I AM FINALLY 5.
“Reema, come line up!” My kindergarten teacher waves her hand. I hurry my work. I scoop the beetles, cupping them carefully. My arm travels up and down the crack where the beetles live, on the edge of the playground. My OshKosh B’gosh overalls have a lot of pockets. Perfect to carry beetles home. If they stay here, the other kids kill them for fun.
“Reema!”
I run over. I go to Queen Ka’ahumanu Elementary School. Most of the other girls are higher than my head. They are so pretty. They have long hair, gold like my Barbie. Their hair is straight. My Barbie’s is curly because her box says she’s a rock star. Momma says it’s because this is the ’80s. I don’t know what that means.
I am not pretty. I’m the only one that looks like me. Which is how it is for everyone but especially if you’re me. The other girls are Hawaiian, with caramel skin, brown eyes, dark black hair, or they’re white, with creamy skin, blue eyes, gold hair. Every girl makes friends with those who look like her.
This is why I’m not allowed to be friends with the goldilocked girls. That’s what they said. It’s all right. I have you. They all take ballet together after school. I wish so much I could take ballet, but I don’t think we have the money. Also, I don’t think ballet is for Bangladeshi girls. One time, for show-and-tell, four of the girls brought in matching toys: ballerinas that live inside little pink music boxes. Each box opens like a present, a beautiful song that sounds like rain starts playing, and the ballerina spins. Slowly. I don’t have one. I make one in my mind.
At naptime, everyone sets their mats near their friends, like island clusters. My island doesn’t have a place. I move.
Today, my mat is next to the prettiest goldilocked girl. Her face is the kind of special that makes me look and want and always remember. Her arms and legs are long and thin. I’m round, small, brown. A pebble. Not something to remember. When I look at her, I feel lonely and little, like the extra button sewn on the inside of a shirt or pocket. Momma says it’s there in case the other ones go on to bigger, brighter things. Then this hidden button gets to be a button. Until then, it hopes. Sometimes, when I feel shy or scared, from not knowing the correct English word or joke, I touch the button on the inside of my pocket.
I smile at the goldilocked girl. She smiles back, and my heart becomes a blur.
“You’re pretty,” I whisper.
She sticks out her tongue. It’s the pinkest tongue I’ve ever seen. I want to pinch it, bite it, make it mine. She giggles. Her friends giggle. She looks away.
It’s fine. Meanness doesn’t hurt my feelings. But it’s wrong. Later, when the girls are playing dress-up in the Cinderella castle, I go to her cubby and steal the crystal pendant she brought in for today’s show-and-tell. Her papa gave it to her for her birthday. I hide it in my backpack, in the pocket that is the safe one.
I go to the reading nook to read Corduroy, one of my favorite books. It’s about a bear who needs to find his missing button before he can have a home. He needs to be perfect. I cry every time I read it; I don’t know why.
That night, Momma does laundry. She finds my overalls. And the beetles. Her eyebrows vanish into her bangs.
“You wanted to save them, again?” She stretches each word the way you wish you could a Sunday so Monday wouldn’t come as quickly.
I nod.
Momma smiles. Then her face gets crinkly. “Have you made friends yet?”
“I have a friend.”
She’s going to say something but stops. I don’t use your name because I don’t know it.
I wait three days. I sneak the crystal back into Goldilocked Girl’s cubby. I know I scared her. I feel bad. But not too bad.
It’s Saturday now. We go to the store. Papa always says, “Buy a new toy.” I look. I feel silly.
“I don’t need anything else, Papa.”
I have Miss Piggy. I have Love-a-Lot, my Care Bear. I have my magic wand. It’s made of glass that’s actually plastic. Don’t tell anyone. There’s magic inside. It makes the glitter move up and down like a lazy dream. Best of all, I have you. I cannot see you or touch you but I know you are always here, the way I know the sun can be found behind any storm cloud. Waiting to warm me.
In the car home, Papa says we are moving. Faraway to the other side of the Earth, to Bangkok. Please come with us. I will find you a window to sit by. We are moving because Papa got a job with the United Nations. Papa is a new word I’ve learned: an economist. United Nations sounds like a place where many small countries come together to make a big country, but it’s actually like a club. Or, a big company. They meet, talk, and find ways to make the world a better place. That’s what Papa told me.
Momma packs half our things to take, half to give to Goodwill.
Papa takes the wrong pile to the store.
I have never seen Momma angry before. I cry. I’m so sad Momma is angry, I forget to miss my toys.
“Momma, it’s okay.”
She sighs. “I know, Reemani.” That’s her special name for me. “As long as we have each other, we have so much. We can send a little of this to others. Somewhere, a little girl is so happy because you shared. She’ll take good care of Love-a-Lot. Let’s send her a hug as a thank-you.”
We hug. Momma, my brother, and I, we sit as one body in our chair until we feel our hearts tick together. I make a goodbye card for Goldilocked Girl. It says, “Thank you. Best of Luck.” That’s what adults say to one another.
Papa flies to Bangkok. Momma, my brother, you, me, we fly to Dhaka. We’ll live with Nana Bhai and Naan, my grandpa and grandma, for six months. Momma’s doing more school; I’ll go to school too. In Dhaka, the electricity goes off more days than it stays on. Momma shows us how to make birds with our hands held in front of a candle. Her bird is biggest, mine, medium, my brother’s, the littlest.
I AM 6. We live in Bangkok now, with Papa. It’s hot like Oahu and Dhaka, but each place is hot in a different way. Oahu has a breeze and smells like the sea. Dhaka is so hot and humid it’s like sitting inside a giant mouth. Bangkok is humid, too, but less so. There’s always sunshine, except during the rains. The trees are a mix of Oahu and Dhaka. Palm, coconut, mango.
I miss our family in Dhaka. If you weren’t here, it’d be lonely.
Our apartment is huge now. In Oahu, our car would cough every mile, and everything we owned used to belong to someone else. Now, we have new clothes, and school uniforms too: white shirts and blue shorts or a pleated skirt. We have a car called a Mercedes-Benz. It is whiter than a smile. We have to be very careful with the way we sit inside it.
6 is much bigger than 5, so I know more things. Making faces makes wrinkles. Good girls don’t do that. We also don’t complain. It’s much better to listen, and watch. Then you can learn people.
It’s also good to be ladylike. We have a secret phrase Papa learned at boarding school called stiff upper lip. Our code we use in public is “sulip sulip,” rhyming with tulip. I behave, he smiles. I dance ballet only I know, tiptoe, change, slide, dip, bow, smile, hush, that’s not nice, hush, that’s not pretty, hush, that’s not good.
Every Saturday I have a special class at home. I wake up at 6 a.m., brush my teeth, and put on a salwar kameez. I cover my hair with my orna, a veil. My teacher arrives at 7 a.m. I’m learning to read Arabic. A good Muslim has to read the Quran thirty times in a lifetime to make it to heaven. My teacher is an old lady with a voice like smoke. We give her tea and a plate of fruit, nuts, and biscuits. I learn all the letters and sounds and read aloud for an hour. I recite the passages she assigns me to memorize. I don’t know what the words and sentences I’m saying mean. I know a few of them, like Allah and insha Allah. But that’s about it.
“What do the words mean?”
“It doesn’t matter,” says my teacher. “Just make sure to read them at least thirty times. God doesn’t care as long as you follow the rules.”
“But God is care and cares about everything. What does the book say about that?”
For an answer, she grunts. I tuck my questions into the ballerina box in my mind. My teacher spits an orange seed onto her plate, sucks her teeth, coughs. She has two fake teeth, way in the back of her mouth. They look like real molars but with sharp, silver feet. Every Saturday, she eats, then takes out one of her teeth to floss the others. She sucks on the silver feet. Sss sss sss. I read. Sss sss sss. I recite.
It’s Ramadan. We go to the mosque. Papa and my brother are going to sit in the front of the room, where only men and boys are allowed. Momma and I will sit in the back with the other women and girls, behind a curtain that comes down from the ceiling, reaching all the way to the floor. Like a wall.
I won’t like being away from my brother. He won’t like being away from Momma and me. He starts crying.
“No,” I say to Momma and Papa. “It’s not okay. I don’t want to.”
Momma’s quiet. Papa says, “Eeesh,” which in Bengali means ugh. He sounds like a balloon losing air.
“No!” I try to make my body heavy but it doesn’t work. They pull me into the mosque. Momma carries my brother, hands him to Papa when it’s time to separate. I’m so angry.
The building has a ceiling curved like an egg. There are lovely patterns everywhere, of diamond shapes and a new shape that looks like a fingernail clipping. Momma says it’s a crescent. The tiny shapes are in different colors, put side by side to make a bigger picture. Momma says this is a mosaic, a painting without paint, with small pieces of glass or stone. There are no faces or bodies in this mosaic.
“Why not, Momma?”
“Because it’s not allowed. Only God can create human faces. Humans cannot.”
We draw faces all the time. I don’t like the giant room without faces but filled with hidden faces, with the big feet of men peeking through the space beneath the curtain. I miss my brother so much. I know he’s scared without Momma and me.
At home, I tell Momma, “It doesn’t make sense. He’s my best friend. If he cries, he’ll need Johnson & Johnson.”
“I know, jaan. Play with your brother.”
She leaves the room. He and I play one of our favorite games. We sit in our chair and hold our encyclopedia of animals, half on his lap, half on mine. We’re trying to learn all the birds, lizards, fish, and animals in the world. Momma comes back to our room. We get up off our chair. She sits in the warm spot we made for her. We climb on her like pink-bottomed baboons, bush-tailed possums, and spider monkeys, because we know their names now. We tickle her. She laughs. It sounds like she has caught a cold since she left the room. She puts kisses all over us. We nuzzle into her like koalas, chinchillas, and gibbons. Her cheeks and chin taste like salt. But she still smells like honey and flowers.
We don’t ever go to the mosque again.
I AM 7. Papa’s reading the newspaper on the family room couch. It’s one big room. I’m at the dining table doing math homework. I love math. I love formulas and patterns.
“Papa, why do we have war?”
He looks up from the paper, turns my way.
“Is it because of pride?” I ask. “Maybe we think our differences are so different and that makes people uncomfortable and scared of one another.”
If it were Monday, he would’ve smiled and said, “Oh jaan, that may be true. What a mind you have. One day, you will be a world-renowned voice. You are my treasure.”
I’d reply, “Thank you, Papa. It’s because I am your daughter.”
But I’ve spoken on the wrong day. It’s Tuesday, so I’m not his treasure.
He sighs. “Stop asking questions. Just do your homework.”
I read a story by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I borrowed it from Nana Bhai. A pendulum goes back and forth. Although I know the pattern, I hold my breath, waiting for what will happen.
I hate when I forget the safe day from the bad. Stupid Reema. I know better.
Maybe war does come from pride. That and other invisible things that make the pendulum go back and forth while you hold your breath. Maybe that’s why grown-ups keep saying, “History repeats itself.” We go back and forth, believing our differences are so different, that the space between us is too big to walk nicely. So instead, we war.
I cannot shush my mind, especially my questions. Why is there a curtain? Why are some people starving and others not? Why does pigment matter when all flesh is the same color? Why do women speak less than men? Why does love make some people hard while others soft? A question I’ve stopped asking is: “Momma, why are you crying?” It’s the only time she lies to me. It seems that whatever the questions are, they make people angry or sad. So, I swallow them for safekeeping, like a locket I need to hide. I try the questions only on you. You help unlock. We find words.
“Papa?” I try once more.
“Do your work.”
I AM 8. Like you and I, my brother and I are best friends but different. He’s small and thin, thinner than I was at his age. His face is so beautiful. His eyes are shaped like teardrops lying on their side. My hair is rough while his is so shiny, like the sun has kissed his head. He likes to chew on his lip or bite his fingernails down to the skin. Sometimes his fingertips bleed. He can draw dinosaurs now and loves LEGOs. We build spaceships and intergalactic kingdoms. They float in space where it’s quiet.
Every day, Momma drops me off at my school, then him at his. She walks around nearby, a few hours, before returning to sit with him during lunchtime. It’s the only way he’ll eat.
Momma’s always been love. Every piece of her and what she does for us, she learned on her own. Naan is nice to us kids but hard on everyone else. Especially Momma and Nana Bhai. Momma has a younger brother, my uncle, and a sister, my aunt. My uncle is four years younger than Momma, my aunt, fourteen years younger.
Momma raised them. She packed their lunches, gave them baths, cleaned their cuts, read them stories. My uncle says the worst day of his life was when Momma was married off.
Naan used to hide a safety pin in her sari for when my uncle was naughty. She would poke him with it until he bled. For Momma, there was slapping, and of course, yelling. That isn’t anything big in Bangladesh, especially if you’re the oldest daughter. Insults and being scolded are part of what we know is ours, like our name, the thickness of our waist, the length of our shadow, the color of our skin.
Naan would say Momma was too dark-skinned to be beautiful. In Bangladesh, it goes skin, hair, body, in deciding whether a girl is pretty. In Bengali, there are different ways to say dark-skinned. There’s kalo, which means black, or moilah, which means soiled or muddy.
I’m lucky because Papa is fair-skinned. This is one of many reasons Momma was lucky to be chosen by his family, despite her dark skin. I’m light-skinned because of him. When they arrange my marriage, I have a good chance of being liked. I must make sure I don’t get ugly or fat as I grow up.
I am careful about that. I don’t eat much and never take seconds. I make mistakes though. I hate myself when I do. I love sweet things, and Momma’s a wonderful baker. She makes cookies, cakes, pie. My favorite is apple. I imagine it tastes like America. Sometimes, when everyone is sleeping except for you and me, I tiptoe into the kitchen to sneak a tiny sliver. I like it warmed up, but I make sure to stop the microwave before the timer beeps so no one will hear. Only the purr beforehand and the scent of cinnamon confess I was there.
I watch Momma give, give, give. Why is this her story? Through it all, she is kind, sweet, patient. How can she not run out of love?
I know it’s us kids who must fill her. We curl around her like wings, hints of open skies. We are small, but maybe we can be the stories Momma wanted to write. I hope we are enough.
I AM 9. I have glasses now, like Papa. I love them. They make me look smart.
Momma and Papa make their rounds in the diplomat’s social calendar. There are so many parties, all the time. We kids are invited as well. I’m happy you’re always nearby because these parties are important and make me nervous. During the day, Papa wears a suit, Momma wears casual Western clothes, and we have our school uniforms. For the parties, Papa wears a kurta, Momma a sari, I a salwar kameez, and my brother trousers and a button-down shirt. Everyone marvels at how mature and well-behaved I appear.
I smile, say thank you, and talk about human rights, culture, and religion. I ask questions. People love it when you ask them for their opinion—on anything. Makes them feel special.
It’s Friday night. Momma and Papa have a party to go to, and this time we’re going to stay home with the maid.
I hear them. Their door is closed. My brother and I are in my room, next to theirs. I hear Papa yelling, Momma crying.
I cannot sit. Anger makes me hot. I leap off the bed, run to meet Papa as he exits their room. As usual, the house is dark. I root my feet into the polished floor and stretch my spine as tall as it’ll go. He looks down at me.
“Kee?” In Bengali, What?
“Why do you do that?”
“You don’t know anything,” he replies, moving to walk away.
“I’m asking to know.”
“Chup!” he yells. Silence. He walks away.
“I will never have an arranged marriage.”
He stops. Turns.
I stare.
He frowns. I keep staring until he looks away. He turns the corner into the living room.
I stomp back to my room, furious with myself. Stupid girl. I’ve made more trouble for Momma.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I turn around and there’s my brother. He’s crying. I half carry, half herd him into my room, shut the door. He uses his sturdy little arms to scoot himself up onto the edge of my bed. He sits, his legs dangling against the side. He cries, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. I kneel in front of him and wipe his face with my palms. I fan my hands the way I do to wash my face, except now, they smooth his face dry. His cheeks are so soft, like the skin on a peach. He looks at me, doesn’t say anything. He starts to chew on his lip. He does that when he’s sad, scared, or nervous. It makes his dimples pop.
“Everything’s gonna be fine.”
He nods. His tears gather his eyelashes into little spikes, like rays of a cartoon sun.
I gently tug at his lip with my thumb. The small tug makes his lip slip out from under his teeth. He smiles, I smile. The little tug is something we do.
“It’ll be okay.”
He nods. He breathes the kind of breath that is three short breaths stuffed into one.
I get our animal encyclopedia from the shelf and sit next to him. We open it up on our laps, play his favorite game, choosing which animal and which country we like best and want to travel to one day when we are big and we can go anywhere we want.
Momma comes in, glowing in her sari, gold jewelry, and makeup, and I understand now that the word “breathtaking” was invented to describe women like her.
“Momma, you’re so beautiful.”
“Thank you, jaan. We’re leaving now. We’ll be gone just a little bit.”
She bends so her face is our height. She sprinkles kisses all over, light ones so her lipstick doesn’t smudge. We giggle. She smells like a wish come true.
She sets up The Sound of Music for us to watch. You and I have learned every song. Our favorite line is “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” I love the von Trapp kids. They want their home to feel like a home. I love Maria’s story. She puts her hope in a trunk and travels, searching for a place to anchor her heart. And Captain von Trapp looks like he could save the world; he is what handsome looks like. When he kisses Maria, I blush. I’ve never seen Momma and Papa kiss.
My brother and I fall asleep on the couch. I wrap around him like a shell holding the ocean’s song. He smells exactly as when he was a baby. Sweat, sunshine, salt, and No-More-Tears Shampoo.
Momma and Papa come home. He carries my brother to bed. She carries me. It’s Saturday already.