by Bapsi Sidhwa
“That’s why I selected the college for her,” said the solemn uncle. “We come from a conservative background, Mrs. Simms, and I think my niece will be happy here.”
“We’ll do our best,” said the counselor. “Anytime you have a problem, just come right in and we’ll sort it out.”
Emily tucked Feroza’s arm beneath her protective wing and walked them to the neat, two-storied brick-and-glass dormitory. Feroza found its simple straight lines elegant and architecturally satisfying.
The counselor introduced them to Jo, Feroza’s roommate. Jo had a large, sullen face and a wary, hostile air that prompted Manek to take Feroza aside and anxiously warn, “Watch out for your valuables. Be careful with her. You don’t have to be rude, but don’t get too cozy right away. She could be a bad influence.”
How bad, Feroza was soon to discover. She often wondered what Manek would have done had he known. As it was, Jo had burst into the room a few minutes later to shout furiously, “What the fuck! The damn toilet flooded when I flushed!”
Manek had just left to buy something from the campus bookstore, otherwise Feroza might have had to listen to more words of dire warning.
Feroza was more surprised, though, by Manek’s blushing unease in Jo’s presence when he took them both to lunch at a small Mexican restaurant. He was diffident and embarrassingly anxious to make a good impression on the large, unsmiling girl. Wisps of blond hair escaping from a ponytail and tickling her face, Jo chewed gum and looked at them with an insouciance that bordered on disdain. “Where are y’all from — Mexico?” she asked eventually and appeared to unbend a little when Manek told her they were from Pakistan. Feroza was flattered to be mistaken for a Mexican.
After this clarification, Jo began responding to Manek’s questions with more than just a monosyllable. And when she cracked an unaccustomed social smile, Manek became so touchingly pleased that Feroza realized the dimensions of the gora complex that constantly challenged his brown Pakistani psyche. And he’d been so prompt to accuse Feroza of her awe of the whites!
Manek spent three days at a motel near the campus, helping Feroza during the orientation. He stood in line to collect forms and helped get her registered. He bought the prescribed books, paid her college and board fees, and opened a bank account in her name. They explored the campus, visited the library and the dorm laundry, checked out the classrooms, and met some of Feroza’s teachers. Saying, “Where do you want this socialist crook strung up?” Manek even helped hang Bhutto’s large poster on the wall next to Feroza’s bed.
After instructing Feroza on all matters he could think of, Manek gravely requested her lumpish and indifferent roommate to look after her. “Could you help her with the laundry if something goes wrong with the machines? I’ve shown her once or twice, but she is a bit confused. Would you also show her where to get things?”
Jo nodded briefly and said, “Yeah,” with all the enthusiasm of a cat charged with training a pup that has not been housebroken.
By the time Manek finally called for the taxi to take him to the airport, it was clear that he had changed his mind somewhat about Jo. His parting words to Feroza were, “You’re lucky you’ve not been palmed off with some Japanese or Egyptian roommate. Jo’s a real American; she’ll teach you more than I can. Just remember everything I’ve told you. Don’t become ‘ethnic’ and eat with your fingers in the dorm. And don’t butt in when someone’s talking.”
Feroza had occasion to think of his words often.
Jo and Feroza gingerly accustomed themselves to each other’s presence. Their initial conversations were hesitant, peppered with long, perplexed pauses, as each unconsciously studied the other’s facial expressions and body gestures to determine the more exact meaning of what was said. Every time Jo spoke, Feroza looked at her with startled, anxious eyes. Jo sounded as if she were either quarreling or stolidly holding the lid on her irritation. Feroza took extra pains not to interrupt when Jo was talking — which sometimes led to complex and baffling pauses.
Sensing that she might be giving out the wrong signals, Jo took care to keep her expression neutral. This gave Jo’s deadpan face an inscrutable quality that made Feroza even more nervous. She took to furtively applying deodorant several times a day.
On the other hand, when Feroza spoke, Jo wondered if Feroza was being sarcastic or pulling her leg by mimicking some fancy British actress on public television. She couldn’t believe that people actually said things like, “Do you mind if I turn off the light?” or, “Is it all right if I read? I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
Feroza sounded mannered even to herself sometimes. She couldn’t help it. It was the only way she knew to speak English with foreigners. The English she used while speaking to her friends in Lahore was informal because it had a mixture of Urdu and Punjabi words tossed in for emphasis, expression, or comic effect. When she talked to Manek, her intonation and accent also changed — not to mention the blithe bounce of the Gujrati idiom that popped into her English. But she could hardly speak to Jo that way. Jo would understand neither the syntax nor the pronunciation and would find her even more “foreign” and tedious than she perhaps already did.
It was almost like learning a new language, and both sometimes wondered if the other knew enough English.
Jo had more of an inkling of what was happening and a notion of what Feroza might be up against, talking and dressing the way she did.
By late October, the cold was beginning to hurt Feroza. She dreaded going outdoors and avoided any excursion that might take her even a few blocks from her dorm or classrooms.
She did not know how to manage her clothes. If she insulated herself adequately by wearing Manek’s long woolen underwear, two pairs of socks, and a polo-neck sweater she sweated miserably in the heated classrooms and almost fainted. If she dressed to be comfortable in class, the red overcoat and red beret afforded little protection against the icy gusts that cut through her inadequate clothing to her skin, making her so cold that she got frightening cramps in her chest and legs.
One blustery afternoon as Feroza trudged bent and dismal behind Jo to a Walmart near the campus, she fancied the wind was an enemy that lurked around corners and deliberately sprang at her to make her teeth chatter, her nose drip, and her hands and feet turn numb and blue. It did not seem to affect anyone else the way it did her.
Brooding darkly along these lines, Feroza miserably allowed Jo to open the door for her and went into the store mumbling a bleak, “Thank you.” She stamped her feet and, removing her gloves, breathed on her hands and on the glass bangles that felt like icy manacles binding her wrists and forearms.
Once she had thawed herself and removed her coat, they meandered to the warm heart of the store, where the following exchange took place between Feroza and the middle-aged, wiry little saleswoman behind the cosmetics counter.
“Can I have a look at some of those hair sprays, please?”
The glass bangles on her arms jingling, Feroza pointed at an array of hair sprays in a window behind the saleswoman. The name tag pinned to the saleswoman’s pink-and-gray striped uniform read “Sally.”
“Sure you can, honey. Look all you want,” said Sally, busy with the cash register.
Feroza colored and said, “I mean, can I see some of them up close?”
Sally looked her up and down suspiciously as if measuring the degree of her “foreignness.” She got off the stool behind her register, performing the feat as if descending a mountain, plonked three brands of hair spray on the glass shelf before Feroza, and climbed back to her busy seat.
Feroza read the labels on each and, holding the can she had selected timidly forth, nervously adjusting the shawl that had slid off her shoulder, ventured, “May I have this, please?”
“You may not. You’ll have to pay for it. This isn’t the Salvation Army, y’know; it’s a drugstore.”
Jo had registered the look the saleswoman gave Feroza and her rude behavior and had followed the exchange between them w
ith mounting indignation and an increasingly threatening scowl. Used to Feroza’s mode of dress and more accustomed by now to her manner of speaking and asking for things, she felt Sally had been unpardonably ill-mannered and bullying. She intervened protectively, “Stop pickin’ on her just because she’s a foreigner! Here, lemme handle this,” Jo said, pushing Feroza aside. “How much d’ya want?” she asked and belligerently unzipped her little wallet.
After she had collected the receipt and the parcel, Jo said to the saleswoman, “You got a problem with your attitude. You have to do something about that.”
The saleswoman pursed her mouth and grimly turned her face.
Jo, who had set out to provoke her and whose face had brightened at the prospect of a battle in which the customer is always advantaged, drifted off, contenting herself by loudly remarking, “Stupid bitch!” and to Feroza, “Y’gotta learn! You don’t have to take shit from trash like her!”
~
Jo took to dropping her jaw and saying to Feroza, “Are you for real? You don’t have to always tell the truth, y’know!” or “You can’t talk like that. They’ll stomp all over you,” and took charge of Feroza’s life.
Feroza’s Pakistani outfits and outrageously dangling earrings were banished to her suitcase and her wardrobe replenished by another pair of jeans to supplement the pair she had purchased at Bloomingdale’s and some T-shirts, sweaters, and blouses. But no matter what Jo said, Feroza could not bring herself to wear skirts. Instead she bought a pair of pleated woolen slacks for more formal occasions.
“What’s the matter with your legs?” Jo asked one evening when Feroza had, as usual, dexterously removed her clothes and wrapped herself up in her robe without revealing any part of her anatomy. “Are they crooked or fat or something? Lemme see.”
Jo lunged across the space between their beds and swept aside the flap of Feroza’s robe. Feroza sat stunned, legs bared to the thighs, blushing. It required a monumental effort on her part not to draw together the flaps of her robe.
“There’s nothing wrong with them,” said Jo in surprise. “Why d’you keep them hidden?” She pantomimed Feroza’s furtive gestures.
“It’s not decent to show your legs in Pakistan,” Feroza said. Recalling the Punjabi movie she had seen before leaving, she used it as an example to explain her culture to Jo. The prancing heroine had tantalizingly lifted her sari to mid-calf and, after a coy look, let it fall; the entire audience had burst into a chorus of whistles and catcalls.
From the very first day they started sharing the room, Jo’s utter abandon where her large, white body was concerned had alarmed and embarrassed Feroza. When Jo undressed, Feroza would turn away on some pretext to her desk or run her hand over Bhutto’s poster to iron out its creases. When Jo talked to her in a state of semi- or entire nudity, Feroza averted her eyes or stared fixedly into Jo’s.
In fact, going to the washroom in the mornings was an ordeal for Feroza. Wrapped from neck to toe in her maroon robe, eyes downcast, Feroza darted to one of the unused washbasins with her toilet bag. Acutely aware of the freshly showered, gleaming bodies in various stages of undress, Feroza splashed her face, brushed her teeth, and slipped out as quickly and quietly as she had entered.
Then, at odd hours, towel in hand, Feroza lurked in the lobby leading to the washroom. She bathed only when she was sure she could lock the door and have the entire washroom to herself. Since this requirement could be met only at some unearthly hour of the night, she rarely bathed during the day.
Occasionally Feroza caught herself imagining those pink bodies, gently tracing the silken curves of the breasts, feeling the soft weight of the flesh in her hands. Sometimes she wanted to hold and be held by those soft bodies as ardently as she had dreamed of being held by the fully clothed, hard, brown bodies of the men she had had crushes on in Lahore.
Mortified and shaken by this new aspect of her desires, Feroza tried to suppress these images. She deliberately called up the attractive faces and bodies of various young men and summoned the emotions aroused in her by them. By diligently nurturing the once-familiar passions that had shamed her so much then and now appeared blameless, she succeeded in banishing the baffling and forbidden images from her mind.
At about this time, she also became aware of her different color and the reaction it appeared to have on strangers like that rude saleswoman, and on some of her classmates. Not that her classmates were discourteous. A few tended to avoid her, and these she disregarded. But some, in their anxiety to be civil, were exaggeratedly effusive and awkward in her presence. She sensed she was not accepted as one of them. Dismayed by her own brown skin, the emblem of her foreignness, she felt it was inferior to the gleaming white skin in the washrooms and the roseate faces in the classrooms.
To add to her confusion, Feroza was astonished, confounded, shocked, and intrigued by the behavior of her strange roommate. Not having known anyone even remotely like Jo, Feroza had no standard of comparison and categorized her vaguely in her mind as a “juvenile delinquent,” a Western and, more specifically, American phenomenon.
In her effort to understand Jo, Feroza came to various complex conclusions. To begin with, she imagined that Jo had been packed off by a distraught family to this remote and austere “hick town” (Jo’s term) to cure her of her various and unbridled appetites. Jo ate constantly and prodigiously and sometimes, when she was in the mood and could get hold of liquor — which she could get even in “dry” Twin Falls — drank herself maudlin. At such times, Feroza felt constrained to protect her, to let her vent her resentments and tears in the safety of her custody, and kept her tactfully closeted in the room they shared. Jo could be expelled for drinking in the dorms.
Jo had taken one look at Twin Fall’s small downtown and had decided that it wasn’t a place she wanted to visit again. Some of the restaurants were going out of business, and the stores on the main streets had the dusty, dispirited air of businesses buckling beneath the pressure of the new shopping mall closer to campus.
Going to the mall with Jo was a hair-raising experience. She was a slick thief. Jo seldom bought or let Feroza buy necessities. Toothpaste, shampoo, chocolates, razors, lotions, ballpoint pens were purloined as and when required. She occasionally paid for — or made Feroza pay for — a bag of potato chips or some item too bulky to be easily lifted. Feroza was more puzzled when she discovered that Jo’s family owned a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, and was comfortably well-off.
Feroza could never have imagined a girl as bold. To think that she, the hero-kicking “hoyden” of Lahore, was reduced to a wide-eyed, O-mouthed, and dumb little disciple shattered Feroza’s confidence. She wondered if Jo’s unconventional code of ethics and general behavior were the kind of shocks Manek had in mind when he had wanted her to plumb the American experience. She very much doubted it, even if her association with Jo might benefit her understanding of America and shorten the period of her adjustment and assimilation.
Feroza longed to talk to Manek about her roommate but was afraid. He might be upset and move her from Twin Falls before her initiation into the mysterious rites of Jo’s way of life was complete. Feroza, nothing if not inquiring, realized she was going through a rare and unusually enlightening experience. And she was as loath to abandon the challenge, daily unraveling new and unexpected insights, as any of her intrepid and fierce-eyed fore-mothers would have been.
Jo and Feroza had only two classes in common. Sometimes a whole day passed without their meeting each other except in the dorm at night. Often they ate dinner at the same table, but not always. One evening in the dining room, Feroza asked someone where the “may-o-neeze” was. No one understood what she wanted, until she found the glass jar on a counter.
Jo spent the next Sunday afternoon improving Feroza’s pronunciations and taught her to say mayonnaise as “may-nayze” and mother-fucker as “motha-fuka,” with the accompanying curl of nose and emphasis. She made Feroza practice saying, “Gimme a lemonade. Gimme a soda,” and cured
her of saying, “May I have this — may I have that?”
Pretty soon Feroza was saying, “Hey, you goin’ to the laundry? Gitme a Coke!”
By the time the first term was over, Jo had come to the conclusion that the constraints of dorm living did not suit her temperament or her allowance. She took a job waitressing at a nearby restaurant and decided to move into an off-campus apartment. She asked Feroza to move in with her. Feroza wrote a prudent letter to Manek, pointing out the enormous economic advantages of moving from the dormitory, with the result that Manek flew to Twin Falls over Christmas.
Manek and Feroza spent Christmas afternoon with Feroza’s genial counselor and her family. Manek, who had balked at the thought of a whole afternoon spent amidst strangers on an occasion that was essentially a family affair, was surprised by how much he enjoyed the turkey and the company. When Jo returned from her brief visit home, Manek and Feroza took her on a tour of some of the apartments they felt were likely to suit their pockets and their requirements.
Feroza, nervous about Manek’s meeting with Jo, explained to her, “You’ll have to be careful with my uncle. He won’t understand some of the things we do.”
Jo said, “Yeah, I know, he’s as square as dice. Don’t worry.”
And it was all right. If Jo had influenced Feroza, Feroza had, without either of them being conscious of it, influenced Jo.
Manek found Jo much more amiable at their second meeting and didn’t get the impression that he was being slighted as often. In fact, he told Feroza in confidence, “You’ve had a good influence on Jo. She’s almost become normal.” Feroza noticed that Manek was much more at ease with Jo and less intense around her. She remarked on it, and Manek cryptically commented, “Yeah, I’ve got an American girlfriend.”