The Game

Music pumps from the walls and jumps off the tin roof tiles. Gay night at the local dive, and it’s a clash of rainbow shirts against walls of dusty license plates. College lesbians and blue-collar queers slide around each other in the hot, coffin-shaped bar. Hands slip numbers over sticky tables, roaming thumbs hook over edges of rough denim, drunken tongues on beads of sweat, lips mix over whispered lies, skin on skin without room for truths and this is why we’re here.

“Two o’clock,” Kris says. “Don’t look.” He leans my way over a tall, spindly table and sips his long island iced tea through a stirrer held between his teeth. His hair, which he grows out into a swoop over his left eye, falls down between us like a curtain. We’ve both taken off our wedding rings. Mine rests in a tiny glass tray in our bathroom. Kris’s is placed carefully on his nightstand next to his multivitamins.

The walls vibrate with the bass, bouncing across my skin. I drink my beer and check my phone, wondering if it’s my ex calling, but it’s only my mother.

“Your two o’clock, or mine?” I say.

“Mine.” Kris shakes the hair out of his eyes and points at my phone. “Is it Emily?”

“No.” I put my phone back in my pocket. It’s only been a couple of weeks since Emily and I broke up, but the time has stretched me out. My insides feel ragged and thin. I want the dance floor to swell up with people, the music to climb inside me and wipe my brain clean.

Kris stares hard at his glass, now mostly filled with ice, the dark tea slurped down to the last inch. Even at twenty-seven, he is still all angles that push at his clothing.

I drain the last of my beer and walk toward the bar. Kris’s two o’clock is a man sitting at the table next to ours in a Red Sox hat and a white Hanes shirt. He holds his Bud Light to his lips but doesn’t drink.

I walk up next to a woman on a bar stool whose sad eyes droop down at the outer corners like they’re going to tip the pupils right out of her face. My phone buzzes. I ignore it. The woman smiles at me, her mouth edged in red lipstick. I could take her into a bathroom stall and push her up against the cold brick walls. I think of that red, red mouth gaping open, lipstick smeared, fingers clutching at me, lips slippery on my fingers and mouth.

I smile back. She slides her bar stool closer and touches my arm when she talks, her fingers tingling the skin where I’ve pushed up the sleeves of my button-down. Kris would say it was worth it. A fuck’s a fuck, he would say.

My phone buzzes. Amma again. I leave the woman smiling and walk back to where Kris is standing, stirring the ice in his glass around and around. This is the first time we’ve gone out in months—my unemployment and his busy work schedule as a second-pass message editor for a greeting card company keeps us out of the bars and at home doing normal married people things like Amma always wanted. Kris spends his nights trying to write his own greetings and staring at the cards framed over his desk, the few he got published when he first left engineering and started in this business. I spend my nights drawing commissions for horny suburban fanboys with money to waste—too-thin elves facing off against tentacled monsters, custom Sailor Scouts, coy anime girls frolicking at the beach, well-endowed geishas undressing in dimly-lit rooms.

“So?” Kris says. He tips his glass back and shakes an ice cube into his mouth.

“The one at the bar? I don’t think so.”

“A fuck’s a fuck.” He holds the ice cube between his teeth and talks around it. “Emily’s getting laid. Why shouldn’t you?”

“Shut up.” I wish I had bought another beer so that I’d have something to hold onto, so that the cold of it could take my mind off the ache in my stomach. My hands grasp at the air.

The man in the Red Sox hat stares hard at Kris through the darkness of the bar.

“Emily was no Nisha,” Kris says. He raises his empty glass. “To Nisha, your oldest and truest.”

I feel the outline of my phone through my pocket and think about calling Nisha.

“Red Sox Hat seems interested,” I say.

“He’s drinking a Bud Light.”

“A fuck’s a fuck.”

I haven’t spoken to Nisha since my wedding, haven’t had a meaningful conversation with her since we graduated from high school four years before that. I tap my fingers on the table. What would she say if I called her now?

“He’s not bad looking.” Kris tucks a piece of hair behind his ear and looks again at the man, letting his gaze linger. He crunches down on another ice cube. “He’s coming over.”

Red Sox Hat puts his enormous biceps on our table, which creaks under the pressure. He’s younger-looking close up, probably still in his early twenties, still in college. Kris sits up a bit straighter.

The man smirks at me and says, “Can I buy you a drink?”

Before I can react, Kris reaches across the table and folds his fingers over my wrist. My phone buzzes.

“This one’s mine,” Kris says.

Red Sox Hat gets up off the table and looks from Kris to me and back to Kris. “My mistake.” He walks back to his table.

I wrench myself from Kris’s grip. He puts his forehead in his hands.

“Sorry,” I say. “I thought he was looking at you.”

Kris nods to the table. I rub my wrist where he held it. We have an agreement that he’ll intervene if guys hit on me, but he overdoes it.

“I knew these boots were a bad idea,” I say. Kris had picked them out. “I look straight.”

“How’s this for a greeting? Roses are red, violets are blue.”

“Is now really the time?”

“Every guy I like just wants to sleep with you.”

“Wonderful. You should write greetings for a living.”

Kris lifts his head up and catches my eye. We laugh at the same time. Our heads tip toward each other and we clutch the table for support. Some of the thinness inside me fades. I feel almost solid.

•••

Back in our two-story cape outside of Bridgeport, Kris and I run on autopilot like we do every night when neither of us is getting laid. I track down one of our favorite Indian movies in a stack of DVDs on top of the TV, the cases lost or in storage or thrown accidentally into the recycling. Kris noisily makes Maggi noodles on the stove. We act against a backdrop of crawling-orchid wallpaper with curtains and light switch plates that match seamlessly. The talk of painting when we first moved in gave way to an affectionate tolerance for the pantheon of flowers that fly awkwardly across the walls, the permanently clogged fireplace, and the bathroom where every surface is mirrored—Kris’s favorite place to shower with his rotating collection of boyfriends and hookups.

We settle down in the dark with our steaming bowls of Maggi. Kris leans his head on my shoulder and we watch Kajol, the heroine, run around somewhere in Europe—snowcapped mountains behind her—while wind rips through her saree and scatters it behind her like a flag. The whole song sequence is a dream in the hero’s mind as he stares at the full moon and strums his cittern, depressed that the girl he loves is getting an arranged marriage. His balding father sits down beside him, squints at the moon, and tells him to go after her. “The bride belongs to the man who brings her home,” he says.

Kris’s phone rings.

“It’s Laila Aunty,” he says, handing it to me.

I pause the movie and get up from the couch. Laila Aunty is the woman that my father married after he left Amma. I can never talk to her sitting down. Her voice on the phone is hushed in a tone she hasn’t used since my second-oldest sister Vidya ran away with a black man from Kentucky.

“Lakshmi,” she says. “You are home, no?” Laila Aunty adds “no” to the end of all her sentences—residue from her British schooling.

I hate her voice.

“I’m home,” I say. I walk into the kitchen. My feet slip with sweat.

“You should call more.”

I’ve never called her. If I feel the need to hear Appa’s voice, I call his cell directly.

“I’ve meant to call,” I say. “I’ve just been very busy.” I wipe my hands on a dishrag and throw away a condom wrapper that was on the counter next to the microwave. I feel naked, like she can see through me and into the house, like she’s judging the piles of dishes that only get done when Kris puts on his big yellow gloves and sanitizes them all with scalding water because he doesn’t believe dishwashers can do the job right. My empty beer bottles stand in clusters on the kitchen table. Recycling spills from the corner trashcan. Laila Aunty would faint if she could see it.

Laila Aunty coughs. “I have some bad news, Lucky.”

I pick up a cup that may have once held tomato juice. It slips and lands with a thud against the stainless-steel sink.

“Your grandmother is in the hospital. You need to come home, no?”

•••

I drive to Boston that night. I miss the city. Muggy air billows from the mountains and seeps into the car. Dingy clouds hang too low over dry patches of grass. Masspike plays hide and seek around tufted green hills. I always forget how narrow the streets are in the old towns just north of Boston, how you can almost stick your hand out of the car window and ruffle the next driver’s hair. Speeding in Winchester feels like scraping the edge of a cliff, moment after moment of narrow escapes and near disasters, chasing the turn of the road, inches away from being swallowed by the night and not caring one bit, one flick of the wheel on Arlington Road and a cold lake awaits, who do I have to live for, a crash bang and blackness, a final note that sounds oh so good and true.

Amma’s house sits at the end of Emerson Drive in Winchester—the house my parents bought before Appa got tenure at Northeastern, before Amma finished her dentistry certification—a tiny cape house with powder-green paint peeling off the siding, nestled in between other hundred-year-old houses with damp, unfinished basements that flood every spring with the river. This block is the cheapest in town.

Through the lit window, I see Amma sitting in the kitchen waiting for me. Laila Aunty and Appa are there, too, milling around our old house like flies. Amma has her face in her hands. She puts her elbows on the blue Formica kitchen island, wearing one of her usual cotton nightgowns that button all the way down over her thick body. Her frizzy gray hair is pulled back from her face.

I enter with my key. Everyone turns toward the door but no one moves.

Appa’s thinning hair is dyed black, his skin leathery from his youth in Sri Lanka, dark and tough. He stands at the bottom of the stairs with his hands in the pockets of his pleated khakis, wearing a blue sports coat that’s starting to rub down to periwinkle at the elbows. Beside the faded orange walls of our kitchen, he seems softened, not diminished but simply worn around the edges like an old photograph. A thin scar snakes down his cheek. When I was little, I liked to trace its raised ridge with my finger and ask how he got it. The story changed every time.

“You cut your hair again,” he says.

He says it every time he sees me, though I’ve had it short for years. He clears his throat. He’s picked up smoking again.

Laila Aunty eyes the two of us before she laughs—a high, tittering giggle that sets my teeth on edge—and comes to hug me. Her hair, as usual, is plaited modestly at the back. Her heavy gold earrings scratch my face when she pulls me close to her sandalwood scent.

I stand there until she stops.

“You’re too thin, dear,” she says. “But beautiful as always, no.” She pushes my bangs out of my eyes and rubs my cheek while I try not to pull away.

Amma clears her throat. Laila Aunty shrinks back.

Amma’s hug smells like vanilla-cake shampoo. Every year for her birthday, my sister Vidya sends this shampoo to Amma, no return address. And even though Amma pretends to throw it out, pretends that she’s too proud to accept something from her wayward, estranged daughter, we all know she fishes it out of the trash once everyone leaves, and uses it religiously until it runs out.

Amma sits me down on one of the three stools at the kitchen island. Three is a strange number, and we always used to have someone standing during family meals, but the stools all match so Amma never wanted to buy a fourth one. She starts to make tea on the stove.

“I can do that,” I say, getting up from the stool.

She waves her hand. “No, no. Your tea is terrible.”

I sit back down and wait for her to tell me about Grandmother. The news comes in little spurts. Amma speaks to the pot in which she boils the tea, and later to the cups as she stirs in the sugar.

“She fell down the stairs. She’s getting so old, you know.” Amma pauses with the clink clink of the sugar spoon against the ceramic cups. “We went to the hospital.” Clink clink. “She’s fine, upstairs resting.”

Laila Aunty studies the picture wall of my family’s frozen smiles. She stands for a long time in front of my oldest sister Shyama’s wooden plaques from high school: 4.0 GPA, National Merit, National Honor Society, Honor Roll all four years; framed pictures of Shyama graduating cum laude from Columbia, getting married, receiving her Master’s from NYU, holding her newborn son.

Pictures of my second-oldest sister Vidya stop around the time she graduated from college. She wears tight clothes in her high school pictures, the prettiest one of all of us with her curls and Bollywood features, posing next to her sculptures and paintings.

Photos of me are all braces and thick glasses, knobby knees and too-sharp elbows, except for the one of me in my Bharatanatyam dancing costume, shining with gold thread and jewelry surrounded by a gilded frame, giant, almost life-size. It’s the one picture where I don’t look awkward or gangly. I’m svelte, feminine, almost sexy, silk pleats pooling between my legs, my body in an impossible pose of movement. The dancer, the black sheep, fucked from birth, but the me in the pictures didn’t know it then.

Amma puts a steaming cup of tea in front of me. My glasses fog up. I wrap my hands around the cup and soak the warmth into my skin.

“This was a close call.” Amma takes her own cup of tea in a chipped mug that says “#1 Dad,” and takes a sip.

Appa picks up the two other cups and gives one to Laila Aunty. They get tea in delicate flower-printed teacups, which Amma reserves for guests who aren’t family. Laila Aunty goes back to studying the photo wall.

Appa rubs nervously at his mustache, which he’s forgotten to dye black. “It would be nice if you stayed with your mother for a while, Lucky. She needs the help.” He clears his throat and brushes down his mustache. He rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, something he does when he’s ready to leave a place.

Laila Aunty pretends not to notice. Instead she stares at a picture of my wedding, Kris and me looking like we’re about to start laughing—Kris in his white and gold turban, me dolled up in a thick red saree, us looking at each other, sharing what my mother thinks is a moment of love. My thali, the thick gold chain that Kris tied around my neck to signify our marriage, glints in the photo. The light of the flash reflects off the thali and onto our skins. Laila Aunty tips back her teacup and drinks fast, her neck ballooning out every time she swallows. The silence gets thirsty, settles on our shoulders like a winter coat.

Let me tell you something about being brown like me: your story is already written for you. Your free will, your love, your failure, all of it scratched into the cosmos before you’re even born. My mother calls it fate, the story written on your head by the stars, by the gods, never by you.

Everyone is watching you, all the time, praising you when you abide by your directives, waiting until you screw up. And you will screw up.

I coasted by for longer than most people. Most stray early, dating in high school or wearing the wrong clothes, maybe piercing something they shouldn’t, drinking like hell in college. But then they shape up, put on a suit and go to their big-kid jobs in the swanky part of town, play middle management at biotech and engineering firms, or go to med school. They get married to other brown people and pop out some brown kids, buy a nice cookie-cutter house and everything is forgiven. As long as you follow your directives in the end, no matter how many lies you have to tell. But here’s the truth: I’m still lying.

When Appa and Laila Aunty finally leave, Amma washes their teacups by hand and puts them away in the cabinet that needs a fresh coat of paint.

I walk up the navy-carpeted stairs to my old bedroom where Grandmother now sleeps. It’s a long, narrow blue box with two gable windows that cut through the slanted roof. My old computer, the bookshelves that used to hold my textbooks, they’re all still there, resting heavily against the walls. Even my wrought-iron bed that’s gritty from too much dust. And if I squint through the darkness, my sister Vidya’s high school final art project—a metal sculpture painted bright orange—sits where it always has on the window ledge.

I can just make out a mound under the blankets, rising and falling with Grandmother’s breath. I watch until my breath matches hers, then sneak back downstairs to help Amma wipe down the kitchen counters before bed. The carpet soaks up my footfalls like sand.

Grandmother gets up early the next morning. By the time I come downstairs, she’s sitting on a folding chair in the living room, watching a Tamil news show about the American election. On the screen, Obama smiles and gives a speech about healthcare reform while Tamil subtitles scroll underneath his face. Grandmother hunches from age, her skin melted into many little wrinkles. Her smile reveals three missing front teeth—one more than the last time I saw her—and a mouth permanently stained red from chewing betel leaves.

She was a beauty in her day. The very few photos she had taken—one of her marriage and one of her graduation—show a smooth-skinned, round-faced girl with pearls laced through her bun. She wears a grand saree and smiles coyly into the camera. When I was little, I thought she was some kind of heiress. She laughed and set me straight. “Those are plastic beads in my hair,” she said. “And that’s a simple cotton saree.” For weeks I stared at the photo, wondering how the camera could transform a working-class girl into a princess on the page.

I bend down and she kisses me with one long sniff on each cheek. She smells like baby powder and betel juice. I sink into the couch and check my phone. Still no contact from Emily. Already my insides feel fuller, some of the thinness filled in by travel. Outside, through the sliding-glass doors to the water-stained deck, Amma’s vegetable garden lies cushioned by the overgrown backyard. In middle school I had taken the mean notes that kids slipped into my locker and buried them under that garden, in between the neat rows of cabbages and carrots.

Grandmother tells me the plot of her favorite show, a Tamil soap opera, and I try my best to follow. My Tamil isn’t the most fluent. Kris and I don’t use it at home. I can understand fairly well but I have an accent when I try to speak. My stomach can’t make the guttural sounds Tamil demands. My speech comes out sounding too flat, too delicate, too American. Tamil needs to be spoken deep and strong with big lungs.

“How are your studies?” Grandmother asks, switching to English.

I snap to attention.

Grandmother smiles. She was once a teacher at a Catholic school in Sri Lanka, fluent in English. Now she only uses it when she thinks I’m not listening or when she really wants me to understand.

“I’m not in school anymore, Ammamma.” I tell her this every time I visit, but she forgets. “I work at a company now.” I don’t. I got laid off months ago. I haven’t even told Amma yet.

She nods slowly—my American accent takes a while for her to process—and squints again at the TV. Obama has stopped speaking for a biscuit commercial with a white-skinned woman and her long, straight black hair that slips across her back like water.

“Your Amma had to go to work,” Grandmother says.

“How do you feel? Does it hurt?”

“I always hurt.” She shakes her head when she speaks, as if she’s shaking the syllables from her mouth.

“But the fall. Do you hurt from your fall?”

She looks at me, and I can see the way her eyes are fading to clear at the edges, fast losing their deep burgundy color. “Fall? I didn’t fall.”

Grandmother was the first in our family to benefit from Sri Lanka’s free higher education system. She got a degree in English and dreamed of teaching at a private school. She married one of her university professors, seventeen years her senior, who promised to let her teach after marriage. And he did, for a year, before she got pregnant. Grandmother’s first maternity leave stretched and stretched until it swallowed the rest of her life.

•••

“She said she didn’t fall,” I say to Amma when she comes home from work.

Amma’s face looks like a deflated balloon. She once looked like Vidya, my prettiest sister, thin and oval-faced. Now Amma is stiff with experience, her flesh choking her bones with too much skin. She purses her lips.

“She gets like that sometimes,” Amma says. “Forgets things. She’s getting older.”

Grandmother dozes on the couch. Amma has told her she’s only allowed to climb up the stairs to go to bed at night, and down them in the mornings. We keep our voices low. Amma unpacks her lunch bag, the small container of rice and curry that she takes to work every day, an orange or banana, and a tiny portion of Greek yogurt with sugar that she claims tastes like the yogurt they made back home in Sri Lanka. Amma eats a lot of foods because they’re like the ones she used to eat as a little girl. She even goes out of her way to find smaller, more tropical bananas at Stop & Shop.

I fill up the electric kettle and wait for the water to boil for Amma’s after-work tea. Kris and I tried to continue high tea after we got married but it never stuck. Our tea had a weird aftertaste like plastic, too sweet, too bitter, too dark, too light with too much milk. Kris isn’t a fan of the dark Ceylon tea that Amma drinks. He wants expensive tea from stores run by white hippies, stores that sell tea leaves mixed with dried herbs and fruits. I can’t stand them, the teas that are too weak and not sweet enough, teas that come with their own accessories.

I check my phone for any contact from Emily. Nothing, no texts, no calls. I put the phone away.

“Can’t you live without your phone?” Amma says.

I set out three mugs in a row and put a tea bag in each. When the kettle dings, I pour hissing water into the mugs. The tea bleeds into the water.

Amma washes out her lunch containers in the sink and sets them to dry on the towel that covers part of the blue Formica counter. The once-tangerine kitchen walls are faded from all of Grandmother’s oily cooking.

I hold each tea bag by its string and bob it up and down in the water until the liquid is dark like oil.

“Nisha’s coming by today,” Amma says.

My heart speeds up at the name. I squeeze out each tea bag with a spoon and put it into the sink.

I first met Nisha in fourth grade when we moved to the same school district—me from Virginia where my sisters and I were born, Nisha from London. She had a strong English accent back then, one she lost over the years. Back then, Amma and Appa had an explosive relationship—they were either having tickling matches and cuddling on the couch, or shouting from across the room and banging doors.

“She wants to see you,” Amma says.

“Great.” I pour milk into one of the mugs.

Amma clucks her tongue. “Heat that up first.”

“I already poured it.”

“It’s not tasty when you just pour it cold.” She takes a glass measuring cup from the cupboard and pours more milk into it. “You can have that tea. I’ll heat this up for mine and Ammamma’s.” She puts the measuring cup into the microwave, punches in two minutes, and sits down at the kitchen table.

I wait for the microwave, pour the newly-heated milk into the rest of the tea, and add two spoons of sugar to each cup. Grandmother is borderline diabetic but she’ll be damned if she’s going to drink unsweetened tea. She says the artificial sweeteners taste funny, and she always knows when we try to trick her.

Grandmother comes hobbling out of the living room to the sound of my stirring the sugar. Amma helps her climb onto one of the stools.

“You should grow out your hair, Vidya,” Grandmother says.

I set the tea mug down in front of her.

“That’s Lucky,” Amma says. “Not Vidya.”

“You made good tea, Lucky,” Grandmother says, taking small sips.

•••

Amma calls me into her room. She rummages around in her antique armoire that once belonged to Grandmother—teakwood carved with hibiscus flowers, the only inheritance Amma owns. A bookshelf next to the armoire holds Tamil romance novels on the very bottom two shelves and framed paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses on the top shelves, each painting draped with a fabric flower garland. Amma burns sandalwood incense every morning when she prays, and the smoke swirls around the room for the rest of the day, working its way into hairs and fabric, lingering like a sweet something at the backs of throats. Here’s the truth: I don’t believe in gods.

Amma holds out a silky beige shirt. “Wear this. You’ll look nice.”

The shirt shimmers through my fingers, cool to the touch. Amma waits with her hands crossed at the wrists, watching me. When I don’t make a move, she walks over to me and I remember how thick she is, how she can easily block a doorway.

She pinches my bicep between two fingers.

This again.

“Your arms need to be soft, Lucky. Your arms are too hard.”

I pull away. I worked for years to get my triceps to bulge.

She sits down next to me. “You need to think about the way you’re looking to others.” Her eyebrows make an arc across her face. She pets my hair, a shoulder-length frizz. I try hard not to flinch. “This is just too short.”

“Shyama—”

“Shyama’s hair is past her shoulders. You’re bald!”

I scratch a place where my jeans are starting to fray.

Amma pats my hand. “You’re not a child anymore, Lucky.”

I concentrate on the loose thread.

“With Nisha’s marriage,” Amma says, “the groom’s family will look at everyone around her. Even you.”

The words erase my thoughts. “Nisha’s getting married?”

“That’s what she’s coming to tell you.” Amma holds out the shirt.

I take it and pull it on over my black tank top. The fabric slides cold against my skin.

“You look like a lady,” Amma says. “Pretty.”

In the mirror, the silk flows around my chest and the pouch of my stomach, small white flowers embroidered into the fabric. I pull at the front of it so it doesn’t hug my chest.

“Stop fussing,” she says.

“I look like—”

“Like a lady. You are pretty.”

The word makes me squirm. Pretty is girls like Shyama who get married to the men their parents pick out, girls who never play sports or talk loudly.

Amma kisses the top of my head and smiles.

•••

Nisha comes by for dinner, her thin torso swimming in an Indian cotton tunic. She’s a good girl in the same ways that Shyama has always been a good girl. Nisha helps Amma heat up food, gets water for everyone, and makes cheerful conversation during dinner. Around her, I slouch even more than usual and forget to sit with my legs closed. Amma hisses at me to sit up straighter, to keep my knees together, to eat without spilling anything or making any noises.

“Sit up, Lucky,” Amma says. “I don’t know what Krishna sees in you. You’re like a boy.”

“Vidya’s getting married,” Grandmother says.

“No,” Nisha says. “I’m getting married.” She giggles and looks down at her plate. She looks like the girls in Tamil commercials—all perfect makeup and practiced allure. She has a face pinched in the center, her eyes close to a long, straight-bridged nose.

“He’s a good guy,” she says, and looks back down at her plate.

I don’t know how she can eat with her fingers when her nails are so long and painted. She’s gotten her nose pierced since the last time I saw her.

When we were young, Amma would drop me off at Nisha’s house when she went to work. We played in the green space behind her apartment building, replaying scenes from our favorite Tamil movies. Nisha loved movies starring Rajnikanth, a man hero-worshipped by most Tamils. Rajnikanth would leap out of burning buildings and beat up fifty henchmen to get the girl in the end. Outside, behind the apartment building, I leapt out of cardboard boxes and climbed trees, beat up imaginary villains and saved Nisha. She pretended to wear extravagant sarees and we sang duets like they did in the movies.

After dinner, Amma and Grandmother watch Tamil game shows in the living room. Nisha and I talk in the guest bedroom. The bed sags and tips us toward each other.

“I like your shirt,” Nisha says. She looks at me out of the corner of her carefully-painted eye.

I shift in my seat and press myself against the headboard. Cold permeates through my shirt. I can make out a trace of the jasmine perfume she always wears. Muffled TV music works its way through the walls.

“How’s the husband?” she asks.

“How’s Simmons?”

Nisha’s on her third post-college program. So far she’s quit pharmacy school and nursing school. Indecisive. Or just flighty.

“Boring. I hate living at home. It must be amazing to live on your own, just you and your husband. Must be romantic.”

I bite down on my laugh.

She slaps my arm. “It’s not funny.”

The room is too hot but my fingers are freezing.

I sometimes wonder what it would’ve been like if we’d both come out in high school, if we would’ve tried dating for real. But Nisha was afraid even then. Even when we were by ourselves, she’d never acknowledge what is was that we were doing. I’d like to think that I would’ve come out, if she’d been willing, but that’s just another lie.

Most people think the closet is a small room. They think you can touch the walls, touch the door, turn the handle, and walk free. But when you’re inside it, the closet is vast. No walls, no door, just empty darkness stretching the length of the world.

Even during our on-again, off-again high school fling, Nisha never stopped pretending to like boys. She had a rotating string of boyfriends, but none that she actually seemed to like or want.

She watches the screensaver of Amma’s computer and smiles with only her mouth.

I sweat cold patches into my shirt, but my skin feels too small.

She stares unblinkingly at her knees. “My parents arranged this. The marriage, I mean. He’s from India.”

“When’s the wedding?” The words feel foreign, unwieldy. My tongue can’t wrap around the syllables.

“The engagement ceremony is in a few weeks.” Nisha draws her knees to her chest. Her lips shimmer with a remnant of pink gloss, most of it eaten away with the meal. I try to remember what it tastes like.

“The wedding’s in December,” she says.

My tooth cuts skin. I lick away the blood on my lips.

This was bound to happen. Nisha’s parents have been desperate to find a guy since I got married to Kris. As far as anyone knows, Kris and I fell in love.

I tried to tell Nisha once, the truth about Kris and me. It was on the morning of my wedding, and I was terrified. But Nisha refused to hear it. She kissed me on the cheek to silence me, and left the room. That was four years ago, and after that I didn’t hear from her.

Nisha scoots closer and presses up against my side. I wrap my arms around her. She puts her head on my shoulder.

“Do you want this?” I ask.

She breathes in and out. I press my cheek against her head. The words sink in. Nisha is getting married. The wedding’s in December. Wedding. Married. Nisha.

“Sometimes I wish you were a boy,” Nisha says.

A wedding that wouldn’t be a lie. A true marriage with love, and children, and nothing extra on the side. It was hard to imagine.

Here’s the truth: Sometimes I wish I were a boy, too.

The three of us—Amma, Grandmother and I—prowl around the house for days like cats in a cage. We run into each other in the turns of hallways. We close doors too fast. Grandmother reminds us of the pain she’s in, but denies that she fell down the stairs. A wheezing cough buds in her throat. She tells me every day to grow out my hair.

During the day while Amma’s at work, I sit with Grandmother and watch her watch TV. I tell Amma I’m working from home. She believes me, and doesn’t ask about the graphics tablet and pen plugged into my laptop. When I was a programmer, I worked from home most of the time. Amma doesn’t know that I haven’t worked for months, that my only source of employment has been drawing commissioned digital art. The gigs pay enough to shut Kris’s face about contributing to the household, but I’m not artistic like my sister Vidya, who could manipulate pigments and shape stories with her hands, make scenes out of nothing. She’s the real artist. I can’t do what she did, but I’m good enough to bring to life the orcs and gladiators and mermaids of teenagers’ dreams.

When she watches TV, Grandmother chews betel leaves with an acrid, spicy mixture that scratches the inside of my nostrils. She’s done this since I was a kid visiting her in Sri Lanka.

She wraps the thick, veined leaves around red-soaked coconut gratings, softened areca nuts, slaked lime paste, and spices I can’t name. After meals she chews coconut gratings that smell like perfume, mixed with candy-coated fennel seeds for fresh breath. Amma doesn’t approve, always scrunches her face and turns her head, but I’ve always loved watching Grandmother’s mouth ooze with red juice that she spits into a metal cup. The liquid clangs against the metal, her aim honed.

She let me chew after my twenty-second birthday, when she first came to live with Amma from Sri Lanka. I couldn’t stomach the sharp acidic flavor that spread over my tongue. I had to run to the trashcan to spit it out. I learned instead how to fold the betel leaves, how to chop and soak the areca nuts, which mixtures went with what, what kind Grandmother liked.

Now I buy ingredients from a local Indian store and fold betel leaves for Grandmother. She tells me stories of Sri Lanka while she chews, and I listen while I draw. She tells me how she spent time in a refugee camp during the civil war, how the old woman in the tent next to hers had no arm, how the buses to Jaffna would be stopped, searched, sometimes bombed.

“We never knew what was coming.” She stuffs a leaf in her mouth. Her eyes flutter closed. She bites down slowly, savoring the way the leaf bursts and fills her mouth with juices.

I draw pictures of a woman in a ratty saree, the tail of it wrapped around her arm where it ends at the elbows. I’ll never be able to sell these, or show them to Amma, who would cluck her tongue and tell me I should draw pictures of nice things like flowers and beautiful girls. The woman’s eyes pull with emptiness. I don’t think I’ll be able to sell any prints of this on my website, but I’m tired of just drawing happy anime characters and fan couples in sexy boudoir scenes. Once when I was in high school, before I started drawing for money, back when I still thought I could be a real artist, Vidya looked at my drawings and said, “Everyone you draw has sadness in their eyes.”

“They’re smiling,” I said.

She said, “Like they’re quietly burning from the inside.”

“Your mother was a young woman,” Grandmother says. “It was a dangerous time for young women. She wants you to have a good life. She wants you to make all the right decisions.” When she talks I can see red teeth and gums.

I shade the eyes of the woman I’ve drawn, hoping I can fill the emptiness in.

•••

For as long as I’ve known her, Grandmother has had a routine of waking up before anyone else and making coffee. Now that she can’t get down the stairs on her own, she waits in bed for Amma to help her. Once they’re in the kitchen, she directs Amma on how to properly make coffee. They fight.

I avoid it all by sleeping in until after Amma goes to work. By the time I come down to microwave my coffee, Grandmother is already a few episodes deep into her Tamil soap operas. She fills me in on the latest plot developments. She asks if I’m doing well in school.

After a few days the sound of the soap operas gets to me. The dramatic music, the women’s shrill fighting, the men’s boasting. I understand enough Tamil to know the gist of what’s happening, and a few days of angelic mothers and evil, plotting daughters is all I can take.

“Why don’t we take a walk?” I open the sliding glass doors to the deck. “It’s nice out.”

Grandmother gets up from her folding chair and walks out onto the deck. I go to get her a light jacket and shoes. When I return, she has dragged her folding chair onto the rotting floorboards and is sitting there, watching Amma’s vegetable patch.

She motions me closer. I step out onto the deck with bare feet, the cold of the wood shocking me all the way up to my knees. There’s a bite to the air. I can smell the leaves starting to rot off the trees, drying and curling their tips in on themselves.

I help Grandmother pull on the jacket and wool socks with her plastic flip-flops. The breeze lifts and cools the hair on my arms.

“Why are you sitting out here?”

She holds a finger to her shrunken lips and cups her other hand around her ear.

“Do you hear that, Vidya?” she asks in Tamil.

“I’m Lucky.”

“Listen.”

I wait and listen, trying to hear anything more than the raccoons puttering around under the deck.

“Can you hear? Use your ears.”

I listen again in the cold, with the wind that smells like trees. And then—floating on the air, a frail wailing, thin and lonesome.

“It’s a baby,” Grandmother says. “You’re going to have a baby soon.” She smiles and closes her eyes, still cupping her ear to take in the cry.

I step back, away from her, away from the deck and the cool wood under my feet.

I don’t tell Amma, but every day after that when I come down for coffee, Grandmother is sitting out there on the deck, straining with her whole self to hear that sound.

•••

Most days Nisha drops by for lunch or dinner. Her visits are long and full of complaints about her impending engagement. Except for my wedding day, Nisha and I haven’t been close in a long time, but here we are, acting like best friends again.

“He’s thirty-five,” she tells me once. We’re sitting outside on the deck to escape the heat in the house from unseasonably warm weather and Amma’s hit-or-miss window air conditioners.

Nisha leans back so I can sketch her outline for a commission of a scantily clad young pixie sitting on a mushroom top in the forest.

“An engineer,” she says. She curls up her nose at the word.

I draw the curve of her back. One fluid line. The pixie I’m drawing is thin and slight like Nisha, draped only in strips of fabric that move with their own wind. In her hand she holds a birdcage from which fireflies escape in an upward swirl.

“I can’t believe you’re still drawing,” she says. “I saw your website.”

My pencil stalls in the middle of a strand of hair.

“I like what you do,” she says.

“It’s just for money.” I charge fifty dollars per hour for each commission, which is relatively high and only possible because I’ve been doing it for six years and have a faithful online following. Fifty dollars an hour and you get high-resolution digital art of anything you want and a frameable print.

I start drawing again, stretching the hair out in movement, and say, “It’s not real art.”

“I can’t draw like that,” Nisha says. She slides closer and puts a hand on my knee. Her fingers find a hole in my jeans. She rubs my skin with her fingernail. My stomach clenches tight.

The first time something happened between us, we were both in middle school. I’d found a bunch of mean letters from Nisha’s more popular friends who didn’t like us hanging out, stuffed into my locker, letters full of words like dyke and transvestite. Nisha and I burned the letters and buried the ashes in Amma’s vegetable garden. Nisha held me while I cried. Maybe she recognized her friends’ handwriting. Maybe she was moved by my crying. Whatever it was, something made her push my bangs out of my eyes and kiss me.

“Will you come to the engagement?” she asks.

I shade in the muscles of the pixie’s leg. I’ll have to darken it later. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’re going back to your husband.”

“I’ll be here for a while.”

She scrapes at the bumps of dry skin on my knee and draws a line up my thigh with her finger. “Do you feel stuck?” she asks. “I don’t want to get stuck.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know.” I know her parents. They wouldn’t force her.

I draw curls that blow back in an invisible breeze.

“I want to come home to someone,” she says. Her fingers slip back and forth across my thigh. “I want to be married.”

•••

On another visit, she brings me a picture. A dark man in a suit stands next to a bright new staircase. She tells me his name is Deepak. He looks filled up with air, his smile stiff and small as if a bigger one would deflate him.

Nisha’s face flushes purple. She only lets me look for a couple of seconds before she snatches it back and stuffs it in her purse.

“Well?” she says.

“He seems nice.”

Her carefully-arched eyebrows sink into each other.

“Do you want me to say he’s ugly?” I ask.

“He’s not ugly.”

She’s baiting me. She wants to lash out at someone. Like it’s my fault she’s engaged.

“What do you want?” I say.

Part of me wants to ask her if she’d be happier if she came out. I know she wouldn’t be. Last time I tried to come out, I ended up homeless and alone.

She slumps over. I snake my arm around her waist. Her weight is heavy on my side.

•••

Nisha wants to visit our high school as a last look at her old life. Or so she says. The school’s closed for summer renovations. I haven’t set foot in it for years, not even for my high school reunion.

We take the same path we used to take as teenagers. Nisha hooks her arm into my elbow and walks in step with me. Leaves blaze in the trees. My feet still know the way.

The building looks like I remember. Renovations haven’t started. The mural of the school mascot—a Native American chief—is still emblazoned on the side of the brick building. When we were in school, students and teachers staged a massive walkout to change the name of the teams from the Winchester Sachems. Nisha didn’t participate because her math teacher had threatened to flunk anyone who left the building.

Nisha tries the front door. Locked. We circle the building until we find an unlocked door in the back, the door that kids used to smoke outside of during lunch. The hallway provided a little niche for them to hide while they passed around their cigarettes and lighters, hand-rolled joints if they felt adventurous. I wasn’t a part of that crowd, but Nisha was. She’d come back with her eyes shining. Rebellion woke something in her. Her smile would tip on the edge of wildness. She’d smell like smoke all day, right up until she washed it out of her hair in the sink before we walked home.

She holds the door open. Her eyes have that wildness.

We walk through the front hallway, looking up by habit. Every year’s art students add self-portraits to a collage of ceiling tiles. My portrait is squashed up next to the men’s bathroom. My skin is painted too dark, my mouth too lopsided, my eyes too flat.

A janitor in overalls watches us silently as we pass. We go upstairs to the science hallway where our class set chickens loose as a senior prank. The hallway is dark and empty. Nisha stops walking. Wooden blinds slice the light that falls onto the vinyl. I can’t really see her, but there’s something about the way she stands that makes me stop moving. The hallway smells like textbooks and chalk.

“I don’t want to get married,” she says into the empty air.

I say nothing.

“I wish I had a boyfriend,” she says.

The thick air presses at my skin.

She jolts into movement and leads me to the light of the hallway, downstairs toward E wing where shop courses are held. Silence stretches out behind us. She walks me into the gym, veers left and holds open a door. I enter onto a concrete staircase.

Everything goes black when she shuts the door. I know the staircase leads to the wrestling room. Wall-to-wall padding reaching up to the ceiling. Gym teachers used it for the yoga unit.

Our steps echo against the concrete. The blackness is all encompassing, thick and impenetrable except for a hole in the ceiling that lets in a thin beam of light. I can make out the dim outlines of the room. The sweat of many wrestling practices floats out of the red mats. Nisha puts a hand in the middle of my back and pushes me into the room.

“I don’t want to get married,” she says again. She slides down the padded blue walls.

I kneel in front of her. “You don’t have to get married.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. Of course I do. But I don’t want to. Does that make sense?”

“No.” I try to smile but my face won’t move.

“I want to get married. Just not like this.”

“Like what?”

“I want to—you know, I want to date.”

She grips my arm. Tight.

“You don’t understand, Lucky.”

She turns my face toward her. Her fingers press hard against my skin. She moves closer. The mats squeak. I can almost see the pinprick of light reflected in her eyes. Veins pump in my skull.

“I’m married,” I say.

With a strength I couldn’t have imagined coming out of her thin frame, she pushes me down onto the mat. She hovers over me. I can only see her outline. She pulls off her dress in one fluid motion.

“What do you want me to do?” I say.

Her outline swallows up my vision. I can smell the dryness in my mouth. The air turns hot and sticky. Nisha is thin skin underneath me, salty everywhere with little black hairs that tickle my nose. We have to peel ourselves from the vinyl mats to move. I press my face against her jasmine scent and push my fingers into her. She trembles. Her nails clutch at me. The room fills up with her soft moans that come out like sighs. She whispers in my ear like a secret. Yes. Yes. I want this. Yes.

I was born bone heavy, my marrow dense like stone, calcium fibers spun tight and thick. People say that I shuffle when I walk but I know I danced beautifully. The pads of my feet are thick from carrying around the heaviness, and they let me slap the ground hard to the rhythm of the drums. I learned early on that I could thrive on the pressure in my heels. Dancing saved me.

Every summer in high school, Nisha and I danced Bharatanatyam together. We trained intensely for performances all around Boston—Indian cultural festivals, multicultural school nights, Sri Lankan community events. Most of the girls who danced with us did it because their parents made them. Their bodies refused to bend, their gestures awkward, stiff, frequently offbeat. Nisha and I danced because we wanted to. We isolated muscle groups and trained each part of ourselves to move independently. The head separate from the neck. The chest separate from the stomach. The hips separate from the torso. I was good, but Nisha was better.

Our performances used to be the only time I wore makeup and noticeable jewelry. Now when I put on makeup, I remember Nisha bending close to my face, my chin in her hands, lining my eyes with kohl, and how, when I blinked too much, she would kiss my eyebrow to distract me from the scratching of the pencil on skin.

•••

Nisha’s parents throw a party before her engagement ceremony. I spend an hour in front of the mirror, lining and relining my eyes, trying to get the color to flick up at the outer corners like Nisha always did.

Amma insists that I wear a saree, but not the navy one that I pick out.

“It’s too dark, Lucky. It’s not a funeral. Wear your pink one.”

“Why can’t you go instead?” I say.

Amma clucks her tongue. “Nisha asked you to come. Be a good friend. Sometimes I don’t know what’s happening to you.”

Kris arrives at Amma’s house two hours before the party. Amma fusses over him, over his long hair and thin frame. Oh, look at the poor husband, starving to death because his wife isn’t at home to cook.

We get dressed in the guest bedroom and fight over the one small mirror on the dresser.

“What do you think?” Kris spins around. His dark Wranglers cling to his legs. He holds up a lime-green plaid tie in front of his striped shirt. “Too much?”

“Too much.”

He throws the tie onto the bed and watches me get dressed. My saree glitters like shards of glass in the sun, six yards of transparent pink shot through with stones. Wrap around once and tuck. Twice around, and over the shoulder. Pleat the extra and tuck. Kris adjusts my pleats so that they ripple evenly at my feet.

On a Bharatanatyam costume, the pleats attach to the legs so that they sway with each movement, fan out and jump with the drums. When I wasn’t dancing with Nisha, I watched the movement of her pleats, the starched symmetry of them, shadows flowing to the staccato beat.

I throw the extra pink material over my shoulder.

“No, no, don’t do that.” Kris arranges my saree so that my blouse is exposed.

I pull the blouse up. He pulls it back down.

“Kris!”

“I have a sexy wife. Let them see that.” He safety-pins my saree and blouse together under my shoulder blade.

“No touching at the party,” I say. I put on my thali, with its thick gold chain and two perfect circular coins flanking a Ganesh pendant. The mark of a married woman is important. Amma wouldn’t let me leave the house without it. I tie a knot with the extra saree material inside my petticoat, and tuck my small flask of bourbon inside the waistband. A couple of sips at every bathroom break and I can get through this.

•••

Kris’s hand is clamped to my waist when we step up to the doorway of Nisha’s parents’ house. He likes to cause a stir when we walk in. Tamil couples don’t often touch in public. This is Kris’s way of rebelling—making them uncomfortable but staying safe, modern, and normal with a wife and a job and a house. I clench my teeth and let him hold my waist. I have to pick my battles.

The house is expansive and still crowded, shiny and new after Nisha’s family remodeled it. Cherrywood floor in dizzying zig-zags, finished basement, new windows, new staircase, granite mantle, beige walls. People fill every nook, the women in sarees and jewelry that jingles when they walk, the men in sweater-vests and slacks, the kids in itchy taffeta dresses and miniature suits.

Kris drags me over to the living room where the men sit around a coffee table weighed down with Johnnie Walker bottles. They’re going to stare at me. I know this, and Kris knows this, but of course he likes showing me off to the men, who find my interest in politics and business amusing. Amma’s not here to tell me to go to the women. Might as well get in an argument about climate change.

The living room suffocates with the extra chairs they’ve squeezed in. White, wood-paneled walls bow inward toward the ceiling. The giant flat screen plays MSNBC’s coverage of the Obama and Romney campaigns.

Appa’s face crumples a little when he sees me. He’d rather I go to the women, too.

I sit next to Kris and arrange my saree so that my midriff doesn’t show. We watch Rachel Maddow rip apart Romney’s platform of trickle-down economics. Appa pours a glass of scotch for Kris and slides it to him along with a plate of hot wings. My flask lies against my belly.

Nisha sweeps into the room in the middle of low, rumbly laughter from the men. She shimmers in a lace net saree and has done up her hair in a 1960s Bollywood pouf.

“You didn’t even say hi,” she says to me. Her bangled hand clings to the arched doorway between the living room and the foyer. She turns and floats out of the room toward the kitchen.

I get up and follow her. The kitchen is the last place I want to be, but maybe if I put up with it, we can escape to the basement after a while. The women are all gathered around the giant kitchen island, leaning on the gleaming black granite countertops and sitting in fancy upholstered dining chairs.

“ . . . and Shyama’s enrolling her son in a gifted preschool next year,” Laila Aunty is saying. She waves her arms around wildly like a drowning monkey. “He’s so smart, you know. Just like his parents.”

I try to hide behind Nisha but Laila Aunty sees me.

“Lucky, dear!” She walks out from the mass of women in the kitchen and comes toward me with her arms out wide.

I step back but she catches me. She sniffs kisses on each of my cheeks.

“You’re looking so pretty,” she says to the crowd. The women in the kitchen look me and Nisha up and down. “Look at you two. A pretty pair. Just like when you used to dance.”

I know that on their way home, these women will talk about each other to their drunk husbands. But I can’t beat my programming. In front of a crowd of brown faces, I sing and dance like a trained fucking seal.

Nisha pulls up two chairs next to each other. She sits with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap. I try not to slouch or sit with my knees apart. The saree helps.

Bharatanatyam usually molds those who dance it. It leaves its mark on the dancers’ bodies. They develop wrist flips and flamboyant gestures, a hip swing as they walk, a way of treading that swings their arms back and forth against their momentum. But I didn’t get those marks. My muscles refused to absorb the fluid motions, the coquettish habit of making eyes bigger, the coy downward glance that Nisha did so well. Amma was always suspicious at the immutability of my body.

Laila Aunty goes on and on about how my sister Shyama’s son is god’s gift to earth.

“We’re looking at grooming him for Exeter,” she says.

The “we” is nothing more than Laila Aunty’s wishful thinking. I manage to turn my snort into a cough. My sister Shyama isn’t exactly fond of Laila Aunty. We all chose sides.

“Shyama’s going to visit soon,” Laila Aunty says. “So busy you know, with the next one on the way.”

“My son just got into medical school,” someone else says. “Northwestern. Best medical school, you know.”

Her son and I went to the same middle school, and as I remember, he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. But that doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter which med school is actually highest ranked. The one her son goes to is the best. No discussion.

“I’m just glad we got a good marriage match,” Nisha’s mother says. She’s a thin, frail woman who looks a lot like Nisha. She wears makeup and high heels, which most of the other brown women her age don’t do.

“Are you excited?” someone asks Nisha.

Nisha does that shy downward glance thing. “A little.”

“The poor girl is probably scared,” someone else says. “Before my wedding, I thought I’d never be happy again.”

“It’s something quite unlike anything else, getting married. You never think you can love someone you don’t even know but then you wake up one day and you do.”

“Right, Lucky?”

The women laugh.

“You know,” one of them says, “my husband didn’t even know how to boil water when we first got married.”

“We already trained our men.”

“Us old women can only tell you so much about keeping a man happy these days, Nisha. I hope you’re getting tips from Lucky.”

None of them had advice for me when I got married. Not that I would’ve listened. It was Amma who gave me the talk. As she pleated my wedding saree before the ceremony, her hands stilled.

“You know how it works?” she said. “You know what happens the first time?”

I froze, not knowing the answer she wanted.

“I’ll bleed,” I said.

Her hand moved again, deftly folding the pleats, bangles clanging together as she worked. She pinned the pleats together and tucked them into my underskirt.

“Kris is a good boy. You got lucky.”

“Amma.” My head was spinning out of control. “I’m scared.”

She looked at me, her eyes focusing on mine for a second before they adjusted and she was looking through me again. “You’re doing the right thing,” she said. “You’re a normal girl. You’re going to have a normal life.”

In the kitchen with the gaggle of women, Nisha smiles and laughs at the appropriate times. I think about the flask resting safely inside the waistband of my saree. When the women start talking about food and swapping recipes, Nisha stands up and gives me the signal to go.

“We’re going to check on the kids,” she says.

“When are you going to have kids, Lucky?”

I trip over the front of my saree pleats. Nisha grabs my arm to steady me.

“I don’t know if we’re ready, Aunty,” I say. I try to imagine Kris with a kid, holding it at arm’s length because he wouldn’t know what else to do with it.

“No one’s ever ready. You just do it.”

I follow Nisha downstairs. The basement smells like new paint. Children cluster around a projector screen in the open space of the den, the older ones playing video games while the younger ones watch with wide-open mouths. Teenagers lounge on the sectionals with their phones out.

“You haven’t seen the new basement, have you,” Nisha says.

She pulls me away from the kids, down the hallway to the bedrooms. She pushes me into one of the rooms and closes the door. The metallic lock clicks.

“Wait,” I say. I back away.

She follows me, pinning me against the cold wall of the room. Night spills from the slit-like window above me. She slips her icy fingers underneath my saree. The moon dips everything in silver. She traces along my waist. My spine arches against her touch.

“Nisha, stop.”

I catch her hand and pull it away from my skin. The place where she touched me stays cold. She looks beautiful with all the makeup. Flawless, like a glass bead.

Her shimmering lips frown. “What’s the problem?”

“This is your engagement party.”

“I’m not engaged yet.” She reaches out toward me again.

I try to slip her fingers in between mine. She snatches her hand away. Her eyebrows make one thin line across her face, dividing her skin in two. She puffs out her chest, turns, and opens the door, leaving me to watch the swish of her saree as she walks away.

I remember the flask. The metal is warm from my skin. I drink it all in one go. The bourbon scorches its way down my throat and into my limbs. I feel raw.

I wait until my heart cools, then go out to the den where the kids are playing. The teenagers get quiet when I sit on the couch. I’m too much of an adult. Married. Can’t be trusted with the gossip of who-likes-whom and who-took-whom-on-a-secret-date. I don’t feel like facing the women and their bullshit questions so I stay down here. I’m about to ask to play a round of Mario Kart when Laila Aunty comes downstairs to find me.

I take out my phone so I have something to hold onto.

“You should be upstairs,” she says. This is one of those rare times she sounds like Amma, and I can believe she and Amma used to be best friends.

I make a show of turning off my phone. “Just checking work email, Aunty.”

“Come, come.” Her thick gold bangles clang with the motion when she beckons me closer. She puts a hand under my elbow and guides me to the stairs.

Back before she married Appa, she was the one who defended me against Amma’s tantrums. “She’s an active child,” she’d say. “I used to climb trees all the time too. Don’t worry.” She talked Amma down from punishing me for scraping up my knees, for ripping holes in my jeans, for holding hands with a boy after school. In third grade I asked for Barbie dolls for my birthday because I’d played with a friend’s and I liked dressing them, with their poreless faces and plastic tan breasts. Instead, Laila Aunty got me a Lego set and some books, and told me that successful women need more than beauty. She was my favorite of all of our family friends. But that was before the divorce, before I took sides.

“You and your husband are getting along, no?” she says.

“Yes, yes, of course.”

She stops with one foot on the stairs.

“We’re fine,” I say.

“Fighting is a part of married life, Lucky.”

Amma and Appa fought all the time when I was young.

She sighs. “You can’t let it break you.”

•••

Upstairs, Kris is drunk. He slurs his Tamil words and gives me a vacant look when I walk into the living room. He raises his glass. I sit next to him on the couch, the bourbon still tingling inside me.

The men are in a heated debate about the election, some of them arguing that Romney’s tax plans would benefit them because they’re in a higher tax bracket, even though we all know everyone here will vote for Obama.

“You need whiskey to join this conversation, Lucky,” one of the men says.

They all laugh, because the idea of a woman drinking whiskey is just too absurd.

Kris chuckles to himself and drains the last sip from his glass. He shakes a piece of yellow-stained ice into his mouth. His arm slithers around my waist.

I slap his hand away. He tries again. I think about Nisha’s cold fingers under my saree. I take Kris’s hand off my waist and put it back on his knee. I twist his fingers just a little too hard. Appa gives me a look, but none of the other men notice our fight.

Kris stares at his whiskey glass like he’s expecting it to refill itself. He doesn’t talk to me the rest of the night, not until we’re in the car and driving back to Amma’s house. He insists that he be seen driving away from the party, like all the other drunk brown men who don’t trust their wives with cars. Once we’re a few blocks away, he pulls over into a gas station and we switch seats in the chilly night air.

“Are you going to ignore me all night?” I say. I wonder if he’s still mad that I twisted his fingers.

He rubs his hands together and blows into them. Steam curls up from his mouth, fading into the darkness of the car.

“You know I hate it when you get all touchy,” I say.

“I’m supposed to touch you. You’re my wife.”

I keep my eyes on the road, anger filling me up in the space the bourbon left behind. “I’m not your fucking wife. I’m not your puppet you can use to make a point.”

Kris gets quiet, and when he speaks again I have to strain to hear him over the hum of the car. “We’re all puppets. That’s all we are.”

“Stop it, Kris.”

“I’m your puppet, too.”

“Stop it.”

“Because of me,” he says, his voice rising a fraction, “you can seem like the perfect little brown wife.”

I check the rearview mirror. No one behind us. I slam the brakes, hurtling Kris forward into his seatbelt. I drive on.

“Jesus, look at us,” he says. A passing Dunkin’ Donuts sign bathes him in its orange glow. “Let’s get coffee.”

I pull into the drive-thru. We get our coffees with milk and sugar and drink them in the car. I wait for a long expanse of silence, revving myself up to say it. Finally I say into the cold of the car, “I fucked Nisha. A couple of weeks ago.”

Kris turns and looks at me. His eyebrows shoot up. He takes another sip of coffee and fights to keep a smile off his face.

“It’s not funny,” I say.

He slips a cigarette out of his pocket. He likes to pretend he smokes, but no matter how many he might tuck away, he isn’t addicted. He wants to be. So he keeps on doing it, hoping that one day he’ll get that urge that smokers talk about.

“Justin’s been staying with me while you’ve been gone,” he says. Justin is his on-again, off-again boyfriend of two years. “He’s been talking about moving to California. He wants me to go with him.”

“You can’t.” It’s silly to say. I’m not his wife.

He spits out sweet, clove-flavored smoke as he speaks. “I won’t. I told him no.”

•••

That night, Amma insists on sleeping in the guest bedroom so that Kris and I can have her bed. When Kris leaves the next morning, Amma says, “You two are fighting.” She’s cooking, talking to the giant nonstick wok that she loves to use.

“He had to go into the office,” I say. That was his excuse. I think he just wanted to see Justin before California becomes a reality.

I’m cutting up onions. Amma doesn’t trust me with the actual cooking. When I was in high school she didn’t even trust me to use a knife without slipping and cutting off my finger, so instead I had to rinse all the vegetables and pull skin off the chicken.

Amma comes up and peers over my shoulder. “Cut them small.”

“I am cutting them small.”

She grabs the knife from me and butts me out of the way with her hip. “Small,” she says. She cuts a few strips, each impossibly thin and transparent as glass.

“That’ll take forever.”

“It’ll taste better.”

I try to cut the onions as thin as she had, but my knife slides down the exposed edge of the onion without stripping it.

“We’re not fighting,” I say.

“Get the leeks out.”

I grab the leeks from the fridge and wash them.

“Do you know how to cut leeks?”

“Why wouldn’t I know?”

I don’t actually. But I’m not going to tell her that. She’d go on for hours about how she doesn’t know how Kris can put up with a wife who doesn’t even know how to cut leeks.

“We’re not fighting,” I say.

“Cut the leeks small, too.”

I cut the leeks smaller, thinner, sliding the knife down again and again, cutting off pieces as thin as string, watching the morning light glint off the metal edge. One slip, and the leeks could be red.

After the engagement party, Nisha doesn’t talk to me. But just a week later she comes by the house while Amma’s at work.

“I didn’t think you’d answer your phone,” she says when I open the door.

“I wouldn’t have.”

She pushes past me and into the house. She keeps her blue peacoat on and her hands in her pockets. “Let’s go somewhere,” she says.

I point to Grandmother, sitting outside on the deck.

“I can’t leave her here,” I say.

Nisha looks around the entryway. “Do you need me to pose for something?” She peers around the wall at my laptop and the reference photos scattered all over the couch. My half-colored commission of a pixie looks back at her. Only the pixie’s skin is colored so far—a dark almond that clashes sharply with the still-white background. The young man who ordered the drawing didn’t specify a skin color, but I know he meant for her to be pale. It’s my policy to default brown skin when the commissioner doesn’t specify.

“The line art’s done,” I say. Three more commissions have come in since I last saw Nisha, but all those are custom portraits—easy, painless, fast. The pixie is supposed to look like an oil painting, and the budget, I was promised, is unlimited. “Don’t you have class?”

She scrunches up her nose. “This weekend then. Let’s go out.” She steps closer.

“I don’t think—”

She puts a finger on the edge of my clavicle and traces it slowly. “Come on, Lucky. You’re still my best friend.”

•••

Amma isn’t keen on the idea.

“Where are you going to go?” she asks. She squints at the computer and enters credit card receipts into a spreadsheet.

“I don’t know.”

“You have to be careful. Not everywhere is safe.”

“Amma—”

“Why don’t you ask Nisha to come here for dinner?”

“She wants to go out.”

Amma’s lips press into a thin line. “When you’re home you should spend time with your family.”

I haven’t left the house for weeks. I want to punch something. Twenty-seven years old and married. I own a house and car, and I have to ask my mother permission to leave her home.

Amma doesn’t say anything. She flattens out a receipt between her fingers and enters the total into the computer. I wait a little longer for her to say something, and when she doesn’t, I take that as permission.

•••

Nisha drives me to Jamaica Plain, to a house where some of her friends from Wellesley—her first college—live. She’s tense and quiet, her shoulders pulled back, her hands in the ten and two position, her eyes on the road. I keep quiet. She doesn’t like the closeness of the other cars, the traffic, the road rage. Makes her nervous. I watch the river. One flick of the wheel.

We pull up to a faded gray triple-decker with a porch so large it overwhelms the front. Three mismatched old parlor chairs overlook the sharp incline of a one-way street. Other houses in the neighborhood still have flowers in their lawns and tough hedges that hide cracked foundations, but this house is unadorned except for the mailbox, which is painted with blue and yellow squares.

Nisha checks her makeup in the rear view mirror and coats her lips with a sparkly pink gloss. When she smiles at me, her lips catch the sun and glisten like water. The wind plucks leaves from the trees and scatters them over the dappled sky. I follow her up the steep wooden stairs to the deck. She knocks. No answer. She yells through the blue curtains that hang limp in the half-open windows. The door opens and a solidly-built white woman with a crew cut sweeps Nisha up into a hug.

“Jesse,” the woman greets me. She extends a hand and I shake it. “Welcome to the Wellesley rugby house.” She moves aside and points the way.

The house is even older from the inside. Exposed beams crisscross the ceiling around a rainbow American flag. Deep cracks spread over dark blue walls like varicose veins. An open hallway leads to two cherrywood doors and a yellow-tiled kitchen. There’s a musty smell I can’t place, like weeks-old sweat. Three women around my age cluster on low couches around a TV. In a corner underneath a bookcase that holds artwork, two people snooze on a single-person bed, covered in a rainbow tie-dyed quilt.

All the women are dressed in polos, black biking shorts, and gym shorts with the same blue and yellow checkerboard pattern as the mailbox outside. Some have cleats hung over their shoulders.

Someone stirs on the bed and says, “We have new people.” A dark head with kinky black hair pokes out of the sheets and looks at me.

The women introduce themselves one by one and shake hands with me, their grips strong like mine. How the hell is Nisha friends with these women?

The curly-haired black woman wiggles out of the bed and introduces herself as Tasha.

“We’re playing in the park today,” she says. “Are you playing?”

“Not me,” Nisha says.

Tasha turns to me. “How about you, handsome? Fancy some rugby?”

Handsome. No one’s ever used that word to describe me before.

“I don’t play rugby,” I say.

Everyone gathers their things and tromps out to a park down the hill. The women spread out on the field in between the fenced-in playground equipment and the brick subway station, scouring the grass, picking up sticks and cigarette butts. They change into their cleats and mark the four corners of a rectangle with their shoes.

I sit on a cold wire bench with Nisha and Tasha, whose cleats still dangle on her shoulder and smell like a hundred feet.

The women jog around the rectangle they’ve marked. One pulls out a ball from a backpack—big and oblong like a swollen football. They form a circle with their backs facing the center and pass the ball to each other. Step to the side and pass. Step and pass. Step, pass.

“Why don’t you play?” Tasha asks me. “Do you want to?” She has sharp eyes and a long, hooked nose like a songbird. She unzips the backpack at her feet, pulls out another rugby ball, and walks over to the corner of the field. She has a slight limp.

I follow. She looks at Nisha, but Nisha’s intently watching the other women as they lift each other up by their shorts.

Tasha teaches me how to throw the ball by stepping to the side. We pass the ball back and forth. “You’re pretty good,” she says. She waves her arms at the women on the field. “Yo! Lucky here should play with you.”

“I don’t know the rules.” I hope I’m not blushing. I never was a sports kid. I may have been a good dancer, but team sports made me uncoordinated and awkward.

“The best way to learn rugby is by playing. Our feet look about the same size.” She holds out her cleats.

Jesse takes me aside and narrates the rules to me while the others play. “This is a scrimmage,” she says. “Or scrum.”

Two women face each other and hook arms over shoulders. Someone calls “go” and they push against each other, the ball on the ground beneath them.

“A scrum restarts play. Usually you’ll have all the forwards stacked against each other. In rugby sevens, you have three against three. In rugby league laws, you get six on six. Rugby union, eight on eight.”

One of the women pushes the other backward. The ball emerges.

“Want to try?” Jesse doesn’t wait for me to answer. She holds up an arm and the others stop playing. We walk out onto the field.

Jesse faces me, tips forward, hooks her arm around me, and presses the top of her head on my shoulder. I imitate her, get a lung-full of sweat smell. We’re locked. I feel steady in this position, solid. Someone puts the ball underneath us.

“Now push with your legs,” she says.

Before I’m ready, she pushes forward. My legs skid back. I push.

“Keep pushing.”

I’m out of shape, and no match for her. She’s twice my size, and probably four times my muscle density. She pushes me backward until someone picks up the ball from behind her.

“Not bad,” Jesse says. “With some practice you could play for real.”

“I couldn’t push you back.”

“Yeah, but I’m a beast. Against someone smaller you’ll be fine.”

We play three on three. Tasha shouts the rules to me while I run from one side of the field to the other and try to keep track of who’s on my team. I don’t fumble the ball. Sometimes it’s cradled against my side. I run down the field and it’s like I haven’t breathed properly for ages. My legs run despite the ache in my muscles. Whenever someone gets close to me I can smell the sweat caked into her uniform, old and stale. I can feel the blood in my skin, the tendons pushing and pulling at my limbs. The others tackle each other, crashing to the ground all limbs and skin. I want to be part of the mess, wonderful chaos and movement, a purpose I haven’t felt in my muscles for much too long. I haven’t danced in ages and this is like scratching an itch deep under the skin. I remember what it’s like to move—like something ballooning inside of me, like I’m going to expand and expand and become the air.

We play until we can’t see each other’s faces in the darkening night. Goosebumps coat my legs and the back of my neck. I shiver even in my jeans and long-sleeved shirt. On the walk home, Tasha pats me on the back and says, “You should play more with us.”

Nisha saunters past Jesse, laughing and tossing her hair.

“I see,” Tasha says, watching me. “You and Nisha.”

I nod and hope it looks nonchalant. I watch Nisha out of the corner of my eye.

Tasha drapes an arm over my shoulder. “You’re welcome at the rugby house anytime you feel like coming.”

We buy beer from a liquor store with large windows and wooden racks of wine bottles. “It’s not rugby without a social,” Jesse says. When I try to give her money she waves it away. “You played a damn good game.”

At the house we pass around a laptop and pick music—mostly obscure girl-with-guitar melodies that collapse over syncopated strumming. I want something with stronger, more regular bass, something I can keep inside my bones. Every once in a while someone picks hip-hop or punk and I can feel it like a heartbeat inside of me.

Nisha sits back against the wall and drinks a wine cooler. I still can’t believe that she knows these women. I scoot closer. She pulls me by the collar and kisses me. The women hoot and raise their drinks. Nisha pushes me away and laughs, like it’s all a joke.

Tasha clinks her beer bottle and the music turns off. Jesse stands up and sings, one hand on her heart and the other raised in the air toward the ceiling and the rainbow American flag. “Oh, my lover’s a lawyer, a lawyer, a lawyer, a mighty fine lawyer is she-ee!” The women laugh and join in. Their voices rise in a drunken heap. “All day long she fucks you, she fucks you, she fucks you”—Jesse points at each of us in turn—“and when she gets home she fucks me.”

They all stand up and make a line behind Jesse. Tasha motions for me to join them but Nisha’s holding my hand and I don’t ever want to move. The women march to the beat and sing. “You’ve got to live a little bit, love a little bit, follow the band. Follow the band with your tits in your hand—wah wah!”

And Nisha watches all this like she’s seen it before. Nisha, who at Sri Lankan parties says all the right things and moves like a Bollywood princess, who has perfected the coy downward glance of a proper brown woman. She lets me kiss her.

Once or twice during the night, the rugby girls get into brawls, holding each other in headlocks or wrestling on the floor. Tasha keeps inviting me to join in, and just when I’m starting to relax enough to try, Nisha stands up to leave.

“My parents texted,” she says. “They’re wondering where I am.”

•••

Forty minutes later, she pulls up to the end of Emerson Drive where the road turns into a makeshift driveway. Was this a date? She waits for me to get out.

I feel like I should say something. “Thanks for taking me. I had fun. Are you sure you can’t come in?” I touch her wrist on the steering wheel. She tenses and I draw away. “Sorry,” I say.

“I can’t.” She looks at the house and its lit upstairs windows.

I start to get out.

“Wait.” She gives me a peck on the mouth.

I watch her drive off. The moon waxes full and eerie. If I were someone else, in some other story, I’d take a midnight walk with my wife.

Amma’s waiting up for me. I hope she won’t notice the beer on my breath, or the lip gloss from Nisha’s kiss. I go straight to bed, ignoring Amma at the kitchen table reading her favorite swami’s scripture.

Appa wants me over for dinner. I change three times before Amma finally gives my outfit a nod. She pulls my hair into a tiny, frizzy ponytail and makes me wear jewelry.

“A woman should never go bare,” she says. “A woman should always wear gold.”

Grandmother watches Tamil soap operas from her folding chair in the living room. Every once in a while she glances at the deck.

I drink tea in the kitchen and try to prepare myself for the lemon disinfectant and vinyl sofa covers of Laila Aunty’s house.

“Be good,” Amma says.

Grandmother opens the sliding glass doors. A cold breeze sucks itself into the vacuum of the house.

“Close the door,” Amma says.

Grandmother hobbles to the kitchen and picks up her tea from the counter. Amma goes to close the door.

“We need to prepare for the baby,” Grandmother says. She coughs and smiles.

Amma freezes.

“The baby is coming soon.”

“What baby?” Amma asks.

“Vidya’s baby.”

Amma’s flesh tenses. Her face goes rigid like it does whenever someone mentions Vidya. She shuts the sliding glass doors with a snap.

Grandmother points at me. “Vidya is having a baby.”

Amma walks back to the kitchen and picks up her chipped mug of tea. “That’s Lucky.” Her voice rises on my name. “What’s this about a baby?”

I take a big gulp of too-hot tea.

“You’re having a baby?”

“Yes, yes,” Grandmother says.

“No,” I say.

“You should be thinking about it,” Amma says.

“About what?”

“Having a baby.”

If this is the conversation we’re going to have, I’d rather be at Laila Aunty’s lemon-disinfectant house. I push my way to the foyer and throw on my jacket.

“I’m serious, Lucky.”

I kneel and tie my shoes.

“You need to throw those away.” Amma points to the faded blue high tops on my feet.

I make a double knot in my shoelaces.

“Kris is a good-looking man,” she says. “You need to give him a baby soon.”

I get up and head for the door without looking at her. I make sure to slam it just a little harder than I need to.

•••

Laila Aunty and Appa live in a renovated yellow colonial that dwarfs Amma’s house, though it’s considered small for their neighborhood. The house is set back from the road, obscured by old trees that make you feel like you’re completely alone inside.

Laila Aunty opens the door half-dressed in a silk saree and plants a sticky kiss on my cheek.

“Come, come.” She walks toward the living room where Appa is reading the Boston Globe from his favorite chair. “We’re going to temple, dear,” she says. “I’m just getting ready.”

“I didn’t bring any clothes for temple.”

“I got you something from that new store in New Jersey. You can wear that.” She disappears down the hallway.

I sit on the hard, powder-green sofa. The cleanliness of the house is unnerving. Thick brown draperies block out the light, fleurs-de-lis dot the thick white carpet, wooden sculptures of dancing women crowd every flat surface—I feel like there’s not enough oxygen in the room. Amma is minimalist by comparison. Dealing only in necessities is a habit she cultivated from her poor childhood.

My mother’s family came here on a lottery visa, back when the U.S. had compassion for Sri Lankan refugees. Her name came out of a hat, so she survived the war. Her two older brothers were detained at the airport in Sri Lanka, suspected of being terrorists, so it was a little family of three that landed at JFK airport, via Dubai, via Hong Kong.

My father came here on a graduate student visa. Immigration policies re-create heightened natural selection. The smartest and those with the most resources make it out, along with a handful of those who just get lucky. Amma’s luck ran out, but Appa’s resources stayed intact.

Laila Aunty comes back with a bag that smells of sandalwood, and dumps the contents next to me on the couch: a baby-pink mirrored tunic with pale-yellow drawstring pants, a necklace, and matching pink and yellow bangles. Of course she’d buy me such dainty colors. Everyone does.

I dress in their guest bedroom. The new churidar scratches against my ribcage. Laila Aunty irons her saree into knifelike pleats, then combs and pulls my hair into something resembling a bun, held together with a thousand bobby pins because it isn’t long enough.

The Sri Lakshmi temple is a half hour away. When I was little I always called it my temple because the main deity is my namesake. I am named after a Hindu goddess sometimes pictured massaging her husband’s shins as he sleeps. Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and beauty, but I wasn’t born into either one. Every time Lakshmi’s husband Vishnu takes a human form, she does too. But sometimes Vishnu incarnates as a woman, usually in order to seduce men. And then what does Lakshmi do? Sit up in heaven and try not to watch? Or maybe she does, maybe she finds herself drawn to his new soft curves. Maybe she wants to unwrap him and fit her hand into the fold of his waist.

Appa drives while Laila Aunty fusses with her saree. Somewhere near the exit for Ashland, she whips around in her seat. “You don’t have a pottu,” she says. “We can’t go to temple with you looking like that.” She digs in her purse and pulls out red lipstick. She spins a dot in between my eyebrows and turns back around.

Set sharply off the road, the stark white temple overlooks suburban sprawl from atop a hill. It grows from the tops of trees as we turn onto a side street. White plaster sculptures pose inside the walls. In Sri Lanka and India, temples are painted bright and clashing colors, but this one is frozen in perpetual construction, its three white spires just recently topped with gold cones that jut into the sky.

Appa circles the parking lot twice before he pulls his BMW into an empty spot at the bottom of the hill. It’s Saturday, meaning everyone is here. Laila Aunty thrives on the crowded energy. I’d rather avoid it. She steps out of the car with her back straight and her stomach sucked in. She pulls up the pleats of her saree so that the drape of cotton covers her chest.

We walk slowly up the hill to the temple. Laila Aunty struggles behind us because of her net-ball-player knee problems from college. Or because she is now as soft and wifelike as Amma wants me to be. We wait for her under the carport where people park new cars to be blessed. The asphalt underneath is littered with smashed limes that were placed under car tires to be run over for luck. Appa holds the door open and I can tell his back has give to it now, not as straight as I remember it.

I know my way around this temple by heart, know that there are two cement steps up to the landing before the doors where everyone takes off their shoes, the white marble antechamber where people hang coats in messy rows, the floor sink with the motion detector faucet where the truly religious wash their hands and feet before stepping inside the main temple. The interior unfolds into an airy main chamber with cool marble floors. Small shrines line the walls, each under their own plaster canopy. The idols wear miniature silk clothes and regular-sized jewelry that hangs down to their knees. Every once in a while a worshipper rings the bell hanging by the main shrine. The sound echoes on the marble and makes babies cry. Fathers pick up their children so they can ring the bell. No one pays me any mind.

The main shrine stands tall and center, completely enclosed. Lakshmi’s chamber is probably around the size of Laila Aunty’s walk-in closet, separated from the worshippers by two sets of thick wooden doors. Only priests are allowed inside.

I watch the women as they circle around the shrines. Women aren’t allowed to be priests, but they seem more saintly than the men inside the white walls of the temple, wrapped up like many beautiful presents—the exposed expanses of their backs, the flesh that ripples over their shoulders, the way their spines curve and dip into their lower backs. In ancient India, before the British outlawed the practice, temples employed and housed dancers. Families pledged their daughters to the temple to be given an education in the arts after a marriage ceremony where a god statue stood in for the groom. These devdasis enjoyed the privileges of a married woman in society but answered to no man. They weren’t expected to remain chaste or give up their careers to become housewives.

Children chase each other around, silent at their parents’ scolding looks, like little muted movies. Infants sleep in carriers near the support columns at the corners of the temple. The air fills with spicy sweet incense that my white friends in high school told me smelled like weed—they had huddled around the doorway of my parents’ prayer room, sniffing the air with round eyes and smiles at the corners of their mouths. Many of them asked me to take them to temple. I never did.

I follow Appa around the shrines. We make a faster route than Laila Aunty, who lumbers from shrine to shrine with her palms clasped together, her lips moving furiously. She’s a real believer. We circle around each shrine three times, stop to touch the carvings at each cardinal direction, count nine careful circles around the shrine of the planet gods. I stop in front of each shrine to pray with my palms together, but not for so long I get bored. The dark idols watch me with vacant eyes. I don’t know what to pray for.

The jingle of bells signals the beginning of pooja. Everyone gets into two lines at the open doors of the main shrine. The priest is naked and hairy down to his waist. A thin white thread loops around one shoulder and travels diagonally down his chest. He wears a dhoti wrapped around his legs to make shorts. Laila Aunty holds out fruit and flowers on a tin platter. The priest asks her for names and horoscope signs so that he can pray for us. He takes the flowers and fruits inside the main chamber of the shrine. His Sanskrit chants fill the temple. He throws flowers one by one onto the dark stone idol of Lakshmi.

I line up behind Appa. Laila Aunty joins the other line. The priest brings out a thick silver tray with little copper containers and a lit oil lamp. He walks down one line, dipping into each container for each person. I hold out my palms, my right on top of my left. The priest puts a pinch of veebuthi in the center of my palm. I dip my finger in and rub a line across my forehead. The rest settles gritty into the crevices of my palms. The priest spoons clear liquid into my palm. I drink it, the sweet water mixed with the remnants of veebuthi, and wipe the rest onto my head. I hold my hands over the flame of the oil lamp and press the warmth into my brow. The priest drops two almonds and three raisins into my palm. He moves on to the next person in line, down one side of the aisle and up the other.

Appa and I escape down the staircase to the basement where the food is sold while Laila Aunty finishes. He buys two boxes of lemon rice and one box of yogurt rice with lime pickle. My favorite. We find seats on cold metal folding chairs set up haphazardly in the open room.

“Laila Aunty will be mad,” I say. “We prayed too fast.” I take a bite of my yogurt rice and the ratio of pickle to rice is perfect. The yogurt spreads thick in my mouth, the lime pickle biting and sour.

Appa’s plastic fork hangs limp. “Nisha wants to see you. She’s having trouble with the marriage idea.”

I can feel the sweat in my armpits, soaking into the cotton sleeves of my churidar top. I dig at the lime wedge in my rice.

“You girls,” he says. “You American girls get so scared for no reason.”

Maybe I should’ve prayed for Nisha. I imagine her in a heavy red wedding saree, her hair done up with flowers and jewels cascading down her chest. Nisha, with a nose ring and bangles stacked to her elbows. Nisha, walking into her husband’s bedroom on her wedding night.

When Laila Aunty finally comes down to join us, she has angry pink patches on her cheeks. The room crowds fast, sweltering with heat. We go outside for air.

“What did you pray for, Lucky?” she asks. “You must always pray for something. I prayed for my daughters to have good heads. And for you to start acting more like a woman.”

In ancient India, devdasis were a revered and respected part of temple tradition. But the British saw the practice of women trained in the arts, free to take on lovers, as prostitution. For many years after that, dancing was considered shameful in Indian culture. It’s only lately that Bharatanatyam has seen a revival. If Nisha and I were devdasis back then, back before the British, we might have been free. I could pray, but here’s the truth: even if the gods are real, I don’t think they can liberate us.