Chloe in India (6 page)

That night after dinner, Dad arranged a Skype date for me with Katie. It took a long time to get everything set up, so I was kind of amazed when Katie's face finally floated up on the iPad. She looked different on-screen. Her nose was bigger and her skin seemed really pale; her freckles stood out like polka dots. It was morning there, so she was still in her pj's. I had already finished my whole day.

“Oh my God, how are you?” Katie said. “How's India?”

My mind went blank.
How's India?
How was I supposed to answer that?

I looked out the window at the park across the street, baking in the night heat.

“Um, it's hot,” I said. “It's really, really hot.”

“Oh.” Katie sounded disappointed, sort of like,
Really, is that the best you could come up with?

“But is it cool?” Katie said. “Not cool like temperature—cool like interesting?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It's definitely interesting.”

I thought about telling her about Humayun's Tomb—about sitting on the wall with Dad, watching the sun set over the gardens—but the words didn't come.

I searched my brain. What was there to say? I mean, how could I explain India? How could I explain the whole place? Everything in Delhi was the opposite of Boston—the heat and the smells and the noises and the colors and the tastes. Everything was totally different.

“There was a snake charmer in the park the other day,” I ventured.

“Really?” Katie said. “Oh my God, that's so cool! Did you touch a snake?”

“Um, no,” I said. (I had only seen the guy from the living room window. Dechen had pointed him out. He was napping on a park bench, his basket of snakes beside him.)

“Oh,” she said. “Still.”

“Yeah,” I said.

There was a long pause.

“There are lots of cows on the streets,” I said. “And sometimes we see monkeys.”

“Wow! Do you feed them peanuts?”

“No,” I said. “They sit on the back of this guy's bicycle. He dresses them up in these little outfits—a boy and a girl. He asks for money and then he'll make them dance.”

“That's so cute!” Katie said.

I didn't tell her the monkey man was really skinny with dirty hair and hungry eyes and that he had the monkeys attached to the bicycle by chains around their necks. When he biked past our house, I'd hide behind the curtain or else he'd spot me, park his bike in the middle of the street, and rattle the monkeys' chains while he yelled up, asking for money.

“What's going on in Boston?” I said.

That's when Katie launched into a monologue about all the things I was missing out on. Even though I had been in school for two months already, school was just starting up in Boston. And Katie's summer had been a blast. She had been to sailing camp and spent the Fourth of July on Nantucket. She had been strawberry picking twice. And she had learned this new trick—catching crabs by tying raw chicken wings with string, then lowering the chicken into the water and hauling it back up as soon as the crabs clamped down on the bait. Her uncle paid her a quarter per crab. She had already made five dollars and seventy-five cents that way.

“You should try it,” she said. “It's super fun—there's this big group of camp kids who do it together on the Cape—”

“There's no ocean here,” I said flatly.

“Oh, right.”

There was another long pause.

“But I did see an elephant once….”

The conversation went on like that for a while, with Katie telling me about something really fun she did back home without me and then me telling her some exotic-sounding detail about life in India. I told her what I thought she wanted to hear—about the India from storybooks with camels and turbans and ladies in saris.

None of it was lies. I mean, most ladies here
do
wear saris. And we
did
take a road trip through Rajasthan where we saw men in bright turbans hitching camels to carts along the highway. What I didn't mention was that our hotel had satellite TV, so instead of going on the “village heritage walk” with Mom, I watched Cartoon Network under the AC.

“It sounds amazing!” Katie said.

“Yeah,” I said. I was trying to sound enthusiastic, but mainly, I felt tired. And fake. I felt really fake.

“I think I better go now,” I said. “My dad is calling me.” (He wasn't.) “This was
so
fun. Let's do it again soon.”

“Promise!” said Katie.

“Promise!” I said. And then I hit the red button to make her go away.

Sunday morning, Dad was the first one to notice I was still in my room while everyone else was up for breakfast. He tapped gently on my door before opening it.

“Everything okay in here, trouper?”

When I didn't answer and just kept staring out the window, he came in and sat on the side of my bed.

“Chloe?” he said. “You okay, sweetie? It's a beautiful morning. Thermostat hasn't even hit one hundred yet.” He was acting jokey.

“I can't get out of bed,” I said. “I'm sick.”

“Is it your cheek?”

I shook my head.

Dad put his hand on my forehead to see if I was running a fever. “Um, I'll check with Mom, but you don't feel hot to me,” he said.

“Not that kind of sick,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “I see. I'll be right back.”

When he came back, he was holding an enormous mug of coffee in one hand. In his other hand was the pink plastic stethoscope from our toy doctor's kit—a toy that used to be my favorite. I hadn't played with it in years; it was Lucy's now.

“Dr. Dad to the rescue!” he announced, but when he tried to put the stethoscope to my chest, I batted it away.

“I'm too old for that,” I said.

A look of pain flashed across Dad's face. I immediately wanted to take back what I had said, but it was too late. He had already slipped the stethoscope from his neck. It flopped limp in his hand.

Dad took a couple of long sips from his coffee mug, the rim hiding his eyes. “I'll go get Mom,” he finally said. And before I could call him back, he had walked out of the room.

Another fifteen minutes passed before Mom showed up. When she did, she was wearing her Barnard T-shirt over a pair of Dad's old boxer shorts. She had her glasses on and her hair pulled up in a messy knot on top of her head.

“What is it, Chloe?” she said. She kept one hand on the doorknob.

“I'm sick,” I said, but my voice came out small and uncertain.

Mom strode to the side of my bed and placed one hand on my forehead. Her eyes were bloodshot. “You don't feel hot.”

“Not that kind of sick.” My voice was even smaller.

Mom put both hands on her hips. “Well, what kind of sick exactly?”

I hesitated. “I'm homesick.”

“Good grief, Chloe!” Mom snapped. “I'm on deadline. I have to produce twelve hundred words on the rotavirus vaccine in the next sixty minutes, so as long you're not presenting with severe diarrhea, I don't have the luxury to give a damn!”

She spun on her heels and marched out of my room, slamming the door behind her.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I thought my mom would actually fall down dead if she didn't turn a story in on time. Turns out, “deadline” is just a figure of speech.

I still had on my Boston Red Sox T-shirt, Friday-night soy sauce dribble and all. I slipped my shorts on. Rather than brush my hair, I pulled a baseball cap over the tangles. Anna was in the kitchen, cutting a mango into neat slices. She glared at me when I opened the fridge and gulped some OJ straight from the carton. I didn't say anything, only grabbed a granola bar from the cupboard.

I could hear Mom pounding on the keys behind the door to her office. Dad was too busy cooing over Lucy in the living room to notice when I opened the front door and slipped out.

I'm not supposed to leave the house without telling anybody, but I really couldn't be bothered. Besides, nobody seemed to care.

Outside, the air was still, hot, and very humid. The sky was gray and swollen with water that refused to fall.

It was only ten o'clock. By noon, it would be one hundred and ten degrees. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

“Stupid monsoon,” I muttered as I slipped through the gate to the park. I had never wanted it to rain so badly.

I kicked at a rock in the walking path. It came loose, so I picked it up and threw it. It landed farther down the pavement, skittered a few feet, then slammed into one of the champa trees in a cluster at the center of the park. It felt good. I kicked another rock loose and then threw it at the tree. Then another.

“Bas!”
a voice said.

I froze, a rock ready to launch in my pulled-back arm.

“
Bas!
Stop!” the voice said. It was a girl's voice. It was coming from the champa trees.

I walked over to the base of the trees and looked up. Way up high—higher than I'd ever dared to climb, up in the uppermost canopy—I could see a pair of feet dangling down. They were bare feet, black on top, brown with mud on the soles.

“Lakshmi?” I said.

A face appeared between the knees that were attached to the feet by a pair of stick-thin shins.

Lakshmi's face grinned down at me.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

“You come.” It wasn't a question, more like a command.

Lakshmi beckoned to me with one hand and as she did, the top of the tree swayed. She grabbed at a branch for balance. “You come!” she repeated.

“I dunno,” I said. I'm no chicken, but watching her up there made my stomach go queasy.

“You scared,” Lakshmi said. Again, it was a statement, not a question.

I was really not in the mood to be picked on, so I kicked off my flip-flops and hauled myself up onto the lowest branch of the tree next to hers. Mine was a bigger, older tree, so I could climb up to about Lakshmi's height and still be among thicker, sturdier branches. I sat in the V created by a branch, my back against the trunk, my bare feet dangling. I was breathing hard. I didn't dare look down.

Once I caught my breath, I leaned forward and peered through the leaves, trying to get a better look at Lakshmi in the neighboring tree. The foliage was so dense I could only see her feet and shins poking out.

“Lakshmi?”

And then I saw one small brown hand slowly reaching across to my tree. The fingers grabbed hold of the end of my branch, which sagged in response. Before I could yell, “Stop! No!” Lakshmi had swung across to my tree. She was hanging on to the end of my branch, her bare feet curled around it, grasping it from beneath like the three-toed sloth I'd seen on TV once. The branch dipped and right when I was sure that it was going to snap in half—and that she was a goner—Lakshmi started to shimmy herself toward the trunk. Before I knew it, she had flipped herself over the branch and was sitting beside me, grinning like crazy.

“B-b-but…,” I stammered. I was gripping the branch so tightly that my knuckles had gone white.

“Hello!” Lakshmi said, and then let out an earsplitting cackle, like she had just told the funniest joke in the world.

“Hello?” I echoed. “Hello? You could have killed both of us! We could have died!”

Lakshmi stopped laughing as quickly as she had started. She pointed at my cheek, which was now eggplant-colored—blackish purple. “You face feeling okay?”

I touched my cheek gingerly, wincing at the tenderness. “Yeah,” I said. “I'm okay….And thanks,” I added. “Thanks for helping me out the other day.”

Lakshmi shrugged. “No issue,” she said.

“Hey…” I was about to ask her why she hung out in the park so much—if maybe she lived nearby—but she was already scrambling down the trunk. She didn't climb like an American kid—moving methodically from branch to branch—but instead shimmied right down the trunk, Spider-Man-style. In a blink, she was on the ground.

“Chalo!”
she commanded, beckoning to me from below. “
Chalo,
Chhole!” She cackled again.

Before I could protest—I really did
not
want that chickpea nickname to stick—she was already skipping halfway across the park, her long black braids bouncing off her back.

It took me a while to extricate myself from the tree, and I let out a sigh of relief when my bare feet hit the grass. I slipped on my flip-flops, wiped my sweaty hands on my T-shirt, and then looked around for Lakshmi. I finally spotted her in the far corner of the park, over by the playground. She was squatting, her attention focused on the ground.

Now what?

As I got closer, I could see what Lakshmi was doing. She was petting a dog. It seemed to be the same dog that she had pointed out to me at school, though up close it looked in even worse shape than it had through the classroom window. It was a splotchy mix of gray and brown—like someone hadn't mixed the colors well enough before painting—and it had tufts of fur missing. A pink scar ran along its snout from its left inner eye all the way to its black nose. A chunk the size of a rupee was missing from one ear. It must have been in some vicious fights. It was so skinny, its ribs poked up like speed bumps, but it was strong-looking, too, with a broad, muscular chest. It was lying on its side, groaning with pleasure as Lakshmi scratched it hard behind one ear.

When I came up behind Lakshmi, the dog stiffened and whipped its head up to glare at me. It let out a low, warning
grrrr,
but then Lakshmi whispered, “Shhh,” and it lowered its head back down to the dirt and closed its eyes.

“This dog, Kali,” Lakshmi said without looking up at me. She was scratching the dog's back with both hands now.

“Is it yours?” I squatted down next to Lakshmi, but kept my hands on my knees. I'm nuts about dogs, but I had promised my parents never to go near street ones. One of the first articles Mom wrote when we moved here was about rabies in Delhi.

Lakshmi shook her head. “My dad say no dog in house. Kali street dog.” She looked at me. “You touch?”

I shook my head. “Maybe another time.”

But Lakshmi reached over and took one of my hands off my knee and placed it onto Kali's side and held it there. I could feel the dog's heart beating through its ribs:
da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.
Its fur was surprisingly soft—not coarse like I had imagined—particularly compared to Lakshmi's palm, which felt dry and rough against the back of my hand.

“Kali not my dog,” Lakshmi said. “Kali my friend.”

We spent the rest of the morning playing in the park with Kali, whom Lakshmi had trained to do all kinds of neat tricks: fetch sticks, bark on cue, chase her own tail, roll on the ground. It was only when Kali paused to sniff at the
mali
's dried-up hose that I realized how thirsty I was.

“You thirsty?” I asked Lakshmi.

She gave me a perplexed look.

“Nimbu pani?”
I asked, wanting some lemonade myself.

It was boiling hot. Lakshmi's lips were dry. Sweat glistened on her face. She
had
to be thirsty. But she shook her head and then glanced up at the windows to our apartment across the street.

“C'mon,” I said, pulling on her elbow. “Let's go get something to drink.”

But Lakshmi dug her heels in. She reminded me of Kali now—stick-thin but stubborn and strong.

“Well, I'm going,” I announced, and started walking toward the house.

When I glanced behind me, Lakshmi was standing by the gate to the park, watching me. I crossed the street, and when I looked back again, she was following me, on the opposite side of the street. I opened the gate to my house, but Lakshmi stayed on the other side. She was frowning. With one hand, she wrapped and unwrapped the end of one braid around her other hand. Kali had followed her and now lay down, placing her muzzle on Lakshmi's foot.

“C'mon, Lakshmi,” I said. I was getting exasperated. “I'm really thirsty. Do you want a drink or not?”

Lakshmi didn't move.

“Can't we at least get some water for the dog?” I said. “Kali's got to be thirsty, right?”

When Lakshmi's eyes lit up I knew I was on to something.

“Help me get water for Kali,” I urged.

Lakshmi crossed the street slowly, placing one foot in front of the other like a gymnast walking on a balance beam, but when I held the gate open for her, she froze on the threshold. Her hands clenched and unclenched the hem of her kurta. It was a maroon kurta with gold paisley patterns printed all over it, and it was only then that I noticed that most of the sequins had fallen off and that the olive-green pajama pants Lakshmi wore didn't match.