Find out more about: A Girl Like Me here Recently transplanted from the quiet, green suburbs of Minnesota to the bustling concrete jungle that is Gurgaon, sixteen-year-old Anisha Rai is determined not to take to the new place she must call home. While her irrepressible mom, Isha, thrives on the crazy juggling between a hotshot job and their new home. ‘Read the opening chapter of A Girl like Me below’ New Delhi. it has changed since i saw it last, it has thickened, blackened, erupted like a pollinating pod. The straight, sparse lines that used to make up the contours in the distance are gone. They are shattered into fragments, twisted into flyovers, contorted into high-rises, billboards, pounding masses of people. The buildings are taller and leaner, the slums have gained weight, and the colors are vivid whirls and splatters, grimier and shinier all at once. It comes at me with a new snarl and an old odor, this old new city, it pelts me with its heat, it lashes across my face; it makes me dizzy. I close my eyes against the burning yellows and blinding reds outside my taxi window, settle back against the burning vinyl seat. My mind pulls up the soothing greys and whites of the winter backyard. It used to be bald, the winter backyard. A birch, a pine, a few skinny ashes; a single Dutch Elm that spread its filigreed wings over the peeling deck, the sunlight shards of silver pierced through its bony branches. When the breeze blew you saw stars dance. And on the ground, the endless snow. It covered everything; it looked soft and fluffy as a comforter filled with down, like you could lie right down and pull it over yourself and disappear underneath its soft white folds and dream soft white dreams. And all around the shrunken skeletons of bushes that promised to keep a quiet vigil.