“You still haven’t told me what exactly happened.”
“Uncle Sandeep took me to a gurdwara—a Sikh temple.”
Her eyes expand. “Whoa.”
“Yeah. Big explosion.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then she raises one apricot, barely there eyebrow. “So what’re you gonna do?”
“I don’t ever want to go back there.”
“You’re gonna have to go back. You can stay here for today, but my mom’s not going to let you stay here if your mom’s not cool with it.”
I sigh. “I know. No wonder I never went against her! I have nowhere else to go! She really screwed things up for me.”
“What about your uncle? Could you stay with him for a bit, until you clear your head?”
I shake my head. “It’ll make things worse between him and Mom. He’ll tell me to work it out with her first, I just know it.”
“Hmm,” she says, looking stumped.
I turn deliberately to look at her. “Maybe you could help me.”
She looks at me suspiciously. “How?”
The wheels for Plan B start rumbling into motion. “Uncle Sandeep and I may not be able to convince Mom to let me see my grandparents…” I stand up and walk to Molly’s dresser, my heart pumping with renewed zeal. “But you and I might be able to convince Uncle Sandeep to take me to see them…on his own! Mom doesn’t have to know everything.”
Her eyes widen, and she jumps up. “Ooooh, I love it.”
“I’m going to meet my grandparents, Moll.” I squeeze her hands and shiver.
Her eyes sparkle. “Even I’m getting butterflies in my belly.”
I drop her hands and rummage through my backpack. “I’m going to call him right now.”
“Now?”
“If he’s free, we could meet him somewhere…at the mall, maybe. You did say you wanted to get your Christmas shopping done early this year, right?”
She grins and begins changing out of her sweats.
I flip open my cell phone and scroll through to Uncle Sandeep’s number. My skin rises in goose bumps as I realize that a family Thanksgiving might actually be in the cards for me. With or without Mom.
After telling him that I have something urgent to discuss with him and it has to be in person, Uncle Sandeep agrees to meet me outside of Wok This Way in the food court of the mall. I leave out the part about Molly coming with me and us tag-teaming against him.
Molly and I get there early, grab some noodles and teriyaki chicken, and figure out our game plan. We know Uncle Sandeep wants me and my grandparents to meet, but we also know he would never go behind Mom’s back to do it. So our strategy is to focus on the fact that I need to meet them no matter what, by any means necessary.
She leans forward. “Tell him it’s your right to know your grandparents—no, wait, it’s your birthright.”
“Ooh, that’s good,” I say, popping a piece of baby corn into my mouth. “I deserve to know them, and it’s just plain wrong—no, criminal—to keep that from me!”
“Yes!” she says, pointing a chopstick at me.
I shovel a forkful of noodles into my mouth when I see Uncle Sandeep jog into the food court. He searches frantically around the tables. I wave, and he runs right over.
“Samar!” he says breathlessly. “What’s wrong?”
“Um, nothing’s wrong, exactly,” I say, feeling bad that I worried him.
“What do you mean?” He wrinkles his brow and looks at Molly. “What’s this about?”
She looks into her plate. So much for tag-teaming.
I straighten my spine and say, in my most serious and authoritative voice, “Uncle Sandeep, I have something very important to talk to you about.”
He gives me a scolding look. “Does your mother know about this?”
I shake my head. “No, but—”
“Then this is wrong, Samar. Sharan is very upset that I took you to the gurdwara against her will, and rightly so! I never should have done so without her consent. This will only fuel her anger and mistrust.”
“I want to talk to you about your parents,” I say quickly, “my grandparents.”
After a brief pause, his face softens. “What about them?”
Molly sets her chopsticks down and gives me an encouraging nod.
I look him in the eyes. “I want to meet them. I…I have a right to meet them.”
“A birthright,” Molly adds, coming back into the mix.
Uncle Sandeep looks from me to Molly and back again. With a sigh, he unravels his scarf, shrugs out of his coat, and sits down. “Okay, I’m listening,” he says.
“All this time, Mom’s had no contact with you and your parents….”
“Which we respect,” Molly throws in. “That’s her choice.”
I continue. “Yes, that’s her choice—not necessarily mine. No one asked me what I wanted. Don’t you think I deserve to know my own grandparents?”
He slouches in his seat. “Samar, this is something I’ve discussed at length with your mother. It’s something she is dead set against.”
I burst. “But isn’t that unreasonable? I know you don’t agree with her, Uncle Sandeep! You know it’s totally unfair!”
He presses his lips together. “She is your mother, Samar,” he says, shaking his head.
“This is crazy!” I shout, slamming my hand down on the table. Several people at the next table turn around. I’m at once aware that we’re the only table in the food court with a sweaty, anxious, turbaned guy having an impassioned meeting with someone pounding their fist on the table.
“Yes?” Molly says, leaning toward the people who are still staring. They turn back around, muttering to one another.
I lower my voice. “Don’t they want to see me?” My chin begins to quiver. “How could they let her get away with this? Don’t they care about meeting their only grandchild?”
He covers my hand with his. “Of course they do! Samar, you have no idea how much they long to see you. For years they’ve lived to catch snippets about you from cousins and friends who’ve happened to run into Sharan!”
My stomach flips. What kind of a mother would do something like this to her own child? Two thin streams meander down my cheeks. “Uncle Sandeep,” I whisper, “if we leave it to Mom, I’ll never get to know them.”
Molly strokes my upper arm deliberately. “My grands are such a huge part of my life,” she says, looking at Uncle Sandeep. “I can’t imagine never knowing them.”
Uncle Sandeep leans back in his chair, throws his head back, and rests his fists against his closed eyelids. When he sits forward again, he leans on one elbow, lets his breath out in a whoosh, and slides a finger under his turban to scratch his head.
“This is probably the biggest mistake I’ll ever make—”
Before he can finish, I’m out of my seat, wrapping my arms around his neck.
“Yesss! Thank you, Uncle Sandeep—it’s not a mistake, you’ll see!” I grab a napkin off the table and blow my nose.
Molly’s grinning from ear to ear. “So when’ll it be?”
“Thanksgiving weekend!” I say.
Chapter 8
The few conversations I’ve had with Mike have been awkward. The last one went like this:
Me: I got a B+ on my last calc quiz.
Him: Cool.
Us: silence.
Him: Hey, ’member that guy Al I told you about, that works with me?
Me: Um, the one with the kid on the way?
Him: No—who has a kid on the way?
Me: I don’t know, I thought you said someone had a kid on the way.
Him: No.
Me: Oh.
Us: silence.
Him: Anyway, Al got laid off last Friday. Can you believe that? Right before the holiday.
Me: Wow.
Us: silence.
Him: You hangin’ with your mom for Thanksgiving?
Me: Uh, yeah.
I’m not telling him what I’m really doing. Based
on the last time I saw him, I get the feeling he won’t be as excited as I’d like him to be. He definitely won’t be as excited as me and Molly.
Even though Molly always invites me to join her family for Thanksgiving, I don’t like to leave Mom alone during major holidays. Not that she has ever said anything to me about it, and I know she would probably be fine, but I still feel bad leaving her all alone when the rest of the world is spending time with their families.
Usually Thanksgiving weekend is a holiday Mom and I celebrate by sleeping in, eating out or ordering in (if Mom’s not inspired to make her Thanksgiving Cornish hen recipe), and catching up on homework for me and client reports for her. Then, if Molly’s in town and not at some out-of-state family gathering, Mom tries to wrangle me and Molly into volunteering with Mom and her friends at some homeless shelter or women’s place.
Except this time. This time I have a chance to spend a huge, family-oriented holiday with my own family. Sure, my mom is family too…but I mean a whole bigger family. A real family, with grandparents and an uncle and a big meal and laughter and conversation around clinking dinnerware—everything I’ve seen on TV shows and at Molly’s house.
Ignoring a few twinges of guilt, I tell Mom I’ll be driving to Pennadunkit Canyon for Thanksgiving weekend with Molly and a couple of friends. Since Molly’s family will be gathered at her Great-Aunt Maggie’s estate, no one will answer if Mom calls the house, and she won’t ask how it was if she happens to run into Mrs. Mac sometime down the road. Plus, Molly said she’ll cover if Mom calls her cell.
After apologizing for the thirty-ninth time for slapping me, Mom almost keels over in relief when I tell her where I’m going, so she doesn’t interrogate me as much as she normally would.
For the next few days there’s a little party going on in my chest. Each day that brings me closer to the weekend I’m to meet my grandparents and finally look into my history and my past feels like a little secret I guard and cherish.
But the days pass ever so achingly slowly. By the time we crawl into the second week of November, the little party in my chest has become a loud, thrashing concert in my stomach.
Ms. Lesiak calls me up after English class on Tuesday morning. “Samar, I noticed that you haven’t submitted your paper.”
I mumble something about being sorry and stressed, and that I’ll get it to her as soon as possible.
She nods. “It’s a difficult subject, I know,” she says, “but I’m only asking for your thoughts and feelings. There is no wrong way to do this assignment, Samar. Why don’t you get together with some of the other students to discuss it? Perhaps that will generate your own thoughts for the paper.”
Wonderful, more Healthy Discussion and Debate.
“Sure,” I say.
“I’ll give you until after the holiday to get the paper back to me,” she says. “After that, I deduct a letter grade for each day it’s late.”
“A whole letter grade?!”
“I’m sorry, Samar, but you’re already a week late. I’m being very generous here.”
I nod and walk out. I’m not one to put things off, but every time I start this paper, I zone out.
As I walk to lunch, Balvir falls into step beside me. “Hey, I heard your convo with Lesiak. Didn’t mean to listen in, but I was getting my stuff.”
“Yeah…sucks.”
“Do you want to have lunch together? Maybe we could talk, like she said, and maybe it’ll help you jump-start your paper.”
I’m about to say, “No, thank you,” when Lesiak’s warning pops into my head: I deduct a letter grade for each day it’s late.
“Yeah, all right.”
She laughs. “Don’t sound so excited!”
“Sorry, it’s not personal.”
“No worries. I’m pretty thick-skinned. Should we sit outside? It’s a bit cold, but the sun’s out….”
I nod, and we head to a grassy spot off to one side of the field. We sit down, open our lunches, and begin eating in silence. On the field, several guys throw a football around during their gym period.
“I hate those guys,” Balvir says, looking out at the field.
“All of them?” I ask, taking a bite from my sandwich.
She shakes her head. “No, just the one in the green, and that one…in the shorts.”
I squint my eyes to see them better. The guys she’s talking about are Chuck Banfield and Simon Monroe.
“They live on my street and have made life hell for us since we moved in.”
I get a queasy feeling in my gut. “How?” I ask, but I think I already know.
“Oh…they throw things into our front yard, harass my sixty-year-old grandmother, chase my little brother home every night…I could go on.”
We eat silently for a moment.
“They threw cans and garbage at my uncle’s car,” I say, looking out at the field. I feel her turning to look at me, then back out at the guys.
“Jackasses,” she says. “Nothing else for their stunted brain cells to fixate on. Always picking on someone smaller or defenseless.” And then she cups her hands around her mouth and yells, “You’re SO big and strong!”
A couple of the guys turn to look at us with puzzled expressions. I want to blend into the tree. Chuck and Simon smirk and keep playing.
She turns to me with a triumphant smile. “I know they probably think I complimented them. Those lunkhead Neanderthals don’t get subtlety or sarcasm. But it felt good to yell.”
“They used to call me names and shove my face into the ground when I was a kid,” I say quietly, the memory slithering back to the surface.
“I bet.”
“I punched and scratched and yelled back, but…”
“But they traveled in clumps. And you were just you.”
I nod and look at her. For a brief moment, our eyes meet. The flecks of yellow and gold in her liquid, cola-colored eyes are just like Mom’s. I tumble into a moment in the past. A moment where I sat under a tree on the grass in the sun with Mom and told her about what was going on at school.
She gritted her teeth and pounded the ground. “Don’t you let them make you believe you’re less than, Sammy! You’re every bit as good—better, even! You’re smarter, lovelier…” Her eyes welled up and she cupped my face in her hands. “And kinder. You could run circles around them. Excel and surpass them, sweetheart…you’ll be so far out of their league, they’ll never be able to touch you again!”
Then she set me on the “math path.” Every type of math book and game you could buy, she bought. For some reason, Mom thought math would be the liberating force in my life.
I look back at Balvir, then down at her kara bangle. An idea begins to take shape in my mind. After our trip to the gurdwara, Uncle Sandeep told me about the Five Ks of Sikhism: the kara bangle, symbolizing right thought and action; the kesh (unshorn hair), symbolizing God’s wisdom; the kanga (comb), symbolizing cleanliness; the kachha (boxer shorts), symbolizing chastity and modesty; and the kirpan (ceremonial dagger), symbolizing readiness to defend one’s honor and faith.
Balvir is Sikh, Indian, and Punjabi. The exact same equation as Mom, and her mom…and, I guess, me. Plus, she’s my age. She might be able to offer me some insight into the experience that I can’t get from anyone else.
“Hey,” I begin. My tongue feels like a rock. “Could you recommend some good books or…something on Sikhism? Like for young people? Even if it’s for older people, that’s cool too…. I just want to learn a bit more about it.”
She looks at me for a long moment, like a jeweler appraises gems for authenticity. I feel like I’m morphing into a giant coconut right there on the field, in front of her very eyes. Finally she looks up into the bare branches above us.
“Try SikhOut.org—smart people keepin’ it real. Then, if you really feel ambitious, you could check out Sikhchic.com and SepiaMutiny.com. Those two are blogs, and”—she gives me a grin—“they might be a bit advanced for you right now.”
I th
ink about Mom and what she sometimes suggests to clients. “What about groups…or like a center for Sikh youth or something…?”
“Groups?” She looks at me as if my ignorance is astonishing.
I’m a coconut that has doubled in size.
“Girl, you need friends. That’s your group. Find some Indian peeps to hang out with.”
I shift my weight, suddenly feeling like I’m sitting on a hill of pebbles. I realize we haven’t discussed anything about the paper I have due for Lesiak in about three weeks and am relieved at the opportunity to change the subject. “So, about Lesiak’s assignment…”
She nods. “Yeah, I keep wondering what your thoughts are on that, but you never say anything in class.”
“What did you write about?”
She squints at the sky. “I wrote about the internment camps during World War II, when there was mass paranoia about the Japanese, and I linked it to the mass hysteria and paranoia about Muslims after the attacks.”
I stare at her.
She looks at me as if searching for something. She sighs and continues. “You do know about the internment camps, right? You know, when hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and sent off to ‘camps’ because the government thought they could be ‘enemies of the state’ or spies?”
I slowly shake my head, racking my brain for the American history lesson that would have taught us about this.
She laughs. “God, girl. Do you even know who you are? You need to learn about more than just your Sikhness; you need to learn about your American-ness, too! Look it up online when you’re doing research for your paper. Check out Wikipedia—they have other links on there that you can follow.”
I wonder why I always feel so dumb when I talk to Balvir. And I know that by asking my next question I’m about to sound just as dumb as I feel. “How do you know all this stuff?”
She stops laughing. “I do research. I dig. I ask questions. You learn from living with a family like mine that most of the time what people tell you and what’s true are two different things. I want to find out for myself.” She sighs again. “History is more than just a class at school, Sammy. What happened then could happen now, too.”
Shine, Coconut Moon Page 8