“Green beans are on sale at Star Market,” Nana said, apropos of nothing at all. “I have a coupon from the newspaper.”
My mother and brother and I all laughed at the incongruity of her comment. Nana’s hearing was getting weaker with age, and she seemed increasinglyto hover near our conversations, without always connecting. My father looked pointedly, kindly in her direction, as if they were sharing a secret.
“I’ll take you tomorrow, Nana. We’ll go first thing in the morning,” he said.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she replied, at peace. “I don’t want to miss it.”
TO UNDERSTAND NANA I had only to stand beside her while she cooked. She didn’t particularly want my help; she always preferred that I do my schoolwork. “Do your studies, don’t bother here,” she would say, as I picked up a spoon and tried to stir one of her pots after school. Sometimes I watched as she expertly sliced ten onions in quick succession; deboned a chicken; turned white cauliflower yellow; sifted through rice, removing tiny rocks and imperfections. She kept her spices in a round metal tin with tiny compartments; each one was a fragrant parcel of seeds. She ground these seeds with her mother’s mortar and pestle, the mortar marble and white and rounded from years of work. When she was finished, I would marvel at this object, holding it in my hand. Its surface was hard and smooth, like an unbreakable egg. From among all the things she left behind in India, she chose to bring this with her. I tried to imagine its other homes, its other lives. “It was Mumma’s,” she said by way of explanation, the name she called her mother, Segulla-bai. As she browned the onions, I stood in the path of the sloping white column of steam, inhaling the smell of the onions binding with the spices. “Don’t stand there, beti! Mind your hair!” It was the kind of smell that clung to you long after you left a place, reminding you where you had come from.
She made puran poli, sandans, mutton curry with tamarind, and fish curry with coconut milk. These dishes I used to think of as food from Pakistan. Years later, I would realize that my grandmother was feeding us traditional Bene Israel recipes from the Konkan Coast. They were handed down to her by her mother, and her mother before her. In those recipes there was sweetness, grated coconut to temper the chili; and there was tartness, fresh tamarind, which she soaked and pulverized, for balance. Coconut milk replacedcow’s milk in Nana’s curries, the legacy of keeping kosher. She learned, in the years of her marriage, to make popular Muslim dishes like biryani, but the dishes I most closely associate with my grandmother are her preparations of fish—fried in chickpea flour with red chili; served in a light-green broth over rice; thick slices of pomfret stewed with tomatoes. Nana was a transplant from a series of seashores—from Bombay to Karachi to Boston. She was a coastal creature.
Cooking required hours of standing, and at the end of most days, Nana’s back ached. She barely admitted to the pain. She knew from experience that when she did so we wouldn’t let her cook the next day. Sometimes after dinner I went to her room and rubbed her back for her. She didn’t like to accept my help. She worried that this was time I was not spending on my home-work. I usually found her reading Family Circle and Reader’s Digest, trolling for cookie recipes and storing up ideas. Lately, however, I found her reading about Judaism. She had recently joined Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization, and I noticed how eagerly she devoured its monthly journal within an hour of its arrival.
“What are you doing, Nana?” I asked, sitting on the edge of her bed.
“I am learning about the Jews,” she would reply, simply, looking at me.
I looked at the book cover and wondered what was inside. “How did your people come to India, Nana?”
“I’ve told you, beti.”
“Tell me again.”
Her ancestors were a puzzle to her that she was trying to solve. She moved forward and backward in her search, in pieces and paragraphs, a little more each year of her life, inching toward its end. Her sons didn’t understand why she wanted to learn about her Jewish ancestry; they told her to leave it be. “What’s past is past,” they would say. I suppose it was awkward for them, to present themselves as Muslim Pakistanis in the U.S. and then have to explain the mystery of how their mother came to be Jewish. My mother was more supportive. We lived in Chestnut Hill, a neighborhood of Newton, which, like the rest of the western suburbs of Boston, had a large Jewish population. Our doctor was Jewish, and we had a smattering of supportive friends who were curious and interested in Nana’s background. “There are Jews in India?” they would ask, their eyes growing wide. “Really?”
I asked Nana to lie on her stomach while I coated my hands with homeopathic oil. She raised her handmade nightdress above her shoulders, and tucked her small arms beside her. I had the distinct feeling as I touched Nana’s skin that I was not existing in present time, that I was storing up memories for the long winter of my adulthood, one she might not be present for. I knew that later I would play this memory back for myself, like a well-worn tape.
Afterward, I would wash my hands and dry them off with a tea towel near her bookshelves, looking at the titles. On one wall of her room, hidden from first glance, she had created a kind of personal reference library, four rows of books that covered her areas of interest. Here she kept her collection of cooking magazines—organized by date and neatly arranged in sequence—an entire shelf of books about knitting, a shelf of her nursing-school manuals from the 1930s, a Marathi-English dictionary, and, on the highest shelf, a Qur’an, a Torah, selections from the Talmud, 101 Christmas Cookie Recipes, a picture book of Israel, and three books about the Bene Israel community. “Don’t worry, finish your schoolwork,” she would say as I picked up one of the books about the Bene Israel. Nana reminded me of a story I read about Venus flytraps when I was a child: if you asked the wrong question, she would close and would not reopen, no matter how much cajoling you did.
Every time she gave me the opportunity, I tried to piece together the different chapters of her adulthood, from her marriage to my grandfather, to nursing school, to her life in Bombay, and to her migration to Pakistan after the Partition of India. I knew the barest sketches of her life story, but none of the details. She hid these stories from view, like her books, to protect them.
“Were you in love with my grandfather, Nana?” I asked one evening.
This kind of question embarrassed her, and she waved it off with a small sweep of her hand.
“Never mind about me, beti,” she said, picking up her knitting. “When you find someone someday, you must make sure he loves you above all else. More than you love him, even. He must be someone who looks after you, who gives you comfort when you are sad. You’ll only know this if you know different people before you make your decision.”
I assumed she was making reference to her own marriage. My mother had told me that Nana married my grandfather when she was very young, a fact that embarrassed her now.
“How old were you when you got married, Nana?”
“Too young,” she said. She would never give me an exact date or age. “I didn’t know any better.”
“What did you wear?” I asked her, trying to picture her as a bride.
“Wear?” she said, squinting slightly. “I don’t remember.”
I found her response odd. What woman doesn’t remember what she wore on her wedding day?
“Was it a big wedding?”
“No, no,” she said hurriedly. “Nothing like that. It was just myself and my husband, two witnesses. We signed a paper. It was very quick.”
“How old were you when you had Mama?”
“Oh, that came much later. I was twenty-six.”
“Twenty-six . . .” I said. “So you were married for several years before you had a baby. . . .”
She nodded, unwinding a ball of yarn.
“Why did you wait so long?” I asked.
“It was a secret,” she said softly. “I kept my marriage a secret for ten years.”
WHENEVER MY GRANDMOTHER discussed her marriage, t
he secret she kept, the sharpness of her guilt was evident. Her father died without ever knowing the truth about her relationship with my grandfather. Her mother found out about her marriage only when Nana became pregnant with my mother. Though a Jewish or Christian woman who marries a Muslim man is not required to convert, Nana lived as a practicing Muslim for most of her adult life. When she prayed, she prayed in Arabic, as she was taught in the years of her marriage. But now, toward the end of her life, she felt different, conflicted. Now she worried endlessly about the decision she had made to marry outside of her faith, about whether her life as a Muslim meant that she could not die as a Jew. Her husband had always promised her a Jewish funeral.
“Do you consider yourself Jewish or Muslim, Nana?” I asked her, and she waited a few moments before answering.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “One is the religion of my forefathers, and the other is the religion of my children.”
“All paths lead to God, Nana,” I told her, and kissed her good night, reminding her, wanting her to feel comforted.
“All paths lead to God,” she repeated.
THE STORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER’S MARRIAGE, as I finally understand it, starts in 1934. Nana is a seventeen-year-old girl. She has fallen in love with my grandfather, Ali, and married him in secret. He is ten years older than she is, a friend and business partner of her father’s. She knows that there will be a scandal in the Bene Israel community when her mother and brothers find out, and she hates to think of it.
She convinces her husband to let her study at Cama Hospital, in Bombay. She moves from her mother’s home into the ladies’ hostel of the nursing school and works in the hospital for extra money. She sends money to her mother and brothers every two weeks and goes to see them on Sundays, happy, chaotic days when she slips back into her old role, Lakshmi, the lucky one. She sees her husband twice a year, when he visits Bombay on business from Gujarat. Each day, her husband’s servant brings her meals to her in a metal tiffin-carrier. Other than this daily reminder, it is possible to pretend otherwise, even to forget that she is married.
At Cama Hospital there is a Sikh doctor in her ward, Dr. Singh. He is a quiet man and keeps to himself, but he always looks out for Rachel, making sure that she has enough supplies, asking her if she needs any water, or if she needs to sit down after she has seen something unpleasant. He is a good
doctor, much admired by his patients. Rachel looks forward to assisting him in his rounds.
One day, an English doctor comes to Cama Hospital to give a lecture on rare tropical diseases. Dr. Singh asks Nana if she would like to attend the lecture, and she says yes. The English doctor shows slides, and Nana is fascinated. Afterward, Dr. Singh and Rachel go to the hospital cafeteria and drink tea. They discuss the lecture, and Rachel asks the doctor questions about things she does not understand.
“You ask very good questions, Rachel!” he says, smiling. “You should have been a doctor yourself !”
This delights Rachel; it makes her feel shy. She says softly that as a girl she had hoped to become a doctor.
“And why didn’t you?” he asks.
She can’t tell him the truth—that she is married, that her husband decided for her.
She looks at her lap and lets silence be her answer.
The next time there is a lecture, Dr. Singh invites her to attend, and she goes. After the lecture they linger in the courtyard between the hospital and the hostel.
“How about dinner?” he suggests casually.
She considers it for a moment. Certainly many people in the restaurant would assume that she was the Sikh doctor’s wife. She is lonely in the hostel; she misses her brothers and sister. It would be nice to have a conversation. But her husband’s servant will report back to his master if she doesn’t eat her evening meal. Perhaps it isn’t the correct thing to do.
“I can’t,” Nana stammers. “You see, my dinner is sent.”
Dr. Singh looks disappointed.
“I see,” he says, and nods to her. “Good night, then.”
He leaves with a small wave.
Nana is too shy to speak to him unprovoked after that. She continues to assist him on his rounds, but they never speak of personal things again. They work side by side in silence for another six months, until she is transferred to another ward and promoted to head matron. A year later, she hears that he has married a Sikh girl.
One evening, Nana is turning a corner when she sees his wife, leaning out of a car in the turnabout of the hospital. The young woman is dressed like a new bride, wearing a red silk sari, with red sindoor in the part of her hair. She calls Dr. Singh’s name as he leaves the building. “Gurudev!” she cries out, brightly. Nana watches him smile in response, that same smile she saw once in the cafeteria. She hadn’t known his first name before she heard his wife speak it. “Gurudev,” she repeats, testing out the syllables with her tongue.
Nana stands there for a moment and thinks about the Sikh doctor’s wife.
Mrs. Singh. A proper married girl. Married for all the world to see.
“WERE YOU IN LOVE with the Sikh doctor?” I asked, feeling bold.
“No, of course not,” she said. “I was in love with my husband.”
I picked up an embroidered pillow from her bed and ran my fingers across her careful cross-stitching. Nana had taught me the cross-stitch a few years before. It was the only stitch I knew.
“It’s just that I married so young,” she said. “Love like that, it causes a tamasha. Too much fuss.”
I nodded, pretending I understood what she meant.
BENE ISRAEL BOYS, her brother’s friends, sometimes ask after Rachel. She always refuses to speak of marriage. She tells everyone she wants to finish her studies. She is the only one who knows the truth. It feels as if the knowledge is burning a hole in her stomach.
Then, one morning, she realizes that she has an option, a solution: she can vanish.
In front of Cama Hospital, two English nurses from the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps set up a table. Before them is a tall stack of papers. Applications. Nana looks out the corner of her eye at their colorful signs: “Join the War Effort” and “Be a Hero!” Nana has been hearing for weeks on the radio about the need for trained nurses abroad, how many wounded soldiers there are, and that there is never enough care. She has a brother named Jacques who is in the army, stationed in Burma. Her brother George serves in Bombay. She thinks to herself how either one of her brothers could be on the front lines at any moment.
On the fourth morning she passes the table, she lingers, listening to one of the nurses explain the application to a potential recruit. “There are two kinds of duty, active duty and nonactive duty. In nonactive duty you are stationed at a hospital; in active duty you are working in camps at the front. . . .”
“What if I were to join?” Rachel wonders. She imagines how angry her husband, Ali, would be if he knew she was contemplating it, and just the thought makes her shudder. She asks for an application and quickly stuffs it inside her handbag. She heads to her ward and resolves to think about it later.
That night she takes out the application and looks at it carefully.
“I could forget that I was ever married,” she thinks. “I would never be a burden to anyone again.”
She pauses for a moment and wonders if she should choose active duty or nonactive duty, and selects active duty. “If I die,” she thinks to herself, “I will have died for a good cause.”
She takes out a pen and begins to fill in her name and address. She writes the information quickly, printing her name in black ink. She will complete the application tonight and write two letters, she decides, one to her husband and one to her family. In the letters she will explain that she has joined the army. Her family will be proud of her. And her husband? She will tell her husband’s servant that she is going out of station for a wedding and won’t be back for two weeks. Her husband won’t find out until she is already gone. It will be too late for him to do anything
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The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 7