SJ Sindu

When I was nine I wanted a short-sleeved button-down shirt. Amma refused to buy one from the boys’ section, pushed me instead toward the pinks and butterflies in the girls’, so I told her I needed one for a school play. I wore it open when I biked down hills, the wind slipping its fingers through the loose weave, cooling my sweat through my tank top. My best friend Nisha told me I’d make a cute boy, and her words squeezed something deep inside my bones, pried loose the skin between my legs. Pin pricks. Needles. My first lie.

Kris spends his nights trying to write his own greetings and staring at the cards framed over his desk, the few he got published when he first left engineering and started in this business. I spend my nights drawing commissions for horny suburban fanboys with money to waste—too-thin elves facing off against tentacled monsters, custom Sailor Scouts, coy anime girls frolicking at the beach, well-endowed geishas undressing in dimly-lit rooms.

Laila Aunty is the woman that my father married after he left Amma.

Vidya ran away with a black man from Kentucky.

Let me tell you something about being brown like me: your story is already written for you. Your free will, your love, your failure, all of it scratched into the cosmos before you’re even born. My mother calls it fate, the story written on your head by the stars, by the gods, never by you.

I first met Nisha in fourth grade when we moved to the same school district—me from Virginia where my sisters and I were born, Nisha from London. She had a strong English accent back then, one she lost over the years. Back then, Amma and Appa had an explosive relationship—they were either having tickling matches and cuddling on the couch, or shouting from across the room and banging doors.

Nisha is getting married. The wedding’s in December.

Kris and I run on autopilot like we do every night when neither of us is getting laid. I track down one of our favorite Indian movies in a stack of DVDs on top of the TV, the cases lost or in storage or thrown accidentally into the recycling.

Your grandmother is in the hospital. You need to come home, no?”

would be nice if you stayed with your mother for a while, Lucky. She needs the help.”