Biography: Sajel Malhotra

SAJEL MALHOTRA

Sajel Malhotra is the youngest child in her family, having an older sister Shondra, who graduated from college before Sajel graduated from high school, and an older brother Vikram. Sajel is on good terms with her siblings, but Shondra was an overachiever of the first degree, and Vikram constantly out with friends; as such, there was not much opportunity for them to bond.

Sajel was an outgoing child, intelligent and capable; her parents made sure to speak English around the house so that she would assimilate. However, much of what she was as a young child became irrelevant when she was nine years old. Her family lived in a large house overlooked by a number of trees, some of them in states of poor health and disrepair; one night, during a thunderstorm, one of these trees was felled, and smashed down onto the house. Her brother Vikram received a major laceration across the stomach; Sajel, sleeping on her stomach, was peppered with shards of wood and glass. The surgeons were able to save most of her liver and one of her kidneys, but she had to be held immobile for a week while her injuries healed. The next summer, feeling a need to start over, her parents relocated to the Mount Hill area, where Sajel started fifth grade without knowing a soul. In some ways, Sajel considers herself to have died the night of the thunderstorm, and a new girl to have been born in her place; she rarely refers to anything that happened in her life before she was nine.

The new Sajel was deeply self-conscious about her scars, a situation exacerbated by her mother's (well-intentioned) reminders to be very, very careful with her damaged body. While Vikram launched himself into his new life and, if anything, became more outgoing than before, Sajel became introverted and reticent. (Of course, it didn't hurt that Sajel felt deeply ashamed of her injuries, whereas Vikram would pull up his shirt to reveal the inch-wide foot of pale scar tissue across his belly if anyone wanted to see it.) She employed snarkiness and biting irony in her defense, endearing some students to her and alienating others; her teachers reflected that she seemed to be a completely-matured adult in demeanor, complete with cynicism. She had very few friends, and those she had were mostly the misfits and the outcasts. Her family, of course, worried themselves sick over her, but when they asked her if she was happy, she always said she was. The new Sajel played things close to the vest.

During junior high, Sajel made what her parents thought of as her first "normal" friend, a nice white boy named Brandon Chambers who appreciated her sarcasm but seemed stable and well-centered despite it all. He also brought several other pals with him, particularly Zachary Crane, who became more of a brother to Sajel than Vikram had ever been. Of course, not all was perfect amongst her new friends; for obvious reasons, Sajel didn't tell he family when Brandon tried to kill himself. If anything, the incident drew them even closer together; Sajel was the only person Brandon could turn to with his despair, and vice versa. The two even became lovers for a very short time, giving their virginities to each other before deciding that they would be better off (a lot better off) just friends.

Despite it all, though, Sajel kept Brandon in the back of her head as a potential romantic entanglement. She certainly needed the back-up: who else could she ask? As far as she was concerned, her scars made her completely unsuitable as a girlfriend; there was no way she could be intimate with anyone, not without revealing them and having to see the boyfriend's face curl into that look of disgust. Her uterus had been somewhat damaged, and the doctors weren't sure she'd be able to have children. What did she have to offer? Nothing, she decided; there was no hope for her. Her opinions seemed to be underlined when only a couple people ever asked her out over the course of high school and junior high; and these boyfriends never went anywhere. They seemed shallow to her, and it was hard to let them touch her. All the things she'd wanted—love, sex, a family, a husband—had been taken away from her, or so it seemed, by the crack of a tree trunk. Cynicism was a natural outgrowth for her personality.

Salvation came via the intervention of her best friend Zach and his girlfriend Christa, who practically forced her to accept the propositions of her latest suitor, a fellow named Garrett Wang. To Sajel's everlasting surprise, things worked out between them; she suspected that Zach and Christa had meddled, interceding on her behalf to warn him of the trauma she had suffered; in fact, as she found out later, they had done nothing of the sort. Garrett was supportive of her nervousness with physical intimacy, and had a dry, ironic sense of humor that complimented her own. The two of them parted amicably after high school, since they were both going in completely different geographical directions for college, but remained good friends for many years.

Once away at Willot University, freed not only from others' preconceptions of her, but her own preconceptions about herself, Sajel found herself beginning to flourish. She no longer felt light-years more mature than her peers; they had caught up with her, and in some ways she had caught up with them. She no longer felt the need to fend off all offers of friendship; while it wasn't hard to get asked out more in her first year than in her entire high-school career, it did happen. And, while some people did react badly when hearing about her scars, most of them were the thoughtless, immature sort she should've known better than to talk to in the first place. Almost everyone else was supportive, or at least sympathetic. Graduating with her degree in Political Science, she then moved on to law school. Unlike many of her friends, she has not yet found the man of her dreams, but she feels confident that, with the right attitude and enough sass, she will someday... And that's more than she could say ten years ago.

Sajel has also been difficult to find pictures for, simply because she's Indian and that's not what crosses my computer screen very often. Furthermore, her personality has evolved more dramatically than any other character's; there are now two or three people I can point to and say, "This person influenced Sajel," and only one of them actually hails from the Middle East. (Another is Slovenian.) This was the closest I could get:

• Sajel, with unusually smoldering expression