Me (in the monotone of a person delivering lines): It’s a small island twenty-two miles off the southern coast of India.
Person (relief dawning in his/her eyes—a familiar word; visions of samosas, chai, and women in bindis): Oh, so it’s part of India.
Me: No, no, it’s a separate island. It’s its own country.
Person: Oh.
Me: It’s a separate independent island nation. It has nothing to do with India.
Person: So is it Hindu or Muslim?
Me: Neither. It’s primarily Buddhist. But there are Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.
Person (eyes glazing over): So it’s not a part of India?
The social studies teacher says, “And as another marker of their primitive state, these people eat with their hands. They haven’t discovered cutlery yet.” She shows a slide of a family of Australian aborigines around a fire, the absence of forks and knives marking them as other, savage, frightening. I think of our dining room in Kandy, all of us gathered together. Sita bringing steaming dishes to the table, the luxury of my fingers moving through rice and curry. So this is what they think of us. Entire civilizations derided because of the way we choose to tackle our food. It feels unfair, but I’m careful after that. No outsider will ever see me use my hands. Always I will be proper and formal, employing my knife and fork.
*
After school, I let myself into the silent, empty apartment. Amma works at the travel agency from morning until well past nine. Uncle Sarath drops her home then, and exhausted, she falls into bed, sometimes forgetting to change her clothes. I’ve found her like that often, feet dangling off the side in her new sturdy flats. I kneel and ease her feet out of them, roll her over so I can cover her with the blanket.
Now I pull out the containers of food she has cooked on the weekend from the freezer, warm up the curries, and eat in front of my textbooks. The apartment has the quality of a place where no one had been for many hours. The sense of not being watched drops around me. It is lonely, but also safe. I can do anything I like, no one is watching me, there are no hidden eyes. A taste for solitude blooms.
In my bedroom, I am the queen ruling over her minute kingdom. This space is mine; no one can enter without my permission. When we left Dharshi’s, she had pulled her old Tiger Beats out of the closet and pushed them into my hands. Now I cut out one picture of Depeche Mode, put tape on the back, and place it carefully in the center of my wall. That night I hold my breath when Amma comes in, squints at these men in suits and manes of teased hair. “What is this?”
“Amma, it’s what girls do here. All my friends have them. You saw Dharshi’s room.”
“Dharshi grew up here. She’s not like you. These are men! In a young girl’s room?”
“Amma, it’s just what girls do here. Please.”
I wait for the shouting, the ripping off of photos from walls, but maybe America has already worn down her ramrod sureness. She turns and looks at me for a long, searching moment, says, “Okay, but don’t turn too much into one of these foreigners, okay? We also have things to be proud of.”
I nod. I don’t correct her. I don’t tell her that we are the foreigners and that everything we had before is rendered useless here. I’m just ecstatic that she has allowed me to retain my poster. I have plans to turn the entire wall into a harem of wall-hugging androgens.
*
A postcard comes from Puime, a missive from a different world. I trace the florid plumage of birds, the spotted coat of the leopard with a finger. Such colorful, vibrant stamps, nothing like the red, white, and blue logic of my new home. Her rounded letters, now formal, as if we barely know each other.
She writes:
Hello,
How is it there? Have you met interesting people, new friends? Everything is the same here. We have exams in a month, so Ammi is shouting at me to stop writing and start studying. Anyway, I miss you.
Love, Puime