An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Feroza became accustomed to Jo bringing boys home. Jo fell in love with nearly every boy she met — and out of love by the end of two weeks. The affairs ended in sensationally noisy and nerve-racking brawls, and Jo got into the habit of replenishing her drained energies and soothing her anguish by preparing and imbibing huge quantities of food.

  Sometimes two boys were invited home. When Jo disappeared into her room with her boyfriend, Feroza sat decorous and embarrassed in their small living room in front of the TV, sporadically making small talk and suppressing her yawns. Although Feroza had come a long way out of her shell and was able to flirt and laugh when in a group, she still became self-conscious and stiff when she found herself alone with a boy.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Jo asked. “You frigid or something?”

  “Yes,” Feroza said defiantly, not exactly sure what Jo meant but sensing enough of the meaning to feel unfairly charged. “What’s it to you?”

  Jo also changed jobs every other week with the regularity of a calendar, and Feroza wondered that there were that many jobs available. Jo would burst into the apartment to announce, “This is it! The job for me. I really like the people. One guy is so fantastic …”

  A week later the cook or waiter or some customer was an “asshole,” and she had quit. She’d go angrily into the kitchen and, amidst a grand banging of pots and pans, shout, “The asshole said I wasn’t doing it right! I’ve been working in this business too long to take that; I got more experience than that douchebag!” and she’d whip up a feast for the both of them.

  At the tumultuous end of each affair — twice every month, true to the track of her cosmic cycle — Jo would bounce into the living room, yelling, “Hey Feroza, I wanna tell you something,” sprawl on the sofa, light a cigarette, and say, “I met the most gorgeous guy. He’s in the marines. This is the man for me. This time I’m really in love. Oh God, I really, really love the guy. He’s gorgeous.” She had a thing for men in uniforms and would often turn up with a policeman.

  Jo would talk about the man late into the night, describing each physical particular — his nose his eyes his hair his teeth — till Feroza, giddy with exhaustion, fell asleep. Jo would shake her awake and prop her up with pillows. Feroza, conditioned by her relationship with Manek to be resourceful, acquired the knack of sleeping with her wide-open eyes fixed on Jo.

  Then Jo met Mike, a slight, good-looking dropout, glib, charming, and phenomenally unreliable. He’d phone and say, “I’m coming over right now,” and never turn up, while an ill-tempered Jo sat up half the night feeding, fuming, and throwing cushions Manek had provided at the TV in the living room.

  Or he’d turn up the next day.

  What with the emotional upheavals in her love life and her propensity to quit jobs and drown her sorrows in food, Jo inflated like a white whale right before Feroza’s alarmed eyes.

  “You eat too much when you’re unhappy,” Feroza said, ventilating her concern. “Either you learn to stick with a job or you stop fooling around with that Mike. You can’t go on eating like this.”

  “I’m fat,” moaned Jo. “I know. Every time I look into a mirror I wanna puke! I don’t know how Mike stands me. Oh God, I’ll lose Mike … I gotta do something.”

  As if to vindicate her prescience, Mike did not call for two entire days, or return her calls. She left messages on his answering machine and all over Twin Falls.

  On the night of the third day, Jo and Feroza drove to Mike’s apartment at two in the morning while Jo sobbed, “Oh God, please don’t let Mike ditch me. You’re right, Feroza, I’m a fat slob.”

  When she found the door barred, brutally indifferent to her violent knocks, Jo wailed at his window on the second floor from the moonlit stillness on the pavement, “Mike, I love you, Mike — Pleeeease don’t leave me, Mike.”

  Mike’s curtained window, with the light coming through it, remained as indifferent to her pleas as the battered door.

  Feroza, who had gone on the mission with her distraught friend in the capacity of a sensible and ministering parent, was so embarrassed and humiliated for her friend that she dragged and pushed the hulking girl to the car. Literally forcing her in and locking the door, Feroza drove her back, venting her bottled-up feelings. “Mike’s bad news. You’re lucky he’s ditched you. Thank your stars.”

  It was the first time Feroza had ever driven a car in America. As she alternately soothed and scolded her hysterical friend, she also kept cautioning herself that she must keep to the right side of the road and not drive on the left as in Pakistan.

  After this incident, Jo encouraged Feroza to drive the Corvette under her guidance. Feroza drove to and from the campus, to the fancier stores in downtown Twin Falls, and to the Department of Motor Vehicles to take her driving test. As soon as she got her American driver’s license, she jubilantly phoned Manek with the news.

  As maddeningly avancular and condescending as ever, Manek said, “Good, good. You’re doing great. Just don’t drive over the speed limit, or you’ll wreck Jo’s car and break your neck. Don’t drive alone, yet.”

  “Oh God. I wish you’d stop being such a grandfather.”

  Which gave Manek just the opportunity to indulge his rusting falsetto: “Oh, Grandpa, I didn’t listen to you. Now look at me, stuck in a wheelchair.”

  Feroza hung up.

  Manek called back at once. “Temper, temper. It’s very rude to hang up. You’ve got to learn to control your temper.”

  “Shut up, douchebag!”

  Manek was puzzled and stunned by this new addition to her vocabulary and too disturbed to call back when she hung up again.

  Jo took up with the state trooper who had given Feroza’s driving test. But so far as she was concerned, it was an uninspiring alliance, despite the uniform.

  “He’s the first nice guy you’ve dated,” Feroza said. “He’s good-looking and he’s steady. He seems to really care for you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jo said. “That’s why I don’t care for him. He’s boring. I’m gonna stop seeing him.”

  Feroza decided to keep her mouth shut.

  Mike showed up again, as if nothing had happened and he had not vanished for fifteen days.

  When the trooper phoned, Jo barely spoke to him, and she wasn’t home when he came by. When he eventually got the message, Feroza spent ten minutes consoling him and packed him off saying, “Whatever happens, happens for the best.”

  Ecstatic at the unexpected reprieve, Jo fed Mike huge meals, washed his clothes, cleaned his filthy apartment, lent him her car, and tolerated his callous unreliability with a stoic resilience that would have done a masochist proud.

  Mike was asking Jo for money. Feroza fathomed this when Jo skipped classes, started working two jobs, and borrowed money from her. Mike was almost living off Jo. Feroza also guessed by the way his eyes oscillated, by his sometimes slow and sometimes fluid movements that reminded her of the kid in the bus in New York, that Mike was on drugs.

  Then she suspected he was a thief. Things were missing, like the little gold chain with the angel Asho Farohar’s winged image she wore around her neck beneath her clothes. She remembered putting it on the TV. Then she couldn’t find an onyx bowl in which they kept nuts. Jo’s electric clock in the kitchen disappeared.

  Feroza sat her friend down late one night and talked to her seriously. Mike had as usual stood her up. “Why’re you working your butt off for that creep? He takes your money, borrows your car, and treats you like shit. Can’t you tell he’s on drugs?” And she accosted Jo with her latest discovery. “Things are missing. He’s a thief.”

  “You just hate him!” Jo screamed.

  After which she broke down. She knew he was on drugs; no matter how much money she gave him, it was never enough. She suspected he did a bit of dealing and was sometimes a fence for stolen goods. Nothing serious or regular, just to make a little cash now and then. She had hocked her watch and her gold bracelet. At times she didn’t know what to do. “But h
e’s a good kid, he just needs work. He’s basically good. All he needs is a little help.” She loved him so much she would change him. He needed her, really needed her, and she could not just let him down like the rest of the world had. He was making progress.

  “You’re kidding yourself,” Feroza said angrily, thinking Jo was as addicted to Mike as he was to drugs. “You’ll fail your classes. You’re ruining your life!”

  Jo bawled.

  Early one evening, Mike walloped Jo in the parking lot. Jo thudded up the stairs noisily and came in crying and sobbing and showing off. “Can you believe it? That asshole beat me up!” She phoned the people at her current job and her other friends, saying, “That asshole beat me. I don’t believe it. I’m bruised all over. I’m going to report him to the cops.”

  Jo called her sister Janine, in Los Angeles. Janine was in the habit of phoning Jo, making a big issue out of small matters. Feroza knew Jo felt Janine was everything she was not. Stunningly beautiful, flamboyant, and dramatic, she had run away with a married man when she was fourteen — and had lived off welfare ever since. At the moment she was living with a bookie, producing baby after baby. Jo fondly remembered the names of all the babies and often talked to Feroza about them. She sometimes quizzed Feroza, firing off a question about one of her nieces and nephews, and was offended when Feroza did not remember their names or who had said which cute thing.

  She also rang up her other sister, Sally, who was extremely and newly rich. Sally and her husband visited Paris and Rome and lived in Champion Forest, in Houston. They were members of the Champion Forest Country Club. They had two children, of whom Jo also talked fondly.

  And Feroza realized that to a fat girl, starved for affection and attention, being beaten up was a sign that she was as normal as any of them, her life as dramatic and full of incident as her sisters’ — as the pretty girls’.

  Notwithstanding her penchant for shoplifting, which Jo incoherently explained was as much a duty she owed an unjust society as an adventure, Feroza found Jo honest and open. The reasons she gave for stealing from the affluent stores were not unlike Manek’s reasons for “skimming” the system, and Feroza didn’t find it too difficult to reconcile the contrary aspects of Jo’s personality. Yet, in many ways, Jo surprised Feroza by her naïveté. Jo believed everything Mike said, and she took as gospel everything she heard on TV and radio.

  Feroza had learned from her parents, servants, friends, and relatives to question the news, form an opinion only after she had absorbed through word of mouth and the rumor mill other opinions. Given a bit of time, the information sorted itself out, and she would come to her own conclusions, as most people did in Pakistan.

  If Jo thought about politics at all it was because a scrap of news, caught inadvertantly while flipping channels, might immediately affect or inconvienence her. Like, if she needed an abortion, would it be legal?

  Otherwise, the last thing that concerned Jo in 1979 was politics, and Feroza understood that it was so because she had no cause for concern. No matter who was voted in, Republican or Democrat, the political process would run smoothly, and it would make as little difference to Jo’s life as it would to American policy. Jo would continue to change jobs and boyfriends and party at will. Regardless of what happened in Vietnam or Afghanistan, or how many refugees wandered the world — like the three million Afghans who, by 1979, had already begun to pour into Pakistan and devastate its ecology and its social fabric — or how many weapons the United States and the Soviet Union manufactured or countries they bullied or bombs they rained down, the theater of war would be profitably maintained and kept remote from their part of the world.

  Martin Luther King Jr.’s and the Kennedys’ assassinations, the knowledge and abhorrence of which she had grown up with, had grieved Jo, Watergate had shocked her, but the tenor of her life and that of her parents’ and acquaintances’ lives remained the same: full of opportunity for those with the ambition to grab it, benign even to those with less ambition, but punishing for the citizens the larger cities had turned into the flotsam Feroza had seen at the Port Authority bus station in New York.

  In Pakistan, politics concerned everyone — from the street-sweeper to the business tycoon — because it personally affected everyone, particularly women, determining how they should dress, whether they could play hockey in school or not, how they should conduct themselves even within the four walls of their homes.

  Despite Jo’s political naïveté, Feroza found her an intelligent and sympathetic listener she could talk to of the political travails of Pakistan and the threatened martyrdom of her hero. Infected by her friend’s passion, Jo also found the man on the poster, with his glowing face and impassioned outstretched arm, heroic and handsome. Jo was concerned when Feroza pointed out that the news about Pakistan and other Third World countries was one-sided. Under Feroza’s influence, Jo began watching the news with her on TV, and she began to realize the extent of the bias and how pervasive it was on all the networks. Then she became gratifyingly provoked, involved, and curious, and Feroza was touched.

  Manek was right when he’d told her she was lucky to have Jo as her roommate, that Jo would teach her more about America than he ever could. Feroza felt that living with Jo helped her to understand Americans and their exotic culture — how much an abstract word like “freedom” could encompass and how many rights the individuals had and, most important, that those rights were active, not, as in Pakistan, given by a constitution but otherwise comatose. A person like Jo could ensure her rights through law and, if required, demand accountability of the State. She admired the vigilant role played in all this by the free press but also realized that each network had its own bias.

  Like her parents, Feroza had a politically acute and restless mind, precocious for one her age, at least in America. And living with Jo and watching TV also gave her a disturbing insight into America’s foreign policy, into the nature of the fissure that existed at the core of America’s political heart, which, like divine Zurvan’s mythic face, was divided into darkness and light — Black-and-White Right-and-Wrong Good-and-Evil — with no room for the gray that other older and poorer nations had learned to accommodate. But duality existed also in human nature, in nature itself, in her own religion, even in God, so who was she to sit in judgment?

  Nevertheless, the schizophrenia she perceived at the core of America’s relationship to its own citizens and to those in poor countries like hers continued to disturb her. She eventually came to the conclusion that it troubled her because America was so consummately rich and powerful, and the inconsistencies of its dual standards, the injustices it perpetuated, were so cynical and so brazen. Not that Pakistan or other countries were paragons, but then no one expected any better of Pakistan — it laid no claim as the leader of nations, the grand arbiter of justice and human rights.

  And while Feroza was groping to understand America through her friend and her friend was beginning to grasp the reality of a world that existed outside America, an American in Pakistan, in an unexpected encounter, filled Zareen’s heart with fear and loathing.

  Chapter 16

  Zareen and Cyrus were at one of the many dinners they attended. It was a large party, with about thirty couples, and the sliding door to the TV lounge had been opened to create more space. The guests formed groups around four or five sofa sets placed at various angles against the walls and in the corners of the commodious sitting and living rooms. For the most part the men stood, either with the women or in groups of three or four, discussing business or politics and slapping each other’s palms as they joked and laughed. Two or three waiters from the Punjab club had been hired for the evening, and they wove between the loquacious guests unobtrusively replenishing drinks.

  Zareen, sitting with some women on floor cushions, looked markedly at her watch and raised her eyebrows. A tall woman sitting next to her in a stunning navy-and-silver sari picked up the cue: “Good God, it’s already eleven,” she said in a shocked voice, as if it
was the first time that dinner had been so late. “We’d better tell Farhi to feed us, or God knows when we’ll eat.”

  This remark drew the attention of the men standing near them, as it was meant to, and produced the expected protests: “Dinner already? Don’t you people have anything on your minds but food?” and “Ladies, please, give us a break; the night’s still young and tomorrow’s Friday. Relax.”

  These were the little ruses the women amused themselves with while trying to wean the men from their evening Scotches and prime them for dinner.

  Their short, roly-poly hostess approached, smiling at Zareen. Zareen feigned astonishment and asked, “Dinner’s on the table? I can’t believe it!”

  A good-looking man with prematurely white hair, notorious for having to be dragged to the buffet table, cried, “Have a heart, bibi. Let us finish our drinks at least.”

  “Take your time,” said Farhi. “Nobody’s bringing out dinner just yet.”

  The women groaned. Farhi laughed, shrugged to express her helplessness, and then leaned towards Zareen to say, “The guest of honor, an American gentleman, would like to talk to you.”

  “Me? Why?” Zareen asked, promptly gathering herself to get off the floor, the lift to her ego at being singled out lending a lilt to her voice.

  “Why don’t you find out yourself?” her hostess said. “He’s heard you’re a Bhutto fan, that you have strong political opinions.”

  The wide borders on their colorful silk saris undulating seductively as they moved, Farhi and Zareen walked through the crowded, noisy rooms into the quieter TV lounge. Farhi went up to a large man who sat at one end of a four-piece sofa, an arm stretched out on the backrest. The vast expanse of his chest, his spread thighs, his sloven posture, all bespoke the language of power and possession and the insensitivity that often goes with them.