by Bapsi Sidhwa
Zareen suddenly reached down, causing Cyrus’s reflexes to jump at the thought that his wife had fainted, and retrieved the photograph with the tips of her manicured nails as if the image was contaminated by disease. She showed it to Cyrus.
Zareen’s anxious eyes had already detected a sinister cast in her potential son-in-law’s blue eyes, a profile that struck her as actorishly handsome, phony, and insincere, and frivolous gold-streaked, longish hair. But what upset Cyrus most were the pair of overdeveloped and hairy thighs, which to his fearful eyes appeared to bulge as obscenely as a goat’s as they burst from a pair of frayed and patched denim shorts.
“You’d better go at once,” Cyrus said. “He can’t even afford a decent pair of pants! The bounder’s a fortune hunter. God knows what he’s already been up to.”
The last, an allusion to the imagined assault by those hairy thighs on the citadel of their daughter’s virtue, was not lost on Zareen. The furrow between her brows deepened and she withdrew into complete silence.
Ten days later, silently mouthing prayers, Zareen was on the Pan Am flight bound for Denver, Colorado.
The young Pakistani student sitting next to Zareen, awed by her handsome profile, the gust of exotic perfume, and the glitter of diamonds on her fingers, made a few desultory attempts at conversation. Finding her distracted and monosyllabic, he leafed through the flight magazine and, fidgeting forlornly in his seat, resigned himself to sleep.
After she had completed the twenty-one Yathas and five Ashem Vahoos proscribed for such long and dangerous voyages, Zareen relaxed her grip on the crocodile-skin handbag on her lap. It contained two thousand dollars in traveler’s checks and five hundred in cash. Just before they left for the airport Cyrus had given her a slim envelope with a bank draft for ten thousand dollars. He had facetiously labeled it “bribe money.” She could at her discretion offer it, or part of it, to the handsome, hairy scoundrel to leave their daughter alone.
Alternately smiling, shaking her head, and making mulish faces, Zareen conversed astutely with her imagined adversary. Six hours after the Boeing had taken off from Karachi, her mind was still reeling from the murmur of last-minute advice and instruction imparted to her at the airport. She tried to remember all that Cyrus had said, all that Khutlibai — after she had fainted and been revived that day — had said, and everything that had happened at the clamorous rounds of daily family conferences once news of the letter had spread.
Behram and Jeroo had driven down from Rawalpindi, and Zareen felt enormously grateful at the way her relatives and close friends had rallied about, thankful for the stratagems the community had pondered and debated and for all their well-meant and useful advice.
For the subject was much larger than just Feroza’s marriage to an American. Mixed marriages concerned the entire Parsee community and affected its very survival. God knew, they were few enough. Only a hundred and twenty thousand in the whole world. And considering the low birth rate and the rate at which the youngsters were marrying outside the community — and given their rigid non-conversion laws and the zealous guardians of those laws — Parsees were a gravely endangered species.
There had been acrimonious arguments between the elders and the youngsters, who had grown considerably in the four years Feroza had been away, at the first hastily summoned family conference in Zareen’s sitting room.
While the air conditioner struggled to cool the horde — and grappled with the fluctuating voltage — the youngsters, candid in their innocence, wondered aloud why the news should strike their elders as such a calamity. They politely informed their parents that times had changed. They urged their uncles and aunts to enlarge their narrow minds and do the community a favor by pressing the stuffy old trustees in the Zoroastrian Anjuman in Karachi and Bombay to move with the times; times that were already sending them to study in the New World, to mingle with strangers in strange lands where mixed marriages were inevitable.
Jeroo and Behram’s daughter Bunny, who was by now a pert fifteen-year-old with light brown eyes and a dark ponytail she tossed frequently, said, “For God’s sake! You’re carrying on as if Feroza’s dead! She’s only getting married, for God’s sake!”
This outrage, coming after the insultingly patronizing tone adopted by the rest of the adolescents, was the last straw. The aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents molded their mournful features into pursed mouths and stern stares, and Jeroo, sensing the mood and consensus of the assembly, quickly quelled her daughter’s rebellion by yelling, “Don’t you dare talk like that! One more peep out of you, and I’ll slap your face!”
Across the room on a sofa, Bunny’s round-shouldered and self-effacing brother Dara, now seventeen years old and in his last year at school, sat back between two uncles and disappeared from view. All the other smirking, smug, and defiant little adolescents who had concurred with the girl’s sentiments and wiggled eagerly forward to sit on the edge of their seats, now opened their nervous eyes wide and looked at the forbidding presences uncertainly.
“Apologize at once,” Jeroo said. “You have no consideration for poor Zareen auntie’s feelings!”
The teenagers squeezed back in their seats and, safely tucked into the communal pack looking away from their cousin to the waxed parquet floor covered with Persian rugs, wisely withdrew their allegiance.
Bunny brushed her flushed cheeks with her fingers and without raising her bowed head, meekly said, “I’m sorry.”
This promptly fetched her Freny auntie and Rohinton uncle to their feet. Rohinton stepped up to the girl with stately deliberation and stroked her bowed head, while Freny lowered her bulk to share the cushioned stool with Bunny. Putting a placating arm round the tearful girl, Freny held her close and said, “Now, that’s my girl!”
After which, feeling called upon to reinforce community values, which were always in the process of being instilled, Freny dutifully said, “I’m sure your mother didn’t mean to sound so harsh. It’s just that we are so concerned for you. You know Parsee girls are not allowed into the fire temple once they marry out. You know what happened to Perin Powri.”
Perin Powri was the latest casualty. Having defied her family to marry a Muslim, she had died of hepatitis four years later.
Although she had contracted the disease through an infected blood transfusion during surgery, many Parsees perceived the hidden hand of Divine displeasure. Honoring her last wishes, Perin’s family had flown her body to Karachi to be disposed of in the dokhma, or, as the British had dubbed it, the Tower of Silence.
Since the Parsees consider earth, water, and fire holy, they do not bury, drown, or burn polluted corpses. Instead, as a last act of charity, they leave the body exposed to the sun and the birds of prey, mainly vultures, in these open-roofed circular structures. In cities like Lahore, where there are too few Parsee to attract the vultures, the community buries its dead.
Perin Powri’s body was denied accommodation in the Karachi dokhma, and the priests refused to perform the last rites. Without the uthamna ceremony, the soul can not ascend to the crucial Chinwad Bridge, which, depending on the person’s deeds, either expands to ease the soul’s passage to heaven, or contracts to plunge it into hell. Without the ceremony, the poor soul remains horribly trapped in limbo. Perin Powri’s body was eventually buried in a Muslim graveyard, and the poor woman’s appalling fate was dangled as an example of the evil consequence of such an alliance each time the occasion arose.
The refrain was then taken up by other aunts, who were as well trained as circus horses, and the names of other transgressors were recited, with each offense illuminating a new and tragic facet of the ill-considered unions. The litany followed an established order, and the names of the earliest miscreants were arrived at last.
“You know how Roda Kapakia wept when she was not allowed into the room with her grandmother’s body,” continued Freny in solemn tones, naming another misguided woman, who had married a Christian. “She was made to sit outside on a bench like a leper! Wo
uld you like that to happen to you when your grandmother dies?”
Thus alerted, Khutlibai jumped to her role with alacrity. Sitting across the room on a sofa, on which she had been swaying as if silently praying, she at once hid the lower half of her face in the edge of her sari and, looking at Bunny through foxy and brimming eyes, pleaded, “No, no, don’t do that! If you don’t attend my last rites, my child, my sorrowful soul will find no peace, and it will haunt this world till the Day of Judgment.” And, being Feroza’s grandmother as well, she pleaded, “One child is on the verge of forsaking us. Promise me you won’t break this old heart also.”
Khutlibai had contrived to make her vigorous person look so crumpled and close to death while she spoke that all the relatives once more glared at the disgraced girl.
Bunny, suspecting her grandmother had adroitly removed her dentures, gaped askance at her collapsed mouth and hurriedly said, “Please don’t worry, Granny, I’ll never break your heart.”
But a distantly related aunt from the Parsee Colony, respected for her forthright and abrasive manner and known as “Oxford aunt” (her husband had spent a year in Oxford learning to repair truck and tractor engines), was conscious that in all this talk to benefit the girls, the boys had been neglected. Inhaling mightily to fill out her chest she burst forth to say, “What do you expect our girls to do? Our boys go abroad to study and end up marrying white mudums. You can’t expect our girls to remain virgins all their lives!”
The aunts and uncles at once shifted their severe countenances to stare at the five boys scattered about the room until they squirmed in their seats.
Acutely conscious of her gangling thirteen-year-old grandson’s discomfort, the discerning Soonamai stroked the boy’s bony thigh and, in her quiet way, said, “You won’t marry a parjat will you? You must marry a nice little Parsee girl of your own choice. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Marry the girl you like.”
His buck teeth fanning out like white daisy petals, the excruciatingly slender adolescent gulped and tried to look as innocent, obedient, and accommodating as he could, while Soonamai continued to stroke his thigh with her soft, wrinkled hands.
The remaining boys scattered about the crowded room were coerced by similarly affecting dialogues to adopt corresponding attitudes. They dared not do otherwise under the scrutiny of their uncles, whose knowing eyes bored piercingly into theirs, as they displayed by their upright deportment and righteous countenances the resolute mettle that would keep them from marrying white mudums and from other equally alluring and infernal temptations.
These performances for the edification of the youngsters were staged with such regularity that the behavior of both the young and the old was almost automatic, entailing no untoward effort.
Their parts played out satisfactorily, the children were summarily dismissed, together with the white-liveried and crisply turbaned new servant, who was passing the drinks and hors-d’oeuvres. Now the formidable think tank of uncles, aunts, parents, and friends, talking vociferously, settled down to the solemn business of thrashing out a strategy.
All options were considered, angles analyzed, opinions aired. “If this David fellow says this, you say that! If Feroza says that, you say this!”
Zareen was alternately instructed, “Be firm. Exercise your authority as her mother!” and “If you can’t knock him out with sugar, slug him with honey.”
They further confused her by directing, “Don’t melt if she cries. If Feroza throws a tantrum, throw one twice as fierce!” and “But be careful; if you’re too harsh, she’ll rebel. Once she becomes naffat, she won’t care if you or I approve or disapprove.”
The Pakistani student in the seat next to Zareen’s covertly eyed her from time to time. Intimidated by the range and ferocity of her grimaces, he quietly ate his dinner and, once again contorting his body to accommodate it to his narrow seat, fell fitfully asleep. Clutching her handbag beneath her sari, Zareen dozed on and off.
Chapter 26
Zareen awoke near the end of her long journey to the sound of the wheels being lowered with a grinding noise and a shudder. A few minutes later, the plane tipped its wings to circle the Mile High city. Peering at it through her window, Zareen saw the mountainous, almost uninhabited spread of the new country, so different from the crowded vistas of her flights over Lahore and Rawalpindi with the untidy rectangles of flat roof-tops and flat fields. Even from the sky, she could see that this was an extraordinarily clean part of the planet, as if new and little used, and the mountains appeared to have been arranged by landscape artists.
The Boeing lost height rapidly, and all at once they were flying over clusters of toylike skyscrapers, just as she had seen them in photographs; banked up against the mountains, the city looked flattened and dwarfed. Then they were sweeping over a rush of clearly demarcated roads winding round sloping doll’s houses and tiny blocks of emerald lawn.
Thus it was that after again praying eleven Yathas and five Ashem Vahoos, jet-lagged and duty-bound Zareen landed at the Denver airport.
Half an hour later she emerged, groggily steering her luggage, and spotted Feroza right away. Conspicuous in the thick fence of pink faces behind a railing, Feroza’s dusky face glowed with affection and delight at the sight of her mother.
A little knot of love and happiness formed round Zareen’s heart. She paused deliberately, looked away, and then looked sharply at Feroza to catch that fleeting instant when a loved face, seen after a long interval, reveals itself as to a stranger before settling into the familiar groove of habitual association.
Feroza wore a light brown tank top and, as Zareen had expected, no makeup. Her plump, well-formed shoulders and arms were chocolate dark with suntan, and her body radiated a buxom brown female vitality. But her most striking feature, even at that distance, were her eyes, a luminous yellow-brown, lighter than her skin or the hair falling about her shoulders, lighting up her face. Zareen held her breath. Her daughter was beautiful.
And then Feroza was hugging her and taking her traveling bag from her hands and brushing the tears from her eyes.
A nondescript young man in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, crowned by an unsparingly short and conservative haircut and wearing steel-rimmed glasses, smiled awkwardly and picked up Zareen’s suitcases.
Feroza said, “Mum, this is David, David Press.”
The little knot of happiness and love in her heart was nudged aside to make room for a harder substance as Zareen assessed her adversary. The photograph had been misleading. David bore little resemblance to the confident, actorishly handsome image. His shy blue eyes blinked with anxiety to be liked behind the unadorned squares of glass.
“How are you, David?” Zareen said, outwardly calm, coolly holding out her hand with the three diamond rings.
David, divesting himself of the two heavy suitcases and hastily wiping his hands on his pants, took her hand gingerly in his and shook it formally. “Welcome to America,” he said and then mumbled something neither Zareen nor Feroza could decipher.
As they followed David to the little Chevette in the parking lot, Feroza whispered, “He’s had his hair cut. He’s all dressed up in long pants for your sake.” She gave her mother a nervous hug.
Zareen decided to postpone any thinking on the matter for the moment and face the situation after she’d had a cup of tea. She glanced at the straight-backed, square-shouldered, muscular young man walking with a self-conscious spring to his step ahead of them and, turning to Feroza, said only, “You’ve become very dark; your grandmother won’t like it. You’d better bleach your face or something before you come home.”
To go downtown, Feroza turned south on Monaco and then west on Seventeenth Street, with its large stone and frame houses. She wanted to impress her mother with the more alluring aspects of the city before taking her to her modest home on East Edison.
As they drove past the sprinklers raining on manicured lawns, Zareen talked about family members, relating amusing anecdotes, an
d addressed herself exclusively to Feroza.
David sat quietly in the back with whatever bits of luggage could not be crammed into the car’s small trunk.
Abruptly they were among the tall buildings downtown, and Zareen stopped talking to gape at the looming skyscrapers that had looked so toylike from the airplane.
David suddenly came to life in the pause. “All this is recent construction,” he said and, as Feroza drove around a large circle, doggedly pointed out landmarks. “That’s City Hall. That domed building — that’s the State Capital. That’s the Denver Art Museum. It’s ugly,” David ventured apologetically, and Zareen, who was impressed with the ten-floor-high fortress with pencil-thin slits for windows that looked like gun-turrets and reminded her of the picturesque forts around Peshawar, wondered at his aberrant taste. “I like it.” Zareen was curt.
“That’s the Denver Center for the Performing Arts,” David continued compulsively, and Feroza noticed his voice was a bit shaky. “Where the Denver Symphony plays … They have small theaters where plays are performed, dance and ballet.”
“Umm,” Zareen said. Even the “Umm” sounded terse.
“Can you see the tall building there with all the glass?” David leaned forward and pointed a taut finger at the windshield. “That’s the Seventeenth Street shopping mall; the area with the lamp-posts has been blocked off for shoppers and people who just want to stand around and look.”
And then David abruptly discontinued the tourist-guide bit and quietly said, “Look at the sunset.”
It was dusk. They had moved a little away from the tall buildings beginning to twinkle with lights, and they saw the mountains and clouds caught in a still and glorious explosion of scarlet, pink, and steel gray. Once again Zareen felt that the city, enormous as it was from close quarters, was dwarfed by the powerful mountains ranged behind it.