I hum a little tune as I work. I’m not sure what it is, but the American girl in Begum Sahiba’s house was listening to an English song all day yesterday, and now it’s echoing in my head. All I could understand was shake it shake it, the rest was a shrill jumble of musical gibberish. She’s got a small laptop on which she types messages, but she also likes reading books and writing in a little gray book. She keeps smiling at me, and I keep staring back, not knowing how to respond.
I finish up the cleaning, wash the dishes from the night before, then begin cooking lunch. It’s the usual Sunday fare: spicy yellow daal, plain white rice, and roasted whole wheat roti. Abba will eat only the daal and roti, leaving the rice for everyone else.
At least that’s what I’ll make him do. He keeps “forgetting” that rice isn’t good for his diabetes. He’ll sneak some onto his plate when I’m not looking, and then I won’t have the heart to make him put it back. “Just a few bites?” he’ll wheedle, his eyes sparkling, his hand out like the beggars I see on the street, and I’ll give in.
Later, when everyone is taking their daily afternoon nap, I crawl into my secret reading space. It’s a tiny half room right behind the toilet, big enough for me to sit with my knees drawn up. Amma used it as a pantry a long time ago, storing dry items such as flour and sugar, but it’s been years since we had enough money to buy extra. Nowadays, we make do with whatever we can buy, storing it all on a broad wooden shelf over the stove. This little space is now mine. I’d give anything to have a door at its entrance, so I could close it from the peeping eyes and greedy fingers of my little brother. But I have to be satisfied with a long swathe of jute fabric hung from the top of the entryway.
This room is my haven, my retreat, my paradise. It’s almost completely empty of decoration, except a naked lightbulb on the ceiling, and one shelf on the side with a pile of books Abba’s managed to scrounge from the houses where he’s worked. They are torn hand-me-downs, one dug out from a garbage heap, a few yellowed from age. There’s My First Book of Animals, a class-two textbook for science, and a mystery story about a girl named Nancy Drew, which has a ton of big words. There’s a cookbook from 1978 with a woman in a checked red-and-white apron on the worn-out cover. Her hair is fine yellow like the silk I see in fabric stores in the market. She wears the sort of clothes I could never afford in a million years.
On the far corner of the shelf, hidden behind the books, is an old tin box. I don’t need to open it to know what’s inside. A sparkly black hair clip that belonged to Amma. A pretty brooch with a bright green gem I found on the street near Begum Sahiba’s house last year. A bookmark with the words Readers Are Leaders. All my saved-up money, which is 243 rupees right now. And the letter from New Haven School. Dear Sakina Ejaz . . .
I push the tin can out of my mind. What really matters is that in this little room, cramped and uncomfortable, I can be the opposite of Sakina. I can dream of going to school, of learning all sorts of things from the earth to the stars. I can dream of being somebody else, not a cook’s assistant at a mean old lady’s house. Not a daughter with a checklist of chores and an ailing parent.
Not Sakina. Somebody else.
Amma always tells me to stop dreaming. She doesn’t like it when I crawl into my little room to read. You’ll ruin your eyes, and then how will you work? she often scolds me. We need your extra income to survive—you know that.
Yes, Amma, I know. I just close my eyes and pretend I can’t hear her. Abba tells her to stop scolding me, that everybody needs a little space to dream once in a while. He’s a softie. It was he who gave in and finally took me for the admission test to New Haven School last winter, after I kept pestering him every single day. Just to see how smart I am, Abba, please? I kept begging. So he relented, like I knew he would. He doesn’t know I’m serious about going to school, about spending the whole day studying rather than earning money. He doesn’t know how hard I’ve been practicing my subjects, spending hours at night reading after everyone is asleep. He thinks it’s a phase I’ll grow out of, so he humors me.
I shift and squirm, trying to find a comfortable space. I’m practicing math problems in a lined notebook I bought from the corner shop, but my legs are getting numb. Better to wait until evening. Sometimes at night after dinner, Abba sits with me and gives me sums to work on: What’s fifty times eight, and what’s three hundred divided by nine? Those are easy, almost too easy for me, but I don’t tell him that. He only studied to class three when he was a child, before his father—my grandfather—died of tuberculosis and Abba had to work in his uncle’s street café to support the family.
It’s all right, though. I’ve realized that I can work on multiplication, division, and even fractions every single day when I measure ingredients for Abba in Begum Sahiba’s kitchen, or buy vegetables from the man who brings the vegetable cart around every morning. I practice chemistry when I bake cakes and cook curries, and biology when I feed Sahib Ji’s birds in the garden cages. He’s got peacocks and pigeons and mynah birds, and each has a different diet. I watch everyone and everything around me, listen to early-morning children’s shows on the radio, and eavesdrop when I walk past the school in my neighborhood.
The only thing I can’t seem to master is speaking English. I know what it is: I need someone to speak to, someone who’ll correct me when I’m wrong, tell me what to say and how to say it. I may be able to teach myself the basics, but if I’m to pass the admission test, I need a teacher.
7
Mimi
My Fruit Is Better Than Yours
The servant girl is chopping a vegetable of some sort in the breakfast area when I go downstairs to get a drink of water. I think it’s a squash, but I can’t be sure. Everything is different in Pakistan. The cantaloupe I ate last night for dessert was white, instead of the melon orange I’m used to, and the taste was almost tart. The peaches are tiny; the bananas look like smaller, softer, blacker versions of ours.
So far, America 1, Pakistan 0. Unsurprising.
The kitchen is big and airy, with windows on the back wall showing glimpses of the garden. Two stoves are lit, each with a pot of something boiling, contributing to the humid air. The servant girl—her name is on the tip of my tongue—has a long braid tied with a yellow ribbon at the end. She’s wearing a faded pink shalwar kameez with sleeves rolled up in a way that make it obvious her clothes originally belonged to someone else. She’s tied her dupatta around her waist like she’s about to wrestle.
“Good morning,” I offer in English, before I remember that she speaks Urdu. Grr!
“Assalamu alaikum,” she says at the same time. I want to shout jinx! but I doubt she’ll understand. She couldn’t catch most of what I was saying the first morning we got here.
I walk to the fridge and open it. I hardly ate any lunch; even the chicken nuggets were spicy. It’s only our fourth day in Pakistan, and I’m sweating tiny streams from my forehead. Mom says I’ll get used to the heat in no time, if only I leave my air-conditioned bedroom.
No, thank you. I’d rather get used to the little boxy air conditioner under my window that blasts icy air onto my face when I stand in front of it.