by Bapsi Sidhwa
There was only silence.
Feroza stood trembling at the periphery of the pale light, hemmed in by darkness. She was inside a nightmare — only it was real. She would not be able to struggle out of it by reciting the Kemna Mazda prayer as she usually did. She forced her eyes shut and, her blood throbbing, said it anyway: “Who shall protect us when the vengeful harm of the wicked threatens us but Thee, O Mazda! May the Evil utterly vanish and never destroy Your Creation …”
But the prayer did not help. When she opened her eyes, her world had unaccountably shrunk, as if nothing existed outside the stairwell. America assumed a ruthless, hollow, cylindrical shape without beginning or end, without sunlight, an unfathomable concrete tube inhabited by her fear. She was sure something monstrous was crouched in the impervious shadows that patrolled this alien domain — ferocious sewer rats, a brutish Doberman — breathing softly, waiting patiently.
Feroza felt the skin on her scalp tighten and lift the roots of her hair. She tried to dispel the dreadful illusions her fear had bred by deliberately recalling images of the well-lit halls, the building crowded with people, the bustle on the streets, and the acres of shops stretched round the YMCA. She whispered the one hundred and one names of Ahura Mazda like an incantation: One Who Relieves Pain and Suffering, The Lord of Desire, The Causeless Cause, The Cause of Everything, The Creator of All That is Spiritual, The Undeceived, The Forgiving …
Then her panic gave way to a more focused fear: a self-preserving fear that permitted her to assess her situation.
Someone was bound to hear her sooner or later. She had no other recourse. She banged on the door again and, more in control, shouted, “Is anyone there? I’m locked in the stairway. Can anyone hear me? Open the door, somebody.”
She couldn’t just stand there. Driven by her need for action, she went down more flights of endless steps. Her feet by now were sure, her descent down the shallow steps quick. She knocked on the door at each landing. The odor of rot was getting stronger, and there was a new sweetish reek of alcohol and vomit she recognized from their evening on Eighth Avenue. Again, it made her want to throw up. She visualized the concrete stairwell drilling down and down, dwindling to a narrow point deep in the dank bowels of the earth. She was buried alive — sealed in a crypt.
Feroza heard something. The faintest shuffle. An intermittent creak. Sounds so slight that they were absorbed by her rather than heard. They appeared to come from way below.
She froze: she was sure something, aware of her presence, was stealthily climbing the steps.
Feroza’s mind again conjured the savage, bestial shapes. The images provoked were frightening enough. Then the shadows around her moved. Some concealed air current caused the dangling bulb to sway gently. A furtive draft keened, sounding eerily human. And her terror, turning its venom upon her like a scorpion its sting, presented her with more fearful images. The dark, impersonal face of the man leering at her in the mirror when she looked up from brushing her teeth, the brutal faces of the men who slyly muttered obscenities in the halls, the dangerous, focused stare of the drug dealer who had loomed whitely out of the recessed doorway on Forty-second Street.
Feroza leaned back against the door on the landing for support. Her body slid slowly down against it. She crouched, still and quiet as a small wild animal. And after a while, like an animal, she sniffed.
Her nostrils picked up the stale, sweet reek and the other odors percolating in the air. But there were no new smells to feed her alarm.
The sounds, too, were becoming familiar. She recognized that old metal and hollow concrete stairwells had their own secret voices. Gradually the space around her became less menacing, and the images her fear made so vivid retreated. She pushed back the new beret that had slid almost to her eyebrows and pulled it about her ears to fit snugly.
At the darkest part of the next flight of steps, just before the bannister curved, Feroza felt something that stopped her breath. A slight buzz inside the palm of her hand on the metal railing, a subtle combination of sensations that were neither built into the steps nor inherent in the construction of the staircase. Somewhere in the uncharted space someone or something had moved closer. There it was again. The faintest suggestion of a quiver beneath her stalled feet; a barely discernible tremor beneath her fingers that, amplified by her tense acuity, traveled up her arm and shot down her spine.
Instinctively she crouched on the steps, carefully pressing her ear to the balustrade. The vibration was discernible, as of someone occasionally touching the railing, taking the steps two or three at a time, swiftly and stealthily, then stopping.
The predatory cunning deployed in the movement, the feel of mass in the vibration of the cement cantilever, convinced her that it was a man. Terror implanted springs into her feet and made her body buoyant. Feroza turned and flew up the steps. She ran up flight after flight of stairs, her heart pounding, her breath rasping in her throat, and when she felt her lungs would explode she flung herself at a door.
She banged on it with her fists and with the palms of her hands and rattled the rod and the handle. She rammed her body into the door and screamed, “Open the door … For God’s sake, open the door! Can’t anybody hear me? Please, somebody …”
A form so tenuous that it could be an invention of her terror appeared to be watching her from the patch of darkness where the cement steps angled. She wasn’t sure she didn’t imagine a movement like a curl of smoke detach itself from the dark, a barely perceptible blur that could be a swarthy man’s paler shirt.
Feroza screamed. She screamed like a siren — like an instrument fashioned to scream.
There was a sharp, metallic click. Noises from outside. A voice. Sounds blessedly extraneous to the evil whispers and rustles of the malign stairwell.
The door gave, and Feroza almost fell into the corridor. The sudden brightness smote her distended pupils and turned her eyes yellow. She shied from the shaft of sunlight slanting through a window.
Someone was chattering garrulously in a quarrelsome tone.
Feroza squinted, trying to make out the shape of the person who had opened the door.
Bit by bit an awareness of her surroundings formed about her. She felt the tile floor beneath her feet, her handbag still on her shoulder, the beret again low and hugging her forehead. She saw the green paint on the door, the green walls, the aluminum-framed, sun-glazed window, the shape and face of a Japanese man. He had begun scolding her from the moment he set eyes on her as she tumbled out of the stairwell.
The Japanese man’s cantankerous voice washed over Feroza like a fresh mountain stream, like a gentle, dawn-drenched breeze, sweeping her with relief. The look of incredulity and concern that had raised his eyebrows and furrowed his brow when he first saw her was replaced by outrage. The man frowned, glaring at her, and his indignant expression soothed her, immensely reassured her.
Feroza was crying. Great shuddering sobs wracked her body. “Sorry, I’m sorry,” she wailed, unconsciously registering the man’s gestures, his mannerisms. And though his features and accent were alien, the expressions on his face and the emotions that charged his voice were wonderfully familiar. He could be an uncle, a family friend. He wasn’t more than thirty.
Feroza grasped instinctively that the man understood her experience, was reacting to the situation with the fears and fury born of his recognition of her naïveté and ignorance — the sheltered, overprotected condition of her young life as an Asian woman. His rage was protective, fussy, Asian. It poured out in a torrent of warning and dire statement:
“Never do that … Never! You could be murdered … No one would know. All kinds of shitty people … drugs!”
Didn’t she know these were fire stairs? Didn’t she know the door would open only on the first floor? Did she know she was stupid to lock herself in the fire stairs?
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Feroza wailed again, faint with relief.
Weeping copiously, Feroza followed the stocky figure in the plaid
shirt and loose corduroy trousers as he led the way, halting only when he turned to scold or demand an answer.
In this way, she gave him a disjointed account of the events; described the wholesome, helpful woman who had guided her to the stairwell and closed the door after her.
“Who is this woman? Show her to me! Right now you could be raped! You must have your head examined … You’re not a baby. You got no business in New York if you got no sense.”
“Are you alone?” he asked. “Who are you with?
“My uncle.”
Feroza knew they were on the eleventh floor. Somehow, between his scolding and her sobs, she had managed to ask which floor they were on, and the Japanese man had told her.
Feroza had no memory of how she arrived at their room on the fifteenth floor.
She remembered only Manek’s face. Ashen, scared. Herself uncontrollably shivering and sobbing. The Japanese man scolding him, scolding her.
As soon as the man left, Feroza crept into bed and covered herself from head to toe with the blanket. The blanket shook with the trembling of her body. Manek stroked the material where her legs were. “It’s all right: You’re safe now … You’re safe. Don’t worry.”
When Feroza awoke some hours later, her body was racked with pain. Her throat was raw and parched from shouting. Her arms, her shoulders, her fingers, her calves hurt.
Manek rushed down and across the street to bring her hot chocolate, sandwiches, aspirin. He looked wrung out, as though he had been through an equal ordeal.
“Weren’t you worried about me?” Feroza asked after she had eaten the last crumb from the cardboard boxes. She was surprised by how hoarse she sounded.
“No. I’d asked you to return by about one-thirty. If you hadn’t shown up by two or two-fifteen, then I’d begin to worry.”
Feroza couldn’t believe she had been marooned in that hell for only half an hour.
The next morning they caught the ten o’clock train to Boston. Feroza was quiet on the train, brooding, unwilling to talk of her experience or listen to her uncle’s concerned and worried homilies. Manek buried himself in the New York Times and let her alone.
An hour later they were snacking on chicken sandwiches, chips, and chocolate milk, and Feroza, caught up in the excitement of this new travel, captivated by the green, unfolding New England landscape, buried the horror of the stairwell.
Chapter 9
Manek had moved from a room he shared with a Turkish student at an M.I.T. dorm in Cambridge once he was sure Feroza would visit.
Two weeks earlier, on an unseasonably wintry morning, he had moved into the attic of a large, drafty, two-story, three-bedroom house in a seedy part of Somerville near Union Square. He shared the house and its one-and-a-half ancient bathrooms with five other shivering Pakistani and Indian students. The attic, with a tank of goldfish, had been bequeathed to his charge by the former occupant of the attic, a silken-haired Bangladeshi beauty.
The first thing Manek did after carrying one of Feroza’s outrageously heavy suitcases and sundry shopping bags up the steps, dumping them by the mattress on the floor and catching his breath, was to examine the glass tank perched on a narrow china cabinet.
“Shit.” A tiny fish, in an aqueous froth of iridescent red and gold scales, floated on the surface. Manek widened his nostrils and lightly sniffed. The murky water, topped by a film of oily patches, gave off a thin, unpleasant odor.
Manek had been away in New York for only a week, but his stock of goldfish, which had persisted in diminishing after the Bangladeshi beauty’s departure, looked alarmingly depleted.
“What’ve you been up to?” Manek asked the lanky Pakistani boy who staggered into the room with Feroza’s other obese suitcase and bits of hand luggage. “Eating goldfish for breakfast?”
Fierce strands of black, disheveled hair falling like spikes over his eyes, Jamil merely glanced at Manek. Too winded to reply, he collapsed in a tangle of scraggly limbs on a chair with lumpy stuffing.
Panting close on his heels, Feroza, still wearing the red beret she had bought in New York, threw Manek’s backpack and overcoat on her substantive mound of luggage and flopped down on the mattress.
“I fed them every day like you said,” Jamil said when he could speak. “But one or two died every day. Maybe you should change the water or their food or something …”
Manek solemnly picked up the dead goldfish by its tail and, his perplexed brow creased, laid it to temporary rest in an onyx ashtray.
“I’ll bury it when we go down.”
A dwindling pot of lackluster ferns by the entrance hall had perked up and flourished ever since its services had been requisitioned as burial grounds.
“Thanks for carrying the stuff up, yaar,” Manek said apologetically, suddenly remembering to acknowledge Jamil’s help.
“No problem.”
Pulling down his glasses to rest on the tip of his nose, Manek looked severely over them at Feroza. “The family’d better learn to travel light if they want to come to America. There are no coolies here to carry memsahib’s trunks up and down on their heads. If Jamil and I develop hernias and premature prostate conditions, it will be because of your ridiculous luggage.”
“Come on, yaar, it wasn’t so bad.”
Jamil stole a quick glance at Feroza. Like any well-brought-up sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl, she pretended not to notice.
“I had to lug the bloody things from Kennedy to the YMCA in New York and then here.”
Feroza removed her beret and, with a toss of her head, uncoiled the braids she had tied in an untidy knot at the back. “I offered to help. But you always have to prove you’re so goddamn strong.”
Manek thought Feroza sounded too cheerful and, considering how much he had put himself through for her sake — meeting her at the airport, showing her around New York, carrying her luggage — ungrateful and disgustingly smug.
“And what would you have done? Put your hand on your back, and said, ‘Oh, Manek, my back is breaking, the suitcase is too heavy. Oh, Manek, massage my back.’” Manek affected the girlish falsetto and the exaggerated delicacy he favored when he chose to impersonate a spoiled-brat Feroza.
Feroza sprang up to aim a kick at his shins, and her uncle nimbly skipped aside. “Hey! I’m still bruised from your last kick … What will Jamil think of your ‘hoydenish’ behavior?”
None of them was sure what the word meant. Jamil swiftly shifted his darkly admiring eyes from the spirited girl.
“I know exactly how to behave, and how to behave with whom!” Feroza stood hands on hips, tossing her stubby braids and cockily facing her uncle.
To see the determined pose patented by his mother and sister incarnated in his niece, whose behavior had grown alarmingly like theirs in the three years he’d been away, shocked and intimidated Manek. He moved closer to the precariously placed tank of goldfish, crossed his legs, and affected nonchalantly to lean against it. Each muscle tensed in the effort, Manek wondered what surprises his niece might treat him to next.
“You should’ve seen the kick I gave that fellow at Al-falah Cinema,” Feroza continued, oblivious of Manek’s complex reaction to her ebullient posture. “He had his collar up — trying to look all smart and gangee. A regular Bhattigate type, you know strutting up and down like a hero. He’d pass that close to us,” Feroza held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart, “and every time he’d go ‘pooch-pooch’!” Feroza puckered her lips and imitated the kissing sound. “I kicked him you-know-where! Another fellow there said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!’ But all my school friends said, ‘Why not? She did absolutely right. He deserved it!’ I think they had to take him to Gangaram hospital.”
Manek was acutely embarrassed. His niece had not only made the obscene noise and publicly referred to the unfortunate ruffian’s anatomy but had also intimated she knew exactly how vulnerable what she’d kicked was. And he was shaken by the chilling endorsement of the brutality by her friends from the Convent of
the Sacred Heart. If Pakistani girls taught by nuns were so vicious, what about the rest of the species?
Manek had no difficulty empathizing with the poor fellow. After all the man had only made kissing noises — not actually kissed any one of them. And who could blame the guy for acting a little fresh? It was perhaps the closest he could get to necking with an “uptown girl” in the Bhattigate social context. But for the grace of God, he thought — not, of course, in his sophisticated new American persona but as a callow, pre-America youth.
Observing the painful emotions coloring and contorting Manek’s features, and guessing part of the reason for his discomfiture, Feroza folded her knees and abruptly sat down on the mattress. She had gone too far. Finding herself awash in this exhilaratingly free and new culture had made her forget the strictures imposed on her conduct as a Pakistani girl. Reacting typically to her guilt and confusion, she raised her chin, dropped haughty lids over her amber eyes, and, turning scarlet, stared imperiously at the attic paneling.
Languid gaze averted, avid ears nevertheless tuned in, Jamil also blushed. His admiration had quadrupled. Here was the kind of girl he could die for. Join the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and shoot missiles from his shoulders at the Russian planes for. Dedicate his life to. This girl knew the true meaning of courage and honor the way a girl should!
And she was beautiful.
Taking note of Manek’s embarrassment, and appreciating also the reasons for his sensitive friend’s chameleonlike changes in color, Jamil made some excuse about preparing dinner and left the attic.
Manek sullenly showed Feroza where to put her things.
While Feroza unpacked, trying to stuff as much as she could in the space he had cleared for her in his makeshift closet and chest of drawers, Manek turned his back on her and scowled at the goldfish.
“Manek, look at all the stuff your sister and mother have sent you,” Feroza exclaimed.
Manek briefly glanced over his shoulder. There was a pile of books, hand-knitted garments, and parcels neatly wrapped in newspaper. There was Feroza’s wistful, almost penitent face looking up at him, aching to make peace.