Born Confused Read Online Free

shots of his own, the pale blue airmail stationery addressed in his tiny slanty script turning the inside of our mailbox azure with a faraway sky. We were going to get around this language thing! It seemed so simple: We’d use pictures to talk. So I sent him pictures of any and everything. Eventhe most inconsequential snap (i.e., my locker door) he would gobble up as if it were straight off the wall of a museum.
    After Bobby O’Malley broke up with me, I sent Dadaji pictures of the street-in-progress where we’d pulled our first kisses from each other, a lone lamp burning in the distance. They were all dark, grainy, a little underexposed; I think I’d used the wrong ASA. I’d labeled them: Some shots of the neighborhood. When he wrote back, his reply was: You don’t need him. You just need a better camera. Focus on the light next time. I couldn’t figure out how he’d known. My parents asked me about that one when they’d translated the letter, but I played dumb at the time; the last thing I’d wanted to do then was talk about Bobby O’Malley.
    In the same letter, Dadaji sent a money order to my parents, the equivalent of too many rupees, with the specific instructions that it was to be used only for the purchase of a “serious” camera for my birthday.
    And that’s how I got her, my third eye, which is why I call her Chica Tikka, for the powder my mother keeps in a little pot in the kitchen temple—the scarlet dust her own mother pressed between her brows the morning she left for America. Chica Tikka, I imagined, could see far far away, even to where Dadaji was now. Whenever I took a shot, loaded a roll, I felt that hand inches from my face, safeguarding the dream. Whenever I peered through the lens I could nearly see him looking back at me from the other end—from a lamppost, a flower bed, even Gwyn’s ever-ready grin—and with so much love in his eyes I had to click to keep the tears from coming.
    I haven’t gone back to India so I haven’t really seen the way in which he is not there, how that singing space has surely taken on his shape. All I knew was the pale blue letters stopped coming to me, though there seemed to be more from Meera Maasi to my mother now, especially since Sangita’s wedding preparations began. I missedthe letters, but I had the camera. No one truly understood why I was so attached to it, or why I liked spending so much time in the darkening room. But it was in this world where chemicals collided to coax images suddenly up out of sheer darkness that I felt most he was just beside me, abeyant, and all it would take to bring him out of shadow would be a single moment of the right chemistry.
    —Beta! Your father’s home! my mother called.—Are you ready, birthday girl?
    I stepped out of darkness. My eyes always throbbed when I did this too abruptly; maybe that’s why babies keep theirs squeezed shut for a while after entering the world. Too much light.
    —Coming, I said.

CHAPTER 3
the wish in your mouth
    The birthday shopping thing had been a ritual ever since I crashlanded into puberty. Basically, what would happen was my parents would take me to the mall and let me pick out a few of my own presents, and then they’d make me not look while they purchased some of these items, which would then mysteriously appear wrapped in oddly shaped boxes and last year’s Christmas paper on my actual birthday.
    It wasn’t really a statement of my newfound independence, my crossing that department store boundary from the child to adult section, this choosing-for-myself-since-puberty deal. This was simply around the time my parents stopped understanding what I wanted and I stopped understanding what they wanted me to want.
    The ritual usually worked according to an unspoken barter system: one proper item for every errant-ways one. For example, last year I’d received a “nice” dress (white, long sleeves, with a sort of pinafore that seemed ideal for bobbing for apples) and a pair of