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‘Hey, girlie,' Olga would say. ‘How
come your one eye is smaller than the other? It makes you look like a
cockeyed crow or something.'

‘A cockeyed crow?' someone else would
repeat. ‘Olga, men, you are too much sometimes.' And I
would swallow the hatred for Olga that lodged like a pebble in my
throat and smile appreciatively at Olga's wit.

And then one day, I decided to change. I stood
before the bathroom sink at home and decided it was time to put an
end to the jokes. I wasn't exactly sure how to shatter this
mould, this role of the good-natured buffoon that I was getting
typecast as, but I knew that if I were to maintain a shred of
self-respect it had to end.

So I did a revolutionary thing. The next time Olga
made a wisecrack about my legs being so short that God should've
thrown in a ladder for free, here's what I did: Nothing. I did
not join the others in their laughter. I did not join in the chorus
of praise of how clever and funny Olga was. Instead, I simply stood
there looking at her unsmilingly, my face as blank as chalkboard.

And Olga panicked. The ground beneath her feet had
shifted, some small, as yet invisible, cracks had appeared where she
stood, but she could not detect what had changed. She knew that
something was different, that the balance of power had somehow
seesawed away from her but she could not put a finger on it. She
looked at me uneasily, as if it was dawning on her for the first time
that she needed my complicity, my fawning affability, for her to hold
on to her position of power. Actually, watching the various
emotions—unease, distrust, embarrassment, fear—flit
across Olga's round face, it dawned on me for the first time
how much Olga needed me to build her up. I felt something akin to the
heroin rush of power.

‘What's up, men?' Olga said, in
a desperate attempt to stop the transfer of this invisible force from
her to me. ‘Why are you scowling like some dirty fisherwoman?'

I felt a second's panic at this open
challenge. But then, I remembered my resolution from a few days ago
and when I spoke my voice was even and thankfully free of the
emotional tremor that it usually carried. ‘Oh sorry,' I
said. ‘I just didn't think what you said was funny,
that's all.'

Olga spat out a comeback and spent the next few
days trying desperately to recapture her old glory, but the tide had
changed. And I had had my first lesson in the power of transformative
change.

By eighth grade, I am one of the most popular kids
in the class. The nuns love me because I come up with original songs
to celebrate all their feasts and saint's days, the teachers
are fond of me because I spend the afternoon recess coaching the
‘slow' girls in history and English and my friends show a
bemused admiration for my willingness to never refuse a dare.

And then Jenny arrives from New York.

J
ENNY IS ACTUALLY THREE YEARS older than
most of us but she has been placed in the eighth grade because
everybody knows that the education she received in America is far
inferior to ours. There are rumours that her brother in New York
shipped her back to Bombay after finding her half-naked with her
boyfriend, a rumour that immediately makes her seem like a goddess
from a different planet. We all marvel at the incon-gruity of Jenny's
New York sophistication and her simple, elderly parents whom we see
occasionally at school. Jenny's parents are Catholics from
Kerala and her mother is a shy, in-trovertish woman who barely speaks
a word of English.

Jenny is anything but simple or shy. With her
American accent, her constant gum chewing and her casual slang, she
is a colourful burst of glamour in the school where most of us have
known each other for years. She is also very beautiful, with dark
chocolate skin and thick jet-black hair that rests in bangs that come
up to the edge of her large, black eyes. Unlike the rest of us, she
is always popping candies and chocolates in her mouth but the sugar
has not eaten into her large, white, perfect teeth. She talks
differently than us, referring to the loo as the ‘restroom'
and ordering a ‘pop' instead of a soft drink. She also
drives the nuns crazy with her insistence on wearing her uniform
short enough to display her muscular thighs. While the rest of us
wear our white socks up to our calves, Jenny comes to school wearing
ankle socks. Within weeks, we are all folding our socks at the ankle.

Our first conversation is about music. In a
fortunate happen-stance Jenny and I ride the same school-bus, she
getting on about twenty minutes before I do. ‘Hey girl, I liked
that crack you made in Mr Singh's class yesterday,' Jenny
says to me one day, rolling her ‘r' as she says ‘girl',
just like they do in Hollywood movies. ‘Say, somebody mentioned
to me that you're into rock-and-roll. What kind of bands do you
like?'

But when I say the Beatles, Jenny seems
disappointed. ‘Oh yeah, they're all right. But what about
newer stuff, like, for instance, do you like Deep Purple?'

‘Yeah, I like him a lot,' I lie.

Jenny looks embarrassed. ‘Um, actually, it's
a group.'

I feel my ears turning red. I am convinced that
this glamorous American girl who is three years older than I am, will
have nothing to do with me after this, having seen me for the
impost-or, for the wannabe hipster that I am. So I'm pleasantly
surprised when I board the school-bus the following morning and Jenny
hands me a copy of Deep Purple's
Burn
. ‘Here,'
she says lightly. ‘I brought this in for you to borrow. Check
it out and tell me if you like it.'

I check it out. I like it. I ask her if she'd
like to borrow some of my albums and she offhandedly says she'll
get off the school-bus with me one evening and check out my
collection. I am charmed by this casual informality that does not
wait to be invited. It is so different from the stifling, rule-bound
society that I am used to.

But when Jenny accompanies me home one evening, I
can tell immediately that the adults don't like her. My mother
seems taken aback by how much more mature and physically developed
she is compared to most of my gawky friends.

Mehroo seems perturbed by Jenny's apparent
lack of manners.

Unlike the fawning, nauseatingly polite stance
that my friends and I adopt when we visit each other's homes,
Jenny is polite but reserved. She does not spend much time chatting
with the adults, wanting instead to go into the living room and start
spinning some records. And when we get there, she turns up the stereo
to as loud as it will go. My stomach muscles clench as I brace for
what's coming. And sure enough, Mehroo is in the room a few
minutes later, covering her ears with her hands, and shouting to be
heard over the music. ‘It's too loud,' she shouts.
‘I'm sure the neighbours on the ground floor can hear it
also. I cannot do any work in the other room.

Turn the volume down.'

But instead of apologizing profusely Jenny merely
fixes her dark eyes on Mehroo. ‘That's all right, aunty,'
she says. ‘We'll just shut the door.'

Mehroo looks as startled as I feel. Ours is not a
family where individual privacy is valued enough that we can go
around shutting doors on each other. Indeed, the only time we shut
doors is when we are in the bathroom. But Jenny looks blissfully
unaware of how revolutionary her words are and after giving me a,
‘What kind of creature have you dragged home?' look,
Mehroo leaves the room.

Jenny immediately gets up and shuts both doors to
the living room. I keep my face deadpan and my manner as casual as
hers but from the inside, I'm a mess of emotions—aware
that Mehroo will be hurt by this gesture and that mummy will use it
to bolster her instinctive dislike for Jenny but also feeling the
kind of triumphant freedom and carefreeness I have never experienced
before.

It is the first of many such experiences. Two
things are clear to me soon after I meet Jenny: One, most of the
adults I know do not like her and are made uneasy by her presence.
Two, they are unaware of the opposite effect their advice of my not
getting too close to Jenny is having on me. Their dislike of her
makes me seek her out even more because I can finally experience the
dual pleasures of pissing off the adults and the heady feeling of
defiant freedom that being with Jenny gives me. My friendship with
Jenny makes me feel connected to America, pulls me out of the narrow
pathways of my own life and transports me to a distant, almost
fictitious, land of youthful energy where the idols of authority are
being toppled everyday.

But first, Jenny and I have to grow in size. The
two of us alone cannot take on all the forces against us—the
nuns and the teachers at school, my family, even my schoolmates who
are scandalized by her frank stories about her steady boyfriend in
America with whom she ‘did things' and stories about how
a classmate at her New York high school had thrown a bottle of ink at
the teacher he had been annoyed with. I think the ink story
scandalizes us more, growing up as we are in a society where teachers
are revered as mini-gods. Anyway, we are soon joined by two other
friends—Patty, a Catholic girl whose brothers had settled in
Australia and Yasmin, a girl from a progressive Muslim family. Now,
we are a band of four and ready to take on the world.

The school has a sickroom—a small room with
a single cot where we could go and nap for a few minutes if we were
feeling unwell. The room has a stairwell leading up to a door and one
day Jenny decides to push open the door to see what lies behind it.
She discovers an attic where the nuns store their belongings. But
there is enough floor space for three or four girls to sit quietly
and talk in hushed whispers (through the walls we can hear the low
murmur of the nuns' voices as they moved around in the nunnery)
while they pass around a cigarette. Patty also makes a discovery that
convinces us that we were destined to discover this room for our
clandestine meetings—lying on the floor next to the neatly
packed cardboard boxes is half of a coconut shell, which made for the
perfect ashtray for the ashes from our cigarettes. The dry shell is
our talisman against getting caught, our good luck charm. And indeed,
we would never be caught red-handed although Mr Narayan, the math
teacher, often flashes me his alert, eagle-eyed look when I traipse
into his class after one of our sessions.

There are a few narrow escapes. One evening after
school has ended for the day, Jenny has a brainwave—instead of
walking all the way to the girls' restroom to light a
cigarette, perhaps we can sit on the floor in the back of the
classroom and smoke there. I have the good sense to suggest that
perhaps we should light only one cigarette at a time, to keep the
smoke down. For a few minutes we smoke in peace. Then, we see Sister
Hillary walk by the classroom and duck down, hoping she hasn't
seen us. But Sister Hillary, a quiet, slow-moving nun who, rumour has
it, is mildly retarded, has spotted me and is making her way toward
us. The burning cigarette is in my hand and it is too late to stub it
out. I jump to my feet and rush to the front of the classroom, trying
to keep Sister Hillary away from the others. I hold the cigarette
behind my back as I face her.

‘Ah, glad you haven't gone home yet,'
she says. ‘Wanted to talk to you about the stereo.' I
groan inwardly. The school's stereo system is Sister Hillary's
pride and joy, one of the few tasks that Mother Superior feels
confident assigning to her dim-witted charge. Because my love for
music is legendary, because I was forever sitting in class banging
away on imaginary bongo drums, I am the only girl that Sister Hillary
trusts to handle the stereo system at socials and other functions.
She does this with all the ceremony and dignity of a mayor handing
the keys of the city to an honoured guest. But the downside of this
is that every chance she gets, Sister Hillary engages me in arcane
discussions about the proper maintenance and handling of her precious
stereo system. Most of the time I don't mind but now, with
smoke curling from behind my back and the heat of the cigarette
beginning to make its presence known to my fingers, I feel trapped
under the gaze of Sister Hillary's innocent, cow-like eyes. I
brace myself for her to sniff the air in suspicion, to ask me what I
am holding behind my back, to proclaim that where there is smoke
there must be a cigarette, but she simply continues to talk to me.
Behind me, I hear Jenny and Patty trying to smother their giggles.
The cigarette continues to burn ever closer toward my fingers.
Finally, I can't take it any more. ‘Sorry, sister. Bad
stomach cramps. Have to go…bathroom,' I mumble and then
sprint towards the bathroom before she can say another word. I pray
to God that I don't run into anyone else along the way.

Not getting caught makes us bolder. A few months
after meeting Jenny, I had refused to ride the school-bus anymore,
preferring to catch a B.E.S.T bus. Tired of the daily dramas of
trying to get me out of bed in time to catch the school-bus, Mehroo
agreed. But not taking the school-bus means that I can stay behind
with the other three at the end of the school day.

Every few days, we collect our money together and
head for the liquor store a few blocks away from school. For the
first few weeks we take turns going into the shop and tell the man
behind the counter elaborate stories of how we are running errands
for our fathers, but it soon becomes obvious that as long as we have
the money, he doesn't care how old we are or that we are buying
beer while still in our school uniforms.

Hiding the brown bottles of beer in our
school-bags, we head for Yasmin's house because her parents do
not get home from work until much later. Just before reaching her
house, we stop by our favourite paanwalla's stall and purchase
three packs of Gold Flake cigarettes.