I turn over the card and find the Sigiriya Queen. An image I have known from childhood. Here are her round breasts and face, her long, slitted eyes, her hand bent at an awkward angle as if warding off evil, holding a sprig of jasmine. I see something I have never seen before. This woman, centuries old, frescoed on the rock face of a single enormous bolder rising far above the forest canopy; this woman who was the beloved of a king who dared build his palace on this lofty, precarious height—this woman looks like me. Here are features from an ancient past, replicated on my face and figure. Here is an inheritance I’ve never even been aware of reaching down through the generations of islanders and touching my blood here now. Amma is right: perhaps we too have things to be proud of.
But that’s not good enough. Looking like some ancient queen from a tiny island a world away will win me no friends here. Her sloped shoulders and gold skin are not beloved here. I would give up the resemblance in a heartbeat to look like the white girls with their long limbs and exposed cheekbones. I would sacrifice a kingdom to have their confidence, their utter and unquestioned belonging. I put away the postcard; it has nothing to do with me.
And yet a magic moment. Christina Green stops by my desk, looks straight at me, says, “Do you line your lips?” I shake my head in confused disbelief. Is it possible that this goddess is speaking to me? She tries again, this time pantomiming the movement over her own lips, tracing an outline. “I mean, do you use lip liner? Around your lips?” Again I shake my head. She says, “Because it looks nice. Like you have natural lip liner.”
I stare at my lips in the mirror after this, study the dark pigment, their color and curl. She never looked my way again. But I had been seen. She had noticed something I had not ever noticed about myself, and this was powerful.
*
At breakfast one day Amma says, “The only dates in this house will be the type you can eat,” and laughs at her own joke. I’m shocked. I didn’t even think she knew the word dates in the context she is decrying. What she doesn’t understand while she is yelling, “Cover up, cover up!” is that she is seeing me in a way no one else sees me, as desirable. At school, the boys are not looking at me. I am invisible. I simply don’t exist in the way the white girls with their thick ponytails and their long, hairless legs do.
Instead I am “exotic,” like a python or a large cat. One does not have crushes on these animals. One does not pet or caress or love these animals. One does not ask them to dances. One regards them with suspicion and perhaps admiration, but one does not approach them. I can wear a skirt shorter than any I have and no boy will come up to me because in so doing he would be marking himself also as strange, and no boy in this place and this time is willing to do that.
But more than this. Something that Amma doesn’t see. I want to be like the white girls; I want to stalk the hallways like them and wear my hair in spiked shapes around my face like them. I want to feel some sort of belonging in this new place. But I don’t really want to be seen by the boys. Not in that way.
Something deep in me shrinks every time a boy’s eyes touch me. Some memory raises its head from deep within and I have to walk fast past the boy before it rises fully and erupts out of the depths. Always the possibility that Samson’s hands will reach out from these strangers’ arms and grab for my soul. So though my skirts are short by Amma’s standards, they are always far longer than anyone else’s. The pivot point of fear inside my skin so much more a push toward chastity than Amma’s lectures could ever be.
*
On the weekends, Dharshi and I comb the racks of the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, looking for baby-blue jeans, fringed boots in soft white leather, sweatshirts that slide off the shoulder. I hide my loot in a garbage bag at the back of my closet. I wear it all secretly under my long skirts and shirts. So that when Amma sees me at breakfast, I am still her little girl.
I come home one day to Amma in my room, my garbage bag of clothes in her hand.
She shakes the bag and shouts, “What is this nonsense?”
“Leave it.” I grab the trash bag, my precious hoard so carefully won, my ticket to an all-American girlhood. I tear it from her grip, and both of us realize that I am bigger than she is, that I tower over her, that she is small and cowering. I raise my hand and she shrinks, and in that moment everything is reversed: I am large and she is small. She steps back and stands by the door and watches me hang each piece up carefully in the closet. I no longer need the garbage bag. The tide has shifted; the power has slid my way. It’s a heady victory.
*
We live alone together, but we never talk about what happened before. It is as if my father’s death has rendered her mute. I catch her looking at me. For a quick second I read the distrust in her eyes. Always, I will be the daughter steeped in a secret and unfathomable shame.
We live alone together, Amma and I. Our living room window looks out onto the desolate landscape of a parking lot, but always beyond this, we hear the smash of falling water, see the curve of a moonlit tree over the rushing, tumbling river. The ghost of one drowned man rises from the water. The shadow of that other lost man waits on the bank. They look up at us in the window. They want entry. They want to be with us and live with us. But we never speak of them, never acknowledge their presence, never say their names or recount their deeds to ourselves or each other. This is the only way to survive.