Ari #2
Outside, Ari could hear his sister laughing with his older brother, his father chiding them in his low, gentle voice, and later in life, he will return over and over again to this memory, close his eyes and picture the scene: Kriti’s elegant hands covered with soap suds as she rinses bowls, Dev pushing curls away from his forehead, Pappa fanning his shirt in the sun.
A while later, his mother came into his room, brows furrowed and eyes glossy, her lips pulled into a line that seemed to be both a smile and a frown.
“Look at you, still asleep,” she scolded. Her voice was hushed with tension, and Ari felt his heart jump in panic.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Come, come.” She put a cool hand on his cheek, and he leaned into her touch. “Come out and say hello to Uncle. He’s offered to take you on a trip, so you need to be thankful.”
Ari obeyed, because he loved his mother, and rose to meet the man that was not his uncle.
When Ari first arrived in Angel City, the man—his real name was Rudra Mahajan, Ari learned—put him up in a luxury hotel, where the air conditioning, a fairly unfamiliar concept to him, was set so low that he spent the night shivering under his blankets.
Lavish breakfasts, lunches, and dinners were wheeled in daily for him on carts laden with silver trays.
Ari eyed the meals warily, prodding at them with his fork until Rudra assured him they were vegetarian.
The same scrutiny was leveled at the tap water, which Ari didn’t trust. In between his meals, he doodled on the hotel stationery and idled by the windows, awed by the strange skyline.
He was not allowed to go outside, which was for the best, since he was too frightened to wander around alone in a new country anyway.
The second week, Mr. Rudra gave Ari an elegant apartment on one of the top floors of downtown’s Eastern Columbia Building, a famed, turquoise-and-gold terra-cotta landmark in the middle of the city.
It was far more space than a child needed, multiple bedrooms and high ceilings and long halls and windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, with floors of smooth, ash-gray oak and veined marble.
The closets were full of crisp collar shirts, trousers, ties, and blazers, all already tailored to Ari’s exact dimensions.
There were so many outfits, in fabrics so fine, that Ari’s head swam.
He grew up wearing shirts handed down from his brother and cousins, threadbare and faded, shorts so large that he always needed to cinch them with his father’s belt so that they wouldn’t slip right off his hips.
Touching clothes this exquisite felt like a sin.
But he still smiled as he tried on the silks and linens, still savored the cool sting of metallic buttons touching his chest.
But the best part of the apartment, by far, was the bookshelves that lined the halls and the study.
A team of movers showed up halfway through the week with boxes and boxes of books, some with gleaming new leather covers, others rich with the smell of old paper.
Ari had never owned a book before. Were all these really for him?
He watched, dazzled, as they filled the dozens of shelves until there was no space left.
That night, he sat in bed with a pile of the new books around him, poring hungrily through each one.
Most of them were in English, with a few in Latin, French, and Mandarin.
He couldn’t read any of them yet, but he studied them all the same, puzzling over the strange diagrams of interlocking circles, the endless formulas, the shapes of sacred geometry.
The following afternoon, right after Ari’s first day of American school, a black car picked him up.
He knew little English then, and the entire day had been a struggle, a litany of reading body language and sitting through ESL and not understanding what kids were saying to him that made others snicker.
Exhausted, he sat in silence in the car as the driver swore quietly at the traffic.
It didn’t seem so bad, Ari thought as he watched the man flip off another car, not when compared to the traffic in Surat.
After a half hour, the car arrived in the center of the city, where it pulled up in front of Angel City’s Central Library.
An older girl with short blonde hair was waiting for him at the entrance.
Like Mr. Rudra, she wore a golden fox pin on the lapel of her flawless navy suit.
She looked down at Ari’s faded T-shirt and jeans through her pair of blue-rimmed glasses.
“Ari?” she said.
Ari nodded.
She pointed at herself. “Isla,” she replied. “Welcome to Lumines.” She nodded critically at his outfit. “Here, we expect you to always present yourself as an example of perfection. I hope you’ll dress accordingly tomorrow.”
Ari understood enough of her rebuke to turn deep red with embarrassment. No one had told him he was supposed to wear his new clothes today. Perhaps they’d thought it should have been obvious.
Isla led him through the art deco doors into a rotunda adorned with murals of the city’s history, then toward a private wing.
Over its entrance were engraved the words: ALEXANDER REED GALLERY.
Inside, Ari turned his head up and gaped at the yawning, circular study, its richly carpeted floors dotted with dappled light from the domed glass ceiling, its columns etched with whorls of leaves and the phases of the moon.
Cloistered under stone archways adorned with carvings of Isaac Newton and Democritus were a dozen well-dressed students settled at one end of a long wooden table, with Mr. Rudra standing at the front of the room.
Everyone turned to stare at him. Ari just stood there in his worn old clothes, shifting anxiously, cheeks hot with shame as they judged him from head to toe.
One of the boys looked away in an attempt not to laugh.
Two others exchanged knowing smirks. Only a girl with a neatly braided crown gave him a small, friendly smile.
How Ari wished he could run away right now, hide somewhere so no one could see him.
Isla motioned for Ari to take a seat at the end of the table, where a translator was already waiting for him. Then she went to stand at Mr. Rudra’s side.
“Good afternoon, Ari,” Mr. Rudra said to him.
“Good afternoon,” Ari replied softly, one of the few phrases he knew.
Mr. Rudra swallowed a shimmering white pill. “Are we ready?” he asked.
An uneven wave of nods. The translator started speaking Gujarati to Ari in a low voice, and Ari heard the word alchemy for the first time, began his first lesson on the big secret running underneath the world he thought he knew.
He desperately wanted to call his family. But Mr. Rudra had shot that down right away.
“A strict Lumines rule,” he’d told Ari sternly. “Your commitment is here. Everything else is a distraction.”
So instead, after his first week, Ari wrote a long letter to them, a habit borrowed from his father.
How is Kriti? How is Dev? Do they miss me?
Is Pappa well? He imagined his mother fussing over Kriti’s fiancé during dinner, his father preparing the dowry.
He imagined Dev in his chauffeur’s uniform, driving wealthy couples around.
Maybe they were wondering about him too, Kriti sighing out loud about missing him, Dev saying, I wish Ari were here.
At night, alone in his new bedroom, Ari whispered aloud to them that he was grateful, that he was surrounded by so much luxury, that he’d been given an incredible opportunity and he’d make them proud.
But his dreams were filled with the laughter of his brother and sister, with the comfort of his mother touching his cheeks.
He woke still clutching his letter in his hand, a dream of Surat’s humidity warm against his skin, a knot of loneliness tight in his chest, his stomach pining for dhokla and aloo puri.
When he asked Mr. Rudra the next morning if he could at least post his letter to Surat and let his family know he was okay, Mr. Rudra didn’t answer. He just took the letter, tucked it into his jacket, and turned away.
Days turned into weeks. Ari wrote more letters to his family, although he kept them in his journal instead of handing them over to Mr. Rudra.
His English improved rapidly, and he understood more of what was said in school.
Weeks turned into months. Homesickness wrapped around him in a forsaken embrace.
He tried to imagine his family’s lives improving with the money he was sending back, told himself that surely he would get to see them again one day, that he was not cast out alone and adrift at sea.
More weeks. More months. His journal filled with unsent letters, updates for his mother on how happy he was and how well he was doing, messages that she would never see.
His English was smooth now, his accent already gone.
He started to forget how to write in Gujarati, hesitating over words he once knew, substituting English whenever he couldn’t remember.
He dreamed of asking his mother how to say this, how to say that, what was this word, what was that.
He wanted to talk to Mr. Rudra about home, whether he still prayed, whether he had family in India, whether he ever talked to them, whether he ever found it hard to obey the Lumines rule himself.
But Ari didn’t have the courage to bring such things up, so instead he folded himself inward.
None of the other alchemy students had come from overseas, and his classmates during the day had already established their circles of friends.
There was no one he could talk to who might understand the singular feeling of trying to regrow torn roots in unfamiliar earth.
A full year. Another summer. A new journal.
A new school semester, a new homeroom.
And then, that fall, he saw a girl step into his class who no one seemed to notice.
He saw a girl named Sam.