When we finally arrived, I was too tired to walk. I just let the sway and push of the people carry me out of the train. Didi grasped our skinny arms tightly.
The train station was like a castle, with large red towers and white-trimmed arches. My left foot had fallen asleep in the cramped train, and as we walked, I stomped on it hard to bring life back to my legs.
With the motion, the strap on my sandal broke, and it went flying into the crowd. Didi was already ahead of us, and I was afraid of losing her if I went to search for it, so I walked on, barefoot. The station was clean, but the minute we exited into the street, the ground was filled with debris and broken glass. Asya peered at me, then took off the green dupatta scarf she cherished, quickly wrapping my foot to protect it. Didi stopped and in her raspy voice told us to hurry.
I tried to run on one foot to spare Mummy’s scarf as much as I could as we hurried after Didi. I turned around, just once, to take in the beauty of the railway station before we left it behind. Then I limped along again, wondering what our new home would be like and where we were. I imagined that the family had a girl close to our age and we would become friends in between our chores.
When we found a taxi, it was bright yellow and so clean we thought it could not be for us. Then Didi spoke to the driver in a dialect we didn’t understand. Asya asked her in Hindi where we were, and she looked at us, then straight out the open door. Why didn’t she answer? Where were we? I scanned the street signs, and everything around us was written in another language. I spotted some Hindi and even some of the English letters Chaya and Nisha showed us, but there was another language I could not recognize.
Then the driver started to play an old song on the radio that we did recognize. It was a Madhuri Dixit number Mummy used to sing and move her hips to.
I looked at Asya and sang, “Ding dong ding, ding dong ding dong ding dong. Ding dong dong. Ek do teen, char paanch che saath aath nau.”
And suddenly we were singing along, the two of us smiling—both of us, I am sure of it, imagining Mummy making roti in the kitchen, flour on her cheeks, smiling. Didi smiled with her crooked yellow teeth, and the driver turned the radio up louder for us. Asya held my hand as we drove to our new family in a foreign India.