American as Paneer Pie Page 7

  We all nodded.

  “Great. Let’s go. You four, you’re a team,” Mr. Jennings said, pointing at the back to me, Avantika, Harper, and Aidy. “Next four, you’re a team. …”

  Mr. Jennings’s voice trailed off as Avantika and I followed Harper and Aidy to the large square in the far corner of the gym. Avantika picked up the big brown rubber ball, and we each took a spot in one of the four squares inside the large square.

  “Everyone ready?”

  We nodded. She bounced the ball once and Aidy easily caught it. Aidy bounced the ball to Harper, who caught it and bounced it to Avantika, forgetting about me. Avantika bounced the ball my way.

  “Was the food good?” I asked, bouncing the bumpy ball at Harper.

  Harper nodded, catching it. “So good.” She bounced the ball to Aidy.

  “Except for the breadsticks,” Aidy squeaked, trying not to laugh as she bounced the ball to Harper.

  Harper started to laugh and missed the ball.

  “You’re out!” Aidy exclaimed.

  “So not fair! You distracted me with—”

  “With Breadstick Boy,” I muttered, picking up the ball and reminding myself that School Lekha keeps her mouth shut when things bug her. I threw the ball to Avantika.

  “Who is Breadstick Boy?” she asked, examining my face, which was twisting with frustration and rejection.

  “It’s just this kid who was eating at the table across from us,” replied Aidy. “He was cracking us up with the way he was eating breadsticks.” Aidy caught the ball and threw it back to Avantika. “You had to be there.”

  “Yeah,” said Harper as Avantika bounced the ball back to Aidy.

  Aidy missed. “I’m out too,” she said, hopping over to Harper.

  “Next time you have to come with us, Lekha. You can’t miss team bonding,” added Harper as Avantika and I began to bounce the ball back and forth to each other.

  “I didn’t want to miss it. My mom wouldn’t let me go,” I replied, throwing the ball back harder to Avantika.

  She gave me a small frown, catching it and bouncing it back before turning to Harper and Aidy. “Of course she missed it. It’s Diwali.”

  Aidy’s eyes widened as she grabbed Harper’s arm. “See? I told you guys it had to be some Indian thing.” Aidy looked at me. “I felt bad for you, missing out on all the fun.”

  “Me too,” said Harper.

  “Not as bad as I felt for Breadstick Boy’s mom, though,” said Aidy, grinning.

  Harper snickered. “I can’t believe I almost forgot about that. Remember her face when he did the walrus thing?”

  Aidy’s and Harper’s giggles bounced off the gym walls, and I swatted the ball to the ground. It went diagonal, and Avantika missed it.

  “I’m out,” she said, stepping next to Harper and Aidy. They were too busy giggling and pretending they were eating breadsticks in their annoying little inside joke to notice.

  I watched as the ball stopped bouncing and rolled around lifelessly on the floor, as if it had given up. Even though everyone else was out, I couldn’t help but feel like I was the loser.

  chapter THIRTEEN

  On Saturday, the last day of Diwali, called Bhaubeej, I sat on the porch, reading with Noah. Cookie, who was bundled up in a crocheted yellow-and-black-striped bumblebee sweater Noah’s dad had made for her, sat beside us.

  Bhaubeej was the day brothers gave their sisters gifts. Since I was an only child, my cousins in India would send me Amar Chitra Kathas each year. They were comic books filled with Indian mythology, history, and stories from different religions, and I loved to read them. Noah was finishing up one about a monkey outwitting a crocodile, while I read one about the Marathi emperor Shivaji. It was cold, and we had to go to Detroit for Diwali festivities, but I knew we’d have a few more minutes to wait because Aai was on the phone with Ajay Mama. Her brother in Berkeley always called on Bhaubeej, and they would chat for at least an hour.

  “This is almost as good as Musings,” said Noah, talking about his favorite magazine.

  I nodded. The Halloween ghost that once guarded the porch had now been replaced by solar-powered strings of Diwali lights, and they twinkled above us. Under the lights, I squeezed my peacoat closed over my sleeveless salwar kurta.

  The kurta was a maroon tunic with shiny, embroidered gold flowers that went to my knees. The teal salwar ballooned out at the thighs, like harem pants. I had a teal odhani with glistening gold sequins around my neck. Although my birthmark was still covered by my hair, a real, sparkling maroon and gold bindi was on my forehead. I had matching maroon, teal, and gold bangles on too, and loved the way they seemed to sing whenever I moved my hands to pet Cookie.

  I looked across the street at Avantika’s house and wondered what she would be wearing to the temple. I had no clue what Maya and Tanvi, my family friends from Detroit, would think of her. Would we even be able to talk about the stuff we normally talked about, or would our conversation be super polite and boring, the way we had to act in front of relatives in India when we met them for the first time?

  I tried not to think about it as we watched Mr. Giordano rake his grass and accidentally scratch the wire feet of his WINTERS FOR CONGRESS sign. It jolted like it had been electrocuted. He had a new blue sign with white letters near his porch too, which said, DON’T LIKE IT?

  I didn’t know why, but something about the sign, something about that question, made my stomach drop.

  Noah saw me staring at it and rolled his eyes. “Winters’s new slogan. It’s what she says at her rallies. ‘Don’t like it? Leave.’ My parents say she’s the worst.”

  “Looks like a lot of people think she’s the best.” I pointed down the street, trying to shake the nervous feeling. Behind the row of almost bare trees that lined the curb, four more houses had the distinctive blue sign with white letters that asked, DON’T LIKE IT?

  “I think my op-ed is going to be about how un-American it is to say things like that,” Noah said, flipping a crunchy brown maple leaf that had blown our way in between his palms by rubbing its stem back and forth. “Like, no one has a right to say someone doesn’t deserve to be here, you know?”

  I shrugged. This was not something I wanted to think about. “I have no clue what mine is going to be about.”

  Across the street, Avantika’s car pulled out of her driveway. Her whole family waved to us as they zoomed down the street.

  “I really don’t feel strongly about anything,” I said, ignoring the little bit of fear that was trying to crawl into my brain. I threw a pine cone back into the bed of the three large white pines that loomed over our front yard.

  “That’s not true,” Noah said over the grumbling of our garage door as it opened for Dad to pull his shiny Ford Taurus out.

  Finally done with her call, Aai was seated inside, in her gold sari with the shimmering purple and green border.

  I quickly stood up, petting Cookie good-bye on the head, and gave Noah my comic to borrow. “I have to ‘Don’t like it, leave.’ ” I grinned.

  But Noah tried not to smile. “It’s not funny. It’s serious. It’s un-American.”

  I waved as I got into the car. I had bigger things to worry about than Abigail Winters. I had just one hour to figure out how to make my childhood friends, whom I saw only a few times a year, fine with hanging out with Avantika.

  * * *

  The November chill made my toes, in my gold, sequined chappal, feel like carrots straight out of the fridge, so I ran up the marble steps of the Hindu Temple. I headed past the two giant elephant statues that seemed to guard the entrance, and entered the building.

  The smell of sandalwood incense and rose water swirled in the air as we took our shoes off in the room to the left. We placed them in cubbies near each other to make leaving easier and hung up our coats, the metal hangers sounding like the percussion section of our middle school band as they clanged against one another. Groups of teenagers were hanging out in the coatroom, some half hidden b
ehind the heavy winter jackets, giggling and snickering to one another as they chatted or read something on a cell phone. They were the “big kids,” and we never said much to each other, other than “Hey.”

  I nodded a few greetings to the various cliques and started to head for the stairs to find my friends in the cafeteria downstairs, but Dad motioned toward the main temple doors. “Namaskar first,” he reminded me.

  A large white man was standing in front of the doors in a navy-blue uniform with an embroidered patch on his shoulder that said, GREAT LAKES SECURITY.

  Aai squeezed Dad’s elbow. “Why is there a guard here?” she asked as the cold marble tiles below our feet changed to thin, gray, looped Berber carpet in the hall.

  Avantika’s dad was inside, near the prasad table, talking to some other uncles and aunties, dressed in their Diwali best. He waved to us as we neared. “They were just telling me that the donation box was stolen earlier this week. What a shame.”

  I looked at the west side of the hall, where the rows of marble deities wearing vibrantly colored saris, fashioned into dhotis and sashes for the gods and little saris for the goddesses, stood. Right in front of them, the metal donation box with an intricately carved floral pattern was missing. Instead, there was now just a small wooden chest with a slit in the top for sliding dollar bills into after praying, to help maintain the temple.

  Near it was Deepika Auntie and Avantika. Avantika was dressed in a mango-orange Anarkali-style kurta that went down to her ankles. She had on a tight yellow chudidar salwar that bunched at her ankles and a sunny-yellow odhani. I watched as they walked from idol to idol. They paused before each one to crouch on their knees, their palms together in a namaskar at their forehead, and bow down until their heads touched the ground. I kept eyeing Avantika’s salwar-kurta. It was probably brand-new from India, in the latest style, which was a long kurta.

  My own salwar-kurta was a hand-me-down from Ajay Mama’s friends in California. It was old and out of fashion. Styles changed quickly in Indian clothes. A few years ago harem pants like I had on were in. Now tight pants and leggings were. Back then everyone wore short tops like mine, but now everyone was wearing ankle-length tops, including some old aunties walking by me in the temple.

  I cringed. Aunties were dressed better than me. Trying not to think about my fashion disaster, I ran forward, my eyes locked on one thing: the brass bell that hung from the ceiling. I jumped up and hit it a few times, letting the peaceful reverberations fill the temple. Avantika turned to me, a small smile on her face, but Aai narrowed her eyes until her tikli looked like it was going to fall off from the wrinkles forming on her forehead. It was her “subtle” reminder to me to not overdo the bell and disturb others.

  Dad joined us and we did our namaskars, put a few dollars into the wooden box, and then ate some prasad. Today the temple had my favorite in a bowl next to the bananas and apples. It was badam, bedane, and khadi-sakhar. Dad scooped a spoonful into my right hand, the only hand you could eat prasad with, since your other hand was considered dirty from the pre-toilet-paper days. I popped the almonds, raisins, and small, flat squares of opaque sugar into my mouth and, Avantika by my side, grabbed my chappal and headed downstairs.

  “It smells so good,” said Avantika as we took our plates and went through the buffet line, loading up with puris, fried golden rounds of bread that glistened with oil. I scooped some shrikhand, thick-strained yogurt sweetened with sugar and spiced with cardamom and saffron, crocus-flower stigmas that just happened to be the most expensive spice in the world. I added batata bhaji onto the side of my plate, eyeing the turmeric-stained cubes of boiled and panfried potatoes peppered with mustard seeds and curry leaves. I scooched my bhaji over to make room for the varan bhaat, and added a bigger helping than was polite of the spicy, tangy mango pickle.

  “My friends are at the table at the end,” I told Avantika. I normally would have run to them squealing because we hadn’t seen each other in so long. But today I felt like I was about to ruin the fun, or like I had to act differently in front of Avantika. We walked toward Maya and Tanvi, who were at the end of a long table crowded with all the kids whose names I couldn’t remember, since we barely came to town anymore.

  Maya, dressed in a long, sleeveless, dark-green Anarkali that went down to her ankles, highlighted by a magenta, purple, and gold odhani, was picking at her varan bhaat with her spoon, making a face. Tanvi’s Anarkali was mustard yellow with navy-blue embroidery all over it, except on her long sleeves, which were sheer gold with a floral pattern on them. Done with her food, she was twisting her blue odhani around her arm like a snake and undoing it, over and over again.

  I tugged at the bottom of my kurta with my free hand, wishing it would magically grow past my thighs, and took a seat. “Hey, guys. This is Avantika. Avantika, this is Maya and Tanvi. We’ve been friends, like, since we were born.”

  “Hi, everyone,” Avantika said, and smiled, pulling a chair from the table behind us.

  “Are you the cousin from Pune?” asked Maya, putting her spoon down as she gave up on the varan bhaat.

  Avantika looked confused, so I quickly spoke up. “We’re not cousins. We’re neighbors.”

  “What? You moved to Oakridge? From India?”

  “Why?” asked Tanvi, throwing her odhani back over her neck. “There’s nothing there.” She turned red as she looked at me. “I mean, of course, there is stuff there. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s fine.” I shrugged, pushing my bindi to make sure it was still sticking in place. “There’s definitely not as much stuff to do there as there is here.” I paused, annoyed at myself for putting down my hometown so easily in front of my friends. Oakridge had its flaws, but I loved my house. I loved living next door to Noah. I loved how pretty our downtown looked year-round, whether it was blooming with tulips in spring, swirled with red, white, and blue ribbons for the Fourth of July, decorated with skeletons in poses from famous movies in October, or twinkling with Christmas lights at the end of the year.

  “I love your salwar-kurta,” said Maya to Avantika. “Very cool. You must really miss the shopping back home.”

  Maya’s words were starting to take on a very slight Indian accent. It was something I subconsciously did in India, too, when talking to my aunts and uncles, so they could understand my thick American accent better.

  Before Avantika could answer, Tanvi snorted. “Why are you talking like a fob, Maya?”

  Maya swatted the air near Tanvi with her odhani, giggling. “I’m so not! If I was talking like a fob, I’d be like, ‘I luvv your salwar-kurrrta. Verry cool.’ ”

  Tanvi laughed. “See? I told you, fob.”

  I started to smile but saw Avantika quickly spoon a glob of shrikhand into her mouth, a flush of red spreading over her cheeks.

  I sighed as Tanvi and Maya cluelessly continued their impressions, remembering what Dad had said about what it felt like to be made fun of just for being who you are. I knew that feeling well. And it was a horrible feeling. “Your parents are fobs,” I said hesitantly, over their laughter.

  They stopped. I froze too, a little shocked at the words that had slipped out.

  “They are not. Not anymore, anyway. Their accents aren’t that bad,” said Tanvi.

  “Shah Rukh Khan is a fob.” I frowned, mentioning Maya’s favorite Bollywood actor.

  “He is not. He doesn’t live here so he isn’t fresh off any boat, and— Oh.” Maya seemed to turn a little green when she saw Avantika’s flushed face. “We didn’t mean it. I wasn’t even thinking.”

  Avantika kept looking down, and I thought I saw a tear plop onto her plate.

  “It was just a joke,” said Tanvi, scooting her chair back with a screech. “Anyway, I’m stuffed. We’ll meet you guys at the coatracks, okay?” she added, grabbing Maya’s arm.

  “Sorry,” I said softly, wishing I had put a stop to the joke earlier.

  Avantika stuffed a big bite of puri with batata bhaji in her mouth so she could only nod
.

  “Next time we’ll get here earlier so their mouths are stuffed like yours. Then they can’t make so many awful jokes.”

  Avantika nodded again.

  “And, hey, maybe you could pack some batata bhaji for Liam, too. I could use some silence from him.”

  Avantika smiled. “He’d probably get grossed out by the name and think it’s made out of butts or something.”

  I laughed, chewing on the mango pickle until it got so hot, I needed to swallow it and chug some water. “ ‘Mr. Crowe! Dot and Dot are eating butts! Is that allowed in America?’ ”

  “ ‘Ew, Dot! Why does it look like that?’ ” said Avantika, doing her best American accent. “ ‘Why does it smell?’ ”

  I sat backward in my chair like Mr. Crowe, easily done thanks to my ugly, short kurta. “ ‘Because it’s butts, Liam.’ ”

  And with that, I started laughing so hard, I could barely speak. Avantika was cracking up, happy tears washing away whatever tears were there before.

  “Do you want to have a sleepover?” I blurted.

  Avantika paused. “Sure. I’ve never had one back home.”

  I tried to sound like a seasoned sleepover expert. “We just watch movies, and pig out, and go to sleep.”

  Avantika nodded. “That sounds like fun. And if you want to do it at my house, we can pig out on bhel. Your favorite.”

  “As long as your mom remembers to put batata in it.” I grinned.

  chapter FOURTEEN

  The bhel at Avantika’s was amazing. Auntie had loaded the puffed rice with potatoes, raw mango, onions, tomatoes, fried strings of shev, small chickpeas, cilantro chutney (which I was okay with, even though I normally couldn’t stand cilantro), and my favorite, tangy, sweet, chincha chutney. I had eaten three large bowls of the bhel, and at the end, when I saw Avantika open a cabinet and pop a few brown hamster-turds in her mouth, I begged her to let me have some too.