An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  Once she was airborne, Zareen opened her crocodile skin handbag. Its three sections contained three thick wads of tissues. She picked one of each color and daubed her eyes. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and, gathering fresh tissues, held their fragrant softness against her face.

  The flight attendant served the first round of drinks. Zareen asked for an orange juice and took a Valium with it. As she was putting back the bottle, her fingers touched the tightly folded wad of paper that she had transferred to her change purse just before leaving. She took it out and spread the sheets on her lap. Since the first cursory scan, she had not looked at them. Zareen had a window seat, but the jet, nosing its way through time, had already been swallowed up in the night outside her window. Zareen switched on the light and held the pamphlet up to it. The message was typed in menacing capitals,

  NOTICE.

  PLEASE NOTE THAT ACCORDING TO THE PARSEE, ZOROASTRIAN RELIGIOUS BELIEFS, PERCEPTS, TENETS, DOCTRINES, HOLY SCRIPTURES, CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS, ONCE A PARSEE-ZOROASTRIAN MARRIES A NON-ZOROASTRIAN, HE OR SHE IS DEEMED TO HAVE RENOUNCED THE FAITH AND CEASES TO BE A PARSEE-ZOROASTRIAN. THE LAWS OF PURITY OF THE ZOROASTRIAN FAITH FORBID INTERMARRIAGES, AS MIXING PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL GENES IS CONSIDERED A CARDINAL CRIME AGAINST NATURE. HENCE, HE OR SHE DOES NOT HAVE ANY COMMUNAL OR RELIGIOUS RIGHTS OR PRIVILEGES.

  There was more in the same vein. It ended by imploring such blasphemers not to desecrate sacred places with their unwanted presence.

  On the other flyer, the High Priest, Dausturjee Rattan, had declared that a girl who married outside her faith was an adulteress and her children illegitimate.

  Zareen felt a dizzying wave of nausea. She realized that the debate, instead of bringing about the reforms she had thought were inevitable, had only entrenched traditional norms. These educated custodians of the Zoroastrian doctrine were no less rigid and ignorant than the fundos in Pakistan. This mindless current of fundamentalism sweeping the world like a plague had spared no religion, not even their microscopic community of 120 thousand.

  But the threatening words that had made her hide the flyers and instinctively blot them from her memory, now resonated hideously in her mind: “The Zoroastrian faith forbids intermarriages, since mixing physical and spiritual genes is considered a cardinal crime against nature.”

  Zareen wanted to spin a protective shield of love around her daughter, defend her from accusations of polluting the genetic structure of their race and dirtying the spiritual genes, if there were such things, and the purity of their religion: mighty charges no young girl could withstand, not even if she professed to be irreligious.

  It dawned on Zareen that the exhilarating strength she had felt when confronting David, as of some subtle power directing her brain, was not a supernatural force come to help her as she’d thought, but the reflexive impulse of her own dread.

  A child toddled down the isle waving a spoon and smiled at Zareen. Zareen put the papers away. She adjusted her chair, rearranged the pillows for comfort, and lay back.

  A picture formed behind her closed eyelids, of Khutlibai and Feroza. Zareen’s expression softened. Feroza had been about three years old then. There had been an epidemic of chicken pox among the children in the servant’s quarters and Cyrus had contracted it. Khutlibai had whisked Feroza away to her house on Punj Mahal Road. Cyrus had a raging fever and large sores all over his body. He was racked by coughs, almost blinded, and seriously ill. The disease that is relatively benign in a child can be quite serious for an adult. Busy nursing her husband and afraid to contaminate her daughter, Zareen had not seen Feroza for almost three months.

  Khutlibai, who had packed Manek off to the Ghoragali Hills boarding school earlier that year, enjoyed having her grandchild exclusively to herself. Her days passed in a blissful orgy of activities centered around the girl and her schedule. Always anxious about her grandchild’s welfare, Khutlibai was certain that Zareen neglected her. Now that Feroza was in her competent care, she enjoyed a season of peace.

  Khutlibai massaged Feroza with almond oil, bathed her “properly,” coddled her in fragrant clouds of talcum powder, tied large satin bows in her hair, clad her in pretty, frilly dresses, and matching socks and kept her always surgically clean and barber-shop fragrant. Feroza was taken visiting and shown-off to her friends, bought toys, and taken to ride the slides and seesaws in the playgrounds of Lahore’s lush gardens.

  Khutlibai supervised her granddaughter’s diet, giving her Kepler’s Malt with her breakfast and nourishing chicken soups at every meal. She regulated Feroza’s afternoon nap and bedtime routine and spent hours answering her questions and telling her stories.

  At the end of three months, with a great deal of fuss about fumigation and other precautions, Khutlibai reluctantly agreed to return her charge.

  She chose a propitious day of the month according to the Parsee calendar, a propitious hour of the day according to her Gujrati almanac, and, preceded by an elaborate flurry of packing, arrived at her daughter’s house in her stately Studebaker (this was before her Toyota days).

  It was fairly late in the afternoon, and Zareen and Cyrus had visitors. The portals of the home were flung open by the salaaming servants. Carrying Feroza, and followed by the ayah, cook, and her handsome chauffeur, who was haughtily holding a new suitcase and frilly little dresses on hangers, Khutlibai passed through the sitting room on a deliberate course to the nursery.

  Their guests had stood up, politely smiling, but Khutlibai’s solemn demeanor, profoundly pursed mouth and straight-ahead, purposeful eyes, effectively arrested their greetings.

  “Passed through” was inadequate to describe their passage, Zareen thought, smiling reminiscently. Sailed past like a galleon on the high seas was more like it. Khutlibai held Feroza with a protective air of significance and gravity that imbued her charge with all the regard due to royalty. Had Bonny Prince Charlie been discreetly hustled through a palace hall after he’d been smuggled into England by an aristocratic lady-in-waiting, their passage could hardly have been more impressive.

  Propped up in Khutlibai’s arms, Feroza’s regal bearing validated the homage paid by her entourage. Her large irises glowed hazel in her brown face as they deigned to acknowledge the standing presences with a demure glance of coy curiosity.

  Her bashful glance, the contours of her finely etched features, the noble angle at which she held her neck as though conscious of her role in the domestic comedy, had branded her image in Zareen’s memory.

  And all that Kepler’s Malt and pampering had paid off. Feroza’s lightly flushed face appeared burnished — as if cast in bronze — as her imperious profile cut through the air like an exquisitely chiseled mermaid at the prow of that proud, broad-beamed, wave-riding galleon.

  And like the ships of old, Feroza would navigate her own course through life, Zareen thought. Not the easy route she would have her daughter follow but the dangerous and alluring trails Zareen had scented in the New World in the short while she was there.

  It appeared to be her daughter’s destiny, and there was not much she could do to shield her from the pain. She and Cyrus and Khutlibai could provide her with everything but her destiny — and if they could, they would have given her even that.

  But her daughter was resilient, courageous in a way she would never understand. Feroza would bounce back, she always did.

  And so would she, Zareen, once she was with her family and friends. She needed desperately to be with them, to be assured she had done the right thing.

  Chapter 30

  David left Denver at the end of the summer term. He had completed his master’s in computer programming and accepted a job with a firm in California. Feroza and he had long discussions after Zareen left, analyzing her visit, wondering what had gone wrong despite their resolutions not to let their religious disparity come between them. But it had — or at least Zareen had convinced David that the differences mattered.

  It was not only a question of analysis and argument, Feroza ackno
wledged sadly. It was David. His feelings for her had undergone a change.

  The very thing that had attracted him to Feroza, her exoticism, now frightened David. Zareen had made him feel that he and Feroza had been too cavalier and callow in dismissing the dissimilarities in their backgrounds. He felt inadequate, wondering if he could cope with some of the rituals and behavior that, despite his tolerant and accepting liberality, seemed bizarre. Stuff his mouth with sweets, break a coconut on his head! And, were he by some gross mischance accepted to the Zoroastrian faith, which fortunately was not permissible, he’d have the singular honor of having his remains devoured by vultures and crows in a ghastly Tower of Silence.

  Even that could misfire; Zareen’s great-great-grandparent’s foot had remained uneaten for a month after an epidemic of typhoid in their ancestral village in Central India. After all, there was a limit to how much the gluttonous birds could eat.

  Zareen had made the horrible details sound like something to look forward to at the end of her life. He knew she was joking of course, but her attitude had distressed and humiliated him. Yet, on another level, he had not realized before how much Feroza’s leaving her faith entailed. It was such a final break, not something she could change her mind about later and go back to for sustenance.

  The mountains Feroza loved so much appeared to have shed some of their splendor and stepped away from her, dimmed and diminished on a somber horizon. It was as if her eyes, robbed of the blue dazzle they had become accustomed to, reflected only dulled and cheerless impressions. Feroza hardly noticed the sunsets they once had driven to distant places to admire together, locations David had discovered especially for her.

  Then her pining, thirsting vision began to conjure up mirages in the wasteland of her heartache, and she started seeing David everywhere. She saw him seated in shaded nooks in restaurants, slipping round campus corners and the counters in stores, cycling ahead of her on paths, climbing into buses and riding past, walking away from her, always stepping away from her. Her heart pounding, she raced after him, her smile fading as she confronted strangers.

  When her friends heard that she and David had broken up, they flocked to her. Shashi dropped by regularly, attempting to cheer her up with the latest news from Mala and Deepak. They had left for Delhi with the baby — and the baby’s brand-new American passport — soon after they retrieved her from the hospital. Gwen and Rhonda brought her flowers and magazines and tried to get her out of bed and comfort her.

  Jo called frequently, and she and Bill persuaded her to go to a Chinese restaurant with them one Saturday evening. Feroza was grateful to her friends and welcoming when they visited, but her spirit was extinguished. She was listless; it was like being with a sick person.

  Aban and Manek called from Houston every Saturday and Sunday. Aban had delivered a baby girl and was already pregnant again.

  David’s room was occupied by a tall and lank student with a racing bike. No matter how much she told herself she was being unfair, she considered him an interloper. She resented his reclusive presence in the converted garage and couldn’t bear to hear music, or other inevitable noises he made in inhabiting his rented quarters. In fact she resented his very existence.

  David called from California occasionally. Their conversations were pleasant and sometimes for Feroza full of hope. Then she became her ebullient and generous self again, and her life seemed full of possibility. But these brief periods were followed by depression as hope sank anew.

  “What’s this?” Shashi said late one evening, imitating her lethargic posture as she sat at the kitchen table supporting her chin in her hand and vapidly stirring her coffee. And when her eyes welled with tears at the rebuke, Shashi drew up his chair and put his arm round her and nuzzled her face, saying, “It’s not the end of the world, you know. I promise, you’ll get over it.”

  He fell to his knees and dramatically bared his chest. Spreading his arms like a film hero, he crooned the songstress Iqbal Banoo’s beautiful lament, Ulfat Kee Naee Manzil Ko Chalay:

  Embarked on a new mission of love,

  You who have broken my heart, look where you’re going.

  I, too, lie in your path.

  Feroza said Wah-wah, wah-wah, in the manner of South Asian appreciation and, although she was playing up to his theatrics, was surprised by his ability to hold a difficult tune.

  Shashi touched his bowed forehead repeatedly in a deep salaam and, swinging slowly from one side to the other in an arc, saluted the rest of the imaginary audience applauding his mehfil.

  Feroza collapsed on the floor beside him, laughing.

  But the ghazal, with its attendant memories of other romantically sweet and metaphysical poems, and the mushairas attended by thousands of fans like herself where poets recited or sang their work, evoked an unbearable nostalgia. Feroza wept, yearning for the land of poets and ghazals she had left behind, for her friends from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and for her own broken heart — when it occurred to her that she had thought of both in the past tense.

  Her life that had bloomed in such unexpected ways had just as unexpectedly fallen apart. She must put it together again, heal her lacerated sensibility. But she could only do the healing right here, in America. For even in her bereft condition, she knew there was no going back for her, despite the poets and her friends.

  From her visit to Lahore, Feroza knew she had changed, and the life of her friends there had also changed, taken a different direction from hers. Their preoccupation with children and servants and their concern with clothes and furnishings did not interest her. Neither did the endless round of parties that followed their parents’ mode of hospitality. Although the sense of dislocation, of not belonging, was more acute in America, she felt it would be more tolerable because it was shared by thousands of newcomers like herself.

  It was not only that, Feroza thought in mild consternation. Like Manek she had become used to the seductive entitlements of the First World. Happy Hour, telephones that worked, the surfeit of food, freezers, electricity, and clean and abundant water, the malls, skyscrapers, and highways.

  There was also the relief from observing the grinding poverty and injustices she could do so little to alleviate, the disturbing Hadood Ordinances that allowed the victims of rape to be punished, and the increasing pressure from the fundamentalists to introduce more Islamic law. These and the other constraints would crush her freedom, a freedom that had become central to her happiness. The abandon with which she could conduct her life without interference was possible only because of the distance from her family and the anonymity America provided.

  However comforting the interaction of family and friends was, they would fritter away her hours in activities she had grown away from, and their habitual meddling would never allow her control over her life.

  In a way Manek was right when he carried on about time. Not that she thought, with his emphasis, that “time was money,” but because the waste of time represented to her a loss of privacy. And privacy, she had come to realize, was one of the prime luxuries the opulence of the First World could provide, as well as the sheer physical space the vast country allowed each individual, each child, almost as a birthright.

  She realized now that the convenience provided by servants brought its own baggage of responsibilities, a drain on her time she could do without. The technology of the West kept one sufficient unto one’s self without the necessity of intrusive human contact. The genii that opened garage doors, the dust-proof, climate-controlled houses, and the gadgets eliminated the need for servants, for dependence on relatives one might need to call upon in a pinch.

  She was not alone in her desire for privacy and plenty. A sizable portion of the world was experiencing this phenomenon, on this scale at least, for the first time in human history, and the rest of the jam-packed and impoverished world — no matter how much they might moan about the loss of human contact, privacy, and the dwindling family — also hankered for it.

  The thirst fo
r knowledge that the universities and the libraries filled with books had kindled in Feroza and the curiosity that still burned like a flame in her mind — all this she had become accustomed to and couldn’t leave. Like Shashi, she wasn’t satisfied with her degree in hotel management. She would indulge her choices: anthropology, psychology, journalism, astronomy. The options were endless.

  Feroza knew her thoughts would be considered despicable and selfish were she to voice them at home. But it was a selfishness sanctioned by the values of the prosperous new world in which she wished to dwell. Surely she could arrive at a compromise if her conscience troubled her — and even as she thought this, she knew it would. Her deeply ingrained and early awareness of political and state evils and her passion for justice would always make her fight injustice wherever she was.

  And, God knows, there was enough cause: in the pious platitudes, in the narrow vision of a world seen through the cold prisms of self-interest and self-pity, in this strangely paradoxical nation that dealt in “death,” that sold the world’s most lethal weapons to impoverished countries and simultaneously absorbed the dispossessed of the chronically dispelling world.

  Yet this paradox was shaping a New World, the future in microcosm, the melting-pot in which every race and creed was being increasingly represented, compelled to live with and tolerate the “other,” and she would play her part, however miniscule it was, in shaping the future. She would leave room in her life for the ideals of generosity and constancy she had grown up with and the attachment to the family and their claim on her. She would manage her life to suit her heart; after all, the pursuit of happiness was enshrined in the constitution of the country she had grown to love, despite her growing knowledge of its faults, and she would pursue her happiness her way.

  Feroza applied for and was admitted to the University of Arizona’s graduate program in anthropology.