An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Jeroo, who had a flare for anything to do with precious metals and gems, flew in from Rawalpindi to help select the jewelry sets for Aban and her mother from among Khutlibai’s heirlooms. She also assisted Zareen with the shopping and the matching of petticoats and blouses for the sari sets.

  Freny firmly helped the more dithering members of the family arrive at decisions and generally threw her officious and solid weight around, as was her wont.

  Two weeks before the wedding, the advance party of relatives and their children boarded the air-conditioned coaches of the Tezgam train to Karachi.

  In Karachi, Freny took charge of the large triple-storied bungalow in Clifton provided for their use by Khutlibai’s widowed cousin. Freny managed the servants and, with the help of a slender stick she occasionally waved about, the children. She was promptly bequeathed a new title, General, which she accepted as graciously as she had her nickname Allah-ditta. Even the servants started calling her General Sahib.

  Behram Junglewalla was urgently summoned to Karachi by Jeroo, arriving with Bunny and Dara a few days before they were due. His presence was required to shore up his wife’s shaky authority.

  Left to the mercy of her in-laws and being temperamentally unsuited to stand up to the more powerful personalities around her, Jeroo had been reduced to a state of stammering and trembling. When not weeping in her room, she went about her business with pink rims round her eyes, tight-lipped and dour.

  Behram staunchly championed Jeroo and had a stern word or two for Freny and Zareen. Zareen, finding herself at a sudden disadvantage, summoned Cyrus to shore up her authority.

  After discharging their duties, the brothers-in-law hung about the house enjoying the waves of chatter and laughter, the discussions and emergency consultations, the rainbow display of saris being folded and unfolded so that they appeared to flow like silken rivers from one room to another.

  Some evenings, Cyrus and Behram were invited for drinks on a Greek ship by a hospitable cousin. The ship was docked in the Karachi harbor, and the cousin catered for the shipping line in Karachi.

  As scheduled, Rohinton arrived with his and Cyrus’s mother, Soonamai, a week before the wedding. He had not been summoned because Freny felt quite competent to stand up to anyone and maintain her own authority.

  While Soonamai Ginwalla, whip-slender and considerate, dignified the ceremonial occasions with her discretion, Rohinton played his part by swelling the crowded rooms with his portentous presence. Soonamai’s counsel was sought by everyone because she knew the niceties of traditional rites and, with her tactful ways and sympathetic outlook, was able to smooth out friction before it escalated into an all-out war.

  When a wedding loomed, most families went to Bombay, the sari and jewelry Mecca. Zareen warned Manek that his bride and her mother would have to make do with what was available in the shops in Karachi and Lahore, since he had not given them enough notice to get visas, nor time to travel across the border.

  “She’s marrying me, not the saris,” Manek retorted succinctly, and his wise and witty words (attributed to his education at M.I.T.) were repeated with gusto among his relatives and friends.

  The quip also made the rounds of the girl’s family, and Manek’s intelligence and sagacity were volubly admired, while Manek’s family tactfully camouflaged any pride they took in the comment with playfully disparaging remarks.

  Aban’s mother, a gentle, docile creature, was diligently quoted. She approved the boy’s sentiment utterly. What use had her daughter for saris when she was getting such an educated and well-brought-up husband? Her daughter had enough saris.

  Pleased by the comment, and not to be outdone, Khutlibai was heard to observe that khandani families always showed their good-breeding no matter what. Her daughter-in-law would be welcome if she came with nothing but the clothes on her back. She would cover Aban with diamonds. She had set aside a flawless three-karat solitaire for her youngest son’s wife.

  That was very generous of her, the girl’s mother was reported to remark. But no jewel could compare with the diamond Aban was getting in the person of her handsome and educated bridegroom.

  ~

  Manek returned to America a married man. He phoned Feroza, smugly saying, “Well, boochimai, what’ve you been up to?”

  Feroza screamed with joy at the sound of his voice. She had missed his calls. She wanted to be told every detail of his marriage, what had happened, who said exactly what to whom in the inevitable dominoes of one-upmanship within a family of so many cousins, each related to the other in three different ways, and what had transpired between the girl’s family and theirs.

  Khutlibai had lost her cool, Manek said, and had given him a dressing-down in front of everybody on the day of the madasara ceremony; he had merely stated his skepticism about the mango he was being coaxed to plant in their garden to ensure his fertility.

  The petty skirmishes between Zareen and Jeroo had exploded atom-bombically on the morning of the engagement. Freny had added fuel to the fire by waving her hands about and loudly siding with Jeroo, and his mother had fainted in the drawing room when her entreaties for peace on the propitious day had gone unheeded.

  The subsequent flap, during which Soonamai applied cologne-watered handkerchiefs to Khutlibai’s head and Behram massaged the soles of her feet, brought a contrite end to the sisters-in-law’s inauspicious quarreling.

  The bride’s parents had conducted themselves with exemplary civility and docility, but her two moronic sisters had been inappropriately rowdy. They had pushed him fully clothed into the Karachi Sheraton’s swimming pool at the end of a party given by the bride’s uncle.

  Cy had been full of his usual frivolity —

  “Who’s Cy?” Feroza interrupted.

  “Your pop.”

  “Cyrus-jee, to you,” corrected Feroza, tagging on the honoring suffix “jee” to express the extent of her censure. “My father would slap you if he heard you call him ‘Cy’ and ‘pop.’”

  “No, he didn’t. But he foamed a bit at the mouth and threw a fit.”

  “You don’t have to be so damned American.”

  “When in America, be American. Haven’t you —”

  “Oh God! I’m going to hang up or throw up!”

  “Okay, okay … As I was saying, Cyrus-jee was full of his usual foolishness. But I was surprised by Rohinton’s behavior.”

  The normally sober and prudent Rohinton had abetted his brother’s frivolity. They had arranged for Manek and Aban to ride in a decorated horse-drawn coach to the Fire Temple in Saddar Bazaar after the nuptials. The gaunt and elderly horse pulling their carriage had balked at the attention of a mischievous crowd of street urchins and goondas who ran alongside hooting and making smacking noises. Manek said that he was waiting for the day Feroza got married to return the compliment.

  “I’d like to see how Cy reacts when his own daughter and son-in-law are ridiculed on their wedding day!”

  “Oh my God,” Feroza exclaimed, “I think I really missed something!”

  “Yes, you did,” commented Manek laconically. “But I must say, I didn’t hear a peep out of anyone saying they missed you. Not even from your grannies.”

  Of course she didn’t believe him. “Jealous? Is someone’s bottom burning?” Feroza said, translating the Gujrati idiom into English.

  Manek and Aban had received enough practical gifts and pareekas of cash to set up house in America. If Feroza had her eye on the three-karat blue diamond, she could forget about it. Her grandmother had given it to his wife; also the diamond and emerald bracelets.

  Feroza groaned, “Oh God, you must be really mad to think I’d mind. For your information, Granny told me she’d kept them especially for your wife. You don’t know what she’s kept for me!”

  “I know, a kiss and a kick!”

  “Oof,” Feroza said, pretending to fan herself at the other end of the line. “It’s so hot — somebody’s bottom is burning!”

  “Not mine. Must be yo
urs.”

  Manek had left his wife patiently waiting beside her packed suitcases back in Karachi. She would join him in a few months, after he got his doctorate and had found a job.

  Chapter 21

  The citizens of Denver sat beneath the leafy crown of trees on freshly mowed and fragrant summer grass. They smiled at the spectacle of the programmed sprinklers watering lawns already being rained upon. An almost anorexic Jo abandoned her hotel management course and moved in with her uniformed boyfriend, Bill.

  To Feroza’s protests at her leaving school when she was already halfway to graduation, she said, “I don’t need all this theory. I could teach them a thing or two about the restaurant business. I know more than enough to run my family business.”

  Bill was a reliable young man with an appreciation of good food and the sundry other appetites necessary for the well-being of Feroza’s former roommate. He also had a promising future in the United States Air Force, and he was stationed at the air base in Denver.

  Feroza moved into an apartment with Rhonda and Gwen, one white, the other black, and both of them strikingly beautiful. The dusky girl, Gwen, was older, almost twenty-five.

  Gwen had the longest legs dangling from her cut-off denim shorts. The skin covering them was a glossy mahogany, and Feroza could not help noticing the way her legs stood out, delicate and beautiful, amidst the crisscross stampede of pale or pink legs freshly bared to the summer sun. After a period of association with Gwen and Rhonda, Feroza finally mustered up the courage one sweltering noon to get into a spare pair of Rhonda’s shorts. Both her roommates applauded and assured her that she looked just great.

  Gwen’s tuition and living expenses were paid by a middle-aged white man. Although Feroza and Rhonda believed in his existence, they never saw him. They heard about him, but they never heard him.

  Invisible and never heard, their roommate’s lover waxed mysterious and romantic in their imaginations. They did not know the make or color of his car, although they knew he sometimes picked up Gwen. Gwen did not reveal his name either, or tell them what he did. She referred to him mostly as “he” and sometimes as “J.M.”

  Rhonda and Feroza got the impression that J.M. was rich and influential. They believed he was a WASP. Every time they spotted a fancy European car on campus with a male white Anglo-Saxon at the wheel, they excitedly speculated that it might be J.M. Rhonda, herself a WASP, helped a curious and intrigued Feroza recognize the species, but it took a WASP to recognize a WASP, and Feroza wondered if she’d ever be able to tell them apart from other whites.

  When Feroza had arrived fresh from Pakistan, she would have considered the arrangement shocking. Even now, more than two years later, she was troubled, but she had a better understanding of the prevailing mores in America and a more accommodating view of the relationship between men and women.

  Feroza learned from chance remarks Gwen let slip what it was like to be a young black woman, how difficult it had been for her to attend college, and how much she valued her education.

  Gwen was guarded about her past. She did not volunteer information about her family, but if asked, she answered without obvious reluctance. Feroza sometimes found the answers to even her most casual questions unexpected and surprising. She soon felt that she was intruding without meaning to, and she started to be more considerate of Gwen’s privacy.

  Feroza knew as much about her roommate as Gwen wanted her to, and Feroza felt it was enough. She knew that Gwen came from a large, loosely structured family in Atlanta and that they were poor. Gwen’s mother worked as housekeeper to a wealthy family in Marietta, and, being the eldest, Gwen had looked after her younger siblings. Although she seldom mentioned them or seemed to have any contact with them, Feroza got the impression that she was deeply attached to them. At times, when her mother was sick, Gwen had substituted for her. She told Feroza she hated it and that was when she decided that she did not want to spend her life mired in a cycle of poverty and domestic service. Once, unasked, Gwen had told her that she had been discriminating in her relationships with boys and that she had been careful not to get pregnant. “You know how it is,” she said, “you can get suckered into something like that!” Although Feroza acted as if she was used to hearing homilies like this and weighing similar considerations, she was taken aback and realized that Gwen’s life had been very different from hers.

  Gwen had been a conscientious student, but she had not done well enough to earn scholarships. She had been too busy with responsibilities to give enough time to her studies. It had been something of an achievement that she had graduated from high school at all and had not dropped out like many of her peers.

  Gwen met her white lover when he was visiting his cousin’s in Marietta. It was one of those occasions when she was standing in for her mother. She had moved to Denver because he asked her to.

  Gwen spent alternate weekends with J.M. in hotels, or they camped in the mountains and toured the countryside. They had flown to Hawaii for a week once and had spent ten days in the north of Italy when her lover had been invited to a conference at the Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio. He attended the conference for barely a day, and they spent the rest of the time frolicking on Lake Como, eating pasta and trout, and touring the spectacularly scenic playground of the rich. It had been one of the high points of Gwen’s life.

  “Do you love him?” Feroza asked, agog when Gwen displayed a platinum ring encrusted with diamonds.

  Gwen looked at her, surprised and defensive. But she saw that no censure was implied. The question had been asked in innocence. She shrugged her wide, slender shoulders. “He’s good to me. He doesn’t want me to date anyone while I’m with him. It’s not much to ask.” Gwen had a musical lilt to her throaty voice that delighted Feroza’s ears.

  Feroza saw much less of Rhonda than she did of Gwen, and their relationship was consequently less complex and more affectionate.

  Rhonda was a blond with a lovely face and dreamy blue eyes, naturally red lips, and a warm, slow smile. She was kindness and consideration personified. Rhonda was not tall, at least not for an American, though she was an inch taller than Feroza. She had a cuddly, feminine body and a most arduous dating schedule.

  Rhonda found it embarrassing and unkind to refuse dates. She accommodated even the more persistent of the less attractive boys pestering her. She preferred going out in a group.

  The phone rang incessantly for Rhonda. She and Feroza shared the line. Once in a while, an exhausted Rhonda would flop into their threadbare living room in an oversized man’s shirt and crankily announce, “I’m not home!” and Gwen and Feroza would handle her calls.

  Feroza had her own hectic social life. Given the quantity and the variety of her friends, she was invited to at least four parties every weekend. It was almost like a junior level replica of her parents’ parties back home. On alternate weekends, Gwen went along with her.

  Shashi found Gwen, her reticence, her secret life with her white lover, and her knowing ways fascinating. He was full of small gallantries in her presence and was considerate of her at the larger parties, making sure she was not bored. Not that he was any less attentive to Feroza. But often when he dropped in at their apartment, he spent the time talking to Gwen. Gwen was laid-back, a good listener, full of insinuating and expressive laughter, and wicked repartee. She had an innate gift for the right compliment.

  One overcast evening, Feroza took some papers to be photocopied, and Gwen accompanied her. When Feroza was through paying for the work, she noticed Gwen talking to a Sikh student who worked evenings at the campus Kinko’s. What struck Feroza was the way the boy was looking at Gwen, like a hypnotized and charmed chicken. Feroza heard him say, “You know, I feel I’ve known you all my life. It’s … as if we’re related, you’re family.

  What’s your name?”

  The expression on the boy’s face was revealing. His defenses and social reserve gone, he stood exposed, his soul bared, exhibiting the measure of his homesickness and loneliness, hi
s need for kind words, understanding, fellowship.

  Feroza had talked to the boy casually before and had been flattered by his attention, attention that, as a woman from the same part of the world, she considered her due. But this was astonishing. She knew he was aware of her presence, but she was at the periphery of his consciousness. What was inside him, his naked need for a friend, his devotion, was focused on Gwen.

  Feroza could not fathom it. What had passed between him and Gwen in the brief moments she’d been occupied to make him respond like this?

  Feroza was not unaware of the interest Gwen aroused in Shashi. Knowing Shashi’s incorrigible curiosity, it had not bothered her unduly. But now she took to observing her roommate with a more speculative eye. She wished to probe Gwen’s personality and discover the enigma of her compelling attraction.

  Although she knew Gwen was likable from her own experience, Feroza now noticed that she generated instant friendships, smitten countenances, warm responses in even the most casual contacts. Feroza sensed it involved more than just her self-possession, her easy, responsive ways or her expressive voice. Although she was pleasing to look at, even striking, there was no particular feature one could focus on and say it was pretty — it was more the way the shape of her face and head and the structure of her long, slender body came together.

  Understanding dawned on Feroza gradually, and it had more to do with intuition than observation. The interest that lit up Gwen’s brown eyes, the unexpected flicker of shyness that suddenly swept her small features, the brief, almost imperceptible gestures, the movement of her body as it shifted a step back, a step sideways, were charged by a subtle flattery, if one could call it that. Combined with her choice of words and the range of inflection in her voice, her tranquil presence, with its armory of compliments, cast a spell on whomever she was talking to, made that person feel good about himself.