Dying to Be Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

God.
    That afternoon when I got home from school, I decided to talk to my mother about what Sister Mary had said.
    “Mama, my friends and the Sisters at my school say that I have to go to church on Sundays, and I have to study the Bible if I want to go to heaven when I die.”
    “No, Beta,” my mother said. “You don’t have to worry about that. Just tell everyone at school that we’re Hindus; and when you’re a little older, you’ll study our scriptures, the Vedas. People from different places have different faiths. You’ll come to learn that after we die, we’re reincarnated into other circumstances.”
    “I don’t think the kids in my school are going to buy that,” I said somewhat sullenly. “And I’m scared. What if they’re right? They can’t all be wrong. How can the Sisters be wrong?”
    My mother pulled me close and said, “Don’t be scared, Beta. No one really knows the truth—not even Sister Mary. Religion is just a path for finding truth: Religion is not truth . It is just a path . And different people follow different paths.”
    A LTHOUGH TEMPORARILY COMFORTING, MY MOTHER’S WORDS didn’t completely alleviate my ongoing fears. Over time, my apprehension over not conforming to the religion of my peers grew worse rather than better.
    I wanted Sister Mary to tell me that I could still get to heaven even though I was Hindu, but she wouldn’t give me the assurance I was looking for. From what I’d learned at school, I understood the grim fate that awaited those who didn’t make it.
    What if God decides to come for me while I’m sleeping? Sister Mary said that he’s everywhere and knows everything. That means he knows I haven’t been baptized!
    So I lay awake at night, not daring to sleep in case God took that opportunity to show me the fate that awaited those who weren’t in his favor.
    My parents became more concerned by my anxiety and my sleepless nights. When they realized that my fears were getting worse and not better with time, they decided to have me transferred at the age of eight to the Island School.
    Just a little cluster of six buildings and surrounding grounds, this British school was nestled in the hills of Hong Kong just above Bowen Road. It was more secular, and at that time, the students were mainly the children of British expatriates who either ran the government or worked in the multinational corporations that helped to build and develop our city.
    The school itself was lavish, beautiful, and state of the art for its time, with science and language labs, an experimental zoo, gymnasiums, and swimming pools. However, as an Indian child in a predominantly British environment, I continued to struggle. Most of the other kids in my class were blond with blue eyes, so I was often singled out and picked on just for being darker skinned and having thick, dark, wavy hair.
    My mind was filled with thoughts such as, I wish Billy would stop calling me names like “Sambo”! In addition, I tended to be the last to be chosen for teams and was rarely asked to join in and play games. The other kids also took my things when I wasn’t looking, such as my books and pens.
    Such behavior made me feel lonely, sad, and dejected, but I held back my tears in public and cried into my pillow when I was alone in my bedroom at home. I didn’t even want my parents to know that I was being bullied because I didn’t want them to think of me as a problem. After all, they’d already made me change schools once, so I kept pretending that I was adjusting well and was really happy.
    Even so, one specific incident had a strong impact on me. I was sitting in the canteen, minding my own business and eating my lunch, when Billy, who’d just finished, got up from his seat diagonally across from me. He picked up his tray of leftovers, and as he walked past me, deliberately spilled the trash on his tray straight into my lunch.
    Everyone sitting around me burst into peals of laughter. It may have been only a