The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,27
there! Leave that to the grown-ups! There’s a girl!”
“Stiff upper lip! Chin up! Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, Karen, darling!” Ma said.
Hearing that name come out of my mother’s mouth made me see red. “Stop that! My name’s Kiran. Kiranmala! You of all people should know my name!” I shook my aching head, looking from one polyester-blazered parent to the other.
“Oh, that’s so foreign-sounding! So hard to pronounce! Can’t you understand that, Karen?” Baba said super slow and loud, like the way ignorant people sometimes talk to people they assume are from another country.
“If people can learn to pronounce Tchaikovsky or Lothlórien or Parsippany, they can learn to pronounce Kiranmala! And even if they can’t, it’s still my name!” I rubbed my aching temples. Oh, what in the world had happened to my parents while I was gone? They were downright colonized beyond repair!
“Oh, pishposh. I mean, tomato, tomahto,” said Baba. “I don’t have time for this. And look at the time—geez Louise, you’ve already missed the bus, young lady.”
“So chop chop, go dress in some decent clothes, will you?” Ma said, sneering at my kurta. She waved, shooing me up the stairs. “I’m not driving you if you’re wearing that foreign other-dimensional stuff!”
I wanted to argue with her, tell her how beautiful clothes from the Kingdom Beyond were, how good they made me feel about myself, but then I remembered how cold I’d just been out in Jovi’s tree. Okay, maybe there was something to be said for seasonally appropriate clothing. Still, I was furious as I threw on jeans under my light kurta and a fuzzy hoodie over it. But just to show Ma I wasn’t doing it to look less “foreign,” I put on a pair of giant jhumko earrings I’d gotten from the Kingdom Beyond. My parents may have lost all sense of identity and turned into self-hating robots, but I wasn’t going to pretend I was anything other than what I was.
As I headed back downstairs to find both my parents still tapping on their phones, I started to put two and two together. If their clothes and accents weren’t a giveaway that something was up, Ma’s and Baba’s attitudes should have been. Plus their shoes! Those weird, chipper tones! The fact that they’d forgotten how dangerous Sesha was! These weren’t my real parents, or even if they were, they must’ve gotten mixed up in the wrong narrative thread or something. That must be it.
Even as the realization made me feel a little better, I knew that if that was really what was going on, I needed backup. I had to find Bunty and Tuntuni, but more importantly, I had to find Tiktiki One. I needed to send Mati a message and get some help. If I wasn’t in the right narrative, maybe this wasn’t even the right tree in which Lal was imprisoned! Plus, how was I going to get back to the story line I should be in?
Gah. What a mess. The kicker, though, came when I asked my parents if they needed to head to work at the store.
“The store?” Baba wrinkled his nose. “Oh, that nasty old place!”
“Don’t you remember we sold it?” Ma added. “Why, we’re tax accountants now!”
Things only got weirder when I got to school. I wouldn’t have thought anything could be stranger than my parents wearing their shoes in the house and telling me they sold their beloved store to become accountants, but I was wrong. School was a whole new level of weirditude.
My first class of the day was science with Dr. Dixon. Usually, I walked from the bus with my best friend, Zuzu, straight to our lockers, then to class. But because I missed the bus, and my newly uptight parents had dropped me at school, I didn’t see her until I was in the science room. There, she met my wave with a stony stare.
I sat down, feeling off-balance. I’d never seen Zuzu look at me like that in my life. Had I done something to make her mad?
I must have looked upset, because the next thing I knew someone was asking me if I was okay. I turned my head, and was shocked to see it was my next-door neighbor and lifelong enemy, Jovi. Even more shockingly, Jovi was looking at me with a big old friendly grin.
“You okay, girl?” Jovi said again, touching my arm.
“Is there a problem, ladies?” asked Dr. Dixon from the front of the room.