Tropicana Women, by Salonee Verma

The story of your birth is a Persaud family fable. The Persauds are storytellers and cooks, so everyone tells it differently. Mumma adds salt, Nani twists the words dry, Bua clips feathers to the letters and tries to set them free.

Here are some truths: When you were born, you were smaller than an orange. When you were born, you were actually an orange, peeled and pith glistening. When you were born, we couldn't leave you unattended at home, or else Nani would swallow you whole like she swallows cinnamon sticks to keep her young.

At night, Mumma runs your hand over the healed cut on the underside of her belly. Look, she says. Look at how I cut myself to birth you. I swear, it would have been easier to pluck you. 

Bua teases you for being born in the hospital. First Persaud in a hundred years to be so delicious that Mumma had to ride an ambulance to your birth. She rummages her fingers through your hair sometimes, pulling sharply before scrambling to make the Blue Line on time. Bua was late to her own birth, but after yours, she was never late again.

The day you asked Nani why the Persauds were cursed, why you still bleed juice when you skin your knees, she laughed. What curse? We're right where we want to be. Babu, there's evil in our blood. Try to catch up.

Last year, on your sweet sixteen, Bua gave you a photo album of your birth. Your father had scampered off with his dentist mistress by then, but his sister had set her jaw and bought a camera. She diligently shot pictures of every moment of your birth in penance for her brother being an asshole. So much blood. So much juice.

Tonight is the first time you open it, even though it’s been plumping in the back of your closet for months. It’s a special occasion. A new beginning. Mumma makes peach cobbler, which means you have Nani duty. You stand on the kitchen step-stool, holding the cinnamon sticks out of reach. Nani bears her teeth at you. For an old woman, she’s surprisingly vicious. She runs like hot honey melting down the sides of a plantain.

When you turn the pages after dinner, you ask Mumma why the photos are different from the stories the women of your family tell you. You were supposed to drain the Hudson dry with how much you wept, but instead, the pictures show you dry-faced and serious. 

Don't believe everything the Persauds tell you, Mumma says. She smooths back the brown of your forehead with a cracked red acrylic and points to a picture of a glass of orange juice tinted pink. There. There's your tears. Nani used to collect them. You think we could have poured that back into the river without polluting it?

You ask her where the juice is now, hoping for a story instead of a takedown. She laughs and hands you a biscuit off the top of the cobbler.

Nani butts in. Babu, I thought you were smart. I put the brains in myself, bheja fry leftovers from the night before you were born. I didn’t trust these two.

Bua points to your belly, cigarette between her lips. She took to smoking after her brother left his family to rot like plums left in a desert and she had to claim them as her own. Spoils of a hunt no one knew existed.  Best part of the Persauds is that we know how to eat. You want to find that juice? Do an autopsy.

She hands you the album again, laughing so loud that all of New York can hear her salted jubilation.

Salonee Verma is a Jharkhandi-American writer, an American Voices nominee, and the co-founder of antinarrative (@antinarrativeZ), a collaborative zine. Her work is published or is forthcoming in the Asian American Writers' Workshop, GASHER, Shenandoah, Backslash Lit, VIBE, and more. She has been nominated thrice for the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at saloneeverma.carrd.co.