My heart is pounding. I feel as if I have come to take back this house.
I am led through the front hall and into the main parlor, still furnished in the Art Deco style popular when my grandmother completed the house in the late 1930s: dark, carved wooden furniture with stylized forms, scalloped edges. The furniture is arranged in conversational groups, and it reminds me powerfully of my grandmother’s room in Boston. I realize what she was trying to re-create. It is all here; I see it.
We walk up a central staircase, and my breath catches when I recognize a low set of drawers in one of the rooms; it has the same inlaid ivory pattern and carving as an armoire my grandmother had in our family home in Karachi, where she kept her jewelry and important papers. I motion to the houseboy to ask him if I may enter the room, and he nods. I imagine this could have been her bedroom. I post imaginary telegrams to her in my mind: “I am sitting on your bed in Rahat Villa, Nana. I am imagining you here.”
Mr. Shandilya is resting on the upstairs veranda of the house, in a chair facing the lawn, smoking a pipe. He appears to be in his mid-eighties, the age my grandmother would be now if she were alive. He is dressed in white and looks as if he is made of paper, as if he may blow away if the wind gets any stronger. I explain that I am Rahat’s granddaughter, from America, and it’s clear that he finds this news perplexing. He smiles an apologetic, befuddled smile and busies himself with his pipe while I speak all of the Hindi I know. When I come to the end of my speech I begin again, this time in English. “I am from New York. My name is Sadia. My grandmother was Rahat.” And this time, I tell him other things.
“My grandmother spoke of this house. She used to wake up sometimes thinking that she was here, in the upstairs bedroom facing the ocean. She used to sit on the rocks facing the water. There, across the street.”
Mr. Shandilya begins gently thumping his cane on the floor, and the houseboy comes running. Tea is produced, and I am grateful for it. I know that he probably doesn’t understand me. But it feels important to speak of Nana here, in the one place that was ever really hers. We sit in a benevolent, awkward silence. Sweat trickles down my side.
Something she often said comes back to me. For each of us, there is a time in our lives that we return to again and again in our thoughts, a place we walk through silently. Mine is the spring before Nana died. When I sleep, I am locked in April and May of my grandmother’s last year, when I could still see Nana and talk to her. For Nana, it was the years she spent in Rahat Villa. For the rest of her life, when she woke up disoriented in the middle of the night, it was this house that she was stumbling back from.
Mr. Shandilya turns his cane between his thumb and forefinger, back and forth, back and forth. A bird begins its afternoon call.
“I wanted to see it with my own eyes,” I tell him.
He nods, gravely, as if it were all perfectly clear. He is either too polite or too deaf to respond. He refills his pipe. A young man arrives and exchanges a few words with Mr. Shandilya. He is Vitin, Mr. Shandilya’s grandson. I explain who I am, and he nods quickly. He offers to take me on a tour of the rest of the house. I want most of all to see the roof: Nana spoke so often of watching the water crash on the shore from the top of the house. Vitin leads me through the rooms upstairs, and while he does I ask him about his family and his studies. He responds to my questions shyly and quickly. He is a little younger than I am, and is studying computer science. He takes me up the stairs to the roof, and we walk across the wide, flat space, ringed with a parapet wall, looking down on the waves crashing below.
“Does your grandfather know who I am?” I ask.
There is a pause, and then he says, thoughtfully, “Actually, it’s a remarkable thing. I believe he thinks you are Rahat, the original owner of the house.”
“She was my grandmother,” I say, as I watch a washerwoman on the edge of the shore hold a piece of wet laundry high above her head and bring it down, like a cracking whip, against the black rocks, again and again. “Before she died, she asked me to come here. She wanted me to see her house. It’s just the way she described it.”
We stand, looking at the water and watching the cars zoom by on the road, far below. Nana always said Rahat Villa felt like a tall ship, and I understand what she meant for the first time.
“It was good of you to come,” Vitin says.
2
SHIPWRECKED ANCESTORS
CHESTNUT HILL, 1988
One Saturday, when I was thirteen years old, I found myself lurking at the door to my grandmother’s room. My mother was sitting at my grandmother’s feet, her head between my grandmother’s knees, and Nana was rubbing coconut oil into Mama’s scalp. They were speaking in Urdu, their private language, and I wished that I could understand what they were talking about.
In the shelves by the door, Nana kept her precious china and strange odds and ends from her journeys abroad: a teacup from Sweden that read “Farmor = Grandma,” a tiny egg in a ceramic nest, a miniature guard from Buckingham Palace. There was a radio on in the background, a woman singing a Hindi pop song. I wanted to enter the room, but I wasn’t sure I was welcome.
Nana’s giant, dark wood four-poster bed occupied the center of the room. The windows were hung with English-style chintz, large red roses that matched her rose-colored quilt. On the right side was a fireplace, the mantel lined with family photographs. There were pictures of Nana’s children: my mother and her brothers, growing up in Pakistan; my mother at fifteen, the day she left for America, proud, garlanded with strings of marigolds, her long black hair in a thick braid almost reaching her waist; my uncles in their twenties at each of their weddings. Then there were color photographs of my immediate family: my parents’ wedding at my father’s family home in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado; my younger brother, Cassim, and I as babies; then the two of us as toddlers; then us at thirteen and ten.
Nana never spoke to me the way she did with Mama. With me she spoke English, quietly and haltingly. With Mama she spoke quickly, in Urdu, and often seemed to be angry. That day, I guessed that they were talking about the property disputes surrounding Siddiqi House, our family home in Karachi, shared among my grandfather’s three widows and ten children. Nana’s sons, my mother’s four younger brothers, were scattered across Europe and the United States. Often we would not see them for long periods, and then they would arrive with presents, driving fancy cars and wearing nice clothing. My grandmother seemed happiest then, when her children were in one place. It’s not the custom for a woman to live with her daughter and son-in-law, and Nana often talked about wanting to move in with one of her sons. She spent part of every year traveling to see them, carting her large, carefully packed suitcases to their homes, places as far as Pakistan, England, and Sweden and as close as New Jersey. The rest of the year, she was with us, the eyes and ears of our household. Her room was at the top of the stairs, and from her four-poster bed she watched the comings and goings of our family.
I edged myself into the room. The pungent smell of coconut oil, a heady combination of candy and musk, filled the room. I knew better than to interrupt, and so I walked quietly to my grandmother’s bureau and rested my hands on the double handles. I said that I was looking for a safety pin and asked if I could open the bureau.
Mama and Nana were barely listening. Nana poured oil from a small, dark bottle onto Mama’s scalp and used her right hand to distribute it, pulling her fingers together and massaging. Mama had her eyes closed with pleasure, and she murmured to me that I could do what I wanted.
I sifted through the contents of Nana’s top drawer, looking for an excuse to listen to them talk. I felt I was intruding into a private space, the way I did when I entered Nana’s room and found her with her head covered, performing her afternoon prayers.
I found spools of thread and small wooden boxes with coins and scraps of paper tucked inside. I opened up a small box, padded with dark blue velvet. Inside was a small, round metal pin inscribed with an image of Florence Nightingale and a
motto that read:
You are required to be sober, honest, truthful, trustworthy, punctual, quiet, orderly, clean and neat.
On the pin was a shiny plate brushed clean for a name to fit, and in that space it read:
Awarded to: Rachel Jacobs
“Nana, who is Rachel Jacobs?” I asked, interrupting her.
“That was my name before I was married,” she said quietly.
A silence settled into the room, and in my memory of this moment the radio pop star saw fit to pause briefly in her song.
I was confused. I had always known Nana as Rahat, not Rachel. “But it sounds like an American name.”
My mother opened her eyes and turned around to look at her mother, smiling slightly, as if to see what she was going to say.
“That was my Jewish name, before I was married.”
“What do you mean, your Jewish name?” I knew that my grandmother was Muslim, because she had a Qur’an that she prayed with and she got very angry if she found my father with bacon in the house.
She poured oil into the palm of her right hand and paused for a moment, looking at the small pool. Then she began a story, one that I had never heard before.
“A very long time ago, your ancestors left Israel in a ship—a big, wide wooden ship—and they were shipwrecked, in India. They were Jews, but they settled in India. In the shipwreck they lost their Torahs, and they forgot their religion.”
“They didn’t remember who they were?”
“They remembered, but they remembered only one prayer, and they continued to believe in only one God, Allah, but they had a different name for him. They stayed in India and they lived there for generations, until it came time to return to Israel. When your mother was your age, my family went to Israel, except for my brother Nissim, who stayed behind in India.”
I nodded. I asked why, if her family went to Israel, she didn’t want to go, too.
Nana smiled, looking down. “I was already married, and I had already become a Muslim to marry your grandfather. I couldn’t go.”
Nana said this with some regret; I wondered why.
“So are you Muslim or are you Jewish?” I wanted Nana to pick a side, and I wanted her to pick us.
“Now I’m a Muslim, but God is the same in both religions.”
My mind reeled with new information. I stared at a picture on the mantel: Nana and her mother wearing shiny silk saris. I tried to imagine Nana going to Temple Emanuel in Newton, where I had attended my friends’ bar and bat mitzvahs, and it seemed impossible. I turned around with a new thought. My mother was silent; she seemed far away.
“This means you’re Jewish, too,” I told her. I had learned in social studies that you are Jewish if your mother is Jewish.
“According to Jewish law I am Jewish,” Mama said. “But when I was small I was taught the Arabic prayers. That’s what I know.”
“Can I choose?” I asked, trying to put together the fact that my mother was Muslim, my father was Christian, and my grandmother was Jewish. I had been to mosque and to church and to synagogue. Did I have a choice?
“Of course,” Mama said. “We can show you all about each one, and you can make the decision.”
“Are you sad to not be Jewish anymore?” I asked Nana.
She didn’t say anything, and after a few moments she said something to my mother in Urdu. It was clear that the window into her world had shut. Their adults-only conversation began again.
I put the pin back in the drawer and walked down the stairs and into the bright sun of our driveway, blinking. The name rattled around my head like the name of a new girl in school. Rachel Jacobs. I tried to imagine Nana as a girl like me, named Rachel, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t imagine her ever being anything but Nana.
THAT NIGHT, I had trouble falling asleep. I wandered into the hall that separated my bedroom from my younger brother’s room and lingered in the bedroom doorway, listening to the sound of my father’s voice telling a bedtime story, deep and low and even. My father always fell asleep before Cassim did, and his bedtime stories became a list of architecture-related words from his latest project—“hanging beam,” “bay window”—and strings of numbers: 18 by 24, 36, 42. Cassim tapped him lightly on the arm. “Abba, what happened next? What happened after that?”
My father jerked awake and continued. That night, my father was weaving another fantastical tale, making it up as he went—a long, rambling saga of King Ludwig and his green-eyed queen, Lucinda, and their son, Prince Humphrey. Cassim watched him eagerly, following the plotline closely, his eyes two large moons in the half-light.
“Prince Humphrey had decided to undertake a long and arduous journey to the kingdom of Princess Tristianna, to bring her sweets and delicacies, and to compete in the royal poetry festival. Hello, Sadu,” he said as he noticed me. “You want to come sit down?”
I nodded, and he moved over, making room on the bed.
“Prince Humphrey was hoping to impress the Princess Tristianna, so he scoured the countryside for rare treasures that she might enjoy and composed beautiful poems to perform in her honor at the festival. . . .”
“Did he want to marry the princess?”
“Yes, Casu, very much. But she was already engaged to an evil count, who hailed from the faraway kingdom of Monchubeestan and had quite a temper. . . .”
As he spoke, I saw Cassim’s eyelids fluttering, though he was trying very hard to stay awake to hear the rest of the story. Finally, he succumbed to sleep, and my father and I both heard his breathing deepen. We listened in silence to the soft, raggedy sound.
“Abba, Nana is Jewish,” I announced. I let this information permeate the room. I wasn’t sure what my father would say.
“That’s right,” he said, looking over at me. “That’s true.”
“What does that make me and Cassim?” I asked him.
“Well, it makes you whatever you want to be, really.”
“You’re Christian,” I said, needing to verify this.
“I am.”
“But you converted religions to marry Mama. I thought that made you Muslim.”
“That’s true, I did. My parents raised me in the Episcopalian Church. But when I married your mama, I learned about her religion. What I believe is that when I embraced Islam I didn’t give up my own religion, that it’s still part of me.”
“That’s why we celebrate Christmas.”
“That’s right, that’s why we celebrate Christmas. And we celebrate Ramadan and Eid for your mom.”
“But we don’t celebrate Hanukkah or Passover.”
“True, we don’t.”
“If Nana is Jewish, we should celebrate her holidays. Maybe she feels left out.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. That’s a good idea, sweetheart.”
In my own room, I quickly got dressed in my nightgown and got under the covers, thinking about Nana. I said her old name over and over. Rachel Jacobs. I felt as if a puppet string had just been lifted, and my head was rising up, up, connecting me to a web of people I never knew existed.
I could choose. Which one would I choose?
3
THE GIRL FROM FOREIGN
PUNE, SEPTEMBER 2001
The day after my trip to Rahat Villa, I board an express train to Pune. In Pune Station I find a surly man holding a placard that reads “SHEPARD, SADIA MISS, Film and TV Institute of India.” I guess my telegrams to the Institute have gone through after all. I am relieved and excited. I have been “met,” as my mother would say.
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 2