Flash House by Aimee Liu

Author:Aimee Liu [Liu, Aimee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780755302567
Google: l1Q5PwAACAAJ
Publisher: Review
Published: 2003-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

7

When Mem told Simon and me that we would soon be starting school, I was quite beside myself. I had never so much as set foot in a school! When my uncle took me from Tihwa, I was still too young. In the flash house, whenever I mentioned the word, Indrani would tell me not to be stupid. Why would I need schooling? Of my sisters there, only Bharati had passed her lower levels. She had been a middling student, she told me, but she’d loved her crisp navy and white school uniform, and the other girls in her class had been more of a family to her than her own. I used to picture school as a kind of party, so many girls together laughing and gossiping, poring over books and scribbling out lessons. I thought this sounded very heavenly, and I could scarcely believe my fortune when Mem said that I should go.

But fortunes may prove good or bad, and the selection of a school was more complicated than I realized. We could not return to the American school Simon had attended in the past, Mem said, because of “the situation.” Lawrence said that we ought to try the Delhi public school, where the children were mostly Indian, because there no one would know or care whether Aidan was accused of being a Communist. “But,” Mem answered, “everyone would know and care that Kamla is a half-breed—not even an Anglo-Indian, at that, but some combination so obscure that, by Indian reckoning, she’ll automatically be viewed as Untouchable. If her complete background became known, she could be in real danger.” They tried to hold these discussions privately, but there were few conversations in Mem’s house that I didn’t manage to hear, so I knew even before Simon when Mem made her choice. “Prejudice is a reality they’ll both have to face, but at least at the AllNations School they stand an even chance.”

The next morning Mem told me we were going shopping, just the two of us. Not even Simon would come along. Lawrence would take him to the cinema.

“Mothers and daughters do this,” she explained as she steered her green Austin between a line of camels and a bullock cart piled high with sugarcane. “I used to love shopping with my mother. We went every year before school started. My mother did mean well…” Her voice trailed off, and I toyed with my braid, uncertain what she wished me to say. All I knew of her parents was that they had died before Simon was born.

A knot of grown boys stared through the dust as we pulled into the car park at Khan Market. Typical crony layabouts, they were not serious goondas, but their eyes were sinister, nevertheless, and there were half a dozen of them, some chewing paan, some squatting on the steps, others leaning against the passageway through to the central court of shops. From the looseness of their arms, the tilted jut of their chins,

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