After a long pause, the answers begin to spill out, like confessions.
“I will go when I finish my studies,” one young man says confidently. “It is our homeland, and we should go.”
“There, all are Jews, together,” says another student. “You can find a job there where you are not required to work on Shabbat. It is more comfortable.”
For some, the move is only a matter of time. For others, the decision is more difficult.
“What about you, Sharon?” I ask. “Will you go to Israel?”
“I have spent some time in Israel,” he says. “I studied in the yeshiva for one year on a scholarship; that’s when I became a sofer. Now I can make the parchment scrolls inside the mezuzah, the prayer that we place on our doorposts. I have returned to work here as a Jewish educator, but I’m hoping to settle in Israel. My wife and I have a daughter, and we would like to send her to a Jewish school. We are hoping to emigrate soon, perhaps in the next couple of years.”
I ask the group, “Will you get married here or there?”
The girls titter, and I notice Judith, one of the young women, elbowing her best friend, Leah, who blushes deeply. Judith is a bright, pretty girl with wavy black hair, more socially confident than Leah, a tall, sturdy young woman with a quiet, unflappable nature. Leah wears her long brown hair pulled back in a perpetual ponytail, and salwar kameez suits in muted shades of brown and crimson. She strikes me as firm and directed when I speak to her one on one, but she is painfully shy in public. It is almost impossible to get her to speak her lines in the play so that an audience can hear them. Judith is her best friend from childhood, and they have an inseparable bond, so, to make them feel more comfortable, I have staged the play so that Leah and Judith are able to stand together for most of the time they are onstage.
The students tell me that many love marriages are occurring now, but some still favor the traditional arranged-marriage process, in which meetings between families are arranged by a community matchmaker or a family friend. They tell me that some will marry here and then go to Israel, but others will go to Israel for work and return home to Bombay to find spouses. Some will find a spouse among the Bene Israel community in Israel, which now numbers between sixty and eighty thousand people.
“Are any of you engaged?” I ask, and the students laugh.
“Leah! Leah!” they say, teasing her. “Speak up!”
The group tells me that Leah is engaged to Daniel, a Bene Israel man now settled in Israel. Leah and Daniel will be married next spring, and she will move to Israel immediately afterward.
“What does your fiancé do there?” I ask Leah.
“He’s working in a job,” she tells me, looking at her hands in her lap.
“What kind of job?”
“He’s working.”
I notice that most Bene Israel are not specific about what kinds of work their friends and relatives do in Israel. The important fact is that they are there. When I press them, I learn that many are working in stores, small businesses, and hotels.
“Is it different from what your relatives thought when they went there, or the same?”
The young people tell me about the initial racism that the Bene Israel faced in the 1960s, before the rabbinate decreed that the Bene Israel were “full Jews in every respect.” I learn that some of the first Bene Israel to go to Israel returned a few years later. It wasn’t what they expected. The work was too hard, the place too unfamiliar. But most have stayed, most are very happy.
“How do you get from here to there?” I ask. “How do you move from India to Israel and become an Israeli citizen?”
They tell me how community leaders help them to fill out the paperwork. There are a lot of forms to fill out, and then you have to raise money for the ticket, make sure that you are ready to go. When you arrive, you will be placed in an “absorption center,” where you take Hebrew classes. Then you start to look for a job.
I ask them if they worry about the violence in Israel, and no one responds immediately.
“Even here there are bomb blasts,” Samson says. “And in New York also. No one is safe anywhere. India is our motherland, but Israel is our fatherland.”
The students nod vigorously.
“Are there things that you will miss if you move there?” I ask.
“You’ll never get a social life like you get in India,” says Samson, shaking his head.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Everyone here is joking, laughing, yelling. There people are quiet. I went to visit my brother. He moved into a new apartment complex. ‘Who is your neighbor?’ I said. ‘He is a man, by himself, in his forties,’ he said. The next day, I went to knock on his door. ‘What are you doing?’ my brother said. I said, ‘I thought I would say hello to your neighbor, tell him that I am here for a month, maybe he would like to eat with us sometime.’ ‘No, no, no!’ my brother said, vehemently, shaking his head very fast. ‘We don’t do that here!’ ‘But why?’ I said. ‘He’s your neighbor. You mean you don’t know him?’ My brother said that’s not how things are done in Israel. I couldn’t believe it. How could you share a wall with someone and not know his face? Not eat with him? I found it very strange. Probably I would have to get used to that.”
ON MY WAY home, I watch the chaos of city traffic as dusk becomes night. Every year, I think, more young Bene Israel migrate to Israel and make their lives there. More of their families join them, and fewer and fewer remain in India. I cannot help wondering if the ones who leave are making the right choice. But, then, I think, I did not grow up with the idea of Israel as my homeland, not the way my students did.
As I enter my driveway, I pass the one-armed man on my right, who watches me silently. The man in the checked shirt who speaks to himself in multiple languages crosses me on my left and addresses me as if we are in mid-conversation.
“It’s only that the theorem doesn’t prove anything, that’s the trouble with it,” he says calmly, matter-of-factly. He speaks English as though he were living in London. “That’s the trouble with it.”
On the walls of my room I have tacked maps of the city, and when I come home at night I rest my camera equipment inside the door and mark with a pencil where I have walked. There are deep grooves of pencil around the places my grandmother loved best. I live just a few hundred meters from Cama Hospital—where Nana studied nursing and became head matron— and three doors away from Mani Bhavan, Gandhi’s house. Sometimes I think I see a glimpse of Nana just ahead of me in Bhaji Gali, a trick of the homesick mind. I can hear the sellers calling out their produce: “Tomatar, tomatar, tomatar . . . Alu, alu, alu . . .” It is a kind of song they have sung since childhood. I imagine Nana in the same alleyway, hearing these same sounds and keeping pace with their call.
“MADAM!” comes the call from Vivek, my vegetable man. He saves the “English” vegetables especially for me. I had never considered that broccoli could be exotic.
“Madam, you are looking tired,” Vivek says to me this evening.
I nod, agreeing with him. “I am tired. I miss my grandmother, Vivek.”
“She is in Eng-land?”
I nod, not wanting to get into specifics.
“She is also missing you. I know it,” he says, solemnly, handing me four small parcels of vegetables. He adds a dozen tiny limes for free and winks at me.
I go home and play the audiocassette of Nana’s voice I have brought with me. It is thirteen minutes long, a recording that I made as part of an interview assignment in graduate school. I am grateful for the likeness of her voice, the crackling immediacy of my faulty recording. There are so many questions I wish I had asked.
“Where was your mother from?” I hear my voice begin.
“She was from a village inside a fort.”
“And where was your father from?”
“He was from Bombay, but his ancestors were from another village, near to my mother’s village.”
“What were their names?”
“What did you call your husband? Before you were married, I mean?”
“I used to just call him Mr. Siddiqi. . . .”
“Mr. Siddiqi . . .”
I REPEAT MY great-grandfather’s and great-grandmother’s original surnames over and over again in my head, memorizing them. Bhorupkar, Chordekar. Their ancestors must have been originally from the villages of Bhorupali and Chorde. I look for the names, circle their tiny dots on my village map. One of my books has a black-and-white photograph of a woman sitting on an old oil press, operated by a large ox. The picture was taken in 1992, and I wonder if the press is still there. I try to find other pictures of the Konkan villages, curious to see what they look like, if any Bene Israel families remain.
13
HINDI LESSONS
BOMBAY, JANUARY 2002
I am convinced that what separates me from India is more than the differences of where I grew up, more than my skin color, my height, my foreigner’s taste for brightly colored salwar kameezes. (“These weird clothes,” Rekhev said to me once in Pune. “I have never seen such funny clothes as you wear.”) It’s all of these things, but it’s language, too. If I spoke Hindi, if I could turn my tongue around the particularities of accent and tone, if I knew, as the local saying goes, how to “ad-just,” then I could make myself understood and, more important, I could understand what was going on around me.
On my way home from Grant Road Station every day for a month, I pass a small sign:
MR. V. SHUKLA, B.A., M.A. ENGLISH
Hindi Tuitions
Guaranteed Excellence in Learning
Many Foreign Clients of All Nations
I decide that I should investigate.
Hindi, a mixture of several Indian languages, is spoken all over northern India and shares great similarities with Urdu, the language of South Asian Muslims and the one my mother grew up speaking in Karachi. I grew up hearing the sounds of Urdu—my mother’s lilting cadence and my grandmother’s more halting staccato—the patterns of the language have left an imprint. So far in Bombay I’ve gotten by with my limited Hindi vocabulary and with hand gestures, but I am acutely aware of the nuances I’m missing. It’s a kind of cocooning, to not comprehend the idle conversation that envelops me like bird-song. Marathi, the language of Maharashtra State, was Nana’s mother tongue; she learned Urdu only after her migration to Pakistan at the age of thirty. Like most Bene Israel, she spoke English at school, Hindi or Marathi in the streets of Bombay, and a mixture of Marathi and English at home. Now, like the rest of the Indian middle class, almost all Bene Israel speak English. The language of child rearing, of simple household transactions, is still Marathi. Those who are planning to immigrate to Israel take Hebrew classes at the local Jewish community center in Mahim. The sounds of Marathi scramble once they reach my ears; Hindi feels more accessible, and more necessary to learn.
One afternoon in January, I follow a series of small yellow signs from the alley to Mr. Shukla’s door, on the second floor of an old apartment building, a dirty gray concrete structure decorated with what would once have been colorful painted wooden arches and balconies.
Above the door hangs a lime, skewered with a thread. The thread binds together four small green chilies and a piece of charcoal. I’ve been told that the sourness of the lime, combined with the spice of the chilies, will ward off the evil eye, which will in turn be absorbed by the charcoal. On the door is a sign: “Mr. V. Shukla, B.A., M.A.” And another, smaller plaque below it, reads: “Educated Abroad.” For a moment, I entertain the notion of making a similar sign for my own door.
I knock three times on the door with a brass knocker, and, hearing no answer, begin to walk back down the staircase. As soon as I do so, the door opens and a sleepy-looking woman who appears to be in her mid-sixties emerges, wearing a housecoat.
“Bolo?” she says, asking me to speak.
I tell her that I am looking for Mr. Shukla.
“Hindi tuition?” she asks, hopefully, and I nod, agreeing. “Ek minute,” she says, and retreats inside the room for a moment. I hear her speaking to a man inside. Then she emerges, rips a man’s shirt from the clothesline, and goes back in the room. A minute or two later, I am let inside to a room of about seven feet by nine feet, where an older gentleman is sitting at a miniature desk reading the newspaper, wearing the shirt from the clothesline. He appears to be in his mid-seventies, with thick spectacles and a small patch of white hair standing at attention toward the ceiling. The woman, who I now deduce is the man’s wife, arranges herself on a mattress on my left, which is elevated on cabinets above the floor to make a couch in the daytime and, presumably, a bed at night. She places her dupatta over her head, and her hand over her face, to return to sleep. In one corner of the room is a hot plate, above a half-sized fridge and a freestanding plastic water tank. The right-hand wall of the room is covered entirely in books and manuals, stacked precariously on top of one another. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare mingles amiably with Chicken Soup for the Soul.
The man gestures toward a plastic chair opposite his desk and invites me to sit down.
“I hope I am not disturbing you?” I ask tentatively.
“Not at all. I am V. Shukla, Hindi tutor,” he announces, somewhat grandly. “I am tutor to many foreign clients at all the embassies, I give workshops, I am holding lectures, I teach Hindi to be spoken within one month. And you are?”
I explain to Mr. Shukla that I am a student from America and am in India for one year.
“Hindi is an excellent language,” Mr. Shukla offers. “Not difficult at all. Shall we begin? Please take out one sheet blank paper and one Pencil Number Two. Only Pencil Number Two is suitable for Hindi tuition.”
I explain to Mr. Shukla that I did not come prepared to start learning today and do not have paper and pencil with me. He looks at me over his glasses, with his chin tipped down.
“Proper materials are necessary for Hindi language study,” he says, shaking his head. “Never mind, I will provide. Jyoti!” he says, rousing his wife. “Paper and Pencil Number Two!” Jyoti scowls at her husband, rouses herself, and fetches his requests from a cabinet underneath the bed.
“First we place paper in front of us, like so.” Mr. Shukla places one sheet of paper in front of himself, and the other in front of me. “Then we write ‘Om’ at the top of the page, like so.”
Mr. Shukla writes “OM” in shaky capital letters at the top of his paper, and then at the top of mine.
“Then we pray to goddess Saraswati, Hindu goddess of learning. Shut your eyes.”
I close my eyes, peeking occasionally to watch Mr. Shukla placing his hands together and reciting a short prayer.
“Then we begin,” says Mr. Shukla. “At top of page we write ‘Namaste.’ This is an Indian form of greeting, with respect.” Mr. Shukla writes “Namaste” at the top of his page, then mine.
“Then we write, ‘What is your name?’ ‘Aapka nam kya hai?’ Then we write, ‘How do you do?’ ‘Aap kaise haim?’ Please note: kaise for males, kaisi for females. This is gender.”
“Mr. Shukla, can you explain about how gender works in Hindi, and how the sentence is structured? For example, I have noticed that in Hindi the verb of the sentence often appears at the end, instead of . . .”
“That is an advanced lesson. We are conducting an introductory lesson.”
“Oh, sorry—”
“Then we write, ‘Aapko yahaan kaisa lag raha hai?’ ‘Do you like it here?’ ‘Aap kis desh se hain?’ ‘Which country you are from?’”
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 16