Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

“Newt,” I hyperventilated, pointing. “Fell down the stairs.”

She uttered one word with total control—“Where”—and sprinted toward the crowd of girls, pumping her arms, as unaccustomed to running as I was to merengue.

I watched from a careful distance. By the time Mrs. Main knelt down beside Newt, Lydia Coe was helping him sit up. His mouth was moving. He was telling them what had happened, how I’d raged at him like a rabid animal. Or maybe he wasn’t. No one looked my way.

I went inside and put my head down on my desk, exhaling frothy rings of vapor onto the Formica. My head felt tight and clogged. Through the window I could see Newt limping along, flanked by two boys, Mrs. Main, and several more girls helping shepherd him across the grass. It wouldn’t be long before Lydia Coe would come bursting through the double doors in search of ice packs. For now, it was just me and Ethnic Ken, stuck straight up in the pile of toys. The possibility of theft flashed and faded. It had never occurred to me that I could grow out of Ken in a matter of minutes, that “5 & Up” had a ceiling after all, and running straight into it left a lasting bruise.

That night, I hovered in the doorway of the bathroom. My grandfather was squatting over the drain, probing each hole with a toothbrush whose bristles were splayed and gray. “I can’t get it clean,” he said. He dropped the toothbrush and folded his arms over his knees, shaking his head. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

I sat on the ledge of the tub. Before he came to live with us, the tub was always speckled and laced with grime. Now it was a spotless, astonishing white, even the veins between the tiles scraped clean.

He put his face on his forearms.

“Look.” I dangled a red mesh bag of marbles in front of him. I’d felt a little guilty about lifting the little bag from the Toy Drive box, but those kids weren’t the only needy ones.

He drew a quick, ecstatic breath. “Where did you find them, Ammu?”

“Somewhere under my bed.”

I expected him to question the label, which read, “Classic Marbles, $2.” Instead, his hand closed around the bag, clenched as tightly as every tale my grandmother had told him. “See, I remembered,” he said. “I remember everything.”

I tore open the bag and emptied them into his palm. He fingered the different marbles — blues, yellows, reds, and clear ones ribboned with white — each a precious, painted planet. I rested my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s hard, Ammu.” His chin trembled. “It’s hard being here.”

I nodded and took the big cloudy blue from his hand, rolled it between my fingertips. I asked him to show me how to play.

• •

Minal Auntie didn’t sleep last night, imagining the moment she would be called to the stage and handed the trophy that has eluded her for the past four years. But now, as the competition wears on and one routine follows another, she grows drowsy. Her eyelids feel leaden. Next to her, a mother slings a towel over her shoulder and begins breast-feeding her baby beneath it, a bored look on her face.

Minal Auntie leans away from the suckling sounds and opens the program. She finds her school—“Illinois Academy of Indian Classical Dance”—and beneath it: “Minal Raman, director.” Her girls are up next.

Every year, Minal Auntie ponders whether to withdraw her students from the All-India Talent Showcase, an annual event that is thick with Indians and thin on talent. In her opinion, there are far too many routines featuring untrained folk and “fusion” dancers, like the six girls currently taking up space on the stage, shimmying and writhing to a tabla-laced rap song. Last year Minal Auntie complained about a similarly indecent number whose song included the lines “He fills my cup. / I like it rough.” To no avail. The worst part is watching tubby little Sanjali Kapoor thrust her hips this way and that, utterly unconvinced by her own sex appeal.

For the past two years, the trophy for Best Group Dance has gone to Twinkle Sharma of Little Star Studios. When Little Star opened three years ago, Minal Auntie predicted a quick and happy collapse; who needed a teacher for raas and bhangra and Bollywood when one could so easily mimic those dances from movies or cousins? Somehow, Little Star swelled with more students every year, all of them deluded by Twinkle’s oft-repeated claim to having danced in Bollywood movies with the likes of Madhuri and Sri Devi. Whole legions have danced with Madhuri and Sri Devi, if “behind” is the same as “with.”

At last, the belly dancers scuttle into the wings. After a dramatic pause, Minal Auntie’s thirteen girls file across the stage, hands tucked at their waists, their ghungroo jingling at their ankles. Minal Auntie sits up and buries her hands in her lap.

First the girls do namaste , ceremoniously apologizing to the earth for the mistakes of their feet, touching fingertips to floor to eyelids. The gilded pleats of their costumes blossom open when they bend, close as they rise with their palms pressed together. They stand straight, knees locked, and wait. A few cheerful screams shoot through the dark: “Pinky! … Reshma! … Aarti!”

Aarti is Minal Auntie’s grandniece, a new student, and the worst in the class. Minal Auntie can pick her out of the group at a glance: a dark, big-boned girl who copes with her size by slouching. Such a shame, to be born that dark. Minal Auntie knows, because she is equally dark, the black-brown of tamarind, a hue that surpasses the spectrum of foundation colors sold at Walmart, even those under the brand called Nubian Queen.

But this is where the similarities end; Aarti has no grace, no confidence, no future on the stage. Her mother still maintains the belief that somewhere in the twisted ladder of her little girl’s DNA are the traits of a dancer. “What she needs is encouragement, chachy ,” said Lata to Minal Auntie, leaning on a term of endearment she employs in times of need.

So to appease her niece, Minal Auntie has positioned Aarti in the front and center, just for the opening of the dance. It is the simplest section of the whole routine, the part they have drilled the most.

From five rows away, Minal Auntie can see Aarti’s pleats all atremble.

The girls begin the jatiswaram with only their necks ticking from side to side. To Minal Auntie’s great relief, every neck is on point, not one lazy neck among them. The girls open their arms, palms stiff and arched. All right arms move like the oars of a mighty ship, circling the air to the held note of a woman’s voice. Thirteen left arms sweep another circle with equal precision.

Soon enough, the ship breaks down. Twelve of the girls gather speed along with the beat, their gazes following the motions of their hands, their feet striking out and stamping to a single rhythm. Aarti is obeying the same rhythm, but with steps that belong to a later sequence. At first, it seems that her peers are her backup dancers, and she has come up with a solo of her own. She soldiers on, her eyes kohl-lined and blank, her lips a wide, terrified smear of red.

Pinky mutters something at Aarti, who looks over her shoulder and slows, like a robot powering down, then falls in step with the rest. By now, her smile is long gone. Minal Auntie knows the feeling: there is no lonelier place in the world than where Aarti is standing now. The girls disperse into the next formation, and Aarti shuttles to the back, where she will remain for the rest of the dance.

At home, Minal Auntie maps out the formations of the next dance she will teach to her class, for the India Day Festival two months from now. She pencils X’s and O’s on a yellow legal pad and intricate arrows between them. One of the O’s is underlined. Every X and O has a chance in the front, except for the O, who will enjoy one brief moment in a middle line but otherwise will be relegated to the back. This O is Aarti.