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 wordalchemyfor 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 theircircles 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.
[…] and Diamond Taylor is expected to arrive here in thirty minutes to cut the ribbon for the grand opening of the Winged Towers, the celebrated businesswoman’s iconic addition to Angel City’s skyline. Taking nearly a decade to complete, the towers are now officially the tallest buildings in California. As you can see behind me, much of the buildings’ facades are adorned in art deco, harkening back to a star-studded past. Now all that’s needed is proof that they can withstand the test of time.
News footage from the grand opening of the Winged Towers, 1995
