Free Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier

to the carpet the pattern jumbled; I looked up to stare down the strip of floor between aisles. I wished I’d brought Chica Tikka; it was actually quite beautiful, the tumbled boxes stripily spilling more white and yellow clouds and gleaming soda cans, the crinkled candy bar wrappers like stars crumpled in a hand and tossed, all glowing astronomically against the dull red deep of the rug and seat backs.
    I was up again, and we were ascending the aisle, which made the nachos rise farther but somehow helped abate the spinning; whenever we halted, the nausea went down and the merry-go-round switched to high speed. Not to mention that I was starting to feel low number-two rumblings in my nether regions. To poop or to puke? That was the question.
    —Keep moving, Dimps, you can do it.
    She was swinging me away from a long centipedal line of twitching women and in through a door with no human barricade.
    Then we were in the bathroom, and paradise was a bathroom, shining and empty. Gwyn led me into a stall where I promptly fell to my knees, the upper ring clattering back down to the lower with the force of my landing.
    —I don’t feel so good, Gwynnie.
    —No kidding? she said.—It’s all that grease—you should never mix nachos and rum.
    —I’ll never eat nachos again, I vowed.
    —Honey, just hurl ‘em up and let’s get out of here before any guys come in.
    She was behind me, steadying my head and pulling my hair into, I suspected from the nimble finger motions, a chignon. I gazed into the white scoop bowl, at the shallow-end pool of water there. I could feel it all nearing my mouth and my head was beating hard now.
    —Come on, Dimps. Just think of something that grosses you out—like that booger that was stuck in Mr. Witherspoon’s nose all day during the lava lecture, or diarrhea, or, I don’t know, kissing Jimmy Singh.
    I considered this last option, and pictured him now, silver kada sliding as he unwrapped his Ziplocked pakoras at lunch, reviewing class notes and (copyrighted) business plans on a Palm Pilot all alone at his cafeteria table-for-two.
    I often spied on him from my own Sloppy-Joed arena—where usually Gwyn was lecturing stalwarts like Maria Theresa Montana and Shoshannah Lieberman, and even pudgy pudding-fiend Franklyn Thomas Porter the Fourth on how to lose a pound a week through creative visualization. Jimmy’s lunch was always tidily packed, but he was not. Even under that turban I knew lay a jungle of unwashed hair, and maybe even a knife, if you listened to some of the aunties’ tales about those warrior Sikhs. So I didn’t talk to him much. No one did. Plus, he kind of smelled. It was a smell I’d gotten a whiff of sometimes when we had relatives or Indian friends over—coconut hair oil and cumin and slept-on pillows, sandalwood and sweat. In our house it seemed normal; in the school cafeteria, however, the odor made me ashamed—which made me even more ashamed. I carried a tiny pink bottle of Love’s Baby Soft in my purse and spritzed it on frequently between classes and under desks. My parents had told me how bathing really was an Indian art, how the British had been taken aback by the cleanliness of the Indian people and the number of baths they took a day, when they were so foul-toothedly colonizing us all those years ago. But you could never be too safe.
    —Gym teachers. Think gym teachers.
    Ooh, that was good. And that was it: The whole Noahic nacho flood had its second world premiere, splattering the bowl, and flying off—and again. And once more. Was giving birth more embarrassing than this? I lay my head on the toilet rim (hoping no one would tell my mother I hadn’t covered it in a foot-thick layer of toilet paper first).
    —Oh god, Gwyn, I said, and I broke into a sob of relief.—What would I do without you?
    —You’ll never be without me, she said.

CHAPTER 6
the house of eternal diwali
    As we bumped through the sometimes slick, sometimes rubbled streets of Springfield,