THE SIKH PATIENT----Chapter 12---TWO FUNERALS AND NO WEDDING (continued)...
Me trying to look cool with sunglasses on in the summer
I had to go to my room and sleep. Remind me again, how do you do that? I went into my closet and pulled out the old raggedy yellow teddy bear with brown and black stripes. When I was five the teddy was bigger than me and dad would talk to Teddy in the morning and then he would tell me he loved Teddy more than me. Then he would laugh as I started to beat it up with my tiny fists. Years later I told him that this was child abuse and I would need him to pay for therapy. He laughed even louder then.
Seema, my cousin, came into my room to sleep with me. Good, I don’t want to be alone tonight. I wanted Uma to sleep with me, but she passed out on the couch. I remembered when she lived with us for six months when Tarak Uncle could still see. My dad and Tarak Uncle went next door and called us, saying they were Santa Clause. “Ho, ho, ho,” my dad chimed on phone. “Santa wants to know what you want for Christmas.” I wanted a Barbie dream house so my dad got me a generic doll house and built it for me before Christmas and we’re not even Christian. Then he started to become obsessed with the architecture of the doll house, trying to fix it and make it as great as possible. As me and Uma played with it, he would stare at it and say the roof was not supported with enough beams, then my dad and Ravi would try and rebuild it while our dolls were trying to have a sleepover. Sonia, my sister, would start crying because we didn’t let her play and Ricky, my cousin, was busy making booby traps with white thread all over the house. Tarak Uncle couldn’t discipline him because he was in Blind school in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he could partially see but he learned all the tricks of how to manage when he wouldn’t be able to see. I could never see that thread that Ricky kept putting in our way that would be connected to some sugar that fell on my head. He was making candy out of us. Trick or treat.
Mom had the eventual breakdown we expected. She would cry all night and yell at us all day. Sonia and Ravi would try and console her. I just watched it. I ignored Nick’s calls until he came over to the house one night and we ended up having decent sex, I mean I didn’t…you know…but it wasn’t bad. By the way, my personality didn’t change afterward and I didn’t like see the light or anything, mostly we did it in the dark. I went from my home to my apartment a lot.
Something weird was going on about my dad’s life insurance, I heard my brother and mother whisper about how the insurance company was calling his death “self-inflicted.” My mom was having trouble working because she was a little upset that the man she had devoted her life to was gone. So I confronted Ravi about it.
“Everything is fine. I don’t want you to worry about money,” Ravi said as I followed him around the driveway as he shoveled snow off of it. We used to hire a guy to do that.
“What do you want me to worry about? World Hunger, Famine, the Environment? I’m not running for Miss America.” I was freezing and snowflakes were getting in my eyelashes.
“What are you running for?” he asked as he tried to break some ice with the shovel.
“I think the question is: what am I running from?”
“And the answer is?” A little sweat poured from his forehead.
“C. When in doubt the answer is always C.” C is for coward, carbon copy, catharsis, corner. Dad would make me copy the word “cat” twenty times when I was six and he was trying to teach me English.
“You did terrible on the S.A.T., how’d you get into Michigan?” he asked and stopped shoveling.
“I wrote a touching essay about alcoholism. I probably made someone cry. And by the way, I got into a lot of other good schools too.”
He went back to shoveling. I guess it was his time to chop wood and carry water.
*
The next day Ravi came into my room. “I want to take you somewhere.” I looked up at him and noticed his face was starting to look more and more like Dad’s. In fact, I could have sworn this similarity increased since his death. I thought about when I was eight my dad told me he wanted to take me somewhere after I had bugged him over and over again about where he got me from. “Kmart,” he said and smiled to himself. “You were on sale.”
“But where in Kmart, it’s a really big store?” I asked with my two braids and overalls. So we went to Kmart and he took me to the diaper aisle and pointed to a box of Pampers with a picture of a baby on the box.
“There,” he said slightly annoyed.
“How much did I cost?” I whined, very fascinated that there were babies inside those boxes.
“Ninety-nine cents.” I didn’t notice him laughing, I was just looking at the pure white skin of those babies. My dad’s beard was hanging low on his chin, his hair inside a baseball cap. Later, I accused him of child abuse again, mental anguish to be precise. He thought it was hilarious. I was serious. I watched a lot of Oprah.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked Ravi as he stared at the sorry state of my room. Clothes were scattered across the floor, empty Diet Coke cans littered my dresser. I sat up and wondered if I had put on weight.
“What’s going on with you?” he didn’t say. Instead, he looked around the room with a very disturbed expression on his narrow features. He looked like he might cry. “I was thinking maybe we could go to Belle Isle,” he whispered. That was the little island in Detroit that I went to with dad when I was a kid. Where I watched him play chess with strange-looking men while I roller-skated and chewed on pink Bubbalicious gum.
“I don’t want to go there,” I said flatly. “It’s January. It’s cold.”
“Where do you want to go?” he asked and sat at the end of my bed.
“Can we go roller skating because I can’t roller skate anymore?” I asked.
“Yeah.” So me, Ravi and Sonia went to the Evergreen roller rink in Sterling Heights. The idea of wearing shoes other people had sweat in was not glamorous to me. And the minute I put the skates on, I fell. They started laughing but I didn’t think it was funny. Why do people think it’s funny when people fall down?
I went to the rink and Ravi and Sonia both had to hold my hands. “I’m gonna die,” I whined.
“Shut up,” Ravi said and went a little faster, it was so slippery. Some nasty men with long hair started to cheer me on when I let go of both their hands. Ravi gave them a dirty look and I went straight for the wall. I didn’t exactly die, but it kind of hurt and the men were laughing. After I hit my breasts against the wall, I looked down, between my thighs, under my jeans. No way. I started my period. The Hell’s Angel guys stared at me. Did we come here to have fun?
Ravi came up from behind me; my face was redder than my vagina. He helped me get up. I don’t know if he noticed the blood. I don’t want to know. Sonia was behind us doing some sort of dance routine on the rink, as the strobe lights were about to give me a seizer. I think I heard once that if you have epilepsy or manic depression, strobe lights could ignite an episode in either disease. I roller-skated to the bathroom. I tried to stand up above the toilet, because this was a public restroom, as I looked at my soaked underwear. But my skates were really hard to balance with so I fell onto the toilet seat. I was sure I instantaneously contracted a venereal disease. I had no tampons, no pads. I realized I would have to roller-skate over to the tampon machine. This is my life. I started to cry. Sonia came into the bathroom. “Yaz, Yasmine, what’s the matter? Yasmine, open the door.” She started to cry too.
“Can you get me a tampon from the machine!” I yelled as someone else opened the door of the bathroom, I assumed everyone in the rink heard me. That person left after hearing me scream.
“Yeah,” Sonia said as I listened to her skates on the brown tiled floor. “I don’t have five cents. It costs five cents,” she whined.
“What?” I started to laugh. “Do you think you can borrow five cents?”
“Yeah,” she said and skated out of the bathroom. I couldn’t stop laughing. Then I cried. I couldn’t stop crying, and crying, and crying.
*
...to be continued…
By
Nina Kaur