EXCERPT with the great RBG

You’re not supposed to say this out loud: my family felt small-time to me. They lived in a dusty world littered with Styrofoam cups, held together by packing tape and dull box cutters, and populated by knuckleheads. My Brearley world was big—a place where we debated the great questions of our time with the great leaders, like the Notorious RBG.

      It was the beginning of tenth grade when my class at Brearley took our civics trip to Washington, D.C. Ours was a special trip. We were going to meet the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She had just been appointed by then president Bill Clinton, and she was a Brearley mom. Her daughter and granddaughter had attended our school.

      Our trip was happening during the historic trial of a mass shooter. The man boarded the Long Island Railroad with a handgun and 160 rounds of ammunition. He opened fire just outside Queens, killing six and injuring nineteen. The murderer lacked an iota of remorse or humility. He fired his defense team and said he’d represent himself. He wanted to be the man at the podium, cross-examining the survivors who had to play dead on the train to escape his bullets.

      “They should give him the death penalty,” I told one of my classmates.

      “What? That’s sooo wrong,” she said in high-pitched, liberal indignation.

      “How can you believe in the death penalty? You design a system for the averages, not the extremes.” By that she meant that, even when some lunatic (she said “mentally ill person”) is caught red-handed, we as a society are all better off not having the electric-chair option because, inevitably, innocent people will get sentenced to death, too.

      I rolled my eyes. I’d wanted to be a prosecutor since I was seven years old because I knew what it was like to grow up in a building with crime. My Brearley classmate didn’t. She grew up in a nice building, in a nice part of town.

      I almost blurted out “rich girl.” But that would not have been right. She wasn’t one of the rich girls. She was one of the nerd girls. Her parents were academics. While the daughters of CEOs kept the lights on at Brearley, it was the daughters of professors who lit up the classroom. With cerebral debate and obscure references to books that weren’t even assigned reading on our already massive syllabus, the nerd girls were as much a part of my education as Ms. Leonard. I hated to admit it, but whenever they spoke, I was taking notes.

      I hadn’t been to the nation’s capital before. As the Brearley bus pulled in, we saw an inordinately long obelisk, gleaming white, thrusting into the sky. “That’s the Washington Monument,” our teacher snickered on the loudspeaker. “They don’t call him the father of the country for nothing!” Gasp. She made a sex joke—which was OK because it was highbrow.

      Skylines are like altars. They tell you what a city stands for, in what it bothers to frame, display, honor. The New York City skyline—steel towers competing for the glory of being tallest or sharpest, squat brick buildings in their shadows—is an altar to the gods of global trade, who feed off inequality. I imagine people who see my city for the first time might have the same mix of awe and unease that people who came upon Constantinople or Peshawar felt in their heydays.

      D.C. is an altar to the gods of nationalism. And its skyline looked, to me, incomplete—like there could be yellow tape around swaths of city blocks that read “we’re working on it.” America is such a young country after all. We haven’t finished figuring out who deserves a tablet or a monument. It’ll get settled through dialogue or shouting matches. Either way, I hoped that in twenty or thirty years, the tiny lady we were going to visit would have a monster of a statue in her image.

      When my class filed out of the bus and into a Supreme Court conference room, a hush fell over us. There was no space for words in the enormity of what RBG represented—a future without glass ceilings, because she was determined to shatter them. We were inspired.

      And we knew it was in the realm of the highly possible that one of us could be sitting where she was sitting one day. We’re Brearley girls, after all. We are destined to run the world, I kept hearing. Even those of us on scholarships felt it.

      After a brief introduction, RBG invited us to ask questions. My hand shot up. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to ask. It’s just that my mouth worked so fast, I didn’t need to overthink. I could move my lips, and 80 percent of the time something decent would come out.

      This time, however, we were solidly in the not-good 20 percent.

      “What do you think of the LIRR gunman representing himself ?” The question rolled off my tongue. I was happy with it. Current events. Close to my heart. First question from the class. And maybe RBG will say something I can use in that unfinished debate with my fellow nerd girl. (It was unfinished because I had not won—at least not yet.)

      Justice Ginsburg responded, “What do you mean by ‘what do you think’?” She sounded unimpressed. “What do I think about what?”

      Uh-oh. She was not going to make this easy. I’d assumed she’d find the hook for me. But the guardian of the Constitution made it clear that it wasn’t her job to go fishing in my kiddie pool of outrage. She doesn’t pontificate on any matter that pops up, like politicians do. She lives to interpret what the amendments and prior precedents say about unsettled matters of law that are well defined, not sprawling.

      “It’s just that, it seems like a mockery of justice, of due process” I searched for words and defaulted to courtroom TV. I sounded like Judge Judy.

      Justice Ginsburg could tell. She turned to her handbag and retrieved a small pamphlet. It was a pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution. “I strongly encourage you to read this,” she said as she handed it to me. “Next question, please.”

      Her words stung. She was implying that I hadn’t read our nation’s founding document before. If I were really American, I’d know and wouldn’t ask nitwit questions. At least that’s how it felt—because I knew I was at Brearley representing a group no one thought needed representation.

      While students and teachers consumed politics, their America was divided between the white majority and the African American minority. The foreigner was an issue, not a constituency. They debated immigration if it came up in the State of the Union address, but they didn’t talk to immigrants—not the ones who served our food in the cafeteria or took kids home after class. Those were my people, and I let them down.

When I was humiliated at Brearley, it wasn’t because someone was trying to make me feel like less of a person. It was because I didn’t rise to be the biggest person I could be. At home, it was the opposite. The message there was: you’re smaller than you think you are.

      On Saturday nights, while my classmates were out living their lives—at concerts, on dates, building their “extracurricular” bona fides at a city shelter—I was stuck at the Shahani compound. It was Dad’s time to feel he still had the world he’d left behind, the one where your family is your primary social life (the way it’s supposed to be, he thought).

      The men and boys sat in the living room—playing carrom board, munching on samosas, drinking whiskey or soda. Mom and Auntie Shanta, the wife of Uncle Ratan, were in the kitchen, putting the last touches on a meal we would serve the men and boys (before eating ourselves).

      We were in Uncle Ratan’s home. He bought a place down the road from us. I was sitting on his carpet, half watching his five-foot TV. There may have been a story about a religious riot or political rally in Mumbai (they looked alike). It was Indian news, not even ABC.

      “Chuhree!” Uncle Ratan barked at me. “Why are you sitting there, looking like a fool? Go help your mother in the kitchen.”

      Chuhree. That favorite word of his. Crazy girl. I couldn’t tell if he was being Third World playful, or if he was serious. He had a trace of a smile. Either way, I wasn’t in the mood. When I was younger, if an adult told me to jump, I wouldn’t even stop to ask, “how high?” I’d just jump as high as I could, hoping to surpass expectations and gain approval. Now that I was getting older, I wanted respect. I ignored him.

      “Chuhree, did you hear what I said?” He repeated himself, harsher this time. The trace of a smile was gone.

      “They don’t need help,” I told him. “I already checked.”

      “Then go stand there and learn how to cook.”

      He was trying to break me in. Back when Ang was in sixth grade, Dad ordered her to take cooking lessons from Auntie Shanta. My big sister didn’t get top grades. Dad wanted to make sure she would at least have good marriage prospects. He didn’t force me. Ang thought it was because my grades were strong. I thought it was because, unlike her, I’d put up a fight. Dad didn’t like to fight.

      His little brother did. “I said go to the kitchen,” Uncle Ratan repeated himself.

      “NO!” The single syllable shot out of my mouth and pierced his eardrum.

      “What did you say?”

      I couldn’t believe it either. But I wasn’t going to take it back.

      Our eyes locked. I wished they hadn’t. I don’t know how to avoid eye contact. We were in front of an audience—Dad was right there—and I had defied my uncle directly, out loud. His manhood was on the line.

      “What did you say?” he repeated.

      “I’m going downstairs.”

      I got up to head to the staircase. There was another TV in the basement. I could find a sitcom about a happy family. Uncle Ratan blocked me. Standing inches from my face, the vein on his temple pulsing, I smelled the stench of his breath. It always smelled like rotten eggs.

      No longer speaking but shouting, the grenade of his temper came straight at me. “Go to the kitchen, or I’ll break your mouth.”

      “Lay a finger on me, and I’ll have you arrested,” I said. “This is America.”

      My legs trembled. But even if it meant a black eye or a broken tooth, I would not lose this fight. Chalk it up to Brearley training or my inherent nature.

      Uncle Ratan thought about it for a moment. I could see the wheels in his mind churn, creak, his jaw clench (maybe his fist, too). He stepped away.

      As I headed downstairs, I saw Mom standing still in the kitchen. She looked frozen in time. Moving to the suburbs did that—stripped her of friends, left her in an empty house with just her memories. Was this moment bringing her back to one before my birth, when she questioned a direct order? Did the protracted, intergenerational battle over who belongs in the kitchen follow us from the past to the present?

      I caught a glimpse of Dad, too, his face pale behind the wrought-iron bannister, his eyes fixed on the floor. I couldn’t tell if he was ashamed of me or his brother. No matter. A man threatens your child and you sit there, you coward. I was ashamed of him.