Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  “Very nice house, very nice,” Thatha said, sounding impressed. He poked his head into the dining room. “But I am feeling a little faint.”

  My mother helped Thatha settle in, and by next morning, when I woke up, the smell had vanished, or perhaps I’d grown used to it.

  Usually my parents drove together to the university. But on that day, my mother called my school’s principal. They parked in the school parking lot, my mother commenting on how dangerous it was that children were dropped off and picked up in such chaotic conditions. At the meeting with the principal my mother repeated what Miss Wabash had done and my father, zippered up in his stiff green winter jacket, watched the principal’s face remain stiff and unmoved. Above him, the minute hand kept ticking and each tick forward seemed like a stab: ten minutes, eleven minutes, twelve minutes. But when my mother spoke, it sounded like she was telling a true story about another girl who was being humiliated and I flooded with anger on her behalf.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s difficult to believe,” said the principal. He rose from his seat and smiled at me. “Come now, Miss Wabash isn’t cruel. She’s new, but she’s a very good teacher.”

  A faint pink flooded my mother’s cheeks. “Hagar doesn’t lie.”

  That was true, or at least it had once been true, which seemed like it could be the same thing. I hid my ice-cold hands in my pockets.

  “There must be some misunderstanding,” the principal said. “I’ll investigate. I’ll speak with Miss Wabash, but I’m sure this is some sort of mix-up or  . . . exaggeration. We’re in the midst of difficult times, as you know.”

  I said nothing. It was too late to say anything of significance. Amma paused, her face tightening like she didn’t want to say what she said next. “It’s not like we’re Muslims.”

  “Do you want to take Hagar home for the day?” asked the principal.

  My father had been silent the whole time, sizing up the principal—I had seen him do this in many other situations, erupt with anger after a few minutes of observing a person to see if he or she understood the moral gravity of a situation. I slouched deeper into my chair. “Miss Wabash should be suspended,” he said suddenly. “Immediately.”

  “Afraid I can’t do that,” said the principal.

  “She made my daughter feel like trash.” Amma’s voice trembled, and my father rested a hand on her sleeve. I’d never seen my mother cry before.

  Appa said, “If you don’t discipline this teacher, we’ll go to the press, to the school board, to anybody who will listen to us.”

  The principal frowned and removed his wire-rimmed spectacles. He rubbed the scabby red skin under his glassy eyes and said, “Hagar, I’ll ask you this once. I want you to tell me the truth now, hear? Is what your parents said true? Did Miss Wabash put you in a trash can during the lunch hour? Did she call you a terrorist?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “All true.” I willed myself to cry to add a much-needed emphasis to what I was saying, but by now, I was too anxious, distracted by the need to survive, and my facial muscles wouldn’t let loose any emotions.

  “All right. I will talk to Miss Wabash. If there’s truth in what you’re saying, I will suspend her. Until I get to the bottom of this, we’ll put Hagar in the other classroom.”

  After my parents left, the principal took me down the breezeway to the other classroom and whispered to the teacher. Thirty-one students stared at me. “Why are you in our class now?” asked the girl who sat next to me during social studies. I didn’t answer.

  “Terrorist,” whispered a boy. He’d built Lego castles with me after school two years before.

  That day, I sat alone in the cafeteria rereading my numerology book, but the magic had already started to leech from the pages, and I was filled with dread. Picking at my rice, I counted each grain, feeling the gravity of those 137 grains. I noticed Miss Wabash, wearing a dazed expression as she glided down the breezeway toward the cafeteria with the principal. Her fine red hair unspooled, slipping out of its clip.

  “I didn’t do anything to you, Hagar. You know that,” said Miss Wabash when they reached me.

  “You did.”

  “I know you’re having a hard time with the other kids. That’s why we work on those extra problems you love so much. I’m trying to help you. Why are you lying?”

  “Nobody loves extra work.” I covered the book’s title with my hands and felt my front tooth sinking into my bottom lip. “You put me in the garbage can. You wanted me to be embarrassed.”

  “I swear I didn’t do anything.” Miss Wabash turned to the principal with her palms turned up. “Let me meet with her parents.”

  When I returned home, Amma was waiting in the foyer. “Your teacher denies it. They’re asking other students if they’ve seen anything.”

  I shook my head. “She just doesn’t want to be punished.”

  “They’ll start the paperwork for your transfer to the other class in any case.” My mother went into the kitchen.

  I thought she would come back and accuse me again, but instead she called my father and said I was going through such a tough time, there was no way to force me to take back what I said. “Latha called to check on Hagar,” Amma said. “I told her we don’t know what will happen. Maybe my father is right. Maybe this isn’t the right place for us.”

  I wondered if we would move back to Chennai, into my grandfather’s house. I’d see my friends at the convent school every day again. We’d be next door to the Kumaraswamys again.

  Thatha walked slowly downstairs, clasping a book of mathematical puzzles to his chest. He caught me standing just outside the kitchen door. “What are they saying?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was just counting cracks in the wall. Twenty-three.” I pointed at the plaster where a mysterious web of cracks spread.

  “I count, too.”

  “You do?” I’d never noticed him counting.

  He beckoned me over to the dining room table, too far to eavesdrop any further on my parents. “I’ll show you something else. Maybe it will help.” He turned on the television, handed me a pencil, and opened the book to a puzzle, which he placed in front of me. Thinking about the difficult abstract problem took me away from Pittsburgh and all my troubles for a few moments. “See, isn’t this better than that numerology book?”

  But just then, on the television, a platinum blonde anchor was talking about how war clouds loomed over India and Pakistan. Both countries were mobilizing their offensive army formations along the border and had conducted nuclear tests. “Secretary of State Colin Powell has issued a warning to Pakistan to rein in two militant Islamic organizations. The United States is trying to reduce tensions between these hotheaded nations,” she said.

  “Hotheaded nations. Such condescension from the superior West. So rational! So righteous!” Thatha scoffed. If my mother had been with us when he went off on his tirade, she would have chided him. She was forever telling him he shouldn’t talk that way, and every time, he would respond there was no point in coddling children and that I was smart enough to understand. But I could hear the quiet hum of her voice—she was still on the telephone—and he kept going. “When it was convenient for Americans they allied themselves with militant Islam. Just to fight the Soviet Union. That’s how these bloody fanatics have flourished.”

  A chill rippled through my body as the blonde anchor kept talking in her easy, lukewarm voice about nuclear war and terrorists. Outside, snow fell in great white drifts, and the warm golden lights of the other houses were blurred. “Is there going to be a war?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “If it’s up to your parents, we’ll stay right here.” Thatha rubbed his leg.

  “Is it safe here?”

  Thatha didn’t answer. After a moment: “What I like about numbers is that they are eternal. People are the opposite. Inconsistent. Fickle. Things with people are always changing, and what’s the right answer with people one m
oment is not the right answer the next. But you can have faith in numbers, in their steadiness. Here, let me explain the sultan’s dowry problem to you.”

  ***

  Every student in Miss Wabash’s fifth-grade class was called to the principal’s office that week to ask if they’d seen anything. At lunch on my second day back, Anne stared at me from across the cafeteria. She said something to the group of girls sitting with her, and then they all looked over with accusing expressions. It was the eighth of January. The book said eight had the worst vibrations. Eights were heavy karmic debt. That meant I had to accept whatever happened, swallow it whole as I had the truth. Outside the cafeteria, rain and snow battered the school. I ran out of the cafeteria and took shelter in a bathroom stall, waiting for lunch to be over, for the truth to come out.

  On Thursday afternoon, the principal phoned Amma. They were not quite finished with the interviews, but the principal wanted all three of us to meet with Miss Wabash.

  “Why are you agreeing to go?” Thatha said in a belligerent tone. By then, my parents had explained to him what was happening. “Why do you let these Americans push you around? You believe Hagar, don’t you?”

  “Of course we believe her.”

  “This is just how things are done here.”

  My parents looked at each other.

  “We should move,” Thatha said. “It’s not safe for Hagar here.”

  On our way to meet the principal the following day, I kept track of the numbers of the houses and apartment buildings. On one stretch, an anxious 4000. As we rounded the corner onto another road, the angry, scornful vibration of 881. The car skidded on a patch of black ice in the neighborhood by the school. Appa struggled to regain control of the car, pumping the brakes as the vehicle careened toward the sidewalk. Nobody was on the road, and in a few moments, the tires found purchase, but we arrived at the principal’s office badly shaken. Miss Wabash and the principal were already seated inside, talking.

  The principal made small talk with my mother, who was trying to cover her agitation from our near-accident. After a few minutes, he said, “Three other students have said that Miss Wabash was inappropriate or tried to embarrass them, too. One said she made her stand in the corner the whole day. Another said she used the n-word around her.”

  “I admit I may have, on the rare occasion, used excessive punishment,” Miss Wabash said. She avoided making eye contact with my father or me and looked straight at my mother instead. “I apologized to those students. But I didn’t do what Hagar says I did.” I felt amazement, believing that perhaps I was right to accuse Miss Wabash—she was guilty. If not of the trash can incident, then something else.

  “Why would she make up such a thing?” Appa asked.

  “You hate me,” I said in a quiet voice.

  Something must have snapped inside Miss Wabash, because her calm tone disappeared. She turned to my father in a rage. “How should I know what your daughter’s motivation is? I can’t stand you people. You come to our country, you take jobs from red-blooded Americans, and then you have the gall to complain? You should be grateful, Hagar, to be getting an education in the best country on earth.”

  Appa jumped up as if he were ready to fight Miss Wabash. “Are you going to let her talk to our daughter like this?”

  I opened my mouth to confess. I didn’t want my father to get in trouble.

  But then the principal intervened. “That’s enough, Miss Wabash. Hagar, why don’t you step outside.” I waited in the hall, thinking about what Miss Wabash had said, that I should be grateful.

  My parents emerged. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.” Amma hugged me. “They’re firing Miss Wabash.”

  Over the weekend, during the lulls in rain and snow, I took Thatha around the neighborhood for his afternoon walk. One fox lurked by the skeletal rose bushes and one red-breasted robin hopped through a shimmery brown puddle. One deflated balloon hung from a sycamore tree in the neighbor’s yard. There was no real pleasure in counting. There was only one of every living thing in the winter snow.

  “But she wouldn’t admit it?” my grandfather asked. “If she was willing to admit to some of those things, it seems she would admit to the others.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose and peered down at me as we shuffled down the street. He waited, breathing heavily, but I said nothing.

  Thatha complained that his chest hurt, and went inside, but I stood on the front lawn for a long while, my feet cold and moist and tender inside my soggy sneakers. I tried to reignite the old feeling of excitement when I accounted for things. It wouldn’t catch.

  The next week, there was a substitute teacher in Miss Wabash’s place, a gnomish man named Mr. Kaplan who had hair growing in thick tufts from his ears. During the math hour, he assigned the same problems to everyone. He did not use colored chalks. Everybody worked alone and there were no advanced problems, nothing to keep my interest. Frustrated, I chewed my cuticles and made up fraction problems to keep myself occupied. I remembered what my grandfather had said—that numbers were eternal, trustworthy.

  At lunch in the cafeteria, Anne passed my table, and unexpectedly, she paused. “What is that?” She was chewing on the end of her wispy blonde braid and staring at the black numerology book.

  At first, I was too startled to answer her. She hadn’t spoken to me in months. Finally, I said, “It tells me about people based on their birthdate.” I told Anne about her personality number and then her karmic number.

  “That’s not anything like me.” Anne wrinkled her nose. “I’m not peaceful.” All the kids at the table pressed in close around asking me to calculate their numbers. Flustered, I started to count in Tamil. The kids stared at me with uneasy expressions, and with a start, I realized I was so upset I was speaking in the wrong language and began counting in English again.

  After I gave them each the number from their birthdays—not the right ones—everyone agreed I was wrong, and the chorus of their voices in agreement was like the black whirring of wasps. I closed my eyes and opened them again. The vibration that numbers had always possessed—the special thing that connected me to the invisible sense-making structures of the world—was gone. Instead, the world buzzed with energy entirely unresponsive to me, and the group, an unknown number of children, stopped talking and stared.

  “That’s so dumb,” said a boy who had once thrown me against the wall. “You can’t tell the future with a stupid book. Dummy.”

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  After school, I spotted Miss Wabash with her familiar shock of red hair walking with a cardboard box toward the parking lot. “Miss Wabash!” I called. It wasn’t too late. This time, I would tell the truth. This time, I would say how sorry I was.

  But she didn’t respond to my calls. I screamed “Miss Wabash!” again and again as I ran across the frosty field, my backpack bouncing off my spine. I slid on a long patch of ice flowering the lawn and fell and scraped my knee. I jumped back up and raced past the other kids as they strolled toward the street where the school monitor was directing traffic. By the time I reached the parking lot, Miss Wabash was already ensconced in her Volvo, pulling out of a spot.

  “Miss Wabash, I’m sorry,” I screamed at the car, and beat the car windows with my fists. “Sorry. I’m sorry!”

  Miss Wabash looked past me with bloodshot grey eyes and the car kept rolling backward, until it couldn’t any farther, and then it lurched forward. I ran after the car in the icy lot. I slid on a patch of ice and steadied myself, and started running again, but Miss Wabash was determined to escape from me. The car picked up speed as it screeched around a turn. Up ahead, the school monitor was turned the other way, directing kids across the crosswalk.

  Meanwhile Anne was galloping through a snowdrift in the lot, her blonde braids bouncing. In a moment’s miscalculation, she lost her balance and dropped to her hands and knees in the car’s path. Miss Wabash swerved. The scream of brakes, metal on metal. A quiet thud as the corner of the bumper
hit Anne. She landed on her face on the cold asphalt. My heart stopped. All around me, I heard screaming and wailing and crying. Horrified, I froze. How could I have missed it? Somehow, I’d failed to read the signs that somebody could be hurt. Nothing in the numbers of today’s date, nothing in the world around me, had suggested this possibility. There was no order to the universe after all—everything was random.

  Parents and children were running toward Anne, running and falling on the ice. In all the commotion, there was the sound of a woman screaming, Get help, get help. Bobby Jamison stood on the sidewalk, watching. He caught my eye and narrowed his gaze before turning back to the gathering mob. Before the crowd in dark overcoats surrounded Anne, I saw a streak of blood, a cardinal feather lost in the grey slush.

  ***

  Thawing ash-colored snow coursed in streams in the gutters alongside me as I trudged home. The ambulance with its bright red lights hurtled past, and then the fire truck. The air was warmer than it had been and carried the smells of wet concrete and fresh yeasty bread. I started to count the snowdrop shoots in a neighbor’s yard, but when I got to seven, I stopped and shook my head. Numbers would do nothing. Counting was futile.

  Near my house, I stopped and opened my backpack and took out the numerology book. I threw it in the gutter. It sank for a moment, the thin cheap paper dissolving almost immediately in the murky swirling water. For a brief moment, hope rose up in my chest. I was tempted to retrieve the book, yank it out sopping wet, and study it, lay bare all the mysteries of this new and vicious life. I would discover the eternal wisdom that the first pages of the book promised, the secret answers that had eluded me thus far, for reasons I didn’t yet understand. Just because it hadn’t worked before, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work this time. I followed the stream as it carried the book. In a moment, the stream quickened, and the pages were caught in an eddy, which flung it over the metal grates and down into the dark sewer.

  It began to rain. A sudden downpour. From the sidewalk outside I could see my grandfather and my mother through the living room window, fighting in raised voices about something, perhaps his heart pills, perhaps the war, perhaps me. Through the glass came the glow of the fire they’d lit in the hearth, the shower of blue and gold sparks. I hoped to go inside and receive the sole remaining comfort I knew existed in the chaotic, terrifying world we had come into—that my mother would run her gentle fingers through my hair and tell me everything would be all right. But I was afraid there was no coming back from what I’d done, so instead I just stood outside, watching firelight animate their faces until I was drenched. Black smoke unfurled from the top of the chimney and died in all that rain and wind.