Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“We’re not going back, Kamala. You have to at least try to fit in.”

“Yes, because there’s nothing to do here between cleaning up after your children and cooking them meals and making sure they are doing their homework, right?”

“ Do something. Volunteer at a shelter. Get a part-time job.”

“And now he thinks I am sitting like some fine Mughal princess, counting up my bangles while the bloody servant girls take care of things! Why not wander around all day in some office and come home and cook the dinner and clean the house like some stupid woman in a perfume commercial?” She started to laugh. “Well, Emperor What’s-His-Name, I refuse.”

“Kamala—”

“I REFUSE.” She glared at him. “You think that changing and changing and changing ourselves to fit in with these people is some good thing?” She tilted her chin up, daring him. “Fine then. You do it. Go away and become some idiot who smiles all the time for no reason because I don’t care anymore! I really don’t.”

The surprise was that he had gone away. As Amina and Akhil stood in the open doorway, their father marched straight back to the car, gunning the engine and roaring back down the driveway. If he saw them standing there, it didn’t stop him. Nor did he return for dinner the usual one to two nights after a fight. For days and then weeks, their father was not seen during waking hours.

Kamala went into angry, gourmet mourning. She made every meal as though it might be Thomas’s last, churning out flaky parathas and paper-thin masala dosas only to watch with fury as they grew limp in his absence. She plucked coriander leaves as Dallas and Dynasty unfolded on the television, sickened and consoled by the sordid love affairs Americans seemed genetically predisposed to partake in. She borrowed Bala Kurian’s Hindi movies and watched them to the exact point where everything fell apart, and then walked around her kitchen, scolding the cupboards.

Amina sighed, tugging against her seat belt. Who knew what they would find when they got home? She knew better than to try to guess. The traffic into the village was at a dead crawl. Akhil sucked his teeth, fiddling with the radio, trying to needle in on the hard-rock station that always faded out as they got closer to home. He sighed and snapped it off. Reached for the glove compartment. Amina kicked her foot up, stopping him.

“We’re too close now. You’ll reek.”

“She won’t even notice.”

“She’s not stupid.”

“No, she’s just too pissed to care.”

Amina sighed. By now she should have been used to the way her mother could perch anywhere in the house, so riddled with fury that she seemed not to see anything in front of her, but it was always disconcerting to walk into the living room and find Kamala smoothing down the same patch of armchair over and over again, or worse, start a conversation in which her mother’s reply was an abrupt departure for another room.

“Do you have any gum?” Akhil asked, and Amina reached into the first pocket of her backpack. Juicy Fruit. She handed him a stick before slipping another out of the foil and into her mouth. Then she turned the radio on and inserted the Iron Maiden tape, taking comfort in the sugar and the screaming as they inched their way home.

“So?” Kamala asked. “How was it?”

Amina and Akhil stared, speechless. It wasn’t just the plasticky-looking jumpsuit, or the hair she had obviously untwisted from a braid to remold into a high ponytail, or even the tennis shoes Kamala wore on her feet, clean and white and laced in place like intergalactic marshmallows. It was her smile. Somehow in the last eight hours, their mother had become chipper . Her eyes and lips glistened with pinks and purples as she leaned against the kitchen counter.

“You like all your teachers?” Kamala nodded.

“Yes,” Amina said, automatically nodding back.

Akhil scowled. “What’s on your face?”

“I went to the makeup counter at Dillard’s.”

“Just like that?”

“What just like that ? I need your permission?”

“What are those?” Amina asked.

“Parachuting pants!” Kamala looked down at her own legs like they belonged to an actual skydiver. “They’re the latest things.”

Akhil looked so baffled that his mother laughed, giving curve to her bronzed cheekbones. Her eyelashes fluttered like the blackened wings of an underworld butterfly, and Amina wondered at the evenness of the thick black line under each eye until she realized her mother was looking back at her with increasing alarm.

“You look great,” Amina said, and a spasm of discomfort flitted across Kamala’s features.

“How about your teachers? They’re good?”

“They suck eggs,” Akhil said, glancing around the kitchen as though there might be more changes hiding in the cupboards.

Kamala shrugged amicably. “Oh well, that’s how it goes, right? Win things, lose things.”

Amina nodded. Win things, lose things. Sure. Their mother turned from them to a boiling pot on the kitchen stove. She lifted it to the sink, releasing the muddy smell of hot potatoes, and then opened a drawer, rummaging around for something. “Why don’t you both get started on your homework? Your father is on his way home, so we’ll eat soon.”

“Dad?” Akhil’s eyebrows shot up. “What’s the occasion?”

“First day of school, silly.” She fanned the steam from her face.

“So?”

“So? So he wouldn’t miss it.”

“Since when?”

“Since now, Mr. Curmudgeon!”

“Are you having an identity crisis?” Akhil asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kamala retrieved a potato masher and held it up like a trophy. She smiled. “Now, why don’t you and whatever radical leftist policies go upstairs until dinner?”

Akhil said nothing as he left the kitchen. They listened to him stomp up the stairs. Amina sat down on a chair and watched as her mother moved around the kitchen. It was remarkable really. The shiny pants hugged her hips, and from behind, her mother looked like any other Mesa Prep girl.

“You look so different.”

“Bad?” Kamala looked at her reflection in the microwave.

“No, just different.”

“I wiped off most everything. But I bought myself a lipstick.”

“Can I see?”

Kamala pointed to her purse, and Amina opened it and pulled out the lipstick.

“Berry Delicious?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” her mother said with an embarrassed laugh. She opened a drawer and pulled out a knife. “So, you like school?”

“Gina Rodgers is in all of my classes.”

“The knows-it-all.”

“Yes.”

“Ach. Poor thing. No one will ever marry her.”

“Mom! She’s my age.”

“Not now, dummy, later . I had a friend like this in college, Ranjini Mukerjee. Such a pill, that girl! And no one wanted to marry her.”

“Um-hm.”

Queen Victoria, a fat German shepherd with a permanently unimpressed bearing, wandered into the kitchen, sniffing in the direction of the parachute pants before settling on the floor.

“But it’s a pretty school, no?” asked Kamala. “So big!”

“It’s okay.”

“What does Dimple think?”

“I have no idea.”

“No classes together?”

“Just biology.”

“Well, that’s probably a good thing, no?”

Amina sighed. “If you say so.”

“Oh, Ami, don’t be so tragic. You just need some time apart to grow into your own people.” She sliced the top and bottom off an onion and then whacked it in half. She placed the flat side down and cut the rest into colorless rainbows, tears pooling in her eyes. “People need to grow apart sometimes to grow back together, you know.”