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girl waved at me casually.
    “Hey,” she said. She had an open and friendly face, a gap-toothed smile. She wore her hair in a high ponytail, which swung from side to side as she talked.
    “I gotta walk down the block to meet my mom,” she said to Sangita. “Call me later, okay?” She lightly touched my sister’s hand, gave her a bright smile, and bounced down the rest of the steps.
    “She’s nice, right?” my sister said, turning back to me. “She introduced me to her other friends, Kayla and Beth. They are also really nice. Beth is Chinese. She was adopted by an American family. I never met anyone adopted before.” Sangita was excited and happy.
    “How was your second day, didi ?” she asked. “Do you feel better about being here?”
    I nodded brusquely and shoved my hand into my open bag, pushing down the box of hair cream before Sangita saw it.

Chapter Seven
    BEFORE LEAVING BANGALORE, I had bought a small pink diary, its front cover decorated with a picture of a climbing vine. I had never had a diary before; but in view of the life change that loomed before me, I thought it might be a good idea to have a place to record my thoughts and feelings. It was also a way for me to remember all the things I wanted to tell Vikram. I had had no need of such a thing before, as he and I would talk many times a day and saw each other all the time; and he would happily listen to even the most mundane details of my life.
    But with an ocean and a large time difference between us, I knew that wouldn’t be so easy anymore. Even though we could email back and forth, I would miss not hearing his voice several times a day.
    Now, however, that diary served a whole other purpose. On the day we arrived, I had started instead to make a list of all the firsts I had experienced in that one day alone: the quietness of the house, the cheese sandwich for dinner, the fact that I could watch anything I wanted on TV without fearing that Dada would come in any minute and change channels.
    In the two weeks that we had been here, I had filled four pages of the diary with all these firsts—things as inconsequential as having the electrician show up at precisely the appointed time, which never happens in India. The diary had become my best friend, my confidante, the replacement for all I had left behind. It had become something that was just for me.
    Some of the entries on my list were repeats: I had listed Doritos at least three times, because I just really loved them. And some were meaningless: next to “Kiwi Strawberry Snapple” I had written, “Made from the best stuff on Earth,” because that is what all the ads said. Since coming here I had tried portobello mushrooms, guacamole, and a cheese-filled pastry called pupusa that reminded me of a paratha , only it tasted even better. I had doodled Vikram’s name across multiple pages, sketching hearts and flowers around it. I had written about the first time he had called me after I got here, how the softness of his voice made me ache for him. I had written about my mother, how distant and cold she had been, barely smiling, not really even speaking to any of us.
    “But it will change!” I had written optimistically. “She knows we have no choice but to try and be happy with Papa’s decision.”
    On this Sunday evening, the light was starting to fade outside. The weekend had been a welcome reprieve from the stress that was school. I sat alone in my room and looked through the pages of my diary. There was “homesickness” and “loneliness” on page two. Beneath that was “sadness,” but I picked up a pen and put a neat line through it when I remembered that I had felt sad the day chachi Rekha, wife of chacha number two Pramod, had died. It had happened in such a haphazard, needless way: tripping over her sari and tumbling down a flight of steps.
    In place of sadness, I now wrote the word excluded , something that had never been a part of my life before. In my old house I couldn’t