*
I am fascinated by the girls. Girls with hair teased into stiff spiders crawling high off their foreheads, girls with eyes magnificently mascaraed and deeply shadowed. Walking into any girls’ bathroom is to enter a hissing, stinging cloud of Aqua Net. There are girls standing with their heads between their legs shaking out their layered manes into a storm of spray. There are girls leaning into the mirror to paint their eyes, their lips. Their clothes, their hair—it is all dazzling. How do they go through this ritual of choice every single morning? If I had more than a few clothes, choice would paralyze me.
But I am learning that the rules are different here. These girls don’t put their arms around each other as we did at home. Boys do not hold hands. Friendship is prescribed by the rules of separation and space between people’s bodies. Instead, it is girls and boys who do these things together, who walk around in couples, their arms linked, or even kiss against the wall of lockers. The first time I see a kissing couple, I look away, sure that a teacher will burst out and slap the two, haul them by their napes to the principal’s office, where their parents will be called, thereby bringing shame upon their families. When none of this happens, when nobody around me even notices, I see that I have indeed come into a brand-new place. Then I stare, mesmerized by the ease of it, the way bodies fit together so fluidly. I can’t imagine that ease. It is hard enough to get used to the presence of boys. I have never before been around them in this casual, easy way. In class, it is hard to concentrate. There are so many of them everywhere. I sit lower in my seat, hoping no one will notice my accent, my clothes, my overwhelming difference.
The presence of boys also means other things. The hair on my legs is suddenly shameful, suddenly public, when before I had barely noticed it. Now there are the long fair hairless legs of the white girls gleaming below their cheerleader skirts to compare with my own limbs. I had been fair before; at home, the girls had called me sudhi, white girl. How ridiculous that name is now, in comparison with these actual white girls. Now I am clearly, irretrievably dark, and beyond that, hairy!
*
In our room Dharshi yells, “What about this for you? It’s too big for me. You want it?” She throws a denim miniskirt at my head. I hold it up to myself in the mirror, see that it would come to the middle of my thighs.
“No way! I’d feel like a gorilla.”
Her head pops out of the closet, eyebrows questioning. “Gorilla?”
I gesture at my legs, say, “Hair!”
She’s out now, gesturing at my pant leg. “Okay, let me see.”
I pull it up, displaying my legs.
She says, “Ah, I see,” and then, “So we’ll have to shave you.” She pushes me into our shared bathroom, says, “Get in the tub, we have to use these.” She is pulling out razors, shaving cream.
“What? No way! Amma will kill me.”
“Okay, so you want to be a gorilla? You want people to look at you in PE and laugh and point?” She fills the tub and gestures at me. “Take it off.” I pull her borrowed T-shirt over my head. Stand there in my bra and skirt. She flaps her hand at me. “All of it. I’ve seen everything already.”
*
I sit in the tub, hugging my knees in the warm water. She squats next to me.
She says, “Okay, soap up to the knees.” I do it, shyly.
“Is it going to hurt?”
“No, silly. Okay, like this. Drag it along the skin.” She leans over the edge of the tub, puts the razor against the edges of my soaped-up leg, starts pulling it along the skin in a long, smooth stroke.
Later she runs her palm along the skin of my leg, says, “Yes, nice. Very nice.”
And then, while she is scrutinizing my face, her brow wrinkles again.
“What?”
“Your eyebrows. We have to do something about them too.”
“Oh no, no way, Amma will notice in a second.”
“Really? Are you sure? We’ll do it very lightly, just a clear-up so you look a little less … Brooke Shields. She’ll never notice.”
I make a choked noise.
She says, “Really? Do you think she looks at you, really looks?”
I’m quiet. She sees more than I think she does. I sit on the bed and her fingers pull and stretch the skin above my eye.
I squirm. “Oh god, oh god, is it going to hurt?”
“Well, yeah, if you jump around like that, I’ll probably stab you in the eye.”
“Oh god.”
“Just settle down, okay?”
“Okay. Okay!”
I close my eyes and she goes to work. It is like being bitten by an insect several dozen times. I screech, “Argggghhhh!”