An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Meanwhile, holding up and displaying hands innocent of bombs, guns or knives — and an equally innocent pair of out-thrust breasts that could not possibly conceal a weapon behind the tight fit of her sari-blouse — Freny barreled forward like a squat and unstoppable tank. Before the surprised guards could intervene she had plastered her chest and glued her nose to the glass. Using her empty hands as blinders, she peered into the arrival lounge.

  Two minutes later, offendedly muttering, “Okay baba, okay. I’m going,” Freny charged past the agitated security police to the waiting relatives. “I’ve had a good look,” she told them. “Manek isn’t there.”

  “Maybe you didn’t recognize him,” Zareen ventured. “He must have changed.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Freny was irritated. “I’d recognize him even if he’d turned into a monkey!” Pointedly looking away she addressed the others. “I don’t think all the passengers have come into the lounge yet. We’ll just have to wait and see. There’s a whole bunch of Sikh pilgrims, it’s a wonder the airplane wasn’t hijacked.” Freny was referring to the two Indian Airline aircraft that had been hijacked by Sikh Separatists in the past few months. The planes had circled the Lahore airport for hours and had been permitted to land only when the fuel ran out. “One of the Sikh pilgrims had his face all covered up like a bandit,” Freny continued. “I couldn’t tell if it was a turban and beard-wrap, or bandages.”

  Deep frowns appeared on the faces of the reception committee. Furtive glances were cast at Khutlibai. There was a bit of subdued khoos-poossing.

  Pale as mountain mist beneath her discreet dusting of powder, Khutlibai looked from concerned face to concerned face and slowly raised a shaking hand to her heaving heart. Appealingly helpless and bewildered, she whispered: “O baap ray! Oh dear Father! What’s happened? Why hasn’t he come?” And, summarily dismissing everybody’s hasty assurances that Manek would turn up at any moment, devoutly enlisted Ahura Mazda’s help and the angel Behram Ejud’s protection.

  A clutch of businessmen — overnight travelers carrying hand luggage — came out of the glass doors and vanished into the waiting throng. An elegant woman, trailed by three children and a porter trundling a loaded cart, was followed by a sedate trickle of other first-class passengers. Then came the disorderly procession of a hundred squeaking carts piled with mountains of suitcases, bedding rolls, and crates, and the accompanying flood of economy-class passengers with bawling infants. The passengers’ eyes searched the receiving throng like orphans hoping to be claimed.

  The hairy Sikh pilgrims came out next, looking perplexed and anxious, and were immediately greeted with shouts of “Taxi! Taxi!” Their colorful turbans and beard wraps could be seen bobbing as they were dragged away by the rapacious taxi-wallas.

  “It’s Manek!” A keen-eyed youngster squealed excitedly. “He’s all bandaged up!”

  Everybody craned their necks. All but hidden behind the crushing line of emerging passengers, his head and most of his face swaddled in white bandages, they recognized him.

  “O mahara baap! Oh my Father!” Khutlibai gasped, thumping her chest, and Zareen simultaneously screamed, “Oh God, it’s Manek! Oh God!”

  They had failed to recognize him earlier because he wasn’t wearing his glasses and only a tiny portion of his brown face showed through the white cocoon of his bandages.

  There was no holding them back. The family broke through the cordon. The security men were as ineffectual as cotton-wool-stuffed gunny-sacks deployed to plug a breached canal. Manek’s startling appearance and the stampede of his anxious relatives, yielded him a passage; sympathetic passengers stood back to let him pass.

  Manek was instantly absorbed into the family fold and steered to stand before Khutlibai. He bent forward accommodatingly. Khutlibai placed a heavy rose garland round his neck, a touching mix of concern and happiness shining in her brimming eyes. She circled the air round his head with her hands, at the same time sprinkling him with rice, and energetically cracked her knuckles on her temples. Having prudently warded off stray evil and envious eyes, Khutlibai hugged Manek tenderly. She kissed those portions of his face spared by the bandages and, with an audible sigh, briefly lay her head upon her youngest son’s chest.

  As soon as Khutlibai released him, the men thumped Manek heartily on his sweat-soaked back and said, “What’s the matter, yaar? You look quite fit … Why the bandages?” But the women, eyeing the unfeeling men with reproach, placed fragrant garlands round Manek’s shoulders and solemnly held him to their copious bosoms. Making indulgent noises, they asked affectionate questions and stroked his arms.

  A pair of solicitous hands grabbed Manek’s heaped cart. Other hands divested him of his duty-free packages, hand luggage, and overcoat. In a protective throng, with Manek conspicuous in its center with his garlands and his alarming bandages, they crossed the road to the parking lot. Car trunks flew open to swallow the luggage.

  All four doors of the Toyota were hospitably open. The old Pathan driver with the vivid blue eyes salaamed, made anxious inquiries, and gingerly embraced his pitifully bandaged employer. Manek was ushered into the front seat, and the long-legged Cyrus crushed into the narrow slot between Khutlibai and Zareen; he sat hunched up, his handsome chin almost touching his knees.

  By this time, even Khutlibai had realized there was nothing seriously the matter with her son. However, maintaining a sympathetic pretense of concern, she lovingly kneaded his shoulders and was pleased by the feel of his strong new muscles. As the caravan of air-conditioned cars honked their way out of the airport, she leaned forward to ask, “What happened to you, my son? May I die for you; tell me how did this happen?”

  There was a dramatic pause occasioned by Manek’s deliberate silence.

  Khutlibai inserted an arm between the front seats and, her elbow jabbing the driver’s ribs, placed her palm flat on Manek’s chest. This gesture transmitted many messages. Besides expressing a readiness to sooth her son and imbue him with the courage to bear his pain, it also conveyed an understanding of his mute ordeal. But, most importantly, it reestablished the web of ties that traditionally bind son to mother, the sacrificial and protective nature of maternal love and its claim to Manek’s everlasting devotion and sense of duty.

  With her usual adroit sense of timing, and in a choked voice, Khutlibai heightened the dramatic potential of the moment: “God knows how much pain my quietly enduring child is suffering. But then he was never one to make a fuss! Does it hurt a lot?”

  Manek started to undo his bandage. Khutlibai and Zareen immediately began to help and squashed Cyrus further. Cyrus pressed back against the seat and raised his knees to protect himself from their heedless arms and elbows.

  Relieved of the bandages, Manek broke his silence. “I’ve hurt my jaw.” Choosing to express his feelings in the colorful Gujrati idiom used by older Parsees, he continued, “Speaking this wretched English all the time has worn away my jaws. Don’t anyone dare talk to me in English!”

  “Get away from me!” Khutlibai said, laughing with relief and giving his shoulder a shove. “Now I know why you haven’t picked up an American wife! Say what you like, but ours are ours! Didn’t I tell you — in the end one is comfortable only with ones own kind!”

  “Sala badmash! Scoundrel!” Zareen swore, messing his sweat-drenched and flattened curls, “You had us all worried for nothing. And we thought your stay in America had improved you!”

  “Still the same old actor, yaar,” commented Cyrus, shaking his long face from side to side with disbelief and amusement, and at the same time giggling with a hiss that sprayed his brother-in-law with a fine mist of spit.

  Partaking of the general feeling of relief, and belatedly reacting to the jab of Khutlibai’s elbow to his ribs, the driver applied his brakes behind a cyclist and, with inches to spare, blared his horn into the unfortunate man’s ears. As the startled cyclist wobbled and turned to glare back, the driver shouted, “If you want to die, you black man, go and die beneath some
other car!”

  The sun had set, and in the lingering afterglow made opaque by the dust and sooty emissions from the buses and mini-buses, it was impossible to tell the cyclist’s color. But, then, had Snow White been the cyclist she would have been called “black man” also. The comment was not pertinent to color or sex. In the hierarchy of Pakistani traffic, truck and car are king; the cyclist, as possessor of an inferior vehicle, is treated with contempt. By the same token the pedestrian, whose only means of locomotion are his shoes, is more lowly. The lowest are the shoeless beggars who skip nimbly from the path of the Toyotas driven by snobbish drivers. The racist overtones were provided by the legacy of the Khan’s service in the British army during the days of the Raj.

  The family sat up late that night in Khutlibai’s air-conditioned drawing room. Manek looked comfortable in a starched white shalwar and kurta-shirt that Khutlibai had kept ready for him. His shampooed curls sprung in a fakirlike halo, Manek regaled his audience with boasts of the wonders of America. “You think we eat well because we’re rich? You should see how the poor in America eat! Everyday chicken! Everyday baked-beans, ham, and sardines! What the Americans throw away in one day can fill the stomachs of all the hungry people in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan for two days.”

  Manek quoted staggering statistics about the inexhaustible supply of gas, water, and electricity. “You can drink water straight from the tap without worrying how many cholera and jaundice germs you’re swallowing. You can have tub-baths ten times a day if you want to: there’s no shortage of water. The landlord usually pays for it, and for the electricity. Everybody keeps their lights and air conditioners on all the time. Huge football stadiums and offices and shopping complexes are air-conditioned all summer. You have to wear a cardigan indoors, one forgets what summer is: it’s as if you are always at a Hill Station. The same thing in winter; everything is centrally heated and you can walk about in shirt-sleeves.”

  They had heard some of this from their America-returned uncles and cousins, but they had heard otherwise also.

  “What about their shameless morals?” demanded Freny, and though she sat back in the crowded sofa she sounded as if she had mentally placed her hands on her substantial hips. “But you must have enjoyed all that part of it!”

  There was a raucous burst of laughter, followed by suggestive hoots and lewd smiles. Manek managed to look like a smug cat who has swallowed nine mice but does not wish to advertise the fact.

  “Yes, but,” Jeroo chimed in, and winding a long string of pearls round a manicured finger, she stayed with their main concern, “what about schoolgirls and boys having sex as casually as if they’re shaking hands? And the terrible muggings and rape? Na, baba, I’d prefer to keep my Dara safely in Pakistan, foreign-education or no foreign-education!”

  The round-shouldered, bespectacled, and serious fourteen-year-old, sitting next to his father, looked startled and dismayed, his dreams of travel abroad abruptly shattered.

  “Don’t listen to what everybody says,” Manek said, considerately looking at both Jeroo and Behram. “You can live as morally or immorally as you want. I’ll tell you something though —”

  Manek leaned forward conspiratorially and cast furtive eyes at the door. Behram at once locked the door. The family, too, edged forward on their chairs and sofas, and those tucked away in corners took quick strides to settle cross-legged on the Persian rug at Manek’s feet. Satisfied that no undesirable person was likely to overhear him, Manek parted with his breathless secret:

  “America is Paradise!’

  The expression on his face, the awed tone of his voice, the energy that seemed to emanate in a glow of happiness from him convinced them of the truth of his statement and, without him needing to spell it out, communicated his fear: that the riffraff would take any means of transport available and fly, sail, swim, walk, or ride to swamp the New World by the millions from China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh once they knew how wealthy America was, and in how many ways a paradise.

  “Now wait a minute,” interjected Cyrus’s portly brother Rohinton, his attitude still hostile from the quip about his wife’s red handbag and the crude allusions to her marvellous bosoms. “I have also been to the United States. You are reacting like a new convert, exaggerating the good points and ignoring the faults.”

  Rohinton looked round the room, gathering with his challenging eyes a consensus for his opinion. His glance came to rest on Cyrus. Cyrus sat with his long legs casually stuck out. He acknowledged his brother’s gaze pleasantly but with reserve. How could he validate Rohinton’s statement: he had never been to America. Besides, it had been a long day and he was not up to rocking the overloaded family boat.

  “But you haven’t lived there,” Manek said. He stood up from his perch between Khutlibai and Zareen to take up the challenge. Sliding his hands into the side pockets of his comfortable kurta, he said, “You haven’t gone to college there. You are only speaking of impressions!”

  Freny nudged her husband to keep quiet. It was Manek’s evening, and he was still glowing from the secret he had divulged for their benefit.

  “Of course, you have to know the system,” Manek continued and, shifting his eyes from Rohinton, turned on his heels to survey his audience and be surveyed by them. “You have to learn to function within it, otherwise you can have a hard time, like I did in the beginning. But if you want to understand what makes America tick, if you want to ‘succeed,’ you have to go when you’re young and get your higher education there. It’s difficult for an old dog to learn new tricks — you’ll be like a fish out of water and lose all your money like thousands of other middle-aged and muddled-headed desis already have!”

  Manek was by now speaking from the heady confidence of his just-returned status, the feel of his hands in the pockets of his starched kurta, and the lightheadedness of jet lag.

  The older dogs pursed grim mouths, projected defiant jaws, and prepared to bare their fangs. But they were quickly restrained by warning looks and surreptitiously applied pressures and nudges from their various wives.

  Judging that he might have been a bit tactless, Manek smoothly shifted gears and gave an account of the mistakes he had made and the hardships he had endured. He told them about his accident in New England and that he had not written home about it in order to spare his mother. And when the approving murmurs had subsided, Manek gave an account of the humiliation and privation he’d endured in the South as a Bible salesman.

  None of them had any idea how impossible it was to live on the income the State Bank of Pakistan allowed a student. Manek knew that at the conversion rate of fourteen rupees to the dollar, it was a princely sum by Pakistani standards. The family probably thought he was living like a prince in America. Not at all. He was living like a pauper. Why else would he, who was considered a heathen in the Bible Belt, sell Bibles? Perjure his soul by lying that he was a Christian? And sometimes risk his life against attacks from farm animals? “You can’t imagine how tight-fisted and difficult some of those farm people are,” he explained.

  Manek had taken an intensive three-day sales course in the basement of the Peach Tree Hotel in Atlanta one summer. The course was offered free, and he had toiled with forty other ambitious potential Bible salespersons and shared a cramped motel room with one of them.

  What had made his discomfort intolerable was the ubiquitous and intrusive presence of the Indian family of Patels who owned the motel. Manek knew that the Gujrati Indians, almost all of them named Patel, owned sixty percent of the motel business in the South; it did not surprise him that one of them should own the one he was staying in.

  In fact, because of the shared last name and the staggering number of motels owned by the Patels, the police in California had at one time suspected that they were an Indian version of the Mafia. Why else would anyone bother to acquire an unrewarding chain of seedy motels?

  A year of surveillance had revealed to the California Crime Detection Agency that the Patels were
a particularly docile community. They often pooled the money they brought from India to buy the motels and, by working long and hard hours, turned a modest profit from the business. The only violence they could be accused of were stray and unverifiable instances of self-inflicted injury — harmless but rather vicious-looking wounds and neatly fractured bones — that enabled them to file claims and live off insurance for a while. They were not above an occasional case of motel arson for the same purpose. For the most part, their crimes were petty and limited to the white collar variety: fiddling with accounts, pilfering from cash-boxes, and cheating on tax. Some indulged in a bit of pimping to supplement their frugal motel incomes.

  The moment Manek opened his mouth and spoke, the Atlanta Patels could tell from his distinctive accent that he was a Parsee. Their well-meaning interest in a stranger who shared their language irked Manek. Especially in view of his strained circumstances and the duplicitous nature of the path he was embarked upon as a Zoroastrian selling Bibles.

  Exhausted at the end of the second day of the course, Manek pretended a headache to avoid another invitation to supper.

  “It will be a simple, vegetarian meal,” the older Mrs. Patel had declared the night before. Manek had no reason to doubt her word.

  But the announcement of a headache misfired. It brought a pack of six Patels flocking to his aid, vocalizing between them six different kinds of medical advice, and Manek’s headache threatened to bloom into a full-blown attack of neuralgia.

  The eldest Mrs. Patel declared that a headache could be caused by an empty stomach; it would disappear after dinner. If it didn’t, he should rub his temples with Tiger Balm or Deep Heat. The youngest Mrs. Patel cross-examined him to see if he had assaulted his stomach with junk food.

  Manek confessed he had eaten a cheese and bacon hamburger.