and read passages from Harry Potter aloud—for her sake. “Tell me how
to say things like an American!” Mariya demanded when I laughed at her
clumsy pronunciation. Despite my mother’s clucking, we began watching hours of television, listening to pop songs on the radio. Mariya began
answering even my father in English when he spoke to her in Urdu. His
eyes widened, and he would look at me, saying nothing. This liberty, I
knew intuitively, was one that applied to Mariya alone. Mariya had to be
readied for school in September.
Even though Mariya was a year older, we were to enter the fourth
grade together. Just to make sure she wasn’t left behind, my mother explained to us, since school operated differently in Pakistan.
At night, I overheard Mariya muttering to her reflection in the
bathroom mirror. “What’s up?” she said, over and over, making sure to
round her w’s so that they didn’t sound like v’s, “What’s your name?”
“Will they make fun of me, Aisha?” she asked the night before
school started. “Will I make friends?” She squeezed my arm beneath the
cover, her hand hot and moist.
I, who hadn’t so much as taken phone numbers from my third
grade friends at the end of the school year, must have told her not to worry. There were some students who couldn’t speak even a word of English,
and had to be in separate, special classrooms. There were only a handful
of them, some brown-skinned and some fair, and they huddled only with
each other on the playground at recess. Mariya was at least better off t