Chloe in India (7 page)

“You look fine,” I said. I was trying to sound reassuring, but Lakshmi scowled.

“No fancy kurta,” she said. “No
dupatta.
” She shook her head and pointed up toward the apartment. “I can no go your house.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Look at me!” I pointed at the soy sauce stain on my Red Sox T-shirt. “Seriously,” I said. “My parents do
not
care. Like,
not at all.
Actually, I know for a fact that they'd love to meet you. You have nothing to worry about. American parents are…” I paused for a moment, searching for the right word. “They're different. They're, um, cool.”

Lakshmi looked unconvinced, but before she could protest further, I grabbed hold of her hand and started pulling her up the stairs.

Dad dashed over the moment we walked through the door. He must have been watching us through the living room window.

“You must be Lakshmi!” Dad stuck out his right hand to shake, but Lakshmi just stared at it, confused, till he dropped it back by his side. “I'm David,” he said. “And this little rascal is Lucy.”

One look at my pesky baby sister and Lakshmi dissolved into mush.

“
Chota
baby!” she exclaimed.

Before we knew it, Lakshmi had taken Lucy right out of Dad's arms and was holding her on her hip. She pinched Lucy's fat baby cheek, which is what Indians tend to do when they meet a cute little kid.

I could see Dad staring at Lakshmi's dirt-encrusted fingernails, now clamped on to Lucy's peachy cheek. He jammed his hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to grab the baby back from her.

Meanwhile, Lucy had curled her fingers around one of Lakshmi's long black braids. She yanked.

“Yeow!” Lakshmi yelped, and we all laughed.

“Okay, enough baby time,” I announced. “Let's get some
nimbu pani
and go to my room.”

Lakshmi unhooked Lucy's fingers from her braid and handed her back to Dad. She followed me into the kitchen. Anna was standing at the sink, scrubbing her hands with antibacterial soap.

Lakshmi stared at her, awestruck. “You have two sister?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky me!”

She didn't pick up on the sarcasm in my voice.

“Three girl?” Lakshmi said.

“Yep. What's the big deal?”

“No one has three girls in India,” Anna interjected. “Didn't you know that?”

I shook my head.

“Well, do any of the kids in your class have two sisters?”

I thought for a second and then shook my head again. “I don't think anyone has two anything,” I admitted. I had never thought about it before.

“Overpopulation,” Anna said matter-of-factly. “In China, most families are allowed only one child. In India, people are
allowed
to have as many kids as they want, but most stop at two. It's a cultural thing. And hardly anyone has two girls because of prenatal sex selection and infanticide—long-standing cultural prejudices against females.”

Lakshmi stood there with her mouth open, staring at Anna throughout this speech.

“See ya,” Anna said, and walked out.

“In case you were wondering, yes, she is always like that,” I said. “She's a lecturer. Gets it from our dad.” I had taken two glasses from the cupboard and was squeezing fresh limes into them with my bare hands.

Lakshmi watched me. “I have no sister, no brother,” she finally said.

“You're
sooo
lucky.” I dumped some sugar, then water, into each glass and gave them a stir. “My sisters are such a pain. I wish I was you.”

Lakshmi looked down at the floor.

I bit my lip. What did I know about Lakshmi? What did I know about her family? Her life?

“You want some ice?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

Lakshmi looked puzzled, so I walked over to the freezer and pulled out the ice tray. As I struggled to loosen some cubes from the tray, Lakshmi leaned over and poked one with her finger. Her face spread into a wide grin.
“Thanda,”
she said.

“Cold?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Yeah, they're cold. You want some?”

She nodded again, so I dumped some ice into the glasses and handed her one. She tapped at the ice cubes for a second, trying to sink them, but they just bobbed back up to the surface.

“C'mon,” I said. “I'll show you my room.”

And that's how it all began.

For whatever reason, Lakshmi and I didn't hang out in school. There wasn't much free time, but when there was, I stuck with Anvi and Prisha, while Lakshmi pretty much did her own thing, unless you count skinny little Meher, who would slink around behind her. She reminded me of a kicked puppy, that Meher.

After school was another story. Lakshmi and I met up in the park almost every day. Even in mid-September, it was still really hot. There was the occasional rain shower, but no real monsoon—at least, not the earth-pounding rain I had heard about—so we baked away under the afternoon sun. Sometimes we'd sit high in the branches of the champa tree, where the thick, waxy leaves shielded us a bit. Kali would put her paws on the trunk and bark at us, annoyed at being left out.

The aunties had put a new sign up in the park. The top was in Hindi, but the bottom was in English, and this is what it said:

You May Relax Here

Leave Your Body

Loose and Breath

Be in a Easy Condition

And Tune With Nature

I guess that's what Lakshmi and I were doing: tuning with nature. Sometimes when the aunties were sitting on their metal benches, sweating and chanting mantras while their maids fanned them with newspapers, we'd toss champa flowers down at them—not a lot, just enough to make them look around, confused.

When we got too hot, we'd go inside and sneak Cokes to my room. It was Lakshmi who got the ice cubes out of the freezer now.

There's something I'm really good at that I haven't mentioned yet but I'm actually pretty proud of: origami.

It all started back in Boston last spring. It was toward the end of the school year, right after Mom and Dad told Anna and me about moving to India and I was pretty upset. Then the school librarian, Mrs. Rodriguez, gave me a copy of this book
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,
which is about a twelve-year-old girl in Japan. At first, Sadako is fine and healthy and winning relay races at her school, but then she gets really sick from the atomic bomb. They put her in the hospital and she's dying and then she starts making origami cranes to pass the time. She wants to make a thousand cranes—because that's what Japanese people do when they have a really important wish—but she only gets to 644.

I guess this book got under my skin because right then and there, I decided that I was going to make Sadako's 356 remaining paper cranes (1,000 minus 644 is 356; if you don't believe me, you can do the math). The problem was that I didn't want to start making the cranes and then have to move them all to India—they'd get smashed in the suitcase—so I found the instructions online and just practiced at first. I didn't tell anybody about it, not even Katie.

By the time we were ready to leave Boston, I could make a crane in eight minutes flat. I didn't rush. I wanted them to look really nice.

The day after we moved to Delhi, I started making my 356 cranes. Every day, I would sneak a couple of pieces of paper from Mom's printer—just a couple of pieces a day so that she wouldn't notice them missing—measure them, and cut them into perfect squares. Then I'd make the cranes.

The hardest part was figuring out where to put them. I wanted this to be my secret until I completed all 356. So at first I filled up a couple of shoe boxes, which I hid under my bed. Then I started putting the cranes in a big heap, way up on the top shelf of my closet, behind my winter clothes. But one day I came home from school and Dechen was standing in front of my closet, twirling a crane between her fingers.

“What this?” she said, looking at me. There was a small pile of white printer-paper cranes on my bed.

For some reason, I started to cry. I guess I didn't want to have to stop making my cranes.

The next day, when I got home from school, there was a neat stack of brand-new colored paper on my bed. Not rough construction paper, but glossy paper in jewel colors: ruby and turquoise and emerald green. I didn't even have to cut the paper—it was already in squares.

Dechen never said another word about my cranes, but sometimes—I guess when she had to get something from the top of my closet—I noticed that she had moved the piles around a bit.

One day, during recess, Anvi and Prisha were working on one of their dance routines. I was sitting on the bench, taking notes for them. (I had become the official choreography note taker. Yep, it's about as fun as it sounds.) They sat down for a water break.

“Hey,” I said. “Have you guys ever done origami?”

Anvi crinkled her nose. “You mean that stuff that Japanese people do?”

Prisha pushed her eyes up at the corners. “I am Japanese!” she singsonged. Then she grabbed my notepaper and crumpled it into a ball. “Look, an origami rock!” She tossed the balled-up paper to Anvi.

“Hey!” I said. “Those were my notes!”

But Anvi was laughing really hard at Prisha's joke, so I tried to brush it off. I even made myself laugh a little too, though it came out like “huh, huh,” not like a real-sounding laugh.

Later that day, right at the end of science class, I heard Prisha telling Anvi the same joke all over again—balling up a worksheet and making her stupid Japanese eyes. This time I didn't try to laugh. I closed my notebook quickly and took a different stairwell to PE.

That afternoon, it was quiet in the house. Lucy was napping. Dechen was in the kitchen, cooking dinner. Mom was out reporting. Dad was at work. Anna had stayed late for some after-school committee or something. Lakshmi and I had met up in the park, but it was too hot, so we had retreated to my bedroom. Now we were lying on our backs on my bed, watching a lizard on the ceiling. He had skittered into one corner and was frozen there, waiting to catch a fly.

Prisha had made her origami rock joke one more time, right at the end of school, which is I guess what made me do it.

“Hey,” I said. “You wanna see something?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Lakshmi said.

I reached under my bed, pulled out one of the shoe boxes, and removed the top.

Lakshmi's eyes widened. She didn't say anything at first, just reached into the box and picked up one white printer-paper crane. She held it in her palm, just inches away from her big black eyes, and inspected it carefully for a few minutes, turning it every which way. Then she placed it carefully on top of my night table. She picked up another crane and inspected it just as carefully before placing it next to the first one. She went on like this for a while: picking up each paper crane, inspecting it, then putting it down in a neat row on top of the night table.

When she finally spoke, her voice was full of wonder. “You make this, Chloe?”

I nodded.

“You teach me?”

I smiled. “Sure,” I said. And then I told her the secret of the cranes, that if you made one thousand of them, you would get your wish.

Lakshmi listened quietly throughout the story. She never laughed at me, not once.

“And you have one wish?” she asked when I got to the end.

I nodded. She didn't ask me what it was. Instead, she rubbed her hands together. “So what we waiting for,
na?
”

Dechen got quiet when Lakshmi was around. Sometimes she'd poke her head into my room unannounced, a scowl on her round face. She checked up on us a lot. Too much.

That afternoon, when she opened the door and saw the paper cranes lined up on my night table, and Lakshmi and me sitting on the floor, folding the jewel-colored paper, Dechen frowned and closed the door without saying a word. I could tell she was upset.

“What's wrong?” I said after Lakshmi went home. “Why don't you like Lakshmi?”

Dechen didn't look up from the ironing.

“Why won't you let her hold Lucy?”

“She Indian girl,” Dechen said quietly.

“So?” I said. “In case you hadn't noticed, so is everybody else around here. So are
you.
”

Dechen glared at me for a moment. She hates being called Indian.

“Her hair dirty,” Dechen said. Her voice was low. “She having the lice?”

I shook my head. I couldn't believe this.

Dechen went back to ironing. “Now I wash pillowcase every day,” she grumbled.

The next day, when Lakshmi and I were sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, making origami cranes, I snuck a peek at her hair, but I didn't see any specks.

“Um, Lakshmi?”

She looked up.

“Maybe, um…maybe we could go to your house one day instead?”

Lakshmi's face twisted into a frown.

“You no like my house,” she said. “It small. No TV.”

“We don't watch TV here,” I said. This was true. When Lakshmi came over, we mainly played in the park. When we came indoors, it was just to take a break from the heat. Neither of us were really indoor people.

“What you want to see?” Lakshmi said. Her voice was tight and angry.

She jumped up. Her hand clenched around her half-finished paper crane, crushing it. “You want to see my house small, your house big? You want to see my house dirty, your house clean? You want to see my house sad, your house happy? You have sister, I don't have? You have baby? That what you want to see?”

“I—I…,” I stammered. But it was too late. Lakshmi had already run out of my room.

I heard the front door slam. I rushed to the window. A couple of seconds later, Lakshmi came flying down the stairs and out the front gate. Her stick figure ran down the street.

“Klow-ay? You okay, Klow-ay?” Dechen was standing in the doorway to my room, her face creased with worry. She held Lakshmi's crushed paper crane.

“Now look what you've done!” I yelled.

I knew this wasn't Dechen's fault. I knew it. Still, I couldn't stop myself.

This was my first fight with Lakshmi. I needed someone else to blame. Besides, it was Dechen who had planted a seed of doubt in my brain. She was the one who had mentioned the lice.

“She was my friend, Dechen!” I yelled. “My only
real
friend!”