Chloe in India (5 page)

“Chloe!” Mom was calling me from her office.

“What is it?” I shouted back.

“Don't yell!” she yelled. “Could you come here for a minute?”

I groaned and dropped my book open-faced on the floor. (It was the third Harry Potter—the best one, if you ask me, which you should because I'm kind of an expert; I've read the whole series twice already.) I glanced at my alarm clock: 10:55. I hadn't even brushed my teeth.

When I poked my head through Mom's office door, she was holding her cell phone in both hands, frowning at the screen.

“Any idea what this is about?”

She handed me the phone.

pls send klowe 4 swimmin 2day sax farm chhatarpur

I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “It's for me.”

“I gathered that much.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “You're the investigative journalist.”

“Watch the sarcasm, young lady,” Mom said.

“Sorry.”

Mom sighed. She was wearing her old Barnard T-shirt, which meant she was having trouble writing. It's her lucky shirt. She only wears it when she's stuck on a story.

She reached up and turned my face so that she could inspect my bad cheek. It had gone yellowish purple overnight.

“Ouch,” she said. “How's it feel?”

I shrugged. “Not too bad.” Then, to change the topic: “I'm kinda hungry.”

Mom dropped her hand from my chin. “Pancakes?”

I smiled. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

“And while we make them,” Mom said, snapping her laptop shut, “maybe you can tell me about this mystery texter who doesn't care to spell or to punctuate.”

We headed to the kitchen. I got the eggs and butter from the fridge, while Mom rummaged through the cupboards, looking for the measuring cups.

“So, who's your new friend?”

“It's Anvi,” I said. “You know, the girl I mentioned last night? The one with the tycoon dad? She asked me for your number at school. Said maybe her mom would call. They have some big house with, like, horses and a pool.” I dumped my ingredients on the counter. “She's really pretty.”

“Hence ‘sax farm'…” Mom was measuring out the flour.

“Is there a problem, Mom?” This was the first invitation I had had from anyone at school—Anna had already gotten five or six—and it had come from Anvi, which made it especially important. It felt like a test.

“Why would there be a problem?” Mom's voice had that sharp edge, like when you tell your parents you were picked for the softball team but they really wanted you to play chess.

I cracked three eggs into the bowl. “One more?”

Mom nodded.

“You know anything about her family?” I could tell Mom was working hard to make her voice sound all casual.

“Not really.”

I got a fork from the drawer and started whisking the eggs. There was a pause in the conversation.

“She told me she has cousins in New York City,” I said. “She goes there every summer.”

“Well, that must be nice,” Mom said.

Dad walked into the kitchen.

“Uh-oh,” he said, reaching for the coffeepot. “Your mother never thinks anything is ‘nice.' ” He poured himself a mug, then leaned against the counter. “Need any help?”

Mom was sifting the flour by banging a sieve against her open palm, and banging it a little too hard—flour was snowing all over the counter.

“Maybe I'm missing something”—
bang, bang
—“but I don't quite understand how people expect me to send my eleven-year-old daughter off to their
farmhouse
”—the word came out like a sneer—“when I don't even know them, I've never met them, they've never introduced themselves to me. I mean, what happened to having coffee first? Or even a plain old phone call, for Christ's sake!”

Dad and I exchanged glances. “You want me to take over for a bit, Helen?” he said.

Mom looked down at her Barnard T-shirt, now covered in flour.

“Yeah, maybe.” She sighed.

Dad took the sieve out of Mom's hand and placed his coffee mug into it instead. Then he nudged her toward the kitchen door. “You go write,” he said. “We'll get breakfast on the table.”

“What's she all worked up about?” Dad turned to me once Mom had left the room. “You have some kind of a playdate?”

I rolled my eyes. “They don't call them playdates when you're eleven.”

“Right,” Dad said. He started mixing the batter. “Chocolate chips?”

I nodded and reached into the freezer for our stash of Hershey's. (Real chocolate chips are hard to find in Delhi. We got this bag from one of Mom's journalist buddies, who brought it back from Singapore a month ago. We ration the chips, one scoop at a time. If we don't keep them in the freezer, they melt into one big puddle. We learned this the hard way.)

I dropped one precious handful of chocolate chips into the batter. Then I watched as Dad mixed them in, scraping the wooden spoon against the sides of the big glass bowl.

These are the things I miss most about Boston: chocolate chips, soft toilet paper, sidewalks, artichokes, blueberries, the public library, clean tap water, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and my best friend, Katie Standish.

Standing there, watching Dad pour the chocolate-flecked batter into the pan, I suddenly really, really missed Katie. It hit me like a wave, that missing. Bang. It knocked me over.

“You okay, honey?”

Dad was looking at me, a metal spatula in his right hand.

“Yeah,” I said. I wiped my eyes with my T-shirt.

Dad flipped the first batch. “Saturdays a little tough?”

I nodded.

“Well, it's nice you have a, um…” He paused, searching for the right word.

“An invitation,” I said. “I have an invitation.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You wanna go?”

I shrugged. “I dunno.”

For weeks, all I had wanted was to get in with Anvi and Prisha. Now here was my big chance and I could already feel it slipping away. I wasn't going to go. I was too chicken.

I picked at some batter that had dripped onto the counter. “I mean, maybe Mom's right and we should get to know the family a little better first?”

Dad lowered the flame. “I'm not sure we're going to, um, be fully compatible with the Saxenas, Chloe,” he said. Then he put one hand on my shoulder. “But we can try. We'll do whatever you want, sweetie. And you should do whatever makes you most comfortable today. Do whatever feels right.”

I looked down at my bare feet. “I think I might feel more comfortable maybe going a different weekend,” I said.

“Okay,” Dad said. He took his hand off my shoulder. “That's okay.”

And even though nothing had changed—I still had two long, hot weekend days to fill and nothing to fill them with—I felt a little better because I had an invitation. I might not be going, but at least I'd been asked. And that was a start.

It was Dad's idea to go to Humayun's Tomb that afternoon. Maybe he wanted a little culture, or maybe he thought I needed a change of scenery since I had chickened out on going to Anvi's.

“Let me get this straight—you want us to visit a
tomb
?” I was lying on my bed, reading, when he came into my room. “Like, a place that has dead people?”

Back in the U.S., weekend excursions meant a couple of hours at the Museum of Science or the aquarium. We went hiking. We went for a splash at the pool. Maybe stopped for ice cream. We did not hang out at tombs.

“Not dead
people.
One very important dead person: the emperor Humayun. And it's not just a tomb, it's a mausoleum.”

I raised one eyebrow, a trick I'd been practicing in the mirror lately. It was supposed to make me look skeptical, which means grown up. At least, I think that's what it means.

Dad didn't seem to notice the eyebrow thing. “It's one of the greatest historical sites of Delhi, Chloe. It has gardens.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and cocked his head at me. “Shreya said you'd like it. She said it's nice.”

Shreya is my parents' best friend. She has silver hair that's cut really short, like a man's, and studs that line both her ears all the way to the tippy top; there must be a dozen of them. There's a sparkly one stuck in her right nostril, too. She wears long, colorful scarves and those baggy pants that only circus clowns wear in America but that normal people wear here. She doesn't wear any makeup. And her two front teeth are crooked; they overlap like a door that's slightly off its hinges.

Shreya works for an NGO, which stands for nongovernmental organization, and which she explained to me once: she wants the world to be more fair for more people, but she doesn't trust the government to do it. Plus, she's a big help to Mom with her work. Whenever Mom's confused about something or needs help with Hindi or background for a story, she calls Shreya first.

I like Shreya because she's one of those grown-ups who talks to kids like we're normal people. The first time she came over, I was curled up on the couch in the living room, rereading this Judy Blume book that Mom hates.

“
Please
tell me you're not reading that junk again, Chloe,” Mom groaned.

Shreya leaned over to get a look at the cover. “
Blubber
's even better,” she said, and winked at me.

You can see why I like her.

Our first week in Delhi, Shreya took Mom and me to buy clothes at Fabindia and books at Bahrisons Booksellers. For lunch, she took us to a hole-in-the-wall, where we gobbled down chicken
kati
rolls, grease dripping from their wax paper sleeves.

Another Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks later, I was about to drop dead with the sheer boredom of my new, friendless life, when Shreya stopped by. She took one look at my face and said, “You ever try
golgappas,
Chloe?”

Before Mom could protest, Shreya had popped me on the back of her scooter and zipped me around the corner to a grimy little storefront I had never noticed before: Bengali Sweet House. We stood there together, in front of the
golgappa
wallah, while Shreya showed me how to stuff whole puffs straight into my mouth and then crunch down on them, letting the tangy sauce gush over my tongue. I wasn't sure I liked
golgappas,
but I sure liked being there with Shreya.

“Best cure for homesickness there is,” Shreya said as we climbed back onto her scooter. I wasn't sure if she meant the
golgappas
or herself, but I had to agree.

Even though Shreya seemed to know everything about Delhi—and seemed to get me, too—I still didn't feel like going to this tomb or mausoleum or whatever it was. I felt like staying home.

“Do we have to?”

Mom and Anna were working in the office. Lucy was napping. The house was blissfully quiet. And I was just getting to the part where Harry meets Sirius Black.

Dad reached down and took the book right out of my hands. “C'mon, kiddo,” he said. “Get your shoes.”

As soon as Vijay parked the car, we were surrounded.

“Sir-
ji,
you buy postcard! You have most beautiful daughter! You buy postcard!”

Dad grabbed my hand and pulled me through the crowd of vendors pushing postcards and potato chip packets and fans into our faces.

We made it to the ticket counter, only to be accosted again: “You need tour? I give you most excellent tour of this most historical and beauteous of monuments in this most magnificent of countries, this incredible India.” The tour guide flashed a tattered ID card at Dad, then leaned close, lowering his voice: “Government-certified. I give you very best price.”

“No thanks,” Dad said, handing me a ticket and brushing past the tour guide. “C'mon, Chloe.”

“This is great, Dad,” I muttered, pushing through the turnstile. “Really loving this. Super relaxing so far.”

But then we walked through the entry gate, and it was like we had passed into a different world.

Vast lawns spread before us. The sun was already low, casting long shadows across the smooth green grass. It was still hot, but a soft breeze stirred the pom-pom tops of the palm trees that lined the main path. There weren't many people, just a few Muslim families out for early-evening strolls. They nodded at us as they passed.

“It's so…so peaceful.” When I spoke, it came out as a whisper.

In the distance, a man's voice wailed out over a megaphone. He was singing in a language I didn't recognize.

“The call to prayer,” Dad said.

I had no idea the place would be so huge. We couldn't even see the mausoleum because it was hidden by an enormous stone gateway at the far end of the lawns.

There's hardly ever this much open space in Delhi.

Dad took my hand and threaded it through his elbow. We started down the main path, our shoes crunching on the coarse sand.

“So this was, like, the model for the Taj Mahal?”

“Yep.” Dad nodded. “Bega Begum had it built for her husband, Humayun, after he died. It was a testament to her love.”

“That's kind of creepy….”

“Wait, listen!” Dad was standing stock-still in the middle of the path. Then it came again—a weird meowing sound, kind of like a cat.

I looked at him, confused.

“Peacocks! Here, this way…”

Dad pulled me off the path, toward a massive, crumbling archway that led to a separate, enclosed garden.

“Hey, look at this.” He was pointing to a set of stairs cut into the archway's inner stone wall.

I peered up the steps. It was pitch black up there and smelled like bats.

“I'm not sure we're supposed…”

But Dad had already started climbing. He had to use his hands, the steps were so steep. “Come on, Chloe,” he called back to me from the dark. “Where's your sense of adventure?”

When I came out at the top of the stairs, Dad was standing right at the edge of the high stone wall, gazing out over the view. The mausoleum spread before us. Its walls, made of sandstone, glowed pink in the setting sun.

I had to admit, it was seriously beautiful.

Dad pointed. A little farther along the wall, a group of peacocks were strutting around, eyeing us warily. They were so close I could see the tops of their blue crowns bobbing up and down and the iridescent eyes on the ends of their tail feathers glimmering.

We sat there for almost an hour, Dad and me, legs dangling off the side of the stone wall, listening to the prayers and watching the peacocks strut. A group of ladies sat in a loose circle in the garden below, their jewel-colored saris fanned out around them on the grass. When the wind stirred the trees, flowers showered down on them, which made the ladies turn their faces up and laugh.

As the sun dimmed, the reflecting pools in the garden around the mausoleum turned silver. The moon rose in the darkening sky. The peacocks meowed.

I'm not kidding: it was like a real-life fairy tale.

Before we knew it, a guard was walking through the grounds, waving people toward the exit.

Dad held my hand on the way out. We hadn't done that in a while, but it didn't bother me a bit.

The same guide was still there, leaning against the wall by the exit, a clay cup of chai in his hands. He grinned at us amicably.

“I tell you it most beauteous monument. Now you believe me,
na?
Next time you take guide.”

In the car, on the way home, Dad put his arm around my shoulder and I leaned into him, my head resting against his chest. We didn't need to talk.

“So, how was it?” Mom asked when we walked in.

“It was great.” I smiled. “It was really great.”