what this is all about?”
I shook my head, still heaving too much to form any words.
She nodded and rubbed my back in a circle. Her touch unhooked a calm in me that spread like thick syrup to all my limbs. A summer’s worth of tears had poured out of me in just a few minutes, and all I wanted then was to climb under my comforter.
“Oh, sweets, you may think I don’t understand what you’re going through, but I do.”
I wanted to scoff, but instead snot bubbled out of my nose. I lifted my chin so my eyes were level with her face. She scanned the bathroom. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking about how much it needed a good cleaning or if she wished she were back in bed. I expected her to sigh and tell me to get some sleep, but she kept talking.
“Has someone been making fun of you or bothering you?” She reached for my chin so that I couldn’t turn away.
I nodded.
“Brothers are like that. It’s just what they do. But if you’re uncomfortable with something—anything—you can talk to me.”
We sat in silence, surrounded only by the soft sounds of our breathing.
“It’s not Kiran. It’s kids at school,” I said as quickly and quietly as I could, hoping the words would get lost before they reached Mom’s ears.
“Oh, sweetie.”
Mo
m held me and let me cry big, silent tears that burned the top of my lip. “I’ve made it worse,” I said between heaves. I would be a big lump of un-spun, un-formed, un-painted, and un-fired clay for the rest of my life.
“You haven’t made anything worse or better. All you did was change something. You can change your clothes or your hair, but you can’t change you.”
I rolled my eyes and wiped my cheeks.
Mom handed me a tissue.
“I wish you’d asked me about shaving. I didn’t even know it bothered you.” Mom looked up at the ceiling. “I guess I knew something was wrong, but I really hoped you’d come to me, like before.”
I nodded and blinked. A few big tears teetered off the edge of my eyelids when I did. “But things aren’t the way they were before. You’re never even here half the time.”
“Oh, I know.” She squeezed me closer to her again. “I really just thought it’d get easier, but I’m floundering around at work. Then I come home and I just don’t know where I belong anymore. But, Karma, I’m never too busy for you or Kiran.”
I twisted the soggy tissue in my hand and thought about that. None of us knew where we belonged right now. Kiran at high school, Daddy at home, Mom at work, and me, I didn’t know where I fit in with Sara or Ginny or even my family.
“Growing up is so hard,” Mom said, and sighed. “I know I’m busy, but I’m not blind. I should have said something. It’s just that you usually come to me if something’s going on. I never realized. I’m so, so sorry.” She moved her hand from my shoulder and rubbed my back again. “You know, they make products for facial hair. Bleaches and small little razors that won’t irritate your skin so much.” She touched my face with both her hands. “But I don’t want you to do anything unless it bothers you. Don’t ever change because of what someone else says.” Now her eyes were watery.
It felt nice to sit on the edge of the bathtub and soak up the reassurance and warmth that radiated from Mom. I didn’t want it to end.
Karma Khullar's Mustache Page 13