Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

Before tackling her hair, Minal Auntie drapes a towel over her chest and unscrews the tube of Light & Luminous. A week has passed since she left the salon with a brand-new face, and her old one has crept back into the mirror. She was planning to touch herself up in the morning, but with the whirlwind of bells and nail polish and bindis , she couldn’t find fifteen minutes for herself.

She prepares the mixture, pauses, then taps in a bit more powder. Holding her nose, she frosts her face thickly. The sulfur smell fills her mouth.

As the cream sets, Minal Auntie braids her hair, injecting bobby pins. Her skin begins to tingle. To distract herself, she thinks of Twinkle. Is she wearing the same outfit as her students, black sequins and red satin, a frayed scrap of red georgette pinned over her head? A warmth prickles across Minal Auntie’s skin. She draws deep breaths of air.

Before she has a chance to rinse the cream from her face, she hears the jingling of footsteps down the hall, the lazy chatter of girls. She shoves her makeup into her bag and locks herself in the handicapped stall, moments before they burst through the door.

Voices and the slap of bare, belled feet. “I told you guys there’s an open bathroom,” says Pinky. Minal Auntie nearly backs into the toilet, holds her breath. “We can practice in private here.”

“What’s this white stuff?” Rashmi says.

“Ew. It smells like pee.” A pause. “What’s ‘Light & Luminous’?”

Minal Auntie’s eyes are stinging. Waves of cold seethe across her skin.

“Dude,” Pinky says. “Is this what Minal Auntie’s been using?”

“No way,” says Aarti. “She wouldn’t touch that stuff.”

“How do you know?”

“I wanted to buy some one time, but she wouldn’t let me. She said it was stupid.” Aarti hesitates. “She said your color is your color, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“She said it like that?”

“Whatever,” Aarti says. “It’s true.”

Minal Auntie is jolted by the sound of her own words in Aarti’s mouth, spoken with such flat resignation. It seemed, at the time, like honesty, meant to equip the girl with a tougher skin.

“Oh, please,” Pinky says. “She obviously uses it. Her face looks all chalky and stuff. A facial doesn’t make you look chalky. I’ve had them before.”

“Pinky, come on—”

“No, I’m sick of this new Minal Auntie! She acts like our dance is her diva moment. She’s supposed to be our teacher.”

“Twinkle Auntie’s dancing with her girls.”

“I watched them rehearse,” Pinky says. “Twinkle Auntie goes on at the end for, like, a minute, and she’s in the back the whole time. She didn’t make herself the star. What Minal Auntie’s doing, it’s …” Pinky falters. “It’s embarrassing.”

Minal Auntie waits for Aarti to defend her, but no one does.

“So should we practice or what?” Rashmi asks.

Minal Auntie can bear the stinging cream no longer. She unlocks the stall door, and aside from a few small gasps, the girls go dead quiet. She looks straight ahead as she strides to the counter. Turns on the faucet. Throws handfuls of water over her face. Gritty white dollops plop onto the porcelain of the sink.

“Auntie, we didn’t know you were in there,” Pinky says weakly. Minal Auntie scrubs her cheeks in slow, mechanical circles. She feels spent, as though she’s been dancing for days and has nothing left. She can’t go onstage, knowing what everyone thinks of her. But she must. She has made herself the star.

Minal Auntie dries off her face with a paper towel. In the mirror, her old face looks back at her, only the slightest shade lighter than her tamarind brown. With trembling fingers, she brushes her own cheek, just as she did at nine years old, when she snuck out of her house at nightfall, the hand mirror in her fist, to see if Velu was right. And here she thought she had outgrown that little girl, had shed her like an old, dead skin.

“Auntie,” Aarti says. “Are you okay?”

The gazes of the girls press against her on every side, their silence far louder than any noise they could make all together. She opens her mouth to speak, but a shiver passes through her as if she is still stranded in the middle of a night so dark, she has all but disappeared.

• •

All throughout childhood, my older brother refused to jump from the high dive, a phobia for which I gave him constant hell. “Amit is a chickenshit!” I’d yell, while leaping flamboyantly off the board. At twenty-nine, he dove off the roof of his buddy’s three-story condo. Later, he couldn’t recall his reasons or the fifth of whiskey in his system or the ER, where he lay with his neck locked in a collar, while my dad called to give me the news: He can’t move his legs . With my dad talking into one ear, I looked around my room. All my belongings were stuffed in a few distended boxes, words like FRAGILE and THIS SIDE UP scrawled on the sides.

I rushed to the airport, feeling oddly calm even as I shuffled from ticket desk to ticket desk, even as I sat elbow to elbow at the gate, inhaling the intimate odor of my neighbor’s egg roll but lacking the will to rise and lose my seat. I opened my laptop and typed an e-mail to Katie, my roommate, asking her to post my boxes home. I wrote: My brother had an accident. He’s in the hospital .

I hit send just as I realized that I’d sent the e-mail to the wrong Katie. I’d e-mailed Katie the bartender from Fiddlesticks, whom I’d gone out with a lifetime ago and never called back. I spent a few minutes trying in vain to un-send my e-mail. I held down the escape key, but it jammed, and in trying to jimmy it loose, I plucked it out. It lay like a tooth in my palm. That was when I closed my fist and lost it. A sudden silence piled up around me. I heard a little girl ask her mommy if I was crying. After a few moments of this, the egg roll guy gave me two of his napkins, and I blew my nose into his grease.

I’d spent the past nine months as a writer-in-residence at a private boarding school outside of Boston, where I taught a creative writing class and occasionally messed around with Caryn, the English teacher. Teaching hadn’t come easily to me. For one thing, I hated most of my students, chief among them Judy Grubich, who called Mark Twain a douche for his scathing takedown of The Leatherstocking Tales . She couldn’t let a day go by without cussing out an author I loved. I thought I’d be molding young minds, but by the end of the semester, all I had molded was one very prickly critic who would be gunning for my first book, should it ever be published.

Caryn told me not to feel bad. She said that she’d studied with some brilliant writers who were terrible teachers. “How do you know I’m not terrible at both?” I asked. She’d never read my novel, though she had casually offered to, more than once.

“Not possible,” Caryn said. “You won that Prague thing.”

The Prague thing: my first taste of recognition. I had submitted the opening chapters of my novel to a contest in which the winner would be flown to Prague for a two-week master class, followed by a six-month stint at an artists’ colony. I didn’t tell my brother or my dad about the prize. I knew what they’d say—“Did you get any money?”—leaving me annoyed and a little embarrassed.

For the time being, I was content to imagine myself in Prague, typing by pallid moonlight, stone bridges and spires out my window. I’d always lived in relatively small, static towns. Prague seemed just the place to bridge the person I was with the writer I wanted to be: traveled, ambitious, alone.