Your Words
“Goddamned. It was my dad's favorite word to say—at the temple, of all places.”
“I think my first cuss word was shit. Or maybe hell. My Hindi teacher freaked out whenever I said it….it was great.”
“What was your first, Isha?”
The question slips around the toothy grins on my two roommates' dark, beauty queen faces. One of them, Nandini, was a beauty queen once: the 2008 Miss Teen India of Nashville. Currently, Nandini is on what appears to be a bamboo and oats diet; I mentally refer to her as Queen of the Cows.
My other boarding school roommate is Indian as well (I’m thinking my parents specially requested these two…). She’s a fast-talking, slow-thinking New Yorker who wears enough eyeliner to rewrite the Declaration of Independence. But that’s okay, since Maya is a proper Indian girl. She goes to temple every week, speaks fluent Gujarati and Hindi, and is already engaged to some future doctor her family found on the Internet.
I look past my roommates, to their posters of Bollywood divas and black-and-white photographs pasted to the wall. My side of the room is quieter, yet still loud, with photo collages of my friends from back home and a small batik print of the goddess Durga my mom had me put up. But after the move into the dorm a few months before—and only once my parents had smilingly bid me and my roommates goodbye—I tacked a poster of the Mexican soccer team to the wall, too.
“Come on, Isha, don’t get all modest,” Dixie Queen Nandini sings. I realized I still haven’t answered the question. “What was your first cuss word?”
So I say it. “Puta.”
Confusion plasters the girls’ twin expressions—awkwardly simpering now—into place.
“It means slut,” I clarify slowly. “In Spanish.”
*
In my defense, I didn’t ask to be a Hispanic trapped in an Indian girl’s body. In fact, I think I would have made a perfectly good Indian girl if my dad hadn’t been stationed at an army base, smack dab on the U.S.-Mexico border.
So as usual, blame the government.
Somehow, my parents successfully closed themselves off from the border town’s Spanish-speaking community. They made friends with a lot of our white and Asian neighbors and the few Hispanics they knew couldn’t speak Spanish to save their life.
I never made those attempts. Growing up, my favorite game was lotería, favorite holiday, Día de Muertos, favorite food, chile relleno. From my classmates to my playmates to even some of my teachers—it was all Spanish, all Mexican all the time. Up until the 10th grade, my world was painted the wrong shade of brown.
*
Boarding school is different. I feel so lost, more confused than ever before.
Every day, Nandini and Maya become more unbearable. They’re perfectly nice, perfectly lovely, but so Indian. My parents would prefer either of them to me for a daughter.
“Isha?” Maya, beckons to me with a hand that is the right shade of brown. “Come shopping with me? I need Diwali decorations and candles.” I pause for a second, then shrug and grab my purse and coat.
An hour later, I sigh into my palm. I’m seated at the T subway station, elbow poised on my knee and face in my hand. The crimson scarf I wear to stave off the chill is Maya’s. If you’re from El Paso, you’re about as likely to own a scarf as you are to be anything other than Catholic.
Ironically, I am Hindu, not Catholic.
I swing my legs on the bench, wishing it weren’t so damn cold and wishing Maya would hurry up with her last-minute street vendor shopping.
“Excuse us, Latika,” a voice says. I glance up to see a pair of guys shuffling along the bench; one’s fair-skinned and looks about twenty-five, the other tall and tan and my age. They’re both Hispanic—from the way he pronounced his “s’s”, the one who spoke sounded Puerto Rican.
Latika? I think, uncertainly. I move over however, so they can sit and wait for their train.
A little weirded out by these two, I turn slightly and begin texting nobody on my phone. My gloveless hands shake, however, and the phone slips from my grasp, clattering to the floor. The battery pops out, along with the SIM card.
“No mames,” I hiss to myself, a stream of colorful Spanish curse words issuing from my mouth.
And you thought my education ended with puta.
From the corner of my eye, I see the boys staring right at me, listening to my cussing in appreciation.
I’ve collected the parts I can and sit back down, trying to reassemble them.
“Aren’t you a Latika?”
The voice startles me; I almost fall off the bench, but the guy grabs me by the sleeve of my coat.
“Woah, hold on there.”
I feel my eyebrows come down into a straight line, and candidly, I look at the boy—the lanky, dark-skinned one. The green of his eyes contrasts with his dark skin and startles me as much as his voice a moment ago.
“What the heck,” I ask slowly, “is a Latika?”
He didn’t expect the question; apparently, this is something I should just know. “Oh it’s uh, well it’s—”
All of a sudden, it hits me. “The name of the girl from ‘Slumdog Millionaire?’”
The movie that for anyone who isn’t Indian is the fount of knowledge of Indian culture.
The boy’s expression is sheepish now; a gurgle of laughter rises out of me. A “Latika,” I realize, is an Indian girl.
“Yeah, I’m kind of a Latika. And kind of not.”
*
The boy’s name is Miguel. Not Michael, he makes clear in his lilting voice. Miguel. He’s half Puerto Rican and half Mexican. He introduces his companion as his cousin Tony. We both ignore Tony’s smirk as we fall—a little too naturally—into conversation.
And when, wistfully, I become sure this is the first and last time I’ll see this Miguel, he asks if my phone still works. “Yeah, why?” I ask in Spanish.
The corners of his lips rise shyly. “Just want to make sure you don’t have no excuse…not to answer my call tonight.”
*
Miguel first kisses me in the red light of Tony’s bodega. Moments later, as I allow his fingers to twine into mine, I realize I could never bring him home for dinner.
As Miguel and I date, my life becomes one of magical realism, the kind that dances through all my favorite movies and stories from back home. I dream of Garcia Marquez books, of pure women floating into the sky, of winged men, of people who don’t belong together birthing children with pig tails.
Every day when I wake, I float through my classes, not on some ecstatic high, but unseeing, mentally replacing my dull surroundings with poetry and beauty. Because it is beautiful, what Miguel and I have—but it is also blind.
The biology professor, I decide, is always tired and cranky because her lover from across the ocean visits her every night, having skimmed across the Atlantic on glass water skis.
My math professor asks me a question and I accidentally reply in Spanish. Maya and Nandini shoot me a look, fazed by my “disconnect” from reality.
I try not to care, but I do. And yet, the next time I see Miguel, he’s full of life, and for a little while, I don’t care because I’m back in my border town. He scrambles to take me to his little brother’s birthday party, a scene of piñata carnage and sizzling Mexican food.
Miguel once told me that having a Mexican mom and a Puerto Rican dad, it kind of muddled his identity, messed with his head. I told him I could relate. Boy, could I relate. He nodded, understanding perfectly.
With a plate of chile con carne at my elbow, I smile across the table at Miguel’s parents and brothers and cousins, but freeze when I realize—Miguel has brought me home for dinner.
*
After the party, I check my phone and find a voicemail from my mom. She starts by saying she hopes I had fun at the Hindu prayer festival this weekend. Did I wear the salwar kameez she sent me?
“Mierda,” I whisper. I completely forgot. That was the night Miguel took me to see a Puerto Rican folkloric dance concert.
Now my mom’s staticky voice is telling me that it looks like someone’s egged our house. She thinks it’s that delinquent Suarez kid who went to my school, because she thought she saw a car that had the Chihuahua license plate on it.
I want to call her and tell her to deal with it; Mario Suarez has enough problems at home as it is, what with his bum of a dad and tight-ass mom.
Instead I text her: “Yeah. It was probably him.”
*
In my parents' language, "I love you" is "Ami tomake bhalo bashi." It's a mouthful, a mishmash of words better suited to a classroom lecture than a clandestine meeting in the dark corner of a café. Which I guess is why I’ve never heard any couple say it.
I’ve certainly never heard my parents say it to one another.
“Te quiero,” Miguel whispers across my scalp.
There's a constriction in my chest, a hot pressure at the back of my eyes. Miguel regards me expectantly by inclining his head forward. His dark bangs tumble into his eyes, those eyes that are as green as the stripe on the Mexican flag. Or maybe green as the cactus on the flag. Or maybe they’re green like the flailing snake on the flag, the snake held in the unyielding beak of a sleek eagle.
In this moment, I wish I were a cactus or a rattlesnake. Anything except who I am right now. Anything, so that Miguel wouldn’t accept my tight, wrenching embrace as I take him in my arms. Into the cotton sleeve decking his shoulder, I tell him I love him, though what language I’m speaking, I don’t even want to know.
He’s pretty perfect, I think to myself. We are pretty perfect.
*
I break up with him on Cinco de Mayo. I want it to sting, and I want that sting to last a long while. That way, he won’t even consider taking me back, in case, in a burst of weakness I try to have him take me back.
“But…” he stutters, Adam’s apple going up frantically.
“Sorry,” I say in a low voice, marveling at how inadequate and stupid one word can be. He looks torn between hitting me and dashing off. I wish he’d do the former.
A beeping sounds and, coward that I am, I look at my phone to see a text from Nandini.
“I have to go,” I say, leaving one phrase unsaid. It starts with “T” and ends with “o,” but it’s not “Te quiero,” because that’s not enough. It’s tiempo. Time. Give it some tiempo, Miguel. Give me time.
And then…And then?
*
The Saturday before I left for boarding school, a whole host of my friends and I drove into the desert. El Paso isn’t exactly a savage wasteland, but the desert and the city still aren’t separate entities; the two lands flow into and out of one another, sand and asphalt dancing and merging all along the interstate.
We drove through the dusty brush and weeds, through swirling patterns of sand, until we were a mile from the nearest road. Until we had reached the place called “The Wall,” a local hangout for the younger generation. Like spiders crawling along a floor, we scattered across the wall, perched on its brick surface, laying across it and watching the dusky clouds. Laughing, singing, yelling in Spanish.
“Feliz Cumpleaños, Isha!” yelled Alma, between sips of beer, snatched from the back of Juan’s truck. The group sang me happy birthday, though it wasn’t my birthday, and someone lit a bonfire, which was probably illegal.
The flames jumped out, licking the dusk air. I burst in on the singing too, which had meandered into some “Kumbia Kings” song blasting from the radio of the truck.
But then the sunset came, and I quieted. I sat, straddling the wall and watched the pinks and the bright oranges floating across the sky, the background for a hot red-orange sun.
I swung my legs out of habit, watching them go back and forth on either side of the wall.
I was meant to live on the border. I didn’t want to cross over.
Around 2 o’clock, my dad’s minivan drove into our mock-camp. I roused from Alma’s shoulder, heavy-eyed and suddenly too aware of how little and shamefaced we all looked, ghostly in the van’s headlights. That light was a shadow on my final goodbyes, the ones my dad begrudgingly allowed me to make.
We drove home. I cried in the car, trying to block out my dad’s exhausted face, his raging, then the worst part: the quiet reasoning that followed as he rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Maulisha, the new school will be better for you than all of this.”
“Don’t!” was my one and only protest.
Shaoli Chaudhuri. is a rising junior currently attending Duke University and pursuing a major in English and a certificate in Global Health. She is also studying to become a doctor.
“Goddamned. It was my dad's favorite word to say—at the temple, of all places.”
“I think my first cuss word was shit. Or maybe hell. My Hindi teacher freaked out whenever I said it….it was great.”
“What was your first, Isha?”
The question slips around the toothy grins on my two roommates' dark, beauty queen faces. One of them, Nandini, was a beauty queen once: the 2008 Miss Teen India of Nashville. Currently, Nandini is on what appears to be a bamboo and oats diet; I mentally refer to her as Queen of the Cows.
My other boarding school roommate is Indian as well (I’m thinking my parents specially requested these two…). She’s a fast-talking, slow-thinking New Yorker who wears enough eyeliner to rewrite the Declaration of Independence. But that’s okay, since Maya is a proper Indian girl. She goes to temple every week, speaks fluent Gujarati and Hindi, and is already engaged to some future doctor her family found on the Internet.
I look past my roommates, to their posters of Bollywood divas and black-and-white photographs pasted to the wall. My side of the room is quieter, yet still loud, with photo collages of my friends from back home and a small batik print of the goddess Durga my mom had me put up. But after the move into the dorm a few months before—and only once my parents had smilingly bid me and my roommates goodbye—I tacked a poster of the Mexican soccer team to the wall, too.
“Come on, Isha, don’t get all modest,” Dixie Queen Nandini sings. I realized I still haven’t answered the question. “What was your first cuss word?”
So I say it. “Puta.”
Confusion plasters the girls’ twin expressions—awkwardly simpering now—into place.
“It means slut,” I clarify slowly. “In Spanish.”
*
In my defense, I didn’t ask to be a Hispanic trapped in an Indian girl’s body. In fact, I think I would have made a perfectly good Indian girl if my dad hadn’t been stationed at an army base, smack dab on the U.S.-Mexico border.
So as usual, blame the government.
Somehow, my parents successfully closed themselves off from the border town’s Spanish-speaking community. They made friends with a lot of our white and Asian neighbors and the few Hispanics they knew couldn’t speak Spanish to save their life.
I never made those attempts. Growing up, my favorite game was lotería, favorite holiday, Día de Muertos, favorite food, chile relleno. From my classmates to my playmates to even some of my teachers—it was all Spanish, all Mexican all the time. Up until the 10th grade, my world was painted the wrong shade of brown.
*
Boarding school is different. I feel so lost, more confused than ever before.
Every day, Nandini and Maya become more unbearable. They’re perfectly nice, perfectly lovely, but so Indian. My parents would prefer either of them to me for a daughter.
“Isha?” Maya, beckons to me with a hand that is the right shade of brown. “Come shopping with me? I need Diwali decorations and candles.” I pause for a second, then shrug and grab my purse and coat.
An hour later, I sigh into my palm. I’m seated at the T subway station, elbow poised on my knee and face in my hand. The crimson scarf I wear to stave off the chill is Maya’s. If you’re from El Paso, you’re about as likely to own a scarf as you are to be anything other than Catholic.
Ironically, I am Hindu, not Catholic.
I swing my legs on the bench, wishing it weren’t so damn cold and wishing Maya would hurry up with her last-minute street vendor shopping.
“Excuse us, Latika,” a voice says. I glance up to see a pair of guys shuffling along the bench; one’s fair-skinned and looks about twenty-five, the other tall and tan and my age. They’re both Hispanic—from the way he pronounced his “s’s”, the one who spoke sounded Puerto Rican.
Latika? I think, uncertainly. I move over however, so they can sit and wait for their train.
A little weirded out by these two, I turn slightly and begin texting nobody on my phone. My gloveless hands shake, however, and the phone slips from my grasp, clattering to the floor. The battery pops out, along with the SIM card.
“No mames,” I hiss to myself, a stream of colorful Spanish curse words issuing from my mouth.
And you thought my education ended with puta.
From the corner of my eye, I see the boys staring right at me, listening to my cussing in appreciation.
I’ve collected the parts I can and sit back down, trying to reassemble them.
“Aren’t you a Latika?”
The voice startles me; I almost fall off the bench, but the guy grabs me by the sleeve of my coat.
“Woah, hold on there.”
I feel my eyebrows come down into a straight line, and candidly, I look at the boy—the lanky, dark-skinned one. The green of his eyes contrasts with his dark skin and startles me as much as his voice a moment ago.
“What the heck,” I ask slowly, “is a Latika?”
He didn’t expect the question; apparently, this is something I should just know. “Oh it’s uh, well it’s—”
All of a sudden, it hits me. “The name of the girl from ‘Slumdog Millionaire?’”
The movie that for anyone who isn’t Indian is the fount of knowledge of Indian culture.
The boy’s expression is sheepish now; a gurgle of laughter rises out of me. A “Latika,” I realize, is an Indian girl.
“Yeah, I’m kind of a Latika. And kind of not.”
*
The boy’s name is Miguel. Not Michael, he makes clear in his lilting voice. Miguel. He’s half Puerto Rican and half Mexican. He introduces his companion as his cousin Tony. We both ignore Tony’s smirk as we fall—a little too naturally—into conversation.
And when, wistfully, I become sure this is the first and last time I’ll see this Miguel, he asks if my phone still works. “Yeah, why?” I ask in Spanish.
The corners of his lips rise shyly. “Just want to make sure you don’t have no excuse…not to answer my call tonight.”
*
Miguel first kisses me in the red light of Tony’s bodega. Moments later, as I allow his fingers to twine into mine, I realize I could never bring him home for dinner.
As Miguel and I date, my life becomes one of magical realism, the kind that dances through all my favorite movies and stories from back home. I dream of Garcia Marquez books, of pure women floating into the sky, of winged men, of people who don’t belong together birthing children with pig tails.
Every day when I wake, I float through my classes, not on some ecstatic high, but unseeing, mentally replacing my dull surroundings with poetry and beauty. Because it is beautiful, what Miguel and I have—but it is also blind.
The biology professor, I decide, is always tired and cranky because her lover from across the ocean visits her every night, having skimmed across the Atlantic on glass water skis.
My math professor asks me a question and I accidentally reply in Spanish. Maya and Nandini shoot me a look, fazed by my “disconnect” from reality.
I try not to care, but I do. And yet, the next time I see Miguel, he’s full of life, and for a little while, I don’t care because I’m back in my border town. He scrambles to take me to his little brother’s birthday party, a scene of piñata carnage and sizzling Mexican food.
Miguel once told me that having a Mexican mom and a Puerto Rican dad, it kind of muddled his identity, messed with his head. I told him I could relate. Boy, could I relate. He nodded, understanding perfectly.
With a plate of chile con carne at my elbow, I smile across the table at Miguel’s parents and brothers and cousins, but freeze when I realize—Miguel has brought me home for dinner.
*
After the party, I check my phone and find a voicemail from my mom. She starts by saying she hopes I had fun at the Hindu prayer festival this weekend. Did I wear the salwar kameez she sent me?
“Mierda,” I whisper. I completely forgot. That was the night Miguel took me to see a Puerto Rican folkloric dance concert.
Now my mom’s staticky voice is telling me that it looks like someone’s egged our house. She thinks it’s that delinquent Suarez kid who went to my school, because she thought she saw a car that had the Chihuahua license plate on it.
I want to call her and tell her to deal with it; Mario Suarez has enough problems at home as it is, what with his bum of a dad and tight-ass mom.
Instead I text her: “Yeah. It was probably him.”
*
In my parents' language, "I love you" is "Ami tomake bhalo bashi." It's a mouthful, a mishmash of words better suited to a classroom lecture than a clandestine meeting in the dark corner of a café. Which I guess is why I’ve never heard any couple say it.
I’ve certainly never heard my parents say it to one another.
“Te quiero,” Miguel whispers across my scalp.
There's a constriction in my chest, a hot pressure at the back of my eyes. Miguel regards me expectantly by inclining his head forward. His dark bangs tumble into his eyes, those eyes that are as green as the stripe on the Mexican flag. Or maybe green as the cactus on the flag. Or maybe they’re green like the flailing snake on the flag, the snake held in the unyielding beak of a sleek eagle.
In this moment, I wish I were a cactus or a rattlesnake. Anything except who I am right now. Anything, so that Miguel wouldn’t accept my tight, wrenching embrace as I take him in my arms. Into the cotton sleeve decking his shoulder, I tell him I love him, though what language I’m speaking, I don’t even want to know.
He’s pretty perfect, I think to myself. We are pretty perfect.
*
I break up with him on Cinco de Mayo. I want it to sting, and I want that sting to last a long while. That way, he won’t even consider taking me back, in case, in a burst of weakness I try to have him take me back.
“But…” he stutters, Adam’s apple going up frantically.
“Sorry,” I say in a low voice, marveling at how inadequate and stupid one word can be. He looks torn between hitting me and dashing off. I wish he’d do the former.
A beeping sounds and, coward that I am, I look at my phone to see a text from Nandini.
“I have to go,” I say, leaving one phrase unsaid. It starts with “T” and ends with “o,” but it’s not “Te quiero,” because that’s not enough. It’s tiempo. Time. Give it some tiempo, Miguel. Give me time.
And then…And then?
*
The Saturday before I left for boarding school, a whole host of my friends and I drove into the desert. El Paso isn’t exactly a savage wasteland, but the desert and the city still aren’t separate entities; the two lands flow into and out of one another, sand and asphalt dancing and merging all along the interstate.
We drove through the dusty brush and weeds, through swirling patterns of sand, until we were a mile from the nearest road. Until we had reached the place called “The Wall,” a local hangout for the younger generation. Like spiders crawling along a floor, we scattered across the wall, perched on its brick surface, laying across it and watching the dusky clouds. Laughing, singing, yelling in Spanish.
“Feliz Cumpleaños, Isha!” yelled Alma, between sips of beer, snatched from the back of Juan’s truck. The group sang me happy birthday, though it wasn’t my birthday, and someone lit a bonfire, which was probably illegal.
The flames jumped out, licking the dusk air. I burst in on the singing too, which had meandered into some “Kumbia Kings” song blasting from the radio of the truck.
But then the sunset came, and I quieted. I sat, straddling the wall and watched the pinks and the bright oranges floating across the sky, the background for a hot red-orange sun.
I swung my legs out of habit, watching them go back and forth on either side of the wall.
I was meant to live on the border. I didn’t want to cross over.
Around 2 o’clock, my dad’s minivan drove into our mock-camp. I roused from Alma’s shoulder, heavy-eyed and suddenly too aware of how little and shamefaced we all looked, ghostly in the van’s headlights. That light was a shadow on my final goodbyes, the ones my dad begrudgingly allowed me to make.
We drove home. I cried in the car, trying to block out my dad’s exhausted face, his raging, then the worst part: the quiet reasoning that followed as he rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Maulisha, the new school will be better for you than all of this.”
“Don’t!” was my one and only protest.
Shaoli Chaudhuri. is a rising junior currently attending Duke University and pursuing a major in English and a certificate in Global Health. She is also studying to become a doctor.
