"There's a stream back there," you said, "in those woods."
My mother became nervous then, warning you not to go there, as she had so often warned me, as I had warned you the night you came, but your parents did not share her concern. What had you photographed? they asked instead.
"Nothing," you replied, and I took it personally that nothing had inspired you. The suburbs were new to you and to your parents. Whatever memories you possessed of America were of Cambridge, a place that I could only dimly recall.
You took your tea and disappeared to my room as if it were yours, emerging only when summoned for dinner. You ate quickly, not speaking, then returned upstairs. It was your parents who paid me court, who asked me questions and complimented me on my manners, on my piano playing, on all the things I did to help my mother around the house. "Look, Kaushik, how Hema makes her lunch," your mother would say as I prepared a ham or turkey sandwich after dinner and put it in a paper bag to take to school the next day. I was still very much a child, while you, just three years older, had already eluded your parents' grasp. You did not argue with them and yet you did not seem to talk to them very much, either. While you were outside I'd heard them tell my mother how unhappy you were to be back. "He was furious that we left, and now he's furious that we're here again," your father said. "Even in Bombay we managed to raise a typical American teenager."
I did my homework at the dining table, unable to use the desk in my room. I worked on my ancient Rome report, something that had interested me until your arrival. Now it seemed silly, given that you'd been there. I longed to work on it in privacy, but your father talked to me at length about the structural aspects of the Colosseum. His civil engineer's explanations went over my head, were irrelevant to my needs, but to be polite I listened. I worried that he would want to see whether I had incorporated the things he said, but he never bothered me about that. He hunted through his bags and showed me postcards he'd purchased, and though it had nothing to do with my report, he gave me a two-lire coin.
When the worst of your jet lag had subsided we went to the mall in my parents' station wagon. Your mother needed bras, one item that she could not borrow from my voluptuous mother. At the mall our fathers sat together in a sunken area of benches and potted plants, waiting, and you were given some money and allowed to wander off while I accompanied our mothers to the lingerie department in Jordan Marsh. Your mother led us there, with the credit card your father had handed to her before they parted. Normally we went to Sears. On her way to the bras she bought black leather gloves and a pair of boots that zipped to the knee, never looking at the price before taking something off the shelf. In the lingerie department it was me the saleswoman approached. "We have lovely training models, just in," she said to your mother, believing that I was her daughter.
"Oh, no, she's far too young," my mother said.
"But look, how sweet," your mother said, fingering the style the saleswoman presented on a hanger, lacy white with a rosebud at its center. I had yet to get my period and, unlike many of the girls at school, still wore flower-printed undershirts. I was ushered into the fitting room, your mother watching approvingly as I took off my coat and sweater and tried on the bra. She adjusted the straps and attached the hook at the back. She tried things on as well, topless beside me without shame, though it embarrassed me to see her large, plum-colored nipples, the surprising droop of her breasts, the dark patches of underarm hair that gave off a faintly acrid but not altogether unpleasant smell. "Perfect," your mother said, running her finger below the elastic, along my skin, adding, "I hope you know that you're going to be very beautiful one day." Despite my mother's protests, your mother bought me my first three bras, insisting that they were a gift. On the way out, at the makeup counter, she bought a lipstick, a bottle of perfume, and an assortment of expensive creams that promised to firm her throat and brighten her eyes; she was uninterested in the Avon products my mother used. The reward for her purchases at the makeup counter was a large red tote bag. This she gave to me, thinking that it would be useful for my books, and the next day I took it to school.
After a week your father began his new job, at an engineering firm forty miles away. At first my father got up early and dropped him off before returning to Northeastern to teach his economics classes. Then your father bought an Audi with a stick shift. You stayed home with our mothers-your parents wanted to wait until they'd bought their home to see which school you would go to. I was stunned, and envious-half a year without school! To my added chagrin, you were not expected to do anything around the house, never to return your plate or glass to the sink, never to make my bed, which I would see from time to time through the partly open door to my room in a state of total disarray, the blanket on the floor, your clothes heaped on my white desk. You ate enormous amounts of fruit, whole bunches of grapes, apples to their cores, a practice that fascinated me. I did not eat fresh fruit then; the textures and intensity of flavors made me gag. You complained about the taste, or lack of taste, but nevertheless decimated whatever my parents brought home from Star Market. I would find you, when I came home in the afternoons, always at the same end of the sofa, the toes of your thin bare feet hooked around the edge of the coffee table, reading books by Isaac Asimov that you'd picked off my father's shelves in the basement. I hated Doctor Who, the one show you liked on television.
I did not know what to make of you. Because you'd lived in India, I associated you more with my parents than with me. And yet you were unlike my cousins in Calcutta, who seemed so innocent and obedient when I visited them, asking questions about my life in America as if it were the moon, astonished by every detail. You were not curious about me in the least. One day a friend at school invited me to see The Empire Strikes Back on a Saturday afternoon. My mother said that I could go, but only if you were invited as well. I protested, telling her that my friend did not know you. Despite my crush, I didn't want to have to explain to my friend who you were and why you were living in our house.
"You know him," my mother said.
"But he doesn't even like me," I complained.
"Of course he likes you," my mother said, blind to the full implication of what I'd said. "He's adjusting, Hema. It's something you've never had to go through."
The conversation ended there. As it turned out, you were uninterested in the movie, not having seen Star Wars in the first place.
One day I found you sitting at my piano, randomly striking the keys with your index finger. You stood up when you saw me and retreated to the couch.
"Do you hate it here?" I asked.
"I liked living in India," you said. I did not betray my opinion, that I found trips to India dull, that I didn't like the geckos that clung to the walls in the evenings, poking in and out of the fluorescent light fixtures, or the giant cockroaches that sometimes watched me as I bathed. I didn't like the comments my relatives made freely in my presence-that I had not inherited my mother's graceful hands, that my skin had darkened since I was a child.
"Bombay is nothing like Calcutta," you added, as if reading my mind.
"Is it close to the Taj Mahal?"
"No." You looked at me carefully, as if fully registering my presence for the first time. "Haven't you ever looked at a map?"
On our trip to the mall you'd bought a record, something by the Rolling Stones. The jacket was white, with what seemed to be a cake on it. You had no interest in the few records I owned-Abba, Shaun Cassidy, a disco compilation I'd ordered from a TV commercial with my allowance money. Nor were you willing to play your album on the plastic record player in my room. You opened up the cabinet where my father kept his turntable and receiver. My father was extremely particular about his stereo components. They were off-limits to me, and even to my mother. The stereo had been the single extravagant purchase of his life. He cleaned everything himself, wiping the parts with a special cloth on Saturday mornings, before listening to his collection of Indian vocalists. "You can't touch that," I said.