An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  A harried woman with sparse, frizzy hair came out shouting at the children. She wore a skimpy, sleeveless top over baggy draw-string pants. The door gaped behind her, and the dim space inside appeared to be cheerless. Although she saw Feroza and Jo, and was having her sister-in-law visit after more than a year, the woman did not greet them. Their presence unacknowledged by her, the distracted woman scolded, spanked, and dragged a howling child indoors.

  Jo and Feroza hung around for about an hour, making desultory conversation with Tom. On closer inspection Feroza thought he was good-looking, and although she was probably seeing him at his worst, there was something appealingly vulnerable about him. He talked in a defensive way, rubbing his nose with his thumb every short while, as if challenging Jo to contradict him. He had fancy business schemes and plans in mind and was about to implement them with the help of partners. He apparently knew a lot of rich people who wanted to do business with him.

  But for most of the visit, Jo played with the children. They saw and heard the woman at intervals, and Feroza was surprised that they had not been offered even a cup of tea.

  Jo explained that some of the kids were foster children.

  Feroza at once felt she might have misjudged the couple and had come to hasty and judgmental conclusions. They must be kindhearted beneath their gruff and rough exteriors to provide care for the abandoned children.

  When they were about to leave, the man shouted, “Elly, they’re going! Are you gonna haul your ass out or not?”

  Elly came out, wiping her hands on her shapeless cotton pants. She offered them an abstracted, unwilling, little smile and said to Jo: “Oh, you’re going? Too bad you can’t stay. How’re Mom ’n’ Pop?”

  On the way home, Jo told Feroza that the children had been farmed out to Tom and Elly by the county for a fee.

  Feroza couldn’t understand the way the family unit she had just witnessed was structured, or how it sustained itself. Obviously Tom was not a steady provider, and she suspected that he drank too much. She was tormented by what she had seen. What would happen to the children? It was so unlike anything in Pakistan. She had never heard of children being sent to foster homes. If a man could not for some reason provide for his family, usually because of sickness, death, or some other calamity, his wife and children would be provided for by relatives. Children were not given up for adoption or “farmed out,” so long as there were family members alive. Men didn’t go to seed the way Tom had because of drinking problems: few Muslim men drank. She had heard of very few cases of alcoholism, and these existed only among the fashionably wealthy, who could afford the black-market rates demanded by their affliction. She wondered, was this the price one paid for the non-interference and the privacy she was beginning to find increasingly attractive?

  After a few days spent in aimless vacation leisure, Feroza and Jo received letters stating that their applications had been accepted by the University of Denver and that their credits were transferable. Feroza and Jo leaped and pranced with a sense of release and exhilaration. Jubilant, they packed small bags and shot off on a tour of the Grand Canyon.

  A little before the new term began, the girls rented a small basement apartment in a building near the campus. From her very first day at the University of Denver, Feroza sensed she was in the right place, that her life would develop in unexpected and substantial ways. For one thing the cosmopolitan variety of students — black, Hispanic, Arabic, Irani, and some unmistakably Pakistani and Indian — filled her with suppressed excitement. Besides, after Twin Falls, Feroza found the sheer size and complexity of the University exhilarating.

  No one, though, would have guessed it from her conduct. Paradoxically, she was for the most part confused and awkward and so overwhelmed by the activity going on around her, the waves of confident new students’ faces and the maze of buildings, that she retreated like a timid clam into her haughty shell.

  She latched onto Jo fiercely, like a child, and even regressed sometimes to holding her hand or hanging onto her shirt. Jo, with her innate familial and domestic impulses, was indulgent and tolerant.

  For the first few weeks, the girls went to Boulder over the weekends, but soon Jo became less and less inclined to visit her parents. One fall weekend, Jo took her sleeping bag and backpack and went camping in the mountains to view the foliage with some new friends. Feroza had been transported by the fiery colors of the trees. She had not expected this blazing beauty in trees that had looked so commonplace in summer. She yearned to steep herself in the magic of the leaves and abandon herself to the wilderness with Jo. Jo had invited Feroza to go along, but shy at the thought of exposing her sensibility to strangers, resentful of their claim on Jo’s time, Feroza made an excuse and backed out at the last minute. Jo did not press her as she might have in Twin Falls. Feroza, though she did not admit it even to herself or fathom the jumble of reasons why, was terribly hurt.

  One afternoon the following week, Jo burst in through the apartment door, excited as of old, hollering, “Feroza! Feroza! Hey, listen to this. I’m goin’ on a diet!”

  “So, what’s new?” Feroza asked, shuffling dispiritedly into their tiny living room, blurry-eyed and in her robe. She had in mind Jo’s recurrent resolutions to go on a variety of diets in Twin Falls.

  These resolutions had followed a cyclic orbit something like this:

  Fantastic new guy, a fireworks of passion, pledges of eternal love. Diet.

  Eternal love waning by the end of the month; Prince Charming transformed into a douchebag. Diet kicked in the teeth.

  Compensatory eating binges, horror about weight gained, frenzy of passion with fantastic new love. New diet.

  “This time it’s different,” Jo said, triumphantly hoisting a large packet from Walgreens above her head. “I’m gonna stick with the plan. I’ve just seen the doctor. He’s gonna help me.”

  “This time you must,” encouraged Feroza.

  Jo stuck with the diet: little packets and potions of protein drinks, and pathetic morsels of prescribed foods. By the end of the month, Feroza was impressed by Jo’s persistence and her regular visits with the doctor and became more encouraging.

  Feroza found herself on her own much of the time as a perceptibly shrinking Jo cavorted with new-found confidence and new friends. Had it not been for Shashi’s determined advent into her life, Feroza might have clung longer to the umbilical cord by which she had attached herself to Jo.

  A sinewy and outrageously gregarious youth from India, Shashi was a year ahead of Feroza in the hotel management program. Intrigued by the attractive new girl from his part of the world and by the challenge her haughty reserve represented, Shashi had persisted in talking to her after the English class they shared twice a week.

  Shashi had a lean, handsome, dark brown face and a tangle of straight eyelashes that cast a deceptively somnolent veil over his inquisitive eyes. He penetrated Feroza’s reserve in a matter of days, as he knew he would. Not that Shashi came by this confidence through any conceit; it was only natural for people to respond to his indefatigable interest in them. Shashi’s readiness to accept people without reservations made him a cherished companion, and he collected friends as one gathers bouquets of wildflowers from mountain slopes in springtime.

  Shashi gave Feroza his notes and copies of the assignments and term papers he had completed the previous year. He also introduced her to his spiraling circle of Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Tibetan, Pakistani, Indian, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, black, and white friends.

  For Feroza it was like stepping through Alice’s wonderful mirror. Each day brought the gift of a tentative new friendship, a provocative bit of knowledge, a mad burst of pure laughter. It wasn’t that Shashi or his friends were so funny; rather, something locked within Feroza opened up, allowing her access to happier places within herself.

  And this shift in perspective was taking place in her mind as well. Her impulse to acquire knowledge, to figure out things, was stimulated by her studies, challenged by discuss
ions among her new friends, by the books Shashi recommended or loaned her. She ventured into psychology, into philosophy, into literature.

  She read books by a variety of new influences: Naipaul, Bertrand Russell, Styron, Desai, Plato, Rilke, Heller, Achebe, Forster, García Márquez.

  Feroza found her days filled with excitement, joyous activity, and ascending wonder. It was as if her combat with Manek and his efforts to instruct her, her year in Twin Falls, and her exposure to Jo, were a preparation for the way her new life was unfolding. Otherwise she would have been too shy to embrace the new encounters, too timid to delve into unexplored ideas or grasp the opportunities suddenly falling about her like gifts from the sky.

  It was the first time Feroza found herself making friends on her own, without Jo. And the feeling she’d had about Denver and the University — that she was in the right place and that her life would bloom — now appeared affirmed.

  It gave Feroza pleasure to introduce Jo to her new friends. Shashi took to dropping in at their apartment as frequently as did Jo’s merry-go-round of steadies, and the three of them established an easy camaraderie that included their various friends.

  And though Feroza and Jo didn’t know how to express it, or even feel the need to, each accepted that the other had enriched her life, extended it to harmonize with and revel in the exotic.

  It did not take much to persuade Feroza to transcribe some of the assignments Shashi had given her and hand them in as her own work. Without this lapse — which she understood was not too rare, among the Pakistani and Indian students at least — she would not have been able to cope with her blossoming social life, or read, or consider the assortment of jobs available. Feroza’s expenses had increased commensurate with her expanding social commitments. It was also costlier to live in a big city.

  Feroza considered waitressing, working in a bar, becoming a salesperson or selling tickets at an amusement park. These jobs were within her range — if she took the chances the other foreign students took — and was prepared to work for less than minimum wage.

  Feroza found the very concept of these jobs breathtaking, beyond the compass of the possible in Pakistan. There were no waitresses in Pakistan, only waiters. Since there were no bars, there were no bartenders. Even had the jobs been available and the stigma attached to them had not existed, Feroza would have found working at these professions in Pakistan intolerable. Her slightest move would attract disproportionate attention and comment, for no other reason except that she was a young woman in a country where few young women were visible working.

  This focus would always isolate her, keep her removed from the variety of human contact she felt was at the very heart of living. The liberating anonymity she had discovered within moments of her arrival at Kennedy airport, when no one had bothered to stare at her and the smoky-eyed American she was talking to, still exhilarated her. In Lahore these contacts would have been noticed and would have drawn censorious comment. Within the heady climate of her freedom in America, she felt able to do anything.

  In this respect, Shashi’s lack of inhibition fascinated her much as the young American’s consummate unselfconsciousness had.

  With Shashi’s encouragement, Feroza started working in a bar close to the campus (no one asked her for her age when she applied for the job) as assistant to the bartender, who was also a student. Feroza enjoyed the convivial, dusky atmosphere, the strangers who spoke to her so readily and her fleeting contact with them. She delighted in serving the colorful drinks with fancy names like piña colada, screwdriver, margarita, and strawberry daiquiri.

  Shashi, and the friends she had met through him, dropped by for an occasional chat. They couldn’t afford the drinks, but sometimes they ordered one to share. If Shashi was alone, he lent a hand as they chatted, and the bartender usually slipped him a drink.

  Like thousands of other Hindu families, Shashi’s had fled Lahore at the time of the Partition of India in 1947. They had been allotted some land as compensation for the urban property and business they had left behind. With the money and jewelry they had salvaged, the family set up a small cloth shop in New Delhi. Given their background and the necessity that drives refugees and new immigrants, their business had prospered.

  The spirit of enterprise that drove his family was in no way lacking in Shashi. Feroza saw him in action once. In the snow-packed Denver winter, he sat blue-lipped and shivering in the entry of a suburban shopping center, an almost transparent white dhoti tied between his legs like an exotic diaper. Partially visible through the white sheet thrown across his shoulders his ribby brown torso looked stiff and cadaverous. His feet were unshod.

  The chattering of Shashi’s teeth, like woodpeckers drilling, could be heard a block away. Americans in hooded goosedown parkas and fur-lined boots were aghast at the sight of this touchingly young and emaciated version of the saintly Gandhi so perilously close to freezing. Only the movement of the whites of his eyes beneath his somnolent lids, and the chattering of his teeth, betrayed any indication of life.

  Next to him, propped up in a empty bottle, was a stick with a scrap of paper glued to it. The paper fluttered when people went in and out of the doors. Those who were in a hurry, or who lacked the means to help such desperation, scurried past, eyes guiltily averted, counting on others to help.

  There are always kindhearted and generous people, and sooner or later, one of them would stoop to read the lettering on the paper. The message was printed with a marker: “Not received money from home in 3 months. Floods have swept away my village and buffaloes. No clothes and no food — kindly HELP.”

  Since there had been news of recent floods in Bangladesh, the message, combined with the horrendous condition of the youth, achieved immediate credibility.

  Feroza suspected that the communique on the note varied according to the nature of the latest catastrophe, which in some shape or other could always be counted on to afflict their part of the world.

  Once the near-cadaver was resuscitated, and usually it was by someone who could afford to resurrect him, Shashi, with his glib tongue and persuasive ways, got not only whatever he required but also what his brand-name-conscious relatives in Delhi wanted.

  Shashi went on a Spartan diet each year after Thanksgiving, and staged the drama every winter. Horrified Americans, shopping for Christmas, bought him enough sweaters, jackets, shirts, and slacks to see him through spring, enough garments appliquéd with alligators and Polo ponies to satisfy his kin.

  His benefactors also wrote checks to the University of Denver to pay for his tuition, with an added amount thrown in to make them feel they were doing something noble in the name of their vague and cherished notions of Gandhi.

  In return, Shashi showered them with gratitude and a touching profusion of bizarre blessings picked up from Delhi street beggars rendered into English: “May you live long, sir/ma’am. May you have many sons and grandsons. May they prosper and look after you. May God part the skies to pour wealth upon you.”

  Feroza felt that Shashi earned every ounce of the clothes he acquired, every morsel of the food he shared with his friends. Having absorbed the attitudes about money and the exploitative “system” preached by Jo and Manek, Feroza appreciated Shashi’s methods. She knew that Shashi received very little money from home; the State Bank of India barely allowed any foreign exchange to go out of the country. His family could have transferred “black money,” but they didn’t. They had complete confidence in his resourcefulness.

  Shashi had a sharp, quick, probing mind, and Feroza’s relationship with him was airy, flirtatious, fun. It was easy for Feroza to be with Shashi precisely because he was so at ease with her. Feroza came to realize that Shashi’s interest in women was powered more by curiosity and an appreciation of their otherness — their softness, beauty, and gentler ways — than by the tempestuous urges that appeared to ravage his more susceptible compatriots.

  Shashi’s temperament did not permit him to be possessive. This lightness, this freewhee
ling congeniality, rubbed off on Feroza; she understood that freedom, dear as its discovery in America was to her, was also an essential condition of any relationship.

  Feroza had grown up, like most young girls in the Subcontinent, believing that everything she expected of life would be hers after marriage. The denial of even her most insignificant wish was followed by comments like: “You’ll reign like a queen in your husband’s house. You can do as you wish once you’re married.”

  Statements like this made marriage seem to all the girls to be the ideal condition of existence. Their marriages would unshackle them, open their lives to adventure and knowledge of the world, give them the freedom that is each individual’s due.

  Chapter 20

  Manek Junglewalla was married in Karachi the following summer.

  Khutlibai and Zareen, complaining at every step that Manek was running them ragged, were in a glorious frenzy of preparations for the wedding. Khutlibai’s house took on a festive air. There were many ceremonies connected with the wedding to be arranged for, many sets of clothes to be prepared as gifts for relatives. Khutlibai’s house was overrun with children on vacation while their mothers spent their days preparing for the celebrations.

  A tailor was engaged. He sat on a white cloth spread in one corner of the veranda floor before a table fan, whirring the handle of his sewing machine. A pious woman, distantly related to Soonamai, was making scores of sudras from the finest muslin. She occupied the guest room and could be heard ripping the material into half-yard pieces from the forty-yard thaan, wrapped around a board. Rohinton had bought it from a factory in Kot Lakpat and saved Khutlibai almost two hundred rupees.

  In fact, the zip of cloth tearing became intrinsic to the exuberant spirit of the house as the women made small cuts with scissors and, curling the edges, ripped the cloth apart. They divided some of the thaans into bedsheets and pillowcases, and the silks and satins into blouse pieces and petticoats.