From Twinkle, With Love(8)
With one last look at me, Brij walked way.
What was that about? Was he just trying to be friendly? Nora, you always said boy/girl friendships were complicated pits of madness, and if that was an example, I was beginning to understand why.
But maybe Brij was scoping out the competition? Indian people could get pretty intense about grades, and maybe his parents were putting the pressure on. Ha. As if I were even anywhere near Brij’s GPA league. He needed to spy on Maddie if he was worried about his future valedictorian status.
Thinking about Maddie made me feel pathetic and unwanted all over again. Why was I so desperate for her friendship when she obviously didn’t value mine even a little? Ugh. My excitement about making a movie for Midsummer Night felt damp and wilty. If I had a cell phone, I’d angry text her right now.
Brij Nath’s Economics Notes, Cover Letter
Dear Twinkle,
Economics isn’t easy, but these notes are. They’re guaranteed to cut your studying time in half (I timed it). Some of these terms are pretty complicated, though, so if you have problems, just text me. Here’s my number: 555-555-0128.
Sincerely,
Brij Nath
01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100011 01110101 01110100 01100101
The one thing I can’t figure out is his weird signature at the bottom—is that a special code? Okay, Brij, maybe you don’t know this, but my IQ is not higher than 1,890 and therefore, like 99.9 percent of the population, I do not speak binary.
Tuesday, June 2
My room
Dear Ava DuVernay,
I walked up our cracked sidewalk and in the front door to find Dadi sitting there in her white cotton sari on the couch, with her hands on Oso’s cheeks. Oso is our little black Pomeranian. Also, Dadi thinks he’s the reincarnated form of my dada, my grandfather and her late husband, Chandrashekhar.
I told you, as grandmothers go, Dadi’s pretty out there.
“Twinkle, tum aa gayi,” she said in this mystical voice. Oso’s beady black eyes rolled toward me, like, Help. She’s doing it again. “Dada told me you would be arriving soon.”
I kissed her on the cheek and crossed the tiny living room to the kitchen to wash my hands and grab a banana. “Right, Dadi. Dada told you.”
When I flopped down beside her, Dadi sighed and put her arm around me. Oso, sensing her distraction, made a hasty escape. “Such a skeptic. Perhaps one day you will understand, Twinkle. Perhaps one day you will accept this gift.” She cupped her bony brown hands to her chest and then held them out to me, but I gestured with my hands full of one whole banana, to show Dadi why I wasn’t accepting her socially unacceptable gift of aatma. That’s what she wanted to give me: a piece of her soul.
So we’re clear, this isn’t Hinduism that Dadi’s practicing. When she immigrated to the United States with my parents before I was born, she enthusiastically embraced American New Age culture like a long-lost friend. She still practices her own version of spirituality, which she cobbled together from too many Deepak Chopra-esque books and TV shows. The rest of us mostly put up with it because, well, Dadi’s just Dadi, and so what if we have a few dozen crystals on our windowsills and we’ll probably never get the smell of sage out of the couch and we’re on a first-name basis with the county firefighters because of the number of times her “scrying” experiments have gone awry? If Dadi wasn’t all hippie-dippie, she wouldn’t be Dadi.
“Are Mummy and Papa working?” I asked, biting off a chunk of banana.
“Yes,” Dadi said. “So it’s a Twinkle and Dadi night.” She grinned, genuinely happy, even though we had “Twinkle and Dadi nights” all the time because my parents are workaholics. I try not to take it personally, but it’s hard when your dad would rather spend his time with kids who aren’t his own and your mom pretty much pretends like you don’t exist because, through no fault of your own, you happened to be born in a different country than the one where she wants to be.
Fidgeting with the edge of a couch pillow, I thought about making that movie with Sahil Roy. “Dadi … how do you know if a decision is the right one to make? Like, what if you could opt to keep the status quo or you could make a scary decision and shake things up? Which one would you pick?”
“Hmmm.” Dadi nodded and closed her eyes for so long, I thought she had fallen asleep. Then she snapped her eyes open and looked at me, her irises like shiny brown stones. “First you must ask, am I happy with the status quo?”
I took another bite of my banana and thought about it. “Not exactly,” I said finally, thinking about how, if things didn’t change, I’d never be able to share my stories with the world. And what if there was another girl coming up behind me? What if I could be her Ava DuVernay or her Mira Nair? “But … change is scary. What if I fail at what I’m trying to do?” What if no one likes the movie I make? I’ve never directed anything before. Making YouTube videos about Dadi or Maddie is totally different from managing an entire cast.
“You might fail, munni,” Dadi said, cupping my chin. “But when you’re off in college, will you wish you hadn’t taken this chance? Or that you had?”
I stared at Dadi, easily the wisest person I knew, just thinking of how many lives I could change if my movies went mainstream. You might say, Okay, but when has a working-class Indian-American girl with a kooky dadi and ripped jeans ever become a famous filmmaker? And you’d be right. It’s never happened. But there are people out there, people exactly like me, who need someone to come along and tell their stories. To explore all those different universes for them. So why can’t I be the one to do it?