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12/21/97 (Sunday)
FINALS ARE OVER!!! I got an A-minus in orgo I. I'm writing it down here so that in the spring, when orgo II eats me alive, I'll have proof that I survived part one.
Ramadan starts in about ten days, so I'm eating everything in sight while I still can. Ammu is making pitha, the little rice cakes with khejur gur (date palm molasses), which is our winter thing, and the whole apartment smells like it. Abbu keeps walking through the kitchen and "testing" them. He has tested about fifteen.
Rafi wants to see the Titanic movie that just came out. Half his class went opening weekend. He says he wants to see it for the special effects. Sure, Rafi. Sure.
Next semester: orgo II, physics II, and starting MCAT prep. I'll try to write more. (I say that every time.)
11/27/97 (Thursday) - Happy Thanksgiving!
We were open, like every year, because a lot of our regulars are cab drivers and guys who live four to an apartment and don't have anywhere to go. Abbu has a Thanksgiving tradition, which is turkey rezala. Rezala is a Bengali wedding curry, very rich, with yogurt and cardamom. Normally it's made with chicken or mutton. Abbu makes it with turkey. It is not traditional in either country. It's delicious.
Anybody who says they have nowhere to go gets a plate for free. Twenty-three plates this year. I carried most of them.
Things I am thankful for:
11/17/97 (Monday)
I wrote this on the 7 train home on a legal pad at 10:40 at night, and now I'm typing it on the family computer, which is technically Abbu's computer for the restaurant books and technically smells a little like onions.
Orgo lab ran long. Our recrystallization would not crystallize. We stood there and stared at it. The TA looked at it and said, "Sometimes it just doesn't want to," which is the most honest thing anyone has said to me all semester.
Rafi was still up when I got home, doing geometry at the kitchen table with the radio on. He'd made me cha. Rafi has never once in his life made me cha. I asked him what he wanted. He said nothing. Then he said, "Can you not tell Ammu I got a 71 on the geometry test." So now we know what a cup of tea costs.
(I didn't tell. I also made him do the test corrections with me until midnight. That's the real price.)
11/9/97 (Sunday)
A lady on the 7 train asked me yesterday if I'm hot in "that thing." It was 41 degrees out. I said no, actually, I'm the only warm person on this train. She laughed. That's the best way it goes.
I started wearing hijab when I was fifteen. Nobody made me. Ammu actually cried, because she was worried about the kids at school. (She was right to worry, but only for about a month.) It's hard to explain why. You know how when you put on your coat to go out, you feel like yourself going out? It's like that. It's me, going out.
It does come up at the pre-med advising office. My advisor, who is a very nice man, asked me last week, very carefully, if I had "thought about how patients might react." I said, "Yes. I've been thinking about it since I was fifteen." He nodded and wrote something down. I don't know what. I hope it was "she's thought about it."
10/19/97 (Sunday)
So. There has been A Proposal.
Not to me, obviously. To my mother, via Shirin Khala (khala means mom's sister, or any auntie who acts like one), via a lady at the mosque whose nephew is an engineer in New Jersey. I have not met the nephew. I have seen a photograph. He looks nice. He's wearing a tie and standing next to a car that I don't think is his.
Ammu brought it up at breakfast very casually, which is how I knew it was serious. I said, Ammu, I'm 21, I have orgo, I have the MCAT in April, then four years of medical school, then residency. She said, "Your Nanu was married at seventeen." I said, "And did Nanu take organic chemistry?" Abbu laughed so hard he had to leave the table.
It's handled for now. Abbu handled it. He told Ammu, "Let her be a doctor first. Then the engineers can line up." But it'll come back. It always comes back. Like orgo.
10/5/97 (Sunday)
Saturday night at the restaurant. We had a birthday party of fourteen and they all wanted separate checks. Motin Chacha, our cook (chacha means uncle, and he's been with us so long he basically is one), burned his wrist on the edge of the tandoor and wouldn't go home. I made him hold it under cold water for ten minutes (see? pre-med!) and he told me I'm very bossy for a girl. I told him I'm very bossy for a doctor. He said, "Not yet." Everybody's a critic.
After closing, Abbu and I sat at table six and ate the leftover dal and rice with our hands out of the same bowl, which Ammu says is not how a future doctor eats, and counted the money. Abbu's hands are so tired at the end of a Saturday. He's been on his feet since eleven in the morning. He's 52. He does this six days a week so I can sit in a lab and draw arrows on molecules.
I think about that a lot. Maybe too much. It's a lot to carry up the subway stairs.
9/24/97 (Wednesday)
First orgo exam today!! I will now describe organic chemistry for those of you lucky enough to have avoided it. Imagine a Lego set where the pieces are invisible and the instructions were written by someone who hates you. Now imagine the pieces can flip into a chair shape or a boat shape depending on their mood. That's it. That's orgo.
I think I did OK. I think. There was a mechanism question where I drew all the arrows and at the end the molecule looked sad, so I erased everything and drew it again.
I prayed Asr (the afternoon prayer) in the Muslim Students' prayer room in the basement of the student center right before the exam, which is my new strategy. Don't tell the imam I'm using prayer as a study aid. Then I prayed again in my head during question 7. I think God understands about question 7.
9/14/97 (Sunday) - My first entry!
Hi!! Welcome to my page! My name is Aisha, I'm 21, and I'm a junior at a college in Manhattan, majoring in biology, which is a nice way of saying pre-med, which is a nice way of saying I haven't slept since 1994.
My little brother Rafi (16, knows everything) calls me Lab Rat because I basically live in the chem lab. So that's the name of the page. My friend Farah made her own page this summer and showed me how, and I thought, why not? It's going to be a journal. I'll write in it when I can. Probably mostly about organic chemistry, which is trying to kill me.
About me: my parents are from Dhaka, Bangladesh. We came here when I was five. My Abbu (dad) and Ammu (mom) run a restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, under the elevated train. The sign says SHAPLA INDIAN RESTAURANT, because in 1984 when they opened, Abbu says, nobody in Queens knew what Bangladeshi food was, and he wasn't going to be the one to explain it to people on an empty stomach. (Shapla is the water lily. It's our national flower.) I work there Friday and Saturday nights. I can carry four plates of biryani at once, which is not on my med school application but should be.
Yesterday Ammu watched Mother Teresa's funeral on TV all afternoon with the sound turned way up, and cried, and then made me promise that when I'm a doctor I'll work for free sometimes. I said, Ammu, I'll have loans. She said, "Sometimes." OK, Ammu.