An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  But once they were past the awesome sunset and masonry downtown and Feroza headed south on University Avenue toward the campus, Zareen continued directing her remarks at Feroza and subconsciously registered the unexpected row of mellowed stone houses, the Cherry Creek Shopping Mall, the astonishing cleanliness everywhere.

  Soon they arrived in a street lined with bookstores, restaurants, and stores selling athletic supplies, hiking, and mountaineering equipment. David pointed out a stately building of rust-colored stone with small, recessed windows, flanked by two other equally stately buildings of gray stone and said, “That’s the University of Denver.”

  They entered a residential area crisscrossed by a checkerboard of streets, and Feroza turned into a shallow drive, announcing, “Here’s where we live.”

  Zareen realized that “we” included David. She cast a startled glance at her daughter, and Feroza quickly added, “Four of us share, Mum. David lives in the converted garage. Two girls, Laura and Shirley, share a room. They didn’t want to be in the way when you came. You’ll see them tomorrow.”

  Zareen regarded the house with raised eyebrows. Coming as she did from a part of the world where houses have thirteen-inch-thick brick walls and reinforced concrete roofs, her daughter’s dwelling looked like an oblong shack of wood and cardboard set up to be blown away by the huffing and puffing nursery-rhyme wolf.

  But once she stepped inside Zareen was pleasantly surprised by the thickly carpeted interior, the evenly hung drapes, the comfortable furniture, and she fell in love with the large green fridge and matching dishwasher in the spacious kitchen. She touched the shining surface of things with delight, appreciating the materials that could be kept so easily clean without the help of servants. She was quite civil to David, but with an inflection that left him a bit breathless and fumbling, as both he and Feroza showed off the house.

  Feroza made a pot of tea, and after a decent interval, David left them to talk. Almost at once Feroza asked, “Mum, what d’you think of him?” She was a little crestfallen when her mother said, “It’s too early to tell. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  The next day, refreshed by her sleep, Zareen launched what she believed was a mild and tactful offensive. She lauded the virtues and earning capacities of three marriageable Parsee boys in Lahore. Each of their mothers had expressed an ardent desire to make Feroza her daughter-in-law. Two other worthy mothers of handsome and wealthy boys in Karachi had expressed similar aspirations.

  Feroza kissed her mother fondly and teased, “I think I’m too young to settle down with mothers-in-law. Besides,” she said, indicating with a shift in her tone that she was serious, “David’s mother, Adina, is really quite sweet. I’ve met her, and we often talk on the phone. She and Abe, David’s father, live in Boulder, near Denver. They are not rich, but they are respectable people. His father is a bookkeeper at Con Edison, the electricity company.”

  This gave Zareen the opening she was looking for. “You’re too precious. We’re not going to throw you away on the first riffraff that comes your way.”

  Feroza’s shining eyes lost a part of their luster.

  “You know what we do when a proposal is received,” Zareen continued, ignoring the change in her daughter’s regard, warned though that she must be more guarded in her choice of words. “We investigate the boy’s family thoroughly. What is his background? His standard of living? His family connections?”

  A well-connected family conferred advantages that smoothed a couple’s path through life, and not only their own life, but the lives of their children! What did she know of David’s background except that his father worked in some Con company? Of David’s family connections? His antecedents?

  “What do you mean, ‘antecedents’?”

  “His ancestry, his khandan.”

  “Oh, you mean his pedigree?”

  “If that’s how you like to put it.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Mum,” Feroza said. “If you go about talking of people’s pedigrees, the Americans will laugh at you.”

  Cut to the quick, Zareen plucked a tissue from the box on the kitchen table. “It’s no laughing matter. You’ll be thrown out of the community! Do you know what happens to girls who marry out? They become ten times more religious!” And then, like a magician conjuring up the inevitable rabbit, she ominously intoned, “Take Perin Powri. Like most of you girls, she never wore her sudra or kusti. After her marriage to a non, she wore her sari Parsee-style, and her sudra covered her hips! Her kusti ends dangled at the back! Till the day of her death, she missed her connection with community. She would have given anything to be allowed into the agyari.”

  “We’re having a civil marriage in any case; a judge will marry us,” Feroza said. “That way I can keep my religion, if it matters so much to you. Of course you know David and I are Unitarians.”

  “Unitarians!” Zareen wrinkled her nose disparagingly. “You sound almost as if you’ve converted! My dear, your judge’s marriage will make no difference to the priests. They won’t allow you into any of our places of worship, agyari or Atash Behram.”

  Zareen moved her coffee mug to one side and placed her arms on the table, “Do you know how hurt and worried we all were when we got your letter? I couldn’t sleep. And your father, I never thought to see him so shaken and grieved! Your poor grandmother actually fainted! She told me to beg you on my knees not to marry this boy. You know she adores you. You won’t be permitted to attend her funeral rites — or mine or your father’s!” She picked out the last tissue and wiped her eyes. “Do you know how selfish you are, thinking only of yourself?”

  Zareen blew her nose and addressed herself to what caused her — next to the thought of her daughter’s outcast status — the most anguish. “It is not just a matter of your marrying a non-Parsee boy. The entire family is involved — all our relationships matter.”

  Zareen tried to describe how much pleasure the interaction with a new bunch of Parsee in-laws would bring the family. More wedding feasts, more cozy friendships, more bonding within the community, more prestige. “You are robbing us of a dimension of joy we have a right to expect. What will you bring to the family if you marry this David? His family won’t get involved with ours. But that doesn’t matter so much … What matters is your life — it will be so dry. Just husband, wife, and maybe a child rattling like loose stones in this huge America!”

  Feroza despaired of bridging the distance that suddenly yawned between them. “You’ll have to look at things in a different way … It’s a different culture,” she ventured desperately.

  “And you’ll have to look at it our way. It’s not your culture! You can’t just toss your heritage away like that. It’s in your bones!” Zareen thumped the table with conviction and tried to look as if she’d settled the argument.

  Feroza stared at her mother. Her face had become set in a way that recalled to Zareen the determination and hauteur with which her daughter had once slammed doors and shut herself up in her room.

  “You’ve always been so stubborn!” Zareen said angrily. “You’ve made up your mind to put us through this thing. You’ll disgrace the family!”

  “I’m only getting married. If the family wants to feel disgraced, let them!”

  Zareen checked herself. She recalled the sage advice of the assembly; she must not push her daughter to rebellion.

  “Darling,” she said, “I can’t bear to see you unhappy.” She buried her face in her arms and began to sob.

  Feroza brushed her lips against her mother’s short, sleek hair, and putting her arms round her cried, “I don’t know what to do. Please don’t cry like this. It’s just that I love him.”

  Zareen reared up as if an exposed nerve had been touched in her tooth. “Love? Love comes after marriage. And only if you marry the right man. Don’t think you can be happy by making us all unhappy.”

  “I think I’ve had about all I can take!” Feroza said, pushing her chair back noisily.

  Zareen suddenly fel
t so wretchedly alone in this faraway country. “I should have listened. I should never have let you go so far away. Look what it’s done to you — you’ve become an American brat!”

  David, who had entered the kitchen at this point to get some cookies, decided he could do without them, and silently withdrew to be forgotten in his book-lined garage.

  “I don’t know how I’ll face the family,” Zareen cried. “I don’t know what my friends will think!”

  “I don’t care a fuck what they think!”

  Zareen stared at her daughter open-mouthed, visibly shaken by the crude violence of her language. “I never thought that I’d live to hear you speak like this, Feroza!” She stood up and walked from the kitchen with the stately bearing of a much taller woman.

  After a while, Feroza followed her into the room they shared and hugged her mother. The corner of the pillow was soaked with Zareen’s tears.

  “I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean that,” Feroza said, herself weeping. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  Chastened by the storm of emotion they had generated and the unexpected violence of the words exchanged, each called a frightened, silent truce. Neither brought up the subject for the rest of the evening. David had wisely elected to stay out of their way and had left the house altogether. Feroza, though made wretched by his absence, appreciated it. It was best that she be alone with her mother.

  They talked late into the night of family matters, of Feroza’s progress in her studies, her expenses (that Zareen termed astronomical), of the scholarship she was angling for; and, carefully circling the subject of marriage, each ventured, gingerly, to mention David. Feroza casually threw in a remark about David when the opportunity presented itself, and Zareen just as casually tossed in a question or two to show she bore him no ill will and was prepared to be objective.

  “David has wonderful road sense. I don’t know how I’d manage to find my way without him,” Feroza said at one point. “In fact, he’d love to show you around. He can explain things better than any guide.”

  “That would be nice,” Zareen said carefully, and on a note so tentative that Feroza expected her to continue. She looked at her mother with a touch of surprise, and quickly Zareen said, “But will he be able to find the time?”

  “Of course he will. He’s planned to keep the weekend free for you.”

  Feroza had already explained how hard David worked. Besides devoting every moment he could spare to his studies, he held two jobs — one as a research assistant to a professor of computer science and another with a construction firm — to pay for the expenses not covered by a scholarship. Feroza cast down her eyes, “His father can pay his tuition, but he won’t.” She knew she was stretching a point; Jewish parents set a premium on education, and David’s father would have paid the fees if he could. “He feels David must earn his way through the university. Actually that’s why David sold the car to me. He travels by bicycle.”

  “Quite right.” Zareen approved the parental decision and David’s attitude. “It will teach him to stand on his own two feet.”

  It was an attitude Parsee fathers would encourage. If Zareen were to believe all the allusions slipped in by Feroza, David had the brains of a genius, the temperament of a saint, and the most brilliant prospects in computers of anyone in Denver.

  “He seems like a nice boy,” Zareen said graciously, and Feroza, delighted by this quantum leap in his favor, hummed as she brushed her teeth. She heard Laura and Shirley move unobtrusively in their room. She saw the light that had come on in David’s garage go out. Hugging her mother good night, saying, “And DO let the bugs bite!” Feroza laughed so raucously at her own stale joke that it infected the small frame house with her joy, and Shirley and Laura, talking softly in their room, suddenly found themselves giggling at the least little thing.

  David, who was inclined to bouts of gloom and self-doubt, felt the thunderous cloud that had descended on him after his encounter with Zareen — convinced he had made the worst impression possible — lift somewhat. He smiled in the dark and longed to be with Feroza. He hoped she would slip into his room later.

  But hugging her soft American pillow that never rumpled in the narrow camp cot next to her mother’s bed, Feroza blew him a silent kiss and fell peacefully asleep.

  Zareen, who had to cope with a twelve-hour time difference, was wide awake at two o’clock in the morning. It came as a bit of a shock to her to think that it was already Saturday afternoon in Lahore. Cyrus would be taking his after-lunch nap, undisturbed by the mosque’s rowdy stereo system.

  Zareen was always amazed, and mildly resentful, at how peacefully her husband slept through the blasts while she shot up in bed, her heart thumping. Sometimes, when one of the family was sick, she sent messages requesting the mullah to tone down the volume. Being a frequenter of the mosque, the bearded cook wielded influence with his pals, and Zareen enjoyed the illusion that she exercised some control over her environment.

  Zareen found the quiet in her strange surroundings in Denver eerie, the opaque, dawnlike glow of the night sky reflecting the tireless city lights disorienting.

  In Lahore at this hour, the pitch dark night would be alive with a cacophony of insect and mammal noises, with the thump of the watchman’s lathi stick or the shrill note of his whistle. The population explosion in Pakistan having extended itself also to the bird community, some bird, disturbed by a sudden light or by an animal prowling in the trees, was bound to be twittering, some insomniac rooster crowing. Zareen had never imagined she’d actually miss the mosque stereos or the insufferable racket of the rickshaws.

  Covering her eyes and her ears in an old silk sari she kept for the purpose, Zareen summoned the imagined presences of her caring kinsfolk and filled the emptiness of her second night in America with their resolute and reassuring chatter. Their voices, trapped in the sari, rustled in her ears, buzzed in her brain, “Our prayers are with you. Be brave. Be firm. We must not lose our child.”

  Fortified by the strength of their convictions and of their characters, visible in the images floating before her, she evaluated the perilous situation, fraught with difficulties neither they nor she could have possibly foreseen.

  For one, Feroza had changed. Not overtly, but inside. For another, David was not as poor as his tattered pants had led them to believe. Besides, he would not be so easy to discredit. Feroza was convinced he was a paragon of all the virtues the community could ever have wished for in its sons — and the little Zareen had seen of the meek-looking fellow appeared calculated to confirm the impression.

  She, of course, was not taken in by his docile exterior. She knew he had wicked little ways hidden some place, ready to kick up trouble!

  As the remarks and the advice of the familial think tank echoed in her head and the words reconstituted themselves into new patterns that conveyed fresh instruction and new insights into the changed situation, Zareen was gradually soothed. She felt once again able to cope with the unforeseen circumstances. And, if it came to a pinch, living up to the trust reposed in her, she was confident she would improvise.

  By the time she drifted off to sleep at about five in the morning, Zareen had glimpsed the rudiments of an idea that had the potential to succeed.

  Chapter 27

  Feroza awoke her mother with a cup of tea. “It’s ten o’clock, Mum. We’ve planned a lovely Saturday for you. David’s ready.”

  Zareen was at once wide-awake. Refreshed by her sleep, and subconsciously aware of having spent the night in fruitful endeavor, she was in a happier and more adventurous frame of mind. After all, she was in America! The New World beckoned irresistibly.

  They breakfasted on omelettes and muffins at Pour La France, a yuppy hangout filled with the aroma of fresh gourmet coffee and the less aromatic presences of bearded professors and students in jogging shorts. David insisted on paying, and Feroza glowed. They lunched at Benihana, where the Japanese chef performed a fierce ballet with his sharp knives and the grilled mushro
oms he tossed to their plates. The bill was impressive, and Zareen settled the question of payment once and for all by declaring, “When I’m with you, I’ll pay. When you two start earning properly, you can pay.”

  At night, Zareen sank her teeth into prime rib of beef at the classy Brown Palace Hotel downtown and rolled up her eyes at its succulence. She tasted the Rocky Mountain trout from Feroza’s plate. Never had she tasted the natural flavors of meat and vegetables quite this way, always eating them drowned in delectable concoctions of spices at home.

  On Sunday, a day as bright and balmy as all the days she was to spend in Denver, they drove along a winding mountain road through pine-wood country made spectacular by rust-colored canyons and boulders, to Georgetown. It was a mining town that had flourished during the gold rush but was now mainly a tourist attraction. Preserved as on the day it was abandoned — and Zareen was sure it had been abandoned suddenly — the pictorial little downtown, with its hotels and saloons hung with Victorian light fixtures, rough wood furniture, and marble bars, excited her imagination.

  Guiding her tour with enthusiasm, blossoming beneath the warmly admiring gaze of his beloved and the interest shown by the sophisticated woman in a sari, David gave Zareen her first taste for the history of the land. So tied up and tangled the day before, his tongue became fluent, and he brought the Wild West vividly to life. His fumbling movements, too, were replaced by a surety that was natural to his compact body. And David, who had despaired in his dark bout of gloom of ever impressing Zareen, was as surprised as she was.

  When Feroza, agile in jeans, asked Zareen to climb the steep struts after her into an old steam engine, David tactfully suggested, “You’d better not in that beautiful sari.”