When I get to school on Monday morning, Aicha is sitting cross-legged on top of a desk right in the middle of the front row, screaming a Green Day song at the top of her lungs.
“I walk this lonely road, the only one that I have ever known…”
It’s the first day of class eight, one of those typical Indian April mornings, all bright sunshine and dense humidity. The sweat trickles down my forehead and splashes on my white uniform. I’m still half-asleep, still in after-exam vacation mode. The after-exam holidays are always the best. There’s nothing to study, nothing to worry about, and always some exciting trip to make. This year it was Thailand. Three weeks of hot showers at five-star hotels, buying new clothes at cheap outlets in Bangkok, swimming, snorkelling and skydiving in the gorgeous island of Pattaya. Bliss.
“Yo, dude, I saved you a seat,” Aicha calls over. I glance at the sea green Von Dutch backpack lying across the dark brown wooden chair behind the desk next to hers. Rachita was here in August 2002 is written on the desk in big block letters with whitener. 2002. Three years ago. The girl is an eleventh grader now. Or maybe she’s dead. Or has left town. Just what I want to do. Not die, exactly – though sometimes even that is a good idea – but leave town.
I love the front row. Teachers never pick on you in the front row. And even if they do, you’re always close enough to the blackboard to have a general idea of what’s going on.
“Hel-lo.” Aicha snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Do you want to sit somewhere else or what?”
Aicha Menon is my best friend. She’s also the coolest (nuttiest???) person I’ve ever had the fortune (misfortune???) to meet. She’s confident, hardworking, responsible, creative, and honest, and she keeps me in constant fits of laughter with her offkey sense of humour. And she’s a nice, decent person. Fill in a completely committed marriage to music and some amount of brains and hey, what else could I ask for?
“Nah, I’m fine here,” I say, shooting her a grin and dumping my own red bag where hers had been a second ago. Aicha grins back. Her eyes are heavily circled with leftover mascara from last night and her waist-length black hair is plaited into a long black braid spilling halfway down her back. My school, River Valley, has a lot of rules about appearance. In addition to the spotless (read : transparent) hideous white frock, black ballerina shoes, and white ankle-length socks that you have to wear everyday, there are a number of other stupid rules, such as suspension if you have a speck of nailpolish on your nails and/or streaks in your hair and/or the slightest amount of makeup on your face and/or coloured earrings in your ears. You can also get suspended if you leave hair below shoulder-length unplaited or nails not totally short. Don’t ask me why. I don’t go around making stupid rules for people.
River Valley is the best school in the country. In other words, it’s an all-exclusive all-girls school where totally stuck-up bitches come to waste tons of hard-earned money on expensive tuition and to suck up to the partial, corrupted teachers. It’s a hard world. When you get a reputation, you stick to it, and you can’t break it no matter what.
Thing I hate about my life Number 1.
I’m a pretty normal teenage girl. I like things you probably like : music, movies, hot guys, the Internet, friends, new clothes, junk jewellery, hanging out, annoying my parents. I dislike things you probably dislike : overprotective parents, too many rules, tomatoes, skanky guys, enemies, studying, waking up early. So guess what makes me just the slightest bit different? Wait, I’ll tell you : my family. The Great Indian Brady Bunch.
There’s my Dad, whose wife bore him three kids and then ran away with the holy people to go and sing hindi hymns on top of Mount Everest. And then there’s my mom, who was a crazy chick with two children and a grumpy husband whom she’d arrange-married like most conventional Indian women when she met (and fell for) my Dad. My three half-brothers on my Dad’s side were in the middle of a screaming row with my two half-sisters on my Mom’s side when I plopped out of my mom’s belly and stopped the fight.
Well, okay, it didn’t exactly happen like that. My mom was nine months pregnant first, and she went into labour, and blah blah…but you know what I mean.
My youngest half-brother is twelve years older than I am.
They all live in America.
I had to end up on the other side of the universe, in a world of dirty roads and HIV and foul hot weather and beggars and poverty and a complete absence of Burger King. I had to end up in a place where they still kill off female kids in remote villages. I had to end up in an overpopulated country where they work you way too hard and never let you enjoy life. I had to end up in INDIA.
Thing I hate about my life Number 2.