“Perhaps we should leave it to the girls to work it out,” Daddy said.
“We already did,” Sheila and I said at the same time.
“Nevertheless,” said Mum, “Tara will apologize to Sheila.”
“I will?”
“You will,” Mum said. Unlike Sheila’s parents, though, mine weren’t going to make me do it in front of them. Mrs. Rosenberg waited expectantly, but Mum intervened. “Let’s give the girls their privacy, shall we? Coffee’s ready.” She herded the adults into the kitchen.
I waited for them to leave before I exploded.
“If you even THINK I’m going to apologize again—”
“No, I’m sorry,” Sheila said. “For telling my mom all that. I should have known she wouldn’t keep quiet. I told her that a long time ago, before we were friends. I begged her not to call your mom.”
Friends. I couldn’t help smiling. Sheila was all right. Messed up, but all right.
“She just saved it up for a rainy day.” Sheila snorted. “Are you going to be in trouble?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably. But it’s not your problem. Just tell your mom I apologized, okay?”
“Okay.” She sighed. “We’re going to Rebecca’s next. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” I said. “You’ll need it.”
“Do you think she’ll forgive me?”
I hesitated. Knowing Rebecca, it would take her a long time to get over this. If she ever did.
“Eventually,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise.
“Sheila,” her dad called. “Ready?”
“Coming!” she called back.
ebecca called early the next morning to say she wanted to walk to school with Ben-o and me. I filled Ben-o in quickly before we got to her block.
Ben-o didn’t believe me. “Sheila Rosenberg?”
“You know another Sheila?” I sighed wearily. It really was hard to believe. Sheila Rosenberg, the self-appointed moral compass of the seventh grade, a petty thief. She’d redeemed herself by confessing so Rebecca and I wouldn’t get in trouble. Still—
“She’s clearly working out some unresolved issues,” I said, quoting Mum.
“Like what?”
I flashed to her hair pulling, but I didn’t say it out loud.
“Just stuff,” I said.
Rebecca was already waiting on her corner when we got there, and immediately she started bad-mouthing Sheila. I mean, I got why she was still mad, but just the previous night, she had accepted Sheila’s apology, before God and her parents and everyone. A deal was a deal.
“All her talk about idolatry and whatnot, and the whole time she’s been breaking an even bigger commandment.” She paused for effect, but when neither Ben-o nor I said anything, she went on. “Um, hello? You shall not steal?” Rebecca blew hair out of her eyes viciously.
“I get it, it stinks,” I said. “Anyway, she’s not going to shoplift anymore. I heard Mum telling Gran that Sheila’s going to get therapy.”
“Retail therapy?” Ben-o snickered.
“That’s not nice,” I said, laughing anyway. “But seriously, that’s good, right?”
“Yeah,” said Rebecca. “Maybe she’ll stop pulling her hair out, too.”
“Stop it, Rebecca!” I said, tilting my head toward Ben-o. It was mean of her to bring it up in front of him, and of course he got curious. I mean, who wouldn’t be?
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, glaring at both of them. But Rebecca told him the whole story in one breath, about the sleepover and how we found out that Sheila is a hair puller.
“That’s gross,” Ben-o said mildly. “Tara never told me that part.” I knew he wouldn’t start spreading rumors all over school, but it was still mean of Rebecca. Just then, I caught sight of Sheila up ahead, walking by herself. I knew she must have seen me and Rebecca together, and maybe even heard us laughing, because she was walking rigidly with her head down, refusing to look in our direction. Suddenly I felt sorry for her, and angry at Rebecca for putting me in this spot. It hadn’t been my idea to be friends with Sheila Rosenberg in the first place, and now it wasn’t my idea to stay mad at her. Right then, I didn’t want to deal with either of them, or Ben-o. I just wanted to be alone for once. At the corner, I pretended to wave to a largish group of kids from our school on the other side of the street. I told Rebecca and Ben-o that I had to exchange math notes with “someone.” Then I crossed the street and walked the rest of the way to school by myself.
lmost before I knew it, it was November, and Diwali was here. Meena Auntie’s annual Diwali potluck would be on Saturday, so on Friday Daddy did a trial run of his contribution—potato latkes with tamarind chutney and yogurt sauce. Mum and I pronounced it a huge success, much better than the chana-jor-garam-crusted chicken wings he attempted last Diwali, which in theory should have been delicious but actually were just soggy and awkward to eat.
Diwali got me thinking about Nanaji, and missing him terribly. It was his favorite holiday, probably because of all the sweets and the patakas—fireworks. Diwali is like Hanukkah, Christmas, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. And when Diwali and Hanukkah happen only a couple of weeks apart, like this year—Diwalikkah jackpot! Bonus gifts. Which was all great except for the fact that my bat mitzvah was coming up fast, a couple of days before Hanukkah, so I was too nervous to completely enjoy myself.
It was not that I wasn’t ready—I had my Torah and haftarah readings down and my speech pretty much memorized. I said it once a day in front of the bathroom mirror just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten any of it.
Diwali and Hanukkah are both called the Festival of Lights, which I always thought was a very interesting coincidence. Hanukkah is called the Festival of Lights because when the Jews reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem—after the Maccabees drove out the Greeks—they thought they only had enough oil to light the menorah for one day, but the oil miraculously lasted eight days—enough time to make more. Which was a pretty cool miracle, I guess. I learned that in Hebrew school.
I didn’t exactly know why Diwali was the Festival of Lights, so I looked it up on the Internet, and it turned out there were at least two different explanations. I laughed—Jews weren’t the only people who liked to leave things open to interpretation. In one explanation, the lights were to welcome Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, into your home. Kind of like opening the door for Elijah on Passover, I guess, but with a cash incentive. Actually, you were supposed to pray to Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, first, to make sure your path to prosperity and well-being was clear. Which was pretty smart. In the second version, the lamps and firecrackers were to celebrate the return of Rama after he defeated the demon king Ravana.
When I had mentioned the Festival of Lights thing to Rabbi Aron on Monday, it turned out he already knew that. Which was cool. I didn’t know they taught Hinduism and stuff in rabbi school. I would have thought they’d be too busy reading the Torah and Talmud, but Rabbi said everyone in the seminary is required to study comparative religions.
As far as I knew, Hinduism didn’t have anything equivalent to a bat mitzvah, so I wondered what Nanaji would have thought about me having one. He had a pretty open mind about stuff, kind of like Rabbi Aron. I bet he would have loved it, actually. Especially the candy table.
After dinner, I tapped on Mum’s office door.
“It’s open,” she called.
“Mum, I just wanted to know … Were Nani and Nanaji … Were they—religious?”
Mum studied my face for a long moment before she answered me.
“Yes, but maybe not in the way you think,” she said finally. “I would say Papa was a very spiritual person—he thought … that everyday things were holy. You remember how he loved birds, for example?”
I did remember, actually. He used to take me around his garden in India, pointing out all the creatures hiding in the trees and shrubbery.
“Show your
self!” he once shouted at a flowering tree, and a small green bird poked its head out of the thick leaves. “Ach-cha!” Nanaji had said with some satisfaction. “You have come back.”
“Who are you talking to, Papa?” Meena Auntie had asked.
“It is my friend chhota basant—this little green bird has kept away all the winter.”
“Oh-ho, scolding the small birds,” Auntie said with amusement.
“Why not?” said Nanaji. “They only will listen to an old man such as me.”
“You’re not so old, Nanaji,” I said, tugging on his leg.
“Not so old? How does one only this high judge the age of a man?”
I buried my face against his leg, and he reached down to swing me to his shoulders.
Nanaji was a big man, which was kind of funny, because Nani was tiny—shorter than Gran, even. And equally feisty.
“Only thing I am missing nowadays is the poor sparrow,” he said once I was securely seated on his shoulders. “They are no more in India.”
“This is not true,” Meena Auntie said, sucking her teeth.
“It is true, all right,” Nanaji rejoined. “The skies used to be filled with sparrows, but they have all disappeared.”
“All of them?” I asked, skeptical, tracing a pattern on the top of his head with my index finger.
“Arrey, beta,” he said patiently. “Not like ‘poof.’ Over time, with the pollution, they have all gone. Here as well as all the cities in Europe.”
Meena Auntie sucked her teeth again.
“Where are they?” Nanaji insisted. “Listen. What cheep-chip is there? Once, you couldn’t sleep for all the sparrows in the guava tree.”
“Such noise,” Meena Auntie agreed.
“Now I can sleep away the whole morning until the dudhwallah comes shouting.”
It was true. The garden was strangely quiet. You don’t realize how loud silence can be until the birds have gone away.
Later, though, Mum and Auntie and I went to the big American-style mall on the outskirts of the city, and as we walked past the parking garage, we saw hundreds of small birds swooping toward one enormous tree. They were moving so fast, it was impossible to see them clearly. More and more went in among the leaves, and none came out. The noise coming from the tree was unbelievably loud, as if every small bird in the world had decided to inhabit that one tree. I peered into the branches. “Sparrows! Mummy, look. Sparrows!”
Mum was distracted. I tugged the loose end of her dupatta. “Sparrows.”
“Yes, Tara, I hear them.”
“Oh-ho,” Meena Auntie said, holding her head. “Such noise.”
“But remember Nanaji said—”
No one was listening.
When we got home, I ran straight to Nanaji to tell him what I had seen. I was speaking very fast and he couldn’t make out half of what I was saying. “Sparrows!” I repeated.
“No sparrows in India,” Nanaji mused, catching only the word.
“But, Nana! I saw them.”
“In a book?”
“In a tree! A great big tree. There were hundreds of them in this one tree, maybe thousands. A tree. At the mall.”
“They were shopping?” he teased.
“Nana-jiiiiii!” I stamped my foot.
“Okay, beta, okay,” Nanaji said, swinging me high. “It seems all the sparrows of India are living in this tree of yours. This must have made quite some racket, your sparrow tree.”
“Such noise!” Meena Auntie said again.
Vijay, standing behind her, held his ears and rolled his eyes in imitation. I didn’t care, though, because I knew Nanaji believed me.
“God’s self must be watching over this tree,” he said.
Spiritual. Was that what Mum meant? It was a comforting thought, and I kind of liked the sound of it. If spiritual meant being kind to animals, and being adventurous, and loving flowers and trees and every kind of food, and having an open heart and mind—then maybe I was spiritual, too.
On Saturday, Daddy rented a car so we could transport Gran and her big soup pot to Meena Auntie’s—the only place in the world where Diwali is celebrated with a vat of matzoh ball soup. It’s really supposed to be for Passover, but Gran makes it for all special occasions. She has to make it twice in November—once for Thanksgiving (“just like the Pilgrims ate,” Daddy always jokes) and once for Diwali, because Meena Auntie loves it so.
Every year, besides family, Meena Auntie invites every single Indian she knows, whether they are Hindu or not, and they all come. Like Aisha Khan and her family—they’re Bengali, and Muslim. Meena Auntie says even though they might not have had much in common in India, it’s different here, because “in Amreeka, we are all brown.” That always makes Daddy cringe, even though everyone else laughs.
Anyway, Meena Auntie and Mrs. Khan being friends was awesome, because everyone knows Bengalis make the best milk sweets in the world, and Mrs. Khan made the best Bengali sweets in all of New York: light, sweet rasgullas and creamy rasmalai (which she pronounced in the Bengali way—“rosha gullas” and “rosh malai”) and her best thing—mishti doi—a sweet, custardy yogurt pudding. And Aisha’s cool. It was nice to have someone my age to hang with instead of Vijay and his pothead friend Biff. I usually brought Rebecca, but this time she had to go to yet another family bar mitzvah. Which was just as well, because if I had to spend the whole day listening to her complain about Sheila, I would surely go mad.
Meena Auntie brought out two trays of her famous potato-pea samosas, which she only makes once or twice a year, since they are such a pain in the tuchis (a word she learned from Gran).
“Joshua, see here, I have made this second batch extra bland for your sensitive American stomach,” Meena Auntie said, patting his shoulder. “The chilies and onions on the side.” I saw Daddy grit his teeth. He loves spicy food, but Auntie can never get used to that idea, all because of that time we all went to India together and Daddy got food poisoning. Twice. It had nothing to do with the food being spicy, but once Auntie gets an idea in her head, she can’t let it go. Like a dog with a bone. Gran doesn’t eat Indian food anymore, spicy or not, ever since her gallbladder surgery. She says even the clarified butter gives her heartburn.
It was a truly awesome feast. It would have been even more awesome if mangoes were in season, but Mum had solved that problem by bringing five pints of Häagen-Dazs mango sorbet, which is the next best thing. Besides, if there had been fresh mangoes, both Meena and Mum would spend the whole day complaining about how they weren’t as good as Indian ones. And so expensive, too.
“Imagine,” Meena Auntie said to Mum. “One hundred fifty rupees for an unripe Mexican mango? What would Papa say?”
Mum just laughed, but I knew exactly what Nanaji would say, from all those times we bought peeled mangoes on the way to Central Park. First of all, he would try to haggle, the way he was used to doing at home. He could never understand why the New York City street vendors were unwilling to bargain with him.
“That price?” he would say. “For one only?”
“Sí, for one,” the lady would say. Of course Nanaji would buy it anyway—two, in fact. One for each of us.
All the way to the park he would mutter complaints. Nevertheless, he would devour the whole thing down to the stringy pit, and then he would finish mine, too.
“Calling this a mango? In India, from your grandmother, this lady would be running for her life.” Which was so true. The fruitwallah had been terrified of Nani, all four-feet-two of her.
“Hey,” said Aisha, nudging me now.
“Hey,” I said.
“Are you going to Ryan Berger’s bar mitzvah?”
“Are you?” I asked, surprised. “So he really did apologize to you, then?”
“Yeah.” She laughed. “It was awkward. But he meant it, so yeah. I forgave him.”
“That’s cool of you.”
“So you don’t have to beat him up again.”
Meena Auntie was coming out of the
kitchen then with another tray of samosas. “Who is beating up people?” she asked.
“Nobody,” Aisha and I both answered. Auntie paused to give us a stern look, setting the tray on the buffet table.
Aisha pointed to the big pot of soup steaming in the middle of the table. “Is that the weird soup your grandmother makes?”
Meena Auntie and I both laughed.
“Try some,” Meena Auntie coaxed, ladling some into a bowl. “You’ve never had anything like it.”
Aisha sampled it. “It’s good,” she said.
“So light and fluffy, nahi?” said Meena Auntie.
“A little bland, though,” Aisha said.
“It’s supposed to be, actually,” I told her.
Auntie shot a furtive glance toward Gran, who was busy showing Mrs. Khan a new knitting trick. She reached into the pocket of her salwar and brought out a little jar of cayenne pepper. When she was sure Gran wasn’t looking, she sprinkled some into Aisha’s bowl and dumped the rest into the soup pot, along with a small handful of chopped onions and green chilies from the bowl next to the samosas.
Aisha sampled the soup again and nodded. “That works.”
“Our little secret,” Auntie said, winking.
Soon, Mr. Khan helped himself to a warm samosa.
“Aisha is looking very grown-up,” Meena Auntie observed.
“Yes,” he agreed, placing a hand on Aisha’s shoulder. “Soon it will be time to find her a husband.”
“Seriously?” I whispered to Aisha.
“Sheesh, Dad, I’m twelve,” she complained, turning red.
Mrs. Khan looked up and smiled. “Arrey, beta, not today,” she said soothingly. “You should have your education at least.”
Aisha threw her hands up in exasperation. It was a good thing she had finished her soup.
“Yo, girl, I’ll marry you,” Vijay offered.
“No, thanks,” she said.
“I thought you was already married, Vee—to Tara,” Aisha’s older brother, Salman, said, cracking himself up.
“Homes, that’s disgusting,” Vijay cried, shoving him. “T’s my little sis.” He touched the rakhi on his wrist as evidence.
My Basmati Bat Mitzvah Page 14
