Born Confused Read Online Free PDF Page A

door as if it had found just where it belonged in this wacky world. I didn’t get this thing with salesgirls. They always stuck their head right in before you’d even changed, like you didn’t need to be alone to endure what you were about to endure—even when you were trying on bikinis, which could be a very emotional experience, bringing up all sorts of memories (like kids who insulted you on the playground twelve years before). And then they’d tell you everything looked great with about as much conviction as a nonbeliever with a wafer in her mouth.
    —So are you gonna get them? whined Taffy. She had a spot of lipstick smack in the middle of her front tooth. I decided not to tell her.
    My mother was patiently folding and hanging things that had fallen from my fists to the floor. I burst into tears.—What do you think? I said.
    —Go, my mother told her.—Go fold something. We need our privacy. Haven’t you done enough damage already?
    Taffy’s mouth dropped open like a fish in a tank with a leak. Once she’d huffily retreated my mother turned to me.
    —Dimple, she said.—You are a beautiful girl. You have hips. They’re not going anywhere. This is the Indian body. We are not like these straight curveless Americans.
    —Mom, I am American.
    —Dimple, no matter how much you try you cannot change your bones. Your body is your temple; your body is your home. It tells you where you are from.
    —My body’s the whole country’s home! I sniffed.—Look at it! All these hips, boobs, butts. Why can’t I just be normal?
    —Normal? Dimple Rohitbhai Lala, when you insult yourself, you insult me. Now, you don’t want to be insulting your mother, do you?
    —Of course not. But Ma, on you all that stuff looks great. You’re a mom. You’re supposed to have curves. But on me it just doesn’t work. Why couldn’t I have taken after Dad?
    —Then you’d have a bald spot on top of all these other so-called problems.
    —He has a bald spot? I said, intrigued.—I didn’t know.
    —Even he does not know yet, said my mother in a hushed voice, leaning in.—I see it when he is sleeping; it is growing, spreading, soon it will take over.
    She straightened up and resumed her normal voice.
    —Dimple, beta. Stop trying to be something you are not.
    Then, as if she’d heard her own words, she curved both hands on my shoulders and kissed my forehead.
    —Come on, she sighed.—Let’s go to the camera store.
    After checking out the photographic goods with my parents, they left me by the fountain where the little kids threw pennies andthe old couples sat together in potted-plant silence gripping cups of tea from the coffee company. This was also part of the birthday ritual: making myself scarce and all of us pretending I had no idea what the gift was. And truth was, this year I didn’t. I really couldn’t imagine my parents actually purchasing any of the wish items I’d just indicated, nearly swooning in my relief to be in a store that was all about looking anywhere but me. Especially since my father had just lectured me on why did I insist on taking black-and-white pictures when the world was not black and white, indicating as his idea of the real thing the superglossy photos of puppies and brides and babies that came with the frames for sale on the display rack. I looked down to the fountain bottom, to all the pennies rippling there. So many wishes. I didn’t have a cent on me and wasn’t sure it counted if I wished on someone else’s but it still felt like a powerful place to be, a mall fountain blinking with so many underwater copper eyes, with so much wanting.
    I pictured my dad flipping a coin at the camera counter, against his better judgment.
    My parents never seemed to mind my taking pictures until recently. I mean, at birthdays and get-togethers or Christmas (which we all loved, closet Christians that we were) they’d always pose and preen and say jalfreezi for the Instamatic, counting out the ek, do, teen