For my parents,
Shashikala Karnik Desai
and
Dhiroobhai Chhotubhai Desai,
with utmost love, respect, and gratitude
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 A TALE OF TWO CITIES
CHAPTER 2 EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BROWNS
CHAPTER 3 QUEENS
CHAPTER 4 CUSTOMS
CHAPTER 5 BROWNTOWN
CHAPTER 6 THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
CHAPTER 7 FOOD FOR THOUGHT
CHAPTER 8 GIFT HORSE
CHAPTER 9 BLUES & COUNTRY
CHAPTER 10 NOSOBOHO
CHAPTER 11 ROOM 212
CHAPTER 12 WHITE NOISE
CHAPTER 13 BANDRA STATE OF MIND
CHAPTER 14 THE PLACE THAT STARTED IT ALL
CHAPTER 15 TYING THE KNOTS
CHAPTER 16 PINK NOISE
CHAPTER 17 CONSOLE
CHAPTER 18 INSECURITY CHECK
CHAPTER 19 BLUESHIFT
CHAPTER 20 L’ARRIVÉE D’UN TRAIN EN GARE
CHAPTER 21 SUPERDENSECRUSHLOAD
CHAPTER 22 WAVE
CHAPTER 23 OLD BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER 24 NEW ENDINGS
CHAPTER 25 BROWN GIRL SINGS THE BLUES
CHAPTER 26 UNSUPPORTED TRANSIT
CHAPTER 27 A SINGLE NEGATIVE
CHAPTER 28 UNBOMBAY
CHAPTER 29 TANGLED UP
CHAPTER 30 BORDER CONTROL
CHAPTER 31 SISTER CITIES
CHAPTER 32 KAMRA OBSCURA
CHAPTER 33 BLUE IN THE FACE
CHAPTER 34 BREACH
CHAPTER 35 HEPTANESIA
CHAPTER 36 BRIDGE POSE
CHAPTER 37 SOMETHING BORROWED
CHAPTER 38 SOMETHING BLUE
CHAPTER 39 TRUE COLORS
CHAPTER 40 PICKLE
CHAPTER 41 GATEWAY
CHAPTER 42 OUR LADIES OF THE MOUNT
CHAPTER 43 THE SWIMMING CITIES OF BANDRISSIMA
CHAPTER 44 HOME IS NOT A PLACE
CHAPTER 45 PHOTO FINISH
CHAPTER 46 PLEASE (DO NOT) TOUCH ME
CHAPTER 47 PERSPECTIVE
CHAPTER 48 BROWN GIRLS IN THE RING
CHAPTER 49 LANDING UP
CHAPTER 50 RECEPTION
CHAPTER 51 L’INDE OF 1001 DANCES
CHAPTER 52 UNION CIRCLE
CHAPTER 53 LIGHTHOUSE
BOMBAY BROWNS
BOMBAY BLUES
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
I lost my heart under the bridge.
—PJ Harvey, “Down by the Water”
Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.
—David Bowie, “Let’s Dance”
The night before I left for Bombay, I had a dream. Heartbreath, scuba deep. Diving into that seventeenth summer, and my headfirst spill into Mirror Lake, Karsh above, ashore. As the waters closed over my head: panic. Then a vision of my grandfather, long passed on, now a kind of merman, fingers coaxing a glimmer of spiraling pink dusk from sea floor, his amber eyes turned away from me.
I was torn. Should I sink or swim?
A jittery jugalbandi, the only submerged sound. An ultrasound horseshoe heartbeat, a foal-like doublethump skittering across it.
I strained with fast-draining breath, trying to reach my Dadaji. But despite my efforts to drown down to him, I felt myself beginning to rise, into what seemed a boundless liquid universe.
There was no way to yell, to catch his attention. I imagined the current tiding me away, lost to my home and family forever.
An upwards magnetic gust and train-track onslaught of sound …
Seized with fear, I emerged.
I woke up in my NYU dorm room. My heart thudded and I heard the sound of sobbing. And at first I thought it was me, waking, tremulous. But it was Karsh, scrunched up fetally beside me on the narrow mattress, shivering in the throes of his own dreaming. His tears; his heart. My hand a buoy on his wildly pulsing chest. A thin layer of sweat veiled his skin, and he was calling out again in that child voice — a choked melody, in Punjabi?
—Karsh, it’s okay, I whispered, struggling to squeeze him, ease him out of his dark place. He seemed skinnier, shakier, since he’d returned from his San Francisco gigs, though from all accounts, everything had gone well. I’d seen him like this before. Since his father died, he’d grappled with these night terrors at least a couple times a week. This time was worse than the others.
He was shuddering. Ever so gently, I tried to peel his eyelids awake.
When they finally fluttered open, he stared right at me with no recognition.
It was like I was the ghost.
Finally, me stroking his hair, he anchored down into a deeper, silent slumber. But I was still shaken. I decided to get some air.
My bags were packed, set to the side of the room. My roommate had split for the weekend already, a steal of a deal back to London. I’d be missing nearly three weeks at NYU but figured it would fodder my final photography project, which had me stumped at the moment. On my desk, a voluptuous bouquet of swimming-pool blue gerberas that Karsh had picked up for me on Houston. Beside it, a brilliant blood orange Titwala Ganesha, god of new beginnings — a gift from Dadaji after a long-ago pilgrimage. In Karsh’s room was the dancing form of Shiva, god of destruction: Nataraj. Out of habit, I dusted off Ganesha’s face with my right hand.
Campus was beginning to hustle-bustle, the up-all-nighters staggering around zombie-like with cavernous eyes, the bright-eyed early risers riptiding the air with an alert cheery smugness.
I figured I’d check my P.O. box before flying out, something I rarely did these days since pretty much everything went encrypted or attached, wirelessly uninked. The only other person in the mailroom was Death, a freshman so named because he donned black riding boots and matching cape every day, all year round. He gave me his strangely chipper smile as he exited, arms laden with letters like a stiff-finned catch.
I opened my own box, and discovered a sliver of acutely familiar foreign sky rippling in that slim grey space.
Pale blue airmail stationery, elephant-stamped from India, like my grandfather and I used to swap tidings upon. But he’d been gone nearly three years now.
Washed up on the envelope, indigo-inked in a script nearly identical to his, my name: Dimple Rohitbhai Lala. Untyped, it was as if it belonged to a forgotten time. To someone else.
I took the missive to Washington Square and found a seat beside a bench where an older couple sat feeding the pigeons.
I could just about smell the swells inside the sky letter, the salt scent nearly granular, a swift reminder of the Atlantic’s proximity. I opened its triple folds and found a swirling fish sketched in my cousin-sister Sangita’s artistic hand — and in the Additional Message area, a request to join her and Deepak for their nuptials in Bombay.
A twinvitation: from one city by the sea to another.
We already knew the date, just over a couple weeks from now. It had been postponed from the original one due to an astronomical astrological error by the chart reader in choosing a moment of great auspiciousness. Or, if you asked Sangita’s peeved sister Kavita, more likely the groom had been delaying due to aesthetic concerns about his wife-to-be (too dark, too thin, specs).
Considering this, and the fact that it was to be an unusually tiny gathering of people already in the know, the invite was a formality, and as such was surprisingly informal.
No presents, only your presence.
It would not only be the first wedding of our generation in this family but also an arranged one, in a city and country I hadn’t retur
ned to since before my grandfather exited it in ashes. The event would last only one day instead of the traditional three (Sangita and Deepak had decided to skip the mehendi party and sangeet, limiting the festivities to the wedding and reception), and was to take place on the day commemorating Dadaji’s passing. It was also the same month as my parents’ silver anniversary. They were planning to celebrate while we were out there. (I was planning to secretly snap the sites of their courtship as a surprise gift.)
Karsh was going to DJ the reception. After a few gig commitments here in New York, he’d be joining me in Bombay in a few days. I was tasked with being the wedding photographer, and I was hoping that, after months of visual roadblocks, a change of scenery would help me reconnect to Chica Tikka, my third eye, who I pulled out now from my camera bag and examined. Though I’d supplemented my photo taking with my parental graduation gift of a digital, that apparatus seemed aimed firmly futureward, whereas this single-lens reflex was my direct portal to the past. The SLR had been my precious gift from my Dadaji. We’d used images to talk, to bridge the miles between us — a photographic dialogue that carried on for years, and one I still felt I was engaged in every time I lay eye to viewfinder.
Lately, all I seemed to be able to pull into frame were borders, dichotomies, black-and-whites, academic either/ors. I longed to crack open a kaleidoscope, to discover a new truth through a new hue.
To follow a color.
Something in me had grown numb the last year or so — which I only realized as the prospect of jetting off into the semi-known unknown approached. I knew I was young and that most of my life (hopefully) lay ahead of me. But I also felt that so much lay behind me … really behind me: an anterior past. In India — a world that meant so much to me and to those I held dearest …
All this studying I’d been doing, about “the gaze,” Rilke, Baudrillard — sure, it was exciting, especially during the moments I’d slip into the cracks between the lines and feel that firefly of elucidation hovering close. But I didn’t know how to apply any of it to my life. Sometimes I felt we were all talking in university code, our shiny (and pricey) new signifiers numbing us to — distancing us from — the neglected, moss-ridden signified itself. I’d often wonder: Was it possible, truly possible, to cut across Broadway for the infinitieth time, grab the same seat, with that invariable supergrande latte (skinny, with whipped), and have a no-catch deep thought?
I loved school. I loved sitting around and having a professor supply all the answers. But I also sometimes felt I already knew what I wanted to do … so why did I have to read so much about it?
When I was actually taking and developing pictures, that’s when I felt pulse-quickeningly alive. Applying. Applied. My goal in India was to be as unacademically hands-on as possible. To live in the body — my own, as well as the city’s.
And to live in Karsh’s, too.
Karsh and me. We’d get through this, become one again. He was the ears, I was the eyes, after all — hearing the beauty, seeing the beat.
After class, my Paris Spleen tucked into camera bag (earmarked at “Loss of a Halo”), we met up at our usual Astor Place spot for a caffeine kick. He seemed back to normal, so I decided not to bring up the terrors; maybe anxiety and anticipation about the trip were keeping us both on edge.
It was to be my first visit back to India since I’d lost my Dadaji, and Karsh, his father. And though the idea of arriving there to no beloved grandfather filled me with trepidation, I hoped I’d be able to light upon some closure, a kind of peace, once I’d finally set foot on Bombay soil, and that Karsh would find the same.
Clutching our coffees — in blue paper cups with Greek Athens logos, bought from Mr. Hyun at Korean deli La Parisienne — we fell into stride, strolled into the East Village, turning into Tompkins Square. Karsh and I were always drawn to the semicircle of benches in the park’s heart; we proprietarily claimed that one in particular, with a partially obscured plaque behind it, had our names on it. In the swelter of city summers, a loop of American elms there unfailingly offered their gemmed shade.
Now, under February’s frostbitten branches, Karsh held out his half-cup.
—Well, rani. To our last day.
—No, Duggibug. To our first. And to finding what we’re looking for.
The coffee splashed over the edge as we toasted, brown drops on blue jeans.
—Imagine. In twenty-four hours, you’ll be wishing for this, Karsh laughed, noting my shiver. Wearing Birks at this time of year could do that to a girl, but I was a hot-footed thing. —Ninety degrees in Bombay about now, right?
Behind us, a fence split pavilion from parkland. Before us, upon a scant circling island, two particularly sublime elms swept up, sapling and veteran swooning towards each other. Through the gap between them, across the clearing, a busker busked the Taj Mahal blues, his guitar case scintillating with coins and picks, warm voice wavering up over the drenched chords of a twelve-string like a surfer.
Looks you ran to the ocean and the ocean runs to the sea….
—I’ll try to soak up twice as much sun for you till you get there, I vowed.
—Guess we didn’t specify same flight when we sent out that message? he replied with a smile.
Last summer, at Long Beach, we’d come upon an iridescent high-and-dry bottle of Sam Adams — plugged and complete with paper scroll inside. The writing had been illegible, ink squid runny, but we’d written our own wish onto a Post-it I had in my knapsack: D+K=B-Bay. I’d chucked it off a pier into the Atlantic. And now, just a few months later, that wish was nearly granted.
—Break on through, I said.
—Our big break as well, Karsh added, referring most likely to the gig he had lined up at one of Bombay’s hippest clubs. Then he turned serious. —I’m going to miss you, you know. We’ve barely been apart a day or two since …
—Our Indian summer.
The summer I was seventeen. Heartache had gone heartflame, misunderstandings had morphed into epiphanies … and we’d come together one starry-eyed, sweaty night at downtown hot spot HotPot, perhaps the most magical and brave night of my life.
Now, over two years later. I was nineteen, in the pith of college life. He was twenty-one, about to edge out into the adult world.
We blew steam off our coffee tops and sat in silence. Though I wouldn’t trade the last couple years for anything, I had to admit our time together had not been entirely uncomplicated. It wasn’t always easy being the DJ’s girlfriend. That’s how I was known in some circles: as Karsh’s woman. Which — though thrilling at first (yeehaw! everyone knows he picked me!) — sometimes made my (ab)normally inactive feminist side rear its affronted frizzy head. Didn’t my photos count for something? Why wasn’t he the photographer’s boyfriend? I supposed images weren’t noisy enough to compete. Also, people didn’t usually get as wasted for photo exhibitions, and thus were in a less embrace-the-world-and-artist state of being than they were at parties.
Mainly, though, I guess I hadn’t quite “made it” to the same extent he had. I didn’t know what making it even really meant for me, but a hunger was building in me to forge some kind of photographic mark, to sink my soul into the trays of darkroom liquid and unearth a truth. Though, or maybe because, I was the shutterbug of choice for any school event sponsored by a club beginning with the letters S and A (South Asian Student Association, South Asian Journalist Assembly, South Asian Women Unite Ignite, and so forth), I felt pigeonholed.
I felt especially awkward hanging out with the charity-supporting (i.e., rich) South Asian from South Asia contingent of NYU that flocked around Karsh. (The rest of us were mainly supporting the foundations of ourselves, if any, or pushing the limits of our families’ charity with the surreal costs of a liberal arts education here.)
As Karsh and I sat on that bench and talked about who we might bump into in Bombay, I flashed back to a night out not too long ago, when I’d met up with him after a gig, just past the defunct CBGB and its pulsing back-alley secre
t, Extra Place.
The only person I’d known well at the Bleep on the Bowery table was Shailly, aka DJ Tamasha, back in town only briefly after a recce into the music scene in Bombay (two months between visits a stipulation on her visa); she was taking time off from NYU to explore it and had brought back a couple of I’d Rather Be In Bandra tees for me and Karsh, which I didn’t totally get (at all) but still found cool and insidery even though I was outsidery. Shy was crammed in next to Karsh, slumping in a rakhi-sisterly manner on his shoulder and smiling beatifically into space. She was an elfin thing with green-blue eyes that everyone thought were fake. They weren’t. Neither was the half-silver eyebrow over her left sea-hued iris. The jagged hot-pink buzzcut-gone-pixie (headbanded with a pair of swim goggles) was, though. I mean the hair itself was real, but the hue was that of the month, and matched the neon catsuit she wore under a pair of jean cutoffs. Shy may have been a good Indian electronica DJ girl from the burbs, but her inner punk had gone slightly outer, which made me like her even more.
There was nothing punk, however, about the Indian woman who seemed to be holding court over various hard alcohols and paper cones of fried calamari. Mallika Mulchandani, a brazen Bombayite grad student at NYU, was oozing enough sex appeal to warp the wooden banquette. As she leaned in, a little closer than strictly required, to Karsh with her laughter, I tried to remember that she was the one with the connection to the up-and-coming Bombay promoter who’d hooked Karsh up with the show. Her dad was some kind of real estate bigwig in India, and she had a Delhi boyfriend at Columbia Business School, Niket, who in fact had no need to go to business school as he was a sure shot for a job in his (or her) father’s company. He did, however, evidentally require a dentally white Porsche, which resided in a midtown parking garage, only emerging to drop Mallika off at international relations classes five feet away from where she’d already been standing in her Jimmy Choos.
Mallika spotted me spotting Karsh, and guffawed (somehow elegantly):
—Ye aai Karshki bibi!
The table broke into uproarious laughter. I saluted them vaguely.
Karsh smiled, gesturing me over. Shailly peace-upped me and slid to the side to make room between them on the bench.
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