American as Paneer Pie Page 6

  I drank some water out of the little silver vessel that Aai kept out for fancy occasions and glanced at the clock. “We have to go!” I said to Aai, grabbing my duffel bag from the hallway. “Change fast, please. I can’t be late.”

  Aai looked at the clock. “There’s no time. Come on.” She grabbed her keys and purse, throwing her long, gray winter jacket over her sari.

  “You can’t go like that!” I said, turning to my dad with pleading eyes. At least his outfit looked more like normal American clothes than my mom’s. If he kept his coat on, no one would even realize he was wearing a long pink tunic.

  “I can’t. I have to dictate some cases for work,” Dad said. “It was a really busy day, and I had to leave early for Lakshmi Pujan.”

  “Let’s go, Lekha. Now,” said Aai, heading into the garage with the car keys.

  I watched her purple sari swoosh around her legs below her coat. Picturing all the looks and questions we would get at practice, I suddenly found myself wishing we did live in India.

  * * *

  I managed to match the pace of my tryout time in the freestyle at swimming, clocking in at twenty-nine seconds. Maybe I got a power boost from all the delicious fried food I had been munching on at home this week, while Aai relaxed her “avoid fried foods” rule. Or maybe it was because I was doing whatever I could do to distract Aidy from asking me any more sari questions than she already had, making me feel like I was going deeper and deeper underwater with each one, until I was as different from her as an ocean creature.

  “What’s your mom wearing? Do you wear saris? Why not? Do you have to be a certain age to wear them? Does it feel weird to have your belly out in them all day? I thought you’re not allowed to show any skin?”

  I was grateful when we were finally no longer in viewing distance of Aai’s sari in the locker room. I showered quickly and pulled my swim cap off my head, pulling some hair out in the process. I pinned my lock of curls back where it normally hung.

  “Everyone swam so well today,” said Harper loudly, blow-drying her hair.

  “I feel like we’re finally becoming a team good enough to beat Preston,” said Aidy, referring to the Dolphins’ archnemesis and neighboring town’s swim club.

  Harper nodded. “We should do a team dinner to celebrate!” she said over the noise.

  “Let’s go to Joe’s!” Kendall added, pulling a sweater over her head. “Like we used to.”

  “That would be so fun,” said Aidy as the blow-dryer finally stopped yelling. “We used to do team dinners there after meets.”

  “I’m in,” said Harper. “I’m starving, too.”

  “Me too,” said Kendall.

  “Lekha?” asked Aidy.

  I chewed at the inside of my cheek. I had to do this. I had to have a terrible conversation with Aai. I had to beg her to let me go to a restaurant on Diwali instead of eating with my family. It was either that or forever be the outcast on the team.

  I took a shaky breath in. “I’ll ask my mom.” I zipped up my duffel bag, already certain what her answer would be. No matter how different today might have felt, it was still going to be same old, same old Aai. No holiday would change that.

  chapter ELEVEN

  You can’t go,” said Aai, jingling her car keys in her hand in the lobby of the Sports Club. Behind her, a TV on mute showed images of Winters and Sharpe debating. A few feet away, Kendall, Harper, Aidy, and their parents watched us talk, waiting by the glass doors to the parking lot. “Sorry.”

  I smiled at Aidy and turned back to Aai. “Please. It’s a team-bonding thing. And Aidy’s mom has a van. She can drive us all and drop me back home.”

  Aai shook her head and started speaking in Marathi. “Maajhi ani Aidy chya aai chi olakh nahi.”

  Hot. I felt hot all over my face as I saw everyone staring at the funny words coming out of Aai’s mouth. I grabbed her elbow and walked a few steps farther away from the parents. “They can hear you,” I whispered.

  “I was talking in Marathi.”

  “Yeah. And they obviously know it’s about them.”

  “So what? I’m not ashamed. And I’m not sending you with a driver I don’t know.”

  “She’s my teammate’s mom. She gets her daughter to school and swimming safely, just like you. Please. I’ll be fine. I’m not a baby anymore,” I whispered, my voice oddly trembling, like I was a baby about to cry.

  “It’s Diwali.”

  I watched Aidy tap her foot impatiently as her mom aimed her key chain at the dark parking lot to start the heat in the car. “Please?”

  Aai shook her head. “They wouldn’t beg their parents to have dinner with friends away from their family on Christmas.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Kaay different aahe?”

  “Nothing stops for our holidays. There’s no vacation from school for Diwali. It’s just a regular day here, remember? This isn’t India.”

  Aai shook her head, tucking her hair behind her ear as the gold bangles on her wrists jingled loudly and everyone looked our way. “I’m sorry, Lekha.”

  * * *

  I didn’t say much on the car ride home. Every time Aai turned the wheel and her bangles tapped against each other, I thought about my teammates and their parents all staring at us, and I felt hot and embarrassed all over again.

  When we got home, Dad had heated up our dinner and had it waiting on the table for us.

  “How did swimming go?” he asked.

  I dropped my duffel bag to the ground in the hallway, not even caring that my stainless-steel water bottle probably got dented from the fall. “Fantastic,” I grumbled, washing my hands.

  Aai told dad in Marathi that I was mad that I didn’t get to go to dinner with my friends.

  Dad shook his head, pouring a spoonful of piping hot aamti, a different kind of lentil soup than varan, onto my bhaat. “Aai’s right, Lekha. It’s Diwali. Look at all this food she spent all day making.” With the aamti soaking into my rice, he tapped a small silver spoon of toop over it, causing a little mound of the ghee to fall into the aamti bhaat volcano and melt like lava down the sides. “This is our holiday.”

  “And that’s my team.” I tore at my poli and scooped up the batata bhaji. I knew Aai had made it because the potato dish was one of my favorites. She had even browned the potato in oil, and given me all the crunchy burnt bits off the serving spoon. That was my favorite part of this bhaji. But I was too annoyed to thank her.

  “And we’re your family,” Dad said, a little sterner than before.

  “Fine. Whatever,” I responded, thinking about all the fun my teammates were having without me. And all the pizza and garlic knots they would get to eat while I was stuck eating Indian food. I shoved bite after bite into my mouth as Aai and Dad discussed boring things like Dad’s work and what our relatives in India were up to on Diwali.

  Aaji went to a couple of classical singing concerts in Mumbai. One of my uncles was in charge of their apartment building’s celebrations and hired a “mimicry artist” to come and impersonate all the Bollywood stars. Sheetal Mavshi, my mom’s sister, was at the theater, trying to see two Hindi movies in one day. And in between eating tons of amazing Diwali food, my cousins organized protests against fireworks, which killed birds and caused pollution. My family in India was having a blast. My teammates were having a blast. And I was stuck at home with my parents. It was so unfair.

  I downed my water, half listening as Aai talked about Diwali when she was a kid.

  “We were so excited to take this train across India for a Diwali family reunion at my great-grandmother’s house in Nagpur. We had been talking about it for months. All the cousins wrote one another letters, so excited for this get-together. … But then the train broke down and we were stuck in the middle of nowhere for hours. I was so hungry. A man who was sitting next to us had gotten on at the last stop. He said this happened all the time to this line, and it would be eight hours before it was fixed. At least. Can you believe that?”


  “Nope,” I said, barely listening. I stared at my distorted reflection in the stainless-steel plate that had the murky remains of aamti, bhaat, poli crumbs, and stray cumin seeds across it.

  “The man, a total stranger, told my parents that Ajay Mama and I must have been hungry. Sheetal Mavshi wasn’t born yet, but Ajay Mama was just two at the time. So you know what that man did? He got down, and this is before cell phones, Lekha. He got down, walked back to the last train station, called his home on a pay phone, and asked his wife to make us a meal. He took a taxi forty minutes home, packed the food into tiffins, and came back two hours later with dinner for the whole family.”

  Aai turned to me as I headed with my plate to the sink. “Now, that’s India for you.”

  In no mood to join Aai on this trip down memory lane anymore while my social life was being derailed, I angrily let go of the plate. It clanged against the stainless-steel sink repeatedly, like booming thunder, before settling in silence.

  “Lekha,” Aai said sharply. “Upstairs. Now.”

  I stomped up the stairs, Aai right behind me. I could see the Christmas lights on my parents’ bedroom curtain rods from the hall, even before we entered the room. Aai paused, distracted from whatever lecture she was about to give me.

  “Doesn’t it look beautiful?” she asked. “It’s the magic of Diwali. If only you’d appreciate it.”

  I stared at the dresser, at the baby picture of me Aai kept right next to a faded black-and-white picture of her parents and Sheetal Mavshi smiling as Ajay Mama tilted his head back in what had to be the loud laugh he was known for.

  “Hello?” Aai asked impatiently.

  “I didn’t hear you,” I snapped, still annoyed with my mother.

  “You need a good tel malish,” she said, spreading an old paisley cotton sari of her mother’s onto the carpet to protect it from grease stains. “Your head needs to cool down.”

  “I told you I’m not a baby anymore,” I replied, sitting down across from the silver devghar on the dresser, where Aai did her pujas in the morning. “I can put coconut oil in my own hair.”

  I was hoping she would listen, or I would need my third shower of the day. I always put just the right amount of organic coconut oil into my hair to make my curls stay in place. I say “just the right amount” because Aai used to oil my hair so much that when I would walk to elementary school in winter, the oil that had turned clear in the heat of her palms would start to solidify. The chunks of cloudy white against my black curls were just one more thing for the fifth-grade boys to tease me about.

  “It’s not coconut oil,” Aai replied. She went to her bathroom and emerged with the dreaded Mahabhringraj Tel.

  It was an ayurvedic oil made out of herbs, kept in an amber-colored glass bottle. When Aai poured the olive-green oil onto her hands and put the oil on my scalp, my head would suddenly go cold, like peppermint was touching it. It smelled like bitter food and gas, like when Dad kept flicking the stove dial on but the range wouldn’t light. The stink was so bad, I could swear my hair still smelled like it even after a washing. This was probably because Aai made me use an all-natural shampoo made from the Indian tree shikakai. It was ugly brown and lumpy, and nothing like the smooth, white, scented shampoos everyone else used.

  “You know,” Aai said, unscrewing the cap and letting the awful stench escape the bottle, “one of the things I will never forget about those two hours we were stuck in the dark on that train, before that man brought us food, was that we were all together.”

  I scrunched my nose and closed my eyes, frowning as the cool trickle of oil began to slither down my scalp. I couldn’t help but relax as Aai worked her fingers into my skin. It felt calming, and for a brief instant I almost forgot why I was so mad. Almost.

  “We were scared,” Aai continued. “It was pitch-dark outside. Who knew what animals were out in the wilderness. Who knew what kind of people were out there, or what they could do to us. Ajay Mama was crying. We were all hungry. But Aaji and Ajoba started a game of Antakshari with us.”

  Antakshari was a singing game where one person would sing a few lines of a song, and the next person would have to sing a song that started with the letter the previous person ended with. People in India loved to play it at weddings, on long road trips, on vacations, and I guess even on a broken train in the middle of nowhere.

  “Soon we were all singing old Hindi songs and laughing together in the dark, cold train, ignoring the howling animals and hooting birds outside. In that moment we were all together on Diwali, safe, and that was all that mattered. And that’s how I like us to be every Diwali.” Aai massaged the oil into my skin and the roots of my hair. “I lost my father when you were a baby, Sheetal Mavshi and Aaji are in India, and Ajay Mama is in California. But you, Dad, and I are here, so shouldn’t we be together on Diwali?” Aai asked, softly.

  I shrugged.

  “I know. It’s been a long day. You’re tired. I know you wanted to go with your team. But Diwali is not a day to leave your family. It’s a day to be with your family. To make memories. I know you think I’m just mean, but everything I do is to protect you, to help you. … Next time I’ll think about it, and if the circumstances are right, I’ll let you go.”

  I opened my eyes. “You will?”

  “If the circumstances are right, yes.” Aai got up to wash her hands and put away the oil. She opened her dresser drawer. “That means not on a holiday, among other things.”

  I watched her pull out a small blue gift bag I had seen for years. It was made out of an old Indian outfit of mine that had torn, and Aai used it to give me a present every Diwali.

  “Happy Diwali,” Aai said, handing me the bag.

  “What about Dad? He’ll probably want to take pictures.”

  “Why take pictures? It’s just a regular day, right? No big deal?”

  I rubbed my thumb on the twisted handles of the bag, made out of my old shoulder straps. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Aai smiled. She called out to my dad and asked him to hurry with the camera.

  As Dad clicked away and Aai just watched with shiny eyes, I reached inside the bag and pulled out an animal joke book. I flipped through it. There were animal knock-knock jokes, animal riddles, and even an entire chapter on animal puns I gnu would make Noah miserable.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled again, even softer than my apology.

  Aai did her best grumpy Lekha impression. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, a little louder, trying not to smile.

  “Suhana safar aur yeh mausam haseen.” Aai sang the old Hindi movie song as she sat next to me, grinning for a picture. “Hame dar hai ham kho na jaaye kahi.”

  “Huh!” said Dad, putting his camera on the dresser and sitting in front of me, never one to turn down a game of Antakshari. “Uh … Hum aapke hain kaun!”

  “Nuh.” Aai pointed to me, assigning me my Hindi letter.

  “Nuh way am I doing this,” I said with a little smile.

  Aai started to sing on my behalf, Dad joined her, singing the girl’s part way out of his range, and soon we were all laughing. The flickering divas and window lights danced all around me and my family as we hung out together on Diwali.

  chapter TWELVE

  All the warm and fuzzy feelings from Lakshmi Pujan started to turn cold when Aidy and Harper walked into the PE locker room the next day in tears.

  I glanced at Avantika, who was tying her shoes, now a pro at changing in public.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Aidy snorted as she shoved her clothes into her locker, and I quickly realized they were tears of joy, from laughing too hard.

  “Breadstick Boy is what’s wrong,” Harper giggled, changing into her gym clothes.

  Aidy doubled over laughing as they headed out the door.

  Avantika was still busy with her shoelaces, so I quickly followed my teammates to the gym. Most of the class was already seated on the shiny wooden floor. Mr. Jennings had tape
d off large squares, divided into quarters around the room.

  “Come on, girls!” he shouted. “Hustle, hustle, hustle.”

  Aidy and Harper took a seat in the back row of our class. I plopped down next to them as Avantika walked out, heading our way.

  “Who is Breadstick Boy?” I asked.

  “Oh my God. Stop,” said Aidy, looking at Harper as she began to crack up again. “You’re going to get us in trouble. PS: What’s that smell?” she asked, sniffing in my direction.

  I tucked a curl behind my ear, wishing I hadn’t heard that question, because I knew the answer. It was the curse of the Mahabhringraj Tel. Despite washing my hair again at night, I was haunted by its musty scent. I wanted to tell Aidy to drop it, to tell her that it was an oil made with herbs from an ancient Indian form of medicine, that my kind of hair was different from hers and needed the oil, but instead, I just desperately searched for a topic to change the subject to so I wouldn’t have to hear the question again.

  “You really should have come out with us last night,” Harper whispered, saving me, as Avantika sat down next to me.

  “Yeah. You missed out,” agreed Aidy.

  Mr. Jennings blew his whistle loudly. “All right. Eyes on me, everyone.” He pointed to the square. “Today it’s Flashback Friday. So we’re going to play a game from when I was a kid.”

  “One hundred years ago?” asked a kid from the front.

  Everyone started to laugh. Mr. Jennings grinned. “Funny guy. And close. It’s called four square. You’re going to break up into groups of four. One kid will stand in each square. The person who starts has to pass the ball to a teammate. It has to bounce once, and then the next person has to catch it before it bounces again. Then they throw it to someone else, the same way. If it bounces more than once before you catch it, you’re out. And if you miss it, you’re out. Got it?”