Same Sun Here (13 page)

It made me sad to read about your parents and how they used to be. Maybe they will be like that again someday. Sometimes I think Mummy-Daddy don’t fight anymore only because they hardly ever see each other.

I can’t believe you gave Sam Brock a black eye. Your fistfight sounded just like a movie!!!! I hope you will be back playing soon. I agree with your mamaw that it’s not good to hit people, even stupid boys like Sam Brock. But I agree with what you said, too. Sometimes it is very hard to know what to do.

I had never heard that word “faggot” before I came to New York. I asked Valentina what it meant and she said, “A boy who wants to make out with other boys.” I said, “Like gay?” And she said, “Yeah, but a mean word for it.”

There’s a boy in Drama Club named Carlos. He is in the ninth grade and knows about everything. Marvel Jenkins says he doesn’t live with his parents because two years ago, he told them he was gay. They beat him up and made him sleep on the floor of a church, and Carlos called the cops on them and they all went to court. Now Carlos stays with his aunt on Essex Street and they go to midnight movies all the time and on weekends they don’t change out of their pajamas if they don’t feel like it.

Carlos knows the words to every single movie that was ever made. He’s playing the part of Gregory Gardner in
A Chorus Line
, and he’s also doing hair and makeup for the girls. He’s better at it than Ms. Bledsoe. Anyway, someone wrote that mean word on Carlos’s locker. I didn’t see this happen because I was absent that day, but Marvel Jenkins saw and she told everyone. It was in between classes and there were lots of kids and teachers in the hallway, and Carlos took out a black Magic Marker from his backpack and he drew a flower and a rainbow on his locker. Then he wrote in big letters underneath the word “faggot”: AND PROUD OF IT. He got detention for defacing school property, but he said, “I refuse to honor my detention unless the other individual who wrote on my locker confesses to his crime like a real man.”

Well, the principal said that was fair. Nobody confessed, so Carlos didn’t get detention. All that stuff is still on his locker. I went and looked at it the other day. He’s really good at drawing flowers.

Maybe you could do something like that if Sam Brock calls you that word again. If you take the bad word and make it good, then you won’t have to hit him and you could just play basketball like you want to.

Do you think you would like making out with a boy or a girl? I asked Kiku that and he said, “Duh. I have a girlfriend, stupid.” But his friend David has a boyfriend and they call each other sweetie and wear each other’s jeans. That sounds nice to me.

Everybody at school is getting excited about Christmas. Sometimes I feel left out at Christmas because I don’t know the songs and we don’t have a tree. Do you have a tree? I bet you and your mamaw make it beautiful. I saw the big one at Rockefeller Center on Mrs. Lau’s TV. She said they should just plant one there and decorate it every December and stop killing a new tree each year. I think that is a very good idea.

Daddy will be working through Christmas. Because he is not Christian, the catering hall asked him to. But he will come home for New Year’s. I am dreading the New Year. I don’t want it to turn 2009. It will be the first year we will live in a world without Dadi.

We have been working hard in Drama Club. The play goes up in five weeks. We are going to have rehearsals even over Christmas break. I am still painting the backdrops, and I am learning how to do the light cues. I like that everyone in Drama Club has at least two jobs. You learn more that way.

We had three inches of snow yesterday. You can always tell how much it has snowed by looking at the tops of the parking meters. It came down like confetti and made me miss Dadi so bad I thought I would vomit. She loved snow and called it God’s blessing. I wonder all the time where Dadi is now. I know she would say she is in things like snow and sunshine. She would say that nothing ever dies, it is just remade. But I still miss her.

I sat on the fire escape in my coat and hat and gloves and watched the snow for a long time. It went past my ears like whispers and it turned the sky pink. I saw a woman in the building across the way watching the snow, too. She was standing in her window, and when I waved at her, she waved back.

The city salts the pavement after it snows, which makes it very painful for Cuba to walk. The salt cuts up his paws and makes him bleed. I looked at those booties for dogs but they cost $20. When I told Kiku, he said he would “do a mad engineer rendition of a bootie.” Sometimes he talks crazy. Well, he cut up old socks, layered them with duct tape, and then rubber-banded them around Cuba’s paws. Homemade booties. He is very inventive, my brother. And Cuba looks so funny! Watching him, Mrs. Lau and I can’t stop laughing. With the booties on, Cuba can’t walk properly. He lifts his paws up high and tries to bite the booties off, and then he sits down and refuses to budge and looks very, very sad. But I think he is starting to like them. I think he has realized that when he has them on, his paws don’t get hurt by the salt. Today he even licked my ear as I put the booties on him.

This is what Cuba looks like in his mad-engineered booties:

Does Rufus come inside when it’s cold?

I do not know much about rent control, so I asked Mrs. Lau. She said hers was started in 1971. So long as she or her children live nonstop in the apartment, they can keep paying the fixed rate. Mrs. Lau says the law was invented to help tenants, so landlords couldn’t keep charging more and making life impossible. But these days, landlords want all the rent-controlled people to leave, so they can sell their apartments for a lot of money. Sometimes they do very bad things to make people leave. For example, there is a woman named Jennifer who lives on the second floor. Her mother had their apartment with rent control, and when she died Jennifer got the lease.

Jennifer has a baby. Last week, Mrs. Lau was talking to her on the stoop and she found out that because the landlord hasn’t repaired Jennifer’s apartment in 25 years, it is falling apart. There is mold everywhere from the leaks, and you can see the pipes in the walls and ceiling. Jennifer said Child Services got an anonymous call, and when they came and saw her apartment, they said she could not raise her daughter there — it was too dirty and dangerous. She said she knows it was the landlord who made the anonymous call. But he won’t fix anything and Jennifer doesn’t have the money for repairs.

So now she either has to put her baby in foster care or move. Mrs. Lau says they will have to leave New York and go to New Jersey, but the girl doesn’t know how to live anyplace else. She doesn’t even know how to drive a car because she has always taken the subway and bus. She was born here, and so was her mother and her grandmother.

The address you mail letters to is actually Mrs. Lau’s post office box. That is something else I do. I get the mail every day. We do not have mail sent to the apartment because then people would know we live here. That is also why we don’t have TV or a landline or Internet — besides the fact that it is expensive — so there is no record of us with any companies. I don’t know what kind of lies we are telling, if they are white or green or red. But they are hard to tell and I wish we didn’t have to.

I don’t remember hearing a message from you on December 7 at 6:34 p.m. Unless what you said was HI. I will try to send you a message now. There. I just did. December 10, 9:07 p.m. Did you hear me? I think we could have telepathy, too. That would be really fun. And it would save money on stamps.

I hope you will not be jealous but I have a new pen pal. It is Daddy. I am helping him study for the citizenship exam. We read the readings on the same day, and then I make up little quizzes and mail them to him. He sends them back to me and I grade them. Kiku got me a red pen and I am practicing to be a teacher.

In a weird way, it is hard to do the readings. I feel like I shouldn’t be a citizen of a country that wasn’t Dadi’s. Sometimes I want to run away and go back home. Maybe if I go to Mussoorie, Dadi will be there, singing a song, watching a thunderstorm. Maybe I just need to go home and then she will come back. Maybe she is waiting for me.

M.I.A. stands for Missing In Action. It is cool that you knew that. I had to ask Kiku what it meant. M.I.A. is Tamil but grew up in Sri Lanka, and her daddy was a revolutionary who hid from the army. So she grew up without him. She is like us, away from her daddy. I don’t know if you would like her music. She curses and she talks a lot about being a girl. I bet she is someone who would write a song about shaving her legs. Kiku calls her “sassy.” He and Mum and I listen to her albums all the time. But we don’t play them in front of Daddy. He only likes Bollywood songs from the ’70s and the Rolling Stones.

I do not know “Here Comes the Sun.” I will ask Kiku if he has it. If you like it I know I will, too.

I forgot to answer one of your questions from a while ago. You asked about Gandhiji. In Hindi, “ji” is something you put at the end of someone’s name to show that you respect them.

Gandhiji is to be respected, so we always say “ji” at the end of his name. You do it for people who are older than you, too. Like if I had met your mamaw in India, I would call her Mamawji.

It is a sad night here. I can hear Mrs. Lau’s television through the wall. I better go fold the laundry. Having Kiku’s bike inside has made everything very cramped. Right now the bike is in the middle of the living room, covered in all of our underpants and socks. It saves money on the dryer to hang things up. I can see Mum studying at the kitchen table. She has decided to go to nursing school when she becomes a citizen. There is a lot she has to learn first, though.

I have been trying to be cheerful in this letter. I hope it has worked. I hope you are doing OK. I will send you another telepathic message tomorrow. Maybe if I stand on the roof you will hear me better. I hope that your mother is home and that she doesn’t have a headache. I hope your daddy arrives soon and in a good mood. Merry early Christmas. Keep your chin up. Ms. Bledsoe has been saying that to me. Keep your chin up. I like it.

Namaskar, mera dost,

Meena