Chloe in India (13 page)

“Chloe?”

Anna and I were walking home from the bus stop. It was Wednesday afternoon—T minus three hours till curtain—and my life was officially a disaster. Remember
fiasco
? That's an even better word. My life was a fiasco. Everything had fallen apart.

Ever since the bathroom incident on Monday, Lakshmi had been ignoring me. I had lost her as a friend. Anvi was ignoring me, too. She couldn't believe that I had “stolen” her spot in the Annual Day finale. As for that finale, it was now in jeopardy. Lakshmi was threatening to quit.

It was Meher who told me. She had snuck up on me as I was about to board the bus after school. She tugged on my shirtsleeve, pulling me toward a clump of bushes behind the bus.

“What
is
it, Meher?” I said, shaking her off. “What do you want?”

The exhaust pipe was belching black smoke. I coughed. “I need to get on the bus.”

“It Lakshmi,” Meher said. “She quit.”

“What?”

“She quit Annual Day dance. She not do show.”

“But we practiced all day,” I said. “We were actually okay.”

It was true—today's practice had been miles better than yesterday's. Lakshmi still wouldn't look at me. She never smiled, never made eye contact, but at least we managed to perform the spins at pretty much the same time. Even Mr. Bhatnagar had clapped us on the backs, saying we were ready for the performance.

Meher was shaking her head. She looked like she might cry. “No, no, she tell me she bunking tonight.” Meher tugged on my sleeve again. “You talk to Lakshmi, Chloe! You tell her she come. She must do the show!”

But Lakshmi hadn't shown up for the bus ride home. That's when I suspected that Meher was telling the truth.

The whole bus ride, I stared out the window, going over the facts in my head. My conclusion: this was all my fault. I was the one who had backstabbed Lakshmi in the bathroom. Now she was abandoning us at the last possible moment, just a few hours before the performance. This was her payback. She knew how nervous I was. She knew I needed her there. She knew I couldn't do the spins alone. And she didn't care enough about everybody else—about Anvi and Meher and Dhruv and the rest of the class. All she really cared about was me, and I had failed her. I had failed Mom and Dad. I had failed everybody.

“Chloe?”

We were on our way home from the bus stop. I had been trudging along behind Anna, but now she stopped on the side of the street by the park across from our house. Her arms were crossed over her chest. She glared at me.

“You've been sulking for days,” she said. “You might as well spit it out. I'm just going to wait here till you do.”

My chin started to tremble.

“Uh-oh,” she said, her voice more gentle. “Here, let's find a bench.”

She tucked one hand under my elbow and pulled me through the park gate and over to a bench. It happened to be facing the champa trees, which only made me cry harder. The last two days, I had rushed home to change, then gone right back out to this very spot in the park, hoping that Lakshmi would show up. I had waited here for hours on Monday and Tuesday. But Lakshmi never came.

Anna sat quietly next to me while I blubbered. She didn't try to hug me or talk to me, she just unzipped the side pocket of her backpack and handed me a small packet of Kleenex. She offered me a sip from her stainless steel water bottle, too.

“Now tell me what's going on,” Anna said.

So that's when I admitted to everything that had happened: the tryouts on Monday, the bathroom scene afterward, betraying Lakshmi. “And now Meher says she won't do the performance tonight,” I said. “She's not going to show up. And I can't do it without her, Anna! I can't make it through. The whole show will be ruined. And it's all my fault!”

Anna looked at me gravely. “There is a way to fix this,” she said. “And it's actually pretty simple.”

“Huh?” I blew my nose. “What do you mean? What is it?”

“I think you know,” Anna said.

“Well, what would
you
do?”

Anna cocked her head. “You and I are different people, right?” she said.

Even when we were babies, Anna and I were opposites. Mom says I came out all chubby and giggly whereas Anna was skinny and colicky. I loved music; Anna liked quiet. I liked to be outside; Anna wanted to stay in her playpen.

As we grew older, the gap only widened. Back in Boston, we shared a room, which nearly drove Anna crazy because I would leave my bed unmade and dump my dirty clothes on the floor. Anna fluffed her pillows every morning and hung her clothes up in the closet at night. Sometimes I'd install myself on our toilet, door open, reading comic books, my sweatpants pooled around my ankles. Anna peed with the door closed.

Anna was the family's good girl; I was the troublemaker. Once, when I stole a packet of M&M's from the corner deli, it was Anna who made me go back and apologize.

Plus, we've always looked like opposites. Anna has Dad's dark brown hair and serious eyes. I'm blond like Mom. She has long, graceful limbs; I'm stocky. Mom calls us Snow White and Rose Red, like the sisters in the Grimms' fairy tale. That's how different we are.

“So what
I
would do doesn't really matter, does it?” Anna was saying. “You have to do what's right for
you.
”

“But sometimes it's hard to know—you know?” I said. I had stopped crying. Now I was plucking the petals off a champa flower and dropping them one by one onto the grass.

“I know.” Anna nodded.

I glanced over at her. “You do?” I said. “Because it seems like you never do anything wrong.”

Anna let out a little laugh. “That's not true,” she said. She paused for a beat. “You remember when Mom freaked out because she couldn't find our plane tickets and we were gonna miss our flight to Delhi?”

I nodded.

“That was me,” she said.

“What?”

“I ripped them up and hid them in the recycling.”

“No way!” I said. I couldn't believe it.

“Yep,” Anna said. She had her lips pressed together in a smile, deep dimples grooved into her cheeks. Then she looked out over the park and sighed. “Too bad it didn't work,” she added.

“You mean…You don't like it here?” I said. “You have so many friends. I thought you loved it!”

Anna gave me a funny look. “I'm just making the best of it, Chloe,” she said. “Sometimes that's what you have to do.”

“But…” I was having trouble digesting all this new information. “But you're a uniform monitor. And you always get good grades. And you go to the mall with your new friends. You even speak Hindi!”

“I don't really like the mall,” Anna said.

“Oh.”

“And my Hindi stinks. But this isn't about me, Chloe,” she continued. “It's about you and Lakshmi. What are you going to do?”

“Um, run away?”

Anna let out another laugh. “I don't think that's a viable option,” she said. “Besides, what about Annual Day? Don't you want to be in the show? This is your big moment—yours and Lakshmi's.”

I nodded. In my heart of hearts, I
did
want to be in the Annual Day performance. I wanted to wear the sparkly costume and put on makeup and stand backstage, listening to the murmur of the audience until the lights dimmed and the music came on and I stepped out….

“Well, then I think you better apologize,” Anna was saying. “Which means we need to find Lakshmi.” She looked at her wristwatch. “And we have only about forty-five minutes till you have to start getting ready for the show.”

“We?” I said. “You mean, you're gonna help?”

Anna nodded.

I looked at my sister, sitting there in her neat school uniform, her dark brown hair tucked up in its high ponytail. Suddenly, my heart was filled with hope.

I leapt up from the bench. “Well,” I said, “I think I might know where we can find her.”

I had no idea how sneaky my big sister could be till I heard her tell Dechen that she needed to take me to the market, quick, to buy some bindis for my Annual Day costume.

Dechen glanced up from the chopping board, her eyes narrow.

“Now you helping your sister?” she said. She sounded suspicious.

Anna put one arm around my shoulders. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

Dechen just shook her head and went back to chopping.

Vijay took a little more convincing. He had dropped Mom at her interview and was killing time, drinking chai on the street with the neighbor's security guards, till he had to go back to pick her up. He glanced down at his watch, frowning. “Then we go
jaldi jaldi, betas,
” he said, gulping down the last of his tea.

Now we were double-parked beside the market, a small pedestrian area with a dry goods store, a butcher, a couple of pharmacies, a fruit and vegetable wallah, and one long row of tailors, all stooped over their whirring sewing machines. Vijay was hesitating. He didn't want us to go into the market alone, but there were no parking spots and the traffic was backing up behind us.

“I take you inside,” he said.

Some cars honked angrily.

“Don't worry, Vijay, we'll be quick,” Anna said. “And you need to stay with the car.” She opened the door and started to get out before Vijay could protest further. “We'll be ten minutes,” she said. “We'll meet you right back here.”

I jumped out behind her and she slammed the door shut.

“Quick!” Anna grabbed my arm and pulled me past the row of tailors, their heads bent under the hot afternoon sun, and around the corner by the fruit wallah, where a dirt path I had never noticed before stretched behind the market to the slum beyond.

“How do you know about this?” I asked.

Anna shrugged. “I keep my eyes open. Now come on. We don't have much time.”

She started walking down the path.

“I dunno, Anna,” I said. There was garbage strewn along both sides of the path—old plastic bags and bottles and
paan
wrappers everywhere. The skeleton of a bicycle lay off to one side, its pedal-less crank arm sticking out like an amputated limb. Farther down the path, two enormous pigs were shuffling around a mound of garbage, their snouts sniffing hungrily. They looked bigger than Igor and Bruno, the twin mastiffs that lived next door to us in Boston. Long, stringy hairs grew from the pigs' blotchy skin.

Anna stopped in the middle of the path and glared at me. “This is where Lakshmi
lives,
Chloe,” she said. “I think you can handle ten minutes of it. Now come on!” She turned and started back down the path.

Who knew she could be so tough?

I took a deep breath and held it, trying to block out the stench of garbage and worse: the small clearing we passed that reeked of poop. I buried my nose in my elbow, trying not to gag. It must have been the slum's open-air bathroom.

Anna picked up the pace, jogging past the clearing, till we came to the edge of the
basti,
where she stopped and took a deep breath.

“That was gross!” I said.

“Shhh!” she admonished.

A couple of little kids were standing there, staring at us. They wore no shoes. Their clothes and faces and limbs were smudged with dirt. One girl's skirt was so ripped, I could see her underwear. Her hair was matted in clumps against her head. Snot ran from her nostrils to her upper lip like the thick slime trail left by a slug.

“Lakshmi?” Anna said. She squatted down so that she was eye level with the little girl.
“Aap Lakshmi ko janate ho?”

The girl just stared at Anna with big, unblinking brown eyes.

Just then, a group of older boys came around the corner. They wore
chappals
and T-shirts with logos tucked into their shorts. They looked less dirty than the first group of kids. One carried a cricket bat over his shoulder. They stopped short when they saw us.

“Hello, madam!” the boy with the cricket bat exclaimed. He gave Anna a broad grin. His two front teeth were missing.

“He speaks English!” I said to Anna.

“Wouldn't count on it,” Anna muttered.

The boys gathered around us, nudging each other and whispering in Hindi.

“Do you know Lakshmi?” Anna spoke slowly, enunciating every word.

“Lakshmi?” the boy with the cricket bat echoed. For some reason, the other boys found this hysterical. They started cracking up. “Lakshmi?” they repeated over and over. “Lakshmi?”

“They're making fun of you!” I whispered.

“Yeah, I get that, Chloe,” Anna said. “Here”—she grabbed my elbow and started walking—“let's keep going.”

As we stepped into the
basti,
the two groups of kids followed on our heels, like we were pied pipers. They chattered excitedly to each other in Hindi. Every once in a while, one of the older boys would yell “Hello!” or “You English?”

I wished they wouldn't cram in so close to us.

Both sides of the dirt path were now lined with small slum houses made of brick. Some were partially plastered and some were painted bright colors—turquoise and aqua green—though the paint was chipped and peeling. Most had sheet metal roofs, but some were covered with only sticks and tarps and flattened cardboard boxes. Those ones didn't have satellite dishes. Electrical wires hung like spiderwebs over our heads.

Most of the front doors were propped open, probably because of the heat. As we walked, I tried to peek inside, but the sun was so bright and the houses so dark, I couldn't see much. As far as I could tell, they were all just one room with little or no furniture, though I saw a couple of TVs parked on packed-earth floors. In one house an old woman was squatting over a small gas cooking range, stirring something in a metal pot. When she caught me watching her, she tugged at her sari to cover her face.

We had reached the end of the path. Now it split into several branches, each one winding deeper into the slum. Anna stopped at the intersection and peered down each lane, hesitating. The kids stopped too, waiting to see what we'd do next. Then the boy with the cricket bat reached his hand out and touched my hair.

I jumped. “He's touching me!”

“Just stay calm, Chloe,” Anna said, but her voice sounded tight.

“But where are we going?” I said. “Which way do we go? How do we find Lakshmi? What if we get lost?”

“Give me a minute to think….”

“I help you?” An old man in white kurta-pajamas was sitting cross-legged on a charpoy in front of a brick hut. He had a thick black mustache. It twitched when he spoke.

“Yes, please!” Anna said. “These kids…” She waved her hand at the children who had been following us.

The man barked something in Hindi and the kids took a few steps back.

“You not from here,” the man observed. He was holding a small plastic cup of chai and when he sipped from it, his hand quivered.

“No,” Anna said. “Actually, we're looking for a girl, a friend.” She held her hand at chest level to indicate Lakshmi's height. “Her name is Lakshmi?”

The old man pointed at Anna's chest with one shaky finger.

“Premium Academy?” he said.

Anna glanced down at the crest embroidered on the front pocket of her uniform. “Yes!” she said. “She goes to Premium Academy. She is the
mali
's daughter. Lakshmi. Do you know her? Do you know Lakshmi?”

The old man smiled. His teeth were surprisingly white, like his kurta. “Very good school.” He nodded approvingly. “Very good school.” He took another wobbly sip of chai.

“But Lakshmi?” Anna prodded.

“Yes, Lakshmi,” the old man echoed. He dropped the plastic cup on the ground and then unfolded himself slowly from his charpoy. “We go.”

He started down the left-hand alleyway. We hesitated for a moment—the group of kids had crowded back close to us—but the old man turned and shooed them away and then beckoned for us to follow him.

As we walked deeper into the
basti,
the paths grew narrower and more winding, with smaller huts packed closer together. There was sewage flowing through uncovered channels.

I felt eyes on me. Men seemed to be everywhere—leaning in doorways or sitting on cane chairs, talking on cell phones, drinking tea, or chewing
paan
and spitting as we passed. They watched us, but didn't say anything.

I held Anna's hand.

Only the women were working—squatting in the dirt to roll out chapatis on wooden boards or to squeeze laundry in plastic tubs. Some young girls passed us, balancing water jugs on their heads. They reminded me of that pretty girl I had seen in the pink
lehenga,
struggling to cross the street with her heavy water jugs. So much had happened in just a few months. I never imagined I would be walking right here in this very same…

The old man had come to an abrupt stop. He peered around the corner, then ducked back and waved us over to the side. He pressed his body against the wall of a hut, so we did the same, hiding in the shadow of its corrugated metal roof.

“Shhh!” he said.

“What's going on?” I said to Anna. “What's happening?”

“I don't know,” she whispered.

“Shhh!” the old man insisted. “Some goondas are there!”

Our bodies pressed against the hut, we could now hear deep voices barking in rapid-fire Hindi.

“I don't know about this, Anna,” I whispered. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

The old man was peeking around the corner again, but he kept one hand back, gesturing for us to stay put.

“Just wait a—” But before Anna could finish her sentence, the old man had spun on his heel and shoved her hard on the shoulder. Anna slammed against me. He pushed her again and we both stumbled through the open door of the little hut. Anna tripped over me and we fell to the ground. We lay there, sprawled on the dirt floor, too stunned to speak. When I looked up, the old man was blocking the open door with his thin body. He was facing us, his back to the outside. I was about to say something—to protest—but he glared down at me and then placed one crooked index finger against his lips, signaling for me to keep quiet.

Anna and I stayed there, frozen in a heap on the floor, not speaking. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness inside the hut—there were no windows, the only light coming from the doorway—I saw a little girl crouched in the corner. She had to be three, maybe four. Someone had outlined her eyes in thick black
kajal.
She stared at me with huge, unblinking raccoon eyes.

What if she yelled? What if she called out?

I forced a smile.

Then I heard footsteps outside.

I peeked between the old man's ankles just in time to catch a glimpse of two muscular men in dark gray uniforms and mirrored sunglasses as they strode by.

I shook my head, confused.

The Saxenas' security guards? What were
they
doing here?

As soon as the men had rounded the corner, the old man reached down to help me and Anna up from the floor. We dusted ourselves off, stepping back out into the lane.

“So sorry, I see goondas, I…”

But we didn't wait to hear his explanation. I spotted a familiar figure coming around the corner.

“Lakshmi!” I ran forward and threw my arms around her skinny waist.

Kali appeared out of nowhere and stuck her nose between us. She barked and pawed at Lakshmi, trying to free her from my embrace.

“Chloe?” Lakshmi said, shaking me loose. “What you doing here?” She leaned down and stroked Kali, trying to calm her. The dog sat down on her foot.

“Anna?” Lakshmi was looking back and forth, from me to my sister.

“Lakshmi, what's going on?” Anna said. “Is everything okay?”

A group of men were clustered nearby, arguing in Hindi. Their voices were angry and they were gesticulating wildly. One was gripping his hair with both hands. He looked like he was going to cry.