Reshmi Hebbar

Swami Sukathaya, the holy man and lecturer at the Hindu temple summer camp, lived only fifteen minutes from Pallavi Reddy’s home in Monroeville. Every time he was invited to come for dinner, their Amma would spin slowly out from her tightly wound spool of daily concerns--their homework, their intake of fruit, their teeth and nail grooming. Ravi, stop the bathrooms--go and dust the blinds! Arjun, change the trash quickly! Pallavi, finish chopping the potatoes! Pallavi and her siblings would pound around the house in loud and whiny protest.

The charge of everybody together was Pallavi’s idea of the best time, especially when her close friend Shruti’s family also came over. Pallavi loved those heady moments, when her parents weren’t concerned so much with molding her, Arjun, and Ravi into what they needed to be--prettier, smarter, cleaner. The evening would be full of energetic distraction, including those thirty-minute goodbyes that Indian parents favored, which would give Pallavi and Shruti time to watch the Debbie Gibson music videos Pallavi had recorded from the previous week’s countdown. She’d hit pause on particularly moving Debbie moments until Shruti fell off the bed laughing from not understanding Pallavi’s mania. Pallavi would finally go to bed upstairs picturing the music video for “Lost in Your Eyes.” She’d omit from her internal screenings the pretty boy playing Debbie’s date and focus on the closeup of Debbie’s face, her black-lined eyes smoldering in the camera, causing chills to run down Pallavi’s spine and eventually putting her to sleep.

That’s what temple summer camp was supposed to be about: constant company and staying up late and collecting glances that Pallavi could play back in her room, knowing what she was only just beginning to know, even if it was a secret. Even if it was, as Debbie herself sang, “Only in My Dreams.”  

But camp had been different that summer. The Swami asked them questions about “inner peace,” questions that were too touchy-feely. He roamed around the classroom and stared unhappily into their faces as if he could guess what they weren’t owning up to. Pallavi found herself thinking how much more she would like to be at home. At their home for dinner, the Swami seemed jolly and appreciative of who they were. He asked Ravi about pre-med, joked with Arjun about The Simpsons, and spoke pluckily with Pallavi about volleyball. And, at home and away from camp, Shruti still wore glasses instead of contact lenses, and Pallavi was her best friend instead of Anita, the new glamorous camper who had a learner’s permit and backswept hair like the women in Prell ads. At camp, with Shruti pulling away from her and the scary way that lecture time was slowly becoming an excuse for people to share their hidden thoughts, Pallavi felt panic coming over her, like she was no longer on a raucous boating party but instead trapped in a riptide of other people’s desires.  

“I thought we’d be learning about gods and goddesses,” said Anita in her room on the third afternoon of camp. She gave Pallavi’s head a forceful tug with her brush, dampening the effect of the strange currents traveling through Pallavi’s hair down through her shoulders, back, and into places she felt she shouldn’t think about. “But I like this other stuff more, even if I don’t know what the Swami is talking about.” Anita chuckled at her own cluelessness. She pulled Pallavi’s hair over her shoulder and grazed her neck with her polished fingers and stretched one out to Shruti, who handed her a rubber band. The Steve Miller Band played softly on a twelve-inch boombox. A dorm window had been opened to “air out the sound,” per Shruti’s request. They all had theories on getting away with illicit activities during the week of temple camp, like hiding Walkmans in their sweatshirts and using their towels to block the light in the cracks under their doors. Usually Pallavi loved it, but she had felt excluded this year, until this moment when Anita had surprised them by picking her and not Shruti for a hair makeover. Pallavi liked Anita just fine, but she didn’t quite trust her. Anita’s plan for free time that day was to walk near the basketball courts where the boys were playing, but before that could happen, she had said, Pallavi needed a French braid to “show off her cheekbones.”  

“Gods and goddesses would be boring though, right?” Jaya suggested. Jaya was still only thirteen like Pallavi, though arguably she made more of an effort to look it. Like Anita, she was a new camper, from Florida, and she dressed in a celebratory style, with dangly plastic earrings and clothes the colors of Easter eggs. Pallavi closed her eyes as the brush came down, the waves she hoped no one else could see surging through her slouched body. She was beginning to shake loose from her mind something the Swami had shouted at them that morning, the surprise of his urgency causing Pallavi to lift an eyebrow across the room at her twin brother. If you are not doing things that make you uncomfortable, are you really living? What is he talking about? her eyebrow had asked. But Arjun was looking at Jaya, casually enough to be an accident. The truth of his looking stung her heart. Pallavi wondered now as she sat in Anita and Jaya’s room and felt awareness stretch and contract like a new muscle inside her whether the Swami sensed that they were all in conflict with themselves. But what was the point of her participating in such discussions? Arjun could steal a look at Jaya just like the pretty boy in the Debbie Gibson video and probably even the Swami would understand. Who was there to understand Pallavi?  

“You’re the only one who ever guesses the answers to the Swami’s questions,” Pallavi opened her eyes and chided Jaya now. “I heard them all talking as we were leaving lecture: ‘The one from Florida is pretty deep.’” Pallavi made her voice get comically low.  

Anita whooped and jerked Pallavi’s head back again. Shruti smiled and stretched her arms over her legs in a yawn. Jaya turned from the window, her eyes shining, her voice cautious.

“Who?” she asked. “Who was saying that?”

Pallavi changed the subject by asking for someone to change the tape.  

“I’ll try mine.” Jaya pressed stop on the boombox. In one swift motion, she exchanged the cassettes and pressed the fast forward button again and again, the sound of propulsive motion undercut by the occasional squealing of guitars. Pallavi was interested in the girl’s easy change in flow. She knew now that Jaya liked her brother, and she was certain that Arjun liked Jaya. A breeze reached them through the window, not quite carrying away the sound but certainly aiding the drama of violins beginning a familiar refrain. Pallavi let herself begin to imagine what it would be like to have feelings for somebody who had them for her. This thought brought a prick of new guilt. The love song playing now was not for her, not for a person like her. She might have a French braid, but what was the point? 

“INXS is pretty awesome,” Anita murmured, her fingers smoothing the crisscross pattern at Pallavi’s temple.  

“I love this song,” Jaya agreed. “You have to listen to the last time he sings ‘collided,’ right before it fades out. It’s so . . . ”

“Sexy?” Anita guessed. They laughed, though here was another wearying topic. Pallavi saw now for the first time that growing older might not mean more freedom but being forced to agree more with other people.  

“Michael Hutchence is sexy,” offered Shruti, grinning gamely through her braces. Her face settled on an uncertain look, like she had said something that could get her in trouble. Pallavi felt a rush of anger at her.  

“Damn straight he is,” Anita agreed, yanking hard.  

“What does sexy actually mean?” The question fled Pallavi’s mouth. Let go of your inhibitions--isn’t that what the Swami had said? He’d explained what inhibitions were--the thoughts of fear that hold people back. Now, with her question about sexiness thrust out there into the lazy afternoon, she faintly understood that something had been holding her back from admitting to certain confusions. She knew why she didn’t care whether Michael Hutchence was sexy. But she didn’t know the difference between wanting to be with a person all the time, wanting to possess them, like she felt sometimes about Shruti, and what made a person sexy. Pallavi didn’t understand what Jaya saw in her goofy twin brother, or what Anita saw in Rahul, the counselor with a crew cut and hairy legs. Did Jaya and Anita simply want to be with these boys all the time because they were “cute” or funny, or was there something more? She knew about sex. But how did liking someone work for people like her--for people who wanted to be around only their best friend all the time and who understood why Debbie Gibson was so special? Maybe it was a phase? Maybe she only had to be a year or two older, like Shruti and Anita, to be able to understand the mysteries of how attraction translated to sex and whether it needed to. Perhaps it didn’t need to?  

“Sexy means,” Anita began, carefully twisting three separate strands in her left hand as she bent around so Pallavi could see her face, “you feel it . . . right here.” She pointed her finger at the crotch of her denim shorts. Laughter erupted in the dorm room again. There was Anita, the queen of cool, gunning her finger between her legs in that showy way. Pallavi watched as Anita’s finger and brush remained in position. They were just pointing down there, drawing attention to the long, lateral muscles of Anita’s thighs, shiny with a recent application of Body Shop lotion, catching the afternoon light in their crouch. Pallavi flushed. Were the other girls looking? Did they feel it? Because she felt she knew what the word meant now. It meant that your pulse quickened, and a sense you were previously unaware of awoke and slid to your stomach and then, yes, downwards. Anita righted herself back into her kneeling position and demanded rubber bands from Shruti, who was laughing the loudest of them all.  

Somebody knocked on their door. Jaya turned the volume down and pushed the boombox under the comforter. Shruti crept to the door and gave them a look of such trepidation that Pallavi almost laughed.  

“It’s Ritu,” Shruti said in relief, opening the door wide to reveal a wiry twelve-year-old wearing a vest over a T-shirt and shorts. She wore wildly colored Keds with the laces removed. She made Pallavi think of a cat, the skittery and self-contained quality that some people possessed that made everybody like having them around because they so rarely stayed put.

“I thought I heard good music in here. They’re playing Paula Abdul in my room.” Ritu shook her head at the lapse in taste.

“You could hear the music in here?” Shruti cried. “Shit.”

Pallavi glanced at her in surprise.  

“What?” Shruti asked.

“It’s not that big of deal.” Pallavi thought about Shruti’s insistence that they go to Anita’s room that afternoon, the lightness in her tone as her best friend suggested that they needed to take the Swami’s advice and try new things, meet new people.

“Yes, it is a big deal! Aunties said no electronics.”

“But it looks like even the little kids are listening to music,” Pallavi retorted, closing her eyes in the confusion of this pressing need to confront Shruti. But she couldn’t tear herself away from the sensation of having her hair touched by Anita. The brushing was protecting her from the answers to difficult questions that sank in now with each stroke.   

“No, she’s right,” Ritu said, appearing unoffended about being referred to as a little kid. “It’s not a big deal compared to the other stuff going on.”

Anita stuffed Pallavi’s remaining hair into a rubber band and stood up.

  “Like what?”

Ritu took in Anita’s matching set of hair spray and mousse, Jaya’s immaculate high-top Reebox in the open closet, the litter of rubber bands on the floor. “Do you mind if I play this?” she asked, sliding a tape out of her shorts pocket. “My mom didn’t let me pack my Walkman.”

“What is it?” Jaya asked uncertainly, unsheathing the boombox.

“It’s L’Trimm.” Ritu popped the cassette in and propped the boombox up on the bed.

“Isn’t that rap?” Shruti asked.  

“I think it’s hip hop, but yeah, sure. They’re less known than Queen Latifah or Salt-n-Pepa, but they’re the same genre.”

Anita raised both eyebrows at Pallavi, and Pallavi felt that she might become her old self again.

“Okay, so tell us,” Shruti said.  

Ritu leaned to look at Anita’s braid work. “Pretty good!” she exclaimed. “You look pretty,” she told Pallavi.

Pallavi’s cheeks burned.

“You better tell us before we ask you and your party music to leave,” Anita warned.  

“Two counselors are doing it. I can show you tomorrow if you want.”  

“What?!” they cried. Shruti’s hand was over her mouth. Ritu moved to the door, unfazed.

“Who is it?” Anita called after her.

Ritu shrugged. “I don’t know their names. One’s got weird hair. I’ll show you tomorrow at free time.”  

“That kid.” Anita closed the door and looked at the others with an unclassifiable smile on her face. “I’m keeping her tape unless she comes back for it.”

Later, Pallavi had walked to the basketball courts with her braided hair, her temples aching and her head itching, the patent desires of the girls around her reminding her of her brother Ravi and his friends sucking in their breath whenever the woman on the Whitesnake music video rolled around on that car. She’d wondered if she would ever be able to look at anyone like that, like she had almost looked at Debbie Gibson that one time with Shruti until Shruti had started to guess her secret and pull away.  

“Keep moving around the room until you hear the music stop,” the Swami had instructed them during the next day’s lecture, over a trill of wooden flutes coming from a compact disc player set up on the table. Arjun began strutting to the airy melody, the boys around him snickering. “When the music stops, I want you to stand and face whomever you find yourself next to and look into their eyes. Hold that eye contact until the music begins again.”

It had been a well-meaning exercise, but they had been immature. Even Anita gravitated towards the girls when the Swami mentioned eye contact. Pallavi found herself thankful for an unexpected moment of the old camp hilarity while pretending to gaze at her friends’ faces, even Ritu’s, who cut across the crowd of younger campers to thrust herself in front of Pallavi, forcing Pallavi to laugh.  

Besides the mock earnest way that Arjun came up and gazed at her group of friends so that he could be close to Jaya, some of the only people who could seriously lock eyes were two camp counselors, one girl and one boy. One was their counselor, Anu, a quiet college girl with hair like Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias. The other was Rahul, Anita’s crush Rahul, who was starting the University of Pennsylvania in the fall and who had hair like River Phoenix in Stand By Me.

Ritu had given Pallavi a look then, her eyes bulging out, which she had thought was the kid’s attempt to be funny.  

“Them,” Ritu hissed.

“What?” Pallavi mouthed.

“Oh my God,” Anita had drawn nearer. “You’re joking.”

“Are you serious?” Shruti whispered.

“No way,” Anita said under her breath, and Pallavi couldn’t tell if she was speaking in awe or heartbreak. “Weird hair,” she said to Ritu.

“I told you.”

“I can’t believe it,” Shruti added unnecessarily.

 “Quietly and thoughtfully!” the Swami called out in consternation, his orange robes whisking by them. “Learn to see the divinity in another person. Learn to look at them in a way that means ‘I see the divine in you.’”

                          #

Pallavi feels like laughing today whenever she looks back on that week; she’s learned how much more awful it could have been for a girl like her. But she finds that she has still not solved the mystery of what the Swami had been after then. What type of leap had he been urging them on towards? Could he really have thought they would have been open then to such currents of insight? Perhaps he was priming them for a life of middle age, when regret surfaced sharply and erratically, like bits of reef in the surf catching you at the ankles as you waded along the shore. It was as if the Swami really might have known that under the depths of Pallavi’s battles with herself, she still smiles whenever she recalls Shruti’s terrified face at the knock on Anita’s dorm door. She still feels a rush of pleasure whenever she thinks of Ritu’s directness in calling her pretty, and the sincerity of the girl’s gaze when she came all the way over to look into Pallavi’s eyes. It’s as if the Swami could foresee that Pallavi would always have to fight to keep from falling over and giggling whenever Arjun sidles up to her now as he did all those years ago during the staring exercise to say, “I see the devil in you.” As if the holy man had been preparing them for the need to stay present, hoping to protect them from the useless pull of nostalgia, from the continual need to be towed back to a time that was far from perfect after all.

Reshmi Hebbar is a writer and professor of multicultural literature at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, where she produces a fictional podcast series on South Asian lives in the South. Her non-fictional essays on identity and culture have been published at Khabar Magazine, and, most recently, Slate.

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