American as Paneer Pie Read online

  Vikram Uncle, who was bald except for a few patches of black hair left on the sides, bent down to remove his shoes. “I was so happy to see another Marathi family here when you introduced yourselves last night.”

  “I meant to ask you what your building name was in Bandra,” said Aai.

  “Parvati Hills,” replied Vikram Uncle. Apartment buildings had names in India, to make them easier to find.

  I watched as my parents and the Savarkars went back and forth with people’s names until one was a winner. It turned out the woman who lived in the flat above Vikram Uncle’s in Mumbai was Aai’s mother’s brother’s sister-in-law. I wasn’t surprised. Even with a billion people living in India, somehow or another my parents were almost always able to find some distant person in common with any new Indian person they met. That was just the Desi way. Well, that and sparkly stuff, of course, I thought as I stared at Avantika’s gaudy gold seashell clip.

  We led the Savarkar family down the hall and into the dining room.

  “It smells so good in here!” Deepika Auntie said. She was Gujarati and pronounced English words differently than my parents did.

  I inhaled deeply. The whole house was full of the smell of the sizzling garlic from Dad’s paneer, layered with the spicy blend of turmeric, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and chili powder that Aai had cooked with. I took my seat next to Avantika.

  She smiled at me and nervously tucked her hair back, opening the gold seashell clip to snap it in place.

  I smiled back, but the grin quickly faded when I thought of how Harper would probably laugh at that clip tomorrow at school, or how Liam would most likely mock her accent, or how everyone would ask her where her dot was.

  Before I could worry about it anymore, Aai served us the traditional Marathi meal of varan, bhaat, bhaji, and poli. Split yellow mung beans pressure-cooked into a hot varan were poured onto the basmati bhaat. It was topped off with a spoonful of toop, the Marathi word for ghee. Today’s bhaji was made from bitter gourd, and the poli was steaming hot, the way the Indian flatbread tasted best. Next to it was a small bit of kairi lonche, made from pickling raw mangos, and a slice of lime with some sea salt. There was also a bowl of koshimbir, cucumber and roasted cumin powder in yogurt. And to top it all, there was Dad’s totally-not-Marathi, Punjabi-style paneer.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” said Vikram Uncle. “I was so worried it would be nothing but Halloween candy.”

  “Vikram!” Deepika Auntie elbowed him hard.

  Dad shook his head, smiling. “No, no. It’s funny. And I bet Lekha would have been thrilled if that really were the case.”

  I mouthed “ha-ha” to Dad, and got a little nervous about my Halloween jackpot being handed out to make Avantika feel welcome.

  “Well, we don’t have chocolate bhaji, but I’m sure Lekha would be happy to give Avantika some of her Halloween candy from last night. She has more than enough.”

  More than enough? I couldn’t believe Dad. He knew I lived under Aai’s ridiculous health-food rules, and Halloween was one of the few times she let me eat what I wanted. But our neighbors were our guests, and in addition to liking shiny things, Desis like respect. So all I could do was smile and nod and hope Dad and Avantika would forget about my sugar stash.

  “This looks good,” I said, changing the subject as I shifted my plate. I was about to dig in but had to remove the cilantro sprinkled all over my meal first. I began my ritual surgery, pulling the green fans of cilantro leaves out of the food with my fingers and spoon and wiping them to the side of my plate.

  “You don’t like cilantro?” asked Avantika, watching what I was doing.

  I wiped a yogurt-covered finger on the cotton napkin next to my stainless-steel plate. “I can’t stand it.”

  “Not even in bhel?”

  “That’s her favorite food,” said Dad. “She’s always begging us to make it for her.”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay in bhel because the chutney hides the taste.”

  “I read some people think it tastes like soap,” added Avantika.

  “To me it just tastes like barf.”

  Aai stifled a laugh as she finished her sip of water. “That reminds me of when Lekha was little. I had made a huge tray of barfi for Diwali. She came into the kitchen asking me what smelled so good. I told her it was barfi and asked if she wanted some. She began to cry. ‘I don’t want to eat barf! Don’t make me eat barf!’ ”

  Everyone at the table started laughing. I was embarrassed but couldn’t help but giggle at the memory. Aai had to explain to me it’s “buhr-fee” and she wasn’t mispronouncing “barfy.”

  “I’m so glad we have neighbors like you,” said Deepika Auntie in between spoonfuls of koshimbir, her diamond nose ring twinkling like a star. “When I first accepted the job at the clinic, I thought there would be so many other Indian doctors there.”

  Dad shook his head with a small smile. “Just me. And your office is several floors away.”

  “Yeah,” Deepika Auntie continued. “And I didn’t realize we would be so far away from all the Indian organizations in Detroit.”

  Aai nodded. “It’s an hour away. We probably don’t go there as often as we should. But I’m happy the girls will have each other now. Kids here want to grow up so fast, shaving and wearing makeup so early. They don’t get time to enjoy being kids. …” She glanced at Avantika’s empty plate. “Ankhin kaay pahije, Avantika?” Aai asked, uncovering the dishes to find out what else Avantika wanted to eat. “Oh, sorry, Deepika. You’re not Marathi. I wasn’t thinking. What language do you all speak at home?”

  “Mala donhi bhasha yetat, Auntie,” said Avantika, telling Aai she was fluent in both Gujarati and Marathi.

  Dad gave me a triumphant look, and I began to tear at what was left of my poli, crumbling the bread on my plate. He was right. I was wrong, and mean, to have laughed about Avantika’s accent.

  “But I’m fine, Auntie. The food was excellent,” Avantika continued.

  “You’re a growing child. Besides, it’s your first time here. How about some paneer?”

  “No, it’s okay. Really,” she added, waving her hands over her empty plate.

  Too late. Aai was already putting paneer on the plate in the gap under Avantika’s hands. She then took a scoop of koshimbir and filled the steel bowl next to the paneer.

  Avantika sighed and smiled, and began to eat with a humble “thank you.”

  Aai was a master at the timeless Marathi art of aagrah, where you forced someone to take a second or third helping because it was the gracious thing to do. You never wanted your guest to leave your home on an empty stomach. I was aagrah’d really bad once on my last trip to India. I was just eight and we were at my cousin’s Seemant Pujan, where the groom is welcomed by the bride’s family before the wedding. His fiancée’s relatives kept giving me syrupy jilbi after syrupy jilbi. I kept saying no, but they kept serving me throughout the evening. By dinner, I had eaten twenty-one jilbis, and then spent the meal puking in a corner. I was the definition of “barfy.”

  “Ani, Lekha?” Vikram Uncle asked me, motioning to the plates. “Kordi poli khau nakos.”

  The parents and Avantika smiled at the dry poli I was eating, my bhaji done. My ears started to feel hot even though I wasn’t calling my aaji in India. “I’m fine. Thanks,” I mumbled, avoiding eye contact with Avantika just in case she was trying not to laugh at me for answering in English instead of Marathi.

  “No problem,” replied Uncle. “Avantika, tell your friend what your classes are tomorrow. Maybe you have some in common.”

  I listened as Avantika spouted off the memorized schedule. She was in eighth-grade math and science. Even though I was a straight-A student, I was not two grades ahead in any subject, so we definitely did not have those together. But we did have English together in the morning, B lunch together in the afternoon, and PE together after that.

  Deepika Auntie put her hands in a namaskar and looked up at the ceiling, “Oh, thank God. I’m so gl
ad you’ll have your friend with you tomorrow, Avantika. You’ll take care of your friend, won’t you, Lekha?”

  “Of course,” Uncle chimed in, speaking for me. “Why wouldn’t she? They’re going to be best friends.”

  I nodded, glancing at Avantika, who gave me an apologetic smile. I thought about everything Avantika was going to go through tomorrow. How I wouldn’t have the courage to stick up for her since I didn’t have any to stand up for myself, let alone a stranger at school. How everyone was going to assume we were friends because we were both Indian. How Liam and Harper would react to her. Before I knew it, I felt an uneasy, nervous quiver deep down, like the one I had felt just before getting sick from all that aagrah in India. I guess the feeling was fitting, since this sort of felt like aagrah, being force-fed a friendship I just wasn’t interested in.

  chapter FIVE

  I went to school the next morning, sleepy, cranky, and nervous from a restless night of worrying about Avantika at school. I suppose I should have been grateful, though. Aai had offered to drive Avantika when she took Noah and me to school, but Uncle and Auntie wanted to take her to her first day of school themselves. I wasn’t sure my nerves could handle entering school with Avantika.

  I passed the empty student desk next to the teacher’s desk and took my front-row seat in Mr. Crowe’s English class, right next to Noah. He had spent the entire drive asking me about Avantika and wondering if she would agree to let him write a “Meet the New Student” piece on her for the paper. Anything for a cover story, I guess.

  Liam entered the room, seemingly recovered from not making the swim team. He took his seat behind me.

  “What reeks?” he muttered, popping some Junior Mints into his mouth.

  Sometimes I hated questions. Because with just one, Liam was able to make me feel like a disgusting outsider who was beneath him. With just one question, he was able to leave me speechless, and not in a good way, like when I saw that I beat my own swimming record. This was in the bad way. In the no-words-are-coming-out-and-I-just-want-a-sinkhole-to-appear-in-the-ground-and-swallow-me-up way.

  I quickly made sure my hair was still in place, swept over my forehead and birthmark, and looked down at my desk, trying to sniff the collar of my turtleneck without being obvious. Had the smell of all the sizzling spices from dinner come for a ride on my sweater? I couldn’t tell, but I hoped if the bad smell was coming from my clothes, no one else would notice it.

  “Is it you, Dot?” Liam asked, fanning his nose as he scooted between the desks and made his way past me.

  I turned to Noah, but he was staring hard at his fingers, as if he were noticing them for the first time. I knew what he was doing, though. We always just avoided eye contact when one of us was being teased and stood there in silence as if we weren’t there. It was just less embarrassing that way if your best friend wasn’t witnessing your humiliation.

  But other kids were witnessing it. I chewed on the insides of my cheeks, watching apprehensively as more classmates piled in, easing up my bite when no one else scrunched their face in my direction. Avantika was the last to enter. She was wearing her gold seashell hair clip. I sank in my seat, but her tense shoulders relaxed when she saw me.

  Mr. Crowe, who had been waiting by the door reading a piece of paper, ushered Avantika to the front of the room. “All right, gang, hope you’re all recovered from Halloween. We have a new student joining us today. Her family just moved here from Bombay—sorry. Mum-baay,” he said, mispronouncing “Mumbai.” “So let’s give a warm welcome to …”

  Mr. Crowe stared at the piece of paper in his hands as I waited for him to butcher Avantika’s name. I also tried to figure out how Avantika would attempt to correct his pronunciation in the game of Indian-name charades every Desi kid is all too familiar with. “Aah-vaahn-TEE-ka?” “No, Mr. Crowe. It’s Uh (like if you were scratching your chin while you were thinking), VUHNT (with your tongue behind your top teeth to make the t sound), ih (like the beginning of “in”), kah (like the snake in Jungle Book).”

  But there was no game of charades. Because despite thinking my name was pronounced “Lee-kha,” Mr. Crowe said Avantika’s name almost perfectly, just shy of saying the t sound correctly.

  “Avantika,” he said again. “That was my college roommate’s mom’s name.”

  I was shocked. Maybe Mr. Crowe had more experience with different cultures than I thought. Maybe he was cooler than I thought.

  He ran his fingers through his blond curls and pulled the empty student desk right next to mine, its steel feet groaning as they scratched the hard floor. “Come on in and have a seat, Avantika. I think you’ll be very comfortable with Lekha here to help you.”

  Nope. I was wrong. He wasn’t cooler than I thought. Putting Avantika next to the only other brown kid in the class was the furthest thing from cool he could do. Noah frowned as he mouthed “racist?” to me. Liam and some other kids behind me snickered, while Avantika took her seat. She raised an eyebrow at me over Mr. Crowe’s segregationist seating assignment. I gave a small shrug back. It was pretty absurd that Mr. Crowe thought the two Desis had to sit next to each other. But on the other hand, maybe he really did think Avantika could use a familiar face.

  “So, tell us about yourself, Avantika,” Mr. Crowe said, sitting backward in his chair.

  “Well …” Avantika’s voice shook a little as she began. Liam coughing at her “well” that sounded like “vell” didn’t seem to be helping her nerves either.

  Great. It was already happening. People were laughing at her. And I bet they were laughing at me, too, thinking that’s how my parents said their Ws. And thanks to our parents, I was going to be stuck with this all year, guilty by association. I wanted to shout, “That’s not how my parents sound!” But instead, I just slouched farther down in my seat as Avantika continued.

  “I used to live in a flat by the sea.”

  “A flat what?” asked Emma from the far side of the room, not bothering to look up from a doodle she was drawing in the margin of her notebook, probably of goose poop.

  “Flat means ‘apartment,’ ” Mr. Crowe interjected. “It’s a British word. India used to be ruled by the British. Isn’t that right, Avantika?”

  “That’s right. Just like America was.”

  Mr. Crowe stood up, his face turning a little pink. “Right. Of course. Er, how about three more interesting facts about yourself?”

  “I used to play field hockey at my old school; I do Bharat Natyam, which is a classical Indian dance; and I had a dog named Ram, who used to love to drink chai with me.”

  “I love chai tea,” added Mr. Crowe.

  Avantika gave me a small smile. I could tell she wanted to correct our teacher and let him know “chai” was “tea,” so “chai tea” was “tea tea,” but she was holding back to be polite. But I had been hearing people talk about chai tea my whole life and didn’t feel the need to have an inside joke with someone I barely knew and was so different from. So I didn’t return the smile. Instead, I focused on drawing a cow in my notebook, and hoped Avantika wouldn’t expect me to always be by her side to help her understand how things worked here.

  “Thanks so much for sharing a little about yourself, Avantika,” said Mr. Crowe, returning to his desk. “I hope you’ll all be open to digging deep and sharing more of yourselves, because this year I want everyone to write a short op-ed for the school paper. It’s my goal that you understand the power of your own voice through this assignment. Each month, three of your op-eds will go in the paper, and if it’s really good, it’s going to be on the front page.”

  Front page. I looked over as Noah began to drum his fingers on his desk with excitement. He was getting a racing-thoughts look in his wide eyes, kind of like Cookie when we asked her if she wanted to go on a walk.

  “You can check the class portal to find out what month you’re assigned to. So start thinking about what you want to say. The December paper is just a few weeks away. And from the looks of it, Mr. Wade, you
already know what yours will be about.”

  “I’m going to write about Abigail Winters,” Noah said.

  A small groan went through the back of the class, but Noah just spoke louder, his voice getting higher pitched as his enthusiasm grew.

  “About how Senator Osher got sick and had to step down, the special election in January, and how Winters is blaming immigrants for taking auto jobs from everyone.”

  I felt my classmates’ eyes on me, but I snuck a glance at Avantika, the only immigrant in the room. Her ears were starting to flush the same color as the red powdery kunku Aai kept in front of the gods in our devghar, our home temple.

  “That’s great,” said Mr. Crowe. “But the way you described it, it’s just an article. You have to figure out what your personal stake is in this. And what the story means to you.”

  Liam’s hand shot up. “If you let him say something about Winters, you have to let someone else say something about Sharpe. It’s the law.”

  “That’s not exactly the law, but I’m all for showing both sides of the argument and the political spectrum,” said Mr. Crowe, opening the English book in front of him.

  “Good,” said Liam. “Because my dad said immigrants have the press eating out of their hands.”

  “Liam,” warned Mr. Crowe.

  “My parents and I don’t have anyone eating out of our hands,” said Avantika, punctuating her point with a pencil jab to her desk.

  I couldn’t believe it. She was talking back to Liam, defending herself.

  “That’s funny. Cuz you guys eat with your hands,” Liam retorted.

  “Enough,” said Mr. Crowe, walking toward our desks.

  “What about free speech? Freedom of the press?” asked Liam.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Crowe,” said Avantika, turning to face Liam. “Do you not eat with your hands here?”

  Liam snorted in disbelief and shook his head. “No. We’re not weird.”

  “So, you eat sandwiches with a knife and fork here in Michigan? And bananas and oranges and popcorn? I guess I could learn to do whatever your local custom is, however weird it may be.”