Blue skinned gods, p.26
Blue-Skinned Gods, page 26
After dinner, Lakshman and I went out for a walk. We wandered through the streets of Brooklyn, passing back and forth a bottle of Gatorade and vodka, my head already dizzy with singing and beer and a night’s sleep in a bus seat. I kept tipping up the bottle to my mouth and letting the liquid burn into my throat.
We stopped outside a Korean market. Its white glow spilled out onto the streets, onto the young people who passed it. Inside the window, a hunched woman rang up goods at a register.
“Let’s go to Manhattan,” Lakshman said.
“Manhattan,” I said blankly.
He put an arm around my shoulders and wove me toward the steps of a subway stop. He was drunk, and when he was like this, there was no way to get an idea out of his head after it had lodged itself.
“I want you to see Manhattan,” he said. It didn’t matter that I’d already seen Manhattan plenty of times.
I let him lead me away from the market and toward the subway. Lakshman was quiet on the train, his body swaying with the movement, the bottle traveling up to his mouth and down again. We changed trains once, and then he led me up a stone staircase that smelled like urine. Everything was whiteness.
Fog had descended on the New York night, slithering in between the buildings, silently taking the city. The lights jumped off the fog and back at the streets, magnifying so it looked bright as day.
I shielded my eyes with my hands. The fog clung to us as we walked.
Lakshman spread out his arms and looked up at the blank whiteness above us, laughing to himself. “This is god.”
The city spun around me, the lights passing through me like ghosts. I was drunk, and I walked arm in arm with Lakshman through the streets, singing parts of the new song he had written.
I don’t know why at that moment I thought of my real birth certificate, but it all seemed funny in the new blankness of the city, the hard edges of the truth warped around my head. Joseph Robert Pratt. My real name. I laughed. I bent over my knees and kept laughing.
Lakshman watched me, the fog seeping into his clothes and skin.
“You should come see Appa,” he said.
The laughter continued to push its way through me.
“Kalki, you okay?”
“That’s not my name,” I said between laughs. “No one knows my name. It’s—get this—my name’s Joseph. It’s not even Hindu. Joseph.”
“Lizzy told you that?”
“Yes. And I have a second birth certificate. You were right. There are two.” I wiped my eyes and straightened up. “Joseph Pratt.”
He cocked his head, a smile stretching his mouth. “You’re not Indian. Not even in name. Dude, you’re white!”
We broke into fresh new laugher and started walking again. I didn’t care where we were going. We walked into the fog.
“Do you remember the indigo they dyed your skin with?” Lakshman asked. “Appa told me some of the other things they did too.”
I was unprepared for this turn in the conversation. The laughter abandoned me. My body became quiet. I wanted to disappear into the fog. I didn’t want to hear the words, afraid that hearing them said out loud would make them real, and therefore consequential.
“They’d secretly feed people antibiotics so everyone thought you were healing them when they got better. That’s how Roopa got better. Your dad gave her medicine.”
“Stop. I don’t want to know.”
“You should know. This is your lie, too.”
“No, stop.” I held my head and tried to steady the swirling of fog around me. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t want to hear it. Even if he didn’t mean to blame me, his words seemed full of accusation.
“You need to hear it from the source,” he said. “Let’s go see my dad.”
I was too weak to resist as Lakshman took me by the elbow and walked me down into the subway.
Compared to the city, New Jersey’s darkness caught me by surprise. We had arrived on a train as clean and nice as the airplane I’d flown in to get to New York, completely unlike the dirtiness of the city’s subways. The night stood still. Stars winked above me for the first time in weeks. We walked through sidewalks held in by manicured grass.
Lakshman led me up the stairs of a small old house with red awnings and a slightly tilted look about it, as if it was so old it sagged. Lights were on in a back room, filtered hazily through the thick curtains of a bay window.
“I didn’t tell him we were coming,” Lakshman said. “We haven’t talked in months.”
“Why?”
“I told him about M and me. He didn’t react well. I mean, what does he care that she’s Dalit? I thought he’d be over it, since we’ve been away from India so long. But we had a huge fight, and I haven’t talked to him since.” Lakshman rang the doorbell.
Footsteps. The light turned on in the front room, flooding the windows. The red door scraped open.
I didn’t recognize the man that stood in the doorway. I remembered Kantha Chithappa as a handsome man with his curly hair parted meticulously on one side. The man that stood in the doorway was old; crumpled; his skin riddled with folds, like he’d shrunk in it; his hair gray and clinging to the sides of his head around a patch of shiny bald skin.
“Lakshman,” he said. His voice grated with an intensity it never used to, a hushed, scraping whisper. His eyes were glassy with tears. “And—”
“Hello, Kantha Chithappa,” I said.
He blinked. It took him a few seconds, but then, slowly, he smiled. It looked like something he wasn’t used to doing. The grin transformed his face, and I saw a hint of the old Kantha Chithappa I used to know.
We followed him into a narrow corridor paneled in white wood. Photos hung everywhere—photos of Lakshman as a kid, Vasanthy Chithy, their wedding. Everything once hidden in photo albums back at the ashram was now displayed on every inch of wall and surface.
We settled in at a circular kitchen table. A large photo hung above it, featuring the three of them and me. Lakshman, six years old, huddled on Vasanthy Chithy’s lap. Her hair fanned out over his small shoulders. In the picture, I sat on Kantha Chithappa’s lap, smiling at the camera.
It had been more than two months since Ayya and I left the ashram, and it jarred me to see reminders and pictures of it everywhere.
“When did you come to New York?” Kantha Chithappa asked.
“A few weeks ago,” I said in Tamil. It felt good to speak my native language again, and it came out all rushed and fluid, like I’d built up a backlog of words I’d wanted to say. The train ride had sobered me up a little, but I was still tipsy. I focused hard on Kantha Chithappa’s words and tried to act steady.
“What have you been doing?”
“I toured the city.” I didn’t know how much Lakshman had told him about my running away. “I saw Lakshman sing.”
“Sing what?”
“It’s nothing,” Lakshman said. “I sang for him in my apartment.”
Lakshman gave me a look, and I understood that Kantha Chithappa didn’t know about the band or our upturn in fortune thanks to the video. I wondered how long Lakshman’s claim of not talking for a few months had actually lasted—how I could fix their relationship.
“How’s the ashram?” Kantha Chithappa asked. He kept staring at me, like he couldn’t believe I was there. “How are you?”
I told him about the ashram expansions, how many buildings we had now, how many visitors stayed at any one time—still trying hard to act and talk soberly.
“You’re the spitting image of Krishna,” he said. He looked me up and down with awe. “My god, I forgot what the blue looked like.”
His eyes were glazed. He kept taking sips out of a porcelain cup, something brown-tinged but clear. Whiskey.
“What am I doing?” he said, standing up. “Let me make you tea.”
“We can’t stay, Appa,” Lakshman said. “We have to get back.” He stood up too.
“Stay for a bit.” Kantha Chithappa seemed anxious and twitchy. I took that to mean that he missed Lakshman, and that he felt lonely. “Kalki hasn’t told me about his Ayya yet.”
“Appa—” Lakshman said with warning.
“How is the old brute? Your Ayya?” Kantha Chithappa sat again, as if he’d forgotten about the tea. His face was eager, though there was a demonic glee to it at the mention of Ayya. He’d shifted positions, revealing the painting behind him—one of Amma’s, a lush piece depicting Krishna’s mother Yashodha scolding him for stealing ghee. Amma had used Vasanthy Chithy as the model for Yashodha, and me as the model for Krishna.
“Ayya is fine,” I said. I couldn’t look away from Vasanthy Chithy’s painted face.
Lakshman sighed and sat back down.
“He doesn’t know you’re here,” Kantha Chithappa said. It wasn’t a question. “If he did, he’d be knocking down my door.” Kantha Chithappa leaned forward over his teacup full of whiskey. “Don’t trust him, Kalki.”
All the pictures of Vasanthy Chithy stared at me from the wall. Her eyes were everywhere, leaning up against every piece of furniture, nailed onto every inch of wall. Dead, just like Amma.
“Do you trust him?” Kantha Chithappa asked.
I hadn’t trusted Ayya since his affair with Sita, hadn’t liked him since Roopa left. “I don’t.”
“Good.” He took a big gulp from his teacup. “Your Ayya is wrong. He’s wrong about so much.”
I nodded. My heart was balled up tight. Kantha Chithappa could confirm all my doubts about Ayya. How they healed Roopa. How the horses arrived at the ashram. How much money Ayya made off me over the years.
Before I could jump into it, Kantha Chithappa asked, “How’s your Amma?”
Lakshman grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
I waited a beat to make sure I wasn’t going to cry. “Amma died.” I was surprised I could say the words without emotion. It had been a long time, longer than I realized. Or maybe it was Lakshman’s support, or Kantha Chithappa’s presence, that gave me the urge to tell the truth about Amma. This was more than I’d shared with even Lakshman. I’d told him she’d died, but not how.
“She drank rat poison,” I said.
Lakshman’s fingers crushed mine.
Kantha Chithappa slammed his fist down on the table. “Goddammit.” He reached across and took my other hand into his. He pushed his face into my palm. “I’m so sorry.” He shook his head. His tears soaked my fingers. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I—I should’ve been there for you. I shouldn’t have left you two with him.”
The world flanged away from itself, dizzying. But I breathed slowly. “Chithappa, it’s okay,” I said. I got up, went around the table, and hugged him. He cried against my shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I kept saying it, because it wasn’t okay and I didn’t have anything else to say, and the tears were climbing up inside me. We both cried together as Lakshman watched us.
Before we left, Kantha Chithappa clung to Lakshman’s shoulders and said, “I want to meet Meera. And her parents. Please.” He put his hands on each of Lakshman’s cheeks and kissed his forehead. “Please. I want to meet the woman who makes my Lakshman so happy.”
Lakshman sat silent on the train ride back to the city, staring at his knees, his head nodding as he fell asleep and woke up. Thin strips of light sliced us open. I couldn’t take it anymore. I closed my eyes and pictured Amma’s painting on the wall of Kantha Chithappa’s kitchen. After we’d cried about Amma, Kantha Chithappa had told me as much as he remembered—how they’d secretly fed Roopa antibiotics; how the horses had been brought in on a trailer with everyone involved paid off to keep quiet; how Ayya had had a deal with the local medical clinic, where he would pay off the doctors and nurses if they would refer patients to the ashram instead of healing them.
These stories swirled in the vortex of my mind, creating a pressure cooker inside my skull.
When we reached our stop, Lakshman slipped out of the train and walked up the subway steps without a word. He kept his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said. He walked so fast, I had to jog to keep up. His body slunk into a downward slope at his shoulders, everything tipped downward and morose. I’d thought he’d be happy his father finally wanted to meet M, but he was shaken and grieving. “I hope you’re sorry about my mother.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Of course I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
I kept quiet. His demeanor was different than I’d ever seen it. Maybe it was seeing his dad so lonely, or the house with pictures of his dead mother everywhere. I was an intruder on his grief. He felt far away again, a stranger once more.
“You can’t heal anyone, you know,” he said.
“I know.” He wasn’t really talking to me. He was talking through his sadness, addressing the world.
“You can’t,” he said. “You’re not a fucking god.” His eyes were shiny under the lights. “My mom was sick. She needed real doctors, and all she got was you.”
I remembered the woman in Delhi, her breathing growing faint as she lay on the road and the car lights pierced into both of us, melding us into each other and carving us from our shadows.
I reached out for Lakshman. The alcohol had drained from my body, but I was dizzy all the same.
He shook his head at the ground and shrugged off my hand.
“I hate being in that house,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“You killed her,” he said, and kept walking.
9
For the next few nights, Kantha Chithappa’s face haunted my dreams. I kept waking up to visions of Amma and Vasanthy Chithy at the ashram, and as the days went by, my body unraveled. My belly always hurt. My joints ached. I woke up feeling like I hadn’t slept at all. To avoid facing these new, scary realities, I took any excuse to drink and wander alone in the city. The noise was jarring on the best days. I was used to birdsong at the ashram, but here there were people everywhere. Everything smelled, even the air, which hung muggy and thick. I didn’t walk through it as much as I waded through. I spent a lot of time riding the subway, but my favorite place was the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in the Bronx.
Inside the giant, cavernous church, the noise of the city all but died away. I went on weekday mornings when men in black shirts and cargo shorts set up chairs, each thud ringing in the stone building like a small stampede. I liked to sit facing the high altar in front of the roped-off area, trying to get everything to line up in my vision—the white marble altar, the cross hanging above it, the stained-glass window behind the buttresses arching up to the domed ceiling, the large frankincense holder hanging above the pulpit. I didn’t know a whole lot about Christianity besides that its history was too bloody for me to be drawn to it. But I missed the quiet of the meditations at the ashram, and in New York City this was as close as I could get to calming my mind. I didn’t dare go to any Hindu temples for fear of Ayya and his loyal followers.
Sometimes other people would come in to pray as I sat in the pews. I watched them, both entranced and sickened. I no longer understood the nature of faith. I hadn’t had faith or belief. I hadn’t needed to. I had known god. I had been god. It was other people who had had faith in me. But now that I knew they were all lied to, that they believed in something that didn’t exist, I wondered what even was faith—what use it had if all it meant was belief in a lie.
After another Blue-Skinned Gods gig, Lakshman, M, Han, Jason, and I went out drinking at a bar, where we met Sunita and Lucky and a group of three girls who laughed at all of Han’s jokes. She sat in the middle of two girls with her hands all over them, buying them drinks and asking them to come back to the apartment. Sunita and Lucky made out in a dark corner of the bar. M snoozed with her head thrown back on a couch, and Lakshman watched her with such devotion on his face that it made me feel deeply lonely. Jason took shots with a mountainous friend of his, the two of them racing to gulp up the group of shots lined up in front of them. After each shot, they smiled at each other, and every once in a while, they kissed.
Another boy we’d met, Julian, leaned on me as he talked. Julian was lithe and bony, with a dark beard and dark hair and dark clothes that stood out against his pale skin. His heavily ringed hand rested so close to mine on the table that I kept finding myself focusing on it. At the end of the night, he invited me back to his apartment in Queens.
I looked to Lakshman. I didn’t know how to ask for clarity on the situation.
Lakshman leaned close and whispered in my ear. “You’re free now. Try everything at least once.”
“But—”
“M and Han are bi. Jason’s gay. And trans! It’s no big deal. Go explore.” He held my gaze for a second to show me he meant it, then turned his adoring attention back onto M, who’d started to snore.
In Hindu mythology, Vishnu sometimes takes the form of a woman named Mohini, who is so beautiful and perfect that she weaves a spell over all the men who see her. Even Shiva was so moved by her beauty that he spilled his seed just from a glimpse of her form. He begged Vishnu to become Mohini again so he could chase her and make love to her. One story tells of a time when, halfway through sex, Mohini became Vishnu again, but the lovemaking continued. The Linga Purana tells another story of Shiva and Mohini making love, but this time they merged into one being, Harihara, who is depicted as half-Shiva and half-Vishnu in his male form. At the ashram, I learned of these stories mostly from Western visitors like Brad. Ayya never talked about sex at all, and definitely never about same-sex attraction.
But when I’d believed I was a god, that godhood had formed most of my identity. My gender and sexuality were always ancillary to my divinity. Most gods and goddesses could shift in and out of their genders and attractions. Going home with Julian didn’t seem like a stretch to me. He was good-looking and smelled nice. I said okay, and he took my hand and led me out of the bar.
