The Rearranged Life (2 page)

“Why is that?”

When I give a stuttering explanation about male hormones causing a female twin’s infertility, he is clearly disappointed, but I shrug him off and tune back out. All I want is to go back to bed and start the day over. No, screw that. I don’t want to repeat a day like this again. My sneakers squeak as I shift my weight, like they agree with me.

Class ends what feels like four hours later, but before I can finally seek refuge in the safety of my apartment, there is one last daunting task ahead: meeting Sejal for coffee.

There are some friends who you can spend all day with and never feel tired afterward. Sejal is not that friend. We grew up together, the two little Indian girls, destined to be friends because of our skin color and because she lived near enough down the street where Amma could pop over and borrow some saffron or Reena Aunty could come by for afternoon chai.

We met when we were five, and the competition started from the very first, “Can I use your crayon?” Sejal had given me her pristinely pointed Brick Red Crayola, raising her arched little eyebrow at my broken one. Rather than be intimidated, I gave her bitten nails the same lingering gaze. From then on, we had a friendship cemented in facing off. Everything from swim lessons to debate competitions became a head-to-head battle.

When our college acceptance letters came, she called and demanded to know where I was going.

“Penn State’s Honors College just offered me a full ride.” I cradled the phone to my ear, stunned as I held the letter. In the dining room, my parents valiantly attempted to buzz all our relatives in India at once on the landline.

“Me, too,” she told me.

While I hadn’t gotten into Harvard or Yale, and decided U. Penn was too expensive and close to home, she had the reverse situation: the two ivies she had placed on top of her list accepted her with no financial aid, and U. Penn rejected her.

Part of me–the part I still don’t like to cop to–felt guiltily smug when she had to join the rest of us plebeians at Penn State. I didn’t feel bad for long, because soon she had another victory under her belt. She won the honor of valedictorian on a technicality–she had one more extracurricular than I did, which placed her ahead despite our identical, perfectly weighted 4.7 grade point averages; the highest our school offered.

Despite all this, I love Sejal. But it does take mental preparation to hang out with her, and I develop a dull headache while I wait for her on Old Main Lawn, watching some fraternity brothers throw a Frisbee back and forth.

“Did you hear Karishma is engaged to an American?” She sweeps into my line of view, ignoring such social niceties as ‘hello’.

Typical Sejal. She hands me the order of hot chocolate I gave her via text. It’s not caffeine I need right now–it’s comfort food.

“My mom told me yesterday. Good for her–I’m excited for the wedding!” I take a sip of my mocha. I love weddings–even the thought makes me giddy.

“I think it’ll fail. Indians and Americans can’t be together. We’re too different.” The finality in her voice tells me she expects me to agree.

“Not everyone is the same. Just because you wouldn’t do it doesn’t mean it’s going to tank, Sedge-ahl,” I say playfully, using the mottled pronunciation our English teacher, Mrs. Gladdis, tortured her with in eleventh grade.

“Stop. You know I hate that,” she responds seriously as she wraps her hair around her finger. “Anyway, I couldn’t do it. Could you?”

Sejal has chosen which culture she identifies with. She assumes I am the same way, but she’s actually wrong. I spent eighteen years of my life trying to figure out the happy medium between being Indian and being American. I struggled to reconcile the Nithya who went to the temple on Friday nights with the Nithya who had friends who talked about the football games happening at the same time. Now, the gap isn’t so wide. I’m not either-or. I am Indian-American. The hyphen allows me to be both and now at twenty-one, I am finally in a comfortable place. I’ve even come to terms (I think) with the idea of arranged marriages, something I will see for myself in a few weeks at my cousin Mohini’s wedding.

“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “I just want to be happy.”

At which point she looks at me like I have three heads.

The truth is, I can’t picture marrying anyone but an Indian. Well, maybe George Clooney. I’d break all the rules for him. But I haven’t faced the non-fantasy exception to the way we grew up, so I haven’t thought about it. It doesn’t matter to me if other people marry outside of our Indianness, but I don’t know if I could. If I tell Sejal that, she will count it as an argumentative victory so I say nothing, content in my conclusion.

After another hour of weighing the pros and cons of marrying outside our culture (pro: beautiful kids, con: a total loss of Indianness because Karishma’s not involved enough to maintain it anyway), I tell Sej it’s been a long day and I need to go home. The end of the week has never looked so good. I can already taste the buttered popcorn I’ll indulge in as I watch a movie to recover from today.

hen I push open the door to our apartment and slide off my shoes in the foyer, my roommate Sophia bounds into the hallway just as I hang my backpack on my bedroom doorway.

“Nithya! Luca told me about a party on Prospect tonight! Want to go?”

Her excitement to make the night special is reminiscent of the first time I met her during move-in day of our freshman year. If there’s ever been a moment where I’ve fallen in love with someone at first sight, it might have been with Sophia.

“I was thinking bright colors. Maybe a futon. Whaddya think?” She’d grinned and her laugh was so infectious, I knew my life was changed. We’ve been roommates and best friends ever since. Our approach to life is different, but that’s why it works. I have a range of moods–she is always either happy or sad. Even our looks are opposites–she, light and I, dark.

I give her a look telling her exactly what I think about going out.

“Nithya, please? Come onnn…” she whines.

“Soph, let’s go over my day from Hades.” I tick the list off on my fingers, starting with my late arrival and ending with Sejal’s hourlong diatribe. “I need a nap. And a sedative.”

“You
cheated
?” she asks in a half-impressed whisper. “Off who?”

“I don’t know. Some guy who sat next to me.” I grumble in response.

“Oh…” I can see the wheels turn, but she beats me to the next question. “Was he cute?”

“Sophia!”

“What? There’s gotta be a silver lining, right? Was he cute?”

“I guess.” His eyes have stayed on my mind, but I don’t admit it.

She follows me to the kitchen, where I put a bag of popcorn in the microwave. “See, there
is
a bright side! Let’s keep up the momentum. Go out with me! You’ll feel better!” she exclaims cheerfully, straight out of one of those self-help books she has scattered about the place.

I stare at her, noting her persistent finger tapping on the counter. It’s as if her pent-up energy comes out in these small quirks.

“Fine.” This future lawyer in front of me–who has an arsenal of reasons ready any time I protest her decisions–has defeated me already.

But I admit, as I’m seated in a desk chair interrogation-style with a lamp over my head, it is nice to have someone else take charge for a change. Soph flits in and out of my room, producing bottles of hues that have clearly come from her makeup stash. She proclaims me ready for the red carpet a half hour later and spins me toward the mirror.

My reflection catches my breath. The girl staring back at me looks exotic. Most days, I am a standard Indian: black hair, brown eyes. I am a little taller than most Indian women at five-six, and have legs that are muscular, lean from years of running. But I’m not exceptional. Exotic is for others–the girls who can walk into a room and command a presence, and have men line up to uncover the mystery behind their eyes. I, on the other hand, have never even been kissed.

The Nithya in the mirror has eyes heavily lined with kohl. Gold eye shadow expands into deep brown, lightening my chocolate eyes to hazel. My lips, which are a little too full and make me self-conscious, are a nude pink that surprisingly does not look like cotton candy. Sophia can sense the energy shift and grins.

“You win,” I groan, trying to hide how pleased I am with the transformation.

She hops off to ‘make herself presentable’ before I can change my mind.

My mom calls as I wait for Sophia to get ready, a process I know will take well over an hour.

“Hi, Amma!” I’m a little more energetic after being pampered.

“Hi
kanna
,” she says, cheerfully. “Did you have class today?”

“Amma, I have class every day.”

“I wanted to be sure you were not skipping. When your daughter is on her own, you cannot be certain of the decisions she makes.” Her sage tone is in equal parts amusing and grating.

I’ve skipped class exactly twice in my college career: once when I had the flu and vomited my body weight in Gatorade, and the second time, when Sophia was upset from one of her many breakups and refused to leave her bed.

“Did you eat today?”

She asks me this every single time she calls, as if I would forget this vital survival component. The conversation progresses as predictably as waking up in the morning and knowing the sky is blue. She admonishes me about forgetting my assignment, completed with a loud, “
Arrey
, Nithya, I taught you better!” and a sudden interjection from my father. I can easily picture him hunched over the phone in our dining room, shouting about how I need to pay attention to these things because, “If a patient suffers and you miss something crucial, how will the patient survive?”

When the call disconnects a half-hour later (with a reminder to eat dinner), I’m glad I didn’t tell them about the cheating. And I miss them more than I can say.

The white house near campus is already bumping, the party fully underway. A group of guys surrounds the keg on the porch while an enormous ice luge stands in the front yard, a girl chugging from the bottom to the raucous cheers of her friends. Loud laughter fills the air. The booming rap music was audible from a block away, and the pain in my high-heeled feet grows along with the noise.

“Let’s dance!” Sophia yells, observing my wide eyes. We make our way to the backyard where an earsplitting bass thumps through the dirt and vibrates up into our legs.

Sophia was trained in a studio specializing in ballet, hip-hop, and jazz. My training came from an Indian place in New Jersey that taught classical and Bollywood styles, but people say dance is universal. I suppose it is because whether I’m hopping around to a
bhangra
tune or Sophia pirouettes while brushing her teeth, it’s something we can bond over. We can lose ourselves.

And lose ourselves we do, moving our arms and swaying to the beat. Every second of my grumpy day melts away. I’m here with my best friend, and it’s special, and I can’t remember why I ever thought I was missing out on anything.

Tonight, I am the exotic girl from the mirror, beautiful, weightless, and carefree. Sophia’s eyes light up. The people around us radiate contagious energy. We’re a happy bubble of college students.