17. Noa
NOA
“Morning!” Claire the PA pops up in my personal space like a caffeinated jack-in-the-box. I’m pretty sure this level of enthusiasm at five thirty a.m. violates the Geneva Convention. “Ready for your road trip?”
“I’m ready to file a labor complaint,” I smile.
She laugh-shepherds me to hair and makeup. “Aarti nixed the straightening today, she said we gotta keep the curls.”
I don’t have time to ponder the meaning behind that directive because two women suddenly descend upon me with fluffy powder brushes. Claire disappears in their talcum smokescreen.
An hour later, Marcus the sound guy wires me up with practiced efficiency. “Rule numero uno: mic is always hot. Take it off before you deal with the aftermath of lunch.”
Before I can unpack that horror, Aarti appears in ripped jeans and a Blondie tee, twirling keys like she’s in a music video.
“Ready to cruise?”
She leads me to the parking lot which hosts a vintage cherry-red convertible fit for Guy Fieri.
“This is very bus route of you,” I deadpan.
“I contain multitudes.” She runs her hand along the hood. “V8 engine, rally pack gauges–”
“Are you seriously explaining car specs to me right now? You gonna show me your golf clubs next?”
She laughs. “Fine, I’m a walking late-night host cliché. Get in, hater.”
The camera crew follows as we peel out. I keep a death-grip on my door handle because Aarti drives like she’s fleeing a crime scene.
“So what’s the angle here?” I ask as she rockets onto Los Feliz Boulevard, trying to ignore the microphone taped to my chest.
“We drive, we listen to music that shaped me, you ask your flavor psychic questions or whatever.”
“My flavor psychic questions?”
“You know what I mean.” She fiddles with the stereo. “Ready?”
Magenta’s voice comes over the walkie in the cupholder. “Rolling!”
“Action,” Aarti says, wiggling her eyebrows.
The opening beats of “Maahi Ve” fill the car. Aarti moves to the rhythm, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping her thigh.
“First stop, 2003,” she says over the music. “This dance was everywhere after the movie Kal Ho Naa Ho came out. Every desi party, every cousin’s wedding, every time my parents had friends over. Preity Zinta is… very talented.” I swear she growls in gay.
“What were parties like?” I ask, reaching for the first question that can get my mind off of Aarti’s queer childhood crush.
“Utter chaos,” she grins. “Someone’s mom would always end up grabbing the mic for karaoke to absolutely destroy a classic.”
“Did your mom sing?”
“My mom?” Aarti laughs, taking a sharp right. “She would sooner let Auntie Priya win at Teen Patti–and hell would freeze over before that happens. She’d dance, though. After enough wine, she’d grab my dad and they’d do the numbers they learned for their wedding.”
She turns up the volume during the instrumental break and pulls out some expressive hand gestures like a Bollywood starlet. I mimic her and she nods like I’m doing something right.
“What about you?” I ask. “Were you a performer then?”
“Always. I’d memorize comedy sketches from borrowed DVDs and perform them for literally anyone who would watch. My poor Nani… I think eventually she’d just turn her hearing aids off.”
Aarti reaches for the dial, jumping to the next track. The opening of "California Love" explodes through the speakers.
“Oh, hell yes,” she exclaims. “Whoever made this playlist rules.” She winks to the camera and I remember it’s there. She’s rapping along with Tupac’s opening verse and in the side mirror, I see the pass van keeping pace, but it feels distant, unimportant.
I watch, mesmerized, as she navigates the canyon curves while perfectly hitting every beat. She’s completely unselfconscious, using her whole body to emphasize the lyrics.
“What?” she asks, catching me staring. “Everyone in LA knows this song.”
“You’re different in cars. Freer,” I say without thinking. I’m sure they’ll cut that. Not funny, too familiar.
The song fades and Aarti shoots me a look.
“You want to pick?” she asks.
I protest. “This is about your ice cream.”
“And as my ice cream sidekick, I feel like we need to know you, too.” She grins and hands me her phone to scroll through music. I select Fiona Apple’s “Paper Bag.”
Aarti snorts. “Of course you’re a Fiona girl.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, nothing. Just very… Lilith Fair of you.”
I scrunch my nose. “Lili–what?”
Aarti laughs a little too loudly and I can tell I’ve said something wrong, but I’m not sure what it is. “You really did grow up under a rock, huh? How’d you even find Fiona?”
“She was one of, like, ten CDs at our public library in Washington.”
“Quaint.” Aarti pushes a few buttons on the stereo and “California Love” disrupts Fiona’s brooding.
“Wha–for real?” I object.
She seems to find it pretty amusing, her mouth twitching before she launches once more into Tupac’s verse.
I gesture at her full-body commitment to the song. “Should you be operating heavy machinery while doing… that?”
“I’m multimedia. Deal with it.”
We crest the canyon. Aarti lowers the volume fractionally as we stop at a red light.
“I used to drive this loop when insomnia won,” she admits. “Three a.m., four a.m. Whenever my brain wouldn’t shut up.”
“Jerky McGee,” I nod.
“Excuse me, whomst? ”
“Just my inner critic. You know,” I say.
“Do I.” She sighs.
“Next time you have a thought like that, just name it. Jerky McGee, Bully O’Burden, Shitty McWeeniepie.” I slap a hand to my mouth. “Can we bleep that?”
Aarti just laughs. “I like that. Shitty McWeeniepie. Fuck you, McWeeniepie!” She raises a fist in the air.
“EAT A DICK, SHITTY!” I yell into the echoing canyon, hands raised above my head.
The driver of a silver Volvo in the next lane shoots us a bewildered glare. The light changes and we lurch forward. I giggle like I’m in high school, on a joyride for the very first time.
“My therapist is going to be thrilled.”
Hours of filming later, I’ve learned so much about Aarti Nair’s musical tastes that I’m itching to get to the BFI for an evening brainstorm. She loves the sounds of her hometown, from Brian Wilson to Nipsey Hussle.
SoCal exports: avocado, citrus fruits, cactus flowers.
She gets a cute, smug look on her face when she can tell she’s usurped my expectations of her, transitioning from rapping along with To Pimp A Butterfly to belting Cher’s “Believe” at the top of her lungs.
Base notes that arrive later on the palate: the lingering apricot of an aged white wine, the robust cocoa bitterness of dark chocolate.
Aarti whips the car around a sluggish Prius with visible disgust.
“Where did you learn to drive? The Fast and Furious franchise?”
“Twenty in the left lane? Death penalty.”
“Note to self: never accept rides from comedians.”
She parallel parks at Echo Park Lake as the sun goes down.
“One of my first real sets was here,” she nods at the waterfront. “About being too ethnic for white kids, too assimilated for Indian kids, too female to be funny.”
“A triple threat.”
“Killed at that mic, ate shit everywhere else. But that one show…” She shrugs. “Gateway drug.”
“And look where you ended up.” I shake my head.
“This has been a PSA,” Aarti tells the camera. “Comedy: all the highs of drugs with half the felonies… So far.”
“And cut!” Madge says over the walkie. “Great job, you two. We’ve got lots to work with. That’s a wrap on the Sound shoot everyone! Roll back to the studio.”
Aarti unclips her mic pack with the ease of someone who’s done it a thousand times.
When she sees me struggling to do the same, she brushes my hands away.
She detangles the wires, reaching around my back in a one-armed almost-hug to detach the battery pack.
I hold my breath, as if inhaling the scent of her conditioner would be breaking some sort of rule.
She sits back. If she noticed me holding my breath, she doesn’t acknowledge it.
“Shall we?” She starts the engine.
As she drives us back to the studio, I’m acutely aware of the sudden lack of recording devices.
Somehow, it was simpler to feel at ease with her when we had a reason to perform amicability for the camera.
She was right at Arjun’s–getting over the nerves of being on TV isn’t reinventing the wheel.
But I didn’t anticipate that the moment we were off-camera would be its own nerve-inducing spiral.
Desperate to fill the newfound silence, I blurt out the one thing I’ve been dying to get clarity on.
“What’s Lilith Fair?”
Aarti lets out a surprised laugh. “That’s been plaguing you, huh?”
I nod.
“It was a women’s music festival in the late nineties. Sarah Maclachlan started it, and all the nineties icons played it–Jewel, Dido, Tracy Chapman.” She darts her eyes at me. “Your fave, Fiona.”
“That sounds… super gay,” I observe, my filter completely fucked after our long day.
Aarti laughs again. “No shit.”
“That’s why you backpedaled earlier?”
She shrugs. “I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”
It’s not an answer, but it sort of is. I want to ask her fifty more questions about her lesbian pop culture knowledge, pick her brain on what else she’s censored herself from acknowledging in her public persona.
Sure, I’ve known I was bi since forever, but I have a feeling that, closeted or not, Aarti Nair’s exposure to the queer zeitgeist growing up as a city kid was a lot more expansive than my sheltered upbringing allowed.
Instead, I pluck the phone off its mount and scroll through songs until I land on my other favorite track from When the Pawn , “Get Gone”.
Aarti nods along as the drums kick in to Fiona Apple’s growing indignation, and for a few perfect moments, we glide toward Hollywood listening to the soundtrack of my angsty teen years, like a couple regular people getting to know each other in any context more normal than the one we’re in.
And then she says: “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
I turn to her, my face burning before she’s even asked the question.
“So you… watched all my sketches, huh? You think I’m… what was it? ‘Aggravatingly funny?’” That triumphant smirk of hers makes my brain freeze.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” I mutter, but there’s no bite to it. For the first time, neither of us is trying to draw bloo– you-know-what . And somehow, that feels more dangerous than any of our fights ever have.