I watch as Rishi struts into school like it’s the only one he’s ever known. Maybe it’s easier to fit right in if you’re eight and in second grade. High school feels like another planet, with different rules and customs, where everyone has attended each other’s birthdays since elementary school, except me.
Rishi’s smile is his entire face as he signs to his friend, “The bus was tardy!”
He already uses words like tardy. We’d never heard that word till we came to New Jersey. Back in Bombay we were just late.
Rishi’s voice is louder than it needs to be, and the edges of his words run into each other. He is so busy greeting his friend that he’s unaware of the glances that some of the other kids throw his way. With a twinge I realize that I am not the only person who understands him perfectly anymore. When Rishi was little, I was his one and only sister, friend and protector.
As I walk to my school building, a leaf gracefully twirls down and whispers in my ear. I pause and feast on the magnificence of Fall.
I’ll write to Dada and Dadi and tell them about this carpet of jeweled red, yellow and gold leaves. Will they believe me? They’ve never seen anything like it. In Bombay the leaves are always green. They don’t transform and remind us that everything changes. If only I had a camera.
Baba reads a lot of science fiction. One day, he says, we’ll all have phones with cameras. I’ll be like old and forty by then.
They were right though, all the aunts and uncles and grandparents and parents. Rishi’s speech has already improved with the new hearing aids he got last month. We could never have bought hearing aids of that quality in Bombay. His residual hearing has also improved. His school has a deaf education classroom where he learns for part of the day, and it has made all the difference.
When Ma and Baba were told the class was free and part of the public-school services, Ma cried. Then she lit incense and the oil lamp to thank God for making it all possible.
“He will not be held back in America.” I hear their chorus as I walk into my classroom and take my seat.
At roll call I raise my hand but don’t say, “Here,” like the others.
I said four words on the first day of school. When my eraser fell to the floor and rolled slowly under my classmate Jane’s desk, I pointed and said, “My rubber.”
Jane’s eyes opened wide. “What?” she said.
“My rubber,” I repeated.
Jane’s face turned red. The kids around us were laughing.
A giant boy who sat across the aisle fished in his pocket and waved a packet at me. “I got one too, baby.”
I knew what it was. To control the exploding population rates, India ran advertisements on TV and billboards encouraging the use of condoms.
“Shut up, Brett!” I heard Jane say. She picked up what I soon learned to call my eraser and handed it back to me. Her eyes connected with mine and seemed to say, Don’t worry about him and the others, they don’t understand. Or that is what I told myself.
My eyes might have been moist, so I lowered them but not before noticing Jane’s barely perceptible nod that said, You’re okay.
That day, my words shriveled up, but Jane’s kindness stayed with me, like a shawl wrapped around my shoulders on a cold day.
A little voice in my head said, If you don’t speak, they can’t laugh at you, but they won’t know you either.
The quieter I became, the more I could hear. My classmates might not know me, but I got to know them and their whispered secrets. Megan told her friends that she had taken glamor shots at the mall and wanted to be a model. I side-glanced and saw the pictures; she looked like a movie star. Jane moved to this school last year. She has lived in five countries, and her father’s job requires them to move a lot. She knows how it feels to be the new kid.
I am becoming comfortable in my silent cocoon. Everyone is busy in their own worlds; there are standardized tests, extracurricular activities, kids thinking about college. Most girls who smiled at me at first have stopped trying. My English teacher required an oral recitation of a poem, but she also offered the option of writing an essay. I was the only one who chose the essay, even though it involved more work.
When I get off the bus at the end of the day, I clear my throat in the cold windy air. My brother gets off his bus at the same time. He starts to excitedly tell me about his day using a combination of words and signs. I laugh. My unused tongue reshapes words again. I can still speak to him.
As we run down the steps to our basement rooms, we smell cardamoms, sugar, tea and milk, boiling and steeping into the perfect chai.
Once inside, I place my backpack next to the shelves built with cement blocks and planks of wood where I have arranged my books.
Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. The two classic books that I first read aloud with Dada and Dadi. They gave me these books almost five years ago, on my tenth birthday.
The books sit by their picture. They wait for our weekly phone call. Calls are expensive, more than two dollars a minute, and make me miss them more. I cannot touch or smell or feel their arms around me over the static-filled phone lines. But I can remember reading aloud with Dada, as he sat in his favorite rocking chair, his voice lilting and excited.
“I have never seen snow,” he said when we read about the March girls walking through the snow on Christmas Day. One day, I hope that he and Dadi will visit, and we’ll walk through snow
