Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

Had Minal Auntie known that Aarti was the sort of student who needed underlining, she would have placed her in the beginner class. But Lata claimed that her daughter had attended a number of excellent dance camps in Ohio, under the auspices of some midwestern charlatan who refused to teach her students the proper names for each hand gesture. Instead of Pathaka, Alapadma , and Katakamukha , Aarti calls them Flat Hand, Flower Hand, and Deer Hand. She has never learned to hold her knees out when she bends them; after only a minute of aramandi , her knees cave in. At the school where Minal Auntie trained as a girl, Aarti’s calves would have suffered enough raps to mottle them black and blue.

“That’s terrible,” Lata says when Minal Auntie brags about her old bruises and blisters. “Thank god we don’t live in Chennai.”

Lata utters these remarks and frowns at her watch, disappointed, as always, by the time. She has just arrived to pick up Aarti from dance class, but already she has to run. In fact, it is rare for Lata to enter the house at all; she usually beeps and waves from her minivan as the door slides shut behind Aarti. But today Lata has a favor to ask: Can Minal Auntie babysit Aarti two afternoons a week? Lata is taking an income tax course and doesn’t want to waste ten bucks an hour on a babysitter.

“I don’t know,” Minal Auntie hedges, “I’m very busy these days.”

“Oh, if you have another class, she’ll sit upstairs and read or something.”

Minal Auntie plucks at the frayed edge of her sari pallu. “I am in a book club. We get together in different-different houses. Members only.”

“A book club?” Lata’s eyes grow round and curious. “With who?”

Lata asks question after question, which Minal Auntie deflects with short answers. (Neighbors … Weekly … Whatever Oprah suggests.) “That’s wonderful,” Lata says, with a cloying delight that barely hides her disbelief. Just to end the conversation, Minal Auntie agrees to Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The most popular magazines at Foodfest are the ones that offer help. The experts grin from every cover, beaming with the belief that anyone can drop fifty pounds or build their own patio or achieve a positive outlook. Minal Auntie turns her back on her register and clutches her arms against the chill gusting from the air conditioners. In passing, the manager taps his own name tag, BILL, and lifts his eyebrows expectantly. She takes the button out of her pocket and pins it to her red Foodfest smock, just above her own name tag. AM I SMILING? the button reads. IF NOT, YOU GET HALF OFF.

There is little to smile about at Foodfest, where the automated registers are always beeping with customers eager to scan and bag their own items. Half the time, they jab the wrong buttons and stand there bleating for help until Minal Auntie comes to the rescue.

The cashiers have been reduced to two per shift. Minal Auntie usually finds herself paired with Krista, a black college student with the flawless air of a pageant queen, every hair slicked flat and in place. Even her eyebrows are perfect. “I get them threaded at Devon Avenue,” she says, when Minal Auntie asks if she plucks. “How come you don’t go to them? That’s your people.”

“Where is the time?” Minal Auntie says. Truthfully, she could care less about threading. Bushy eyebrows are the least of her problems.

Yesterday evening, another student quit her school in favor of Little Star Studios. Over the phone, Mrs. Tajudeen had babbled on and on about the “fun and frolic” in folk dance. “Your bharata natyam classes are becoming too serious for Tikku!” she chided lightly, while Minal Auntie paced the small square of her linoleum kitchen floor. She came close to confessing everything if only to hold on to one more student — how she had trouble making her mortgage payments last year, how she was forced to find a second income, how the employment agency had deemed her unskilled.

Now here she is at Foodfest, a half hour away from her home, a safe distance from the friends and acquaintances who would never guess what she has become. She punches numbers in the register and shoves the cash drawer closed when it lunges out at her. She tries to avert her gaze from the lunch station opposite, where headless chickens in a glass coffin are spinning torpidly on spits. Directly above the coffin is the clock, which moves even more slowly. After work, she will have to speed all the way back and pick up Aarti.

Krista unscrews a small gold tin of lip gloss and holds it out to Minal Auntie. “Try this. It’ll look good on you.”

Minal Auntie frowns. “It makes your lips look wet.”

“That’s the point. It’s called Wetslicks.”

Out of boredom, Minal Auntie dabs some balm over her lips. “I’m probably too old for those things.”

“How old?”

“Forty-eight.” Minal Auntie smacks her lips together. “So? How is it?”

“Sexy,” Krista says, working her eyebrows up and down. She hands Minal Auntie a compact from her purse. In the little round mirror, Minal Auntie’s lips look glazed with Krispy Kreme frosting.

“Right?” Krista says.

Minal Auntie nods. When Krista isn’t looking, she wipes her lips against the back of her hand, leaving a gooey streak of glitter.

Minal Auntie screeches up to Aarti’s house and beeps twice. Lata and Aarti tumble out the door, Lata bolting for her car with a hasty wave in Minal Auntie’s direction. “Sorry, Auntie! Can’t talk, I’m late!” Before Minal Auntie can apologize, Lata has shut the door of her minivan.

Aarti climbs into Minal Auntie’s car with a laminated library book on her lap, her finger holding her place. Her face looks ghostly pale, as if covered in a film of dust, a different color from her throat. “What happened to you?” Minal Auntie asks.

“Nothing,” Aarti mumbles defensively. She cracks open her book and doesn’t look up. The car has filled with the scent of Pond’s talcum powder, and though Minal Auntie is sure that its source is sitting next to her, she hasn’t the energy to question the girl. For the past thirty minutes, Minal Auntie has been gripping the wheel, weaving and speeding to get here. Now she feels drained, distant from the world reeling past her window, a chicken spinning around on a stick.

“Does it look bad?” Aarti asks suddenly.

Minal Auntie blinks at her; the world draws focus. She tries a tactful approach: “You don’t look like you, raja .” She gives the girl a sideways smile, but Aarti is squinting at something on Minal Auntie’s shoulder.

“What’s your button say, Auntie?”

Minal Auntie glances down at the thing. How did she pin it to her sweater when she has always, always pinned it to her smock? Next time she sees Bill, she will pin it to his forehead. “I found it on the ground. I liked the message.”

Aarti leans in to read it. “Am I smiling …?”

“Let’s stop at the IndoPak store. Do you like eating idli-sambar ?” Aarti begins a polite refusal, while Minal Auntie wrenches the pin from her shoulder so hastily she knows she’s pulled a thread.

Like a pro, Minal Auntie enters at one end of the IndoPak Grocery and snakes her way up and down the dusty aisles without once doubling back, filling her jute bag with masalas, chai powder, and masoor dal , until she reaches the produce section, where no bruise or tenderness escapes her appraisal of okra. She arrives in the last aisle, the toiletries section, to find Aarti with a box of Light & Luminous in her hand.

Minal Auntie knows the commercial. Two girls, one fair-skinned and one nut-brown, go to a perfume counter. Brown Girl catches her reflection in the mirror and looks away with the disappointment of a girl forbidden to play outside. Fair Girl confides that her own skin used to be similarly afflicted until she tried Light & Luminous. The commercial shows a brown patch of skin, its brownness lifted away in a whirlwind of flaky debris to reveal a paler shade beneath. Sometime later, the two girls joyfully reunite at the perfume counter, their skin so china white one can hardly be distinguished from the other.