An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Chapter 10

  They slept late on Saturday morning. Feroza was so cold in the unheated attic that she had snuggled into Manek’s long johns and thick socks and pulled the red beret over her ears before slipping into bed with the hot-water bottle thoughtfully provided by Zareen. The bed consisted of a foam mattress that was peeled off Manek’s spring mattress every evening. Once the bed was laid on the floor, there was no room to walk or even to sit at the desk.

  Shivering in her flannel wrap, hugging her towel and her toilet bag, Feroza followed Manek to the improvised bathroom in the dank basement. The basement was stacked here and there with boxes, furniture, and trash bags filled with stored belongings. Cobwebs trailed from the seams on the roof, and the smell of mold and damp filled the room.

  Feroza noticed the antiquated shower protruding two feet from a hole gouged out of a corner. Beneath it lay something that looked like an abandoned kiddy sandbox, decrepit with patches of rust and discolored paint. A wire ran across the corner to hold the shower curtain, which was drawn to one side, its grimy edge sticking to the gray-painted brick wall.

  “I can’t shower in that!” Feroza balked and stepped back.

  “Nobody’ll see you once you draw the curtain.”

  Manek pointed out a plastic bath caddy dangling from the wobbly shower rod. “You can put your shampoo, etcetera, there.”

  Stubbornly maintaining her distance, Feroza peered into the pit as if looking out for worms that might suddenly rear up to attack.

  “I’ll get tetanus.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Feroza turned to go back. “I will not shower in that!”

  “Then you’ll have to sleep outside. You already stink like a goat.”

  Manek rolled up the sleeve of his navy velour bathrobe and turned on the shower. The rush of water steamed almost at once.

  “I’ll guard the steps till you finish,” Manek said and, before Feroza could protest, closed the basement door after him.

  Alternately blistered by the boiling water and yelping with shock from sudden glacial torrents, Feroza managed to get the shampoo out of her hair.

  Feroza dried herself quickly; it was cold in the basement. She pulled her woolen vest over her head and saw a shape emerge tentatively from the hole in the wall in which the shower rod rested.

  Feroza froze.

  Not sure of its hold, the large cockroach slithered along the slimy edge.

  Feroza flung her clothes on in a panicked rush and stormed up the steps. Incandescent with rage she burst into the room and glared at Manek. “You didn’t even mind the door!”

  Feroza flung herself on the mattress and sat in a huddled, panting huff against the wall.

  “I told the boys not to go to the basement. Have a nice shower?”

  Feroza turned away her face.

  “You look nice and clean. Like a boiled lobster. Ever seen a boiled lobster?”

  Feroza flung a slipper and, in rapid succession, a book and another slipper.

  “You damn swine!”

  “If you’d behaved yourself, I’d have shown you how our shower works. Or taken you to the good bathroom. Don’t think you can be smart all the time and get away with it. You behaved disgustingly in front of my friend yesterday. Let this be a lesson to you. There will be many lessons till you learn to behave properly. You have to learn that in America you don’t get something for nothing.”

  “I’m going right back to Lahore!” Feroza was glad she hadn’t mentioned the cockroach. At least she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

  Feroza’s rigid profile was the color of fire. Her features looked alarmingly swollen, heavy with fury. Knowing her capacity to dig in her heels when confronted and the pride that even as a child had rarely permitted her to cry, Manek felt he might have pushed her too far, and in the wrong direction.

  Since he also possessed too much pride to apologize, Manek did the next best thing. He clowned. “Oh,” he said in his breathy falsetto, wringing his hands, “Now what will I do? You want to cut off my nose and put it in my hand. You will shame me. How will I show my face to the world if you go back?”

  Manek fell abruptly on his knees and, repeatedly lifting and throwing his arms on the floor, absurdly, energetically, and noisily prostrated himself before her. “Oh, say you will not go. Oh, say you will not. My honor and izzat are in your lily-white hands!”

  Feroza turned her contemptuous, swollen face on him.

  “You color blind or something also?”

  “Oh, sorry. In your lily-brown hands … your lily-brown hands.”

  Feroza battered his hands with her fleet bare feet. “You lesson-walla! You lesson-walla! I’ll teach you a lesson, you lesson-walla!”

  Manek made up to Feroza by taking her on a personally guided tour of M.I.T. in the afternoon. He marched her through the long, echoing halls and the auditoriums with the same reverential expression with which he had trotted her, in her high heels, down Wall Street. He held open the doors of his classrooms with a proprietorial and courteous air while she peeped through, and he became puffed up with benevolent vanity at the impression everything made on her. Feroza was profoundly affected to be in this citadel of learning to which her uncle belonged, and Manek was immoderately pleased by her response.

  In an excess of self-congratulatory gratification and the affection for his niece the complacent feelings generated, Manek took her to Legal Seafood. So innocuously did he order the boiled lobster that, after a quick look at his face, Feroza decided the choice was inadvertent. Thus Manek gave Feroza her first addictive taste of the succulent Maine lobster. And, glancing at the check, he held his brow to advertise his regret.

  ~

  Monday morning returned Manek to a sense of his other responsibilities and set the pattern for the next few weeks. He would awaken, examine the fish tank, and grow mournful at the demise of yet another goldfish. He became obsessed with their welfare and viewed each new catastrophe as a personal failing.

  He leafed through books on the care of fish and visited pet shops for advice.

  Sometimes when he returned late after working on an assignment in the library bearing little plastic pouches of fish food and fish tonics, he was stricken to discover another casualty. Those were black days, and Manek would bury himself in his books. Feroza knew enough to keep out of his way.

  While Manek was out all day, Feroza watched a small black-and-white TV with the fascination of a cobra charmed by the flute, her hooded hand moving hypnotically from the bag of potato chips on her lap to her mouth.

  Sometimes Feroza varied her routine and read the Harlequin romances she had discovered at a grocery store, murder mysteries, or the P. G. Wodehouse she had brought from Lahore. Her hand traveled as hypnotically to her mouth with whatever she was relishing as she read as it did when she watched TV.

  When she remembered to, she put a few drops of fish tonic into the tank.

  She varied her diet: during the commercials she might open a can of cocktail sausages, baked beans or sardines, sprinkle them with lemon juice and red pepper, and, to prologue the delight, eat them in tiny nibbles. For dessert she licked spoonfuls of condensed milk or opened a can of peaches and often combined the two.

  Manek had stacked a corner of the wardrobe floor with canned foods and the freezer compartment in his small fridge with pizzas. Judging from his own experience, he knew how much Feroza would relish them.

  Manek let Feroza eat her fill for a week and then, looking at the empty space on the wardrobe floor and the nearly empty freezer compartment, announced, “You can open any four cans a day, whether it is soup or fruit or ham or mushrooms. No more than four frankfurters or four slices of bacon, and only one pizza a day. If you’re still hungry, you can eat dal and rice, or bread and butter. You’ll get fat and sick if you eat like this, and I’ll get broke and thin. You’ll also get fed up.”

  “Never. I could eat this all my life!”

  “That’s what I thought too,” said Manek.
“Now I can’t bear the sight of frankfurters and sardines.”

  Feroza could not believe her good luck where food was concerned. It was an extravagant bonus — like so many of the unexpected delights her visit to America was to provide. She had presumed that canned foods like olives, mushrooms, condensed milk, asparagus, clams, were as precious and rare in America as they were in Pakistan, to be served up only on special show-off occasions.

  Feroza was curiously reluctant to venture outside the attic without Manek. She declined his offer to drop her off and pick her up from shopping malls or Harvard Square. For all her brash posturing and tossing of braids, she responded so diffidently to the friendly overtures of the other Pakistani and Indian students inhabiting the lower portions of the house that they reluctantly left her alone.

  Feroza became tongue-tied and remote even with Jamil when Manek was not with her. In averting her radiant gaze and by discouraging chatter, Jamil felt she dropped a veil about her person. An intriguing veil that added to her other attractions an element of mystery.

  Jamil, and even Manek, wondered sometimes if this demure creature had actually kicked that fellow at the Al-falah cinema. Manek, though, was less uncertain. He guessed that his niece’s unexpected shyness and timidity had to do with being sixteen years old and finding herself in such unfamiliar and diametrically different surroundings. But once her exuberance returned, his doubts disappeared, and Manek was sure Feroza was only passing through a phase.

  Besides, ever since her experience with the scalding shower, Feroza had become passably tractable, a fact upon which Manek mused with quiet conceit. As for her shield of reserve, he thought it only proper and didn’t mind it one bit.

  One afternoon Manek finally accepted what had been killing the goldfish. Everyone he consulted had taken it for granted that he changed the water — it was so elementary — and he hadn’t. Not since the treacherous Bangladeshi beauty left them in his charge without instructing him to.

  That evening, after carefully transferring the few remaining fish to a plastic bag, Manek and Feroza scoured the tank and filled it with fresh water from the bathroom faucet.

  Still, the next morning two fish died. Thoroughly depressed, Manek and Feroza concluded that the dead fish had been so contaminated by the toxins in the stale water that they could not recover.

  ~

  The following afternoon Manek returned with a bottle of wine and a bag of groceries. He had run into Father Fibs, and the storyteller was to dine with them in the evening. Manek had asked Jamil, the students from downstairs, and a few other friends to join the party.

  Three fish had expired that day, and Feroza had laid them out ceremoniously on a bed of pink tissue in the ornamental onyx ashtray. Manek slumped into the stuffed chair, defeated, his hand shading his brow, mourning his fish. Feroza sat at his feet, solemnly and silently commiserating.

  After a few moments, they roused themselves and gravely set about preparing dinner. Manek, who had never prepared even a cup of tea in Lahore, astonished Feroza by the culinary prowess necessity had brought forth. Not that he cooked anything as fancy as prawn-patia or Dhansak lentils. But given the bland taste of the fare available to them and the steady and relentless diet of canned foods and pizza, Manek’s cooking tasted almost as good as Kalay Khan’s.

  Father Fibs arrived. Stooping shyly through the attic door, he was followed by the unexpected and matronly person of his chocolate brown and upright wife.

  Smiling genially, Mrs. Fibs handed Feroza a gift-wrapped box of candy. She was a little taller than Feroza, about five feet six inches, and about a foot shorter than her husband.

  The other students, looking like pygmies, stood up to greet the guests of honor.

  Manek seated Mrs. Fibs on the dining chair Jamil had carried up for the occasion, and Father Fibs was ceremoniously directed to the stuffed chair.

  It was a rather small chair for Father Fibs, and he looked as ill at ease in it as a squashed camel. When he stretched his legs, they took up all the walking space in the attic, and Manek and Feroza had to step over them to serve the drinks. When he straightened his arms, his knuckles knocked against the floor. And when, unaccustomed to sitting long in any one place, Father Fibs stood up, his head touched the sloping ceiling.

  The attic appeared to have shrunk, and Father Fibs, who looked so elegant on the pavements of Harvard Square, suddenly became a lumbering and baffled bean stalk.

  Mrs. Fibs talked affably, asking interested questions. But all attention centered on the colorful and alarming person of the willowy giant.

  Sensing it, and self-consciously adjusting his booming voice to his restraining surroundings, Father Fibs began to talk. His voice was a husky, hesitant whisper. He told Feroza he liked her manner of speaking, her gentle ways, the movement of her yellow eyes in her brown face. He told Manek he had visited India as a draftee and understood the background of the young men in the room. They must be rich. Only the rich sent their sons to America. Money they would surely make, but what did they plan to do with their lives?

  When he was a student at one of the universities in this area — Father Fibs declined to tell them which — he had shared a room with a Sri Lankan student. He related stories of their escapades, of rows and hilarious misunderstandings occasioned by their different cultures. He told them what the man, now middle-aged, had achieved and salvaged of his ideals.

  As Father Fibs hit his stride and his gestures became more comfortable, his fingers brushed the light fixture on the ceiling, displaced a brass plate recently affixed to the wall, and almost toppled the onyx ashtray. So Father Fibs tried to hold his hands clamped to his sides. His speech dried up. His tapered fingers fluttered nervously and scratched his thighs. Again he sat down, camellike, in the stuffed chair.

  At some point after dinner, when coffee had been served, inspired by the expectation on the young faces at his feet, the storyteller suddenly took off on another soliloquy. His hands, like unexpectedly released birds, darted here and there and, after testing the air and adapting themselves to the confined space, coasted with the proficiency of hummingbirds. Again he loomed elegant and splendid, and his presence transformed the shrunken attic into space worthy of his inspired renderings.

  “You are like buds,” he said, bringing his hands together and loosely cupping his slender fingers. He cast his eyes down, drawing their attention to the colorful flowers, birds, and butterflies appliquéd on his denim costume. The colors appeared to glow, taking on a life and movement of their own. “But like all young things, you will bloom.”

  Father Fibs opened the tender bud his dusky hands had formed into a quivering flower. The gesture, and his gravelly, almost messianic voice, imbued the tired words with fresh intensity. “You think you are already flying?” Father Fibs paused, looked long at them, and slowly shook his head. “No. You are protected innocents, secure in your chrysalises. When you leave your universities, you will test your wings. You’ll fly and fall, fly and fall.” His lithe hands weaved and turned, showing beige palms. “It will hurt. You’ll be frightened. Don’t be. Your wings will become stronger.”

  Feroza glanced at Manek. His curls had been recently cropped and his lean face looked strengthened, handsome, lit up by the visions Father Fibs’s supple hands conjured.

  Next to Manek on the mattress, his dark eyes intent beneath fierce spikes of hair, sat Jamil, hugging his knees.

  It became clear to Feroza that to be this far from home, to have to cope with strangers and mysterious rites, was itself a test. Manek and Jamil must surely have found themselves in some ways wanting and in some unexpectedly able. Still committed to proving themselves, they would avail themselves of the options America offered. They would stay — no matter how long it took — to test their expectations.

  Feroza’s perception suddenly ignited when she remembered the smiling blond with the transparent green eyes in Harvard Square and the thought struck her like a jolt — what extraordinary sexual possibilities they would avail th
emselves of.

  Might not she, too, wish to prove herself? Even if she was only a girl? Explore possibilities that were beginning to palpitate and twinkle — as yet unrecognizable — on evanescent new horizons?

  Father Fibs’s arms stuck out at the elbows like fledging wings, his shoulders slightly heaved. “Then you’ll want to fly, taste of what Adam tasted,” his shy eyes rested for a moment on Feroza, “what Eve tasted, the bitter and the sweet, and discover the places you can fly to and fall from. And once you’re no longer afraid to fall, away you’ll soar — up, up, to where you need never fall!”

  Father Fibs’s open-armed and triumphant gesture swept the fish tank off its precarious perch on the china cabinet, and it shattered at their feet.

  The fish scattered, barely distinguishable from the patterned carpet and the broken glass, into watery crevices, where they disappeared.

  Chapter 11

  In the days that followed Father Fibs’s memorable dispensation of the fish in the attic, Manek was washed by a tide of relief so intense that he determined never to keep pets. Who needed the onus of tending to pets when nieces like Feroza were packed off to his care? In any case, he felt temperamentally better suited to the charge and guidance of young humans.

  Manek guessed, of course, that Feroza was merely the first of the nieces and nephews, the horde in Lahore growing like saplings, ready to be air-freighted to wherever he was, once they shot up.

  Youngsters he could cope with. Given his burgeoning sense of responsibility, manifest in the nature of his urges to broaden Feroza’s outlook and to improve her mind, who knew but that he might even derive pleasure from his selfless part in shaping their futures.