Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“No I don’t,” Dimple said.

“It’s gross,” Akhil said. “Better not let Dirk see it.”

“He doesn’t give a shit,” Dimple said.

“About you? Or about anything not in the immediate proximity of a soccer ball?”

“What is wrong with him?” Dimple asked, head swiveling from Akhil to Amina and back again. “What is wrong with you?”

“Ben Kingsley is playing Gandhi,” Amina said, replacing one sore subject with another. She watched her brother’s face cloud over. The news, if it could even be called that, had hit Akhil hard. No one had even seen Gandhi yet, and wouldn’t for three months, but Akhil was already tracking its progress with the nervous scrutiny of a jealous stepbrother, both too close and too distant from its subject matter to be easy with its coming.

“So?” Dimple asked.

“Ben Kingsley is half British.” Amina panned down, focusing on her brother’s shoes.

“He was raised in England ,” Akhil said, sulking.

“So he’s not Indian at all?”

“Barely.”

“He’s half Indian,” Amina corrected.

“Oh, for the love of …” Dimple rolled her eyes. “Seriously, man, holding on to a grudge over colonization ? Naming the dog after British royalty? You have so got to mellow.”

“Is she speaking English?” Akhil asked Amina.

“Whatever,” Dimple sighed.

“Whatever. Right. Never mind the hypocrisy, the insanity, not to mention the corruption of the introduction of our culture to the American mainstream! Mark my words, this movie is going to affect the way every single one of them sees us for the next decade. They’ll be looking at you, but they’ll be seeing Mahatma !”

Dimple slapped her own forehead.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Akhil asked.

“It’s not supposed to mean anything.”

“It’s supposed to mean something .”

A heavy banging on the door startled all of them, and Akhil looked around the Stoop frantically. Dimple reached under her chair for the bottle of Wonder Bubbles, and Amina under hers for the Stetson cologne. Akhil spritzed wildly as she crawled back into his room through the open window.

“Who is it?”

“Are you going to let me in or what, baby?”

“It’s just Sanji Auntie,” she told the others, unlocking the door. Sanji entered Akhil’s room, fanning her scowling face as she walked across it.

“My Gods, who put on an entire bottle of cologne? Akhil, was that you? You think it’s covering up the devil stink of your cancer sticks?”

“We told him. He doesn’t believe us.” Amina wiggled past her aunt to climb back out the window, and Sanji leaned through it, wrinkling her nose.

“It smells like a bloody billiards hall in here! Really, your parents don’t know? Daddy used to be a cigarette smoker, nah? He’ll sniff it out.”

“That would take him actually being in the house.”

“He’s in the house now!” Sanji peered around the roof. “Where’s the ashtray?”

Dimple held up the jar of Wonder Bubbles.

“Well, if that isn’t the height of corruption.” Sanji motioned for a cigarette. Akhil gave her one and then cupped the flame on the lighter as Sanji leaned farther out the window, her hot-pink chuni fluttering in the breeze. She exhaled, muttering, “Oh, goddamn lovely thing,” and inhaled again. After three drags, she handed it back to Akhil. “So? What’s the hot topic on the roof these days? How is the new school year?”

“It’s awesome,” said Dimple.

Sanji smiled. “I hear you’ve been invited to Homecoming?”

“You have?” Amina looked at her cousin.

“Yeah.” Dimple pinched a stray hair from her sweater and released it into the breeze. “I’m going with Nick Feets.”

“Nick Feets ?” Akhil asked.

“What about it?” Dimple glared.

“So what’s he like?” Sanji asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, whatever, he’s nice I guess. He’s a friend of Mindy’s.”

Amina swallowed, feeling vaguely stabbed all over.

“Fantastic!” Sanji cheered. “Our Dimple is going to her first-ever Homecoming dance! Bala said you were wearing a sari!”

“She what?”

“Kathi silk and all that, nah?” Sanji winked at the others. “Hair plaited with jasmine?”

Dimple’s face was smothered with horror. “Oh my God, what if?”

“It would be social suicide,” Akhil said. “Everyone would know you’re Indian, and the next thing you know, you’ll be asked to make samosas for the whole school.”

“Anyway,” Sanji said, clapping her hands together, “I think it will be fantastic, whatever you decide to wear. How I always wish that I had grown up with these American traditions — homecomings, proms, clambakes! You must tell Mummy to take pictures for all of us to see.”

Already, Amina could see the pictures: Dimple in some satiny dress with stick-necked Nick Feets, Dimple with the entire girls’ volleyball team, curling their arms to show off taut little biceps, Dimple with a corsage bigger than her face. She stared at the top of her camera, slowly shifting from f-stop to f-stop.

“What about you, Ami? Do you have someone you’re keen on?” Sanji asked, and Amina looked up, speechless and aggrieved. She pulled the camera to her face.

Sanji Auntie’s breasts lapped over the window frame, the soft folds in her neck streaked with baby powder. Amina panned up to the bleached fur above her aunt’s upper lip, and over to the ruby-and-sapphire earring dangling from one fat lobe. Her aunt looked over her shoulder at the door, sighing. “I suppose I should get back before they get suspicious.”

“No,” all three of them chorused, and Sanji looked pleased.

“I must, I must. Chacko and Raj will pop each other’s eyeballs out over this trickle-down theory, and there’s only so much good humor Thomas can provide.” She looked around the roof. “Where’s the horrible cologne?”

Amina reached under the chair and handed her the Stetson.

Sanji sniffed at it gingerly and winced. “ Chi! Bug spray! Is that the only one?”

“I have some Jean Naté on my dresser,” Amina offered.

“That’s my girl.”

They watched her thump across the room, listening through the door like they had taught her and then opening it quickly, locking it behind her.

“Do you think she’d be as cool if she had kids?” Dimple asked.

“No,” Akhil said. “No one is.”

Amina leaned back in her chair, reaching behind her for the camera case and her notebook. She flipped open to a new page and wrote down the film speed, exposures, and time of day. She paused at the column she had titled “light quality.” She looked up at the sky and wrote down “spitty.”

“So what’s the deal with your dad, anyway?” Dimple asked.

Akhil scratched his cheek. “Nothing.”

“You just told Sanji Auntie he isn’t around.”

“He isn’t.”

“Yeah, but why not?”

“Because he isn’t,” Akhil said. “It’s no big deal.”

“Then why are you so pissed at him?”

“Who says I’m pissed at him?”

Dimple rolled her eyes. “Clearly you’re pissed at him.”

“He’s not around enough for me to be pissed at him.”

“Okay, but it’s not like he’s off, like, gallivanting around the world or having some great romance, right? He’s just working.”

“It’s fine,” Amina said. “Akhil was exaggerating. Dad is here a lot. At night, mostly.”

“Bullshit,” Akhil said. “He got mad at her and he left us.”

“What?” Dimple asked.

“Nothing,” Amina said quickly, glaring Akhil into silence. “He did nothing.”