Dear Mrs. Naidu

by Mathangi Subramanian

  Here are the reasons why I sometimes don’t love my neighbourhood. For one thing, most of us don’t have proper roofs. We cover our houses with pieces of blue plastic, or sheets of tin, or whatever else we can find. Hema Aunty’s roof, for example, is a hoarding with a photo of a woman politician with a round, fair face. Hema Aunty says that the politician promised everyone new roofs when she ran for election, so it was only fair to take the hoarding and help her keep her promise. Anyway, when it rains (and it rains a lot) all of our stuff gets soggy and the paths between our houses become one big muddy puddle and the trash that people throw outside starts stinking even more than it usually does.

  But then, even though everything’s always wet, there’s never any water to drink. I mean, we have a tap, but it only works half the time, and in the summer, when we’re the thirstiest, it hardly works at all. That means we have to walk to the truck and fill up drums and drag them all the way home when we’re supposed to be getting ready for work or school. If the truck comes late and we miss it, we’re dirty and thirsty all day.

  Also, there are a lot of dogs in the neighbourhood, which some people don’t like.

  (I know you wouldn’t think that, Mrs. Naidu – you had so many pet dogs and cats that I can’t keep track of all their names. And I’m still at the beginning of your life!)

  I guess people think that the dogs in my area are scary. Although, to be fair, they also think the people in my area are scary. They even think us kids are scary, because we might get them sick or something.

  If I become rich, I’ll probably move away, just like Amir did, and just like everyone does the second they make enough money.

  But sometimes I think I’d rather stay here and fix all the problems. I’d put cement down so we had real roads. I’d put pipes in so we could have water all the time. I’d get us a generator that we could all share, so we could stay warm in the rain. I’d ask the garbage collectors to come take the trash and I’d make sure every house had a roof.

  (I’d probably keep the dogs, though. They’re not so bad. Maybe I would even teach them to fight crime, just like bloodhounds in detective stories.)

  Like I said, Mrs. Naidu, most of the time, I love where I live. Like when we run out of cooking gas, and Mary Aunty lends us some to get us through the month. Or when Amina Aunty’s house floods, and Amma makes hot bhaji and invites her and her children over to warm up. Or when Hema Aunty’s husband disappears and everyone knows he’s going to come back home with blurry eyes and hot, nasty breath, and Kamala Aunty starts singing bhajans in her sweet, clear, mynah-bird voice to help us all think about something else.

  Or when there’s enough water, and all the families do laundry at once and hang it up between the houses. Then our neighbourhood looks like a tropical bird flew by and dropped all its feathers. It even smells good, like soap and cloth and sunlight and something else clean and fresh and hopeful.

  And even though I wish we didn’t have to get water from the big yellow truck, sometimes that can be fun too.

  Especially when your best friend helps you and you have contests to see who can take the most and who can do it fastest.

  And when your Amma and your best friend’s Amma watch you scrambling past each other and laugh so hard they have to bend over and hold their stomachs.

  And when you win, and your best friend’s older brothers slap him on the back and ask him what it feels like to be beaten by a girl.

  And when your best friend smiles and says, “She’s not a girl. She’s Sarojini.”

  And when you all go inside and drink Tasmiah Aunty’s hot hot chai in three quick gulps so that you have time to change into your uniform before you walk to school and spend the whole day together.

  How could you not like a home like that?

  All the best,

  Sarojini

  June 22, 2013

  Dear Mrs. Naidu,

  I have some good news. Miss just gave me marks back for these letters. She says that I am doing a good job and that I am writing ‘from the heart.’

  I guess that means that my heart is growing.

  (No offense to Miss, but I really hope my brain is growing too.)

  I’m not telling you about my marks to brag, Mrs. Naidu. I’m telling you because I want to thank you for helping with my assignment. I think ‘writing from the heart’ means something like writing honestly. It’s easy to write honestly when I’m writing to a listener reader friend like you.

  Today, we have to write about something that happened this summer. If you remember, Mrs. Naidu, I mentioned that I have a best friend named Amir. He used to live next door to us. Well, not next door exactly – there was a wall between us, but we shared the same roof. A roof which used to be a blue sheet, but now is made out of tin.

  Amir and I do everything together. I think it’s because we fill in the parts of each other that are missing. I help him with maths and English and he helps me with social studies and science. He taught me how to bowl and I taught him how to bat. When his brothers shout and fight, he comes over to our house and we sing songs and tell stories. When Amma’s salary doesn’t quite last the whole month, he brings over roti-subzi.

  I never tell him when we’re hungry, and he never tells me when he’s scared.

  That’s the best thing about me and Amir. We both just know.

  Some people think it’s strange that we have so much in common, because if you look at us from the outside, Amir and I seem like opposites.

  I’m a girl and he’s a boy.

  I’m a Hindu and he’s a Muslim.

  I’m an only child and he has two brothers.

  All those opposites don’t matter, though, because inside we’re the same.

  (Maybe it has something to do with the way our hearts grew in the same place at the same time. Miss might know.)

  Mrs. Naidu, I’m very sorry, but I just realized I made a mistake in this letter. I am writing in the present tense. I should be writing in the past tense.

  (I learned about past tense in class. Which is probably why I forgot it. Things you learn in school hardly ever make sense in real life.)

  What I wrote about is how Amir and I were before.

  But it’s not before any more. Now, it’s after.

  Things started changing from before to after when Amir’s brother Farooq got a job at a call centre. They changed even more when Amir’s brother Tariq finished his engineering degree and started working at this manufacturing company with a foreign name.

  At first the changes were small and they were nice. Like getting a tin roof. Or being able to buy chocolates on the way home from school on Fridays before Amir went to mosque.

  Then, this summer, the changes were bigger. Amir and his family moved into a flat in a neighbourhood that had paved roads that didn’t wash away every time it rained. Their house had water that came straight out of the taps and a bedroom with a door.

  Even the big changes were nice at first. We would go to Amir’s house when it was really hot and we would lie on the floor under the ceiling fan, which worked most of the time. Farooq bought a two-wheeler, and on Sundays he took us to Gangarams and let us buy one book each, and then he took us to Lal Bagh where we all sat under the trees and read and ate kulfi from the vendors that walk around the lake.

  Then the biggest change happened and it wasn’t nice at all.

  Amir switched schools.

  He started going to a private school. And not just any private school: Greenhill Public School. It’s the same school that Vimala Madam’s kids went to, and Vimala Madam is rich.

  Just like you.

  Just like Amir.

  But not like me.

  As you know, rich and poor are opposites, Mrs. Naidu.

  I guess they might the biggest opposites of all.

  You probably think I’m silly for being surprised. I just thought that Amir and I would always be friends. And I
guess we are still friends. But it’s not the same.

  For one thing, Amir hardly comes to our my neighbourhood any more. Both of our Ammas say it’s safer in Amir’s neighbourhood. Amir and I don’t play cricket outside like we used to, because we don’t know any of the kids on the Amir’s street. Once when I knocked on the door, Tasmiah Aunty said Amir wasn’t home because he was buying school supplies, even though every year that I can remember, we’ve always bought our school supplies together.

  We don’t do our homework together any more either – Amir’s is really different than mine. And it’s all in English. Plus, Amir has all these new friends now. I see him with them sometimes when I’m walking home from school. He always waves at me, and I always wave back, but we never walk towards each other like we used to.

  When Amir and I went to the same school, we used to wear out our school uniforms until they fell apart. Have you ever seen worn out uniforms, Mrs. Naidu? The fabric gets so thin that if you hold it up to the light, you can almost see through it. That’s how Amir and I feel now: stretched and worn out and scratchy.

  So that’s what happened this summer. I didn’t exactly lose my best friend. But I didn’t exactly keep him either.

  All the best,

  Sarojini

  June 26, 2013

  Dear Mrs. Naidu,

  Mrs. Naidu, I just realized that in my last letter, I was very selfish. I was talking about myself the whole time, and I didn’t even ask you: did you ever have a best friend?

  (I know this is breaking my policy of not asking questions to adults. But I think since you are dead passed away no longer alive historical, maybe, technically, you are not like other adults. I hope you don’t mind.)

  I know you had lots of friends, Mrs. Naidu. Like Gandhi Thatha and Panditji and lots of other people who I will probably learn about in social studies. You even wrote letters to them, which people don’t really do anymore since they can text or talk on the phone instead.

  But did you ever have a best friend, Mrs. Naidu?

  A friend that made all your other friends less important?

  A friend that was so close to you that he could just look at you and know exactly what you were feeling?

  A friend that you had so much fun with that you didn’t need any other friends?

  If you remember from my last letter, Mrs. Naidu, I have had maybe have a best friend that makes all my other friends less important.

  So when Miss told us that our next assignment was to write about a time we made a new friend, at first I couldn’t think of anyone.

  But then, this morning, that changed.

  I was walking to school, and I was kind of hurrying, because I was late from going to the water truck and then I realized that I had forgotten my pencil case and so I had to go back and get it… anyway, you get the idea.

  So I was walking to school, and I was kind of hurrying, when suddenly I heard, “Oy!”

  Mrs. Naidu, where I live, everyone knows each other. We may never speak to each other or even look at each other, but we know each other. Do you what that means?

  It means that everyone knows that I am Sarojini and my Appa doesn’t live with us and my Amma had a love marriage and works in rich people’s houses and I go to the government school and Amma and I share used to share a wall with a Muslim family and that we just got a tin roof last year.

  I guess it’s only fair, because I know the same things about them.

  Who their parents are. What their problems are. What everyone says about them.

  So when someone yells “Oy!” I don’t turn around, because you don’t yell “Oy!” to someone you know.

  But then, it happened again.

  “Oy!”

  This time I looked. Not to see who was making the noise, but to see who wasn’t answering.

  I found the person making the noise first. It was a girl in a purple and gold pavade – or, what used to be purple and gold, I guess, but now looks kind of gray. Her hair was oily and dusty, and her skin was the colour of the ground when it’s soaked with fresh rain. She had a little boy on her hip. When she yelled “Oy!” for the third time, I realized that she was looking right at me.

  “Are you oy-ing me?” I asked.

  “Do you see anyone else here?” she said, rolling her eyes. (Which, if you’ll notice Mrs. Naidu, is not an answer but another question.)

  “Um,” I said. “No, I um – I guess not.”

  “Where do you go to school?” she asked.

  I looked down at my uniform, which is the same uniform that all the government school kids wear, and then I looked back at her.

  “Well?” She hitched the boy up a little farther onto her hip.

  “Ambedkar Government School,” I said.

  “Do they have an anganwadi?” she asked.

  “Ang-an-what-i?” I said.

  “A place for kids like him,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m in sixth class.”

  “Me too,” she said, which was another surprise, because she’s probably half my height and she’s skinny enough to fit between the pages of a comic book. I guess she knew what I was thinking, because then she said, “At least, I should be.”

  “You’re not in school?” I said.

  “That’s what I just said,” she told me, rolling her huge, tired eyes. Even though she was speaking Kannada, she sounded funny. There was something about the way the sounds all mushed together like bisebele bath in her mouth, and how she didn’t keep using English words in between the Kannada ones.

  That’s when I remembered where I had seen her.

  “You’re one of those country kids that live at the construction site,” I said. “The one behind the hospital.”

  “Me and all the other kids who don’t go to school,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know about the others. But me, if I go to school, no one’s going to watch him,” she said, sticking out her chin like she was pointing to the boy. “So I have to stay back.”

  “Can’t you leave him with your parents?” I asked. I had seen a lot of children playing in the piles of sand next to construction sites, or toddling around the cement floors while their mothers and fathers carried bags of heavy rocks on their heads.

  “Do you know how many kids get killed in accidents at these places?” she said, shivering. “As much as he drives me mad, I don’t want him to die.”

  And she turned and – really, Mrs. Naidu, I’m not making this up – she spat! I’ve never seen a twelve-year-old girl do that before, at least not in that way – the way that men do, without apologizing or looking embarrassed or anything.

  When she did that, Mrs. Naidu, a voice in my head told me to stop talking to her and walk away. I couldn’t blame the voice (which, by the way, sounded suspiciously like Amma, or maybe Hema Aunty.) After all, let’s review the clues so far:

  She lives at a construction site

  She is from a village.

  She doesn’t go to school.

  She spits like a man.

  I know a detective would conclude that this girl is poor, backwards, lazy and impolite, and that an Aunty would conclude that well-behaved girls like me shouldn’t be speaking to her.

  Maybe you feel the same way, Mrs. Naidu. But there was something about her that I liked. I’m not sure what it was, exactly – maybe the fact that she seemed like a fighter, like you or Amma.

  Besides, every good detective knows that sometimes you have to ignore the clues and follow your instincts.

  So that’s what I did.

  I said, “I’m going to school right now. Do you want to come?”

  She shrugged like she didn’t care, but I could tell that she did. Then she started walking beside me, the boy still on her hip.

  After a few blocks, we got to the school, and I stopped in front of the g
ate.

  “Is this it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  I knew what she meant.

  We have some nice teachers at our school, Mrs. Naidu, but we don’t have a nice building. For one thing, there is a weirdly-shaped hole in the gate. (A bunch of boys tried to break the padlock by running their scooter into it. I think they’re probably the ones who were mean to Amir, but I’m not sure.) For another thing, it smells funny, probably because the walls are lined with garbage where people drop their plastic wrappers and empty beer cans and old newspapers. The school compound is full of small, sharp rocks that sneak through the holes in your shoes and sting and slice your feet. In the summer, it gets really dusty, and when we eat outside or play shuttlecock, we can’t stop sneezing. The compound is slightly sloped, so during monsoon, dirt rolls down the hill and floods our classrooms with muddy, brown sludge.

  “Come on,” I said, “I’ll introduce you to Annie Miss.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “My teacher,” I said. Then I looked at her sideways and said, “You ask a lot of questions.”

  She shrugged, hitched the boy up, and said, “Let’s go.”

  As usual, when we got to the classroom, Annie Miss was already there.

  Well, it’s usual for Annie Miss, but it’s not usual for our school. A lot of teachers show up late, or they don’t show up at all. But Miss is always early, drawing on the board and putting out papers and sometimes even sweeping when the ayah doesn’t come. She stays late too. I think maybe she sleeps there, but I can’t be sure.

  Plus her classroom looks different. It’s only the beginning of the year, but she already has a lot of the work we’ve done up on the walls. She’s got a bookshelf with a whole bunch of books that she brings from home. This morning, she was reading one that had a bright red cover and had some English words on it that I don’t understand, like “social justice” and “pedagogy.” Once Roshan asked her what the books were about, and she said, “Creating a more just and beautiful world.” I don’t know what that means, Mrs. Naidu, but I’ve never seen any of our other teachers reading books in English – or any other language for that matter.