Sulekha sensed an opportunity.
—Well, I do miss having a sister around, she said slowly.
Her parents exchanged pained glances. Sulekha cleared her unimpeded throat.
—You know, Aai, Baba—the girls from school wanted to have a party for me tomorrow night. At Carmen Roncevic’s, just across the town line by Gemma’s.
They stared as if she’d just announced she was joining a traveling circus.
—Not even a party really. Just to, you know, celebrate my . . . sweet sixteen.
Sulekha felt a near-hysterical giggle hiccup up when she said it. Sweet sixteens were for SPF 15 girls with slim hips and Little Dippered skin. Not her.
—What is so sweet about sixteen in this country? her father wondered aloud, chewing slowly, perplexed. —Why not fifteen?
—Baby is very sweet, her mother said, arrowing a glance at her father.
—Why not eleven?
—Alliteration, probably, said Sulk.
That last word seemed to frighten her mother.
—Baby, do not stress, she nearly pleaded. —But why you can’t invite your friends here? I will make puran poli—just the way you like!—and we will all do the pooja together. Kaka and Kaki might even come from Hartford.
Sulekha considered this incongruous image of the Bees mingling cross-leggedly with her family before the floored Ganesha, with her uncle, who was unabashedly prone to a vigorous belch after meals, and her aunt, whose regurgitative release was shallower but still Richter-registerable; even though Reshem couldn’t make it, Sulk still pictured her, lobbing about looks of disgust, taking solace in the fact that they weren’t her real uncle and aunt, just called that the way all your parents’ friends were in India.
It didn’t seem very sweet.
—They can’t come Saturday, said Sulekha. —They go to church.
—On Saturday? I thought church was Sunday.
—Right. To practice. For Sunday.
—Good girls, her father said, nodding with surprising seriousness.
—I’d be back in time to help get everything ready for Kaka and Kaki.
—Oh, Baby, I don’t—
—It’s just the girls, she added. —It’s just one night. It’s not even my actual birthday.
When there was no response, she played the missing-period factor.
—It would really de-stress me.
—Well, her mother sighed. —I suppose it can’t hurt. And Gemma will be there to keep an eye on you.
—Ah, Mummy, it’s okay, her father said, smiling, patting her hand, gently, clumsily. —What kind of trouble can she get into with the girls?
Sulekha’s mother and father had really taken to Gemma ever since she’d dissed Winston Churchill for allegedly calling Gandhi “that little man in a loincloth,” which made them instantly forgive her burgundy passport. They might have appreciated her sooner had they realized that until Gemma arrived, Sulekha’s first year in America had been the loneliest of her short but deeply felt life.
That first day of school in the U.S.A. felt like a birthday. Not in the sense of a celebration, but in that it felt like no matter how far she’d come in her six adventure-studded jamrukhslaked years, she’d have to start all over as if they’d never happened at all. Sulekha was dressed in her Catholic-school uniform from India (she was Hindu but that’s how it worked if you wanted a proper British education there): starched white short-sleeved shirt, denim-blue skirt to the knees, and chappals, her hair tightened in two coconut-oiled braids with even longer ribbons (red, white, and blue; her mother thought it would be a nice touch). She stood out like a small brown pilgrim awash in a sea of scintillating pinks and ironons. This was not an auspicious start. So many of the American mother-daughters were dressed nearly identically; a number were in tracksuits, which made Sulekha worry they’d be asked to run or climb soon.
—Aai, Mummy, what will I say? little Sulekha had panicked when it was time for the children to leave their parents.
—Do not worry, Baby, her mother murmured. —It’s the English, it’s the same. It is your second language.
That wasn’t what Sulekha had meant. And in any case, it wasn’t the same language. The English she’d learned in India, British English taught by Indian nuns with its tea blend of chiseled stone and hilly sky, was not the highway slur and blurry blue windows of American English. And this distinction was made plain right away, at roll call.
—Sue . . . Sue Lake Shayne?
She hadn’t recognized it as her name at first. Then it clicked.
—Uh . . . heeyuh, she’d said. Here.
—Hee haw? someone chortled.
They giggled at her shalls and shan’ts and lorries, her queues and jolly goods. Sulekha didn’t share with them the bloody hells that marqueed resoundingly in fantastic fonts across the backs of her eyes. They wrinkled their eyebrow-noses at her saran-wrapped samosas and asked if she was Cherokee (her art teacher had been to a reservation once! It had changed her life!).
Until Gemma arrived.
Gem then looked a miniature version of Gem now, the longly tangled hair, and something like a patchwork quilt for a skirt and camisole top. Blue and fuchsia rubber bands wound round her wrist, the same way Sulk wore seven gold bangles. She had an utterly serious expression on her face.
—Class. This is Gemma Nicks, they’d announced. —She has arrived to Royal Oak from London . . . England!
A collective intake of breath.
—I shan’t be late again, Gemma had said in a crisp, controlled accent that trimmed the air of all its excess fat. Sulk’s heart leaped: Shan’t.
At recess, scores of seven-year-olds thronged around the mysterious girl, not least because of this accent that evoked little princesses and single princes, powdery queens and page-turning Dickens, but, more important, the Spice Girls. Sulekha, however, was drawn to it for another reason: It was just like her own with the soft parts pared off, the core of an overripe apple. She began to sense the pulse of vindication on a nearing horizon. And at lunch that day, as she fiddled with her brown paper bag at a corner table, it was confirmed when, in front of absolutely everyone and their dog, Gemma Nicks set her tray down next to hers, and for a brief rapturous moment made Sulekha Madhav Shahane good visible.
—Papadum! I simply adore papadum! Gemma exclaimed, cat eyes tipping higher. —I don’t reckon you’ve got another, Sulekha?
Sulekha: sung like a sigh. It had been ages.
—I’ll trade you, she’d added, rummaging in her rucksack.
India, it turned out, was nothing new to Gemma Nicks: India was well tucked into London with its curry houses and supermarket spices, its imported marble temples and the Brick Lane she spoke of that seemed a kind of Yellow Brick Road but red, but blue, but many-hued. Sulekha couldn’t believe her ears. And when Gemma produced a luridly wonderfully large Toblerone bar, she couldn’t believe her eyes.
—Chocolate? she offered, and it sounded like chalk lit . As the nougat emerged on her tongue, Sulekha imagined glow-in-the-dark blackboards scripted in luminous cursives that spoke to her alone.
They chose Gemma. But Gemma chose Sulekha.
Over the years they teamed up, the British-born and the Indian, in a quest to become American as quickly as possible. Together, as if they were performing the most exacting surgery, they learned to extract the l from travelling, the u from colour. They shifted “shan’t” to “won’t” and “a bit” to “a little.” They never, ever engaged in “dreadfully frightful rows.” And, word by word, it worked. It didn’t feel so much a surrender as a fantastic linguistic heist, a game of dress-up of audible proportions. What was lonely as one was lovely with tea for two.
And, as seemed only fitting, along the way they created a new language for this young map:
A stirrup was when something moved your heart. A hodeo was a bunch of fooled-around girls getting together and spelling out the d’s. Bullfight: when someone was lying to you. Giddyup—noun, singular—an outfit that made y
ou feel particularly gorgeous. The good, the rad, and the snoggly was an irresistible boy; the hood, the bad, and the ugly, a nasty one—increasingly, the line between the two thinned for Gemma and solidified for Sulekha. Holster was gimme-a-hug, saddled was bummed out. Bareback: being caught in your birthday suit. Riding bareback involved entanglements in other people’s birthday suits. Ghost town? A dead party— that’s how Gemma usually described the ones Sulekha couldn’t attend.
A goldrush was how they felt around one another.
—Do you speak Indian? the creamy-skinned children had asked.
Now she spoke cowgirl.
—Don’t forget your mother tongue, the umber ones in India had warned.
Now, with Gemma, she remembered herself.
The September before embarking on high school, with Gemma’s Christmas checks and Sulekha’s odd-figure Diwali dollars, they gifted each other their most prized possessions ever: a pair of bona fide cowboy boots. Sulk’s were pull-on lizardskin, green as limes. Gemma’s were crisscross lace-ups, purple with suede fringe. Gazing in the floorbound mirrors that made the world seem a swiftly tilting planet, Sulekha was mesmerized.
—We made it, Damsel, Gemma had said. —We’ve conquered the Wild West.
They were a size too big so the girls could grow into them. Sulekha’s feet slipped around a little on their slopes, but they were magnificent. In these cowgirl shoes, she felt like a different person. Or the one she actually was. A pioneer, a buccaneer. A pardner.
—Lonestar, Sulk said with a twang that lay somewhere shot through the middle of a pile of maps. —Let’s ride.
Fourteen and this turf was just big enough for the two of them. But that was all before the indie boys rode into town with their caravan of stick-shift cars and dusty grins. Fifteen, and the playing field was replete with damsels in distress. It didn’t pay to be a lonestar—you wanted to be part of a constellation. Nearing sixteen, bitterstung bee-sweet: Gemma stopped wearing the boots.
—It’s getting childish to match like that, she explained, in kitten heels identical to the ones the Bees were wearing that week.
A kick, invisible, in Sulekha’s belly.
Last September, in the sweltering season of Ryder, Gemma grew shy about her body. One afternoon, when they were last in the group shower stall for the required pre-pool rinse, Sulekha was astonished to see Gem’d come up with fresh prep choreography: She curled over herself fetuslike, rolling over the shifting landscape of her chest and Down There— jealously, possessively, shyly, as if she were cupping her hands over a particularly important exam answer. And Sulekha tried not to cheat but couldn’t help herself: Off the edge of her eye, as Gemma unfurled for an instant to shave her underarms, Sulk was amazed at how the lush, unruly undergrowth below her belly button had condensed to a tamed slim strip, more of her baby shape visible than had been in four summers. Sulekha felt a strange sense of nostalgia and revulsion, was suddenly conscious of her own nakedness in a way she’d never been with Gemma before. She felt shy, and sad to feel shy.
—What are you looking at? Gemma snapped, rapidly pulling on a one-piece, but not before Sulk had seen the double blues of bitemarks running down her inner thigh flesh.
—I dunno.
—Boys like this.
—It’s just . . . different.
—Well, if you want it to be the same, Gemma said then, curtly handing the razor over. —Make it the same.
Sulk stood stupidly holding the pink plastic handle until she realized what Gemma meant.
—Go on.
She sudsed up, feeling absurdly frothy Down There. She took the razor with one hand, stretched her skin back tight with the other, stroking upward. She was surprised at the thickness and curliness of the hair that coated the razor with that single stroke. She glanced up. Gemma stood with her arms crossed and nodded at her to continue. Sulk shaved off one more strip from the outer edge, a little too hard. She sucked in her upper lip as a single drop of rose reddened up on that previously untouched flesh.
And then Gemma was kneeling before her. She took the razor from her hand.
—Here, you’ll hurt yourself, she said gently. —Let me do it. She felt frozen looking down at Gemma’s head, the hair so dark when it was wet, almost like Sulk’s own. Her heart dropped to the base of her belly, swelling.
Gemma slipped the blade up so easily she didn’t feel a thing. And when she was done, Sulekha looked just like her. There.
—Let me see, Gemma had said, standing. It felt strange, being examined by her. They’d shared this space before, but that day it was different. That day Gemma perused her with a stranger’s eyes. And there was a little sad something in those eyes, and a little something Sulk had never seen there before, like hunger and fear combined; hunger for fear? But in an instant it was business as usual. Gemma rinsed the razor and turned her back.
—Join the club, she said, and stepped out of the stall. From that day forward, they stopped walking with their schoolgirl arms around each other. They knew what was happening inside each other’s clothes, and though they did not touch, they held on even more tightly in their exchanged glances, their averted eyes, in what they didn’t say.
On Friday morning, from the pre-homeroom moment Sulk coaxed on her lizardskin boots, Royal Oak Regional High School resonated with new meaning. No one but the Bees knew who the midnight boyman would be, but it felt like everyone—from the custodian to passing upperclassmen— was giving Sulk looks loaded with meaning.
It was a different world in which anyone could be The One. The rowdy boys, the brainy boys, the alt boys with MP3s dreaming moody music, the skater boys and their proudly displayed bruises. It was a more hopeful world. The boys began to look less and less like parts of their various groups, and more just like boys. Independent. Even Lane Hallestorm (would it be? had he given her a glance just now? how could it be?): Once you zoned in on him and not the posse he posed in, he cocooned nearly human.
All day Sulekha gazed with an intensity at the mouths of her classmates—Carmen’s carefully applied, Joel Macero’s pensively chewed, Patrick Trainor’s brazenly toothed, Gemma’s own bare heart-shaped lips—until it seemed the whole room was awash in a sea of tongue steeped, a chorus of openings.
Her family seemed joyfully far.
And the Bees seemed satisfied. They were laughing at her as they went through a round of puckering exercises in the parking lot, but they were also closer than they’d ever been, and that meant something. And most important, Gemma was nearly being Gemma again. Sending her secret shimmering winks that made the butterflies flutter by in the pit of Sulk’s queasy stomach. We made it across, the smiles seemed to say. Nearly there. Nearly together again. In spite of herself, anticipation began to mount. Sulekha’s lower belly was in twirling cramps, like springs longing to shoot into the world, unspiral, straighten out a truth.
Last period put an end to the ellipses. In Honors American History, she turned around to pass the assignment back to Abhijit, today wearing a bandanna over his forehead that she’d seen him tying on by his locker. He mumbled:
—Got your phone?
She nodded, confused.
Moments later, she felt it vibrate through her bag, against her boot. Peering down, she saw the tiny envelope symbol and clicked.
xo + folks = kill. 210 at nth-sth
She understood.
At a little before two P.M., Abhijit raised his hand and asked to go to the boys’ room. A smidge after, Sulekha waved and requested the girls’.
At the junction of North and South Halls, by the handicapped toilet, she found him.
—Abe, she said, just in case anyone was around, and then, closer up. —Abhijit.
Despite the brazenly patterned headwrap, he looked sheepish.
—I’m really sorry, he said.
—So it’s you.
So this was the suitable boy they’d sorted for her? Abhijit. No alt, no rowdy, no jock, no skater, no brain, and of course, no Lane. But Abhijit Joshi, the only o
ther desi (however American born) in school. How uncreative. Or actually, perhaps how creative, nearly doing her parents’ work for them— though the Bees probably didn’t realize that joint outcastedness at Royal Oak Regional High did not undo the biases their families had long ago packed in their luggage just in case and later casually unfolded before the eyes of their U.S.-bred children. Though both were Marathi, the Joshis were Brahmin, the religious caste, and more important, a higher caste than the Shahanes’ warrior one Kshatriya, which made them a little too uppity in Sulk’s mother’s opinion. Mrs. Joshi was always going on (in front of her) about how their bodies ran with pundit blood. And Sulekha’s mother was constantly proclaiming (behind her back) about how it was the Kshatriyas, the caste of kings, who’d protected these supposed pundits during all the great wars.
They stared at each other a moment, then simultaneously began to laugh.
—Look at us, said Abhijit, shaking his head. —My parents would kill me—with a CKP NRI like you.
—Nonresident immigrant? Excuse me, we live here, Sulekha said, smiling. —And imagine mine, with a pseudo-pundit ABCD like you.
—Look, I’m not gonna be able to escape so late without my folks sending out a SWAT team, Abhijit said, lowering his voice. —But can you act like it happened? You only have to go for a few. You don’t even have to do the woods; they won’t know.
—Don’t worry, said Sulekha. —I’m kind of in the same situation.
Of course, she couldn’t call his bluff. It was in both their interests, whatever the stakes were on his end, to just say they’d gone through with it.
She presented her hand. After a moment he took it and shook. His palm was warm and his grip surprisingly firm.
—Thanks, Sulekha, I owe you, he said, and grinned. His mouth wasn’t so outcaste then, though it was still hard to imagine kissing it. —I hope it was good for you.
—The sweetest sixteen I never had, she said.
She almost liked this boy she’d called an American Born Confused Desi, with his earnest eyes and eager bandanna. She expected to feel winded, a tangible disappointment. But instead relief pumped her body bright. And when she looked around at her classmates running for the buses, clustering with friends in the sidewalk light, the sun still shone, stored with gold across a nearing frontier.
Sixteen Page 20
