An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Zareen’s first instinct was to back off. But her hostess was already saying, “Here she is. You wanted to speak to her, no?”

  Zareen stood there, teetering on her party heels, because her hostess had stood her there. The man’s glance passed her indifferently, and Zareen wondered if he’d asked to see her at all. The guest of honor looked to her like a made-up B-grade movie villain: a pair of thick, brown eyebrows, and then a bald scalp, clean as a plucked chicken’s.

  A Dutch man Zareen barely knew chivalrously vacated his chair next to the sofa, saying, “Please, sit down.” He could barely conceal his relief as he withdrew.

  Zareen smiled her thanks and, as she adjusted the elegant fall of her sari, wondered what she had let herself in for. Sitting sideways in her chair, she turned to the American expectantly.

  From the recesses of the sofa, his impersonal eyes wandering, the man rumbled something indecipherable and attempted to draw himself forward, as if trying to get to his feet.

  “Good God,” Zareen thought. It was as if she had put him to considerable trouble in forcing his reluctant attention.

  Zareen lowered her disconcerted gaze. The man’s chest and stomach bulged above his belt like a bomb dressed up in an expensive evening shirt.

  “You’re a social worker?” The man’s grating voice appeared to match his other unpleasant attributes. “They tell me you worked with this Bhutto’s wife, on some committee or other?”

  He made it sound as if social work was despicable and that having once worked with the imprisoned prime minister’s wife was something to be ashamed of. Zareen caught herself feeling sheepish and apologetic. Surprised and provoked by her own reaction, she mutinously replied, “I like to help disadvantaged people. I do voluntary work at the Destitute Women’s and Children’s Home and at two orphanages. I was on many women’s committees with Begum Bhutto.”

  What was she trying to prove? And to whom?

  “And Bhutto — what d’you think of him?”

  “He’s my hero. The champion of the poor, of women, of the minorities and underprivileged people — of democracy.”

  The man went through the motion of clapping softly. Zareen noticed that his cheeks dimpled when he smiled. It was the last gesture Zareen expected of this cynical, bald, villainous-looking character. She found herself relaxing, less on the defensive. She smiled.

  But the instant she met his eyes, her defenses were back in position. There was no point at which they had made contact as two equal people, as she had imagined.

  “What d’you think will happen if this ‘hero’ is hanged tomorrow? Will there be a lot of trouble? Riots? People making trouble on the streets? Killing?”

  The question was weighted with the conceit of a man who already has the answers.

  Zareen was acutely aware of the man’s insolent demeanor, but courtesy and the tradition of hospitality were too deeply ingrained for Zareen to exhibit her chagrin. She looked away, taken aback in a way she couldn’t comprehend.

  The man rasped, “The people here lie a lot. I don’t know what to believe.” He raised a shoulder in a disparaging shrug. “Maybe we Americans have to stop being so naive.”

  Naive? He did not strike her as naive. She felt he had come with preconceived notions about Pakistan and intended only to reinforce them. Nor were some of the other Americans she’d met naive. Nor were the European, Australian, and American hippies who had passed through Pakistan on their drugged pilgrimage to Katmandu before the trouble in Afghanistan had closed the route.

  Had anyone told the poor villagers, who fed and sheltered these wanderers and gave them their pitiable clothes, that the world out there had changed? That these strangers were conditioned to look out only for themselves and that the villagers’ kindness and canons of hospitality were naive?

  The man sat up straighter and looked briefly but politely at Zareen. “Well, what d’you think?”

  Zareen found her petrified tongue suddenly loosen, and with her infinite capacity for loquacity and truth-telling, the frightened, desperate words tumbled out: “There will be a lot of trouble. It will be the worst possible thing, the most tragic thing to happen. He is loved by the masses. The repercussions will be terrible. Horrible.”

  “But what about tomorrow? If he’s hanged tomorrow, will there be trouble?” he asked in the same emotionless voice.

  Zareen felt the complete lack of compassion the man projected; he was chilling. For the first time he appeared to be really interested in what she might have to say.

  “No,” she shook her head, thinking hopelessly that all the Peoples’ Party leaders, from the mighty to the smallest, were either in prison or under dire threat of some kind or other. Some had been bribed into compliance. “The immediate trouble will be controllable, I think.” Zareen said simply, wondering how she knew the answer to a question she had not thought to put to herself before.

  ~

  After midnight, as she removed her diamond-and-emerald choker and earrings, unwrapped her sari, and unhooked her blouse, Zareen told Cyrus what had happened. “But why did he want answers from me? Who am I?”

  Cyrus looked equally puzzled. “I guess you’ve a reputation for shooting your mouth off,” he said. “And you keep on and on about the feelings of the masses, as if you represent them. The fellow must be CIA.”

  “You know what I hated most?” Halfway to folding the shimmering, six-yard sari, her arms stretched out, Zareen stood still and thoughtful. “The man did not think of me as a person, as somebody. I was not Zareen, just some third-rate Third Worlder, too contemptible to be of the same species.”

  Cyrus could see her groping for expression, and he was surprised and touched by the eloquence her distress inspired.

  “He was so cynical,” Zareen continued. “He asked the most simplistic questions, as if the complexity that makes up our world doesn’t exist. I’ve never felt the way he made me feel … valueless … genderless.”

  Zareen jerked her arms to bring the sari edges together. “The fool! If he had all the answers, why did he ask me questions? Did he have to make me feel so miserable?”

  She finished folding her sari with abrupt movements and flung it over the back of the rocking chair. As she turned, Cyrus noticed her blink. Her eyes, large and dark, made more seductive by the unexpected width at the bridge of her nose, were unnaturally brilliant.

  Zareen was always meticulous about removing her makeup, but tonight she merely switched out the light and crept wordlessly into Cyrus’s arms. Cyrus stroked her hair, nuzzled her neck, and, holding her close, healed the wounds inflicted upon her voluptuous and shaken womanhood, and to her psyche.

  Exactly a month to the day after the dinner, they woke up to the news that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been hanged at four minutes past two in the morning. All-India Radio was the first to announce the news to most Pakistanis, at seven o’clock in the morning. He had been hanged in the Rawalpindi jail.

  On the morning of the news of Bhutto’s death, their phone rang constantly. Everybody was agitated, asking, “Heard anything new?” or saying, “I’ve just heard —”

  Like thousands of distraught citizens all over Pakistan, Zareen disbelieved the news. They would not dare hang him in the face of the appeals from Amnesty International, other human rights organizations, and leaders of countries all over the world!

  In her crumpled sari, Zareen drove her Christian ayah and the sweeper’s, gardener’s, and cook’s wives up and down the streets leading from the Gulberg Market traffic circle. They passed other small bands of distraught women who were also looking to join one of the larger processions that surely must exist somewhere to protest the injustice: to establish a martyr’s claim to his martyrdom.

  The men drove in cars and trucks and ran here and there on the streets like headless chickens in similar scattered batches to join their voice to the national howl, if they could find the others. But there was no main crowd, no large procession they could become a part of, no avenue to vent their rage, hu
rt, and grief.

  The larger tragedy was that General Zia had the support, open or covert, of all the major political forces in the country and all the country’s major institutions — the military, the civil bureaucracy, and the judiciary.

  In the long, bitter letter Zareen sent to her daughter she wrote: “I realized then that there is no such thing as a ‘spontaneous uprising’ unless it is sanctioned!”

  Chapter 17

  It is believed that troubles come in threes. They can also come during an ominous moment in the Panchang, an astrological calendar in which the Parsees generally believe, in fives.

  Jo and Feroza’s decrepit apartment, which had been tolerable mainly because of its relative quiet, suddenly developed the most ominous creaks and thuds. Without any warning the apartment above theirs had been rented to what sounded like a family of horses.

  This invasion of their peace of mind, Feroza fathomed in retrospect, was the harbinger of their subsequent tribulations — the start of their particular ominous moment.

  The girls were startled awake at dawn by the galloping above them of hoofed creatures and, in the lengthening spring evenings, rained upon by peeling paint and chunks of plaster.

  Jo called their landlord.

  The landlord said he’d have a word with his tenants.

  She called him again. And again.

  He crustily counseled her to go upstairs and tell the new occupants to stop whatever they were doing and banged the phone down.

  Jo stormed up the stairs, followed by a glowering Feroza, and pounded on the door. It was opened by a lissome, athletic-looking young woman wearing mauve jogging shorts over a black leotard. Obliterating the rest of the view with a massive pink torso and overdeveloped biceps stood an irate-looking man in a jockstrap.

  Jo’s bearing was anything but that of a neighbor dropping by for a friendly chat. The lissome woman, whose brown hair was tied in a severe ponytail, hastily squeezed to one side to allow the muscled creature behind her center stage.

  “What d’ya want?” the man said.

  “We wanna know just what the hell’s going on up here.”

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “I mean the jumping an’ all that shit. What’re you guys doing, running a bloody stud farm? The living room plaster and paint’s falling. If this goes on the ceiling’ll crash.”

  Feroza was more explicit. “On our heads!”

  “It ain’t none of your goddamn business! Sandy an’ Mary here do aerobics.” Hearing the shouting, Sandy had poked her cropped blond head out between the biceps and torso. She quickly withdrew it to reveal another muscular and jock-strapped presence in the background. “And Andy an’ me pump iron — and we ain’t gonna stop,” said the bodybuilder and slammed the door in their faces.

  Feroza and Jo exchanged alarmed looks and clattered down to their apartment to huddle in a conference. In about ten minutes, while they were conjuring strategies to force the landlord to evict the hulks, there was a dull thud above them, as of a heavy object being carelessly released. A chunk of falling plaster barely missed Feroza’s head.

  Jo yanked open the door and shouted up, “Stop doin’ that you fuckin’ assholes!”

  The upstairs door banged open. “Shad-up you fucking freaks. Go join a circus, fat-girl!” The door slammed shut.

  There were more frightening thumps from upstairs, then a hail of plaster and peeling paint. Another large fragment of plaster fell on the sofa right where Jo had been sitting a moment before and bounced to shatter on the floor. The living room floor, drapes, tables, and furnishings were shrouded by the accumulated debris.

  “Don’t touch anything! Leave it just as it is!” Jo gasped excitedly, like a detective instructing an underling not to disturb the arrangement of the body or weapon. Feroza, who did not have the slightest inclination to clear the mess, or venture out of the corner she was cowering in, nodded obediently.

  Jo cast her eyes to the ceiling, and, as the look of exasperation on her face turned to an expression of incredulity and horror, Feroza looked up too. There was a bulge radiating from the center of the ceiling. It looked as if their ceiling had sagged.

  “Come on,” Jo said, and without bothering to lock the door or put on their jackets, they hurtled down the steps.

  Jo brought her jalopy to a squealing halt right in front of their landlord’s small frame house. She punched the horn several times and, having shattered the serenity of the neighborhood with the blasts, proceeded to savagely pummel her landlord’s door. “Our ceiling’s falling! D’ya hear me? Those dumb hulks up there are dropping weights! If you don’t do something about it soon and we get hurt, we’re gonna sue your ass.”

  The landlord opened the door and glowered at the outraged girls. Their distraught appearance and the paint and plaster on their hair and clothes appeared to have an effect: “Don’t holler,” he opened his mouth exaggeratedly wide to whisper testily. “The ceiling is not going to fall. I’ll take a look.”

  The girls sat tense and panting in their living room while the landlord went upstairs. They listened to the sounds of an altercation, the angry words muffled by the closed doors. The shouting subsided. After a while, the landlord rattled down the staircase and poked his head in for the briefest moment, “I’ll have the ceiling fixed on Sunday. I’ve warned those guys upstairs. They won’t bother you again.”

  Instead of the handsome construction workers Feroza and Jo expected on Sunday, the landlord appeared. He came staggering through the door carrying a stepladder and tools and dragging a large canvas tarpaulin.

  Feroza and Jo grumpily sipped the beer they had procured in anticipation of a good time and sullenly ate the roast beef sandwiches Jo had prepared. Regretting the pains they had taken to look good, they watched with skepticism the elderly handyman’s efforts. They did not offer him even a glass of water.

  The landlord eventually succeeded in attaching a tarpaulin to the four corners of the ceiling. He stepped down the ladder to inspect the canvas. It drooped like an overloaded hammock. He wiped his face and helped himself to a Coke from the fridge. He climbed up again to hammer in more nails along the edges.

  The landlord stepped back finally and surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction. He looked at the girls and noting their dismayed expressions, told them that he’d have the ceiling properly fixed once he had the money; there was no way he could afford it from the rent they paid. In the mean time they were not to worry, the structure was sound, and the tarpaulin would keep the paint and plaster from messing up their living room.

  The next day Feroza and Jo heard the news of Bhutto’s hanging on CBS. It was the second misfortune in the series of their five tribulations.

  At first Feroza did not believe it. “Rot! Absolute rot!” she said. “If he’s dead, why don’t they show his body? I bet he’s alive … I bet he’s escaped from jail and they are saying this to hide the truth!”

  “If it’s on TV, it’s gotta be true,” Jo said and, remembering Feroza’s tutorials regarding her blind faith in whatever she heard on TV, added, “Shit, I mean, they wouldn’t say something like that if it wasn’t true.”

  As the inevitability of the martyrdom, presaged by the distress of Bhutto’s sister at Data Sahib’s shrine, sank in, Feroza’s eyes began to smart and her face to turn red.

  “Assholes! Douchebags! Fools! Donkeys!” Feroza shouted, her voice breaking, and, repeating the swear words again and again, began to weep.

  Jo, also shocked by the terrible fate of the handsome man on the poster in Feroza’s room, let loose a sympathetic repertoire of curses to augment her friends inadequate vocabulary.

  The following morning it was as if the school had suddenly discovered Pakistan — and recognized Feroza as the country’s sole representative. Feroza’s face was covertly studied. When it was found to bear the puffy eyes, the red nose, the quivering mouth, and the other signs of grief, the students’ sympathetic expressions, and the consideration they showed Feroza, touched and comforted
her. Jo accompanied her carrying a square box of tissues and supplied the details and answers to some of the questions when Feroza was unable to speak.

  Feroza’s counselor, Emily Simms, sought her out in the afternoon. She knew how emotionally involved Feroza was with Pakistani politics, particularly Bhutto. She plied Feroza with coffee, tissues, and cookies and told her, “I know just how you must feel, honey, being so far away from your family and home. But please think of us as your family. We’re very fond of you; we love you.”

  The teachers in Feroza’s classes stopped to have a word with her. Students she had never seen smiled at her, said, “Hi, how’re you doing?” and grouped round to ask questions and say, “Oh, shit,” and how sorry they were.

  Just as Feroza’s celebrity was beginning to wear thin, Zareen’s letter, full of groping evaluations, fanciful conjectures, and the reactions of the Parsee community, their dinner party friends, servants, and shopkeepers, arrived.

  The length of the letter and the details with which it was packed, gave Feroza a clear idea of the grief Bhutto’s hanging had caused Zareen and many others like her in Pakistan.

  She related their tiny ayah’s whispered confidence that Bhutto would arrive at the right moment from across the border in India riding a white stallion. Zareen ended the letter saying that she had had the same news whispered in her ear so often by the poor people that she did not have the heart to contradict it.

  ~

  It had been an exacting day. Feroza spent the free time between classes scribbling out an assignment for her American history class and spent a grueling hour after school with the teacher who was trying to coach her in chemistry.

  Earlier that afternoon, she had discovered a flat tire and had walked her bicycle to the campus store to have it fixed.