And the line goes dead, abruptly. I sit, unsure of what to do next.
Reflexively, I think of calling my old boyfriend Tony, tracing the familiar numbers on the keypad, calculating what time it must be in San Francisco. I think of him waking up in his attic apartment, the corner desk covered with his dissertation, sheets of mathematical equations. It must be early on a Sunday morning, about the time we would be planning our afternoon. I think of the day we might have spent stretching out before us, those endless possibilities of sun and hills. But now we are separated by more than living on separate coasts. I left him and all of that when I decided to come to India, something that I felt I had to do alone.
There’s a knocking on the window, insistent and getting louder. At first I don’t notice, staring through the glass into the traffic. The door opens and a young man peers inside.
“Are you finished?”
I gather my change and my handbag.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say, emerging from the booth. “What do I owe you?”
“Perhaps you should ask the phone attendant.”
I realize that he is one of the students that I watched cross the street earliertoday, the one who told me that I wouldn’t drown. I notice now that he has a shock of black hair that hangs into his eyes. He is wearing a blue woolen vest over a blue-and-white-checked oxford shirt and is carrying a small canvas army satchel. On one of the fingers of his left hand is an unusual ring, a ruby and emerald sitting next to each other, mismatched twins set in yellow 22-karat gold. He has a studious air, and there’s something comfortable and musty about him, as if he just stepped out of a library. That’s what it is; he smells like books.
He gestures in the direction of the desk next to the phone booth, where a young girl is sitting with a tally book of the day’s calls and the numbers dialed.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I mutter, counting my change. “I’m Sadia,” I say, extending my hand, trying to make amends. “I’m here on a fellowship, but no one knows who I am, and the director is out of town, and I don’t know what to do.”
“I know who you are,” he says matter-of-factly, shaking my hand quickly. “You’re the American filmmaker. From New York.”
He ducks into the booth to make his call, and I am left standing there, perplexed. I watch the telephone girl entering in her book the number I called.
He shouts something into the phone, in a rapid Hindi that I don’t understand. When he leaves the booth he looks at me quickly, surprised I’m still there.
“How did you know I was from New York?”
“Rumor,” he says, and walks past me.
I feel strangely emboldened by how alone I am. “Do you know where I can find something to eat?” I ask after him.
He looks back at me over one shoulder and nods. “I’ll take you to my favorite place.”
He walks down the main road ahead of me and then down a small lane. It’s difficult to keep up with him, and I’m worried that I might lose him. It occurs to me after we’ve been walking for twenty minutes that I don’t know his name to call out to him.
He ducks underneath a low overpass, a dark, dank space with women crouched on each side, sitting on crossed legs, sewing small, fragrant white jasmine flowers into long strands, which their female customers will wind into their chignons. On the other side of the overpass we enter a narrow alleyway, lined with tiny shops that sell hundreds and hundreds of bright-colored glass bangles and plastic jewelry. Children dart beside me on either side, threading their way through the steady flow of people haggling over prices. I overhear an exasperated shopkeeper scold a customer: “This is a fixed-price shop!” The young man I’m following turns to me halfway through the alleyway and gives me a pointed look tinged with frustration.
“I wish you spoke Hindi.”
And I reply, “Me too.”
After several more minutes, we arrive at a place called Lucky, a small basement-level canteen with fluorescent-tube lights.
“All the great Indian filmmakers spent time in this café,” the young man says, introducing me to the dingy room with a small sweep of his hand.
This place holds some kind of magic for him, and I look around, trying to see it.
“Is that what you study? Filmmaking?”
He nods, noncommittal. “Direction. Among other things. What kind of films do you make?”
“Documentaries.”
I have forgotten how much more comfortable people are here with silence than I am. I ring a table bell for the waiter, who emerges from the kitchen awaiting direction, looking as though I have woken him up from a nap, his dishcloth stained a dark gray and hanging limply on his arm.
“Cold drink?” he asks.
I ask for some biscuits and a Coke. The student orders one for himself, and then stops the waiter as he leaves our table.
“No, you should have Thums Up. Indian cola. Two.”
The waiter nods, shuffles into the back of the canteen, and emerges carrying a plastic tray with a packet of cookies and two cold Thums Up bottles, wrapped in wet napkins and bearing long straws.
“What’s your name?” I ask, once we have our sodas.
“Rekhev. What are you doing in India, exactly?”
“I am studying a community called the Bene Israel, or Children of Israel, which my maternal grandmother was descended from.”
Rekhev nods, sipping his Thums Up.
“You want to make a film about them?”
“I want to make a series of pictures, then perhaps a film, once I know them and understand what their story is.”
“Do you like it?” he asks, gesturing to the soda.
“It’s more interesting than Coke,” I say.
“Many of these Muslim café owners are starting a ban on American products, so they don’t like to sell Coke. But the funny thing is that Coke owns Thums Up, and no one knows it. India is very funny that way. What do you think of the attack on your country?”
“The world feels like a different place now. I wonder if I should stay here or go home.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No.”
“Then stay.” Rekhev looks me in the eyes for the first time. He lights a cigarette. “You should form an opinion about the American response to the attacks. People will ask you.”
“I never said that I didn’t have an opinion,” I say, feeling defensive.
We sit in silence for a few moments. “May I have one?” I ask, pointing to his cigarette. I don’t smoke. The Indian cigarette makes me cough, and Rekhev smiles.
“What do you make films about?” I ask.
“Actually, I’m writing a novel, set along the border with Pakistan, the area where I grew up. How much do you know about Indian mythology?”
“Not much.”
“That’s too bad. You won’t understand my book. There are a few essential texts you should read while you’re here, just to begin to contextualize what you are seeing. Don’t bother with anything contemporary; just get yourself a decent translation of The Ramayana.”
“What do you mean?”
“Westerners make this mistake—they think that India can be ‘understood, ’ that with diligent study it’s somehow going to make sense. But they never go back to these early texts to see the foundation of what they are looking at. There’s a story that I heard in Jammu, that two scientists—one from Austria and one from Japan—are collecting samples of dirt alongside a road, and two villagers pass by. One villager says to the other: ‘How sad, they have no jobs in their own country so they have to come here and collect our dirt?’ ”
I smile at this thought. I am a dirt collector.
“I’m not used to speaking so much English,” he says, pulling out another cigarette.
“You speak it well.”
“Only because I read it all day. But I don’t usually speak so much of it at once. Perhaps you’ll be good for me in this way.”
He lights his cigarette and we fall into silence. I don’t fully recogn
ize it yet, but Rekhev has volunteered, in his terse way, to keep an eye on me. The next day, I pass a used-book stall and buy a copy of The Ramayana.
4
LUCKY CHILD
CASTLE ROCK, 1917
Rachel Jacobs. Once I had discovered it, the name opened up new doors, new curiosities in my mind. I began to pester Nana for details. What did it mean to be Jewish, growing up in India? How did her ancestors practice their religion without a Torah? When Nana was in the mood to tell me about her childhood, she always began with the same story: the tale of her first prophetic dream. She told it quietly and urgently, to reaffirm for herself that it had happened, to warn me to be careful. The first time I heard it, the story kept me up all night. Usually, Nana’s stories were a series of simple facts; she told them sparingly, as though words cost money. But the stories of her dreams were haunting—filled with evocative, metaphorical images, images whose meanings weren’t always clear.
“Don’t worry,” she liked to tell me. “I will always send you messages, even after I’m gone. While you are sleeping, we will visit.”
RACHEL’S EARLY CHILDHOOD was spent in a rural mining outpost called Castle Rock, a two-day journey from Bombay. Her father, Ralph, ran a manganese-ore mine. Before she was born, Ralph and Segulla-bai, Rachel’s mother, had lived for years in temporary housing, moving between Bombay, its outskirts, and various mining sites throughout the region. One season they found a two-story stone bungalow, a four-kilometer walk from the train station in Castle Rock. The house was set back from the road, with a small duck pond in the front and a river on its left, framed by a footbridge. Ralph inquired after the house and was told that it was vacant; in fact, it had been empty for several months. There was a rumor in the village that it was haunted, and no one in the community wanted to rent it. Ralph and Segulla-bai decided that they would stay there and moved their possessions in—a stream of trunks, two tables, and one double bed.
In the course of six years, Segulla-bai gave birth to six children. When two of her children died in infancy, some Bene Israel women in other towns whispered that Segulla-bai was unlucky, that she should not be so pious, and should pray to the local Hindu deities as they did, to ward off the threat of smallpox, to be safe.
“After all, our God is so far away, na? We should be protected here also,” the women whispered behind their fans.
But Ralph would not hear of it, and took Segulla-bai and his children the three-day journey to his family synagogue for the Jewish High Holidays. There were four children: a strong, dark-haired girl named Lizzie and three boys, Eliezer, George, and Benjamin, who had the light coloring and lithe frame of their father, Ralph.
On Saturdays the Jacobses observed the Sabbath at home, resting and eating foods Segulla-bai had prepared the day before. Their Hindu neighbors asked why the Jacobses rested all day on Saturday, and they explained that this was their tradition, passed down from generation to generation, to honor their God. The neighbors nodded and agreed to take care of their livestock on that day. As a sign of respect for their friends, the Jacobses abstained from eating beef. Once a week, a Hebrew tutor visited the house to teach the boys how to read Torah, and when they mastered the basic lessons, he brought them a small ram’s horn, to practice blowing the shofar. The children were inseparable. As they moved from town to town, they formed an invincible circle, a tiny army. They were self-sufficient and strong, and took care of their mother, whose constant pregnancies left her weak.
When Segulla-bai was pregnant with Rachel, she visited her family synagogue so that she could perform the traditional malida offering, asking the Prophet Elijah to keep this baby safe. She prepared a deep thali dish with mashed rice and coconut. Up the path from the bazaar came the women of the community, their satchels filled with fruit from the market. They sat in the shady grove of the synagogue courtyard, set out a sheet, and begin to work in a neat assembly line, dipping dates, bananas, figs, oranges, and chiku fruit in bowls of water, peeling skins, and grating coconut as they talked. It was said that a wish made in the synagogue would come true, and when a person made that wish he or she should make an offering to the Prophet Elijah, beloved Eliyahoo Hanabee.
Segulla-bai’s husband, Ralph, said prayers over their offering, and asked that his business might prosper, so that he could provide for his growing family. They rested easier that night, encouraged that they had performed all of the possible precautions and blessings to prepare for their child’s arrival.
Rachel’s birth was an easy one. The labor pains began in the morning, and by the time the midwife arrived at the house, Segulla-bai was ready to begin. That day, while Segulla-bai pushed Rachel into the world, Ralph received word that his company had been given a new large government contract, and that his business would triple in size in the next year. It meant almost certain wealth.
That evening, Ralph returned from the mine to find his wife and mother-in-law and children gathered in the bedroom around the new child, a beautiful baby girl.
“This child is lucky,” he proclaimed.
He smiled, looking at Segulla-bai, exhausted but happy, resting on her pallet. She looked weakly up at him while he told her about the contract.
“Haan, I knew something was different today.”
From then on, Rachel was considered a lucky child, and her father gave special instructions that she was to be given the utmost care. They called her their Lakshmi, after the Hindu goddess of wealth. He brought miniature gold bangles from Bombay for her to wear, tiny gold rings for her ears. Her grandmother Sara bathed her in rose water, and massaged her tiny limbs with almond oil. At night, she slept in her grandmother’s double bed, and her grandmother stroked her back long into the night with her right hand, while she fanned her small, fragrant body with her left hand. This greatly annoyed Rachel’s elder sister, Lizzie, who ran the house as second-in-command to her mother and had never received such lavish attentions. Rachel had clothes made of silk and was not allowed to get dirty. As she grew, she watched her brothers and sister in the yard below her balcony playing games at twilight and wished that she could play, too, to no avail. Her grandmother explained to her that when she grew up she was going to marry a rich man and live in a fine house, and provide for her siblings. With beauty and luck such as she had, she could not afford to darken in the sun.
“Nanijan, tell me a story,” asked Rachel. Then her grandmother would begin the story of their ancestors, how seven couples survived the great journey from Israel, and how they made their houses with their hands, and learned how to crush local seeds to make lamp oil.
In this way, Rachel and her grandmother passed their afternoons, the afternoons of nine years.
ONE NIGHT, her grandmother was missing. Rachel woke up Lizzie, curled around Benjamin, sleeping peacefully in the crook of her arm.
“Where’s Nanijan?” she cried.
“She’s gone,” replied Lizzie sleepily.
“Gone to where?” cried Rachel in a panic.
“She died. Sleep now, we’ll talk in the morning.”
Rachel couldn’t sleep. She missed her grandmother’s hand on her back, the coolness of her fan. The loss was too sudden, too hard to understand. Rachel lay in bed that night, listening to the sounds of the crickets, the sounds of breathing, her entire nine-year-old world packed into this two-tiered house, with her grandmother, its center, suddenly gone.
It was during these nights without her grandmother that Rachel began to dream. The first dream she had was terrifying; in it, she saw three heads in a row in the sand. The three heads belonged to her brothers, two of whom had died before she was born—David and Menahim—and the third was her brother Eliezer. Eliezer’s head was in the middle, and bright orange flames lapped his face, surrounded it. Rachel awoke early that morning to her mother’s cry, like that of a wild animal being shot. She ran into her brother’s bedroom and saw her mother cradling Eliezer’s body, rocking back and forth. He had died in his sleep. The doctor was sent for, and even he could not
explain why God had taken Eliezer. He was fourteen.
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 4