Watch Me

Martina was not her real name. Not the one she was given at birth, at least. And this was half of the problem.

Her adoptive parents were tennis fans and had seen no issue with giving the little brown girl the agency had sent her a name that her peers at school would associate with snobbery. And everyone knew brown girls couldn’t – shouldn’t be snobby, even if their new parents are some of the wealthiest of their street.

‘Why aren’t you called something more Indian?’ the kids would ask.

‘Like what?’ she would ask with her small, quiet voice.

Then, the children, who had never seen another Indian person before and assumed they were barbarians of the worst order, would make various animal sounds.

Martina raised her shoulders almost to touch her ears, watched them with wide eyes, in awe of their condition of settled assimilation, feeling that it was certainly all her fault.

Other times, the kids would ask why she wasn’t wearing feathers. Of course, wrong Indians, but precision is not always required when teasing a shy girl at the playground: most things would do.

Yes, it was all her fault. She didn’t fit in. Everyone else did.

And there were the little pranks, the incessant tormenting of a girl, whose real parents hadn’t been able to love. It had taken the charity of her adoptive parents to give her a home and put some clothes on her back.

Not that Martina remembered what it was like before. She had been re-homed when she was a few days’ old. Who knows why her biological parents had given her away, she would reason? Maybe… She could come up with fanciful stories, some more plausible than others, but not a day went past that she didn’t look at herself in the mirror and think: ‘You can’t be loved.’

The fact remained that Martina’s adoptive parents, a dentist and a school principal, lived in a white, upper-middle-class suburb. There was no one like her for miles: nobody knew how to deal with someone like her.