Mytrae Meliana - Brown Skin Girl: An Indian-American Womans Magical Journey From Broken To Beautiful

1985

I will return to what I love. To music. To Evan. To my life in graduate school at Chapel Hill. To Beethovens Opus 110, Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Haydn, and Mozarts Concerto in C Major. To my graduate recital and concerto competition next year. To my cozy attic apartment on Tenney Circle. I will return. Soon. I just need to hold on for three months.

Ive been chanting this mantra since yesterday.

Since everything shattered like a crystal bowl.

I must talk with him one last time.

I have to go to the bathroom, I tell Amma, my mother, after we check in at Delta Airlines at JFK airport in New York. I walk purposefully to a pay phone some distance away where, hopefully, she cant see me.

I check the flight monitors. Only an hour before we board. JFKs as crowded as a farmers market and I weave my body, brushing a shoulder here and there, through the rush of travelers to get to the bank of phones. Announcements of departing and arriving flights, snippets of conversations in New York, Southern, and California accents, German, Hindi, and Chinese swirl around me.

My hands tremble as I pick up the receiver. I imagine him waiting anxiously in his Chapel Hill apartment, his lean face and lithe body strung out as he paces tight as a wire in his two rooms. From the corner of my left eye I see Amma, in black polyester pants and a maroon baggy sweater, watching me like a hungry cat. She wont give me a minute alone. I twist away so I dont see her. My eyes sweep over crowds of other Indian travelers reminding me, with irritation, that Im one of them.

My fingers press the cold steel numbered buttons. My tongue, dry with worry and determination, tastes metallic and sticks to the roof of my mouth.

Evan answers after one ring.

Hi, Evan, I say in a rush.

Hi, love. His honey-like tenor is taut. The sound of him is home. Im so worried about you. Are you really going?

Its only three months. We can do it. You know we can. I imagine his brown eyes, his arms around me. I need to hold on to this moment, to his voice, to us .

Of course. But d on t you see? They wont let you come back.

They will. They cant take me away from my education! Our familys god is education. Amma always made sure I went to the best schools. Though she loves a beautiful home, my parents did without much furniture when we immigrated six years ago so they could pay for my college tuition.

I dont trust them. Don t leave, Mytrae! Cant you go to the bathroom and flush your passport down the toilet? Or throw it in the trash?

Amma has it with her. Theres no way shell give it to me.

Walk away, then. Dont get on that plane, whatever you do, love. Do something, anything.

His frantic voice makes me doubt myself. But this is the only way I know. Do what I dont want to ultimately get what I do want. They said if I stay in India for three months and still want to be with him, theyll let us be together. Just like they made me minor in Computer Science, when I wanted to major in music. I sigh, winding and unwinding the metallic phone cord around my fingers.

Hes not Indian. He doesnt understand how we need our parents permission for everything.

My shoulders tighten with decision. Im doing this for us. Ill call and write to you while Im there. Theyre announcing our flight. I have to go. I love you, Evan.

Always remember, I love you, he says slowly, deliberately, like he wants me to really know it. And hold on to it. Goodbye, my love.

Bye, Evan. I hang up, lean my forehead against the pay phone. Three months will be unbearable.

I walk back to Amma, feeling the thick rope between us and beyond us. It ties us to Daadi, my grandmother, then spools century upon century through my female ancestors to the very beginning of time. It wraps and knots around my waist, and hangs heavy, like lengths and lengths of six-foot saris. It binds us. It defines us. However different we all are, because of it we are the same.