The Samosa or the Betty?

Jessie never thought of it as "losing my virginity." To her it was more like "losing my religion" as in R.E.M and bashing yourself up against a padded wall in an MTV studio. Ever since the age of twelve when her mother passed on a dog-eared copy of Fear of Flying, Jessie has sworn a silent oath never to stand on tippy-toe for any man, let alone get horizontal with him. Both feet planted securely on the ground, Jessie followed the pastel-coloured-boy-meets-girl-dramas of her classmates with the interest of a reformed addict whose guide to moral welfare is popular music. That is why when Sam, complete with her Cure regalia, introduced herself in the corridor between classes, Jessie agreed to extend the introduction.
From beneath her black, shiny hair, Jessie glimpsed dark eyeliner, purple lipstick, and a layer of white powder. "Look, sorry to bother you like this," she said, "but my brother is like really keen on you and maybe you'd consider meeting him. I know it's silly, and I wouldn't normally do this to you or any other woman, but he's getting on me fucking nerves," she blurted out and pulled at the split ends of her fringe to reveal more black, purple and white.
Sam was the first ever to have called Jessie a "woman." There was no one else in her limited circle of friends who had made the connection between Jessie's widening hips, enlarged chest and womanhood. Jessie always thought it would have been another ball game altogether had there been a father to share the responsibilities of child rearing with her mother. It wouldn't even have to be a father in the biological sense. Jessie wasn't fussed; she knew what decade she was living in. Just a male around the house would have made all the difference. As it was, Jessie's mother shunned the opposite sex and as far as she was concerned there hadn't been a male involved from the start, not even during conception. But Jessie's mum had been no Mary. In her distant youth, Jessie's mother had been a prostitute. She was now an organic food retailer. That was her joke. Her cracking the ice. Trafficking dead meat had made her a vegetarian. Something along those lines. Jessie usually got nauseous at that point of her mother's narrative and turned up the volume on her Walkman for lyrical support.
On their way to the smoking pit, Sam pointed out the obvious: "I hope you're not racist or anything. This isn't suntan." Jessie was about to reply something equally obvious when Sam added, "And if you think I'm dark you should see my brother! Me dad's from India and mum's a Yank, but we both got dad's colour. And, yeah, we've got a corner store, but here's where we are different 'cause we don't sell groceries, we're into videos – mostly porn, Packie-porn with sing-song music and women hiding behind the trees. My brother's not into that kind of music though. He plays the guitar and fancies himself a bit of a rock star..."
Halfway through that bit of genealogy, Jessie and Sam found themselves in the smoking pit getting assessed by the smokers. One of them isolated himself from the group and approached them languidly, almost reluctantly. Brother and sister exchanged looks and then brother broke the silence and offered Jessie a cigarette that she had to refuse, not knowing the mechanics.
Blowing a thin circle of smoke over her head, he asked what her name was.
At this point, it must be inserted that Jessie did suffer a terrible blow shortly after her birth that by those inclined to make things out of things like this would definitely constitute branding. She was given the name Jezebel, otherwise known as the Whore of Babylon.
"That's fucking brilliant!" croaked Sam and gave her a tap on the back.
"I'm Johnny," said her brother.
"No it's not!" said Sam with a sadistic smile on her lips. "It just so happens that this guy's ashamed of who he is, isn't that right, Jaweed?"
Jezebel who had been ashamed of who she was for as long as she could remember, lent him a sympathetic smile which was more like something you would find pasted on the face of the chronically ill.
"Let's get the fuck out of here!" said Johnny and flicked the cigarette on the ground.

Johnny was a poet, but until he could make money on his songs, he worked in his father's business. Only sporadically did he go to school. What Sam had said about their father's video shop proved to be somewhat of an understatement. He didn't actually own one shop: he owned a whole chain of them. Together with Johnny Jaweed's uncle, he catered for the movie consumption of the entire Indian community in London. He owned his fortunate disposition to excellent contacts with the production companies in Bombay. Thanks to them, his customers were guaranteed new releases at the same time as their relatives back home. In fact, sometimes they were watching Indian films before they had even been released in India.
Despite or perhaps because of his success, Johnny only referred to his dad in the most derogatory terms as he represented everything that Johnny tried to get away from – his Indian origins and the family enterprise. The lack of communication between his father and himself was fortunately well compensated for through Johnny's relationship with his mother. Vivienne adored her son more than anything else on the face of the earth to the point that she would secretly take money from her husband to support her son's opulent lifestyle. And Johnny Jaweed adored her back, in an angular, robust sort of way.
When asked what it was about his mother that inspired such devotion, Johnny needed only one word: "artist." Her artistry consisted of two achievements: having acted as a body-double for a famous Indian actress in Bombay in the early 70s and having had a song dedicated to her by Billy Joel. As it were, her career was unexpectedly cut short through meeting and falling in love with an assistant director.
When Jessie was first introduced to Vivienne by way of Johnny ushering her into the master bedroom, she thought the woman must have been suffering from a serious illness. Vivienne received her on a bed that was so big that Jessie had to get on it in order to take the hand that was extended to her. She was overweight, very pale, heavily made-up, and dressed in a purple, velvet pyjamas. She addressed her son "my little brown baby" and pouted her lips to him for a kiss that he duly gave her under loud protests, obviously meant for Jessie's benefit.
The master bedroom was the nerve centre of the family. This was where decisions were made, problems discussed, money distributed, and guests entertained. When Jessie was introduced, Vivienne's visiting sister from America happened to be at the other end of the bed.
"That's because there's nothing to see hon," explained Vivienne when Aunt Mazie asked why she hadn't been shown around London.
"Your mother's unbelievable, Johnny! The only place she knows is the milkbar down the street," said Aunt Mazie.
"Wrong, auntie! She has never set her foot there. They actually deliver her daily dose of smokes and cherry chocolates. She's the laziest woman on earth, aren't you mum?" jeered Johnny and squeezed his mother's fat foot that was poking out of the silk doona cover.
"Oh, shut up you two!" said Vivienne. "There, be a good boy and massage my toes a little."
Shortly afterwards, Johnny and Jessie excused themselves. Aunt Mazie gave them a knowing look and whispered something in Vivienne's ear after which they both burst out laughing. It wasn't the easiest place for petting, but you could get away with it, if you didn't mind the jokes and the looks. It was, in any case, considerably better than at Jessie's mum who interrupted every attempt at nudity with a stern knock on the door and the offer of fresh pumpkin muffins.
The walls at Johnny Jaweed's were painted in smoky colours, there were silk cushions to lounge on, embroidered cloths smelling strongly of incense were draped over every piece of furniture, an open fire burned even in the middle of summer, the heavy silk curtains were perpetually drawn, and there was the sound of sitar music occasionally pierced by Sam's melancholic rock.

On her sixteenth birthday, Jessie woke up and got dressed as usual and sauntered down to the kitchen where her mother was assembling barley burgers for lunch that day. The usual constellation of parsnippy women was coming over with their gossip from the latest dream-therapy session and their crushes on kineteologists with albino eyes.
"I've told everyone to bring something edible for you instead of presents. It's such a waste getting things you're not going to like anyway."
"Ta, I'm off to see Johnny," came Jessie's reply.

Wearing a more festive pyjama top, Vivienne had transferred into the kitchen where she was exchanging snippets about her own Sweet Sixteen with Aunt Mazie to whom Sam was dictating how to make samosas. Johnny looked suspiciously at the mixture his sister was enthusiastically filling in the dough.
"This," Sam stuck a sticky piece of dough in his face, "is where you come from!"
Johnny Jaweed duly contemplated the mass and then said: "Give me Betty Crocker anytime."
Vivienne smiled endearingly at her son who like her appreciated the finest of American culinary traditions.
"I can't believe you'd rather eat that filthy shit than something that belongs to your own culture."
Their father now looked equally endearingly at his hot-tempered daughter.
It occurred to Jessie that he and Vivienne rarely had to talk to each other when they had children who were young enough and had the strength to sort out the ethnic dilemmas in their place.
Despite the crudities exchanged, everyone was in a celebratory mood. Johnny's dad had taken the day off to be with his family and even Sam could not hide the softer side of her personality to Jessie who for a moment feared that they had all talked about her virginal predicament in greater detail than she would've wished.
Partly because she had eavesdropped on enough of her mother's conversations with her women's group to know that it only meant something if you yourself instigate it and partly because she wasn't about to repeat the samosa assembling under Sam's critical eye, Jessie took Johnny Jaweed's hand and led him to the bedroom where she stripped him of his clothes and laid him down horizontally on the single bed with the bed sheet made from a print of flying helicopters. It took another ten minutes before she extricated herself from his grip and another five until she was standing in the kitchen again with both feet once again firmly planted on the linoleum floor.
It was Johnny's dad who broke the silence by extending a plate of fried samosas to Jessie and inviting her to sample one. Jessie, for no reason at all, except perhaps relief and a sense of being at the beginning of a new refrain, began to giggle. A chorus broke out, led by Sam's guttural laughter, quickly followed by Aunt Mazie who popped a champagne bottle, and Vivienne who produced a Betty Crocker cupcake out of nowhere with the numbers one and six on it.
After two samosas, one Betty Crocker cupcake, and half a guilty thought about the barley burgers at home, Johnny's dad asked: "Eh, Jessie, what do you like most – the samosa or the Betty?” Vivienne, Sam, and Aunt Mazie looked at her expectantly. Not wanting to be partisan to any domestic cause over another, she was carefully thinking over her options when Johnny Jaweed came to the rescue:
"Can't you morons tell? – She loves them both just as much."