Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“No, I mean … it’s not like I never thought about how we would die. When I was a kid that’s all I thought about for a while — when it would happen and who would be next and how it would feel. I was sure one of them would disintegrate just from having to get up every day and take a shower. That part is the worst. But we made it past that, you know? I just thought we were in the clear.”

She heard Jamie get up and come around the counter, and jumped a little as his hands settled on her shoulders. She did not want to cry, so she didn’t, she just kept her chin tucked to her neck and let Jamie pull her into a backward hug, his long arms folding around her, his newly smooth chin pressing into her neck.

“And half the time, I don’t even know what’s real anymore,” she said, quieter now because it felt like the kind of secret you keep. “All these days start feeling like one really long day, like there’s no difference between being awake and asleep, and nothing will ever make it end, except that it’s ending, and I know that, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do about it.”

“I love you,” Jamie said.

“Your face feels like a girl’s.”

His hands folded around either side of her rib cage, holding it in place, and a bolt of relief moved through Amina, leaving her acutely aware of how fragile and strange and necessary breathing was. She leaned back into him.

“I was just caught off guard yesterday,” he said. “Over the phone. I’m bad on the phone.”

“Yeah. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s because I grew up thinking the government might be listening in. It makes me paranoid now.”

“Because the government doesn’t want you to love me?”

“Something like that.”

The front door opened, the jangling of Kamala’s bangles sending them apart.

“Hello?” Amina called out, straightening her shirt. “Ma?”

“It’s me,” her mother said. “Someone came?”

“It’s my friend Jamie.”

The soft thud of Kamala’s feet hurried down the hall, and then suddenly she popped through the kitchen doorway, all sari and tennis shoes and braid and scrutiny.

“Hi.” Jamie stuck out his hand. “Jamie Anderson.”

Kamala looked at his hand but didn’t take it. “What are you doing?”

“Ma!”

“What? I’m just asking if he wants to stay for dinner!”

“No, no,” Amina said quickly. “He just dropped by.”

“Dinner sounds great,” Jamie said.

“What?” Amina turned around.

He squeezed her arm gently, saying to her mother, “I’d love to have dinner, Mrs. Eapen, as long as I don’t put you out.”

“Not out! In . I’m cooking.” She turned to Amina. “He likes fish or chicken?”

“I like both,” Jamie said. “And actually, I love to cook, if you don’t mind having me in the kitchen.”

Kamala wrinkled her nose, squinting from his shoes to his shoulders. “We’ll see.”

They made a feast. Or rather, Kamala made a feast, instructing Jamie on how exactly to cut each vegetable before she threw it into one of many pots, and answering “some” every time he had a question about how much spice she was adding. How they’d managed to make so much in just over two hours was inconceivable, even with Jamie helping, but there it was, sprawled along the dining table like edible treasure, two kinds of curry (chicken and fish), four sides of vegetables (cabbage, carrots, beets, and cauliflower), pooris, lime rice, regular rice, salad, raita, and an entire array of glossy chutneys.

Thomas insisted on not leaving sight of the garden, so he and Amina made a hasty table from plywood planks and sawhorses, and half an hour later all four of them floated in the darkening green grass between the house and the tomato plants.

“So tell me,” Jamie asked, letting Kamala serve him thirds of everything, “why is it that South Indian food is so much better than North? Is it the spices? The rice-based thing?”

Kamala leaned in to expound on her favorite subject, and Amina sat back. At first, it had been strange to see everyone sitting at the same table — like watching a play where she knew too much about all the actors to believe anything they said. But as the day melted around them, as the early-evening sun poured gold into the fields and Jamie kept asking the kind of questions her parents enjoyed answering, she felt herself enjoying the meal, or at least not worrying through every second of it. It helped that they had put the table in the middle of the field, giving Thomas a clear view of the garden. He seemed calm and focused, albeit with two pairs of binoculars (regular and night-vision) on the table beside him.

“And we live better, too,” Kamala said, finishing up a small diatribe that pinpointed reasons as varied as better cows (for finer paneers and ghees) and better genetic makeup (“far superior” Dravidian taste buds). “What laughing? No jokes! Thomas, tell him! Everything is better when you’re not constantly worried about the cold and the dust and the crazy Mughals slaughtering everyone!”

“Kamala has always been an excellent cook,” Thomas said, adeptly sidestepping the historical assertions. “First time she cooked for me, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”

“And when was that?”

“Nineteen sixty-four. We were just married, staying at my mother’s house for one month before we got our own flat.” Thomas scraped his plate with the pads of his fingers. “You remember, Kam? How Amma had to bribe Mary-the-Cook to leave the kitchen to you?”

“What leaving? She stood there huffing and puffing over everything I did, telling me I am cutting onions wrong and too much of cloves and the biryani will be too wet!”

“It was perfect,” Thomas said, shutting his eyes like he could still taste it. “Best I’ve ever had.”

“And what year did you come here?” Jamie took a sip of beer.

“Nineteen sixty-eight. JFK to St. Louis airport to here,” Kamala said, plotting the points across her plate with her middle finger. “I was just pregnant with Amina. We went back to get Akhil a few months later.”

“Wow. Albuquerque must have been so small back then.”

“You don’t know! One tiny speck of city in so much of brown!”

Thomas’s eyes snapped open. He squinted at the garden. Sat up a little.

“Had you always wanted to be a brain surgeon?” Jamie asked him. Thomas did not answer. Amina prodded him with her foot.

“No,” Thomas said, dragging his eyes from the garden to Jamie with some effort. “When I was young, I wanted to be a pilot.”

“What about you?” Kamala said, spooning a little more rice onto Jamie’s plate. “You always wanted to go into teaching?”

“Not at all. I just really enjoyed the field studies I was doing, and this is one way to keep doing them.”

“Amina said you’re in archeology?” Thomas asked. “Anthropology.”

“Anthropology,” Thomas repeated. “So do you just teach all day, or—”

“No, actually, my tenure-track status is pursuant to a study I’m conducting, so I spend a portion of my week out in the field. Or, well, at casinos.”

“Like the Sandia Casino?” Kamala asked.

“Actually, that’s the one I’m looking at right now.”

“Chi!” she shook her head. “Horrible place! So dark inside! And not one thing to eat at the all-you-can-eat!”

“Not even the chicken fingers?”

Kamala looked aghast. “Who eats chicken’s fingers?”

“So Amina must have told you about all that terrible business with her picture,” Thomas said. “The Puyallup Indians and all that.”

“Uh, no, actually,” Amina said. “Can someone pass me the beets?”