by Sorayya Khan
In the months following her return to school, I could tell that Lizzy had changed. She hardly ate, offering me her Wonder Bread sandwiches before throwing them away. When my American classmates had first started bringing sandwiches made with newly available Wonder Bread from the commissary, I couldn’t wait for a taste, but all it took was a single bite to want nothing more to do with the spongy bread. The best thing about Lizzy’s appetite loss was that even when it slowly returned, she never regained an interest in sweets. I was the happy recipient of whatever desserts the Simons’ cook packed for her, cupcakes and blueberry muffins made from powdered mixes, perfect squares of fudge, tiny packs of Junior Mints and candy corn. I never turned down the items that had made their magical way across half the world to the embassy’s commissary, a mythical place to which all Pakistanis, half-and-half or not, were forbidden access. In exchange, Lizzy devoured Sadiq’s samosas. They were my mother’s ingenious method of using up leftovers and making us eat healthy, and instead of the standard spicy potato or keema filling, Sadiq filled the samosas with spoonfuls of saag or chhole. It didn’t matter to Lizzy, because she didn’t know that aloo saag or chhole weren’t meant to be in samosas.
By June, when no one could decide whether the bus windows should stay open to let in the scorching breeze or closed to protect us from it, school was endless, especially my French class. French was the last hour of my school day, I wasn’t good at it, and I didn’t like the teacher. Mr. Duval was from Mauritius, but until I heard him speak for the first time, I thought he was Pakistani. He was almost as dark as my father, with deep brown eyes and extra-white teeth, but unlike my father, he was growing bald and kept what was left of his hair oiled and combed behind his ears. He spoke with an accent that was difficult to place, part British and part attempting to be something else, as if the way he talked could change who he was. He sported brightly colored ties that did not match his clothes and spoke in a faltering and timid voice. More often than not, he walked into our classroom after students had used the few minutes between classes to fill the blackboard with sketches of his paunchy belly. His eyes were the worst. There was something beggarly about them, something uneasy and defeated in the way they darted from one person to another and back again. We passed notes to one another during class about the stains in the armpits of his V-neck blue sweater, his graying nose hairs, and anything else that struck us as funny on a particular day. When he caught us, he never had the courage to send us to the principal’s office. He probably worried about losing his job.
He spoke French hesitantly with an abundance of pauses and an annoying tendency to draw out even the shortest words, transforming a monosyllabic word into one with several syllables. It was exactly the way I spoke Urdu, so I knew his tricks. In the classroom, our laughter halted only once a week, on Wednesdays, when we prepared for the weekly quiz the following day. Instead of writing notes, we copied explanations for verb conjugations and Mr. Duval’s own rhyming grammatical rules into our notebooks. It was the only time any of us asked questions, and in his eagerness for us to do well on the quizzes, he would provide us with the questions and, eventually, the answers.
One afternoon, I was slumped in my seat waiting for the end-of-class bell, aware that despite Mr. Duval’s help, I’d done poorly on the quiz. He collected the tests and tapped them into a neat pile using the arm of my old student desk, which prevented me from getting up while everyone else left the classroom.
“You are not doing very well in the class,” he finally said. “If you study for your quizzes, you will do better.”
He didn’t say anything I didn’t already know, and I decided to be blunt. I told him I didn’t like French, and it didn’t make sense.
“But it is simple,” he answered, genuinely surprised, “once you learn the rules. For one, the order of conjugation.”
In the ceiling-to-floor window behind his shoulder, Lizzy was making faces, sticking out her tongue at him, scratching her armpits like a monkey, and blowing raspberries against the classroom window. Two or three other friends joined her. I’d done the very same things when we’d made fun of him together. “You don’t even speak French,” I mumbled disdainfully, suddenly brave, the words slipping from my mouth.
“Qu’avez-vous dits? What did you say? I am from Mauritius,” he proclaimed, and the severity of his tone forced my gaze from the window to his face. “Do you know what we speak in Mauritius? French. French is the national language. French is my language.” As if to prove his last sentence, he repeated himself in French, quickly and more loudly. “Je suis francophone.”
He planted his hand on my desk, pulled up the sleeve of his stained sweater, and uncuffed his shirt. He brought his forearm close to my face, and I felt his arm hair against my chin.
“Because my skin is brown,” he said quietly, as if he might be overheard, “you do not think I can speak French?”
A moment passed, and then another, before Mr. Duval moved. I could hear Lizzy and her friends giggling, but I followed his arm until it hung at his side, and the contrast between his white shirt cuff and his skin reminded me of my father. I was no longer sure he didn’t speak French, and I was desperate with fear my father would discover my impertinence.
“You won’t tell the principal, will you?” I pleaded.
Mr. Duval gripped my wrist until he pinched my skin.
“You are not one of them,” he whispered, and let me go.
I rubbed the inside of my cheeks against my braces until they were raw. I wrapped my fingers around my wrist like a bangle and did not leave my desk until the color returned to my pinched skin and Mr. Duval finished tidying the classroom.
Lizzy had tired of waiting, but we caught up with each other walking to the bus.
“Liya! What did evil-Dooval want?” Lizzy asked.
“Not much,” I mumbled. When Lizzy continued to look at me expectantly, I added, “To go over my test, that’s all. I didn’t do so well.”
“Did you see his sweat puddles today?” Lizzy said derisively.
I had, like everybody else. But Mr. Duval no longer seemed stupid, and his armpits were no longer funny. I nodded and got on the bus.
When the principal called home, he didn’t mention the scene with Mr. Duval but told my mother he was concerned about my performance in French class. My attendance at the school was contingent on outstanding academic performance, he noted, and added that my French marks fell far short of excellence. When my mother repeated the conversation to me and I didn’t offer an explanation, much less an apology, she resorted to her common refrain. Attending the American School of Islamabad was a privilege, not a right.
I hated the reminder. My mother had once told me that a year’s tuition was more than my father’s annual salary, and we could afford the school only because of our scholarships. While my mother went on to express her disappointment in my French marks, I wondered if there were any Pakistanis who did not need scholarships. The prime minister’s children?
Starting that evening, I was forced to spend half an hour with my mother, my French homework spread out on the dining room table. Having learned French when she was a child, she could conjugate any verb without thinking, while I couldn’t remember how to conjugate the easiest ones.
“You must learn other languages,” my mother said patiently, launching into yet another favorite refrain, “for not everyone will speak yours.”
I sighed, but I was grateful for her concern. I was even more grateful that Mr. Duval hadn’t told the principal what had happened between us.
Alone in the room I’d once shared with my sister, I could still feel the pressure of Mr. Duval’s hand on my wrist. Dinner, my mother’s version of nasi goreng, churned in my stomach, and I’d already stood up a few times thinking I’d have to make a dash for the toilet. “You are not one of them.” Mr. Duval’s final words echoed inside my head until, all strung together, they became my only thought.
I was not one of them. I was not American. I didn’t look lik
e them, and try as I might, the details of trying to pass for one were exhausting. Every day they included a whole host of things, such as wearing jeans, which I worked hard at not calling denims, copying their accent, staying away from British words my parents used, like fetch for get and senior to instead of older than, and saying things like That’s cool! and What’s happening? I even pretended to be aware of what my classmates discussed, including movies they saw on home leaves in America or houseboats they stayed in while visiting Indian Kashmir, where my Pakistani passport would never have allowed me to go. I recalled one Halloween when a trick-or-treater, the son of an American teacher, stepped into my house while Sadiq was cooking biryani and wrinkled his nose with distaste. While I put my mother’s carefully wrapped meringue cookies in his bag, he said, “Your house smells like Pakistan.” My parents drove a car with black license plates, not the yellow ones sporting special codes of numbers that announced their foreign embassy and rank. My mother packed my lunches in oversized yellow paper bags from the fruit market, not the brown paper ones that could be purchased in packets of fifty or one hundred at the American commissary.
The afternoon I put my name on a list to join the Girl Scouts, my mother received an apologetic telephone call from the troop leader claiming Pakistanis were not allowed in her group, but there was a local equivalent if I was still interested. Then there was the evening I was invited for the first time to the movies at the American Embassy with Lehla and one of her friends. The young American man collecting the tickets looked us over from head to toe before indicating Pakistanis were not permitted in the movie theater. But he finally allowed us to pass after putting his face to mine, his breath in my ear, and chuckling, not unkindly, “You’re not really one, are you?” I’d been delighted at first, but if passing for white was what I wanted, why did my gleeful reaction trouble me when we got home? Lehla said to forget about it because the point was, we got to see the movie.
Being white is nice, I thought. It’s blonde bangs falling away from your forehead with the toss of your head. It’s slathering baby oil on your skin to make it turn golden in the sun. It’s wearing blue jeans that sit on your hips and flare to the floor. It’s the steering wheel being on the wrong side in a car with yellow license plates. It’s eating Pringles and Twinkies and Wonder Bread flown into Islamabad from America. It’s knowing what prime rib is and how bagels are made. It’s having a cook who makes cinnamon rolls. It’s wearing clothes advertised in magazines and using catalogs to buy underwear. It’s knowing the best lines in The Spy Who Loved Me and all the verses in “Staying Alive.” It’s not having to remember to spell color without the u. It’s ordering donuts at United Bakery or poking at the pomegranates in Covered Market without ever thinking of lowering your voice. It’s knowing who you are because you look like people in magazines.
But the most important thing was also the simplest. Being white is not being half-and-half. It’s being whole. And knowing it.
My mother looked like one of them, but she was not, really. Being married to my father had made her brown, though, of course, you couldn’t tell by looking.
Although it was too late to do well in French, the principal’s warning made me worry about getting good grades in other classes. So I convinced Lizzy to join me in a complicated science project that involved mosquitoes and malaria, and we asked the help of her father, who was an expert on the subject and who promised us colorful brochures and real mosquito larvae.
I couldn’t think of Lizzy’s mother as anything but Anne Simon because that’s how she’d introduced herself, as if we could be on a first-name basis. Although I called her Mrs. Simon, she was Anne Simon inside my head. The resemblance between Lizzy and her mother was astonishing. Aside from their blue eyes and white-blonde hair, they both spoke softly, as if they were concerned their words might intrude on others. I’d also recently noticed they shared half-moon shadows under their eyes, bruises almost, and I was surprised I’d missed the likeness earlier. When we went to Lizzy’s house to start work on the project, Anne Simon was hard at work on her sewing machine, holding folds of material and guiding hems into white-lace curtains she intended to hang throughout the house.
Mr. Simon was sitting on the other side of the sofa, and laid out on the cocktail table in front of him were Polaroid photographs documenting a work trip to Kabul through the Khyber Pass, from which he’d only just returned. We sat with him for a moment and he pointed at a few photographs, giving us the names of towns and exclaiming on what a beautiful country Afghanistan was.
My mother had raised her eyebrows when I’d told her he was going on the trip. There had recently been a coup in Afghanistan, but instead of removing a prime minister from office, as our general had, the king had been removed, and according to the BBC newscaster, a Marxist-Leninist government had been installed. “Is it safe for Americans working on malaria projects to be there?” my mother had wondered aloud, but my father, back from Lahore, was preoccupied with a new electricity or water crisis in the country and hadn’t responded.
Several cardboard boxes were stacked against the bare white wall across Anne Simon’s sewing room. One of the boxes was open, and I peeked inside. I saw piles of white shirts, miniature versions of the white ones my father used to wear to the office until the government changed the dress code a year or two earlier and demanded citizens give up Western shirts for Pakistani clothes. More garments lay draped on the backs of chairs and scattered on other surfaces. Although the clothes were sewn in different fabrics and colors, they all appeared the same size. I touched a flannel shirt hanging on the back of a chair and drew my fingers over the careful stitching on the pockets.
“You made these for the twins?” I asked Anne Simon, referring to Lizzy’s brothers, who were still a year away from beginning school.
“They’re much too big for the boys,” she answered as the two identical beings, four years old, pranced into the room clutching plastic train tracks. “I made them for a women’s charity group. The clothes we make go to kids who need them.”
“They’re all the same size, right?” I asked, but Anne Simon was being called to the telephone. She was the embassy nurse, and according to Lizzy, she was always being called at home for advice. While Lizzy ordered cookies and soda for us from the kitchen, I held one of the shirts up to the light. The white cotton suddenly resembled a child’s torso, Hanif’s size, and I quickly put it down.
We finally opened our notebooks and began to write up notes for our malaria project. Mr. Simon gave us an illustrated poster that chronicled the life of a mosquito and a map of the world that depicted the countries most prone to be plagued with them. He promised to get us mosquito larvae to display as part of our presentation as soon as he had the time.
Anne Simon was going to the embassy to see a friend and suggested that Lizzy and I go along and have an early dinner in the embassy dining room. “How would you like a cheeseburger?” she asked me.
I accepted the invitation immediately and without asking for my parents’ permission or informing them. I had good reason not to tell them, because recently my father had forbidden me to go to the American Embassy and had cautioned me against speaking to Americans about Pakistani politics entirely. He’d explained that the growing tension around whether the prime minister would or wouldn’t be hanged, along with concerns that the Americans were conspiring with the general to hang him, made the situation volatile. Neither my mother nor I thought this fair. She also thought it was pointless. “She goes to their school, rides their yellow buses. What on earth difference could it make?”
Before the driver picked us up, Lizzy and I sat in front of the mirror on her grown-up dressing table, dabbing Vaseline on our eyelashes and Anne Simon’s powdered rouge on our cheeks. As different as we looked, Lizzy’s alabaster against my olive skin, our bodies were virtual replicas of each other’s. We both wore stretch bras over budding breasts, and unlike many of our classmates, neither of us slouched inside our clothes to hide them. Lizzy op
ened her closet and I selected a worn pair of jeans that hugged my waist as though they were mine. She told me I could keep them, because with the weight she’d lost with the flu, she didn’t know when they would fit her again. I copied Lizzy and tied my shirt in a knot around my waist and gathered my elbow-length hair into a high ponytail with Lizzy’s purple ribbon. Right before we left, Anne Simon said, “You’re both gorgeous,” and I was thrilled at the word, gor-geous, as if Lizzy’s mom couldn’t see the miniature railway tracks on our teeth.
The car smelled new. Lizzy explained that Mr. Simon had bought it as a gift for the family right before they moved to Islamabad. He’d presented it to Anne Simon with a pink ribbon rising from the belly of the car and tied into a bow on the roof.
“So the car was shipped here?” I asked.
“From Virginia,” Lizzy answered, and I wasn’t surprised, knowing this was done all the time. Still, the car was so big.
“Mom doesn’t like it, though. She says it’s too much. She calls it ‘The Extravagance’ when Dad isn’t around. Don’t you, Mom?”
The steering wheel, of course, was on the wrong side of the car, on the left instead of the right; never mind that cars in Pakistan were driven on the opposite side of the road. There were traces of clear plastic covering the leather armrest and around the window where they had not been completely removed. The backseat was so wide that with each of us sitting against opposite doors, there was space for two or three more people. The driver switched on the cassette player, and the sound of an American disc jockey in a faraway city filled the car.