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Arthi and Pooja
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Pooja was born 14 minutes before Arthi in the same year I was born, but I met Arthi first in our language arts class taught by our stern but fair grammarian teacher1 with a thick Southern accent in 8th grade: a petite Indian girl with wiry rectangle glasses, a tight long braid down to her waist, who knew what the word “appositive” meant. I kept this in mind in science class when Arthi and I were paired up for a data collection project. We ended up getting a C-, mutually finding out months later that we assumed the other one was the nerd who would carry the project. We did not end up becoming friends immediately.
A year after we barely passed our 8th-grade science project, Arthi, Pooja, and I, who lived a mile away from each other, ended up getting districted into the same massive high school in the neighboring town that formerly consisted of horse farms2. We were nerdy ethnic minorities, active Tumblr users, and in the same lunch period. Arthi and I ended up becoming friends, and soon after, so did Pooja and I. And then the rest of the gang.34
Back to present day...Arthi is leaving for Trivandrum next week (the same day I leave for grad school) to study the research the gig economy in Kerala and Pooja is in South Carolina completing her PhD. A week before I saw them in my city, Pooja had just returned from Kahzakhstan on a research trip studying tritium contamination in birds.