Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

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Spanning India in the 70s to New Mexico in the 80s to Seattle in the 90s, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is a winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past.
When brain surgeon Thomas Eapen decides to cut short a visit to his mother's home in India in 1979, he sets into motion a series of events that will forever haunt him and his wife, Kamala; their intellectually precocious son, Akhil; and their watchful daughter, Amina. Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas has begun having bizarre conversations with his dead relatives and it's up to Amina-a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis-to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas's unwillingness to talk, to Kamala's Born Again convictions, to run-ins with a hospital staff that seems to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so thick with disasters that to make any headway at all, she has to unravel the family's painful past.

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“But …” Amina cleared her throat. “I mean, what’s the treatment? Do you operate? Take it out?”

“We will know more when we get more tests, but the location and the size would indicate—”

“No,” Thomas turned around. His face was pale and he smiled sadly at her. “It’s inoperable.”

“So then, like, what? Radiation? Chemo?”

Thomas shrugged.

“We’ve had some success in preventing growth with radiation,” Dr. George said, but now he was talking to Kamala, Kamala whose head tilted farther back, glaring at the ceiling. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. Amina watched in surprise as her father stepped toward her and reached down to brush one, then the other away.

“Kam,” he said softly, and her mother pulled his hand forward until it covered her whole face.

There was a knock at the door, and it opened to show a slight Asian woman who held two more folders in her hand. She smiled when she saw Thomas. “Hey, Doc.”

“Thank you, Lynne,” Dr. George said, rising to take the envelopes from her. “We’ll be a minute longer.”

“Oh. Sure.” She closed the door quickly behind her, and Thomas motioned for the envelopes. He slid them out and flipped from one page to the next, reading for what seemed like twenty minutes, though of course it could not have been. Amina looked blankly in front of herself. She counted the yellow bodies until she lost count, and started over. Her father handed the papers back to Dr. George.

“I should go,” he said. “I have a patient waiting.”

“What?” Her head snapped up. “Dad—”

“Sir,” Dr. George said, rising, “I’d like to schedule you for a biopsy as soon as—”

“That’s fine. Please make the necessary arrangements with Monica. My schedule will be cleared.”

“Wait!” Amina half-shouted, and Thomas turned to her, stoneeyed. “Can we — I mean, we need to talk about this, right?”

“I’m late as it is.” Thomas swiveled to find the doorknob, avoiding looking at Kamala, who wasn’t looking at him anyway, but at her own lap, as though she couldn’t imagine who it belonged to. “Please make sure your mother gets home safely.”

BOOK 9 A FATHER OF INVENTION

ALBUQUERQUE, 1983

CHAPTER 1

The morning of Akhil’s funeral, the remaining Eapens sat in the car, looking at the glass doors of Love’s truck stop. Outside, an eighteen-wheeler glided by like a cruise ship, and the car rocked gently like they were on water.

“Okay,” Thomas said, a reassurance to no one in particular. “Okay then.”

Amina watched her father open the door and stand up. He shook his legs so that his pants fell smoothly, and when he took out his wallet, she looked away. It wasn’t that she expected the world to stop for the funeral. But certain things, like the country music blaring from the car next to them, or needing gas to get to the church, or having to pay anyone for anything, seemed cruel.

In the passenger seat, Kamala readjusted the pleats on her white sari, smoothing them down with one hand. She leaned her head back into the seat cradle, and Amina watched her through the rearview mirror. The bruise was spectacular. A large purple poppy bloomed over Kamala’s cheek and eye socket, her red-rimmed eye in its center. Strangely, the bruise had the effect of making what was beautiful on her face more so, her nose more patrician and lips more full and the good eye somehow better than it had been before, so that the sum of her parts gave her the air of a harrowed starlet, of glamour all lit up with tragedy.

“These were the biggest they had,” Thomas said as he opened the door and sat down. A cloud of diesel and dust floated in, and he handed the sunglasses to Kamala before shutting the door. Amina watched her open them and pause. The frames were purple and sparkly and as big as tea saucers. Kamala put them on gingerly.

“Let me see,” Thomas said, and she turned her head toward him. He placed his thumb on her chin and rotated her head from one side to the other.

“Fine,” he said, and started the engine.

She would not cry. At the funeral, Amina kept her eyes closed for fear of seeing any one image that would stick too deeply inside, turning the day into something real. She ran her fingers along the edge of the card stock in her hand, digging the corner under her thumbnail. Already she had seen too much of it, the white program with Akhil’s senior photo and the numbers 1965–1983 underneath. Already it had sucked her air out, replaced it with a buzzing numbness. The room, she knew, was thick with Indians, doctors, nurses, patients, parents, teachers, and the throngs from Mesa High, unrecognizably adult in their suits and black dresses. Prom , Amina thought when she first saw them. It was like they were practicing for prom. And in truth, there was something prom-ish in their manner, some terrible mix of dread and cool and hunger for the unknown that washed over their faces like sunlight.

“Two, Samuel, chapter twelve, verse twenty-two to twenty-three,” the minister said. The rustle of opening Bibles sounded like a flock of birds rising through the church. Kamala, face hidden by the sunglasses, did not move.

“While the child was alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who can tell whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?’ But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.” Pastor Kelley exhaled and looked up. “This morning is a difficult morning for you. It is a morning filled with questions and despair, when the young have seen one of their own taken by the hand of the Lord. And so you have come here for comfort and I can only say to you …”

Amina kept her eyes shut as Pastor Kelley went on to deliver a sermon about God’s favorites, apparently believing that Akhil was one of them. She did not see Mrs. Macklin rising to the podium to give, at Kamala’s request, an odd testimony to Akhil’s courage in the face of French. She did not notice how Mindy Lujan looked at the coffin and stifled sobs, surprised and terrified by her own grief; how a group of young Mathletes stared at their just-shined dress shoes, wondering what it felt like to fly over a cliff and exactly how fast Akhil had been going at the moment of impact; how everyone kept looking around for no-show Paige, as if she was supposed to be the North Star of their mourning, something they could fixate on and guide themselves by.

Instead, buffeted by the darkness of her own eyelids, Amina saw her mother’s face so clearly that it seemed for a minute that time had been kind enough to reverse itself. She saw the orange cut of the kitchen light on her mother’s cheekbones, the rise of steam from the idlis and stew, how Kamala’s mouth had softened watching Akhil eat, how in that moment everything extraneous had been erased. Two mouths, one eating, one hiding a smile. She opened her eyes to see her brother sitting on the choir bench.

She blinked. He blinked back. She sucked in, trying to make her mouth move, make anything move. He waved. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to yell or shout or scream or just say anything, but Akhil winked at her and put his finger to his lips, a dodgy smirk rising on them. She shook her head. Up on the podium, Mrs. Macklin leaned in and whispered, “L’esprit est éternel pour les enfants,” and Akhil flipped the woman the bird, kissing his middle finger before raising it high.

“Stop,” Amina said, and a chastened-looking Mrs. Macklin stopped talking.

“He’s right there,” Amina said, but her arm felt suddenly too heavy to lift and no one looked anyway. Dimple’s hand was cool on her wrist.

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