Saris and American clothes would not coexist in the same shallow closet of these first homes.
The way I’d seen in all of my friends’ houses, too-the saris couldn’t fit into the parents’ closets. There were certain colors that bloomed normal on the palette of Indian saris, hanging in rows in the guest bedroom / youngest daughter’s closet. Parrot green.” In my head, this was the same color as kelly green, but I never found out. My mother would say to me, “Will you get the matching blouse from my drawer? It’s popti-colored. Nearly everything that happened in my life when I was twelve took place at home, or at some close distance from home. And isn’t that what all writers want? Falling into a book, each one a kind of Narnia, and feeling that exquisite edge of aloneness, honed almost to happiness? I tried these words on in my head, alone in my room, the bedside lamp on, folded under the covers, escaping into the pages of a book. That’s what I mouthed to myself, then: scarcely.
Like every girl, I wanted both.Īnother series: four girls away at camp-it was in truth a boarding school, but I could scarcely imagine such a thing. Like every girl, I wanted a twin or a best friend. A series about twins, one good and one slightly more interesting. No one felt alone past the second chapter. A series about two best friends from the same street who made room for a third. These were books about girls with doting fathers and best friends named George, books about an adopted boy named Jim and his sister, Honey. I remember, with a specificity that surprises me, the foreignness of certain colors: kelly green, strawberry blonde. In the books I read growing up, there were always words I couldn’t quite imagine. Ever since their first publication in the 1940s, the Betsy-Tacy stories have been loved by each generation of young readers.Photograph courtesy of Sonal Gadhia Dubey But Betsy, Tacy, and Tib always manage to have a good time. They cook up awful messes in the kitchen, throw mud on each other and pretend to be beggars, and cut off each other's hair. Sometimes they quarrel with Betsy's and Tacy's bossy big sisters, but they never quarrel among themselves. The grown-ups think they will quarrel, but they don't. Then Tib moves into the neighborhood and the three of them start to play together. |a : |b HarperCollins Publishers, |c 2011.
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