An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  They rented a decrepit two-bedroom apartment within cycling distance of the campus for three hundred dollars a month. It had mangy carpets, stained linoleum, fragile windows that were difficult to open, and a heating system entirely dependent on the caprice of the landlord. But it had an attraction. The landlord pointed out that the rooms above theirs were not occupied; they would have undisturbed quiet in which to study. Feroza bought a secondhand bicycle, and Jo a small thirdhand Corvette that required combat with the stick shift to put it into reverse.

  Feroza was thrilled at the thought of living on her own with just Jo. Manek helped them move. They scoured the streets on trash day for discarded housewares and the Salvation Army outlet for discarded furniture. They acquired odd chairs, tables, two threadbare mattresses, pans, a sofa bed, and lamps. Jo bought a color TV at a garage sale, and Manek stocked their cabinets with toilet paper, an economy-size box of Surf, and a broom. He crammed the kitchen shelves with Indian spices, rice, and lentils and covered the chairs with cushions. He wanted to stock their apartment with toiletries, but Jo, who was by now used to kidding him, dissuaded him. “I know where to get these things at a discount. You’ve done enough. Now you rest, and Feroza an’ I’ll massage your feet — Pack-iss-tanny style!”

  Manek quickly removed his sneakers, lay back on the couch, propped up his legs, and looked at the girls appealingly.

  Jo narrowed her eyes, mean and mischievous, and promptly sat down on his legs, rowdily shouting, “You bum! I ain’t gonna massage your legs!” And just as promptly, she changed her mind. “Okay, you bum. I’ll massage them!” She screamed and gleefully wiggled her bottom.

  Manek, red in the face and rubbing his knees, pushed the hilarious girl off and wrestled her to the floor. Feroza came to her surprised friend’s aid awkwardly and felt foolish when she suddenly sensed she might be intruding. She couldn’t understand why she should feel wounded and excluded, as if they had both betrayed her.

  The day before Manek was to leave, Jo brought home two brown bags of groceries and a bottle of wine. Feroza knew that Jo had acquired a false ID that showed her age as twenty-one. “We’re going to celebrate,” Jo announced and, warning them to stay out of the kitchen, busied herself in it.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Jo shouted, and made impatient by the meaty fumes percolating from the kitchen, Manek and Feroza all but burst out of Feroza’s room.

  Jo wore high heels and a dress with thin straps. She seldom wore dresses, and it was the first time Manek had seen her in one. “You look nice,” he complimented gallantly, and in an aside to Feroza in Gujrati, “A buffalo will remain a buffalo in skirts or in pants.”

  The attractive way the table was laid, using only paper towels, stolen cutlery, and unmatched plates, was a lesson in ingenuity. A fresh, leafy salad gleamed in three small wooden bowls before each place setting. A large ceramic dish containing a leg of lamb with sautéed baby carrots, beans, and cauliflower formed the centerpiece. Garlic bread, cunningly folded in a white paper napkin, wafted its enticing aroma. Empty jars sprouting elegant arrangements of twigs and leaves added a classy touch to the atmosphere. They did not require the wine to make them high; the food, the decor, and their ease in each other’s company was enough to put them in a superb mood. Feroza in any case left the dry wine alone after the first sip.

  ~

  After Manek left, Jo and Feroza both missed him, and Jo remarked, “Your uncle’s kinda cute. I like him.”

  Feroza flashed her a keen look. She couldn’t imagine Jo as Manek’s wife, and even less as her aunt.

  “He likes you, too,” she said, graciously returning the compliment Jo had paid her uncle; and, her sense of betrayal and exclusion gone, she was proud to have a member of her family approved by her exacting and redoubtable friend.

  Jo, abetted sometimes by a petrified and brow-beaten helpmate, purloined the smaller items they required to make themselves comfortable in their new home. On such occasions Feroza wore her loose Pakistani garments and jingling bangles and played her part by distracting the saleswomen with her exotic finery and exhaustive inquiries. She also carried a large sling bag, its dimensions made inconspicuous by the drape of her embroidered shawl.

  Considering Jo’s various delinquencies, it surprised Feroza to discover Jo’s fastidious housekeeping skills and how well-ordered, cheerful, and feminine their apartment always was, despite its debilitated condition. Jo hung lace curtains and pretty framed pictures and tastefully displayed her collection of dolls. Little arrangements of flowers and ferns in odd pots sprang up on tables and windowsills, and intriguing posters, one of them just three pairs of feet, on the walls.

  Feroza brought out the small onyx tortoises and elephants, brass knickknacks, and framed family photographs Zareen had put into her suitcase, and laid them out as her contribution to the decoration. Bhutto’s poster continued to enjoy pride of place in her bedroom.

  Jo scrubbed the floors and kitchen tiles until they shone, and once, quite by accident, Feroza surprised her scouring the bathtub and bathroom tiles directly after Feroza had cleaned them. Feroza realized at once that Jo must often do this and was touched that Jo, considerate of her feelings, had been at pains to conceal this from her.

  Jo kept the apartment obsessively tidy. Feroza, who had never needed to fold or put away her clothes, appreciated Jo’s domestic talents and tried to help, but each time she cleaned out the freezer or the small living/dining room, she could tell afterwards that Jo had duplicated the task with sponge and brush and a daunting range of fragrant detergents.

  Chapter 15

  Once they were settled in the new apartment, Feroza discovered a fresh aspect of her roommate’s social life and understood more exactly why Jo had felt so cramped in the dorms.

  Jo picked up strange young men from stores, restaurants, movie theaters, construction sites, and places where she worked with an ease and lack of discrimination that shocked Feroza. Feroza also found out that the young construction workers and guys from the next town that Jo picked up, and sometimes brought home, were the source of the wine and beer and the fake ID card.

  Jo’s extraordinary capacity for expletives, which matched her other appetites, soon had Feroza saying “shit” and “asshole” with an abandon that epitomized for her the heady reality of her being abroad, away from home, and, even if she knew it was an illusion, a sense of control over her actions.

  Another reason for Jo’s move to an apartment was her delight in cooking. She cooked a lot, ate a lot, and was generous in sharing. Feroza, as sampler of the culinary artistry Jo had acquired from her parents and various restaurant cooks, discovered that pot roasts and meat loaves with vegetables and gravy were as good as anything she could get out of a can and a welcome supplement to her steady diet of sardines, baked beans, and sausages.

  Feroza ventured tentatively to cook from a book of Parsee and Pakistani recipes that Zareen had thoughtfully provided and doggedly ate the burned or undercooked consequences of her attempts until she became passably adept.

  But after Jo had screamed, “I’m on fire!” a couple of times and, eyes and nose streaming, rushed to splash her face at the kitchen sink and drink Coke, Feroza sacrificed red pepper, an essential and cherished ingredient, on the altar of her friend’s unaccustomed palate.

  Jo was moody, changeable, her persona governed by an internal orbit of its own, which completed its mysterious cycle once every two weeks.

  In early February, a month after they moved, Jo brought home a small, striped cat destined for the pound and named him Kim, after her latest crush. But in just two weeks, the cat got on her nerves; she couldn’t stand the responsibility or the continuous strain of pilfering cat food and threw him out.

  Feroza took the cat right back in, protesting, “How can you be so cruel. Don’t you know how cold it is? You’re condemning him to death!”

  They had their first serious quarrel the next afternoon. Feroza was away at class when Jo took Kim for a long ride in her Corvette and dum
ped him outside the city limits.

  When Feroza returned, she called out to the cat. After tugging open a window, she cried, “Kim, Kim,” and then, “Kitty, Kitty,” in case the cat had forgotten his new name.

  Jo got back from work late in the evening, hollering, “You won’t believe what that asshole said! I told him where he could shove his job!”

  Feroza listened sympathetically until her tale of woe was done and then, with a worried frown and a lump in her throat, said, “I don’t know where Kim is. I’ve been calling him all evening, but there’s no sign of him.”

  Attempting instantly to put her friend out of her misery, and with characteristic frankness, Jo said, “Oh, Kim … He was yowling and jumping all over. I left him near some farmhouses. Someone’ll look after him.”

  “He was no longer your cat; he’s my cat!” Feroza shouted. “How dare you do this. He’ll freeze to death!” Tears blurred her vision.

  “You don’t know cats — he’s not gonna freeze so easy. He’ll find shelter in a barn, and some schmuck’ll feed him.”

  “You heartless hoyden!” Feroza screamed.

  Feroza marched into her room and shut the door with a bang she hoped would reverberate all the way to Lahore. It also caused a lump of plaster to fall from the scabbed and discolored ceiling.

  An hour later, the small apartment percolated with the fragrance of grilling meat and steaming vegetables. Jo knocked on the door. “Hey, Feroza, I’m sorry … You wanna eat?”

  “No!” Feroza shouted. “No! No! No!” and, as memories unleashed by her anger echoed her nostalgia, “I’ll never eat in this house again!”

  “Jesuschrist! Who cares!” Jo shouted and, in her anguish over the sudden rift in their friendship, polished off the entire dinner and a small loaf of nut-and-raisin bread.

  In the morning, they were awakened by the most heart-rending mewing, and Feroza rushed to the door to let her cat in. His fur sticking out in icy tufts, his slashing tail and plaintive cries cataloging his complaints, Kim entered awkwardly, with what appeared to be a limp. He saw Jo and, like a ginger comet, streaked into Feroza’s room.

  Jo relented — with reservations. “S’long as I don’t see or hear the monster, you can have him.”

  The cat was confined to Feroza’s room, and she committed herself to his care. Feroza, who because of her foreign-student status could not work outside the campus, had not bothered to find an on-campus job. Now she dashed off to her counselor, and Emily Simms helped get her a job in the registration office. Feroza started working that very day to support her cat. She bought cans of cat food, bicycled home between classes to feed and stroke him, and cleaned out the litter. In fact Feroza took better care of the animal than she did of her room, which was in a state of permanent disorder. Feroza kept her door firmly closed, to keep both the cat and the mess out of Jo’s sight.

  Kim was an affectionate little stray who liked company and snuggled, purring, on Feroza’s lap every chance he got. He also had a habit of mewing and yowling dismally in Feroza’s absence, even though a window was kept slightly open for him to go out.

  Jo threw a progressively strengthening series of fits at intervals of approximately fourteen days, until it was decided that Feroza could keep the cat only till they found him a suitable home.

  That was when it struck Feroza that, like the moon orbiting the earth once a month, Jo’s life revolved round a mystifying cosmic agent that orbited on a two-week cycle. Feroza, who had imbibed Zareen’s belief in astrology, wondered what madly swift and obscure planet governed her friend’s life with such unfailing regularity.

  Feroza gradually discovered that Jo had an unexpected conservative side to her personality as well. It was a different genre of conservatism, and it took Feroza a while to catch on that whereas the shortest skirts were permissible by her standards, a strapless dress was not. Otherwise Jo wore the standard all-American uniform: jeans and, in her case oversized, T-shirts and sweaters.

  Jo worked hard at finding a home for Kim; a month after the ultimatum had been served, she found a home that received Feroza’s reluctant and tearful approval.

  After school, Feroza sat glumly in front of the TV nursing her broken heart and her empty lap and thinking about home. She missed her grandmothers, her parents, their friends, her friends, her ayah, the incessant chatter of her cousins, and even the raucous chorus of the Main Market mullahs on Friday afternoons. She became unbearably homesick and found it impossible to work on her term paper.

  After a week of moping, alone and Kim-less, Feroza finally plucked up the daring and courage to venture out for an evening with Jo.

  Feroza sat shy-eyed and monosyllabic before a glass of orange juice, while Jo flirted with boys in ponytails and trendy bobs wearing dangling earrings in one ear; though she never went for them, Jo was not averse to chatting with them. The boys, after tossing a remark or two at Feroza and observing her confusion and her “foreign” reaction, clammed up.

  Feroza had no experience with socializing with boys; there is no such thing as dating in Pakistan. It was excruciatingly painful for her to be among so many young people and not know how to respond or behave. She had a good role model in Jo, but she didn’t think she could be as casual and sure of herself around boys in a hundred years.

  After suffering the agony a few times, Feroza decided she’d rather stay home, even if it was lonely and Kim-less. “I can’t handle it,” she told Jo. “I feel like I’m spoiling everybody’s fun. The next day is spoilt too; I keep thinking of it and feel miserable.”

  “You aren’t used to boys. So, okay — get used to them,” said Jo, compellingly forthright. “You gotta learn to sometime. You gotta stick with it.”

  At Jo’s insistence, Feroza asked for a glass of wine the next time and nursed the drink all evening, taking small sips. Feroza discovered that she became less self-conscious, more comfortable, and that it mattered less what impression she made, whether she spoke or was tongue-tied.

  Something within Feroza must have changed imperceptibly, because suddenly one spring evening Feroza discovered that the boys were talking to her, making a concerted effort to kid, cajole, and encourage her out of her painful shell. She felt their genuine interest. It occurred to her that they liked and accepted her.

  Feroza graduated to two glasses of wine, and she actually started to enjoy the excursions that she had found such a painful ordeal before. And she began to admire Jo’s spontaneity more and more.

  At the slightest inclination for company, Jo’d say, “Let’s meet some guys,” or wail, “I wanna drink,” and they’d just shoot off, without needing to seek anyone’s permission or fear anyone’s wrath. Feroza marveled at her friend and felt that Jo’s was a truly free spirit. “Don’t feel like washing dishes,” she might say. “Let’s eat out” — usually at a cheap Mexican restaurant. Or Jo might jump up at midnight to say, “Come on; let’s find some guys who can get us a drink.”

  Although the cat had been banished, Feroza still worked in the college registration office. She found she needed the extra income to pay for the occasional glass of wine or some minor treat involving her new social life with Jo. She had also found a valuable friend in Nancy, the cheerful secretary with curly blond hair who supervised Feroza’s duties and with whom she felt as much at ease as she did with Jo. Feroza privately thanked Kim for giving her cause to take the job and treasured the $3.50 an hour it brought her.

  Feroza never quite got over her feelings of guilt. Every time she went out with Jo and flirted modestly with strange young men, her dusky face blooming and warm with the wine, her eyes bright, she wondered what her family would have to say of her conduct if they knew. At the same time, she felt she was being initiated into some esoteric rites that governed the astonishingly independent and unsupervised lives of young people in America. Often, as she sat among them, Feroza thought she had taken a phenomenal leap in perceiving the world from a wider, bolder, and happier angle.

  As the pressure of constraint
s, so deeply embedded in her psyche, slightly loosened their grip under Jo’s influence, Feroza felt she was growing the wings Father Fibs had talked about, which, even at this incipient stage, would have been ruthlessly clipped in Pakistan. Feroza was curious to discover how they might grow, the shape and the reach of their span. This was her secret, this sense of growth and discovery, and she did not want to divulge any part of it, even to Manek.

  Manek called once in a while to find out how she, her studies, her finances, and her social life were doing.

  “Oh, I go out once in a while to restaurants with Jo and her friends, but mostly Jo works in the evenings, and I sit at home and study.”

  “You’re not lonely or homesick?”

  “Not yet.”

  As for money, she always told Manek she was broke, which she always was.

  The risqué nature of the pleasure the guilt afforded — the smoke-filled, twilight spaces inhabited by the boisterous, teasing, and amorously inclined young men — was well worth the gnawing battle with her conscience it also caused.

  Late one evening, Feroza committed the cardinal sin. She took a few puffs from a cigarette at Jo’s guitarist boyfriend’s insistence. Jo had tried to protect her friend. “Lay off. It’s against her religion to smoke. She worships fire.”

  But Feroza was a bit drunk on wine, and the boy persuasive. Without bothering to protest Jo’s misleading interpretation of her faith, she drew on the cigarette held between the guitarist’s fingers. Feroza choked on the smoke, coughed to the intense amusement of the company, and thoroughly enjoyed her role as an ingenue.

  That night Feroza hunted out her kusti and her sudra. She covered her head with a scarf and, holding the kusti between her hands as proscribed, said the Hormazd Khoda-ay prayer. She whipped the air with its tasseled ends when she came to the part that said, “May the Evil One be vanquished!” and then, winding the kusti three times round her waist, knotting it at the front and the back to the accompaniment of the appropriate prayers, symbolically girded her loins to serve the Lord. After performing the kusti ritual, Feroza bowed her penitent’s head to beg divine forgiveness for desecrating the holy fire — the symbol of Ahura Mazda — by permitting it such intimate contact with her unclean mouth.