Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Kamala got off the bed and opened the bedroom door. She looked at the children. “Out.”

“What? No, Mom, this is a family discussion , right? We’re entitled to—” Akhil started.

“OUT.”

Akhil and Amina scooted off the bed as quickly as the marbles and bedsheets would allow, walking straight across the hall into their own room. They waited exactly five seconds after Kamala shut the door to slide out onto the verandah, where they could watch their parents but remain hidden in the dark.

“—can’t. It’s just not done,” Kamala was saying.

Thomas opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off with the flat of her hand.

“Bad enough the son leaves for America, then he comes home and stays for all of three days only ?”

Thomas sniffed. “Don’t let’s start with all that.”

“I am not starting anything! You yourself started this business!”

“Enough, Kam. I am warning you.”

“You don’t warn me when I’m warning you!”

“She lied to me!”

“So what, now you want to run away? All because Dr. Abraham came?”

“She told him I wanted a job!”

“And you told her you would come back after studies! So? You are two liars! So what?” Kamala spun toward the window and Amina ducked, but her mother wasn’t looking at her. She was scooping up loose marbles and placing them in the game box.

“I did not lie , Kamala. It’s not as though I planned this.”

“No, of course not, His Holiness of Sainthood and Angels! You would never do such a thing!” Kamala shoved the top onto the game box. “You just studied the one branch in all of medicine that would be difficult to practice here and were shocked to death to learn that you could not practice it here !”

Thomas’s mouth hung open. He blinked several times before answering. “You saw me, Kamala. I asked at Vellore. I checked in Madras. I even looked in Delhi, for the love of God!”

“Yes, you said.”

“And what? You think I’m lying to you now?”

“No,” Kamala said, uncertainty creeping onto her face.

“The technology is not here yet! What do you want? You want me to work some miserable job just so we can be here?”

“I am just saying—”

“Answer me! Is that what you want? How about if I become a dentist? We can live right here, upstairs.”

“That’s not what I — and anyway, what’s so bad? So you don’t do the surgery! You are still a doctor! We could still have a good life.”

Amina had not known, until that very moment, that her father could look so bloodless, the color draining from his face until it looked like an angry husk. “What is so wrong with your life, Kamala?”

“We are not talking about me!”

“What is it that you long for? What opportunity have you not been given?”

Kamala fumed at the floor. “Nobody is talking about that.”

“Is it the house? It’s not big enough? You don’t like your car?”

“Don’t be a silly.”

“You want to come back here, is that it? After all these years, after everything we have built for ourselves there, after all that I have tried to give you, you want to uproot the kids from their entire lives and just move back here?”

Kamala’s lips clamped shut.

“What can you have here that you can’t at home?” Thomas took a step forward. “Really, tell me! You sit here like some pained mermaid longing for her sea, but what is it, really, that you don’t have back in the States? Your sisters who live in all different towns here anyway? Your independence? Enough help around the house? Someone to—”

“Myself,” Kamala said.

Thomas swayed a little bit, as if slapped.

“Myself,” Kamala said again, her eyes filling with tears she wiped away hastily, and Thomas’s arms dropped in their sockets. They did not look at each other then, but at the floor. A moment later Thomas turned and left the room, shoes heavy on the steps. Amina leaned over the verandah’s edge a few seconds later, watching him cross the yard, heading back to the gate. Akhil tugged her arm.

C’mon , he mouthed.

The lock screeched open again, letting Thomas back out to the street, and Kamala sat on the bed. Something round and hard moved from Amina’s throat to her gut, making it difficult to breathe. Akhil frowned at her.

“Let’s go, stupid,” he hissed, and she turned and followed him back inside, glad to have somewhere to go.

What was it that woke her? Late that night, Amina found herself awake, blinking into the dark. Scraping footsteps. The settling of weight. She stared at the fan cutting the air above her for several seconds before rising out of bed. The verandah was empty, but the tar on the roof was still warm from the day’s sun as Amina took the path back up to the top. The high, warbling songs of newfound Tamilian love rose from the movie theater down the street, along with smoke from the beggars’ fires and the bidi Thomas smoked, his back slumped into a yellow chair, beer between his feet. He glanced over his shoulder as she approached.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Ami.” He looked neither surprised nor unhappy to see her, and though the night was too hot and she was a little too big for it, she climbed into his lap, shoving her forehead against his jaw.

“You should be asleep,” he told her, his breath burning her eyes.

“You should be asleep,” she said, and he grunted.

“Are you having a good time?”

“Sure,” she lied. “Are you?”

He nodded once, heavily. He sighed and she sighed with him, feeling his belly rise and fall at her back, his heart thumping behind hers.

“She’s never satisfied,” he said.

Kamala? Ammachy? Amina was scared to ask.

“Where did you go?” she asked instead.

He shrugged.

“Are we still going to the beach?”

His stubble scratched her forehead as he nodded.

Amina closed her eyes. The pool. Tomorrow she would be crawling through the clear turquoise while light dappled the walls around her. Until her ears hurt. Until her fingers pruned. Maybe there would even be a slide, one of those long ones that curled like a giant’s tongue and spat you into the cool water.

“How is your brother?”

Why was he asking her? Amina opened her eyes to the muggy dark. “Mean.”

Thomas laughed.

“No, it’s true, Dad! He’s worse here than at home.”

“That’s because it’s hard for him here.”

“It’s hard for me, too!”

“Not the same way, koche . He was born here. He remembers more.”

This seemed like one of those things that her father had wrong, like the time he said that being famous would be terrible. Why would it be harder to be somewhere you remember more ? What about when you didn’t remember anything if you’d ever even known it in the first place and everyone was always exchanging dark looks over it like you were blind or dumb or didn’t understand what scorn looked like?

“That boy is going to be something else,” Thomas said suddenly, wistfully, like he was seeing the end of some movie she couldn’t. “He’s difficult now, but one day he’ll grow into himself, and then you watch. He’ll shine brighter than the rest of us combined.”

Amina’s heart puckered with jealousy. She wanted to remind her father about how sometimes Akhil spoke so fast that you couldn’t even understand him, and even when you could understand him, he didn’t always make sense, but just then something crashed below them in the yard.

“What was that?” She jumped up, ran and looked over the edge of the roof, seeing a flicker of white. Now came a deep thud, followed by a string of curses and a growl.