Read Online Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier - Free Book Online Page A

nodded, abundantly pleased as I abundantly gulped. And I don’t know why, but I wanted to please him.
    I took deeper and longer swills so he could love me more and more. And actually, the more that went in the more I in fact began to feel beautiful. Maybe it was because it was dark, which is where I felt best, like in my darkening room, but also, I suddenly realized, I was a seventeen-year-old budding photographer influenced by Ansel Adams and I was at a movie that might even be a film, and all this with a college boy no less, a college man, and an executive film producer to top it off! Little matter that this was for, as far as I could see, a so far nonexistent film; invisible things were life’s most precious. Wasn’t there a saying like that? Or money can’t buy invisible things? What did love look like? Inspiration? Elucidation? It was the thought that was counting, as my father said. And the thought of my parents counted, made me smile in spite of myself. They were so on: How could I think they didn’t understand me? They so did. Now I couldn’t remember why we were so often shifty and edgy around each other. I was going soft and the corners whittled gone and so much love was filling my heart I felt it was too small to hold it.
    And that love Slinky was springing out in every direction and I had an epiphany. I knew what the secret to world peace was (father, hallway, prayer): It resided in a plastic red cup with a swirly-whirly strip in the front row of a theaterful of pixilated people and a boy everyone wanted watching you—of all people, of all things—swallow. And Gwyn, maybe she’d just arrived at that epiphany a little earlier than me, but I could catch up, it was still a relay, and that’s what part of growing up was—having too much emotion and not knowing what to do with it and pouring it on everyone and everything, the way the night liquid drenched the ice in my cup, almost spilling over it was, and everything was just a moment away from good things, you just needed that right balance of…of Bacardi to Coke, if you will.
    I would definitely keep drinking. I must always drink.
    —Why are you rocking back and forth like that? whispered Julian.
    I was?
    His arm was around me now and it felt nice, having a college film producer boy’s arm around me in a movie-maybe-film.
    We were one and we were all, I thought, happily crunching on my ice.
    —You know what that means, said Julian. —Frustrated.
    —Oh, I’m not frustrated, I said.—I’m just having an epiphany.
    —You are?
    —You’re not?
    —Well, maybe I’m about to, said Julian, and his face was coming closer like the actors’ faces and my neck was craning back like he was the image, unpeeling off the screen, and a split second before his lips were on mine, I knew we were about to kiss and a thrill frilled my neck—I felt like I was in the movie, in the picture—and then a split second after his lips were in use, his tongue was, too, checking out the place where my wisdom teeth used to be.
    Actually, it was kind of slimy. After a little while my neck started to hurt, rather impertinently piercing a leak into my floatingly numb reverie. And I couldn’t breathe; even my nose was squashed, nostrils flattened to buttonhole slits. So I pulled away to take a gulp of air. But for some reason I think that stricken gasp convinced Julian thatwhatever he was doing was working and he dug farther, archaeologically, into my mouth. I tried to remember that I was in fact enjoying this, but the convivial buzzy feeling I’d been having was fast evaporating off me.
    I came up for oxygen again, and there was a name that could have been a (distant) uncle’s on the final credits.
    —Look—it’s an Indian director! I cried.
    —Yeah, he said squeezing my shoulder.—Yeah, I think he is. Or Jewish. M. Night Shamalyan. What does it matter?
    —Well, you know, I’m Indian, I said. I vaguely recalled the Cherokee jokes I’d been subjected to in middle