Allegiance

My father, mother, older brother, and I are spending the night on the roof. I’m four in this first memory, and we live in India, where it’s too hot to sleep inside, but out here, the air is dark and warm and soft and big, not too much of anything. And neither am I.

Our wooden charpoys creak beneath us. Mine scratches through my sheet. Everybody’s a shadow. Somewhere close, my father snores. I try to breathe in time with his low, gentle bursts, to inhale the smell of him, cool as damp clay.

Overhead, the sky whirls with sparklers like a million tiny secrets. The desert feels heavy with dung smoke, bright with invisible flowers. The night stretches on and on, as if anything’s possible up here. Then a jackal cries in the distance, and the wind kicks up.

Dust howls out of nowhere. Everybody springs awake. Whipped into action, my father yells. Our bearer Nagu’s shadow appears in the yellow stairwell. My mother pushes me toward the light as my eleven-year-old brother grabs our sheets and pillows, and Dad and Nagu flip the charpoys so the heavy wood frames don’t go flying. Everyone’s so alive in this flapping. A family of hysterical ghosts.

Another push from my mother, and I’m dragging my pink blanket down the gritty stairs to the white room I share with my brother—Nagu calls it the nursery—where the storm beats against the shutters like a stranger demanding to be let in.

Except, we are the strangers. Unfamiliar with this heat, this dust, this temperamental sky. Outsiders in Nagu’s India. I’m old enough to sense this even then, and yet, India’s where I begin.

*

Another first memory: Dad has gone away for his job with the United Nations, and my mother wants to take me to a birthday party for an older girl I don’t know. She wants me to wear the angel dress she made last Christmas for my nursery school pageant. It’s hot and thick as a blanket, but that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is breaking rules, like the rule that you’re supposed to wear a party dress to a party.

I’m terrified of showing up in a way I’m not supposed to, but I don’t know how to say this, so I just tell my mother I want to wear my party dress. I cross my arms and stare at the fat orange wedges that slant from the high windows across the nursery. My mother tells me, “Don’t be ridiculous! This is a costume party.” I’m so certain of my own logic that I don’t ask what a costume is, don’t make the obvious connections to pageantry and angels, and she’s too fed up to explain. Why must I always be like this?

The Darzi has made me a brand new green and white smocked party dress. That’s what I want to wear, with my black patent Mary Janes. My mother tries to force the scratchy white angel gown over my head, but I fight her off, stamping my feet and curling into an impenetrable ball. I don’t care how mad she gets. I need things to make sense.

“Fine. Have it your way,” she says, as she will at least a thousand times in our battles to come. What she really means is, you’ll be sorry.

I am, and I’m not. As soon as we get to the garden where the party is happening, I can see I’ve made a mistake. The yard is busy with kids dressed like pirates, clowns, witches, and queens. A few wear turbans and saris, though they’re no more Indian than I am. I don’t know why I never wear Indian clothes. There must be a rule. And costume must mean you get to break the rules, to pretend to be something you’re not. The thought makes me feel upside down. I don’t want to be something I’m not, but suddenly I don’t know what I am, except the odd girl out.

My mother leaves me to stew in the error of my ways while she goes off for a drink on the terrace with the other parents. They’re the reason she wanted to come. Mom has Indian friends who wear saris not as costumes, who have names like Ratna, Veena, Krishna, and Lakshmi, and some of their kids go to my nursery school, but none of them are here. The parents on the terrace all live near us in the International Enclave. They have names like my mother’s: Jane. They’re dressed like her, too, in proper party clothes. The ladies have puffy skirts and long bare white arms. The men wear light suits, like my father does, though none of them have hair as shiny black and straight as his. And he’s not here.

Across the yard, a camel snorts. They put him in a costume, too, all red, purple, and gold tassels, and a glittery howdah on top of his humps so he can ride these make-believe children around in circles. The only person who really makes sense here is the camel driver, a short skinny brown man in the same gray pajamas he probably slept in. He’s not pretending anything.

My mother returns, insisting I ride. I like camels but I don’t like heights. I don’t want to get up on this one’s back any more than I wanted to dress like an angel, but I don’t dare make a fuss in this crowd of strangers. The camel kneels and his driver grunts as his hard square hands lift me into the howdah. An older blond girl, maybe the birthday girl for all I know, is already sitting in front. She’s dressed in white, with a bright red cross stitched like a badge to her cap. She won’t look at me. My dress embarrasses her. Or I do. I hate her back.

The animal beneath us lurches up. The howdah tips sideways, I’m facing the sun, then the ground. The girl leans forward. I know not to even think about touching her, so I clutch the sides with rigid arms. We sway and bump apart. The ends of her yellow hair sweep like a broom against her stiff white collar.

Finally, the camel stops, and before we can get out, the birthday photographer orders us to look down. You can tell from the way I glare at him I still don’t think I’m wrong.

*

Dad stops flying around Asia long enough to take us to the mountains, where it’s not hot at all. We stay on a lake pink with water lilies, sleep in a houseboat that rocks and creaks like a cradle. Everything here smells blue as the sky. We ride shaggy ponies along steep trails, and picnic by a wide, stony brook that churns up icy mists. We shop at bazaars and roadside stalls, where my brother buys a wooden sling shot and I choose a red and blue Kashmiri belt with heart-shaped cut-outs and leather that feels as soft as my mother’s earlobes.

One dark afternoon, a flock of sodden sheep surrounds us in a narrow Himalayan valley. The black air shimmers with needles of rain, and the wet funk of wool and mud and woodsmoke sinks indelibly into me. I will never visit this place again, yet I will dream for the rest of my life of its day-for-night darkness, its smell of soaked smoke and animal closeness, the sheep herder’s slight, silent shadow so like my father’s. The sense of being wildly suspended right where I belong.

Everybody in the Himalayas looks like my daddy. Their faces have his slanted eyes and inky brows, the same high, smooth cheeks and toffee-colored skin. Dad says that’s because the mountain people descend from Tibet and Nepal—and China, like him. Their ancestors married Greek and Persian traders along the Silk Road, just like his father married his American mother. And like he married Mom.

“We’re all mixed up!” he says with a quick, hard laugh. I think he means it’s good to be mixed. I decide that’s a rule. The way Dad looks at these mountain people, the way I do, too, fills me with a feeling that it will take decades for me to recognize as longing.

Mom doesn’t share this feeling. She thinks people in the Himalayas are beautiful. She thinks my father is beautiful. But she looks nothing like him and is not mixed up at all. She’s a pale-skinned all-American brunette from Milwaukee. Her eyes are round and brown. She looks like the parents at the Delhi girl’s birthday, except her hair’s not yellow.

My mother will dream about India for the rest of her life, too. People meeting her for the first time will think she lived there for decades. But her dreams return her to New Delhi. To the servants who call her Mem Sahib and free her from housework and childcare. To the weekly cocktail soirees with embassy officials and foreign correspondents, where she boasts about her husband’s work for the documentary film division of the United Nations. And to the title she earns for herself, as cottage industries development consultant for the Indian Government. Mom is devastated when my father develops amoebic dysentery, his two-year assignment in India slashed to just eighteen months. Returned to Connecticut, Mem Sahib will go back to being a housewife. To strangers, she’ll describe India as if she invented it, but really, it’s the other way round.

*

When our ship docks in New York, we drive off it in the pea-green Mercedes that we picked up in Germany “en route,” as Mom likes to say. It’s late September 1958. I turned five on the boat and got a birthday party at the captain’s table with balloons and cake. I wore my party dress.

I’m thinking in the car about my birthday because the drive on this road Mom calls a “thru-way” is so boring. No elephants. No camels. Just one lamp post after another, and cars, cars, cars. My brother names every one of them. Jaguar, Skylark, Corvette, Triumph. Marc’s nearly twelve. He pronounces each car like it’s something he wants to eat. I get busy with my coloring book, only looking up from my careful brown and black ponies when we finally exit at Cos Cob.

Behind the stoplight, there’s a giant red and white sign with the letters A&P. Beyond that, low buildings run like glass ribbon around a huge black car lot. “What is that?” I ask. I’ve never seen a shopping center before, but nobody bothers to answer.

My parents are both smoking. My father is driving. My brother rolls down his window and the incoming gust replaces their smoke with the smell of Connecticut, which smells to me like pencil shavings. The light outside is white and crisp, not dusty orange like Delhi’s. Not blue like the air in the mountains.

We drive down a wide road edged with sidewalks. No bullocks or cows or carts or even people walking. Just more cars, a gas station, a church with a giant witch’s hat, a bridge that goes over a dam.

“That’s the Mianus River,” my mother says. “We skate there in the winter, kids, remember?”

“Mo–om,” my brother says as if she’s said something stupid. Something I ought to understand. “We haven’t even been gone two years!”

The two of them juggle memories I can’t see. To them this place is familiar. They loved India, both of them. They didn’t want to leave. But this, to them, is home.

Not me. To me, this place makes no sense. And something tells me my father feels the same way. He doesn’t say anything. He keeps his eyes on the road. He’s driving in his shirtsleeves, elbow out the window. Sitting behind him, I watch the cigarette smoke stream from his fingers, the way his shoulder twitches every time he takes a puff.

We turn onto a street lined with blue-, pink-, and yellow-faced houses with roofs that fall like hair and windows that stare like eyes, and tidy little lawns behind white necklace fences. The trees in front of the houses wave red and yellow leaves. Up ahead, a rock the size of our ship leans out over the road. I think my father’s going to crash right into it. Instead, he turns in front, up a drive I didn’t see behind all the trees.

“Welcome to Lia Fail,” my mother says in a tinkly voice.

“What?” I ask.

“Lia Fail, dummy,” my brother says. “Our neighborhood.”

One day I’ll learn that Lia Fail in Irish means “Stone of Destiny.” The drive that encircles our neighborhood like a purse string was named for that big rock, which was named for a stone in Ireland, but I don’t know any of that yet, and nobody explains.

Past the top of the hill, the macadam drive forks, and we stop before turning right. Straight ahead there’s an overgrown swamp. The trees in here are so gigantic, they block the whole sky, but a low wooden fence rims the swamp, and somebody’s tied a bunch of pink and blue balloons to it.

At first, I think the balloons are for me, for my birthday. Then my mother reads out the handmade sign stuck beneath them: “Welcome Home Lius!”

On second thought, the sign and balloons with nobody here scare me. There are too many trees. The swamp is dark. Where is everybody? Where are the cows and camels? I want to go home to Nagu, to the ponies and sheep in the mountains, to our rooftop in Delhi. I want my father to turn us around and get us out of here. But he just keeps driving. Slowly. Silently. As if he finds this place as strange as I do.

Around the bend we stop again at the top of a driveway to gape down at a house that my mother cries out is, “Home!”

Nothing like our flat-roofed house in India or even like the face houses we just passed on the road outside, this one hugs the hill as if it’s trying to hide from the woods. It’s made of rocks and glass and weathered gray that Mom will teach me is cypress. She says she and my father, with Marc’s help, built this house with their very own hands, starting before I was born. She’ll prove it with pictures of her and Dad clearing the front field, of me as a baby I don’t recognize, contained in a playpen on the lawn out back. She’ll tell me how she sanded the floors and oiled the wood siding and stitched twelve-foot lengths of white parachute cloth to curtain the living room windows.

I refuse to believe her. Mem Sahib wouldn’t do any of those things. And I’ve never seen this place before. If I had, I would remember. Isn’t that a rule?

I look to my father, remember the mountains, the rain, the mixed-up people where we really belong. But Dad says nothing. In the morning he’ll disappear, just as he did in India, to the UN, to his work, to the other parts of his life apart from us. Lia Fail isn’t his home, either.

I remember the sun in Delhi beating hard enough to throb and the smell of freshly washed grass in the garden when they let me out to play. My only companions then were the snails I chased under the hedge. I loved the perfect swirl of their shells, their curious little horned heads. I didn’t mind their slimy trails or the mess of their mud. Our hiding place was cool and close, and it smelled like clay. I could hunker down and watch the sun shaping secret stars, constellations of elephants and horses between the shadow-black leaves. I could hide for hours, at least in memory, before my mother fetched me back inside.

Already I feel old.

It’s a kind of old, I will one day realize, that every emigrant must feel. Like someone who’s lived a whole other life and now is supposed to pretend to be a different person.

*

I’m from India. This is what I tell my teacher when I start kindergarten at North Mianus School. I try to tell the other children, too, but they’re too busy to listen. I’m starting the year late, so already they whisper together, pretending to bake cakes in toy ovens, to buy wooden apples at make-believe shops. I watch them buddy up on their blankets and actually sleep at naptime. They play a game called “It” during recess. And the only animal in sight is an old white horse that stands with his shadow watching over the fence at the end of the big kids’ playing field. I’m not allowed down there.

When my mother picks me up, I complain, “Mommy, it’s so boring.” What I mean is, nobody here’s ever heard of India, and if I try to tell them, they don’t hear me. They’re like the birthday kids in Delhi, except at least they were there.

My mother laughs and tells me I’m right. Things were never boring in India, but it’s not so bad, is it? She talks to me like she talks to herself. It will just take a little time, she lies.

After that, at school I don’t try to talk about India. But when we pledge allegiance, I silently substitute “India” for “America.” I will do this for three years.

Then, a new girl joins my class who I think might understand. She has hair like orange cellophane and freckles to match. She moved to Connecticut like I did, from another country. I think we might get to be friends. But both her parents are American, not one of them Chinese or Indian or anything else. She remembers living in Ohio before she moved to Saudi Arabia. “I’m from Ohio,” she tells me, not understanding what I’m looking for at all. She’s never slept on a roof under the desert’s open sky. She doesn’t like the rain.

I think of the stranger banging shutters. I am that stranger now.

I am that stranger, still.

* * *

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