In “Defend Yourself Against Me” Sidhwa brings together a group of expatriates of South Asian origin with an apparent commonality of language and culture, but as the story unfolds the reader learns that these people belong to different religious groups: Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh. Using a Pakistani Christian narrator named Joy, Sidhwa develops themes that run through most of her work: minority identity and multiculturalism. Sidhwa looks at the dimensions of human compassion, the will to survive, and the capacity to forgive. In the sidelines of this story, when Sidhwa introduces Kishen’s white American wife, Suzanne, she further comments on adaptation, mutation, and change that encompass both the migrations of 1947 and the movement of South Asians into the diaspora.
• • •
“They are my grandparents,” says Kishen. I peer at the incongruous pair mounted in an old frame holding an era captive in the faded brown and gray photograph. I marvel. The heavy portrait has been transported across the seven seas; from the Deccan plateau in India to the flat, glass-and-aluminum–pierced horizons of Houston, Texas. The tiny sari-clad bride, her nervous eyes wide, her lips slightly ajar, barely clears the middle-aged bridegroom’s ribs.
“Your grandfather was exceptionally tall,” I remark, expressing surprise; Kishen is short and stocky. But distracted partly by the querulous cries of his excited children, and partly by his cares as a host, Kishen nods so perfunctorily that I surmise his grandfather’s height cannot have been significant. His grandmother was either exceedingly short or not yet full grown. I hazard a guess. She could be ten; she could be eighteen. Marketable Indian brides—in those days at least—wore the uniformly bewildered countenances of lambs to the slaughter and looked alike irrespective of age.
We hear a car purr up the drive and the muted thud of Buick doors. The other guests have arrived. Kishen, natty in a white sharkskin suit, tan tie, and matching silk handkerchief, darts out of the room to welcome his guests loudly and hospitably. “Aiiay! Aiiay! Arrey bhai, we’ve been waiting for you! Kitni der laga di,” he bellows in a curious mix of Urdu and English that enriches communication between the inheritors of the British Raj, Indians, and Pakistanis alike. “I have a wonderful surprise for you,” I hear him shout as he ushers his guests inside. “I have a lady friend from Pakistan I want you to meet!”
I move hesitantly to the living-room door and peer into the hall. Flinging out a gleaming sharkskinned arm in a grand gesture of introduction, Kishen announces: “Here she is! Meet Mrs. Jacobs.” And turning on me his large, intelligent eyes, beaming handsomely, he says, “Sikander Khan is also from Pakistan.”
Mr. Sikander Khan, blue-suited and black-booted, his wife and her three sisters in satin shalwar kameezes and heavy gold jewelry, and a number of knee-high children stream into the living room. We shake hands all around and recline in varying attitudes of stiff discomfiture in the deep chairs and sofas covered, desi style, with printed bedspreads to camouflage the stains and wear of a house inhabited by an extended Hindu family.
Kishen’s diminutive mother, fluffed out in a starched white cotton sari, smiles anxiously at me across a lumpy expanse of sofa and his two younger brothers, unsmiling and bored, slouch on straight-backed dining-room chairs to one side, their legs crossed at the ankles and stretched right out in front. Suzanne, Kishen’s statuesque American wife, her brown hair falling in straight strands down her shoulders and back, flits to and fro in the kitchen. As comfortable in a pink silk sari with a gold border as if she were born to it, she pads barefoot into the room, the skin on her toes twinkling whitely, bearing a tray of potato samosas, fruit juices, and Coke, the very image of dutiful Brahman wifedom. A vermilion caste mark spreads prettily between her large and limpid brown eyes.
I know her well. Her otherworldly calm and docility are due equally to her close association with her demanding and rambunctious Indian family, and the more private rigors of her job as a computer programmer in an oil corporation.
I make polite conversation with Mrs. Khan’s sisters in hesitant Punjabi. They have just emigrated. The differences from our past remain: I, an English-speaking scion of Anglican Protestants from Lahore; they, village belles accustomed to drawing water to the rhythm of Punjabi lore. They know very little English. Tart and shifty-eyed, their jewelry glinting like armor, they are on the defensive; blindly battling their way through cultural shock waves in an attempt to adapt to a new environment as different from theirs as only a hamburger at McDonald’s can be from a leisurely meal of spicy greens eaten in steamy village courtyards redolent of buffalo dung and dust-caked, naked children.
Observing their bristling discomfiture and the desultory nature of the conversation, Sikander Khan moves closer to me. He is completely at ease. Acclimatized. Americanized.
Our conversation follows the usual ritual of discourse between Pakistanis who meet for the first time on European or American soil. He moved from Pakistan eleven years ago, I two. He has a Pakistani and Indian spice shop on Richmond uptown, I teach English at the University of Houston downtown. Does he have U.S. citizenship? Yes. Do I? No, but I should have a green card by December. Mr. Khan filed his mother’s immigration papers two years ago: They should be through any day. One of his brothers-in-law will bring Ammijee. It will be his mother’s, Ammijee’s, first visit to the United States.
Mr. Khan speaks English with a broad Pakistani accent that is pleasant to my ears. “I went to the Dyal Singh College in Lahore,” he says courteously when he learns I’m from Lahore. “It is a beautiful, historical old city.”
All at once, without any apparent reason, my eyes prickle with a fine mist, and I become entangled in a web of nostalgia so intense that I lose my breath. I quickly lower my lids, and the demeanor of half a lifetime standing me in good stead, I maintain a slight smile of polite attention while the grip of sensations from the past hauls me back through the years to Lahore, to our bungalow on Race Course Road.
I am a little child playing hopscotch outside the kitchen window. The autumn afternoon is overcast with shadows from the mighty sheesham trees in the front lawn. There is a brick wall to my right, a little crooked and bulging in places, and the clay cement in the grooves is eroded. I keep glancing at the wall, suppressing a great excitement.
Spellbound, I sit still on Kishen’s lumpy sofa, my pulse racing at the memory. Then, clearly, as if she were in the room, I hear Mother shout: “Joy, come inside and put on your cardigan.”
Startled by the images, I snap out of my reverie. I search Mr. Khan’s face so confusedly that he turns from me to Kishen’s mother and awkwardly inquires of her how she is.
I have not recalled this part of my childhood in years. Certainly not since I moved to the United States. Too enamored of the dazzling shopping malls and technical opulence of the smoothly operating country of my adoption, too frequent a visitor to Pakistan, I have not yet missed it, or given thought to the past. Perhaps it is this house, so comfortably possessed by its occupants and their Indian bric-a-brac. It takes an effort of will to remember that we are in the greenly shaven suburbs of an American city in the heart of Texas.
Bending forward with the tray, smiling at my abstraction, Suzanne abruptly brings me to earth. “Joy,” she asks, “would you like some wine?”
“I prefer this, thanks,” I say, reaching apologetically for a glass of Coke.
“I used to know a Joy . . . long, long ago,” says Mr. Khan. “I spent one or two years in Lahore when I was a child.”
Suzanne has shifted to Mr. Khan. As his hand, hesitant with the burden of choice, wavers among the glasses, I watch it compulsively. It is a swarthy, well-made hand with dark hair growing between the knuckles and on the back. The skin, up to where it disappears beneath his white shirt sleeve, is smooth and unblemished.
There must be at least a million Sikanders in Pakistan, and several million Khans. The title “Khan” is discriminately tagged on by most Pakistanis in the United States who generally lack family names in the Western tradition. The likelihood that t
his whole-limbed and assured man with his trim mustache and military bearing is the shy and misshapen playmate of my childhood is remote.
But that part of my mind that is still in the convoluted grip of nostalgia, with its uncanny accompaniment of sounds and images, is convinced.
Having selected a glass of orange juice, Sikander Khan leans forward to offer it to a small boy whimpering halfheartedly at his feet. I glance obliquely at the back of Mr. Khan’s head. It is as well formed as the rest of him and entirely covered with strong, short-sheared black hair.
My one-time playmate had a raw pit gouged out of his head that couldn’t have grown hair in a hundred years! Still, the certainty remains with me and, not the least bit afraid of sounding presumptuous, I ask, “Was the girl you knew called Joy Joshwa? I was known as Joy Joshwa then.”
Holding the glass to the child’s lips, Sikander looks at me. My body casts a shadow across his face. His dark eyes on me are veiled with conjecture. “I don’t remember the last name,” he says, speaking in a considered manner. “But it could be.”
“You are Sikander!” I announce in a voice that brooks no doubt or argument. “You lived next to us on Race Course Road. You were refugees. . . . Don’t you remember me?” My eyes misty, my smile wide and twitching, I know all the while how absurd it is to expect him to recall the sharp-featured and angular girl in the rounded contours and softened features of my middle-ageing womanhood.
“Was it Race Course Road?” says Sikander. He sits back and, turning his strong man’s body to me, says, “I tried to locate the house when I was in Lahore. . . . But we moved to the farm land allotted to us in Sahiwal years ago. . . . I forgot the address. . . . So, it was Race Course Road!” He beams fondly at me. “You used to have pimples the size of boils!”
“Yes,” I reply, and then I don’t know what to say. It is difficult to maintain poise when transported to the agonized and self-conscious persona of a boil-ridden and stringy child before a man who is, after all these years, a stranger.
Sitting opposite me—if he can ever be said to sit—Kishen comes to an explosive rescue. “You know each other? Imagine that! Childhood friends!”
Kishen has squirmed, crab-wise, clear across the huge sofa and is sitting so close to the edge that his weight is borne mostly by his thick legs. Halfway between sitting and squatting, quite at ease with the restless energy of his body, he is radiant with the wonder of it all.
“It is incredible,” he booms with genial authority. “Incredible! After all these years you meet, not in Pakistan, but on the other side of the planet, in Houston!”
Triggered off by the fierce bout of nostalgia and the host of ghost memories stirred by Sikander’s unexpected presence, the scenes that have been floundering in the murky deeps of my subconscious come into luminous focus. I see a pattern emerge, and the jumble of half-remembered events and sensations already clamor to be recorded in a novel I have just begun about the Partition of India.
Turning to Sikander, smiling fondly back at him, I repeat, “You’re quite right: I had horrible pimples.”
Since childhood memories can only be accurately exhumed by the child, I will inhabit my childhood. As a writer, I am already practiced in inhabiting different bodies; dwelling in rooms, gardens, bungalows, and space from the past; zapping time.
Lahore: Autumn 1948. Pakistan is a little over a year old. The Partition riots, the arson and slaughter, have subsided. The flood of refugees—12 million Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs fleeing across borders that define India and Pakistan—has shrunk to a nervous trickle. Two gargantuan refugee camps have been set up on the outskirts of Lahore, at Walton and Badami Bagh. Bedraggled, carrying tin trunks, string cots, and cloth bundles on their heads, the refugees swamp the city looking for work, setting up house on sidewalks and in parks—or wherever they happen to be at sunset if they have wandered too far from the camps.
A young Christian couple, the Mangat Rais, live on one side of our house on Race Course Road; on the other side is the enormous bungalow of our Hindu neighbors. I don’t know when they fled. My friends Sheila and Sam never even said goodbye. Their deserted house has been looted several times. First by men in carts, shouting slogans, then by whoever chose to saunter in to pick up the leavings. Doors, sinks, wooden cabinets, electric fixtures, and wiring have all been ripped from their moorings and carried away. How swiftly the deserted house has decayed. The hedges are a spooky tangle, the garden full of weeds and white patches of caked mud.
It is still quite warm when I begin to notice signs of occupation. A window boarded up with cardboard, a diffused pallid gleam from another screened with jute sacking as candles or oil-lamps struggle to illuminate the darkness. The windows face my room across the wall that separates our houses. The possession is so subtle that it dawns on me only gradually; I have new neighbors. I know they are refugees, frightened, nervous of drawing attention to their furtive presence. I know this as children know many things without being told: But I have no way of telling if children dwell in the decaying recesses of the stolen bungalow.
Although the ominous roar of slogans shouted by distant mobs—that nauseating throb that had pulsed a continuous threat to my existence and the existence of all those I love—has at least ceased, terrible new sounds (and unaccountable silences) erupt about me. Sounds of lamentation magnified by the night—sudden unearthly shrieks—come from a nursery school hastily converted into a Recovered Women’s Camp six houses away from ours. Tens of thousands of women have been kidnapped and hundreds of camps have been set up all over the Punjab to sort out and settle those who are rescued, or “recovered.”
Yet we hear nothing—no sound of talking, children quarreling or crying, of repairs being carried out—or any of the noises our refugee neighbors might be expected to make. It is eerie.
And then one afternoon, standing on my toes, I glimpse a small scruffy form through a gap in the wall (no more than a slit really) where the clay has worn away. I cannot tell if it’s a boy or a girl or an apparition. The shadowy form appears to have such an attuned awareness that it senses my presence in advance, and I catch only a spectral glimpse as it dissolves at the far corner of my vision.
Impelled by curiousity—and by my loneliness now that even Sheila and Sam have gone—I peep into my new neighbor’s compound through the crack in the wall, hoping to trap a potential playmate. A few days later, crouching slyly beneath the wall, I suddenly spring up to peer through the slit, and startle a canny pair of dark eyes staring straight at me.
I step back—look away nonchalantly—praying the eyes will stay. A stealthy glance reassures me. I pick up a sharp stone and quickly begin to sketch hopscotch lines in the mud on our drive. I throw the stone in one square after another, enthusiastically playing against myself, aware I’m being observed. I am suddenly conscious of the short frock I have outgrown. The waist, pulled by sashed stitched to either side and tied at the back, squeezes my ribs. The seams hurt under my arms and when I bend the least bit I know my white cotton knickers, with dusty patches where I sit, are on embarrassing display. Never mind. If they offend the viewer, I’m sure my skipping skills won’t. I skip rope, and turning around and around in one spot I breathlessly recite: “Teddy bear, Teddy bear, turn around: Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground.”
And again, I sense I’m alone. I rush to the wall but my phantasmal neighbor’s neglected compound is empty.
The next few days I play close to the damaged wall. Sometimes the eyes are there, sometimes not. I look toward the wall more frequently, and notice that my glance no longer scares away the viewer. Once in a rare while I even smile, careful to look away at once, my lids demurely lowered, my expression shy: trying with whatever wiles I can to detain, disarm, and entice the invisible and elusive object of my fascination.
It is almost the end of October. The days are still warm but, as each day takes us closer to winter, the fresher air is exhilarating. People on the streets smile more readily, the tonga horses snort and shake t
heir necks and appear to pull their loads more easily, and even the refugees, absorbed into the gullies and the more crowded areas of Lahore as the camps shrink, appear at last to be less visible.
One such heady afternoon, when the eyes blocking the crack suddenly disappear and I see a smudge of pale light instead, I dash to the wall and glue my eye to the hole. A small boy, so extremely thin he looks like a brittle skeleton, is squatting a few feet away, concentrating on striking a marble lying in a notch in the dust. His skull-like face has dry, flaky patches, and two deep lines between his eyebrows that I have never before seen on a child. He is wearing a threadbare shalwar of thin cotton and the dirty cord tying the gathers around his waist trails in the mud. The sun-charred little body is covered with scabs and wounds. It is as if his tiny body had been carelessly carved and then stuck together again to form an ungainly puppet. I don’t know how to react; I feel sorry for him and at the same time repulsed. He hits the marble he was aiming at, gets up to retrieve the marbles, and as he turns away I see the improbable wound on the back of his cropped head. It is a raw and flaming scar, as if bone and flesh had been callously gouged out, and my compassion ties me to him.
Suzanne is in the kitchen and Kishen is flitting between the dining table and the kitchen filling stainless-steel glasses with water and arranging bowls containing a variety of pickles. He places a stack of silvery platters, their rims gleaming, next to the glasses. The smell of mango pickle is strong in the room and, seeing our eyes darting to the table, Kishen’s mother says, “We have made only a vegetarian thal today.” She sounds apologetic: as if their hospitality would not stand up to our expectations. I know how much trouble it is to prepare the different vegetables and lentils that add up to the thal. Glancing at his sisters-in-law, Sikander says, “The girls refused to eat lunch when they heard you were serving the thal, Maajee.” The sisters-in-law solemnly nod. “I’ve been looking forward to the food all day,” I also protest.
And the World Changed Page 4