From Twinkle, With Love(64)

1. Person: Maddie. Reason: We’ve been fighting nonstop. She ratted me out to my parents. She called me a loser. She’s sisters with Hannah now, not me.

2. Person: Sahil. Reason: We’ve kissed (multiple times). And I still haven’t told him about my e-mail relationship with my secret admirer, who may or may not be his identical twin brother, who is also the one who stood me up.

3. Person: Mummy. Reason: Losing it on her after sneaking out to a party. (Dadi and I are simpatico again. All it took was a simple apology for her to hug me and make me reconciliatory coconut burfi.) 4. Persons: Hannah, Francesca, Taylor, etc., etc. Reason: I don’t want them to second-guess the interviews they did and ask me to delete them, which I will not for reasons of artistic integrity.

5. Persons: Aaron and Matthew. Reason: They are now officially going out and are always all lovey-dovey at the lunch table, which only forces me to remember what a train wreck my own love life (and life at large) is. Therefore, I have spent my last two lunch periods either in the bathroom or in the library and am savage with hunger by the end of the day.



So? Now do you think I’m being melodramatic?? I didn’t think so. The thing is, I feel a little bit on shaky ground with most of these people. My brain keeps trying to convince me I’m right, but my heart keeps whispering that I’ve made some pretty major mistakes. That, like Sahil said, maybe I’m losing my sense of who I am.

Whoa. Mummy just popped her head in here and asked me to come to her room. Avoiding her is out of the question since her room is right across the hall from me and she’d see me running away.

Love,

Twinkle





Nineteen



Tuesday, June 23

My room, redux


Dear Aurora Guerrero,

You know those times in your life when you feel like you’re watching everything go down in a movie rather than in real life? People seem to be actors and the lines seem to be scripted and you just stand there with your mouth hanging open, wondering if you look as stupid as you feel?

Yeah, that.

So, Mummy called me into her room. I don’t think she’s ever asked to “see me” before. I went in there, my hands in the pockets of my KEEP CALM AND MAKE MOVIES hoodie, trying to look like I didn’t care. Like I wasn’t dying of curiosity and also awkwardness because we hadn’t talked at all about the stuff I said to her when I yelled that night after the party.

She had this small cardboard box, the size of a shoe box, open on her bed. She sat down beside it and patted the bed on the other side, so I sat, too. Silently, she pulled out a bunch of papers and set them between us. Some of them were letters written in Hindi. I don’t read it, but I can recognize the script. The letters at the top were written in this careful, slow hand, but some of the ones at the back of the pile were in shaky writing. I sifted through them, and then got to some black-and-white pictures. There was one of a little girl around five years old, with short, curly hair and these solemn eyes staring straight into the camera without smiling. Her dress was too small for her, and she was barefoot on a dirt road, standing in front of a little hut.

“Is that you?” I said, peering closer. Those black eyes … I’d recognize them anywhere.

“Yes,” Mummy said. “I was six years old. You can see the house where I lived behind me there.”

Wow. I mean, I knew Mummy had been poor in India, way poorer than we were. But I’d never seen evidence of it before. My cheeks got hot when I remembered how I’d shouted at them for not having a cell phone. Mummy didn’t even have shoes.

Mummy picked up one of the pictures. This one was of a young couple sitting on a cot with a baby in the woman’s arms. “Nani and Nana. You know, they weren’t much older than you when they had me. She was seventeen and Nana was twenty. He worked in a factory all his life, but he died when I was ten because of all the fumes he was inhaling there every day. A lot of men in the neighborhood died from that. Nani kept working as a dhobin—she washed people’s clothes from the apartment complexes nearby. She wanted to be able to afford my school fees. She was determined that I would finish twelfth grade; she never finished fourth. When your Papa came to ask for my hand in marriage, she immediately said yes. She wanted something better for me and he had a job as a bank clerk. It was stable.” She smiled and squeezed my arm. “When I got pregnant with you, Papa’s friend told us he had a connection to a US company. He said he could get Papa a job here. I wasn’t sure. I wanted to have my baby at home, where my mother could help me raise her. I had always imagined that—you growing up near Nani. And I knew that was her dream, too. She was so ecstatic at the thought of being a grandmother. Of spoiling you. But when she heard we could give you a start in the States …” Mummy shook her head, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “She told me to go. She made me promise to send her pictures of you as you grew, and she asked that we name you Twinkle if you were a girl, after the daughter of one of her favorite actresses.”

“Did she … did she get to come visit when I was born?”

“No.” Mummy swallowed. “We couldn’t afford her visa or her ticket. We sent her a lot of photos and letters. She wrote all the time. She wanted to know what you wore for Diwali, what your favorite sweets were, whether you had the same curl to your lip when you were angry that I did. She was trying, I think, to be as much a part of your life as an eight-thousand-mile separation would allow.” Mummy took a breath. “And then … she got sick. I would ask about it, but she said she was fine. It was just arthritis.” She picked up one of the shakily written letters. “Just a part of getting older, she said. I had no idea how sick she was until she was … gone. She never asked for a single thing, even though we sent her money whenever we could. She was making do without so we could live well.” A tear dripped off the end of her nose and made a dark blue circle on the sheet. I put my hand on Mummy’s. My mind was reeling. I had no idea at all about any of this. What Mummy had been through, what Nani had wanted for me … I had no idea.