Chloe in India (10 page)

I sighed.

“Sure, you're right, Mom. But it was a party, you know? I mean, that's what people
do
here.”

Mom took a deep breath. “Chloe,” she finally said. She was speaking slowly, enunciating her words. “You need to understand something. You need to believe me when I tell you that when your father and I decided to send you to an Indian school, we never expected that you and your sister would be exposed to this kind of opulence, this kind of privilege….”

“Then why did you, Mom? I mean, it's like I can't win! You want me to go to an Indian school and so I do. But then, when I finally make some friends and get invited to the birthday party of the most popular girl in class and do what
you
say and play the games and try to fit in, then you tell me it's no good. I just don't get it.
What do you want me to do?
”

I was crying now. Hot tears were streaming down my cheeks.

“Oh, sweetie,” Mom said. She reached over and took my hand. “I know you're trying. I know it isn't easy.”

I pulled my hand away. “No,” I said. “You
don't
know.” I was crying harder. “You don't….”

“Chloe…”

Vijay had reached down and now, without a word, was handing a box of tissues through the gap between the front seats. He had seen scenes like this before.

“Thank you, Vijay.” Mom pulled out a tissue and handed it to me. I blew.

“You might not understand how valuable this experience is right now. But later, when you look back on your childhood, you'll be so proud of this time. It will have taught you so much….”

“Not everything has to be a lesson, Mom,” I said. “Why can't some things just be, just be…fun?”

Mom was silent for a moment. She looked out the window. Then, rather than speaking, she pointed. We were stopped at the same red light by the market between home and school. As we idled, some kids scampered up a pile of garbage. They were laughing and pointing. I looked up to see half a dozen kites swooping and darting, lunging at each other in the bright blue sky.

“It looks like
they're
having fun,” Mom said. She closed her eyes and rubbed her thumbs in circles against her temples. “You know, you don't need a bungee cord and a zip line—”

“I know, Mom,” I interrupted.

One of the kites swooped too low and landed in some electrical wires by the side of the road. Two boys sprinted over, pushing and shoving, each trying to be the first to climb up a concrete pillar and free the kite from the twisted knot of wires.

The light turned green. Vijay stepped on the gas and the boys disappeared behind us.

Mom opened her eyes again. She looked over at me. “I suppose…,” she began. “I suppose I'm concerned about you being overly influenced by all the privilege around you. I don't want you to…to change.”

“If you don't want me to change, then why did you bring me here in the first place?” I said.

Mom thought before she spoke. “So that…well…that…well, we—your father and I—we wanted you and Anna and Lucy to see that every place isn't just like Boston. That there's a strange and fascinating world out there…”

“Where some kids have bungee cord birthdays and some kids play on piles of garbage,” I said.

Mom smiled a little. “Yeah,” she said.

Vijay was pulling the car to a stop in front of our house. He turned the motor off. It was silent for a moment. I picked up the party favor—a large box wrapped in sparkly pink paper with a silver bow. I knew with complete certainty that it would be a much fancier, pricier gift than the two paperbacks I had given Anvi. I knew that fact shouldn't matter to me. But it did.

I couldn't sleep that night. Maybe it was all the candy and Sprite at the party. Maybe it was the fight with Mom in the car afterward.

I got out of bed. The house was quiet and dark. I snuck into Mom's office. Her laptop was humming on her desk. I flipped it open and a Word document popped up:

There's No Place Like No Home

Slum Clearances Leave Delhi's Poor Desperate and Homeless

It had to be the feature story that Mom had been slaving over these past couple of weeks. My eyes scanned the first paragraph:

Ashok Kumar, 37, has no running water or electricity in the 500-square-foot one-room brick dwelling he shares with his wife and two daughters, but it's eviction that he worries about. He is one of Delhi's estimated 5 million unauthorized settlers…

I clicked on another tab and Mom's Gmail account popped up. I placed my fingers on the keys, took a deep breath, and started typing.

To: Katie Standish

Subject: Hi!

Dear Katie,

I miss you a lot. Things are pretty good here, but they're also really different than back home. I went to a birthday party today and they had this huge zip line and a mechanical bull! It was fun but also kind of weird.

I have this friend Lakshmi. She's Indian, with two long braids all the way down to her waist. She's not really like the other girls at school. And then I have this other friend called Anvi. She's the one who had the birthday party. And Lakshmi didn't come to the party. I'm not even really friends with her at school.

I'm not very good at typing, so that's as far as I got. It wasn't just the typing, actually. It's that I didn't know how to explain what I wanted to say. I mean, how could I describe the differences between Anvi and Lakshmi and why we didn't all hang out together? If I didn't really get it, how could I explain it to Katie? And why would she care anyway? There weren't these same kind of differences back in Boston. At least, not in our school. Or maybe I hadn't noticed them there, I guess. I was on my own in figuring this situation out.

I clicked on discard draft. Then I closed the computer and went back to bed.

Annual Day was coming. The excitement had been building for weeks. There would be a big show to celebrate the school's birthday. All the parents were invited. It would happen at night, under the stage lights. Each class would get costumes and perform a special dance routine. The evening would culminate (which means
wrap it up already! 
) with the handing out of special academic awards.

Honestly, since we don't have anything like Annual Day back home, I didn't understand what all the fuss was about. But I could tell it was a big deal here. Even Ms. Puri—who is usually pretty chill about this kind of stuff—was telling us to get our hair cut.

The problem that Annual Day raised for me was the dancing. I stink at it.

Back in Boston, we had no separate dance class—just a couple of square-dancing lessons during third-grade gym—but at Premium Academy, dancing was an obsession. We had dance class several times a week. And now, with Annual Day coming up, we had hours and hours of dance practice every day.

For the Indian kids, this was great. Indian kids love to dance. They do it all the time at huge family functions, like weddings that last for days. And they watch endless Bollywood movies where the actors break into huge, flashy dance numbers. The kids in my class never get self-conscious and never seem to worry about how silly they might look with their hands pumping up and down in the air. They just do it. And they're good, too. Really good. All the girls in my class know how to shimmy their shoulders and wiggle their hips. They can twist their wrists and tap their feet and wiggle their butts all at the same time. Me? I only dance at home with the door to my room shut, earbuds stuck in my ears so that no one else will know what I'm up to. And preferably with the lights off.

So for me, this whole Annual Day extravaganza was a source of stress. The dance routine—with its complicated choreography and fancy footwork—was way too hard. Just getting to the right spot on the stage at the right time was a major challenge.

As a result, Mr. Bhatnagar, the dance instructor, had stuck me in the very back, half-hidden by some large potted palm trees. I was supposed to stand there for most of the routine and wave my arms over my head to “add some very nice texture,” as Mr. Bhatnagar put it. Lakshmi and Meher were stuck back there with me, too. But at the very end of the routine, for the grand finale, the three of us were supposed to skip forward—carefully avoiding three pyramids of boys and two spinning girls—to join a line of dancing girls, which would then snake out to the exit. The tricky part for me was catching the cue. All the Hindi lyrics sounded the same, so I kept missing the moment when I had to start my skip—and I was leading Lakshmi and Meher, who were supposed to stay tucked behind me.

At least I wasn't the only person struggling with the finale. The real problem was the spins. Mr. Bhatnagar insisted that two girls in the front and center had to perform five full spins in perfect synchronicity, which means at exactly the same time. Even the very best dancers in the class—Anvi and Prisha—couldn't get the spins right. They tried and tried, but there were too many spins. They'd get dizzy and stumble out of position or be unable to synchronize. One always seemed to finish before the other. So we practiced and practiced in the playground during recess—Anvi and Prisha doing the spins while I counted.

But it wasn't happening; the spins were too hard.

Still, Mr. Bhatnagar wouldn't give up.

Then things really fell apart. It happened on a Friday afternoon, the week before Annual Day. We had been rehearsing the finale for an hour already. Things were
not
going well.

Mr. Bhatnagar paced across the front of the stage, shaking his bald head in frustration.

“Again! Again! A-one-two-three-four…” He clapped his hands and tinny music blared from the speakers. It was our ninth run-through.

I stood in my spot in the back beside the potted palm trees, waving my hands in the air, but my mind had drifted to Boston, where last year I had starred in
Christina and the Moonbeam Pullers,
a play written by Mrs. Rose, the elementary-school drama teacher. As Christina, I got to wear my pajamas onstage and sing a solo while swinging on a real swing set up on…

Lakshmi poked me, so I started skipping forward, but I was on autopilot. My mind was still in Boston, where, at the end of the play, the whole audience had stood up and given me a standing ovation. I could see my parents in the front row….

“Chloe!” Lakshmi yelped. “Watch out!”

I snapped to, just in time to see Anvi spinning toward me. She was twirling so fast, her long black hair fanned out around her like a parasol. I tried to duck out of the way, but it was too late.

POW!

Anvi crashed into me and we both toppled to the floor. We lay there in two heaps, stunned for a moment.

“Bas! Bas!”
Mr. Bhatnagar bellowed.

The music screeched to a halt.

The boys scrambled out of their pyramids. They stood in one large clump, laughing and pointing.

I glanced around. Everyone was laughing.

I could feel my cheeks heating up and turning red.

“Look, she is red like
rajma
!” Dhruv Gupta cackled. “We should not call her Chhole! We should call her Rajma only!”

Some boys hooted.

“Bas!”
Mr. Bhatnagar barked. “Take your places!”

I picked myself up off the floor. “Anvi? Anvi, are you okay?”

But Anvi turned her head away, pretending not to hear.

Prisha helped Anvi up. Wrapping her arm around Anvi's shoulders, she guided her back to their spot in center stage and whispered something in Anvi's ear.

I slunk back to my spot in the back row.

“You okay, Chloe?” Lakshmi whispered.

I shook my head, blinking back tears.

Mr. Bhatnagar was standing at the front of the stage now, his shoulders slumped. He had taken off his glasses and was massaging his temples with his fat, stubby fingers.

Maybe the pressure was getting to him. Annual Day was next week. He had made us practice our dance over and over, but we just couldn't get that last bit of the ending right. (If someone had asked me, it was because those five spins were too tough. But no one
had
asked me. And Anvi would never admit to anyone—even herself—that she couldn't do them. She was Anvi Saxena; she
needed
to be the star of the show.)

When he finally spoke, Mr. Bhatnagar was still staring at the floor and shaking his head slowly. His voice was low and tired. From my spot in the back, I had to strain to hear him.

“Annual Day is next Wednesday night,” he said. “We have very less time. The finale must be tip-top.”

He put his glasses back on, then took a deep breath and looked up at us. He shrugged his shoulders as if he were apologizing.

“You give me no choice, you see….”

The girls glanced at each other, their eyebrows raised.

Mr. Bhatnagar cleared his throat before he spoke again. “There will be one competition. The two girls who perform five full spins in a row at the same time and in very best fashion will get top marks for the same.” He held five fat fingers up for emphasis. “Five spins. No falling. No stepping out of position. Perfect timing. Perfectly together.” He dropped his hand back to his side. “Pick your partner with utmost care. And this weekend, maximum practice. The competition will take place on Monday.”

With that, he turned and walked out of the room.

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“But…” I heard Prisha Kapoor say. She still had her arm around Anvi's shoulders. “But…but…that's supposed to be us. We're supposed to be doing the spins. That's the routine!”

Anvi shook herself from Prisha's grasp. She spun around to glare at me, her eyes narrowed, her hands clenched into fists. “It's because of Chloe!” she hissed. “She knocked me over. And now we all have to go through these stupid tryouts! We don't have time for this! It's going to ruin our performance!”

“But I…,” I said. “But I was doing the right thing. I was in the right spot.
You
were the one who crashed into
me
!”

“You
always
ruin
everything
!” Anvi's eyes flicked from me to Lakshmi, who was still standing next to me at the back of the stage. “You and your
special
friend,” she hissed.

Anvi spun on her heels, her long black hair flying out behind her. As she strode off the stage, I could just catch what she said to Prisha: “Mama will get Shiamak. We'll practice in my home dance studio all weekend. I know I'm the best dancer in class. We're sure to be picked!”