by Bapsi Sidhwa
“Leave it all in one place,” Manek directed coldly and resumed his abstracted and glum scrutiny of the fish.
Feroza appeared to have lost the bit of deference he had managed to wrest from her in Pakistan. In the time he’d been away, and in the short while she’d been exposed to the American culture, she’d grown shockingly brazen. She had also been disrespectful and un-niecelike before his friend.
And she interrupted him! He thought with chagrin about a fault he had already fretted about in New York. When he’d tried to explain something seriously, she’d cut in with a wisecrack or change the subject. Now, every time he spoke to Jamil, she hijacked the conversation.
Manek regretted his consideration in not drawing her attention to this intolerable habit earlier. He’d thought he must not crowd her with his advice, but she needed to be crowded with as much advice as he could cram into her.
He’d taken the knocks, learned his lessons the hard way, and here she was, being spoon-fed the beneficent fruit of his experience, he reflected bitterly.
Manek recalled the stony expressions of professors as they looked away whenever he tried to correct someone who was giving wrong answers in class. How icily they had looked down their noses at him afterwards. Nobody had told him that Americans felt so strongly about interruptions. He’d had to find it out for himself.
Manek brooded darkly on ways to improve Feroza’s manners and tame her behavior. He’d have to guide her, explain things no matter how much she resented it, no matter how persistent he’d have to be. He knew it would no longer do to crack his whip, even figuratively, and say, “You must learn to respect your uncle. You must learn to listen. I’ve lived six years longer than you,” as he could, with a real whip, when they were children. Manek yearned for her respect and, even if he didn’t acknowledge it to himself, her awe and admiration.
Manek’s eye caught the poster of Bhutto that Feroza had hung from a nail on the paneling. She had removed the landlord’s small, framed sketch to do so and was in the process of smoothing out the curl in the paper.
“If you hang that socialist bastard on my wall, I’ll tear him to bits,” Manek said in a level voice that scared Feroza.
“Okay baba, okay,” she said and quietly rolled up the poster and tucked it back into its cardboard cylinder.
~
That afternoon, after they had feasted on a dish of lamb-hamburger and peas thoughtfully prepared for them by Jamil, Manek decided to drive his niece across the Charles river in his fifth-hand, two-door 1971 Ford convertible.
The foam stuffing showed through small, angular gashes in the upholstery, and the passenger door was permanently fastened with entwined wire. Jamil vaulted into the back, and Feroza, muffled up in overcoat and scarf, had to slide into her seat from the driver’s side.
“So, how do you like my car?” Manek inquired of Feroza.
He sounded so hearty that Jamil, who had wondered if the afternoon’s unpleasantness had been smoothed over, relaxed, and Feroza, who knew Manek better, at once became alert.
“I bought it for sixty dollars from the girl who gave me the goldfish.”
“We-ell,” Feroza said warily, trying to be both honest and tactful, “It’s certainly bigger than your room, if nothing else.”
“You shouldn’t judge things merely by their outward appearance. Appearances are deceptive. Listen to the engine. Even an idiot like you should be able to tell the car’s okay for another thirty thousand miles at least. I’m not a fool … I’ve more experience than —”
“Nobody’s calling you a fool, baba.”
“There you go, interrupting again. You won’t even let me finish a sentence. I don’t know when you desis will learn good manners. If there’s —”
“What do you mean, ‘you desis’! What’re you? A German?”
Manek lifted both hands from the steering wheel in a gesture combining exasperation and disgust.
Feroza, who had a mind to express herself more fully, curbed her speech.
After a half-minute of absolute silence, Manek said, “As I was saying, if there’s one thing Americans won’t stand, it’s being interrupted. It’s impolite. It’s obnoxious. You’ve got to learn to listen. You can’t cut into a conversation just as you like. You’ll be humiliated. Learn from someone who knows what he’s talking about.”
And Manek’s tone of voice and choice of words finally declared to Feroza all the pent-up hurt within him and the pressures he had been subjected to, not only that afternoon, not only since she’d arrived from Pakistan, but since Manek had arrived in America.
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. His neck appeared thin and fragile beneath his curly mop of overgrown hair. His wide, bony wrists stuck out from his shirt and jacket. The lean line of his jaw, covered by slight stubble, looked uncertain.
Feroza’s heart went out to him. She could only guess at how he had been taught American ways, American manners. He must have endured countless humiliations. And his experiences — the positive and the humiliating — had affected him, changed him not on the surface but fundamentally.
Manek had told her about the accident late one night in New York. They were both in their respective beds, and Feroza, who thought she would drift off to sleep as she usually did when Manek talked at night, found herself listening.
Manek had spent a weekend with a Pakistani friend in Southbridge, near the Connecticut-Massachusetts border. Walking to the bus stop, which was at a gas station on a country road, he had lost his way in the dark. A car had hit him and sped away. He was severely bruised, his ribs and elbow broken. He had lain there in the snow. The few cars that went past, their headlights shining, did not stop. He had walked six hours to get to a hospital.
This had happened almost a year ago, but he had not written home about it. It would only worry his mother. Feroza guessed that it had been more an assertion of his fierce need for independence — the challenge to cope, to fend for himself — than any inordinate concern for Khutlibai.
Sitting by him in the run-down car, Feroza recalled also how his face had shone when he told her of his travels, hitchhiking across America with a friend. It was his first summer in the States, and he was still at the University of Houston. They’d visited the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, the caves in New Mexico. And the kindness of the people they’d met.
He’d told her about Houston itself, the unimaginable quantities of free food the desi students had ingested every evening in Houston’s bars during the happy hour.
He’d told her of the unexpected pleasure he had derived from the one opera he’d been dragged to because his friend had a free ticket.
The sheer bliss of telephones that worked come cloud or drizzle, the force of the water in the YMCA showers, electricity that never fluctuated or broke down or required daily hours of “load shedding” were joys Feroza was discovering for herself. The enchantments of the First World.
When she had seen Manek leaning against the railing, waiting for her at Kennedy Airport, his arms and ankles crossed and pantomiming all kinds of exaggerated emotions the moment he glimpsed her, Feroza had believed he was the same old Manek.
She had been misled.
In this moment of insight, Feroza thought about some of the changes she had unconsciously noted since her arrival in New York. Manek was humbler and, paradoxically, more assured and quietly conceited, more considerate, yet she sensed that at an essential level he had become tougher, even ruthless. Her mother had been right when, after that short telephone conversation with him from Pakistan, she had asserted, with tears of happiness shining in her eyes, that her brother had changed.
Feroza vaguely sensed that America had tested Manek. Challenged him, honed him, extended his personality and the horizon of his potential in a way that had made him hers.
She thought of that evening in New York when she had known that Manek would not return to Pakistan. The sadness affected her again.
“Know something — the engine sounds like a Rolls,” Fe
roza said impulsively, convincingly artless and earnest. “I’m sure it will go another thirty thousand miles easily.”
But Manek was too upset to be so easily appeased. After an initial moment of silence, he launched into a ten-minute harangue on the virtues of the worn Ford and the astute bargain he had struck. And Feroza drew upon her meager resource of patience and responded to what he said with appropriate exclamations of admiring agreement.
At the end of the hectoring discourse, Manek was soothed. Feroza was driven around Boston. Up Commonwealth Avenue with its stately foreign consulates, through the winding and undulating streets of Beacon Hill, and past the exclusively priced shops and salons on Newbury Street, where a haircut cost two hundred dollars.
They drove along the Public Garden and down Marlborough Street aglow with dogwood, and Boston promptly became Feroza’s second favorite city.
When they drove back over the repair-constricted bridge that led them past M.I.T., she found her initial impression of Cambridge reinforced. The squat brick buildings, the peeling frame houses, the seedy-looking shops in Central Square reminded her of the army barracks, servants’ quarters, and some of the more unfortunate shopping centers on the once-fashionable Mall in Lahore.
Manek turned into the narrow lane outside Eliot House and sneaked the Ford into a dark space overhung by trees, between two cars parked on the curb.
~
Manek’s life had been blighted the first week he owned the Ford. It stalled at traffic lights, and the engine died on deserted roads. He replaced the battery and the carburetor.
The car’s performance improved, but there was another snag. Each time he parked the car it either disappeared or had the dread police ticket tucked under the wiper. And you couldn’t bribe the cop with small change; he’d been warned by his compatriots not to try it.
Manek paid more in tow-away costs, fines, and repairs than the Ford was worth. Reeling from the malign rapidity with which the fines were imposed, Manek gloomily toyed with the idea of drowning himself, the dying fish, and the ungainly albatross of a car unloaded on him by the heartless Bangladeshi in the Charles River.
That is, until Jamil, an old hand at bucking the perils of parking in Cambridge, showed him all the secret crevices in which to park a car — even one as wide and long-finned as the Ford — within walking distance of Harvard Square.
With the Ford safely tucked away, they strolled through a narrow lane congested with smart little Japanese cars seeking parking meters and emerged on Massachusetts Avenue. Stores and restaurants lined the street to one side.
“That’s Harvard Yard.” Hands in his pockets, Manek indicated it with a movement of his head. Feroza looked at the unimpressive masonry peeping through the thick crowns of trees behind a tall brick wall. They crossed Massachusetts Avenue and, through towering wrought-iron gates, entered Harvard Yard.
What had appeared so unimpressive from across the street opened up to display a noble girth of elegantly apportioned space. The atmosphere around them also changed, whisking them off to some loftier dimension that insulated their ears against the din of traffic on the road and freed their minds from the mundane cares of attic dwellers with intractable fish and ornery Fords.
As they sauntered beneath the vaulting spread of newly leafed trees that permitted only a very special light to filter into Harvard Yard, Feroza absorbed some of the sense of the power and intellectual excitement of Harvard. She cast shy darts of admiration at the students, fresh-faced, tall, victorious. Feroza was glad to be wandering among these intelligent beings and felt herself suffused by an exultant glow.
Jamil, a gleaming white scarf tossed about his neck, pointed out the modern science building and the Sanders Theater. Manek remained silent, wearing the benign expression of a man content to see his niece impressed and awed by what impressed and awed him.
It was almost dark when they crossed the street to the Holyoke Center. The square was crowded. Pulling out wicker chairs, they sat at a table in the open. Self-consciously sipping coffee in the American way, without cream or sugar, the three young people felt themselves become part of the privileged throng of boisterous young eaters and drinkers.
The heady sense of freedom, of youthful happiness, deepened in Feroza. Nobody looked at them. If by chance someone did, the glance was incurious and friendly.
Feroza noticed a slender, beautiful girl with short fair hair and transparent green eyes smile at Manek.
“Do you know her?” Feroza asked, surprised.
“No,” Manek shook his head, deliberately enigmatic.
“But she smiled at you.”
“I looked admiringly at her and she smiled back, that’s all.”
Warned by the expression on Manek’s face, Jamil sat back in his chair and tactfully looked away.
Manek leaned towards Feroza and spoke in a low voice, “Civilized people don’t kick men in the balls just because they happen to stare at them. Imagine what would’ve happened in Lahore! First she’d kick me, then she’d go whining to the cops wailing, ‘O menu ghoor-ghoor ke vekh raha see. He was making big, big eyes and staring at me!’ I’d be soundly slapped and hauled off to the police-thanna.”
Feroza recalled the stern, watchful eyes of uncles and cousins, ever ready to pulverize young men who dared to look at her with their languishing orbs. She heard her aunt’s voice, her mother’s, and grandmothers’, “Aren’t you ashamed, looking at women? How’d you like it if our men stared at your sisters?” or, “Mind your eyes, you shameless! Don’t you have mothers and sisters at home?” and other variations on the theme.
Feroza couldn’t help drawing comparisons. She concluded there were so few women, veiled or unveiled, on the streets of Lahore, that even women stared at other women, as she did, as if they were freaks.
At around eight o’clock, a jazz quartet suddenly began to play on the far side of where they sat. A trumpet note, loud and pure, spun into the air to greet the fading light, committing the evening to pleasure and beauty. The guitar, in a subtle transition, carried the note where the trumpet left off. Feroza had never expected the melody of an alien music to move her so deeply. The sensual, drawn-out blues notes throbbed in her senses and turned the dusk magical.
Feroza quietly left their table and joined the crowd that had formed round the musicians. Manek and Jamil, busy ogling the girls and exchanging snide remarks, suddenly realized she was not with them. They got up, anxiously looking about, and sought her out.
It was a mellow, spring Friday, and Harvard Square was permeated by a carnival spirit. Streetlights and lights from shops and eating places lit up the cheerful faces of the people thronging the pavement, and they cut across the serpentine streets diagonally from wherever it suited them.
A bunch of Hare Krishna crusaders were prancing about in saffron dhotis and saris in front of the Co-op store. Around the corner, on Brattle Street, a lone violinist in a long-sleeved black dress played in the recessed shelter of a small door.
And then they stood before a spectacular brown gentleman who was later introduced to Feroza as Father Fibs. Manek and Jamil were full of information about him. Father Fibs was a storyteller. It was rumored that he had given up a promising career at Harvard in order to inspire young yuppies and direct their thoughts to the finer, less materialistic aspects of life. He was reputed to be a Shakespearian scholar and sometimes, when the mood took him, had been known to render long passages from Hamlet and Othello like a virtuoso. He was a man with a vocation who followed his own heart.
Whatever the truth of the rumors, Feroza was as impressed by the tall and slender middle-aged man as she was by the blue denim outfit he wore. It was his personal uniform, studded with monograms, buttons, appliquéd butterflies, birds, and flowers. Despite the flamboyance of his clothes and his sweeping gestures, there was a disarming shyness and sensitivity to his attractive features.
Very few people were listening to him. Father Fibs had been around so long that his novelty had worn off, and the older inh
abitants of Cambridge passed him without pausing.
Almost at once his practiced eye lit on Feroza. Father Fibs could tell at once that the girl would be too polite to move away while he was addressing her. His eyes remained on Feroza for the duration of the rambling story, which she found exhausting to follow.
His confidence in her was not misplaced. When Manek and Jamil grew restive, Feroza stood her ground, insistent and steadfast.
At the end of the tale, when even the few remaining listeners drifted away, Father Fibs strolled over and, considerately lowering his towering length onto some steps, started talking to Feroza.
He invited the three of them to Adams House for coffee, and Manek extended an invitation to dinner in his attic whenever it suited Father Fibs.
On the way back to the car, Feroza, unconsciously indulging her Lahori habit of staring at women, was disconcerted when each one of them smiled back. Soon she was smiling at all the women they passed, delightedly greeting those who greeted her.
“What’re you doing?” Manek asked. “Don’t stare at people like that.”
“They don’t mind. Everyone’s so friendly.”
“You’re embarrassing them. If you look at them, they have to smile back. It’s like holding a gun on them or something. It’s rude.”
“You don’t seem to mind when they smile at you,” Feroza retorted, her knowing, foxy eyes reminding him of his mother.
It had become cold, and the wind was swooshing up the narrow byways. Feroza glanced at Jamil. He was walking with his head bent against the sudden gusts, his hands in his pockets. They were, all of them, so far away from home, Feroza reflected, and yet she was happy. Impulsively she tucked her arm into Manek’s, and for an instant lay her beret on his shoulder — something she would not have thought of doing in Lahore.
Occasionally sheltering her nose in Manek’s sleeve, Feroza continued her uninhibited staring and smiling. Manek was too cold to notice or care. Feroza smiled, as if her cheeks had frozen in their happy contours, all the way back to the Ford.