I suspected that I had become a casualty of Prachi’s Spring Fling misbehavior. But my sister, the perpetrator herself, was allowed to roam free due to her pageant activities. It seemed immensely unfair. Perhaps my parents feared my descent into averageness more than they feared Prachi’s tumbles into vice. They trusted Prachi. My sister telegraphed her ambitions in the Duke poster on her wall and the Duke T-shirt she tugged on whenever she had a test, for good luck. She had a dream to lose. Me? I had no college poster, no talisman.
On the first evening of my imprisonment, I grabbed the upstairs cordless in hopes of calling Kartik to arrange a covert video game rendezvous. But my mother was already on the phone.
I heard Mrs. Bhatt’s voice on the other end of the line saying, “And that Anjali Dayal!”
“How would she go do something like that?”
“Why, mujhe toh pata nahi, but Ramya, I saw her going into my bedroom during Manav’s toast, and I waited, soch rahi hoon ki, maybe she just needs to use the bathroom—”
“She should have been using the powder room! Who enters the master bathroom like that—”
“But just wait, I sent Meena in, usko maine bola, ‘Meena, go see if Anjali Auntie needs something, or if she’s looking for me,’ so Meena went into my bedroom.”
“And?”
“Toh, that woman is just standing in my closet!”
“That’s what Meena said?”
“Yaaah, yah! Not only that, looking at all my clothes, my jewelry!”
“She opened your jewelry cabinet?”
“I had left it open, I remembered later, because I kept trying to choose, which earrings—”
“Itnaa nice-nice earrings.”
“And also I kept trying to get Jay to wear the gold Om his daadi gave him, but these boys won’t wear necklaces, saying ‘Mummy, I look like a girl,’ and then people started ringing the doorbell and I never shut it all up . . . anyway, strange behavior—”
My mother tutted. “She’s jealous, Beena. She goes to all these parties-schmarties as catering, no husband in sight, and you’re always wearing those niiice saris and stoles and—”
“Skinny-mini gold digger shouldn’t need my saris.”
“Gold digger? Kya matlab?”
“Ramya—you know. All these kids listening to that song these days, you must keep up with them or you will lose them. Get down, girl, it goes, some such thing. Anyway, my cousin Rakesh was Pranesh Dayal’s senior at IIT Bombay. He only told me. She went round with all the boys. Then chose Pranesh because people said he’s the class topper, going to make lots of money, going to America and whatnot.”
“Hanh—” my mother paused. “Thought I heard something on the line.” (I muted the phone.) “Lekin, back there marriage can be a little transactional, na? Gold digger, bahut American way to think about it, Beena.”
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs; my mother liked to pace around the house, complementing gossip with exercise, so I returned the cordless to its cradle and rushed back to my bedroom to stare out at the Dayals’, beginning a pattern that would define the summer. I ran through hypotheses as time rolled by, as I squinted through the heat and fireflies and the low glimmering of the suburban streetlights. Did the Dayal women need money—money to be garnered from Prachi’s necklace, or something in Mrs. Bhatt’s closet? Was a divorce pending? Was Pranesh Uncle not funding the fancy-schmancy school? Or was something else altogether setting in?
I watched that Crayola yellow house that night and all summer, not knowing entirely what I was looking for, but aware that it deserved my attention.
• • •
My vigils over the Dayals’ were interrupted by library trips, where I was stuck researching the upcoming debate topic. A bunch of high schoolers would spend the year discussing the fossil fuel crisis, something that felt distant, even invented, from my perspective amid Atlanta’s gas-guzzler-crammed highways, where all seemed quiet, the apocalypse staved off in the comfort of concrete suburban stasis.
My parents had feared debate at first, because of the tournaments that took students out of town on weekends. Surely my mother imagined nonsense playing out beneath the noses of the chaperones in Howard Johnson hotels. But they relented when talk at Indian parties centered on the clarity of purpose that debate offered—you have one job, and it is not to tell the truth about the fossil fuel crisis. It is simply to win. Debate gave children ambition, the Indian parties concluded. Ambition: the substance to settle the nerves of immigrant parents. Ambition: the point of that summer, for me, was to acquire some.
I’d set up in a light-filled corner of the Hammond Creek Public Library in the mornings, at a table with a view of a slippery pine-needled slope leading to a ravine. There I took direction from Wendi Zhao. She was rumored to be among Harvard’s top choices for debate recruits the next year and did not need a partner so much as a “tool” (as the debate kids said)—someone to do as she demanded amid the high heat of a tournament’s elimination rounds. She had reduced female teammates to tears too many times, so the coaches decided she’d pair best with a guy.
I was uninterested in the policy papers Wendi forced me to read. Stuff about planning for a distant future. Solar wind capture. Hydrogen fuel. I found myself wandering the library, seeking higher-order material, in hopes of becoming the kind of competitor who opted for a philosophical approach over a wonky one. We called the former kritik debaters, or K-debaters, and their ranks were populated by enviably nonchalant potheads from alternative private schools, some of whom would grow into Harvard humanities professors. I spent my days aspirationally tunneling into the work of Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger, sneaking these texts under the table until one day when Wendi approached silently—she had assassin’s footsteps—and caught me.
“What’s that got to do with alternative
