Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal Read Free Book Online Page B

gathered every picture he has ever taken of me and stacked the lot in one pile, I’d have a flipbook of my life. Just thumb through the stack and see me coming out of the womb, then riding a bigwheel in my OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, then doing ballet in the kitchen. He doesn’t need any particular reason to take a picture. The other day, he took a picture of me spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread.
    My parents head into the house, but I linger outside for a moment. We live in front of Crestview’s token park. Like The Clearing, it’s an abnormally large piece of land, mainly because it’s really just a forest. But one day someone slapped some tennis courts, an elaborate swing set, some Druid-like stone shelters, and a steel gate bearing a PARK CLOSES AT DUSK sign onto the land and called it a park. Here, at our house, where only the trees—and not the playground accoutrements—are visible, the park looks primitive, untouched. As I eye it now, it seems to have lost none of its mystery after all the times I have stared into it. Sometimes, when I feel grumpy, I try to naysay my entire Ohioan experience and insist that there is no Ohioan beauty that I couldn’t find in New York or Paris or Russia or Madagascar or any of the other places I gaze at in travel books. But my grumpiness is futile. There is an implacable intrigue in the gray-brown quilt that the trees make, and above all, the dark recesses far beyond. In moments like this one, I realize that what I have been attempting to do with those travel books is re-create the marvels that have always been in my own backyard.
    What is more, in Central Park you might come across derelicts playing with Campbell’s Soup cans and thinking they’re dogs; you may come across old crones feeding the birds tuppence a bag before shoving a fistful of seeds in their own mouths, crazier birds than the pigeons they feed; you may come across suicidal lovers or homeless men finding feasts in trash cans; but you most certainly would never find a middle-aged Indian recording crude-oil prices on graph paper as if his life depended on it.
    I walk into our house through the side door. Only recently have I been able to detect a slight but ever-present odor of Indian cooking permeating its walls. It gets stronger as I walk into the kitchen. For a long time, I assumed that my house was immune to such an odor. I know that the other Indians in our social circle have always had house odors so stifling that an asthmatic wheeze has attacked me upon entering their foyers from time to time, but I thought my house had always been different, Americanized, as cleanly scented as a Glade air freshener. But a few weeks ago when Cody came over to play, he dropped the bomb on me. “Dude, yer house smells like curry.”
    “So, vhen do I get to meet your future vife?” my dad asks, entering the kitchen with a cat-sized camcorder held out in front of him. He looks at its small fold-out screen, then twists the screen around so that it faces me. I can see the bored yet uncomfortable look in my own eyes.
    “Mom, when do we eat?” I ask nervously, trying to ignore the camcorder. We’ve just eaten prasad at temple, but it never satisfies our hunger. Prasad feels more like an obligation than a meal.
    “ Beta , it vill be another fifteen minutes. Vhy don’t you go change your clothes and then study until it’s ready? Here—drink this.”
    “Okay,” I say, downing the murky concoction of vitamins that she gives me in a tall glass. I head for the foyer. My father follows. He has these stages when his affection for family life comes pouring forth. It’s nearly impossible to guess when this emotional display will occur, but when it does, it’s a full-on wave of giddiness. I can actually converse with him when he’s like this, even if it’s to berate him:
    “Dad, please don’t film me while I change!”
    “I’ll stop filming if you tell me your girlfriend’s name.” He laughs heartily, flipping