Chapter 2 Rupi
Two
Rupi
My clients often cry when I’m done with them.
Not because of the pain they feel when I give them what they ask for, but because what I give them is always far, far better than anything they imagined.
The lady with silver curls and dark kohl-lined eyes lets out another sob as she slips me a twenty-dollar tip. It’s her first time.
A first tattoo is like opening the floodgates to owning your body, claiming your skin, letting yourself flirt with being edgy.
The fact that there isn’t much space left on my body where my ink hasn’t made its mark says all anyone needs to know about me.
The client is already talking about the next tattoo she wants.
The watercolor I gave her today is a Medusa—the universal symbol of surviving sexual assault.
The woman is sixty-seven. Something about the fact that she is only now getting her Medusa makes me want to scream with rage.
Rage is how I’ve always processed sadness.
“Do you have an Instagram page? I’d love to take a picture and tag you,” she says. “You’re such a great artist. I want everyone to know about you.”
“No.” I want to laugh. Social media is the surest way to get caught when you’re hiding. “I don’t do pictures.” I don’t make eye contact and keep my gaze just over the woman’s shoulder, my expression blank.
It works. Her face does the thing I’m hoping for. It registers a hint of sympathy, followed by a flight response. She’s identified me as someone who’s a little “off.” She backs away and leaves.
This is why I love Americans. They respect your space.
Or they run from discomfort. Whichever it is, I’ll take it.
In India, where I grew up, people stop you in the street to point out anything that marks you as different.
If you have a scar, they look straight at it and ask how you got it.
If they think you’re overweight, they offer unsolicited diet tips.
When we were young, my little sister had a severe stammer.
Every single person she ever met pointed it out.
They either outright imitated it to her face, or they expressed sympathy and provided advice.
Simi hated confrontation, so it had fallen on me to tell every single one of those assholes to go to hell and mind their own business.
That’s my special skill. I have a full arsenal of weapons to get people to go away. And yet I can’t seem to stop being hunted. Perpetually and relentlessly, I’ve been hunted all my life. That might sound dramatic, but it’s true. Unlike my sister, I don’t hide from the truth. Only from people.
If you really want to be left alone, stop getting into trouble to seek attention. Those were my mother’s go-to lines for me. Our very own bonding words. Parents give us several gifts, but the ones that burrow deepest and stick longest are when they tell us exactly why we’re not enough.
As soon as the client leaves, I yank off my mask, then the glasses I don’t need and the Chicago Bears cap that makes my scalp sweat.
I run my fingers through my short-cropped hair, airing out the sweaty strands and making them stand up in spikes.
My arm cramps, and I stretch it out. Medusa took a good six hours of head-down labor.
I push a window open and stick my face out, letting Chicago’s famed wind cool me down. I’ve spent one winter here, and it’s the only time in my life that my body felt as cold on the outside as it does on the inside.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I memorize the Medusa I sent out into the world today, her many snake heads alert and ready to strike at any threat.
Feminine anger in all its inexhaustible, indomitable, multitudinous glory.
Distrustful and alert, with as many fighting heads and watchful eyes as there are threats.
In other words, she’s every woman I’ve ever known.
I watch the hordes of tourists and locals walking along Michigan Avenue, with the powder blue lake beyond shimmering all the way to the horizon.
Bikes whiz by and dodge pedestrians on paths that crisscross the park.
A man with a thick mustache stares up at the building.
It’s a common sight: tourists and locals alike marveling at the Romanesque-style building constructed in 1887 to be a carriage factory.
His gaze stops when it finds mine. My heartbeat slows.
He doesn’t know me.
It’s just some tourist.
This closet-size room I’ve been living in for six months is in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building. It’s often on the list of “hidden gems” that locals share with visiting friends.
The man keeps staring.
I pull away from the window, my heart fluttering against the cage of my ribs. This isn’t a residential building. I only live here, in the tattoo studio, because I’m sleeping with my boss . . . Another theme that’s become pretty consistent in my life.
When I came to America two years ago, I believed with my whole heart that I was going to break my old patterns.
I was going to finally take my mother’s advice after her death and stop getting into trouble.
I’d made a list of all the things I was going to do differently.
The only thing that should have been on that list was learning how to turn invisible.
The only proof that Rupi Naik still exists in this world is the tattoos I’ve inked into clients, and that’s how I want it.
When I got to Chicago, it had been a year and a half since I held a tattoo gun.
I hadn’t touched one since I fled Mumbai.
Then I ran into Matthew on the brown line in Chicago.
I was slipping in and out of sleep (the only way I ever sleep), and my flannel shirt had popped a button, exposing the tangled mermaids on my belly.
I caught him staring with his startlingly green eyes.
When I slipped past him and got off the train, he followed me.
My hand was on my penknife, but when he complimented my tattoos, I surprised myself by telling him I’d done them myself.
Then he surprised me by offering me a job if I taught him how to ombre a color like that.
He threw in a place to stay, because obviously I looked like I didn’t have one.
It had been three days since I’d eaten, and I really didn’t want to add food theft to my crime repertoire, so I accepted. After spending six months traveling from city to city on buses, trains, and foot, I needed to rest for just a moment.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve found something good after running away.
A silver lining, a golden egg, a pot of treasure at the end of a rainbow.
So what if the relief is short lived? The gray clouds always return, the goose is impossible to keep alive, and the rainbow inevitably moves as soon as the gold comes into view.
That small respite has still always made running away worth the trouble.
When I was a girl, running and hiding meant protecting my sister and myself, but I also got a little addicted to watching the lumbering, drunk asshole we were hiding from lose.
Giving those who wanted to hurt us the slip was even better than the high of watching the ink do exactly what I want under human skin and turning it into an inadvertent and unsuspecting canvas.
It’s time to give it up again, to run once more.
I pull away from the window and wait in the shadows to see if the man staring up at the building moves on. It takes him a while, but he finally looks away and starts walking. He digs a phone out of his pocket and pulls it to his ear.
I jump into action, my body moving at the speed of my flight response.
I grab my backpack, a hand-me-down from my last boss, Ron Komar.
I’m wearing the only pair of jeans I own and one of the two black Underground Tattoo T-shirts Matthew gave me when I first started here.
I cast a glance around the room that’s been my home for six months.
The place where I got to do what I love.
My work is the only thing that I’ve loved with my whole heart that’s loved me back without demanding a price.
I’ve learned as much from Matthew as he’s learned from me. About inking, at least. The sex was absolutely ordinary. Even fifty-year-old Ron Komar had better moves. Now the asshole is back to haunt me. Why don’t the dead ever stay dead?
I pull on my shoes. “Running shoes,” our mother used to call sneakers. A laugh bursts from me. Thanks for the laugh, Ma!
I hook the backpack on my shoulder, and as if on cue, the landline rings. It’s the number listed on the internet. If I’m going to run, I should at least know why I’m running. I answer.
“If you’re on the run, why would you stand at the window like a call girl in Amsterdam?”
I haven’t spoken to her since I came to this country, but I recognize the voice only too well. Tina Komar sounds exactly like she did when she teamed up with her husband to entice me into coming to LA: bright and friendly and high as a kite.
“Return the stuff you stole, or I’m going to have to turn you in to the cops,” she says.
“If you were going to turn me in, you would have done it already. But to hire a private investigator to find me is pretty desperate.” I thank my lucky stars for taking the documents when I stole her jewelry.
“Just return the stuff you stole from me, damn it!”
The glee I feel at her frustration is a moment of light in the darkness, and I soak it up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m pretty sure you do.”