the neighbors’ children—two boys, who had always regarded me sullenly.
“It’s normal, at this age. You are her little sister now. You wouldn’t want to
play with your little sister at school and at home all the time either!”
But Mariya’s the only one I have! I wanted to say. Mariya, queen of
the blacktop—I wanted to play with no one else.
Still, at night, I begged for stories. Still, I braided her hair and
played checkers with her on the carpet. For the first time, I noticed how
fair her skin was compared to mine, how brown her hair, how pale her
eyes in the light. Sometimes, I called her Maria by accident; by then, I
had grown so accustomed to hearing her called to as such.
“You look so American,” I said one morning in December as we
walked to the bus stop. The sidewalks were piled with snow, throwing
shards of light into the air and reflecting off of our coats, making Mariya’s
eyes look almost hazel.
“I am American!” She laughed. “And so are you.”
But my only friends had faces colored different shades of
brown—a phenomenon I never sought intentionally, but one that happened regardless, year after year. At lunchtime, though I ate peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches, I longed for my mother’s crispy potato crepes, for
Naani’s mango pickle. Did that make me un-American? I wondered, what
didn’t I understand that Mariya did?
We spent our fifteen days of winter break with Naani and Naana
in Pennsylvania. Zoya khaala rose only to use the bathroom, or take her
evening chai. She wore a nightgown, under which I could see swollen
ankles, blue toes. We heard her low, extended moans wherever we were in
the house, even when we were sent to retrieve bottles of salt or bay leaves
from the basement. Sometimes, we heard them while swinging in Naani’s
backyard. We heard them in the groans of the creaking metal, we heard
them in the way the wind howled against the frosted trees in the forest
behind.
When we visited Zoya khaala in her room, or joined her for tea,
she greeted us with a close-eyed smile, soft prayers for our health. She
smelled of stale sesame oil, which my grandmother rubbed hot onto her
body every morning, and also the slightest bit of old, canned tuna. Whatever feeble vibrancy I knew of Zoya khaala from the summer was also fading. No longer did she hold Mariya in long embraces, or stay awake for
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