While my jungle was being stripped away, a new woman came. My adopted dad moved in with Dottie the Clown. She had closets full of costumes; bright wigs, painted shoes, jackets that smelled like cake and old laughter. Her house was big, like the kind you see in old movies, with ceilings too high and long hallways that creaked with secrets. It stood alone in the middle of nowhere, beside a horse stable and a tiny airstrip where no one ever landed.
I was only five. I wanted to die. I wanted to be with my mother. I didn’t tell. Growing up in a psychiatrist’s house, you learn what not to say. So I kept it quiet, my secret folded deep inside. My handler didn’t like when I talked about my mom, she would say, "I'm your mom."
Most children are taught not to talk to straingers, I was made me answer every strangers. “What happened to your leg?”, "How did you loose your leg?", "Why do you have one leg?" they’d ask the same question over and over. And I had to tell them: “I was in a train accident when I was a baby.” Every man, woman, child; I had to repeat the worst day of my life, the day my mom died beside me. My middle brother said I should get to choose, but he was hushed. I answered, and answered, and answered. A machine on repeat used as a prop for the handler.
She wouldn’t let me take medicine. So the nerve pain stayed. Zap—every three seconds. Zap—through my leg, through my little body. Zap—circle, buttocks, groin. Each one a lightning strike. My little body glitching, sparking, stripped frayed wires for the experiment, for the white coats. Like a broken toy nobody believed. Doctors said nerve pain wasn’t real. So I must be making it up. But I wasn’t. I was hurting. Spinal root avulsion is one of the most painful injuries you can have and normally fatal, then add the weight of the experiments on top. I couldn’t mourn my mother. I wasn’t allowed to mourn her.
Still, there was good. My adopted dad put me on Snickers, a fat, shaggy Shetland pony. First I was led, then I learned the reins, and soon we flew across the fields. The horses listened. They breathed warm against me, tossed their heads, swished their tails. They saw me broken, but loved me anyway, like the Sisters. Unconditional. Not like humans in my new world. Hopkins had taught me that pain always came before love. But the horses gave love first. I clung to them like the monkey clinging to the wire mother, hungry for touch that didn’t hurt.
One day my adopted mom asked, “Do you want to learn Indian things?” I said no. I didn’t understand racism, but I knew I didn’t look like anyone except Courtney and her family. I wanted to fit in, to be as white as I could. Learning about how I was different would make me even more different than just missing a limb. So I said no. But it should never have been my choice. Every child should know their culture. Mine were left behind because I desperately needed to be a part of a family that kept slipping through my fingers.
She brought me to the Dutch embassy once, for Christmas. They had Zwarte Piet—white people painted in blackface, curly wigs, calling it tradition. It was strange, and it hurt something inside me, though I didn’t yet have the words for why.
my handler wasn’t smart. She was pretty once, and she told me she married my adopted dad just for his doctor’s money. But he never had much. Her words about race slipped sharp into my self estime. “Eat all your food—think of the starving children in India.” Or, “Indians live in poverty. Indians are all beggars.” She knew I was listening, that I was learning to hate myself through her voice. Learning to hate myself the way she hated my people.
I carried an alien card; that’s what they called it then. And I thought I was from space and India must be in space. Because the only aliens I knew came from the stars. We must have fallen from the sky onto the tracks to be hit. my child mind was trying to understand what wasn't making sense.
When it was time for U.S. citizenship, she wanted to take me to her country to visit her family. I asked why we didn’t visit mine. She said, “You don’t want to be around that poverty and filth.” So I gave up India, without knowing. I lost my citizenship. Unlike her citizenship, I could not be two things at once. I was stripped of another piece of me, until I didn’t know what I was anymore. Just a doll from a train wreck, paraded around to please my handler. paraded around to others as her nice Christian act. Her good deed. Saving a starving, poverty-stricken one legged beggar baby.
I remember when I told her, “I want to die.” I was six, maybe seven. We lived on Reader Lane. She slammed the van into a space—not ours, just sudden. She turned with a hiss. Her face was angrier than I’d ever seen, her eye black. I don’t remember her words, my brain blocked them. But I remember the hate in her eyes. I stayed silent after that. Some days okay, some days wishing to be gone. Because in her house there was no room for mistakes, no room to grow. The conditioning was pain first then love. And I was the baby monkey wanting the cloth mother but getting the wire one.
But when Snickers carried me across the fields, for a little while the pain and hurting fell quiet. The horses kept me alive. They breathed their warmth into me, pressed their soft noses against my skin, nudged me when I wanted to disappear. Their energy flowed into mine, as if they were lending me their strength. Every swish of their tails, every stomp of their hooves reminded me I still existed.