Chloe in India (3 page)

“Dekho,”
the girl said again. This time she pointed out the window.

I shook my head again. I was staying put.

Then the girl spoke in English: “Come. Look.”

Now, you have to understand, I was brought up to be polite. I didn't want to seem rude to this brand-new girl, so I stood up. I would just take a quick glance, then go right back to my desk.

When I got to the window and looked in the direction the girl was pointing, I saw a dog—a mangy, short-haired, gray-and-brown street dog, the kind that lazes around in the road all day, dozing in pockets of sun, and then runs in packs at night, barking and fighting. These kinds of dogs are all over Delhi. This particular one was sleeping, head on its paws, under a tree by the edge of the cricket pitch.

“That's it?” I said. “A plain old dog?”

I was standing right next to the girl. I could smell her. She smelled like Indian cooking—fried onions and spices. Her skin was so dark that the whites of her eyes looked practically blue.

Now she was grinning, and before I could stop her, she put the pointer fingers of both hands in the corners of her mouth and let out a piercing whistle. The dog sprang to its feet but stayed under the tree, wagging its tail furiously. It let out a short bark.

“Are you crazy?” I yelled. I grabbed both the girl's wrists, pulling her fingers from her mouth. “You're not supposed to be here! You'll get me in trouble!”

That's when Ms. Puri walked into the room. I froze, my hands still gripping the strange girl's wrists.

“I—I…,” I sputtered.

But then a strange thing happened. Instead of scolding me, Ms. Puri smiled. “So I see you've met Lakshmi,” she said. Then she winked. “You are not the new girl anymore, Chloe.”

In America, when a new kid joins the class, everybody makes a big fuss. Maybe the kid's parents come to drop them off. Introductions are made. Everybody goes around the room, saying his or her name. Then the new kid has to stand up and say where they're from and what their favorite movie or flavor of ice cream is, and then the teacher picks a buddy for them so that they feel more comfortable on their first day.

At Premium Academy, there's none of that. On my first day, both my parents walked Anna and me through the school gate where the principal, Mrs. Anand, was standing in a dark green sari, telling students to hurry up. At first, I thought she was there to greet us specially. It was only later that I realized she stands out there every morning before assembly. It's part of her job.

“Today is your first day?” Mrs. Anand said. It seemed like maybe she had forgotten.

“Yes,” Mom said. “We are so looking forward to meeting the girls' teachers—”

“I will do the needful,” interrupted Mrs. Anand. She held out her hand to me, but I kept firmly gripping Mom's.

“We were hoping—” Dad began.

“We are a big girl, now, aren't we?” Mrs. Anand said, peering down at me.

It really bugs me when grown-ups do that—talk as though they're kids, too, when they are obviously not. There was no “we” in this situation. There was just
me.
I was the only one being sent off to a new school in a new country where I knew exactly nobody. (Well, the only one besides Anna, but she doesn't count because she's older and she's like those chameleons in the rain forest, changing her color to match a new environment.)

Mom squatted down so she was eye level with me. “You can do this, Chloe,” she whispered. Her voice was so full of hope that all I could do was nod and let go of her hand.

Lakshmi's parents didn't walk her into class on her first day either. She wasn't introduced. She didn't get assigned a buddy. She simply joined the rest of us as though she'd been there all along. It was like a single minnow joining a school of fish—you start swimming in the same direction and pretty soon, you blend in.

Except that Lakshmi didn't blend in. She stuck out. There was something about her that was different. I could see it in the way the other kids gave her extra space. They didn't cram in close to her, whispering, touching her hair, or tugging on her arm, the way they did with each other. They didn't ask for her mom's mobile number. They didn't steal cookies off her lunch tray, then laugh and put them back.

With me, the girls recognized that I was different—with my blond hair and pink skin, how could they not?—but they still talked to me and gave me toffees and slid their sharpeners over the desk when my pencil tip broke. With Lakshmi, it was like they didn't see her. It was like she wasn't even there.

There was just one other girl—a mousy little girl named Meher whom I honestly hadn't noticed before—and she latched onto Lakshmi like Lakshmi was some kind of life raft. I mentioned that Lakshmi was small and skinny, right? Well, standing next to Meher, even Lakshmi looked normal, that's how scrawny Meher was. She was like this skinny shadow of Lakshmi, sliding around silently beside her.

Later that first day, during dance class, Mr. Bhatnagar gave Lakshmi one long scan, head to toe, frowned, and without saying a word, pointed to the corner. Lakshmi's face didn't change. She just sat down cross-legged on the floor where he had pointed. Every time I glanced over, she was watching the lesson, her big black eyes following every move. I could see her lips counting out the steps. One foot bounced to the rhythm. But she never joined the class. At the end, she stood up from her spot and filed out with everyone else.

In the library afterward, I looked up from my book and realized Lakshmi wasn't there. Her little shadow, Meher, was missing, too.

“Where's that new girl?” I whispered to Anvi. We were sitting at the same reading table.

“Huh?”

“The new girl—the one with the braids—where is she?”

Anvi rolled her eyes. “You mean Stinky?” she said. “She smells like the kitchen!”

Prisha let out a giggle. “Maybe her mama's a cook.”

“Did you see all the oil in her hair?” Anvi said. “It was practically dripping!”

I was starting to wish I hadn't said anything.

“She's been taken for tutoring, you idiots.” Drippy-nosed Dhruv was sitting at the table next to ours. He stared at me over the top of his
Young Engineers
book. “They get extra help with English, you know.”

“Oh,” I said. Who did he mean by “they”?

Anvi and Prisha looked wide-eyed at each other and then burst into giggles. They get that way around boys.

If you are starting to think that Anvi is a little bit mean, you're probably right. Even I had realized that. But I'm telling you, it's like she had cast a spell over all the girls in Class Five. Everybody wanted to be her friend. One day, she came to school wearing this brand-new Kipling backpack. It was a shiny petal pink and it had a pink baby monkey charm hanging from it by a short silver chain. And what do you know? A couple of weeks later, there were petal-pink Kipling backpacks with monkey charms all over Premium Academy. That's when Anvi stopped wearing hers.

Sometimes, lying in bed at night, when I couldn't fall asleep, I would wonder: Was I just another “cool” thing that Anvi had added to her collection? Anvi had asked me for Mom's phone number. She said maybe I could come over to her house one day after school. When she said that, my heart had soared—Anvi Saxena wanted to be friends with
me
!—but then, lying in bed at night, I would stew over it. What if I did go to Anvi's house and then all my newness wore off ? What happened when Anvi realized that I was just plain old me?

Back in Boston, I never worried about this kind of stuff. I had my best friend, Katie Standish, and a bunch of other girls I grew up with. We walked our dogs together and baked cookies and played board games. Our moms drank coffee. I never thought about whether we were friends or not. We just were.

Maybe that's why Lakshmi pinged on my radar during her first day at school. Maybe it's because just two months ago, it was me who was the new girl at Premium Academy, standing alone in a corner of the playground, desperate for someone to come up and ask me to play. And then Anvi did come up and it was like a dam broke—all the other girls rushed in.

But no one was doing that for Lakshmi.

During third break, Lakshmi sat alone—I don't know where mousy Meher was—on a bench under the banyan tree, watching the rest of us with those big black eyes of hers. She swung her skinny legs back and forth, back and forth like metronomes, looking quite content. Her hands lay loose in her lap. When I walked close to her, pretending to look for hopscotch rocks in the roots of the tree, I could have sworn I heard her humming.

So maybe I was wrong? Maybe she didn't want new friends after all?

Maybe she wasn't like me?

Mom was not at pickup. She sent Vijay instead.

I was so quiet that Anna—who doesn't usually notice me—asked what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I said.

But the opposite was true. Everything was wrong. In the morning, I had destroyed my hair and made us late. Then Anvi had laughed at Dhruv's picture of me. And then I got detention—which I had to tell Mom about. And now the weekend stretched before me, a long, hot weekend with this many friends to hang out with: 0.

A long, hot weekend of being cooped up inside, trying to play Monopoly with Dad while Lucy pulled the pieces off the board and stuck them in her diaper.

Back in Boston, I lived for Fridays, when school was over. Here in India, I dreaded them.

“Suit yourself,” Anna said.

Even if I tried to explain, Anna wouldn't understand. She
has
friends—friends who call on the weekends and invite her to go to the movies or to the mall. She even got invited to a sleepover once, though Mom wouldn't let her go. Besides, Anna has a thing against Anvi Saxena.

No, Anna would never understand.

As soon as we got home, I went straight to my room to strip off my school uniform and put on my weekend one—a pair of oversized athletic shorts and my favorite faded navy-blue T-shirt with
BOSTON RED SOX, WORLD CHAMPIONS
in swirly writing across the chest. A surprise was waiting for me. There, lined up in a row on the bedspread, were three stretchy headbands: one gold, one black, one navy blue.

There was also a note scribbled on a yellow Post-it:

For my favorite porcupine. Tomorrow will be a better day. Love, Mommy

I held the Post-it for a minute, then folded it up and put it in the shoe box I keep under my bed. I picked up the blue headband and walked over to the mirror. If I arranged the strip of fabric just right, it covered all the porcupine hairs, flattening them against my hairline. I smiled at my reflection and then ran to Mom's office. But she wasn't there. Anna was there instead. She had already installed herself at Mom's writing desk, her schoolbooks arranged in four neat piles before her. She had laid out her colored pencils in one long row and was getting her sharpener out of her pencil case.

Anna likes all her pencils to be exactly the same length, their points like perfect colored cones. She sharpens obsessively.

“Where's Mom?” I asked.

Anna held up a Post-it note by way of an answer. It read:

A: Had to run to intvu. Don't let C eat whole jar of Nutella! Back by 7. XO M

“Cool!” I said. “Now we get to watch TV!”

Wordlessly, Anna handed me another Post-it:

When C asks, the answer is
NO TV
.

The
NO TV
part was underlined three times.

“Rats.”

I dropped onto the couch and kicked at the leg of the coffee table. “Will you play a game with me?”

Anna didn't look up from her sharpening. “You know I can't. I have to do my homework. And
please
stop kicking the table.”

“It's Friday afternoon,” I protested. “No one does their homework on Friday afternoon!”

“I do,” Anna said. She placed the last pencil back in the row, then smoothed her skirt—she was still in her school uniform—and tucked in her chair. “So if you don't mind…”

Anna doesn't like to have any distractions while she works, and I count as a major distraction.

I picked at some crusty stuff on the sleeve of my T-shirt. “But what am I supposed to do?” I whined.

Anna glared at me. “I don't know, Chloe,” she snapped. “Just think of something that's not in this room!”

I gave the table one last kick. “I'll go make myself a sandwich.”

“Not too much Nutella!” Anna called behind me. “And shut the door!”

I left it wide open.

When I went into the kitchen, Dechen was seated cross-legged on the floor, an enormous bowl of chopped raw meat glistening beside her. Another bowl held a fat lump of dough. Dechen was pulling off nuggets of dough, rolling them out on a wooden board into flat, saucer-sized disks, then stuffing them with the meat and folding them into half-moons. She crimped the edges of the dumplings expertly. When she smiled up at me, her fingers didn't stop moving—roll, stuff, fold, crimp; roll, stuff, fold, crimp. There was a smudge of flour on her cheek.

“Klow-ay!” she greeted me. “You home from school!”

“Momos!”
I replied. Dechen's dumplings are my all-time favorite dinner.

“I make specially for you,” she said, and grinned. “How many you eat today?”

“Thirty!”

Dechen gasped in mock horror. “No, no.” She shook her head. “Then you too fat, like Dechen.” She held her arms over her head and shook them so that the fat wobbled back and forth like a turkey wattle. “Is better I make you five.”

“Five?” I protested. “Lucy can eat five!”

Dechen cackled. “I joking you. You no worry. Dechen make you lot of
momos.
”

When we first moved to India, Mom realized she would have to hire a cleaning lady, as well as an ayah—a nanny—to help take care of Lucy while she worked, but she was adamant about not having a cook.

Dad tried to reason with her. “This isn't Boston, Helen,” he said. “There's no Whole Foods that you can dash over to at six to pick up a roast chicken.”

Mom gave him a hard look. “I've always cooked dinner for our family,” she said.

Dad could have argued that store-bought ravioli with Prego sauce does not count as cooking, but he didn't.

It took Mom less than a week to capitulate, which means give up. There were too many challenges—the taps ran out of water, the gas canister ran out of gas, the vegetable vendor ran out of vegetables. (“You wait monsoon,” he said as Mom paid for one tiny bunch of limp salad greens and one wrinkled cucumber. “We're supposed to wait until it rains to buy our food?” Mom said. He shrugged and turned back to his newspaper.)

Then we all got Delhi belly.

Turned out, Mom hadn't soaked the limp greens and the wrinkled cucumber in chlorine before chopping them up into our dinner salad.

“How was I supposed to know I had to sterilize every goddamn vegetable?” she groaned from her spot over the toilet bowl. “I mean, who does that?”

Dad was doubled up on the bed.
“You…are…never…cooking…again,”
he said.

The very next morning, the doorbell rang. When Mom opened the door, Dechen was standing there, smiling. She had heard from the security guard across the street that we were looking for help.

“I all-rounder,” she announced. “I do cooking, I do cleaning, I do baby. I do everything good for you.”

“Word sure travels fast around here,” Mom muttered.

“You're hired,” Dad said.

I pulled the Nutella jar out of the kitchen cabinet and grabbed a spoon from the drawer.

“Tsk-tsk,” Dechen clucked. “Your mama tell me no Nutella today.”

“Well, I don't see her here right now,” I grumbled.

Dechen's hands stopped working for a moment. “Why you so angry, Klow-ay?” she said. “You beautiful girl. You must be beautiful on inside, too.”

I should explain: Dechen is Tibetan. Well, she was born and raised in a Tibetan refugee camp in southern India, and while she has spent every one of her twenty-three years in India, not Tibet, she feels completely Tibetan, not Indian. She dresses in T-shirts and jeans—never a sari or a
salwar kameez
—and she wraps Tibetan shawls around her waist. Her face is round and smooth. She has fat cheeks that flush pink when she stirs things over a hot stove. And she is a Buddhist. So she's always telling me to calm down, which usually has the opposite effect.

“I am
not
beautiful on the inside
or
out,” I snapped. I slammed the Nutella jar down on the counter but not before stuffing one glorious, goopy spoonful into my mouth.

“Klow-ay!”

I could hear Dechen calling my name, but I was already out the front door and down the stairs. I pushed open our gate and crossed the street to the park.

In case you've never been to Delhi and you are imagining it as one traffic-jammed parking lot, let me take a moment to explain that—at least where we live, which is a pretty fancy part—it's actually quite green.

Our neighborhood is mainly three-story houses, one apartment per floor. We're the jam in the sandwich—the middle floor, which Indians call the “first floor” instead of the second, just to make things more confusing. Most ground-floor apartments have a little patch of garden out front and a lot of top-floor apartments have roof gardens. In our neighborhood, there's also a community garden about the size of a soccer field every couple of blocks. Some are dry and dusty with plastic bags and
paan
wrappers strewn about, but some are pretty nice. The nicer ones are taken care of by
malis
who spend a lot of time lying on benches and napping, but also squat in the grass, trimming it with scissors. (I kid you not.) They also drag black rubber hoses around to water the grass with something that smells a lot like pee. (Dad says it might actually
be
pee. Yuck.)

In our park, the head
mali
keeps an enormous pair of metal shears tucked into his belt in case he comes across a leaf that's out of place. He's bossed around by two old aunties who live in a concrete bungalow across from the main entrance to the park. The aunties like the bushes neat-neat-neat, so they're out there at six every morning in their saris and sneakers, squawking at the
mali
to trim-trim-trim. This upsets me a bit. I like my trees big and messy—towering elms and broccoli-shaped oaks. The trees in our Delhi park look like kids with fresh haircuts.

At least there are the champa trees. Those are my favorites. They're so big, the
mali
can't reach the upper limbs to cut them. And they have low, knobby branches, so they're easy to climb. If you climb high enough, you reach the canopy, which is so thick with dark green, waxy leaves, you're pretty much hidden. Sometimes, after school, I bring a book and a bag of potato chips and camp out up there for a while.

The champa flowers look like they're carved out of Ivory soap. They're thick and creamy white with bright yellow centers, and they smell so good. Sometimes I close my eyes and put a flower right underneath my nostrils and take a long sniff. In that moment, I'm back at Nana and Grandpa's house on Cape Cod, hiding in the honeysuckle bush by the old toolshed. I can hear the waves crashing. I can hear the seagulls crying as they try to break crabs open by dropping them on the dock. I can almost taste the sea.

Then I open my eyes and see the plain old crows in the dried-up park and I realize: I'm still living in Delhi.

When I got to the park, there were a bunch of boys playing cricket by the broken swings. It was really hot, and sweat was pouring down their faces and making their shirts stick to their backs in dark splotches. They were all staring at the bowler in intense concentration as he started jogging toward the batsman, with the ball in his hand.

I was skirting the cricket area, heading for the champa trees, when Dechen's voice rang out, “Klow-ay! Klow-ay!”

I stopped to turn and look up toward our balcony, where Dechen must have been standing, calling to me, and that was when
CRAAACK!

I fell to my knees, both hands pressed against my face. Tears filled my eyes as the pain rushed through me. I felt a wetness on my fingers.

Then, out of nowhere, a girl was crouching beside me. She was trying to pry my fingers away. I looked up and I recognized her—those huge dark eyes with the whites so white, they're practically blue. It was the new girl from school. Her lips were moving. She was saying something to me but I couldn't hear her—there was too much ringing in my ears. The ringing was so loud, I couldn't hear anything. I wanted to say something to the girl, to tell her I recognized her from school, but the words wouldn't come out. I couldn't seem to speak. And then, just as I felt a darkness swelling up over me, I saw Dechen's round face, bright pink from running.