Her name is Nico Rudolph and I love her. She loves me as well, and while there have been times when I’ve questioned that, she does. You should know that now because there will be times that you’ll question it as well.
Before I get into all of that, though, I suppose I should tell you who I am. If I’m being honest—and I’m truly trying to be—there isn’t much to tell. Until I met Nico, I had a quiet life. My parents are still together, still love each other in that unreachable, uncontainable way that makes me ache sometimes. And, yeah, OK, my quiet life hasn’t always been quiet. Being the only desi girl in my class isn’t always easy. And the whole I prefer girls thing definitely isn’t easy, even if saying it out loud finally silenced something in me.
Even so, I’ve never felt different. Until I met her, I moved through life without leaving a dent, like the stiff red velvet sofa in my grandparents’ living room that forgets you as soon as you stand up. I am extraordinary only in my ordinariness. I do well at school, but I’m not destined to go to Oxford or Cambridge, or anything. I can’t dance like my mother, or cook like my father, or sing like Nico. I can’t draw or paint or speak any other languages apart from a bit of Hindi. And I hate sports. Hate chasing things or kicking things or aiming things at impossible targets. Hate anything that requires me to run or to wear a shirt with a number on the back.
So I’m not going to cure cancer or change the world in any meaningful, Pulitzer Prize–winning way. And I’m OK with that, especially after what happened to Nico. Trust me, having a quiet life is no bad thing. I’m probably too young to know that, but if there’s one good thing to come out of all of this, it’s that.
I’m lucky. I have a great group of friends who, like my parents, love me with a ferocity—and a constancy—that, now I think about it, kind of ruined me because I thought that’s how everyone would love me. I guess that’s another thing I’m probably too young to know: not everyone can love you in the way that you need to be loved.
Still, I’ve had it pretty easy. Other than being charged with fancying every girl I speak to or the odd casually cruel comment in the corridor at school, I’ve never been bullied. I’ve never had to walk a different way home or complain about period pain so I didn’t have to go to school. Never had to endure more than the usual adolescent tragedies. Fights with friends. Fruitless crushes. Failed exams. Things that felt so much bigger and more impassable until I met Nico and I realized that I didn’t have a thing to worry about.
Except I do, of course. We all do. We all have those things only we know. You never know the secret things that people cry themselves to sleep over. The things they’ll never tell you. The things that make their easy lives not so easy. The things that distract them. Derail them. Stop them from being bold enough to hope that there’s more than this. Even if there’s nothing wrong with this.
That’s who I am, isn’t it?
Who I really am.
Not just the girl in the photographs of birthdays and holidays that line the walls of my house. Not just the star of my parents’ stories, the ones they tell at the end of weddings, after the cake’s been cut and they’ve had too much champagne. Or when a song comes on the radio and they turn to one another and smile, then turn to me and smile a little wider. I’m every mistake I’ve made. Every scar I’ve earned. I’m in the songs I listen to on repeat, in the clothes I’m not brave enough to wear and the sentences I underline in books.
That’s who I am. Not just the me everyone knows—the me who is chronically early for everything and hates kidney beans and overwaters succulents—but I’m all the things I’m too scared to say out loud as well. I’m every hope. Every fear. Every wild thought that makes me weak and woozy with the promise of something else, something beyond me, beyond the borders of photographs and my parents’ stories and this tiny corner of the universe that I tread. I’m more than what people think they know. More than this endless, exhausting feeling of something shifting, trying to make space, but there isn’t enough room.
Mara Malakar. Only child of Vasudeva and Madira. Born in Brighton and still here. Still in the house on Toronto Terrace my parents brought me back to sixteen years ago. Still in the bedroom overlooking the garden, the one my father painted pink before I was born and has been every conceivable color since then.
Mara Malakar, who is bad with numbers and instructions, but always answers her phone. Who reads too many books and loves words. Even if, until now, they’ve been contained to the corners of my notebooks that aren’t too pretty to use. Other people’s words knotted with my own. Lyrics and lines from stories that made me lightheaded with relief that a stranger could know something about me before I did. Scruffy ink-and-paper time capsules of whatever I was feeling, which, I told myself, I didn’t need to feel once I’d written it down.
But I want to feel it this time.
Even though this is all still so very tender and every time I put any weight on those tender parts, I’m reluctant to do it again. And I’m even more reluctant to write it down in case I dilute it somehow because I can’t find the right words to articulate the misery and magic of it all. But I must because I’m terrified that if I don’t, I’ll forget. Memory is fickle, isn’t it? It can fail you when you need it most. It lies to you, convinces you that something happened when it didn’t. It will erase the things that matter, like hearing someone laugh for the first time and knowing it’s a prelude to some great joy to come, and replace it with a tiny, thoughtless comment that returns to you months after you said it, unexpected and uninvited, to make you doubt who you are.
That’s why I need to write this down now. Before I forget. So forgive me if it isn’t perfect. But that’s another thing I’ve learned: things don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be true.