During the ten-hour flight over the Indian Ocean to London, stray tears roll down my face without permission. Nothing had felt real till the plane abandoned land with a deafening shudder. The roar of the plane seems to say, You’ve left Bombay, you’re going to America. What do you know about it?
We spend hours in Heathrow Airport, dazzled by our first glimpse of the country that ruled us for a gazillion years. We strain to understand the announcements over the speaker system. We worry that they might be important. The words are familiar, but the clipped British accent is difficult to understand. Then we board another plane and cross the Atlantic. Another ocean between us and home. I’ve lost count of time zones and days.
When we land in New Jersey, I ask Dad, “What day is it?”
“Saturday,” he says.
“But it was Saturday when we left Bombay,” I say.
“We’ve traveled back in time,” says Dad.
Rishi always signs when we’re in loud public places. “Time travelers!”
At the immigration counter the officer stamps the actual, no-time-travel-involved date on my passport: July 23, 1988.
After that twenty-four-hour journey, Dad’s cousin drives us to his motel and leads us down a flight of stairs into rooms that are literally under the earth. He calls it the “basement.”
It’s dark and smells of stale food and liquor, like the train station in Bombay. Rishi runs down the steps two at a time. “Wow!” he says. “Wow!”
Rishi obviously doesn’t care about the odors.
Ma and I exchange looks. If we were alone, we would hold our noses.
After his cousin leaves, Baba reminds us, “He’s doing us a favor. He’s letting us live in his motel, rent free, for as long as we need.”
In return Ma and I help their family in every way possible. After school starts in August, I help in the evenings. We clean on our knees and we peel mountains of potatoes. Ma even lets me watch their two-year-old; she says at fifteen, she raised her younger brother.
Dad and Rishi rake mountains of leaves. Those golden leaves, I learn, are dead. I marvel that even death can be beautiful.
Dad reports to his job the Monday after we arrive. Baba has a job teaching physics at a small college. It’s how we got a visa to immigrate. Ma, Rishi and I scrub the smell in our rooms away. We wash the little windows that are one foot under the ceiling. Leaves and debris are piled high outside the windows, trapping in gloom. We sweep them away to let the sun shine on the worn, green, holey carpet again.
After buying four airline tickets, there wasn’t much money left for anything else. In the new year, we’ll have saved enough to move into our own apartment, Baba promises. Some days I ache for my old life, my old friends. I want to be a bird who can fly home across the ocean. When I write to Neena, my best friend in Bombay, I tell her about the apartment we will get soon, and that Dad has bought a car. It was a colleague’s old car, but to us it is new. It is our first car.
It takes almost three weeks for my letter to get to Neena. She writes back and asks if we have become rich. In India most people don’t have their own cars.
In another letter Neena writes that Raj, the boy I liked in my old school, gave her a tape of Bollywood songs. That day, I scrub the floors extra hard.
Dating might not be allowed, but the heart still beats. My fingers used to tingle when they accidentally touched Raj’s as we passed each other test tubes in chem lab back in Bombay. What if I had told Raj that thinking of him made me smile?
It doesn’t matter, does it? I am across the world, and Neena is listening to Raj’s favorite songs.
Dadi writes a letter telling us she made kheer for my cousins. She isn’t one to complain, but we can tell that they’d probably not eaten the kheer with as much joy as Rishi. They had probably not hunted out the raisins and nuts, like I did.
Today Ma’s brow is furrowed when I leave for school. Since school started, August, September and October became waves of newness strung into days, and now it’s late November.
Like every other day, she reminds me, “Priya, I pray Rishi is okay in school, check on him.”
The elementary and high schools are next door to each other.
You’re worrying about the wrong kid, I should’ve told her. He might be hearing impaired and he might have a long way to go with his speech, but he’s already found his voice. It’s your “normal” daughter who has been mute in school for more than three months. At first, I knew the exact number of days I hadn’t spoken, then I lost count. It’s easier to count the few words that I have spoken.
Ma has no way of knowing that; I’d never tell her. It would make the circles under her eyes dark as the night. Ma and Baba say we need to “work hard” to build our new life. I have never slogged so much at school. My hardest class is American History. I have nightmares in which a stern general from the Revolutionary War quizzes me. Last week, the English teacher asked us to diagram a sentence. English has been the language of instruction in my school in Bombay since kindergarten; I have written and read myriad sentences, but never mapped one. My parents know English, but they’ve never mapped sentences either. Staying after school almost every day for weeks to meet teachers and catch up has become routine. All that learning has left me with no energy to
