Free Serving Crazy With Curry by Amulya Malladi Page A

bruised pride twitching helplessly, painfully.
    “What's wrong,
beta}”
Vasu, who was visiting for the summer, asked when Devi reached home, hot tears streaking down her cheeks.
    First there were just sobs, hiccups. And then slowly, tearfully, Devi told Vasu that Dylan called her a brownie slut.
    “How dare he?” Vasu said wiping Devi's tears with the
pallu
of her sari.
    “Oh, G'ma,” Devi screeched, warming up to the sympathy, and she spilled all the beans. Saroj who was bustling around the house only heard the “I wanted to kiss Dylan again and he called me a brownie slut” part and came charging like a bull on the loose.
    “What did you expect when you behave like one?” she demanded angrily and didn't wait for Devi to respond.
    The first slap rocked Devi almost off the floor. The second was warded off by Vasu.
    “Saroj,” Vasu warned rising above Devi like Durga Ma, ready to protect her granddaughter from such abuse.
    “This is your doing, Mummy,” Saroj bit back. “You keep sayingit's okay this and it's okay that. And then you tell them both about sex. Of course they want to experiment. She is eleven years old and she wants to kiss some boy. All this garbage you put in her head.”
    “I put the same garbage in your head and you seemed to have gotten by just fine,” Vasu countered.
    “Fine? What fine, I had to raise myself,” Saroj retorted.
    Soon they both forgot about Devi and her tears. And that was when she decided to run away. No one loved her, that was evident, and she wanted to get away, never see Dylan again, at the park or anywhere else. She was even more afraid to bump into this Father Thomas. She imagined a white man with a large beard who looked like Jesus Christ and wore black with a white collar. She could see his stern face and his wagging finger as he told her that it was wrong for a brownie like her to go around kissing white boys.
    She didn't know where she would go, but she had three dollars and fifty-two cents, which she carefully put inside the pockets of her shorts. She looked around at her room and felt the itch to stay, forget about Dylan and the whole nightmare. But the word
slut
still rang in her ears and she started packing fretfully. She wanted to take everything, but finally settled for Mr. Turtle; her blue teddy bear; her favorite book,
The Enchanted Wood,
which Vasu gave her for her ninth birthday; her favorite red T-shirt; a pair of socks; two pairs of underwear; and an empty notebook that had a pencil attached to it.
    She zipped her backpack, hauled it onto one shoulder, and said a silent good-bye to her room before starting her unknown journey.
    Vasu and Saroj were still yelling at each other in the kitchen about some party Saroj had not been allowed to go to when she was fifteen. Neither noticed Devi's departure.
    The bus stop was just a few hundred steps away and Devi sat down on a bench, trying to figure out where she could go. Maybe Los Angeles, she thought, and then shook her head, almost sure that three dollars and fifty-two cents wouldn't get her there. Maybe she could go to San Francisco and then work at some restaurant as a waiter, make enough money and go to LA? Yes, she thought that would be a good idea. Once in LA, well, once she was there, someonewould want her to be in all those ads about milk and juice. Everyone kept telling Saroj that she should take Devi to an audition for advertisements because she was so cute.
    “Better than that Welch's girl, they will just grab her, cent percent guarantee,” Megha Auntie said all the time.
    A bus stopped.
    Devi sat rooted to her seat, unable to get on, unsure how to ask if the bus went all the way to San Francisco.
    The bus left and Devi promised herself that with the next one, she would ask the driver where the bus went. She then noticed a man in black come and sit next to her at the bus stop and knew she had to be careful. Saroj had told her, showing the face of a little girl in the back of the milk carton,