Free Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier Page A

I thought about that last trip to India, how my stomach kept rolling long after the hitchka had stopped. Despite avoiding unpeelable fruit, unboiled water, and the crackling pani puri stands of Juhu Beach I’d been constantly nauseous. But somehow I’d managed to keep my inner organs intact until the second to last day at, of all places, the Taj Hotel; shortly after lunch, even the five-star rating couldn’t outdazzle the explosive effect on my being that an innocuous-looking shrimp salad was having. The next day I could hardly keep my seat belt on the whole fourteen-hour ride back on the plane. The slightest sign of turbulence elicited unsolicited bits and pieces of the irrepressible shellfish throatwards, and I spent the entire flight panicking not only about dozing off and drooling on the shoulder of the kind-faced Walkmanned stranger beside me, but that I would toss my crustacea on his freshly pressed Nehru jacket as well.
    This car ride was a lot like that.
    Julian was leaning way over with his head out the window, sniffing the breeze like a Labrador out on the town. But I knew he was just trying to manage his risks, what with me sitting next to him and all. I tried counting sheep to take my mind off my stomach, but math always makes me ill, so that wasn’t such a good idea. Then I thought of snow, that particular silence of its falling, blanketing. The whole forked street in white star-crusted stillness. This was a good thought, snow, the way it powdered up and caked onto the edge of a ski braking and in your ears wind and whistle and the almost indiscernible scratch of the pole tapping you into a turn. It worked a while.
    But fact was, the AC was broken, the roof was open, and we were in the middle of a heat wave. By this point my skirt had ridden up (a feat I’d hardly thought possible, considering it had never gotten that far down in the first place) and I was shamelessly exhibiting the two tanned beached whales that were my thighs. My coat was off, stiffly crumpled and creating a sort of hurl barrier between Julian and me. And it was still really hot.
    I tried to sink deeper into snow. Last year we had so much of the stuff that for a while people were cross-country skiing down Fifth Avenue in the city; I saw it on the news, but by the time my mother and I went into Manhattan to get her visa for India it was all ashen slush, and everyone was slipping at the traffic lights in expensive shoes and getting cranky. We dropped off the passport at the embassy and were told to come back to pick it up stamped later that afternoon. So we went to lunch at a place that wasn’t Indian but had things like elderberry chutney and mango coulis (which the waitress pronounced “coolie” to my mother’s perturbation) and charged a lot for a salad with leaves called endives that were so bitter I nearly spit my first and last bite out. We left vastly unsatisfied and bought chestnuts from the Indian guy on the corner and went to Bloomingdale’s, which still looked decorated for Christmas even though Christmas was long over.
    And then we took a walk, clinging to hot chocolates from the diner on the corner. They had marshmallows and everything, but somehow we couldn’t get warm. We were sitting on a bench when my mother started shaking, and the hot chocolate grew stormy, the brown liquid spattering the slush caking around her feet, marshmallows flopping out over the brim. She couldn’t stop shivering, and at first I thought she was really cold, and I reached over to put my mittens on her bare blue-veined hands and squeezed them and looked at her. But she kept shaking.
    —Mom? Mom, what is it? Do you want to go back and wait inside?
    —It’s too late.
    —I’m sure it’s still open, Ma.
    —No, no, no it’s too late—he’s going, he’s going. I can feel it. I’m not going to make it in time.
    And then she was sobbing, and she let me hold her like a child.
    —Come on, Mom, don’t worry. You’re just stressed. You’ll