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wondered if this was due to the workings of the faerie creature inside me.
    Since our return from India, Monika spent most evenings sulking at the dinner table. Worse, she usually kept her bedroom door closed; I was no longer welcome in her room to play and witness her daily beauty rituals. When she did find me messing with her maquillage, she screamed at me, “Get the hell out, you pest!” She and Dad argued almost every day, especially when she came home late. She was standing up to my father in ways I would never dare. My mother did not intervene. Her role was to defuse the situation with food.
    I listened to the heated exchanges between Monika and Dad through the bedroom wall, biting my cuticles until they bled. Our happy home movie had turned into dreadful documentary, a real-life horror of clashing wills as I watched the perfect image of my idealized grownup self coming undone.
    In a few months time, Monika would be gone, her room vacated, and her memory buried like a distant dream.

07 . Hit of Numbers and Nature
    At age thirteen, Mina was a faithful subscriber to Seventeen and followed its exhaustive beauty advice to the letter, from cuticle care to the painstaking treatment of teenage acne.
    Meanwhile, my morning routine was just insane. Every morning I took on the weigh scale with the fury of a boxer facing her opponent. I stepped on the scale and braced myself for the punch: 1-2-1. I stepped off in shock, unable to fathom that I’d gained weight while on a slimming diet. I looked at my bloated brown figure in the mirror, my deceiving double. My instinct was to turn away, but I looked hard and long. I hadn’t done that since I was twelve, when the shock of pubic hair and sudden bulge of breasts sent me into a tailspin of suicidal grief. Two years on, the grief was intensifying.
    In a daze, I stepped into the tub and ran hot water over my head and down my back, utterly disappointed with myself and my disobedient body. My breasts and belly extended into a grotesque shape. A handful of flesh on my belly had ballooned over my panty line, my thick upper thighs pressed tightly against one another, and my face was full and round, the hollow of cheekbone lost under flab. No space. No bone. No self-control. I longed for jutting pelvic bones and a glorious thigh gap, for a sunken inward-curving abdomen under a visible ribcage. Like the cover model of Elle, whose light figure floated on the glossypage in her two-piece and carefree sheen.
    I stepped into my stiff jeans and tugged them over my legs and thighs. I had gained a whole size. If that wasn’t punishment enough for my deplorable lack of discipline, I had to expose this body to the world and, worse, to my grade-nine classmates. It was gym day.
    By the curious and cruel hand of fate, I was surrounded in my small-town Catholic school by beautiful tall girlazons, all fed on the same diet of pop culture. While they were faithful followers of fashion and celebrity trends, I was subject to the discount and hand-me-down ethos of my mother, a leftover of her early years as an immigrant. Mother was a faithful fan of the “marts” of Quebec: Bonimart, K-Mart and, her favourite, Miracle Mart. Unfortunately for me, the cult of the marts had resulted in a tacky wardrobe of styles and colours well-suited for Halloween, not for high school.
    In my hideous gym shorts, I braced myself for a snide remark about my unshaven ape legs from the boys whose own fur would never meet the cruel sting of a razor or a humiliating remark. I had once heard that the hair of Punjabi girls was thicker, darker, and more tenacious than that of white girls, and that no amount of shaving, waxing, or grooming could conquer the mighty Punjabi follicle. I don’t know if this was true, but I figured that I was living proof. While Mina had inherited my mother’s hairless gene, I had—just my luck—inherited the hairy gene of auntie Gurinder Kaur from Patiala, well-known