Raj says nothing for a few minutes as we drive in darkness. I don’t even know where we’re going. I can’t bring myself to care.
“How’d you know I wasn’t going to call the cops?” he finally says, shattering the silence.
I shrug, not that he can see me. “I took a chance.”
As annoying as Raj is, he’s one of the few good dudes in Goldy’s life. After he came back from rehab, he just completely shifted his lifestyle. Like no more partying, no more drinks, let his hair grow out, started wearing a dastaar. I get really resentful when I see Raj, though, because he was able to do what rehab is supposed to get you to do. Rehabilitate. Say not today, alcohol.
While he’s generally a good dude, he does let himself get talked into taking shady capitalist shortcuts. A blackmarket ice cream supplier, a sketchy deal on a freezer. So odds are low that the paperwork for this ice cream truck transfer is completely legit. Also, he knows Mama and Biji and Papa would have beat his ass if I’d gotten a record for stealing my own brother’s ice cream truck. So yeah, I took a chance.
“Don’t drop me home,” I say. I can’t face the quiet or the chaos.
“You are such a padh,” Raj says. His eyes are red. Ready for sleep. He doesn’t swear and when he needs to say something mean, it’s in Punjabi and always sounds funny. And the best he comes up with is padh. Fart.
I would laugh, but it’s almost four in the morning and I have used up all the fucks I have. “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you? All night long! I haven’t stayed up this late since I used to . . .”
“Be an alcoholic?” I say.
Raj gets quiet.
“You do know that I’m still an alcoholic, right? I was gonna say, since I worked the night shift at my chacha’s store.”
“That was not cool,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I surprise myself with just how easy it is to apologize.
“I’ll always be an addict, man. It’s an illness, plain and simple.”
“Why couldn’t Goldy do it?” I say, on the verge of tears.
“I don’t know, little man. Everyone is different.” He reaches out a hand and squeezes my palm as he continues driving around aimlessly. “But you gotta remember, Goldy was sick. It ain’t just willpower. It’s environment, genetics, habits, and there’s the whole Punjabi and general dude culture that makes you feel like you’re a punk if you admit you got a problem. They just want to throw you off the cliff like they’d do in Sparta. There’s something in our brains that makes us alcoholics. We literally cannot drink two glasses and then be like all right, peace out.”
I stare at the dashboard listening to every word coming out of Raj’s mouth. I’ve never thought about how hard it must have been for him to admit he’s got a problem. “You know who gave me my first drink?” Raj says. “My pops. You’ve met him. He’s not a bad guy and I don’t blame him—anymore. I used to blame everybody. Most of all, I blamed myself because I thought I just wasn’t trying hard enough. I hated that people had seen me in such embarrassing situations. But it never stopped me. That’s what this kachra does to you. Makes you shameless and forget that you are a child of God. But Goldy wasn’t just my friend, he was my brother.”
“Word,” I say.
When Goldy confided in me and told me he was an alcoholic, my reaction was to tell him to be a man, that nobody else in our entire family is an alcoholic. Which I don’t know how accurate that is because there’s so much we do in secret. Carry all this pain. The only times my stutter is acknowledged is when someone has a kooky plan to fix me with yoga or very sketchy homeopathy involving pastes made from things in the masala tin and the garden. For years I just thought I was broken. No actual therapy because Punjabis don’t do that, just stumbling around on the internet trying to figure shit out. Trying to figure me out.
I wonder if Goldy ever tried doing what I used to do to fix my stutter: looking up videos with advice, thinking it would actually work. Breathing techniques. One article by a therapist who clearly didn’t actually stutter suggested replacing words you stutter on with different words. Meanwhile I’m like, I don’t know if I’m going to stutter on those words because I haven’t used them yet. I wish I’d had a conversation with Goldy about my stuttering. Obviously he knew--hell, everyone does. Just wish I’d said it out loud and my brother heard it. I close my eyes as I think about Goldy in that hospital room. How I couldn’t have just given him a hug when he told me he was an alcoholic the same way I did when he told me he was gay. Nobody ever says alcohol poisoning out loud. It’s dehydration, jaundice, heart problems, liver problems. Any kind of problem except what it actually is. “Drop me at the peacock gurdwara,” I say.
Raj snorts. “You know, you can start becoming more spiritual tomorrow.”
We keep driving. I doze off for a few minutes. The truck rolls to a stop, and now we’re here. The grand stone gates looming, the sound of birds honking like trucks in the background. The peacock gurdwara. He could have just dropped me home so he could get some sleep. But he knows I need this. It’s what I like about him.
The night is over. How do I face Ngozi? Mindii? I just tried to steal her bike. What was I thinking? I shake my head as I think of how badly I behaved. But maybe abrupt endings is how I should leave things. Preemptive measures.
Most of the gurdwaras across the Valley have long- winded names that nobody ever remembers. They’re usually referred to by the geographic area. If it’s a small area like Caruthers, boom, Caruthers vala gurdwara. If it’s by Highway 99 in Fresno, 99 vala gurdwara. The peacock gurdwara is the only one in Fresno that people know because of the peacock that roams around here and not because of its location. One time, Papa and I were getting gas at Costco and this Sikh truck driver asked me in Punjabi where the Guru Nanak Dev Center of the Central Valley is. And I immediately was like, “No idea. Not in this city.” Papa jumped in and told the dude to follow us to the morni vala gurdwara. The gurdwara with the peacock. It’s a sprawling white building with that familiar dome, and a tall flagpole with the Nishaan Sahib fluttering in the air.
“You can bounce. I’ll walk back,” I say to Raj as I start climbing out of the truck.
“You’re gonna walk three miles?” He’s leaning toward the passenger side, frowning down at me. “In the dark?”
“I’ll figure it out,” I say.
“Well, I’ll be here. You already wasted my night. Might as well wait till it’s completely ruined. What are you planning to do here anyway?”
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“This ain’t Harmandir Sahib back home where it’s lively all the time with kirtan going twenty-four-seven. And you can’t go in the divan hall dressed like one of King Arthur’s rejected knights of the kiddie table.” He gestures to my cosplay.
“I know,” I say. I’m not going to wake the Granthi or go inside. I get out of the truck, and walk out toward the area me and Goldy used to call the forest.
It’s really dark. Kind of eerie, like moonlight and mist have descended or something. Straight out of a horror movie. I almost turn back. But something drew me here tonight. So I walk a little farther into the darkness, stumbling as I go.
All of a sudden, I see Goldy’s face appear. He’s wearing his sharp Kenyan-style pag with a big starched flap. It matches his bright blue button-down. Familiar. I almost reach out to touch it.
I know I’m hallucinating. Maybe he is too. Because he’s taken aback when he sees me. Then he grins. He walks along the far end of the gurdwara grounds, where the fairy lights glitter like diamonds. So I follow him.
“Remember we got yelled at when we tried climbing those almond trees,” he says. The trees are much taller now, towering, bearing fruit. Or nuts? Yeah, nuts.
“You’re not real,” I say.
“So what? You remember it or not?”
“Those are walnut trees, actually,” I say definitively, just to take a counterposition, and be nonsensically argumentative. The way I always was.
Goldy walks up next to me. His phone is out. Do ghosts have phones? “There.” He looks at me all smug. “I liked your post.”
I can’t tell if he’s goading me or thinks that’s the kind of person I am. Cheered up by the glittery fakeness of a social media like.
Obviously, I am that guy. I love the glitter.
Except I don’t even look at my phone. I can’t. It’s dead. “Dead.” I laugh.
But there I am on his. Pictures from a lifetime ago. Earlier today. Prom.
“It’s all a big ruse anyway,” I say. One second I got my arm around someone, all smiles; another I’m making corny-ass selfie poses; and the very next second I’m alone, as usual.
But Mindii didn’t give a shit about the fake me. Ngozi isn’t about that faux life either.
Am I not that guy? Do I not love glitter?
I don’t even know who the real Sunny is, the one Mindii thinks she knows. Dude with this clean-shaven baby face wearing a fake beard? Dude from two days ago with a small but real beard?
Goldy starts walking again, and I race behind, afraid to lose him. He heads closer to the gate where the actual gurdwara is. It is unlocked, and he walks right through, so I follow. The Nishaan Sahib—the triangular saffron flag of the Sikh nation or panth—flutters peacefully above our heads. “Why do they even have a peacock here?” He’s grinning, his teeth crooked and white in the dark, like a messed-up fence. “Like how did that conversation come about?”
“You ever see the peacock?”
“No,” Goldy says.
“I found your notebook,” I say.
He laughs. Something he would never do if he were real.
“My art therapy notebook?”
“Is that what that piece of shit was?”
He laughs again.
“You know the worst thing about art therapy was answering the therapist’s questions because they would get all up in my grill and ask things like, how has your addiction affected other people? And I’d always be like, this shit is for my recovery. MINE. It’s my addiction. It ain’t affecting nobody. Let everyone else do their own damn rehab. It took a lot longer than it should have for me to stop being so full of myself. I thought about you. About Mama. Papa. I’m so sorry. Listen, Sunny,” Goldy says as he steps closer towards me, my lips quivering. “I’m an alcohol—” I leap into his arms before he has a chance to finish. “—ic,” he says, gasping for air and returning my hug.
“Thanks for n-not making me feel bad about my stutter,” I say.
“There are so many other things to make you feel bad about,” Goldy says with a smile.
I start crying. He cries too as we eventually disentangle ourselves from each other. “I put way too much energy and so much significance into your notebook. You must have been entertained watching me run around town like a fool,” I say.
“If I knew how to switch on your channel, yeah, prolly would have found it entertaining.”
“How come you didn’t just leave me something? Anything?” I say.
Goldy shrugs his shoulders. “I didn’t plan on dying.”
“Then why’d you . . .”
“There was this experiment they did in like the 1950s on rats. There was this button or lever or something that would stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. And some of the rats would choose it instead of food, instead of water, instead of taking care of their own kids. That’s how insidious this disease is. I’m that rat. I just can’t stop myself.” Goldy looks at me. “So basically, I don’t know.”
I meet his gaze.
“Your boyfriend’s Thor, huh?”
“We don’t like labels.” He grins. “But yeah, he’s totally my boyfriend.”
He laughs. I laugh. It feels good to laugh together, familiar and well-worn, like a rediscovered favorite T-shirt that Mama washed a million times, soft and comfortable.
We start walking. He doesn’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want to say goodbye. He’s stalling. I’m stalling.
“You ever heard the taus?” Goldy says.
“No. What is it?”
“It’s the predecessor to the dilruba. You know its name in Farsi means a stealer of hearts because the music is that beautiful. The taus is much heavier. Still got the metal frets, strings are plucked like a sitar, and played with a bow, but it’s shaped like a peacock! It sounds incredible. I could sit for hours listening to bani played with the taus, full of soul. The beauty of traditional Sikh instruments before the British forced the foreign sounds of the harmonium on us. Here, I’ll play you a few notes . . .” Goldy purses his lips together.
Nothing.
I hear nothing.
“Taus,” Goldy says, then pauses for dramatic effect, “means peacock.”
“So we’re here to find the peacock?”
“I mean, that would be pretty cool.”
“Okay. So is there a late-night kirtan with the taus happening here?”
“Not exactly. Nobody plays the taus at this gurdwara. Or like at any gurdwara here in the Valley. At San Jose there’s one Kaur, who learned it from the UK. Anyway. Not the point.”
“What’s the point then?”
“Don’t be in such a hurry to get to the point,” Goldy says.
I let out a huge laugh.
“Destination Fever,” I say.
Goldy lights up. “Exactly!”
“Remember when Mama was really tired one morning and had to walk us to school and I was so urgent to be on time because I didn’t want to explain why I was late to the teacher?” I say.
“I remember. You were like six or seven. Mama had had it with you and was all, ‘Are you a doctor? Is someone on fire? No?’ ”
“Then shattap your face!” we say in unison, and crack up.
Goldy walks a little farther.
“You know, when I told them I was gay, Mama brought me here to try and find the peacock that roams around here. It symbolizes love or something.”
He ignores all of my interruptions, but I am—as Ngozi would put it—gobsmacked. This is a hallucination though, so maybe it didn’t really happen in reality?
“So when I told them I was gay, it wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought it would be. Thought Papa would swear at me like he would every time I got drunk. He didn’t hug me or nothing, but prescribed some poems and we ended up drinking cha and singing for hours. But when I told them I was an alcoholic, there was no prescription of poems. Just an hour of fittey-mooh-kutte-da-putt-haramzada and various conjugations of that.
“Mama and Papa started watching Queer Eye after I told them I was gay because that was them trying.”
I laugh. “I always thought they started watching that to figure out their other weird son.”
Goldy laughs. “We’re both pretty weird. And awesome. So we were all in the garden and Mama and Papa came to where I was weeding or something, and they said, ‘Je tu fabulous banna, fabulous ban.’ ”
If you want to be fabulous, be fabulous.
“Dude!” I say. “They said that to me too. That same line.”
“That’s shady, man. Double dipping. I was stunned. It was so hilarious, I wanted to die laughing, but all I could do was blink.”
I smile at the thought of Mama and Papa sitting and watching Queer Eye, trying to support, to understand.
“Why do you think Mama brought you here?”
“She latched on to the word fabulous, which was kinda cute, to be honest. And she would tell me all about the brown dude on the show.”
“Tan France,” I say.
Goldy looks at me, his eyes glittering. “Yeah. Tanveer Wasim Safdar. What a zabardast name. Then she started talking about the white peacock, who loves flaunting his feathers. She probably thought I was gonna start dressing better all of a sudden, and start using more vibrant colors. Maybe decorate the house more. Be more responsible. Not become all . . . you know . . .” His voice goes quiet again, far away.
Goldy is looking at me, half familiar, sort of a stranger.
“I feel like a fraud,” I say, touching my face. Still startled. And a bit disappointed. “But that’s not why I did this. To my face. I did it to not be me anymore. I don’t know if I actually like me?”
Goldy pulls me close, his arm a heavy weight, but comforting, familiar.
“Don’t worry so much about your face, how sharp the folds of your dastaar are, or how dark your beard is.” The weight of his arm. The weight of his words. He feels real. “Sometimes you need to feel anger and sadness. Go through a whole process. Not just come up with an answer.” He steps away a bit. “See this tattoo?” he says, tilting his neck.
“Rahao,” I say.
Pause. Reflect. It’s in key sections of some shabads in the Guru Granth Sahib. “It’s not about how many pauris you got memorized or how well you tie your pag. It’s about taking the time to understand.”
I nod and look around.
“I love you,” I say, and feel Goldy’s eyes looking at me. Neither of us steps closer.
“I love you too,” Goldy says.
“Think I’m putting too much significance into this notebook?” I say as we stand there in the silence. “Like that keedi story you were telling me that one time?”
“Keedi story? Like an insect?”
“That one with the aliens. And the ants.”
“Unbelievable,” Goldy says, laughing. “The Strugatskii brothers? Two of the world’s greatest science fiction writers? ‘The Roadside Picnic’ is one of the greatest science fiction stories—and you reduced it to ‘that keedi story.’ ”
Goldy laughs. And I hear it. The honk of the peacock.
His eyes light up as he thwaks my shoulder, excited. “You hear that?” he says, stepping away, ready to chase shadows. “You coming?”
I shake my head, gesturing off into the distance. “Nah. I got someone to find.”
I wake to the unsettling sound of nature. Crickets chirping super loudly, the cool air rushing out of the open window, cooling as morning looms. I smack my forearm in a futile attempt to thwart a mosquito bite.
“You were out cold. Did you know you snore?” Raj says, turning briefly to look back at me as we fly down the street. I must have dozed off, my head absorbing the roar of the wind.
I look around, confused, as the ice cream truck rumbles down my block.