a simple question

I wasn’t sure if he was joking because the tone of his voice and his face did not provide a clue. I wasn’t even sure if it was an insult or a simple childish curiosity. Perhaps I’m projecting my adult self onto that entire incident but the one thing that remains quite clear is my memory of the question itself.

“What color is your blood?” he said. I didn’t know him but I recognized him as one of my classmates.

“What?” I said, not sure I had heard the question correctly.

“Your blood, what color is it?”

I was confused. I had been in America, a small town in Louisiana specifically, for all of three months. I was eleven years old, and still hoping to wake up one day and find myself back home. I didn’t understand much of what was going on around me, much less the people here who always seemed to be asking strange questions, about the sacred cows and the bindi on my mom’s head or the smell of the food that my mom packed in my lunch-box or where exactly in Africa it was that India was located.

I made a decision in that moment.

“Green,” I said.