American as Paneer Pie

by Supriya Kelkar

  “But we never even used to lock this door.”

  “Your father never even used to lock this door. I’ve been telling him for years it’s not safe.”

  Aai led me on a tour of the other sensors she had installed, on our front door and sliding door, as if she were showing off some high-tech bank security system in the movies. I knew the security system was supposed to make us feel safe. But it just made me worry more, and made me wish we could find out who wrote those awful words on our garage so Aai would go from being super weird about stuff to just regular weird.

  That nervous feeling was bugging me so much later the next evening at swimming, my hands were shaking in the pool, and not just from the cold water. I stared at Aai in the stands, anxiously checking her phone for security system alerts or a message from Mama or Mami as she tapped her feet over and over again. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Despite the sounds of kids splashing and talking to each other, every little sound Aai made seemed to boom in the room.

  “You have to focus so we don’t lose the next meet, Lekha,” said Aidy from the next lane, snapping her black swimming cap around the sides of her head. Harper and Kendall, stretching poolside, looked at each other. I hadn’t paid much attention to my teammates in PE. We were grouped separately for wretched volleyball, and I was too busy trying not to think about our garage door. But the looks being exchanged were unmistakable. They must have been talking about me since we lost the meet before break.

  But what were they saying? We lost because I wasn’t focused? I thought it was because I didn’t shave. Isn’t that what Aidy told me? That I was in America now and people in this country shaved when they were my age?

  “Time me, Harper,” Aidy said as she climbed out of the pool and took her position on the starting block.

  Harper grabbed her cell phone from the bench and hit the stopwatch.

  Aidy was off. But instead of the fly, she did the freestyle.

  That was my stroke. She was trying to prove she was faster than me. Better than me. She was trying to show me how things should be done around here. I wanted to speak up. I wanted to tell her she was being mean. That this wasn’t how teammates should treat each other. That we definitely didn’t lose the meet just because I didn’t shave. But I just sat there, quiet. Like a good School Lekha. Thinking a million things in my head but never having the courage to let them escape my lips.

  As Aidy zoomed down her lane, I watched her black swim cap get smaller. I couldn’t help but think of the hateful black letters. And then I suddenly felt cold. Did Aidy do it? Was she so mad at me for us losing the meet that she got dropped off near my house and spray-painted those ugly words on my garage?

  Aidy tapped the wall next to me. “Well?”

  “Thirty-three seconds,” said Harper.

  She was a couple of seconds off my best time. And that was with her aerodynamic shaved legs.

  “Cool,” said Aidy. “I’m still faster at fly. I was just checking to make sure.”

  Coach Turner neared us. “Let’s go, girls. Break’s over. I want you doing your stroke until you match your best times.”

  Aidy nodded, a fire in her eyes. “We’ve got less than two months until conference finals. We can do this.” She turned to me. “You’re our anchor. You have to do this.”

  I wordlessly snapped my goggles back on. Aidy didn’t write on our garage. All she cared about was winning. And they couldn’t win without me. I was the fastest anchor on the team.

  But if Aidy didn’t do it, who did? Who did that to my home, to the place where I was free to wear Indian clothes, and play Indian music, and eat Indian food without anyone belittling me with questions?

  I put my head underwater, trying to drown out the tap-tap-tap sounds from my mother. But I could still hear them. Like a trembling heartbeat. My heartbeat.

  Maybe Aai was right not to tell the police. To just be quiet about it all.

  Maybe Aai was right to be so scared.

  chapter THIRTY

  Even though I didn’t want to think about the garage graffiti anymore, I spent the weekend brainstorming lists of people who could have done it. One of Dad’s patients, Mr. Giordano, Mrs. Finch, a stranger. … I was not any closer to narrowing down my suspect list when Monday arrived. But Monday meant Avantika was coming back, and I was excited for the distraction from solving this mystery.

  I rushed into Mr. Crowe’s class. Avantika and Noah were already there, looking at pictures of India on Avantika’s phone. I butted in the middle and gave Avantika a huge hug.

  “How was India?”

  She grinned. “It was great. And hot. Way hotter than December should be. My mom said I got too dark there from all that sun.”

  I shook my head as Noah swiped through the pictures, not wanting to have to get involved in a skin-color conversation. “She’s wrong to make you, or anyone, feel bad about the color of your skin,” I said.

  “Anyway, what did I miss?” Avantika asked, taking her seat as Mr. Crowe entered the room with a stack of papers. Apparently, she was as good a subject changer as I was when it came to talking about skin color.

  Noah opened his mouth to answer, but I quickly spoke over him. “Nothing interesting.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Mr. Crowe, “hot off the presses, this month’s school paper! And congrats to Noah for getting a cover!”

  I turned to Noah. “I knew your op-ed would get the cover!”

  Noah shook his head. “It didn’t. It’s on the back page, after the band news.” He flicked his pencil against his desk a few times as Mr. Crowe started passing the paper out. “It’s something else.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Noah when Mr. Crowe dropped the paper on my desk.

  “Really powerful stuff there, Mr. Wade,” he said as he headed back to his desk. “Flip them over and start reading. You’ve got ten minutes before we talk book reports.”

  I flipped my paper over, feeling Noah’s eyes on me. And then my stomach dropped. There, on the cover of the paper, was a picture of my garage door and the words “GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY” for all the world to see.

  chapter THIRTY-ONE

  How could you do that?” I said as softly and calmly as I could to Noah as we walked out of English. My mouth was dry and my hands were cold. I felt like I was going to hurl every time I thought about how Noah had described to the entire school how someone had come to our house, on our property in the dark, and vandalized our door. It made me think about those words I wanted to forget. It made me feel different and all alone, like a hundred-times-worse version of School Lekha.

  “People need to know that hate exists in our town,” said Noah as Emma walked by, trying to be polite and not stare at us.

  “I didn’t want anyone to know about it. My mom didn’t want anyone to know!” I paused, thinking of how angry Aai would get if she knew the whole town knew what had tainted our house. Or how scared she would be. Would I never be allowed at another sleepover again thanks to Noah? Thanks to the one person on this planet who knew Home Lekha and School Lekha? Who knew every part of me and knew that I didn’t want this to be public? And what if whoever did it saw the article and came back to our house to do more stuff to us? Worse stuff? Like what happened to Joginder Uncle and Ajay Mama? My throat felt like it was getting constricted as Noah’s voice grew.

  “I didn’t say who it happened to, and the picture is a close-up of the garage. It’s unrecognizable.”

  Avantika looked at the paper, confused. “Wait. This story is about you? This happened on our street?”

  Harper glanced over at me as she passed us, eyebrows furrowed like she was solving a puzzle, as she kept looking between the paper in her hand and me.

  “Shh,” I hissed, hoping Harper wouldn’t figure out the garage was my garage. “Yeah. It happened on our street. To my house. Do you have any clue how humiliating that is, Noah? I don’t want everyone here talking about me.”

  “But I kept it anonymous!”

  “There are like five kids
in this whole school who aren’t white! Everyone knows it’s about me,” I snapped as we neared Noah’s history classroom.

  “Someone had to do something. You weren’t speaking up. It’s like what I told you over break. Sometimes the person who is safe in the situation has to speak up. It’s called being an ally—”

  “I don’t want you to speak up for me! You’ve never done it before. I’m pretty sure you just look down when Liam says stuff to me, so don’t act like you were doing this because you always speak out against what’s wrong. Or because I needed your help. Or because it wasn’t safe for me, so you decided to do it for me. You just did this to get your front-page story! Well, congrats. You got it. So I hope you’re happy now. Go shove it in your frame for everyone to see.”

  A few kids reading their papers by a KINDNESS IS KOOL sign looked at me as I stormed away from Noah’s class, Avantika trying to keep up.

  “He was only trying to help, Lekha. Be mad at whoever wrote that on your garage.”

  A group of eighth graders passed, looking me up and down. More questions. They were wondering if the front-page story was about me. I just knew it. I couldn’t take any more questioning looks, or quizzical faces, or inquiring minds. I didn’t owe anyone any answers. I was drained from having to answer for who I was. I was tired of always being different. Of being less than. And who was Avantika to tell me who I should be mad at? She had no idea what it was like to grow up looking different from everyone. She grew up in a country full of Indians who spoke her language and ate her food and danced her dances and knew her movie stars. That’s why she could stand up for herself that first day in class, and that’s why she could stand up for me in the cafeteria. She could do it because she had no clue what it was like to be the kid everyone has questions about. I turned to her, my heart thumping in my chest as I thought about how unfair it all was.

  “I’m not mad. For all we know, they meant to do it to your house.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” I said, louder than I had ever spoken in these halls before. “Like an Anju-Manju situation. I’m American. So what country could I possibly go back to? You’re the one with the accent,” I said, making sure the eighth graders heard, making sure they’d finally ask questions about someone else for once.

  Avantika’s eyes started to get shiny with tears, and I immediately regretted my words. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. All this bad stuff has been happening, with my family and my team, and I didn’t get to talk to you properly that morning you left after all that drama with the sleepover and swimming and shaving, and there’s so much I have to tell you and—”

  “We didn’t have a sleepover when you last saw me.”

  “Yeah, no.” My palms started to sweat at my slipup. “It was so long ago,” I fumbled, trying to cover. “I meant … I meant, when I was with my team.”

  “Your team. … That’s who was laughing when you canceled on me.”

  I felt my stomach drop. And the flushed look on Avantika’s face was leaving me with a sickening feeling in my gut.

  “That’s where you were coming back from that morning. You had a sleepover with them instead of me.” Avantika blinked away her tears. “I guess you got over that exhaustion pretty quickly.”

  I shook my head, searching for the right words to make this better. “I’m sorry.”

  Avantika shrugged. “I get it. They don’t have accents to embarrass you. They were laughing at me, right? You all were?”

  My ears felt like they were scorching hot as everyone in the hall stared our way. Was she really making this about her after everything I had been through? My uncle got attacked. My house was defaced. My team thought I was some loser who wasn’t old enough or American enough to shave. I was the one getting all the looks in school, thanks to Noah.

  “Maybe this really was meant for me,” Avantika added, tossing the paper in the recycling bin nearby.

  I squeezed the straps of my backpack tightly and felt my voice rise up my throat like venom. “Yeah. Maybe it really was.” With the eyes of the whole school on me, I turned down the hall for science, leaving my friends far behind.

  chapter THIRTY-TWO

  I spent the rest of the week avoiding Avantika and Noah at school. I found a spot on the far side of the cafeteria and would eat my meal quickly, and then stare at my homework in order to not make eye contact with my former friends or the people who were watching me sit by myself like a loser.

  On the weekend Deepika Auntie came over with a shopping bag from India, made from folded newspapers. Avantika was not with her.

  Auntie and Aai hugged, and Deepika Auntie began pulling stuff out of the bag, covering our kitchen table. She had brought us gulachi poli, stuffed with sweet jaggery and cardamom. She had packets of homemade aavalyachi supari, shredded gooseberry that had been salted and dried, a new Kalnirnay—the vertical calendar Aai kept in her room, and a black and gold shawl for Aai.

  “You brought us so much!” exclaimed Aai.

  “There’s one more thing for Lekha in here,” Auntie said, taking out a little orange plastic bag with handles. “You’ve been so good to us. Making us feel so safe in this new place.”

  A tear fell from Aai’s face onto the newspaper crossword puzzle before her. “I don’t know that we should feel safe here.”

  Deepika Auntie rushed to Aai’s side. She looked at me and subtly pumped her palm at me with an “I’ve got this” gesture.

  “I’ll go to my room.”

  Auntie nodded. “Avantika and Noah are playing in the snow if you’re interested in joining them.”

  I smiled respectfully and headed outside, feeling awful as I heard Aai sob into Deepika Auntie’s shoulder as she told her what had happened while they were in India.

  I stepped onto the porch, hugging my shoulders even though the cold hadn’t hit me yet. I wasn’t going to the backyard, though. I was going to get the mail. I walked down the driveway, making sure not to look back at that blank canvas of a garage door that made me feel ashamed and angry all at once. Making sure not to crane my neck to get a peek at my former friends in Noah’s backyard.

  I grabbed a handful of mail from the mailbox, squeaking its door shut. Avantika and Noah were being awfully quiet for people having fun outside. I hope they aren’t having any fun without me, I thought as I rushed back inside.

  I normally would have dropped the mail off in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to have to explain to Auntie why I wasn’t playing with Avantika outside. So I headed right up to my room. I could still hear Aai talking about Ajay Mama, Joginder Uncle, and the garage through the vent by my window. I neared it, feeling the warmth on my toes.

  A bright sunbeam was on my yellow desk. I looked at the Post-it notes of assignments on the desk calendar and pulled my curtain back, filling the room with more light, shining on all my posters of Aamir Khan and the paintings of Ganpati and Lakshmi on my walls. It was happy and cheerful up here, totally the opposite of what I was feeling. And then I heard laughter. Squealing, joyful laughter.

  They were having fun.

  I glanced out the window. My backyard was a blank sheet of snow with no sight of the faint rabbit tracks that were often there in the morning. But there was a slew of footprints on the border of our yard and Noah’s. I craned my neck to see an entire snowman family. Noah and Avantika, wearing a newly crocheted orange fox hat, were in the midst of a full-blown snowball fight after building the snow people.

  I slid the curtains shut, remembering how Aai used to say when I played with Noah in the backyard and she was out on a walk, my laughter was so loud, she could hear it drifting down the street.

  Through the vent, I could hear echoes of Deepika Auntie talking about her cousin in Ohio who was told by a stranger at a grocery store to please go back to India after he got his degree because her daughter was having a hard time finding a job and didn’t need more competition from foreigners. Then the conversation went back to
the garage door scrawl Avantika had probably already told Auntie all about.

  I had read enough about it in the paper, thanks to my traitor neighbor. I didn’t need to hear any more, so I blew the dust off Dad’s old CD player on my dresser and played a scratched-up CD from the black-and-white days of Hindi movies. The songs were slow and sad, a perfect way to cover up what Aai and Auntie were talking about downstairs.

  I plopped down at my desk and turned its little lamp on. Aai had pinned my new schedule to the bulletin board above it. It had just come this week, and I couldn’t wait for all new classes to start on Monday, for a chance to see Noah and Avantika even less. Or even more. We weren’t talking when the schedule came, so I had no idea if we would have classes together. I reminded myself I didn’t miss them. That I was mad at them, and glanced at the pink Post-it stuck to my calendar with “op-ed” circled on it.

  I looked at all the unanswered questions below. The new semester meant I had only a few more weeks to answer them and turn my op-ed in on time. Like a good Desi kid.

  I sifted through the mail, wondering if Mr. Crowe would accept an op-ed about bad friends. I put all the medical conference flyers in one pile for Dad. I put the junk mail in a pile for recycling. I put the grocery flyers in a pile for Aai, although I wasn’t sure she needed them anymore with her new app. And I went to put this month’s copy of the International Indian News at the top of Dad’s pile, when I felt my insides fold over.

  There, on the front page of the Indian American newspaper, was a cell phone image of Joginder Uncle in a hospital bed, his face swollen and blue. Next to it was a picture of Ajay Mama’s face after the attack. It was the image my parents didn’t want me to see.

  I stared at Ajay Mama’s familiar face in the picture. Only it wasn’t his familiar face. His eye was bandaged up and he had big black bruises all around the socket. The white of the other eye was now all splotches of red from the burst blood vessels. And there was no sign of his beaming smile from the old picture in Aai’s room.