Although the setup had been engineered, the actual decision to stay in the States to attend school had not, and it was the first time I was given primary responsibility for a major decision about my life. Right before my mother left to head back to India, she said, “Now that you’re going to live away from me, remember what we discussed about the pros and cons. Remember that this was your decision. And if you change your mind, Dad and I will always be there to come back home to. You can call us for anything. And whatever happens, try your hardest so that you’ll always know you gave it your best shot.”
Short version: Own your choices. Or, as my mother must have told me hundreds of times growing up, “have courage of conviction.”
* * *
IOWA—DEEP IN THE American Midwest and known to be conservative both politically and socially—was incredibly welcoming and accepting for a girl like me: immigrant, brown, different. Different hair, different skin, different accent, different clothes, different food—the ways I was different seemed endless. I was acutely aware of my status as Other. But it wasn’t so much that other students considered me Other. It was that I did; I had never been more aware of my ethnicity than when I left my own country and moved to America. The most obvious way I was Other was my skin, and even in India there were issues having to do with skin color. Girls like me, who were darker, were often referred to pejoratively as “dusky.” But I wasn’t different at home. Here, I was, even though there was no unkindness associated with that status—yet.
I acclimated to John F. Kennedy High School with a minimum of difficulty and spent the eighth grade falling in love with hot dogs, Hot Pockets, and a hot boy named Seth (though I’m sure he and his green hair didn’t know that I existed). Part of what may have made it relatively easy to acclimate was that I didn’t have to worry about keeping up academically. Whereas the American school year generally goes from August or September to May or June, the Indian school year generally goes from April to March, with summer and winter breaks. I had entered eighth grade back in Bareilly earlier that spring, and I would now be reentering it in Cedar Rapids. The more important reason, though, is that when I was in school in the U.S. in the nineties, many Indian schools were far more rigorous than their American counterparts (or at least that was my impression). On day one of Advanced Math class in Cedar Rapids, for example, I discovered we were to be studying quadratic equations—which was going to make the class awfully easy for me, since I’d learned them the year before. When I was handed a scientific calculator for an exam in that class, I didn’t understand what I was being tested for if I could use a calculator. I was a good student in India, but I was never one of the best in my class. Here I earned that distinction quickly.
Unlike math and other subjects that I was comparatively advanced in, the social aspects of this huge new school were harder for me. One of the most difficult adjustments I had to make, believe it or not, was figuring out the food that was being served in the big, noisy cafeteria. At my previous school I’d always brought my lunch from home, as is the norm in India. Knowing that I had been sheltered and protected at home, as most middle-class Indian children are, Kiran Masi wanted me to learn the independence that kids in the United States have. So, like many parents in America, she gave us money to buy our lunches at school. For the first few days, I simply watched what the other kids did—how they each got a tray, went through the line, pointed at what they wanted, and took their food to a table to sit with friends. Negotiating the lunch lines and trying to quickly figure out the unrecognizable foods that were being offered by the cafeteria staff was overwhelming at a time when looking cool and unfazed was very important to my teenage self. Afraid of looking stupid, or worse, of calling further attention to the fact that I was an outsider, I decided I’d just buy chips from the vending machine and eat them in the girls’ bathroom. After about a week, I got the courage to venture back into the cafeteria. I’d made one friend by then, who, like me, existed without status—not popular, not invisible—so I went through the line, got food on my tray, and sat down at a table with her and a few other kids. So far, so good. As I was finishing my meal, I started to eat what I’d thought was my dessert—a white mound of vanilla ice cream that, oddly, hadn’t started to melt. I gagged when what I put into my mouth was not cold, sweet, and delicious, but warm and gloppy. Mashed potatoes, I was told as I choked down the first bite. Moments later, when the creamy, buttery mouthful actually registered on my taste buds, mashed potatoes had a new fan. From then on, they were on my plate every time they were offered. Still are.
Food confusion was a frequent occurrence at the time, whether it was because something new looked like something familiar or because the name made no sense to me. (Imagine my bewilderment when it came time to try buffalo wings.) There were other things to get used to, too. When I was living with my parents, I’d been driven to school for the most part. It would have been hard for Kiran Masi to drive me; she had a job and three children to look after and mornings were busy. While the school district provided bussing to Priyam’s school, my new school was within a mile of our house and so bussing wasn’t available. Still, it was too far to walk. Masi thought it would be smart for me to be able to handle myself on public transportation here, so now I was taking a city bus the short distance to the school. Every morning, I was given $2.00—50 cents for the bus and $1.50 for lunch. On the first day of school, Masi rode with me on the bus.
“This is how you put in the coins, and this is how you find a seat. When you sit down, don’t engage, just keep your head down. And then you get off when you arrive at school.”
Chores were another big change for me. “This is America,” Kiran Masi said. “You will make your own bed. You will pick up after yourself. You will help to do laundry. We cannot afford to pay people to do these things for us here.”
My mother had always tried to impress upon me the importance of tidying up after myself in spite of us having help a large part of my life. I’d belligerently ignored her because I knew there was someone to do it for me if I didn’t. Here that wasn’t an option, and I have Kiran Masi to thank for keeping after me until I finally learned how to do the chores of everyday life, and then turned those life skills into habits.
* * *
I HAD AN amazing school year at John F. Kennedy High School. It wasn’t Beverly Hills, 90210 or Saved by the Bell—my only previous references to what high school in America was like—but sometimes it felt close. I loved the hubbub in the halls between classes, the cool fashions, and the general feeling of freedom. And I adored participating in the school choir. The director, a soft-spoken, encouraging, and at the same time energetic man named Storm Ziegler—who as of the writing of this book is still the director of choral activities at the school—nominated me as one of two singers to represent our school in the state Opus Honor Choir festival in Des Moines. It was indeed an honor, and a treat, and I practiced so diligently that I think my family knew the alto part of Monteverdi’s “Cantate Domino” as well as I did. Mr. Ziegler also introduced me to the concept of musical theater, something I’d never heard of before. I knew music, and I knew theater, but I’d never seen them combined. I auditioned for a role in a nearby production of Fiddler on the Roof, and when I didn’t get the part, Mr. Ziegler knew just what to say.
“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t get the part this time, Priyanka. You’re good at this. We’ll try for a part in a show again next year, and you’ll get it next year.” His faith in me caused me to realize that one failure doesn’t mean failure. It means you didn’t get the part this time, but you can prepare hard for your next opportunity and maybe you’ll get that one. Or the one after. All these years later, I’m happy to know that Mr. Ziegler is still offering musical students at John F. Kennedy High School the same kind of encouragement and wise counsel that he offered to me.
The year I spent in Iowa gave me my first experience of a whole winter living with snow. Until then,
snow meant throwing snowballs at my dad when we vacationed in Kashmir. Snow for months on end in Iowa was not nearly as glamorous. It meant waking up at 5 a.m. to help Masi shovel the driveway so she could back the car out and get us to our bus stops in time to catch the bus for school. #GetsOldFast.
At some point during the year, Amitabh Mausa had found a new job in Lincoln, Nebraska, more than three hundred miles to the west. He’d return to Cedar Rapids on weekends, but during the week it was Masi and the three of us girls. Then, in the summer of 1996, Kiran Masi changed jobs. Her new one was in Indianapolis, Indiana, almost four hundred miles to the east. It was decided that she would take a few months to find the right apartment, pack up, and move. In order to not uproot us so quickly after the start of the school year, Priyam, Pooja, and I were sent to New York City to live with my mother’s brother and his family while Masi settled into the new apartment and her new job. This was not just an example of the commitment to extended family that is seen in most Indian families; it was part of the pattern in our specific family encouraged by Nani, who was adamant about her daughters having every possible opportunity to further themselves in their careers. “If you need time to focus on your studies or establish yourself in a new job, take that time,” she impressed upon them. “The family will always tend to your children.” And the family always had. It’s part of the reason I was in America in the first place.
My cousins and I arrived in time to start the school year in New York, joining Vimal Mamu, Vimla Mami, and their children, Divya and Rohan, who had just moved from New Delhi to Flushing, Queens. Though taking us in meant there would now be five kids and two adults sharing their one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, they welcomed us with big smiles and open arms.
It turned out to be a great move. Queens, the largest borough of New York City and the second most densely populated, is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world, with almost every country and language represented on its streets and in its shops and restaurants. Robert F. Kennedy Community High School, where I spent much of ninth grade, was completely multilingual and multicultural. Everyone in Flushing was from somewhere else, so blending into the crowd was effortless. Because of that, I felt a sense of ease, of belonging, that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing so much.
Vanessa Smarth, born in Haiti and raised in New York, quickly became my best friend, and we’re still in touch. She taught me all sorts of things about New York, and style, including how to do my hair in tiny braids, a project she enthusiastically embarked on one day after school. She’d never tried braiding hair as thick as mine, though, so it took her far longer than she’d imagined. After two hours-long sessions of watching the painfully slow progress, my clever cousin Divya rolled her eyes and said, “Just make the braids thicker. It will go quicker.” So that’s what we did. I ended up with a headful of braids that were a mix of super-skinny and thick, but it was the first time I’d ever had braids and I loved it.
And I loved New York. The music, the fashion, the massive laundromats with so many machines, the pizzerias on every corner. I’d never seen so many washing machines in one place and I’d never seen pizzas so big! Everything was new. Everything was exciting. New York was almost poetic in its frenzy—almost like a global India. I could meet people from China, Australia, Guatemala, Haiti, France, Russia, Greece, the Philippines, and more in this one borough. All I had to do was walk out the front door of my apartment building and the world was there to greet me. Queens was where I discovered hip-hop. Not only did I love Tupac and Biggie but also the fashion that accompanied the music—hoop earrings and puffer jackets, Rollerblades. It was in Queens that I realized I could be cool if I chose to be. I could be cute if I chose to be. I could be whatever I wanted to be. What a sense of power for a fourteen-year-old girl.
New York was also bursting with culture, history, and fun things to do, and Mamu and Mami wanted to make sure we took full advantage of those offerings. They took us all over the city, to places like the Statue of Liberty, the New York Hall of Science, and the Children’s Museum. One day Mamu decided to take Divya, Priyam, Rohan, and me to visit the world-famous Museum of Modern Art, or the MoMA as it’s known to New Yorkers. Living in Queens as we did, we had to take a bus and two subways to reach the museum, which is located in midtown Manhattan. I’m sure we viewed all sorts of great works of modern and contemporary art that day, but I only remember one of them: The Starry Night, by Vincent van Gogh. I must have been utterly fascinated by the deep swirls of color and texture, because apparently I stepped right up to this masterpiece of Impressionism—and touched it. A nearby security guard swooped in and immediately escorted me, my cousins, and my uncle down the escalator, into the huge lobby, and out of the building. With all the people staring at us, poor Divya was super-embarrassed on that long escalator ride down to the first floor, and I was mortified that I was the reason all of us had gotten kicked out. Somewhere inside, though, I was also silently exhilarated. I’d touched The Starry Night! What a story to be able to tell someday!
Queens shaped my understanding of America. I’d arrived in Cedar Rapids thinking that all Americans looked like the polished, perfect characters on television and in the movies, and that all Americans—or almost all of them—were one skin tone: white. Now I was coming to understand that America doesn’t look like any one person, and it definitely doesn’t look like any one character in a made-up story on TV. New York taught me that you don’t have to have the same hair, eyes, skin tone, or language to be an American. It taught me that unless you’re one of the Native peoples, everyone in this country has come from someplace else, and together, all of those people from someplace else have built this country.
* * *
NEXT STOP: Indianapolis, Indiana.
Having moved around so much already, it didn’t seem like a big deal when Priyam, Pooja, and I packed up to rejoin Kiran Masi in March of my ninth-grade year. Like Iowa, Indiana is in the Midwest and is socially and politically conservative. In other words, it’s a world away from diverse, liberal New York. Politics and diversity were the last things on my mind there, though, because Indianapolis is where I met my first boyfriend. His name was Bob (not really; I’m protecting his privacy here) and we both attended North Central High School, where he was in tenth grade. Dating him was definitely a hard flex and I fell for him in a big way. The guy played varsity football, had a really high GPA, and was everything high school dreams were made of.
Our great romance consisted mainly of Bob standing outside the door of whatever classroom I was in, out of the teacher’s view but in mine. He’d wave at me and make funny faces as we both waited for the class to be over. Then he’d walk me to my next class, completely willing, it seemed, to be tardy on my behalf. We got to the point where we’d even hold hands in the hallway. He wrote me notes in his careful, beautiful handwriting. One day he took off the gold chain around his neck and put it around mine. OMG, I thought. We’re getting married!
The whole romance took place inside the school, because Kiran Masi was not only a brilliant engineer, she was also a brilliant sleuth. She was somehow always magically aware of everything her kids and I were doing, making sure we weren’t getting ourselves into any trouble or breaking any of her strictly enforced rules. One of those rules was that dating was absolutely not allowed. The same rule applied to my cousins, but since I was the oldest, fourteen to Priyam’s eleven (and Pooja’s four), it didn’t apply to them yet. It was all on me.
For a while, I tried to outsmart Agent Kiran. In order to talk to Bob on the phone, I used subterfuge techniques, ones that would make my future Quantico character, Alex Parrish, proud: Bob would get his sister to call my house so that Masi would give the phone to me, thinking the girl on the phone was my friend. (Such tactics were possible in the late nineties, before cellphones.) Then his sister would hand the phone to Bob. But Masi was too smart for such tricks. I don’t know what made her suspicious, but one evenin
g she picked up the other landline extension—I could hear her lift the receiver even though she tried to be super-stealth when she did it—and that was the end of our phone calls.
I wasn’t giving up that easily, though. In order to spend more time with Bob, I came up with a plan to enroll in summer school classes.
“I need more credits,” I told my aunt. Which was actually the truth. Sex Education was a requirement to graduate, but because of all the moving and changing of schools I’d done, I still hadn’t gotten around to taking it. She agreed, so, ironically, Sex Ed was the class I attended in the mornings and after which my boyfriend picked me up. Then he’d drive me to the bus stop near our apartment, where I’d pretend to have exited the bus. Then I’d walk home.
Again, Agent Kiran realized something was up. One morning she waited in the school parking lot until my class was over, and then she followed Bob’s car from the school. When I got out at the bus stop and saw her pull in behind Bob, it was clear that the jig was up. Again.
We made yet another plan: I would take the bus home, and Bob would come to the house while my aunt was still at work.
One day Bob and I were sitting on the couch watching television, innocently holding hands and switching channels back and forth between BET and MTV because they had the coolest music. While Boyz II Men was playing “I’ll Make Love to You,” Bob inched toward me. I turned to look at him, wondering if it would be that moment—my first kiss—when suddenly, outside the window on the sidewalk below, I saw my aunt making her way up the stairs. She was glancing around furtively as if she didn’t want to be seen.
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