After two months of practice, Tara was coaxed to try the road test a seventh time. This time, Alyona took her to the DMV south of Atlanta, over thirty miles away. She had asked around, done extensive homework in finding a center that had no reputation for fussy examiners. It helped, psychologically at least. The examiner had a benign face, and that propped up Tara’s confidence. She turned when she had to, tipped over no cones, and brought the car to an almost perfect position while parallel parking. She came out of the DMV, a wide smile slathered across her face, eliciting whoops of joy from Alyona. She could finally drive. No one would comprehend how big a personal hurdle she had crossed. She had driven to the top of Mount Everest.
Derek had broken up with Alyona earlier that fall. The post-breakup routine was a set one—dripping tears on Tara’s empathetic shoulder, sipping her soothing cardamom chai or chamomile tea, and secluding herself in her apartment for a week. Then, Alyona was back to being Alyona. By December, she was going out with Brian McKenny, an energetic, buffed up Georgia native with sandy-brown hair, who owned an auto repair shop in Tucker. Again, Brian was everything that Derek was not, and she was in love like she had never been before.
It was Brian who helped Tara find her first car. He told Alyona about the white, two-door Mitsubishi Lancer, which had been offered to him by his pawnshop owner friend in Stone Mountain. Brian didn’t need the car, but he had checked it out, and it seemed to be in good running condition. Alyona wasted no time in taking Tara to see the car. The pawnshop was a shocking museum of guns, gold, and gadgets, and the owner was a surly Santa with a flowing silver beard, but the Lancer was a stroke of good fortune. The girls took it for a test spin around the block, Alyona behind the wheels, evaluating its mechanical wellness—lights, brakes, accelerator, tires, air, heat, music. The car smelled like cigarettes and cleaners but seemed to be in fine fettle.
They headed out an hour and a half later, Tara steering her Mitsubishi Lancer down the main street, nervous and excited. She was finally in control of something, even if it was an old piece of junk purchased at a pawnshop for $675.
Chapter 12
Tara tried to avoid Sanjay as much as she could; they lived in precise compartments of her design. She stayed in her room until he left for work, and retreated in there when she heard him open the front door at night. It was a cage, but the inconvenience was of her choice, and it wasn’t really all that difficult, given that he left early and returned late. She had enlisted Alyona’s help in getting a membership at the county library. It was a shame she had waited this long to do something so simple. Books brought the world to her cage, as they had done in her childhood.
At Shanti Nilaya, ironically, it was Zeenat, who did not speak or write a word of English, who was responsible for Tara’s acquaintance with books.
Grandfather Madhava caught Tara with the Beary girl on a Sunday afternoon, playing hopscotch behind the mango tree in the backyard. He silently confiscated their marker, a flat piece of stone, and gruffly ordered Tara back into the house.
“Have I not told you to stay away from that girl? As long as you live in this house, you will maintain propriety.” His voice was a growl, his face dark like a thundering cloud. An irritated grandfather was worse than a grandfather who treated her like one of the walls of the house. Tara disappeared from his view behind the veil of Grandmother Indira’s sari pallu, and stayed there through his dressing down.
“She won’t play with the rickshawallah’s daughter again,” Grandmother Indira weakly assured her husband, but it was Uncle Anand who miraculously appeared on the verandah to save Tara.
“Come with me,” he said, putting a hand over her shoulder, ushering her out of the house. “We’ll find you new playmates.”
He asked Tara to hop on his bicycle. They were going to Second Bridge, he said. She rode pillion, clutching the sides of her seat with an iron grip, keenly aware that the breeze was blowing her hair into a feather duster, and wondering who her new playmates were and how Uncle Anand had stumbled upon them.
But they arrived at a library. NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY, said the sign outside the door, painted in red letters on a white background. Tara was met with book-lined shelves covering three walls and dividing the room into three rows, and a small laminated checkout counter where the library owner sat, poring over the day’s newspaper.
“I think miss will like the Enid Blyton books,” he said in English, pushing his glasses down his nose to peer at them. Uncle Anand agreed and led her to the far end of the room, to shelves stacked with books by the English author. He picked The Magic Faraway Tree. The blue cover had an illustration of three children atop a tree.
“Here. This is your new friend,” he said. “Read this book. Then come back for more. Read. Read. Read. Learn about people in England and America. Who knows? One day, you might even go there.”
Tara nodded. She didn’t want to ever go to England or America. She wanted to go to Dubai, to be with Amma. The last books Tara had read were two thick volumes of the Fairy Tales. But that was in another life, a long time ago, when her own life had been a fairy tale, and her friends Pippi, Leenika, and Runa were impressed with her ability to string words and read whole sentences. She remembered the thrill of living the lives of Cinderella and Snow White and Rapunzel and Red Riding Hood over and over again until the stiff books had turned limp in her hands.
She felt the familiar stirrings of excitement when she looked at the cover of The Magic Faraway Tree. Three naughty children looked back at her from up a tree, beckoning her into their world, promising an adventure she would love. She came back the following week, completely smitten with Enid Blyton, and itching to say hallo and queer and shan’t. Soon she had devoured The Magic Faraway Tree series and graduated to the Famous Five and the Secret Seven books. She craved English tea and fresh-baked scones with strawberry jam every afternoon.
Several evenings, from her upstairs room, through the grilles of the rectangular window, Tara saw Zeenat waiting for her in the backyard. A couple of times in the morning, from the inner sanctum of the house, she caught Zeenat peeping into the verandah from the topmost step that led into the house. Tara could have disobeyed Grandfather Madhava again because he didn’t always keep watch over her, but she no longer felt the need for Zeenat’s company. Zeenat said things that made Tara sad; Julian, Dick, Anne, and George of the Famous Five only made her happy. It was easy to decide whose company she preferred. So she stayed indoors, hidden away from her only friend at Shanti Nilaya, until she stopped seeing snatches of a voile veil by the mango tree.
A couple of years later, when Uncle Anand started to go crazy, it was a bunch of American teen detectives, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Brothers, who rescued Tara from a life of near isolation.
It was the ten-day Dassera festival. Every now and then, the beat of drums filled the air, sometimes distant, like the roll of thunder, sometimes reverberating from close quarters. The beats came from huli vesha groups. A bunch of teenage boys from the neighborhood got together in troupes, and went from home to home, dancing the traditional tiger dance for a few coins.
When the first huli vesha visited Shanti Nilaya, Tara watched from the verandah as the troupe members, stripped down to their gold satin knickers, painted head to toe in yellow varnish with black stripes to resemble the national animal, pranced and twirled, crouched and leaped to the beat of the drum. Even their faces looked so remarkably tiger-like—painted whiskers and all. They had on headgear made of papier-mâché and raw wool that resembled tiger fur.