ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: “Stardust & Destiny” by Vandana Khanna + Bonus Interview

Vandana Khanna

Stardust & Destiny

Meena wakes with a dry mouth and swirls of blue-black marks on the back of her hand—a fake bruise indicating every club or bar that she’d been to over the weekend. The previous nights’ restless revelry resulting in a cluster of them blooming on her skin like a garden. From dimly lit Karaoke bars with mechanical bulls to slick rooftop pools overlooking the glittering eyes of the city, each entrance was accompanied with the coveted slash of belonging. Meena even ended up at the club where that teen actor from her childhood had died of an overdose. It had a faded grey awning and a grim, nondescript interior. The floors were predictably sticky. She’d been disappointed with how ordinary it all seemed next to the bright-hot glitter of the Strip. 

Weekend after weekend, sometimes starting on Thursdays or Wednesdays even, Meena would find herself tucked up in some dark corner booth or under the blinking lights of a dance floor. She’d close her eyes and let the alchemy of it rise up around her—the lights, the music, the throb of alcohol rushing through her like a warm wave until she was suspended above the chaos in her own cloud of sound and movement.

Most nights, Meena didn’t mind hanging back on a barstool watching the constellation of people orbiting around her, the delicious heat of bodies pressing up against each other. This is what she’d driven four days cross country for—the stardust and desperation, the electric current that vibrated through the air. The possibility that the ordinary could turn bizarre in a second like when she ended up standing in the fruit aisle next to an aging rocker that she’d listened to in high school. Meena watched as his long, silver-ringed fingers grabbed at the organic apples that she couldn’t afford. 

Sometimes, she’d watch the cute bartenders mix god-awful vodka tonics to pass the time while her roommate, Jennifer, who went by Celine when they went out, would follow the trail of actors and directors from one end of Sunset to the other, armed with her too short skirt and kohl-lined eyes. Once, while Meena waited for Jennifer to get them into the VIP section, a soap actor that she recognized mistook her for a Telenovela star and offered to meet her in the bathroom in five minutes. Meena liked his dimpled chin, his bright teeth, but thought about the actual realities of a pseudo-dive bar bathroom in West Hollywood and passed.   

Meena knew as she packed up her hand-me-down Camry in her parents’ driveway in Virginia that LA was her last chance to get away from her most recent failure—mainly her broken engagement to Ravi. Her parents were disappointed at all the time they’d wasted cultivating the match since she’d been a freshman in college. 

“I’m never going to understand what’s going through your mind,” her mother said, shaking her head. Meena watched as she dumped the freshly fried pakoras straight into the trashcan, the ones she’d spent the morning filling and folding with such care, specifically for Ravi. In the end, the engagement ring swelled around her finger stubbornly and Meena had to walk outside into the cold front yard for the metal to loosen its grip. 

She imagined herself bending with the weight of all those expectations and disappointments, like the way her grandmother’s back curved with age, her torso perpetually bowing towards the ground. And that’s when she knew she needed to get out of town, so Meena lied and told her parents that she’d gotten a fellowship to study in LA, even though she hadn’t made it past the first round. Her only other chance to escape was grad school, but in the end, Meena couldn’t afford it. Anyway, who wanted classrooms overlooking cornfields when she could have Hollywood and Silver Lake? The beaches of Malibu? Meena had only made it to the beach twice since she’d arrived, but still, the rippling blue, the white-washed waves were waiting for her. And wasn’t that enough? 

When she was younger, Meena thought she wanted to be a writer, spent most of her nights and weekends reading and desperately scribbling into a spiral notebook, while her parents worked double shifts at the airport. But most of her “writing” was comprised of weird poems and images that came to her in a rush but didn’t make much sense when she re-read them later. Her computer’s cursor blinked like an accusation, and she never got past the first few lines of anything. But LA, with its palm trees strung with Christmas lights year-round, LA had promise. 

Sometimes, Meena felt like her life was an ancient Sanskrit prayer she’d memorized as a child—mouthing the words, but not knowing what each one meant. She learned that she was good at going through the motions. She felt certain that whatever spell that was holding her back could be broken in LA. So, when Jennifer called her late at night after a bad breakup, begging her again to come out, she started making plans. 

When she’d first moved to town, Meena signed up with a temp company in the hopes of landing an assistant job at one of the big agencies. But who knew you needed a law degree and a manicure to be the third assistant to the head of a company that never seemed to produce anything. Meena knew almost immediately that she hadn’t gotten the job when she looked over at the first and second assistants with their smooth, pale pink fingernails and equally smooth blowouts. 

The blonde one had given her a cool half-smile and said, “I like your eyebrows.” 

Meena had splurged on a J. Crew tank dress that she thought made her look boxy but professional. Later, as she recounted the whole awkward encounter to Jennifer, she shrugged with a practiced indifference she didn’t really feel. 

“I’d just end up being the phone bitch for three years and reading terrible scripts every night. Definitely not the plan.” Although, if pressed to answer, what the actual plan was, Meena wasn’t sure she knew. She put the dress in the back of her closet, knowing it wasn’t even worth reselling. 

Instead, Meena ended up substitute teaching at the local middle school. Every Monday through Friday, she’d put on the same drab uniform of brown flats, khakis, and a powder blue Oxford in the hopes of keeping the classroom of twelve-year-olds from erupting into full-blown anarchy. There was something terrifying about all those sets of eyes watching her, maybe more now as an adult than it ever did when she herself was in middle school. Her memory of those years seemed to involve an endless process of plucking, shaving, or curling. She remembered feeling anxious and exhausted all of the time. Meena knew she’d reached peak LA when one of her students, a girl with stick-straight lavender hair and heavy eyeliner, pointed to the black slash on her hand. “Fun night, huh,” the girl said with a knowing smirk. 

The first sign that the air was hissing out of her magical LA bubble came when Jennifer didn’t book the tampon commercial she’d had a callback for, and they had to start prioritizing which nights to go out. Neither one of them wanted to admit that the ride might be over, so they stood in front of the bathroom mirror applying mascara and lipstick with a stony determination. The second sign was when Meena had ended up seeing a psychic on Wilshire. 

The woman had soft hands and a bad dye job. They sat in a cramped room with green velvet curtains and a burnt orange couch. The psychic peered down at Meena’s palm and took a few deep breaths as if to calm herself, or maybe to get into a trance. While the psychic spoke in vague sentences about “negativity” and someone from “the other side” trying to reach her, Meena did the fake-serious nod she’s been practicing since she was thirteen and the “Aunties” would come over. The women in chiffon saris and Dr. Scholl’s sandals who came around for tea and gossip, who’d try to figure out Meena’s whole essence in the thirty seconds it took to look her up and down. Did she stay home Friday nights and watch Silsila with her parents or did she roll up her uniform skirt in the school bathroom before first period? Was she a good girl who learned how to make round chapatis or a troublemaker who’d date American boys and lie about it? In time, Meena came to find out that she was a little bit of both. 

She and Jennifer had just finished brunch, hung over and slightly jittery from two lattes, when Jennifer had pulled her towards the neon sign. 

“Come on. We walk by this place all the time. Let’s go in.” 

Meena shrugged. “You know it’s just a scam,” she said but followed Jennifer through the door. 

Meena didn’t really have an opinion about psychics or palm readers because she’d grown up with parents who called back to Delhi before every major life decision to find out what the astrologers thought. Whether it was asking for a promotion or buying a new car, the stars were the final decision-makers. She’d seen when those calls worked out, like buying the car…and when they didn’t—like asking for a raise. Those same stars had told her parents to leave their home, travel all the way across the world so that they could work harder than they ever had before. So they could dream about their past in full color, the flavors from their mothers’ kitchens still haunting their tongues. Meena considered her relationship with the stars complicated. She thought of herself as a skeptic who was unwilling to piss the cosmos off by pressing too hard for answers. 

She was slightly nervous waiting for Jennifer’s session to finish—the psychic meeting with them separately. When it was Meena’s turn, she sat perched on the ratty couch, a little nauseous by all the loud orange and green surrounding her or maybe it was the memory of the third tequila shot she’d had the night before. She felt like she was sitting on the inside of a mango or some other hot, heavy fruit. A wall-unit air conditioner chugged loudly, barely making a dent in the late August heat that beat against the windows. 

Meena shivered and waited for the prophecies to fall from the psychic’s bright pink mouth. 

“You are searching for something,” the woman said quietly, peering at the lines on Meena’s palms. Meena imagines that she can feel actual heat boring into her skin and almost snatches her hand back. 

The woman could’ve said anything and it wouldn’t have mattered. Not really. Some part of her knew that whatever the psychic “predicted” would likely not be true, or else she’d have to twist the events of her life in such a way as to make even a small part of it true. Later, as Meera stared off the balcony of her condo, overlooking the small, defeated pool and beat-up plastic loungers, she thought about those astrologers thousands of miles away in their tiny offices next to a tailor shop or the paan stall. Did they even look out at the night sky anymore? Or was it all charts and mathematical equations? The soft science of analyzing the composition of a face and reading someone’s destiny from the space between their eyes?

Thirty years into their immigration and her parents still believed. So it was, in fact, a shock when Meena’s mother called and told her that her father had died of a heart attack, his second one since she was a teenager. Wasn’t this written somewhere in all of those charts? Or in the silver-scatter of stars overlooking some distant, noisy city? And why hadn’t one of these present-day oracles predicted this? Warned of clogged arteries, of faulty valves not opening and closing on time? 

Meena went home for the funeral and cremation, and came back to LA within a week, using the non-existent fellowship as an excuse. “If I don’t go back, I’ll never finish,” she told her mother before hugging her goodbye and driving cross country for the second time in a year. She wanted to tell her mother the truth, that she had to leave because she couldn’t breathe in the house anymore, felt the walls constrict the minute she walked into the tight pocket of her childhood bedroom with its one tiny window. 

The first night home Meena dreamed that she was back in India during her summer break. She was a child again, sent to the grandparents while her parents worked. She’d woken up in a sweat, the electricity having kicked off sometime during the night, an almost daily occurrence during her visit. Her grandparent’s house was covered in a black silence – no streetlights or whir of overhead fan. Meena remembers the particular panic of unending darkness, no bend of light to offer relief. She woke from her dream to her breath catching painfully in her chest. She flicked her bedside lamp on and off to make sure she was still in her narrow twin bed in her too small room in Virginia. 

On the way back out west, Meena stopped only to pee and eat soggy hamburgers in the parking lot, sleeping in motels right off the highway, where she securely fit a chair under the doorknob before she went to bed. She wore a baseball cap pulled down over her ponytail, a suggestion from her mother who lived as if always expecting disaster. But then, hadn’t the biggest disaster already happened, and no one could do anything about it? Maybe this trip back to LA was some desperate attempt to outrun her fate that had been written in the stars for thousands of years? Meena wasn’t sure how it all worked – something to do with celestial calculations and the stardust hidden in some corner of her body, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d made a mistake but didn’t know how to undo it. 

Meena thought briefly about calling those astrologers in Delhi, maybe the same ones that those famous Bollywood actors used. Just to see if there was a sign hidden in some faraway galaxy that would help her figure things out. Some planetary movement that spoke to her as she stood staring off at the distant Santa Monica Mountains. But maybe they had it all wrong. Maybe the alignment of some distant star’s glitter couldn’t predict what would happen next—never could. Maybe the long distance between stardust and destiny still remained a mystery that no one knew how to read. That even those seers were just pretending. Some patterns taking a hundred years or more to form. And really, who knew what might happen in the meantime?

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Vandana Khanna is the author of three collections of poetry and her poems, fiction, and essays have been published in The New Republic, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Fiction Southeast, Phoebe, and in the Sunday Short Reads section of Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry has won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Her essays and short fiction have been finalists for the Flash Essay Contest in Sweet: A Literary Confection and in the Raleigh Review Flash Fiction Contest.

Troylon Griffin II is a writer, editor, and lover of philosophy and learning. He has worked as a reporter and editor for the award-winning newspaper The Signal where he won awards for his blogs Second Thoughts and The Empire Writes Back. He received his bachelor’s in Communication from the University of Houston Clear Lake and is currently pursuing his master’s in Literature at the University of Houston Clear Lake. Griffin spends his time writing fiction and poetry he plans to share with the world one day.