I sigh, wondering for a moment if this is worth it. Ishita Dey is not exactly a ball of sunshine. We’re so far from friends that I’m not sure how we’d go about doing this thing together.
I rattle off my address anyway.
This may be the only way to convince everyone that I know who I am, and what I want.
“Ishita Dey is coming over today,” I tell Amma as soon as I dash into the house.” Is that … okay?”
Amma is in the sitting room, tapping away on her phone. She blinks at me slowly with her eyebrows furrowed together. Like she needs a few moments to process the information.
“Ishita … like, Aparna and Dinesh’s daughter?” There’s so much confusion in her voice. I don’t blame her. Ishita has never come to our house without her parents before, and even when she has come here we haven’t exactly chatted it up.
“Yeah, that Ishita,” I say.
“Is this something to do with you avoiding your friends?” Amma asks.
I shake my head—maybe a little too quickly—and say, “We’re just … hanging out.” I shrug nonchalantly, even though I know that Amma can see right through me. She knows I’m lying.
She doesn’t press me though. Just shrugs and asks, “She’ll be having dinner?”
“I’m not sure …”
“She’ll have dinner.” Amma’s voice is firm. “I’ll call Aparna and tell her.”
“Okay, okay.” The thing about Bengalis is that they don’t let you leave their house without having some kind of food. Visiting someone and not eating is basically one of the biggest insults to Bengalis.
When I get upstairs, my room is a mess. I haven’t cleaned it in a whole week, and in that time the floor has accumulated enough dirty laundry to fill up the washing machine twice over. My desk has a pile of unreturned and unread library books that is half as tall as me. And my dressing table has so many bottles and vials and brushes that I could probably start my own beauty line.
I pile all the clothes into my wardrobe and shove the books and makeup into whatever drawers have remaining space. The room smells a little funky—probably from all the dirty clothes—so I throw open the window before changing out of my uniform.
The doorbell rings just as I pull on my trousers. I rush downstairs, hoping to beat Amma to greeting Ishita. No luck; Ishita is already inside when I get to the door. She’s smiling at Amma, and her smile is so awkward that it looks as if she’s in pain.
“Hey, you made it!” I try not to let on that I’m panting a little from running down the stairs so fast.
Ishita raises an eyebrow. “I did.” I can tell from the pained expression on her face that she’s trying to be nice—even if she’s failing pretty badly at it.
“Well, um. We should get upstairs?” My eyes flicker between Ishita and Amma—because Amma is looking at me with a bemused expression.
“Do you two share any classes?” she asks.
“No!” I say, at the same time that Ishita says, “Yes.”
“I mean …” I shoot Ishita a small glare. “We both do the core subjects … obviously. So … um.”
Amma nods, like what I said actually makes any kind of sense. She turns to Ishita and says, “I called your Ammu and said you’ll be staying over for dinner.”
“Great, thank you, Aunty.” Ishita shoots her another polite smile before following me to the stairs.
“What the hell was that?” she whispers as soon as we’re out of Amma’s earshot.
“What the hell were you doing?” I ask. “Why couldn’t you have just stayed quiet and let me handle it?”
“Um, maybe because you looked like a deer in the fucking headlights. We do have a class together. Biology, remember?”
I stop at the top of the stairs, fixing her with a glare. “No cursing at my house, Ishita.”
She rolls her eyes. “You can’t be serious.”
“If I wasn’t serious I wouldn’t say it, would I?”
For a moment I think she’s going to fight me on it. Instead, she closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and says, “Fine. No cursing in your house.”
I smile. I really hadn’t expected to her to give in that easily. This is Ishita Dey after all.
I lead her into my room and she takes it in with narrowed eyes. Even with everything hidden away from her eyes, I can almost see her bite back a comment.
“Your room is … nice.” She says it like it’s a struggle to say the word nice.