Chloe in India (2 page)

By the time I got down to the car, Anna was sitting in the backseat, her seat belt fastened, her arms crossed tightly against her chest and her face scrunched up in a scowl. Her uniform was perfectly neat: tan shirt, navy skirt, navy belt, tan socks with navy stripes. There was no mud caked around the soles of her black nylon school shoes. There was no gunk from peeled-off star stickers on her shiny brass belt buckle. A navy elastic held her long, straight brown hair up in a high, tight ponytail. Her new badge—
ANNA JONES, UNIFORM MONITOR
—was clipped onto her left breast pocket.

Ever since Anna was appointed to uniform patrol, she's been on my case.

“Your socks don't match!”

“Your skirt is too short!”

“Ew, is that dal? Is that
yesterday's lunch
on your shirt?”

Today was no different. “We are all supposed to cooperate when Dad's away on business trips, Chloe. Mom needs our help. Instead, you're making us late!” Anna glared at me. Then she gasped: “What happened to your hair?”

I looked out the window, pretending to see something really interesting instead of the plain old whitewashed wall that surrounds our house.

“We are ready, girls?” Vijay, our family driver, grinned at me in the rearview mirror.

I love Vijay. Even though his entire job is to drive us around all day—a job that Mom says would make her positively cross-eyed crazy—he's always in a good mood. When Mom isn't in the car, he plays bhangra music really loud. Sometimes he sneaks us toffees. And every couple of months, he dyes his hair electric orange with henna.

I nodded. Vijay pressed his palms together in a two-second prayer and then pulled the car out into the street.

“What happened to your hair?” (Anna again.)

I hummed a little before answering. “Oh, this?” I finally said, making my voice all normal-sounding. “It's my new hairstyle. Mom and I decided to give me a trim. I like it.”

But here's the truth: I did
not
like it.

To get rid of all the black and then even things out, Mom had to cut off the whole front part of my hair right up by the roots. Just thinking about it reminded me of the cold kitchen shears against my forehead, the ripping sound of my hair being cut. Long, limp blackened strands had fallen to the bathroom floor and curled up there like dead centipedes.

Now my bangs were so short, they stuck up from my scalp like the bristles of a hairbrush. When I had looked in the mirror, the first thing that crossed my mind was
Porcupine. I look like a porcupine.

The second was
I look really, really ugly.

I might have cried a little bit.

Anna giggled. “You look like Lucy.”

“I do
not
!”

Lucy is one and a half, and her white scalp shows through short tufts of reddish hair. She is practically bald.

“You do! You look like a baby!”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Well, Mom says it'll grow out in a month or two, which means I'll be back to normal soon.”

“So you don't like it after all,” Anna crowed. “You said you like it, but really, you don't.”

This is one of the most annoying things about Anna—she's always trying to trip me up, trying to catch me saying something that isn't technically one hundred percent true.

But it isn't the
absolutely
most annoying thing about Anna. The
absolutely
most annoying thing about Anna is that she was born first, and so every year, year after year, she is exactly forty-two months older than me. Anna will always be older, which means that she will always know more things and be better at most things than me.

No matter what I do, I will never catch up to Anna.

As if we weren't late enough, the car got stuck at the red light near school. I know the spot really well because it's the only red light and so all the cars and scooters and auto-rickshaws and bikes and buses—and often a bunch of lost-looking cows—squish up against each other, everybody pushing and shoving to make the turn. There's a small market on one side where the rickshaw drivers double-park, blocking half a lane of traffic as they chew
paan,
pick their noses, and wait for fares. We get stuck there pretty much every morning.

Anna likes to do flash cards on the way to school, but I like to look out the window and watch the world go by. Next to the market there's a small slum built right up to the edge of the road. As the car idled, I watched some men who were squatting in a circle, sipping their morning chai out of tiny plastic cups just like the ones at the dentist's office back in Boston. One guy was cleaning his teeth with a twig. There was a group of teenage boys too, piling carts high with bright green limes, and an old woman with a face like a charred marshmallow, sitting on a charpoy, picking lice from a little girl's hair. When the girl squirmed, the woman slapped her on the side of the head and went back to picking. There were three goats tied up next to them. Then a little kid pulled down his shorts and squatted right next to our car, getting ready to push out a poop. I looked away. Yuck.

Click.

With the flick of a finger, Vijay locked the car doors.

A beggar was winding his way through the cars, coming toward us. He was old and dressed in rags, with a walking stick and no shoes. At first I tried to smile at him, but then he put one hand up on the glass, right in front of my face. He had stumps instead of fingers. Vijay pulled the car up a few inches.

That was when I saw the girl. She was stumbling across the intersection, carrying a large plastic jug of water in each hand. She wore flip-flops and a pink
lehenga
smudged with dirt. Her shoulders sagged from the weight of the jugs, which bumped against her shins as she walked, splashing water on her skirt. She had to be younger than me. Maybe eight?

As she crossed the intersection, she got so close to our car, I could see the hole in her nostril where a nose ring used to be. The auto-rickshaw next to us inched forward, trying to cut her off. The driver honked and yelled but the girl didn't look up.

When she reached the other side, she ducked down a narrow alleyway into the slum. The pooping boy and the beggar had vanished, so I pressed my face back against the window, trying to follow the girl with my gaze. Where was she going? Why wasn't she at school?

The light turned green.

“I wonder what Anvi will think of your new
favorite
hairstyle,” Anna said. Her fingers were still flipping through her flash cards, but her eyes flicked over to me for a second.

Anvi Saxena is the girl I most want to be friends with at Premium Academy. She has long, straight black hair and really long arms and legs. She's like a spider. Not an icky spider but an elegant one. Her uniform is always perfect, like Anna's. But in Anvi's case, it's because all her clothes are brand-new. She once told me she has thirteen uniform skirts and eighteen uniform shirts. To give you some perspective, Anna and I have three of each.

Anvi is popular, which means a lot of people like her, but even I can tell she's pretty spoiled.

There's this long dirt path you have to walk down between the drop-off point on the road and the school gates. Just last week, Anna and I were walking a little way behind Anvi on the path. I called out, but Anvi must not have heard me, because she kept going without turning around. A maid and a man followed a few steps behind her. The maid was tiny, but the man was tall for an Indian, and he wore a dark gray uniform with buttoned loops on the shoulders. When he heard me call Anvi's name, he glanced back. His eyes were hidden by mirrored sunglasses and he wore an earpiece in one ear. He didn't smile or anything, just turned back around and kept following Anvi.

Right before she got to the school gate, Anvi stopped short and held her arms out from her sides. The maid stepped forward. She slid a backpack over Anvi's shoulders and then squatted down to straighten Anvi's skirt and retie her shoelaces. Anvi gave a little flick of her wrist, like she was shooing away a fly, and the maid stood up. Then Anvi stepped through the school gate while the maid and the guy in the uniform turned and headed back down the path toward Anna and me.

“Seriously? You wanna be friends with
that
?” Anna said.

Look, I'll admit it: Anvi is a bit of a princess. But she's also the only kid in my class who spends every summer in America, so she gets where I'm coming from. And she's the only kid who came up to me on the first day and tried to be friends.

I was standing alone in a corner of the playground, trying to look very interested in the dust circles I was drawing with the tip of my sneaker, when Anvi marched right up to me and told me that her cousins live in Manhattan and that they have fair skin because their mom is a “real” American. She put her hand around my wrist and flipped my arm over so that the underside was exposed. Then she poked at my veins with one finger.

“You can see theirs even better than yours,” she said. “They're more green.”

“You have nail polish on,” I said.

Anvi dropped my wrist. She held her long, thin fingers up in front of her face and waggled them so that her pink nail polish sparkled in the sun.

“Always.”

“Is that, um, allowed?”

Anvi shrugged.

“Have you been to Disney World?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Universal Studios?”

I shook my head again.

She frowned for a moment. “Broadway?”

“I saw
Mary Poppins
once?” Something told me I probably shouldn't mention that it was a middle-school production. And that I saw it in the basement of the Boston Public Library with my nana.

Anvi grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the swings. “That'll do,” she said.

Vijay was slowing the car down. We were nearing the drop-off point. We had only a few seconds to jump out before the traffic wardens would blow their whistles and wave Vijay on. The black SUV behind us was already honking, trying to get us to hurry up.

I grabbed the door handle. “You're just jealous,” I said to Anna. “You want to be friends with Anvi, too.”

“Yeah, right—” Anna started to say, but I slipped out of the car and slammed the door before she could finish her sentence—and trip me up again.

Everything was going okay till art class.

More than okay. Good, everything was good. During morning assembly, they skipped the national anthem, which is when I feel the stupidest because even though I've been at Premium Academy for two whole months already, I can hardly speak a word of Hindi. I just stand there, moving my lips while everybody else sings.

Come to think of it, I don't know why I should be singing the national anthem anyway. It's not
my
national anthem.

After assembly we had free reading time, which I love because I'm a really good reader and Ms. Puri put my name up on the Reading Wall.

Ms. Puri is my class teacher. Compared to the other teachers at Premium Academy, she's a little zany. She wears baggy
salwar kameezes
in bright colors, with patterns like polka dots and chevrons. (
Chevron
is my new favorite word. It's those zigzaggy lines that go up and down like mountain peaks. You can look it up.) Ms. Puri has half a dozen different pairs of glasses, all with thick, candy-colored rims. Sometimes her glasses don't match her outfits and then she throws her hands up in the air and says, “Well, I woke up feeling
gulabi
!” And that whole day she writes on the blackboard with pink chalk and marks our papers in pink ink. It's a little kiddie for Class Five kids, but everybody secretly loves it.

The other teachers at Premium Academy keep their black hair long, but Ms. Puri cuts hers short. Not porcupine short, but golden retriever short. And she's the only female teacher I can think of who's a “Ms.” All the others are “Miss” or “Mrs.”

After reading, there was math and I got not one but two green check marks—Ms. Puri was wearing green glasses today—for excellent work. Then, instead of Indian breakfast, we got good old American cornflakes, so I took three helpings. And then, during first break, Anvi said I could be an alternate for the dance routine she was choreographing with her best friend, Prisha Kapoor. I got to sit on the steps and take notes.

So you see, it was a pretty good day. I was so busy, I even forgot about my hair.

That is, until art class.

As soon as we stepped into the art room, Mrs. Singh announced that she was breaking us up into pairs.

I crossed my fingers behind my back, but it didn't help.

“Chloe and Dhruv,” Mrs. Singh called out.

I groaned.

Mrs. Singh glared down at me. She is tall and skinny and has a nose with a crook in it, like a real live witch.

“Do we have some problem, Chloe?” she asked.

I looked down at the floor. “No, ma'am.”

That was not true. I did have a problem. A
big
problem, and its name was Dhruv Gupta, the most annoying boy in all of Class Five. Dhruv's nose is always runny. On my very first day at school, back in July, he danced around me, saying, “Ooh, look at me. My name is Chhole! I am from America!” When I tried to make him stop, I might have sort of pushed him a little. And then he tripped over his
own
feet and fell down and chipped his front tooth on the edge of the slide and Ms. Puri called my mom and when my mom picked me up from school at the end of the day, she said, “Really, Chloe? On day one? Day
one
?”

When I tried to explain that
he
was the one who started it by making fun of my name, Mom actually laughed.

“He was calling me ‘chickpea,' Mom.
Chhole
is, like, some kind of cooked chickpea dish.”

“Well, I think it's cute.” Mom ruffled my hair. “My little garbanzo bean.”

Dhruv and I have been enemies ever since.

As soon as Mrs. Singh turned her back to hand the papers out, Dhruv crossed his eyes at me.

How original.

“Our project today is portraits,” announced Mrs. Singh. “You have exactly fifteen minutes to draw your partner. No erasers. We start”—she paused for dramatic timing—“now!”

I like drawing dogs and 3-D shapes. I do not like drawing runny-nosed, chipped-tooth boys named Dhruv Gupta. So when Dhruv said he'd go first, I just nodded and sat cross-legged on the floor.

Dhruv sat across from me, his paper on top of a big hardcover book that he balanced on his knees.

There are no tables and chairs in the art room, which I thought was weird at first, but now I'm used to it. In India, people sit on the floor more than they do in America.

For the first three minutes, I sat still, listening to the sound of pencils scraping against paper. The air was heavy and sticky with rain that refused to fall. It was hot. Delhi was having a bad monsoon season. Every morning, when Dad checked the weather, it was the same story: temperature in the high thirties to low forties—that's in the hundreds back home—record humidity, no rain.

The park across the street from our house was drying up. Even though Dechen, our housekeeper, wiped the terrace down every morning, by evening it was coated in a thick layer of dust again. If I licked my finger, I could write my whole name on the glass-topped table.

The heat in Delhi is different from summer heat in Boston, where you know it'll last only a couple of weeks. Besides, you can always throw on a bathing suit and go to the spray park or cool off in the air-conditioned public library for a while. Delhi heat is heavy and wet and there is no escaping it. It's all around you, every day, pushing against your skin, into your lungs. It's like living in a greenhouse with no walls.

At school, it's even worse than at home, where Mom will sometimes click on the air conditioner in her office and let us play cards on the marble floor under the gush of icy air. The school's concrete walls trap the heat and there's no AC except in a few tiny pockets: the principal's office and the sickroom. One time I pretended to have a tummy ache, just so I could lie down on the sister's cool white sheets. After twenty minutes, though, she sent me back to class.

I watched the ceiling fan turn in lazy circles, pushing hot air around the art room. The corners of Dhruv's paper fluttered. I tried to sneak a peek, but he pulled his knees closer to his chest so that I couldn't see.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at the clock. Only five minutes had passed. Sweat was gathering at my hairline. It tickled. If I didn't wipe it soon, the sweat would slide down between my eyebrows and along the side of my nose.

I reached up and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

“Ma'am!” Dhruv yelled. “Chhole is fidgeting!”

I gritted my teeth. “I am
not
a chickpea,” I hissed. “My name's not
Cho
-lay. It's Chloe.
Klo
-ee.”

“Now she is talking!” Dhruv yelled. “How can I draw her if she is always talking?”

Mrs. Singh glanced up from her desk at the other end of the room. She put one skinny finger to her thin lips. “Shhh!” she hissed.

Why, oh why, did I have to be paired with Dhruv Gupta? Why couldn't I at least be paired with another girl? Anvi Saxena has a long neck and straight black hair that falls like a curtain around her shoulders. I'm really good at drawing long necks and straight hair. I have a special technique.

But Anvi was paired with Prisha Kapoor, of course. They were sitting right behind Dhruv, their heads huddled together. Now they were whispering. They peeked over Dhruv's shoulder. Then they giggled.

Alarm bells went off in my head.

“Hey!” I said to Dhruv. “Hey, let me see!”

I reached for Dhruv's paper, but before I could grab it, he had twisted it out of my reach.

“Hey, what did you do to me?”

I grabbed again. This time I got one end of the paper. Dhruv was still holding tight to the other end. I pulled hard and Dhruv lost his grip. As the paper slipped out of his hands, he fell backward onto the floor.

I looked down at the paper.

I gasped.

Oh my God.

It was me. But I looked like some kind of nutso porcupine with beady eyes, buckteeth, and hair that stuck straight up from my forehead like a row of quills.

It was my hair! Everyone hated my hair!

Before I even knew what I was doing, I had crushed the paper into a ball, pulled the window open, and thrown the ball of paper as far as I could. It hit the roof of the jungle gym in the playground and then bounced down the slide, landing in the bowl of dirt at the bottom. A crow swooped down and pecked at it.

“Mrs. Singh!” Dhruv shrieked from his spot on the floor. “Mrs. Singh!”

Sitting alone at my desk in the middle of the empty classroom, my back to the door, I could hear the shrieks of my classmates as they ran around outside during second break. I wasn't even allowed to read. I was supposed to be thinking about what I had done.

I nibbled at a hangnail on my pinkie. According to the clock on the wall, I had been sitting here for thirteen minutes. It felt like an hour at least. Maybe two.

Whenever I get in trouble, my mom—remember, she's an investigative journalist—tells me to “get to the source.” And so I tried to think backward.

I was in trouble because I threw Dhruv Gupta's picture out the art room window.

I threw Dhruv Gupta's picture out the window because he had drawn my head all ugly.

He drew my head all ugly because my mom had cut my hair.

My mom cut my hair because I had colored it black.

I colored it black because I wanted to look like the other girls at Premium Academy.

I wanted to look like the other girls because I live in India and I go to Indian school.

I live in India because my parents moved me here.

So technically, this detention was my parents' fault.

My parents—they were the ones who had brought me to this hot school in this hot country where, even though I wore the same tan uniform and black shoes as everybody else, I stood out like a piece of peppermint in a bowl of licorice. It wasn't fair. If only I had dark hair like Anna's. If only I were neat like her. If only…

I put my head down on my desk, resting my cheek on its sticky plastic surface. One tear slipped out of the corner of my eye and sat trapped there for a moment until it spilled over the bridge of my nose and across my cheek. I didn't even bother to wipe it away.

I closed my eyes. It wasn't fair. I am a blond girl. I am an American girl. I shouldn't even be here.

The fan whirled above me, ruffling my porcupine hair. Suddenly, I felt very, very tired.

Before I even opened my eyes, I could already feel another person in the room. I sensed the weight of a gaze on my face.

I opened my eyes.

A girl was standing by the window, watching me.

In my two months at Premium Academy, I had never seen this girl before. Even though she was in uniform like everyone else, I could tell there was something different about her. Maybe it was her hair, which was shiny and hung in thick black braids like ropes down both sides of her face. The braids were tied with big navy-blue bows at the ends, all the way down by her waist. Only the littlest girls at Premium Academy wore their hair like that.

This girl seemed shorter than the other kids in Class Five, and skinnier, too. And there was something funny about her uniform. Her shoes were too big. They stuck out like ducks' feet. Her skirt was too short; two knobby black knees poked out from beneath the hem. And while her shirt was ironed—I could see sharp creases along the sleeves—it had clearly been ripped and then sewn back up at the shoulder. The brown stitches stood out like a scar on the tan fabric.

The girl cocked her head toward the window.

“Dekho,”
she said.

I shook my head. Ms. Puri had been clear—I wasn't to move from my desk. I was to sit alone for the entire break to reflect upon what I had done.

The thought of Ms. Puri made another tear slip from the corner of my eye. What if Ms. Puri didn't like me anymore? Just last week, when my mom came in for her parent-teacher conference, I overheard Ms. Puri telling her that I was a “real firecracker.” She said it in a laughing voice, but now I wasn't so sure. Was that a good thing—like I light up the sky with bright colors? Or maybe a bad thing—like I am noisy and make people jump?