Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

“But have you ever been on Asianet?” For the first time ever, Lata says, Asianet will be taping the competition and broadcasting the highlights worldwide. “If you guys win, it’ll be amazing exposure for the school. Who knows, maybe student enrollment will go up.”

“On TV?” Her stomach drops at the thought of what a television camera will mean. How it will take her picture and beam it into homes all over the world. Into Velu’s home, possibly the very same one in which he grew up. What if the camera zooms in? What will it see? And who else will see her?

Lata takes a small sip of her water and says she better take off before Aarti starts honking. “But you barely drank your water,” Minal Auntie says. “Take a biscuit at least.” Lata makes her way down the hall, claiming that she binged on granola this morning.

At the door, Lata pulls a small, folded paper from her pocket and gives it to Minal Auntie. She opens it, bewildered. It is a check made out to Minal Raman, in the amount of three hundred dollars.

“It’s no big deal, really,” Lata says. “I should be paying you a lot more, what with all the hours she spends over here.”

“Podi pennae!” Minal Auntie scolds her, half-mockingly. “I can’t take money from my sister’s daughter.”

“Please, Auntie.” Lata looks pained. She glances at her sneakers with none of her usual breeziness. It is then that Minal Auntie understands: Lata has heard all about Foodfest. This accounts for her sudden desire to pay, her new interest in student enrollment. “Really. You have no idea how much I’d have to pay for a nanny service. Plus there’s the money you spend on gas—”

“Take it back.” Minal Auntie speaks with the low control of an elder, Lata’s elder. “I don’t want your money.”

Minal Auntie holds out the check between two fingers. Lata takes it and folds it twice, her head bowed like a scolded child. Minal Auntie remembers chasing Lata when she was just a baby toddling around her mother’s legs, wearing a sun hat and sandals and nothing else. “I’m sorry if I …,” Lata says, then shakes her head and flashes a weak smile. “See you next week.”

Arms crossed, Minal Auntie watches the car pull away but does not wave. She returns to the kitchen and sits at the table, trying to reactivate the elation that came of Aarti’s words— even the clock stopped to watch . They taunt her now. The clock on the wall ticks on without pause, its noise interrupted by the occasional rattle of the icebox.

With a week until the show, Minal Auntie goes to an Indian beauty salon on Devon Avenue. She sits in the waiting area with a magazine in front of her face, sure that Twinkle Sharma will walk in at any moment and give her that same false smile of surprise and compassion. You? Here?

And why not? Over the magazine, Minal Auntie watches a stylist furl a long hank of hair around a brush, twisting her wrist at the end to sculpt a soft curve. The client stares vacantly at her reflection, spellbound by what she sees.

Moments later, Minal Auntie is lying back in a barber chair while a threader attacks her eyebrows, upper lip, chin, and sideburns. Her eyebrow hairs will not go easily, the roots a torture to rip out. Minal Auntie clenches her armrests, a stray tear squeezing out the corner of her eye. The stylist continues without pity.

After this is a cleansing process of rose water and soap, the cool burn of witch hazel. At last Minal Auntie sits up and looks in the mirror, pressing her fingertips to the tender contours of her face. The thin skin beneath her arching eyebrows and the space between them, the smooth plane of her cheek. It is an improvement, and yet, not enough.

The stylist points to the cashier and says, “Pay there.”

Minal Auntie musters the courage to quietly ask, “Have you heard of Light & Luminous?”

“Hah, yes, we use this in the Fairness Facial. You want to have the Fairness Facial?”

Does she? The stylist stands over Minal Auntie, hands on hips, waiting impatiently for an answer.

“Okay,” says Minal Auntie.

The stylist leads her to a corner of the salon, where Minal Auntie lies back in another chair and closes her eyes. The process begins peacefully, with warm towels draped over her face. Once the towels are removed, the stylist scratches at her pores with something sharp, a process so painful that Minal Auntie forgets to ask about the toxicity of Light & Luminous. A smell of sulfur assaults her nose as the stylist spackles a cool, grainy cream across her cheeks, her jaw, her forehead. She is told to wait within that stinking mask, so she waits. She feels foolish, all these young women circling her, chattering in Gujarati as if she is of no more consequence than a potted plant.

Gradually, the bleach begins to tingle under her skin. She listens for the stylist’s footsteps to return. Just when the tingle begins to burn, the stylist comes back and scrapes away the cream with a warm, wet towel.

The stylist gives Minal Auntie a hand mirror. “See?”

Her color is only a slight shade lighter, just a hint of cream to her coffee, but unmistakable. There is a glow to her face, a lively radiance from within. The stylist is nodding, the others gathering around in a chorus of wonder and affirmation. Buoyed by these voices, she believes them. Her new self has expanded to fill the frame of the old, fresh and resplendent, immune to pain.

At the India Day competition, the debris from performances past are strewn all across the dressing room floor: sprays of bobby pins and rubber bands, mirrors spattered with round red bindis and their sticky entrails. The air smells of waxy cosmetics and metallic aerosols. Throngs of girls fill the room, dressed in punjabis or chaniya cholis or classical costumes, except for Twinkle’s girls, who wear sequined black nighties over red satin pants, their outfits as simple as their routines. Twinkle remains nowhere to be seen, perhaps sealed off in a dressing room of her own. One hour until stage call. There are always more flowers to add, more hooks and eyes to fasten, enough details to quickly whittle two hours down to twenty minutes.

Minal Auntie spends only a few minutes in the dressing room to inspect her dancers and give them last-minute tips. “Reshma and Rashmi, don’t confuse left and right. Pinky, when you call to Krishna, don’t make that sexy face. Backs curved. Knees bent. Fingers stiff. Okay?”

They nod mechanically, absorbing nothing but in need of her attentions all the same. She has applied every faceful of makeup, has held each of their sharp little chins in her hand while lining their eyes with kohl. They stand around her like a pack of wide-eyed marmots.

Minal Auntie tells her students to finish up their costumes, and she will return in thirty minutes to practice once more. Dismissed, the girls head to whatever space their mothers have staked out with garment bags and plastic Caboodles.

Minal Auntie slings her costume over her shoulder and climbs the fire-exit stairs. The chaos of the dressing room fades behind to a distant echo. Earlier in the evening, she had searched for a secluded space in which to change; the second-floor bathroom will do. Here the tiles are free of mildew, the mirrors clean, unlike the dressing room mirrors faintly gauzed with streaks.

She hangs her garment bag on the bathroom door and draws down the zipper, releasing a wave of cedar scent, anxiety, adrenaline. She pinches the pleats, the gold still stiff though the wine-red silk has softened with washings and wear. She fingers each deliberate stitch her mother made along the shoulder in mismatching red thread. One by one, she fastens each of six separate pieces around her body, and though some of the hooks strain against the eyes, the costume hugs her as close as it should.