Ginny, David, two other boys, and I were the only ones left in the classroom. Ginny helped David with his backpack. The other boys played something with cards. I stood at my desk, and the buzzing in my ears got worse. I didn’t even hear the walker bell. Everyone filed out of the room, so I followed.
Ginny walked ahead of me. I wanted to catch up to her and say something, but I needed something to say first. There was no point walking next to her in an awkward silence. Times like this, I wished I would write down the clever conversation starters that entered my brain before I fell asleep. Then I could carry around my little notebook and never have to endure any awkwardness.
I slowed down, giving myself time to come up with something smart but not too smart. Funny was out—I could never pull off funny, not on purpose anyway. Then I remembered her locker magnets and jogged after her.
“Hey, Ginny,” I called.
She stopped and turned around, holding the door open.
“I just wanted to say that I really like your recycling magnets. You know, the ones in your locker.”
“Yeah. I know the ones,” Ginny said.
A laugh echoed in her voice, but when I lifted my eyes to check, I found a real smile.
I took a big inhale of the outside air. “Also, what you said to Lacy . . . that was . . . hilarious.” I fidgeted with the straps of my backpack to hide the burn of my cheeks, which were probably chili red.
“Well, it’s true. Green is in, and more people should bring reusable lunch boxes. What goes around comes around. Be nice to the earth, and it’ll be nice to you.”
That reminded me of something Dadima liked to say: “Your actions start a trail of reactions.” Which she said explained karma way better than “What goes around comes around” because it’s more about what we do than what others do to us.
“Maybe you should suggest that as your big idea for the suggestion box,” I said.
Ginny cocked her head at me. “That’s not a bad idea. BYOB—‘bring your own bag.’ Like at the grocery store.”
Her smile softened the hard lines that usually etched her mouth. I wondered if this was how she looked at home, where no one called her “Guinea Pig.”
We were quiet as we made our way up the hill. This simple chat with Ginny lightened my mood, despite my backpack being weighed down with every textbook from my locker. Daddy had asked me to bring them home, like he did every year. He wanted to ensure my education was “well-rounded.” By that, he meant he would go online and to the university library to supplement my education with long lectures and handouts.
Unfortunately, none of that knowledge came in handy now. I mean, if Daddy really wanted me to be “well-rounded,” maybe he should have made Teen Bop magazine required reading. After all, it had an article on how to scrub away a mustache with some sugar, and advice on friendship, both things I desperately needed help with.
Is this how everyone figured stuff out? I might have asked Mom once upon a time, but Sara had been right about one thing. We weren’t in the third grade anymore. Not only had Mom been too busy with work, but I shouldn’t have had to ask my mom to help me. I should have been able to do this myself.
Ginny waved and turned down her street, leaving me with the echo of her words bouncing around in my head: “What goes around comes around.”
Maybe I was getting what I deserved?
Maybe this was my karma.
Chapter Fifteen
I’m home,” I called as I walked through the door. I let my backpack drop to the floor in the kitchen.
For the first time since I’d woken up that morning, I felt like I could take a deep breath, knowing not a single person at home knew anything about ’Stache Attack.
“Daddy?” I poked my head into his study, but it was empty. I quickly grabbed the tiffin from my bag and took several bites of dal, because I didn’t want Daddy to ask why I hadn’t eaten it at school. I couldn’t bear to dump it out at school because Dadima used to tell me that throwing away perfectly good food was like telling Babaji to stop blessing you with good things.
I left the tiffin in the sink so Daddy would know I’d eaten most of it, and went upstairs to find him.
He wasn’t there. Nobody was home. But Daddy was always home. I checked for a note. Again, nothing.
Every force in the cosmos came together to remind me that nothing was the same as it had been last year. Last year Mom would have been home, or she’d have left a note next to a snack on the counter. But that was only once, when Kiran got sick at school and she had to pick him up.
That day last year had been the last time I’d been home alone. My body did that weird twitchy thing that happens when I drink an entire cup of masala tea. To calm down I went around to all the windows downstairs and closed the curtains. I hated myself for doing it, for being such a baby.
It took two granola bars and several peeks out the closed curtains to convince myself that Daddy had probably gotten tied up at the grocery store and that Kiran would be home any minute from school, before I could calm down enough to stop fidgeting and pacing.
I grabbed my backpack and went up to my room. Sitting at my desk, surrounded by my familiar walls, made me feel less alone. Only Ms. Hillary had given us homework, so I reached into my bag to pull out my English book. I’d keep the rest of my textbooks in my bag until Daddy asked for them later. The sticky pages of Teen Bop stuck to the back of my English book.
Just when I’d managed to smother my panic about being home alone, the memory of fighting with Sara and the words “facial hair” replayed in my head. No way would a stupid magazine be able to help me. I’d already rubbed my face raw like a crazy monk, and the lemon juice had been a bust. How would a magazine that featured smooth-skinned girls do me any good?
Then again, Horrible Histories was totally ancient, and things had changed a lot. And maybe those girls had smooth skin because they used the sugar scrub. It wouldn’t hurt to just read the article.
Tingles of embarrassment spread across my face as I opened the magazine. Even though I was home alone, I couldn’t help but keep it hidden in my English book.
I skimmed the articles until I reached the page with the recipe for the sugar scrub. You had to mix sugar, water, and lemon juice and rub it on your face before bed. Yeah, right. I’d already been rubbing, AND I’d used lemon juice this morning. Adding sugar wasn’t going to magically make my mustache disappear.
At least it didn’t suggest I shave it off, like Kiran teased me about. Sikhs don’t cut their hair. I might not be a typical Sikh or even a 100 percent one. Mom took us to church on Easter and Christmas, and Daddy brought us to the gurdwara on Diwali and Vaisakhi. Still, Daddy didn’t let Mom cut my hair. She took me for trims now and again but never let them cut more than an inch or two. Kiran cut his when he turned five because kids at his kindergarten called him a girl. Daddy still kept his hair long, but wrapped it up under a turban so it wasn’t very obvious.
If I didn’t come up with another solution, I’d end up twisting and tucking my mustache into a turban the way Daddy did with his beard. Daddy rolled his beard under and tucked it up on either side of his face to keep it from hanging down. He said it was too hot and itchy, but Dadima would tsk. She said summers in India were even hotter than summers here, and Dadaji managed to keep his beard loose until he died at eighty years old.
I looked up from the article and right to the pamphlet I’d grabbed out of the recycling the other day. Your Karma, Your Life. I pulled the paper off my mirror and unfolded it so I could read the entire thing.
A talk by Dr. Gurwinder Singh.
Come on the 23rd of September at 7 p.m. for an enlightening discussion about karma through the scriptures of Gurbani.
When Ginny had brought up the whole “what goes around comes around” thing on our walk home, I’d been half thinking that karma was messing with me. Now, looking back at the entire summer—with my mustache, Daddy losing his job, Mom becoming super busy, Kiran being grumpy, me getting called �
�Stache Attack, and Sara and me getting all weird—maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea. I mean, in books kids got superpowers when they turned twelve or thirteen. Maybe in real life you got a dose of karma served to you.
I thought that there must be a way to turn bad karma good. Things had already gotten so out of control, I couldn’t wait the two weeks until the twenty-third to figure it out.
Below, the garage door shifted and complained as it opened. I shoved Teen Bop back into my school bag and ran down the stairs.
Kiran barged through the door at the same time I got to the kitchen. His backpack hung off one shoulder, and his hair hid half his face. Daddy came in right behind him, waving a paper.
“This isn’t over, young man,” Daddy yelled.
“You never listen,” Kiran yelled back.
Every muscle in my body pulled back in surprise.
“I don’t have to listen. It’s all written down here on paper!” Daddy poked the paper furiously with his finger.
“Fine!” Kiran didn’t wait for Daddy’s response. He stomped up the stairs and slammed his door. His footsteps paced back and forth in his room, making the floorboards creak. Daddy stared at the paper in his hand and shook his head. Then he turned to me and acted surprised to see me standing there.
“It’s four thirty?” He rubbed the face of his watch like he wanted to erase time. He crunched the paper in his fist and stormed into his study. He left the door open a sliver, so the noise of him slamming drawers and pounding on the keyboard still seeped out.
All of this was an unspoken sign that dinner was my duty. It’s not that Daddy would tell me I had to. If I looked in the fridge, I could find leftovers, and Mom would be able to whip something up when she got home, but strained silence always made me feel like I hovered on the edge of a cliff, about to fall off with a single gust of wind. Making dinner or cleaning up kept me busy and moving and, I hoped, safe from collateral damage.
I grabbed some eggs, tomatoes, and butter from the fridge and went to the stove. Omelets were my specialty. Mostly because it’s all I knew how to make from my two years of Brownies. I had everything in the pan when Mom walked through the door.
“That smells yummy,” she said, patting my shoulder. “Why are you making dinner? Where’s your father?”
“In the study.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
Her eyes went from Daddy’s study door to the ceiling where Kiran’s room was.
“Your first day of school went well?” she asked, giving me a quick hug.
I nodded. I wished I could just tell her the truth, that school was awful and weird and I had a mustache problem and most likely terrible karma to top it all off. But her eyes watched Daddy’s door. It really wasn’t the best time to dump out all my problems.
“Let me have a word with your father, and then I’ll help you with a salad.” She patted my back again and walked toward Daddy’s study.
I had chopped the lettuce and grated the carrots and radishes for the salad by the time they finally came out of the study. It had felt good to chop those vegetables to teeny tiny bits. So good, I didn’t mind that no one had helped me.
Daddy sat down at the table and scowled as I brought the food over.
“Bring the hot sauce and some char,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m eating eggs and salad for dinner. What do I look like? A rabbit?”
Daddy always got grumpy over food when he was in a bad mood. I just nodded as I got the spicy pickles and hot sauce from the fridge.
“I’ll change and get Kiran. Then we can all eat,” Mom said with a smile that forced the dimple on her cheek to appear but couldn’t make her eyes happy.
A quiet settled over dinner that made every tink of my fork sound too loud. Daddy’s mood shriveled my thoughts of wanting to ask him about the talk at the temple.
In a way I didn’t mind that Kiran’s problems overshadowed mine—I didn’t have to talk about any of them. But a small part of me was stung because I did want to tell someone. I would normally call Sara to complain, but that wasn’t a possibility, considering that my problems had expanded beyond just a mustache to include her. Mom had work to worry about, and obviously I couldn’t just bring the topic of my fight with Sara or my mustache up to Daddy.
Dadima would have understood. She liked to tell me that Sikh girls had to be a lamb on the outside and a lion on the inside. Strong and determined. I didn’t feel either right now.
Chapter Sixteen
Dadima’s box sat on the top shelf of the linen closet upstairs. It held a few of her most special keepsakes, like a prayer book, her favorite chunni that she used to wear over her head when she prayed, and her wedding bangles—things she’d had in the same box under her bed while she lived with us. I knew everything in there, because I used to go through the box every day during the weeks after she died. Then I realized that all the opening and closing of the box made her smell disappear. So I stuck it up high and left it, hoping it would be full of her smell again.
I tiptoed across the hall to the closet, trying not to listen to Daddy lecture Kiran or Mom’s muffled voice. I pulled out the step stool so I could reach the top shelf and grab the box, and held the lid closed with my thumbs. The rumble of Daddy’s voice drifted up the steps as I slipped back into my room and closed my door behind me.
I inhaled slowly once I took the lid off the box. Dadima’s scent lingered faintly and sent a surge of memories through me.
The smoky, woodsy smell of chapatis cooking.
Cardamom, fresh and minty on her breath.
The yellowed skin of her thumb and pointer finger from turmeric.
The soft plinks of her bangles as she moved around the house.
I grabbed the prayer book and quickly pushed the lid back onto the box before any more of her smell could escape. The prayer book was only a little bigger than my hand. It was a hardcover, but it felt comfortable clutched between my fingers. Dadima’s bookmark was still stuck randomly in the book. I let the book fall open to the page and started to read the English translation on the right side.
This precious human life is a reward for my past actions, but without wisdom, it is wasted. Tell me, without worship of the Lord, of what use are mansions and thrones like those of King Indra?
I had no idea who King Indra was, and mansions didn’t sound so bad to me, but I got the impression that I shouldn’t want them.
The next part read:
The Naam lives within the minds of those who worship the Lord. Those who are separated from the Naam shall never find peace. Many come and go; they die, and die again, and are reincarnated. Without understanding, they are useless and wander.
I let those words tumble inside my head like clothes in a dryer. They mixed together into nonsense, but at times fell on top of each other in a way that made me wonder if somehow I had something to do with this. If “this precious human life is a reward for my past actions” was true, then maybe my past actions weren’t very good. Maybe they were really horrible. Maybe I had been a hot-water girl in my past life! What if I deserved this mustache because I’d been mean in my past?
Well, I guess I was getting what was coming around. It was a karma curse. Karma’s karma curse.
Those who are separated from the Naam shall never find peace. I needed to be with the Naam, with God. I read through more of Dadima’s prayer book in Punjabi, not because the Punjabi was easier to understand than the English but because it was nice to let the words work parts of my mouth the way my mouth works when I’m chewing gum, ready to blow a bubble. Reading in Punjabi was easy. Understanding it was the hard part. The sections that were too confusing, I cheated and read the English translation.
After just reciting a few prayers from the book, I already felt closer to the Naam. If I did suffer from a karma curse, the first thing I needed to do was earn some major karma points.
I turned the page to a list of vices to avoid. As I read through them, I started to think of all the ways I wasn’t re
ally a very good person.
For example, Covetousness and Greed. I’d wanted Sara as my BFF and no one else, and I hated that she wanted other people as her BFF. I’d been a pretty selfish friend, and now I’d lost Sara.
Attachment to Things of This World was the next vice. I didn’t really think I was attached to much, but it did bother me that the car door squeaked and that our house only had one bathroom upstairs for us all to use in the morning.
I’d thought Pride was only a problem for someone like Lacy, but I had cared when everyone had laughed at ’Stache Attack and at my lunch.
The last vice was Anger. I imagined the day at the pool when Lacy had pointed out my mustache and Derek and Tom had invented ’Stache Attack, and then today when I had fought with Sara after lunch. A small twinge of heat stirred in my chest.
There wasn’t a single vice I could say I didn’t have. No wonder I had a mustache!
There weren’t any rules that I could find for earning karma points, so I made up my own. In my head it made sense. I’d get points for not getting angry or prideful or having any of the vices. But if I did have these things, I’d lose points.
I had no idea how many points I’d need to clean up my karma and break this curse. Once I could get to the place where I didn’t need to think so much about karma, maybe my mustache would start to disappear and my family could go back to normal. No more fighting, no more tension.
Trying to get myself to not be angry or prideful or jealous might take a while, but I had an idea for the school suggestion box that just might help.
Chapter Seventeen
Before breakfast the next morning I packed my backpack and put my suggestion idea between the pages of my social studies book.
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