Hirsh Sawhney - South Haven

“Tell him,” said Luca.

Siddharth took a deep breath and kept his eyes fixed on his desk. He reread the words a previous occupant had etched into it: Kiss Rules. His brother used to like Kiss. He wished Arjun would barge into the room at that very moment and save him.

“Siddharth, you need to look at me when I’m talking to you.”

He met his teacher’s angry eyes, green slits in his pudgy, bearded face. “What do you want?”

“What do I want? I want to be able to move on with class, if that’s not too much to ask.”

Each student was now looking at him, and his face burned.

“So?” said the teacher.

Siddharth turned toward the window. It didn’t matter that a hard rain was falling, or that water had turned the asphalt paths into little rivers — he would rather have been outside getting drenched.

“You want me to wait all day?” said Mr. Latella. He placed a hand on one of his flabby hips. “Because I can, you know.”

Siddharth put his pencil in his mouth and started chewing it, keeping his eyes fixed on the rain. “My great-grandfather. .” He peeked down to make sure his rendition of his teacher’s bulbous gut was still obscured by his arms. “Well, my dad. . he says my great-grandfather was royalty.”

“I can’t hear you with that pencil in your mouth. Lead poisoning is a serious thing, you know.”

He removed the pencil. “My great-grandfather was royalty, but that was a real long time ago.”

“Is this some kind of joke? Did you and Luca plan this or something?”

Siddharth shook his head, and his teacher wheezed deeply.

“You’re telling me you’re serious?” said Mr. Latella.

“I told you so,” said Luca.

Mr. Latella shifted his weight to his other leg, and his stomach jiggled. “So what? He was, like, a maharaja or something?”

“He was a prince,” said Siddharth.

“A prince?” Mr. Latella gripped his beard. “Wait, was he, like, nobility?” His eyes suddenly widened. “Was he English?”

The next sentences came out before Siddharth could pause to consider them. “My great-grandfather went to study in England — at Oxford. That’s a famous college.”

“Thanks, I know what Oxford is.”

“He married this, uh, woman there — my great-grandmother — and she was, like, a real distant relative of the king.”

“Which king?”

“King George.”

“How distant?”

“I don’t know. The king and my great-grandmother were fifth cousins or something.”

“Really?” Mr. Latella put his foot on an empty seat, and the keys on his belt loop jingled. He stared into the air and smiled. “You know, I always wondered if you were mixed.”

The teacher’s words made Siddharth feel bolder. “That’s why my skin’s light. And my eyes — in the right light, they have little flecks of green in them.”

“Go figure,” Mr. Latella snickered. “Your great-grandmother was British nobility.”

Siddharth nodded. In that moment, the lie he had told felt right. It didn’t feel like a lie.

Luca started pounding on his desk and chanting. “ Prince Sidd-harth, Prince Sidd-harth .” The rest of the class joined in too: “ Prince Sidd-harth, Prince Sidd-harth. . ”

Mr. Latella shook his head, but he was still smiling. “Okay, okay. Settle down.” He gave Siddharth a high five for the second time that year. “Take a bow, Prince Siddharth. Take a bow, and let’s move on.”

Siddharth was pretending to do math homework but was really watching television. He heard his father call for him. “What is it?” he yelled back. He wasn’t in the mood to get his father a glass of water. He wasn’t in the mood to tell him if the clothes he was wearing looked good or not. Mohan Lal kept on calling, and Siddharth begrudgingly peeled himself off the sofa.

He found his father in the bathroom wearing a pair of tan pants and a ribbed banyan — what Marc called a wifebeater. He was on his knees scrubbing the floor of the shower.

“Dad, what do you want?”

Mohan Lal told to him to clean up the house. He said Siddharth had turned their home into a pigsty.

“I turned it into a pigsty? Me?” Siddharth was about to shoot back with something mean — that Mohan Lal was worse than a pig, he was like a dirty Indian beggar who lived in a slum. That the house got so dirty because Mohan Lal was too cheap to pay the Polish cleaning lady to come more than once a month. But as he looked down at the glistening gray hairs of his father’s shoulders, he realized something strange was happening. Mohan Lal did clean from time to time. He blued the toilet bowls with that gel, vacuumed the floors in the family room and kitchen. But he rarely got down and dirty like this.

“Go clean your room,” said Mohan Lal. “Rachel and Marc will be here soon.”

“They’re coming over? Again?”

“Hurry up. Thanks to you, she’ll think we are animals.”

“Yeah, thanks to me,” Siddharth muttered. “I’m the one who has seven dirty coffee mugs on my desk. I keep the catalogs on the dining table for five months but never actually cut the coupons.” He reluctantly headed to his bedroom with an empty garbage bag and the vacuum cleaner. He sifted through the chaotic assortment of school papers on his desk, chucking a blackened banana peel and a paper plate full of Dorito crumbs into the garbage. Two weeks of dirty clothes were strewn across the patterned carpet. He stuffed his sweaters and sweatshirts into a drawer, then dumped his pants and T-shirts into the laundry basket in the linen closet outside the main bathroom, where Mohan Lal was now ringing out a mop.

Siddharth said, “So what are we doing tonight?”

“ We are not doing anything. Rachel and I have an appointment.”

“An appointment? What does that mean?”

“Nothing that concerns you.”

Fuck off , thought Siddharth. At least Marc was coming over. As long as he had Marc, the adults could do whatever they wanted.

The electronic doorbell rang just after five, and it sounded particularly off-key, like a dying bird. Ms. Farber walked into the house before he or his father could get there. She kissed Mohan Lal first on the cheek and then on the lips. She said, “I think those batteries need a-changing.”

“I’ve been telling Siddharth,” said Mohan Lal, who was now wearing a tie and blazer.

“I’ll take care of it right now,” she said. “Marc, get me a chair.”

“Leave it,” said Mohan Lal.

Marc slapped Siddharth five, then plunked himself down on the frayed love seat. Siddharth sat beside him and stared at Ms. Farber. Today she was wearing lots of black — black stockings and a black ribbed shirt. But her skirt was gray, and it stopped at her knees. He thought she looked good tonight — sort of elegant.

Mohan Lal handed her a recent letter from his publisher, which Siddharth had already read aloud to his father multiple times. Mohan Lal had sent in the first four chapters of his manuscript to Walton, and they were pleased with his progress. According to Ronald Wasserman, an assistant editor, Mohan Lal’s “perspectives on the field of marketing are not only impressive, but often innovative.” Although the book wasn’t due for another four months, Wasserman suggested that Mohan Lal rush to finish it by June. That way, they might be able to publish it as early as February.

After reading the letter, Ms. Farber dropped it to the floor and threw her arms around Mohan Lal’s neck. “Absolutely amazing! See, what did I tell you about positive thinking?”

Mohan Lal grinned. “Well, perhaps my discipline also played a role — my innovative ideas.”