Abby Spencer Goes to Bollywood (8 page)

At the airport before I left, Mom handed me a pill for motion sickness. “Abby, it’s a long flight and Priya’s mom

thought you might need this. So take it.” I slipped the pill into my pocket and I thought I’d take it if I needed it.

I should’ve taken it. I needed the medicine thirty minutes ago. I need to rest my spinning head. One minute the soup sloshed in my stomach and then the next it was in my throat.

Frantic, I search for the barf bag. There isn’t a bag, only an in-flight magazine selling fake rocks to hide your speakers in the garden.

Jeez, do passengers not get sick in first class?

The soup sloshes its way up my digestive track. I reach for the blanket and the rest is history. The woman sitting next to me shrieks and sits on the flight attendant buzzer. She didn’t pay upward of five thousand dollars to sit beside a girl who makes hicbucroak sounds and throws up into a blanket. The flight attendant calms her and moves her to another seat. She finds an unsuspecting glamorous Indian woman to occupy the seat beside me.

I’ve never been so embarrassed. Physically I feel better after chucking up. The barfing realigned by body’s internal organs and magically cured my hiccups. Yippee!

After a quick wash in the miniscule capsule pretending to be a bathroom, I change into pj’s.

Yes, the nice flight attendant gave me pj’s!

Airline’s huge hint to Abby Tara Spencer,
Shut up and fall asleep!

The plane now inches toward Europe. I didn’t want to be sick again. I take the tablet Mom gave me and conk out.

Hours later, I wake up over the edge of Africa. The cabin is dark. The woman beside me looks less glamorous with her head lolling to the left and emitting a barely audible snore.

My stomach growls in protest.

The flight attendant with the smiley freckled face sees me and comes over. “You missed dinner. We’ll serve breakfast in a few hours. Would you like a snack?”

I nod. She comes back with peach yogurt and granola, which have never tasted so good. After being asleep for so long, I’m wide awake. Everyone on the dimly lit plane is asleep while I read my travel guide to Mumbai. It’s a present from my grandparents. The cover is a photo of the Gateway of India. Soon my brain is buzzing with facts—like how Mumbai was originally a group of islands and that the city is India’s economic and commercial center. It’s India’s most diverse, cosmopolitan, and westernized city.

The flight map on my TV console says we’re over Afghanistan. It feels weird to be flying 30,000 feet above a war zone. Same space, different altitudes, and different stories I think as I page through my book.

Finally the captain announces that we’re about to begin our descent into Mumbai International Airport. I gather my belongings, tighten my seat belt, and pray through the bumpy landing. The plane shudders, sighs, and touches its wheels to the earth in exhaustion.

“Good luck,” The flight attendant squeezes my hand as I get off the plane, my backpack over my shoulders and clutching my violin case. Because I’m an unaccompanied minor, an airline employee with immaculately creased pants meets me at the gate.

For the first time in my life, I’m in a foreign country. My string quartet is quiet as if it too wants to hear all the foreign languages spoken around us. The sounds are gibberish to me interspersed with familiar nuggets of English. Huge rusty fans swing on pedestals, valiantly fighting the heat. Surrounded by newness, I struggle to take it all in. Women in saris walk all around me—some are travelers like me while others are airport staff. There are other people dressed like me in jeans and shirts.

At the immigration desk, I say I’m visiting friends. What if I tell them the truth? Would the earth stop revolving? Would it be like a scene in a comedy when chaos rules? I grin, imagining an elephant running through the busy airport, clearing desks with his tusks and crapping in the gift shop.

I look at my watch as the immigration officer checks whatever it is immigration officers check. It’s eleven a.m. in Houston. What is Mom doing?

He stamps my passport with the seal for entry. Thunk!

He slides it through the window.

My airline chaperone hustles me through customs and out of the airport terminal. The sliding doors open, and hot, humid, pungent, dark night air sneaks into the airport to cool down.

I scan the faces behind the rusted metal barricade. It seems like hundreds of men are holding up signs for the passengers they’re meeting. I disregard the signs and focus on trying to locate my father’s face.

Right to Left. Left to Right. I’ve never seen so many people milling around at this hour at an airport. Mumbai, I read, was the most populous city in India—with a population around fifteen million. It’s the fourth most populated city in the world, and I’m sure a good chunk of those people are at the airport!

My eyes scan the crowd. A crumb of panic rises. I look at the signs. None of them reads
beloved long-lost daughter.

A car honks and startles me. My backpack slides off my shoulder. The heat swirls around me. The smells of sweat, heat, soil, and people overpower my brain.

My chaperone tugs my sleeve and points to a sign. “There.”

A man holding a sign with my name sees us point and steps forward, “Abby?” he yells.

Who is this man? Why isn’t my father here?

The airline employee and the man discuss. The man signs some papers and then my chaperone says good-bye and leaves.

“Wait! He’s not my father.” Sheer panic invades my body, down to my smallest pore.

The man hands me a cell phone.

I hold the phone to my ear. “Abby! Welcome to Mumbai,” my father’s voice booms.

“Dad?” I ask. “Why aren’t you here?”

“I didn’t think you’d want the hoopla after a long journey. Thomas is my publicist. He’ll drive you home. I’ll see you in thirty minutes.”

I hand the phone back to Thomas, give him a weak smile, and trip over a mangy dog sleeping on the street.

“Sorry, guy,” I whisper to the dog, whose bones stand out against his skin, and follow Thomas to the waiting car.

Chapter 11

A white-haired Indian man opens the car door for me. “Abby, this is Shiva,” Thomas says.

I hold out my hand, but Shiva joins his hands and does a slight bow. “Namaste.”

I feel stupid. Next time I’ll do a namaste too.

We get into the car—me in back, Shiva in the driver’s seat on the right, and Thomas in the passenger seat on the left. Thomas turns on the air-conditioning and then chuckles. “You thought Naveenji would come to the airport? Do you know what
hangama
—chaos—that would cause? There would be photographers going mad and fans fighting for autographs.”

His tone is condescending.

I have to focus to understand his accent. “Oh, I didn’t know,” I say.

“You didn’t know?” His laugh is disbelieving as if I’m an idiot. I already know I don’t like this man much.

“You didn’t know,” Thomas repeats, unbelieving. “Naveen Kumar,” he says with pride, “is the king of Bollywood! He has acted in thirty-five movies. Each one has been a hit. They have each grossed over a hundred crore rupees. He has millions of fans. Women love him and want to marry him. Men? Men are jealous of his body. They wish they had his charm. Kids mimic his dance moves.” Thomas’s voice rises in ownership and I cringe.

This guy thinks I’m an ignorant idiot who lives under a rock. Shiva pulls the car into traffic, and we drive on the “wrong” side of the road, which I guess is the right side here. “In India, Naveen Kumar is a phenomenon. He is big. Bigger than the prime minister!” Thomas voices his

declaration of love.

Finally he looks at me. “You must be tired.”

My watch says it’s noon in Houston, and the clock on the dashboard of the car says it’s 11:30 p.m. in India. I’ve been traveling for more than a day. Mom, Grandma, Grandpa and I left home for the airport almost thirty hours ago. No wonder I feel like a plant that hasn’t been watered for days. I slept, but not enough. I rest my head against the tinted window of the air-conditioned car.

Keep your eyes open, Abby!

I struggle to take in my surroundings through the haze of fatigue. It’s dark outside. The streets feel smaller and dustier than at home and there seems to be a lot of construction near the airport. Then we’re on a highway. I look out at the buildings on the side of the road and force myself to stay awake. I see an exit sign that reads
South Mumbai
and under it is a script in an Indian language.

In spite of my efforts, my eyes close.

“Naveen Kumar is big in India, big, big, big…” Thomas’s voice echoes in my sleep.

My head whacks against the window and my eyes fly open. The car lurches with a thud. At first, I think I’m still on the plane and we’ve hit a turbulent patch. But then I realize we’ve just propelled over a pothole.

“Shiva, drive carefully!” Thomas chides.

I look out the window. We’re not on a highway anymore. We’re on a smaller, crowded street and I can see groups of people gathered around. There seems to be some kind of celebration on the sidewalk. Music blares and people dance.

A giant billboard of a man looms over us, like Gulliver over a Lilliputian city. I look at his face. It’s my father’s!

I gasp. “Is that—?”

“Of course.,” Thomas replies. “It is his big movie. The premiere is in eight days. Very soon. This movie is the best,”

Embarrassed, I turn back to look again. I can see the back of the billboard, a twin image of the front. My dad, at least fifty feet tall, striding with a menacing look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the
Terminator
movies. He wears a ripped sleeveless T-shirt, so ripped down the front that he might as well not be wearing a shirt. His muscles bulge, his face is streaked with dirt, and he appears to have survived some grueling escapade to hell and back.

I want to shut my eyes. No, better yet, maybe I could paint a shirt on every poster of my father in this city.

“
Jhoom
—that’s his latest movie. It’s the first one that we have produced under our production company. By God’s grace, it will be a huge hit,” he says, crossing himself. “Bollywood will be at his feet.”

Thomas’s belief in my father is touching even if the publicist is crazy. When he’s excited, he talks even faster.

Focusing on Thomas’s accent and trying to stay awake is making my head hurt.

We turn onto a road with the ocean on one side—the Arabian Sea to be exact. Mumbai is a peninsula surrounded by the ocean. I crack the window just a bit and I can hear the waves pounding the rocks.

All along the drive I’m surprised to see what looks like large, brown sandbags on the sidewalks and under bridges. What are they for? When one of the sandbags gets up and

starts walking, I’m shocked. My heart constricts. It’s not a sandbag—it’s a person.

I see now that people sleep on the streets, under the shadows of skyscrapers, with threadbare sheets pulled over them, their knees in the fetal position. Cocooned in their homelessness. I read that Mumbai is both a city of dreams and of extreme poverty. Some sources in my book claim that one in five people in Mumbai lived below the poverty line.