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for hours and look at them. Now, he made model airplanes. He spent whole days at our kitchen table, his mouth open, one hand holding tweezers and the other a magnifying glass.
    M Y MOTHER TOOK a job in a garment factory. The morning that she was to start, she came into the living room wearing jeans. I had never seen her wearing something formfitting before. Birju and I were sitting on one of the mattresses. “Your thighs are so big,” Birju said, laughing.
    My mother started screaming. “Die, murderer, die.”
    Birju laughed, and I joined him.
    In India, when my father said we should do something, we wouldn’t really start doing it till our mother had decided whether it made sense. In America, our parents were closer to equal importance. My father had all sorts of plans for us. Mostly these involved us assimilating. He made us watch the news every evening. This was incredibly boring. We didn’t care that there were hostages in Iran or that there was a movie called The Empire Strikes Back . He also bought us tennis rackets and took us to Flushing Meadows Park. There he made us hit tennis balls because he believed that tennis was a sport for rich people. Both Birju and I wore white headbands.
    My father was still irritable and suspicious as he had been in India, but he also had a certain confidence, like no matter what happened he would have done one thing that was uncontestably wonderful. “A green card is worth a million dollars,” he repeatedly told us. My mother, despite working in a garment factory, was mostly the same as she had been in India. She had been enthusiastic there about trying new things, taking me and Birju to movies and restaurants, and she was the same in America. She took Birju and me for walks in grocery stores so that we could see things we had never seen before—canned hearts of palms, boxes of colorful cereals. My mother said that she wished she was a teacher but she did not feel diminished by her work. “Work is work,” she said.
    My relationship with Birju changed. In India, my mother used to come home around the same time we did. Now, Birju was expected to take care of me until she returned from work. He was supposed to boil frozen shelled corn for me and give me a glass of milk. He was supposed to sit with me and watch me do my homework as he did his. Till America, I had somehow not paid much attention to the fact that Birju was older than I was. I had thought that he was bigger, but not more mature. Now, I began to understand that Birju dealt with more complicated things than I did.
    B IRJU AND I were sent to spend the summer with our father’s older sister. This was in Arlington, Virginia. She and our uncle lived in a small white two story house beside a wide road. The houses in Arlington had yards. The hot humid air there smelled of earth and the newness of green plants. Among the exotic things about Arlington was that the television networks were on different channels than in Queens. I turned nine while I was there.
    In Arlington, Birju began studying for the test to get into the Bronx High School of Science. He had to study five hours a day. While I got to go out, Birju had to stay in the living room and work until he was done with his hours.
    When we returned to Queens, Birju had to study three hours every weeknight and all day on weekends. Many nights I fell asleep on my mattress as he sat at the round, white kitchen table, his pencil scratching away.
    Despite all the time Birju was spending with his books, my mother felt that he was not studying hard enough. Often they fought. Once she caught him asleep on the foam mattress in the room that my parents shared. He had claimed that he needed quiet and so instead of studying at the kitchen table where he could be watched, he should be allowed to go into their room to study. When my mother came into the room, he was rolled onto his side breathing deeply.
    She began shouting, calling him a liar. Birju ran past her into the kitchen and