Outside, the service completed, Shoshanna puts an arm around me and tells me that she’s proud of me. She opens up a small paper packet from her purse and takes out two dry moon-shaped pastries with crimped edges.
“This is saath padar, traditional Bene Israel lady sweet. For breaking fast,” she says, handing one to me. “Like your grandmother used to make from the recipes. Eat.”
I take a bite out of the pastry, and it crumbles in my mouth; inside, I taste the sweet filling of coconut, raisins, and crushed nuts. I recognize it instantly. It’s the same sweet Nana used to feed us during Ramadan.
I CALL REKHEV to tell him that I’m back, and he comes to visit the next afternoon, holding in his hand a curious-looking instrument peeking out of a plastic bag. My sojourn in the States has made me forget that we never touch. When I see him, I throw my arms around him impulsively, crushing my cheek against the starch of his shirt, startling him. The instrument is a kind of horn made out of a gourd and wrapped in string, which he explains was made for him by the indigenous Warli people of Maharashtra. In the weeks I’ve been in Massachusetts, Rekhev has been making his first documentary, a film about the Warlis, and has been living in one of their villages, several hours from Pune. He is filled with tales of late nights of singing, campfires, and the stories that the village elders have told him. I listen to his adventures in wonderment. Though he says that he resists making friends, he draws out people’s life stories easily, as my mother does. It’s one of the contradictions about him that I find most interesting.
“I thought about your work while I was there,” he tells me. “I’ve been reading this essay by A. K. Ramanujan which asks if there is an Indian way of thinking. He argues that we may think of space and time as universal contexts, but that in India they have properties, varying specific destinies. The soil in a village produces the crops, which are eaten by the people—and those crops, the soil, the vegetation around them, affect their characters. Houses here have mood, they change the luck and experience of those who inhabit them. My interest is always in the story, in the myths that I grew up with, in translating those into images. But I thought about how you research and frame your photographs, about how you allow people to pose for you, to suggest what you should photograph. I adopted this strategy with the Warlis, and the results were very interesting. I don’t know if I would have been interested in making a film like this if I hadn’t met you.”
He pauses for a moment. He hands the horn to me, telling me that he’d like me to have it, and I think that it might be one of the most wonderful things that anyone has ever given me.
WE GO ACROSS THE STREET to the tea shop, and then for a long walk down the leafy lanes behind my house, peeking into a Hare Krishna temple. We visit Mani Bhavan, the Gandhi museum, where I stand on the balcony and imagine Gandhi writing. It has been a long time since I have spent a full day in Bombay without working on my project, and it feels like a vacation, an unexpected chance just to observe the city. We continue down Laburnum Road to the park, where Rekhev tells me the Quit India movement held many meetings. There I’m thrilled to discover a wonderful old play-ground slide shaped like an elephant, where children clamber up a ladder on one side and swish down the other. We resolve to return another day with my 16mm movie camera. I feel comfortable with Rekhev, and grateful for his company. I’m surprised at how much more at ease I am with him now than with any of my friends in New York. The thought makes me feel very far away and right at home at the same time.
“Tell me,” he says, after we’ve walked in silence for three-quarters of an hour. “You didn’t have to come back. What is it that you have returned to do here exactly?”
“Well . . .” I begin, “so far I have photographed each of the synagogues of the Konkan Coast and Bombay. I’ve gotten to know the Bene Israel a little bit, through teaching and through interviewing people and taking pictures.”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t know what the story of the community is yet, what the story is that I came here to tell.”
“Ah,” he says. “You want my help.”
“Yes,” I say, “if you have time.”
“I have time.”
“The Jewish festivals of Sukkot and Simchat Torah are in a few days,” I say tentatively, as we round the corner and walk back to my house, and as soon as I say it I realize how much I hope that Rekhev will accompany me. Truthfully, it would be difficult for me to go to Revdanda alone. But there is another reason I hope Rekhev will come. I feel as if I have embarked on the journey that he sketched out for me in the library, and I want to experience part of it with him. I try to keep my tone light, so as not to betray how badly I want him to join me. “It’s the harvest festival that David told you about, where the community finishes the annual cycle of Torah readings and begins again.”
“In Revdanda?”
I nod. I’m prepared to start convincing him, but it doesn’t prove necessary.
“Let’s go,” he says. “I’ll come for you tomorrow.”
REKHEV AND I retrace our steps from Bombay to Revdanda: a boat to the port of Mandwa, a bus to Alibag, a six-seater rickshaw to Revdanda. We each have a shoulder bag with a few changes of clothes, and we take turns carrying the video camera, tripod, still camera, and case of sound-recording equipment. I feel self-consciously tall. I’m aware of people looking at us, at our city clothes and behavior, at a foreign girl and a young Indian man traveling together. I watch as the omnipresent neon lights, car horns, and loud music of urban India give way to forests, houses set back from the road, and winding paths. Every so often there is a stall selling tea or cigarettes or soft drinks. We share the last leg of our journey, the rickshaw from Alibag to Revdanda, with a young woman and her small daughter. The woman looks at us furtively through her hands, clearly curious as to the purpose of our journey. The little girl stares at us openly. She reaches out a small hand and touches my hair, then frowns instantly, as if she has tasted something sour.
We reach Revdanda before dusk. It is a Friday evening, and Shabbat must be about to begin. I have several loaves of challah bread from the ORT bakery to give to the Waskars, but I hate to arrive unannounced. Rekhev assures me that I’m worrying for nothing.
We hike the last section of road, from the outskirts of the town to the center, and after a bend in the path I notice a sign for something on our right hand side called the Sea Side Holiday Home.
Rekhev stops in front of it. “David Waskar mentioned this place to me the last time we were here—this is where people from Bombay come to stay when they come to see the synagogue.”
“Really?” I ask, relieved that the place has been vouched for. “Shall we go inside?”
It feels slightly uncomfortable to ask for a hotel room with Rekhev standing beside me. We find the innkeeper, who shows us around his pleasant guesthouse. His large rooms contain rows of cots lined up such that an extended family can easily stay comfortably together. The innkeeper assumes that we will take one room, and I correct him quickly by asking to see another one across the hall. Rekhev and I don’t discuss the strangeness of the fact that this evening we will sleep in rooms a few feet from one another.
AT THE SYNAGOGUE, we find David and his sons Ellis and Benjamin preparing for a weekend of festivities, cleaning the main hall of the synagogue, laying down white sheets on the veranda for guests to sit on, and hanging strings of flowers and colorful crepe paper from the ceiling. Like their co-religionists around the world, the Waskars have constructed a sukkah, a temporary dwelling, to remind them of the forty years that their ancestors spent wandering the desert. They have made another one that they keep outside their home. The sukkah, made of saplings and long reeds and thatched with palm leaves, looks sturdy and well packed, as if someone could camp there comfortably. Tonight there will be prayers for Shabbat, and Simchat Torah will begin. Simchat Torah is a joyous holiday, a celebration of the Torah, and I’ve been told that young men and boys sing and chant songs and prayers in the synagogue, the f
estivities lasting late into the night.
In the back of the synagogue, we meet a young man who is mashing small dark purple berries into a pulp to make the kiddush wine for this evening’s Shabbat prayers.
David greets us enthusiastically, throwing his hands into the air, exclaiminghis happy surprise to see us again, and I feel endlessly glad that we came. Rekhev explains to David that we would like to shoot the preparations for the holiday and the ceremonies on video, which makes David laugh uproariously.
“You want to put me on the movie camera?” he says. “Ha! Why not?”
REKHEV HELPS ME UNPACK and organize the equipment. We begin by shooting the synagogue: long shots of the exterior courtyard and garden, then the interior spaces, where the men are working. Rekhev is fascinated by each ritual, by the reasons behind each decision, and asks David and his sons numerous questions. I tease him that he will be a documentary filmmaker, instead of a fiction filmmaker, before long. As we are shooting, a sprightly young woman in a bright green sari comes up behind us and peers inquisitively into the viewfinder.
“I have a video camera also,” she says proudly, in Hindi. “From the Gulf.” We say hello to her and begin to shoot Benjamin polishing the ornate silver casing of the Sefer Torah, which is kept carefully in the Holy Ark of the synagogue.
“My camera is very advanced,” she boasts, smiling.
I nod and smile at her, but she seems determined to interrupt us.
“It’s smaller than yours. Probably lighter, too.”
Rekhev takes a long look at the woman, and I think that he must be about to scowl at her.
“What can you do on that camera? Special effects?” she asks.
Rekhev explains that we don’t use special effects with this camera.
“No special effects?” she asks incredulously. “That’s too bad. I have many different special effects on my camera.”
She sticks her hand out to shake our hands and introduces herself as Sangeeta Roi, smiling broadly again. Sangeeta is an attractive, affable woman with wavy black hair who appears to be in her late twenties. She pronounces the “S” in “Sangeeta” with a “sh” sound, so that her name sounds like “Shangeeta.” Sangeeta explains that she rents an apartment across the street from the synagogue. She doesn’t have the light coloring or the rounded features of most Bene Israel, and I note the bindi on her forehead and her sindoor, the part in her hair colored red to indicate that she is a married Hindu woman. Before I can express to Rekhev my curiosity about Sangeeta’s origins, Sangeeta explains herself.
“I’m from Calcutta,” she says proudly.
“Calcutta se?” asks Rekhev in surprise. Calcutta is clear across the country. How on earth did she end up in a tiny place like Revdanda?
“Do you have family here?” I ask, suddenly curious.
“Just me and my daughter. My husband is working on a ship. In the Gulf,” she says proudly. “A very big oil ship.”
“Why do you live here in Revdanda, instead of in Calcutta?” Rekhev asks, his curiosity clearly getting the better of him.
“I may look stupid, but I’m not stupid,” Sangeeta responds brightly. She holds out her hand. “This is India, na?” she says, offering her palm as a map. “The Gulf is here, na?” She points to one side of her hand. “And Calcutta is here.” She points to the other side of her hand. “So, when my husband comes home from the Gulf, where is he going to go first?” she asks us. “Obviously, he is going to come to this side faster, na?”
She turns to me, taking in my cotton salwar kameez, and then looks back at Rekhev, concerned.
“She’s not going to wear that to the festival, is she?”
Rekhev translates her question for me.
“This or something like it,” I tell them. “Why?”
“No, no, no,” she says firmly, making a clucking sound with her tongue. “She has to wear a sari.”
“Sari?” I say, picking up the familiar word. I don’t have a sari.
“Come with me,” she says, pulling on my arm and leading me outside. I look over my shoulder at Rekhev, who raises an eyebrow at me in amusement.
I go with Sangeeta across the street to her apartment, a bright, whitewashed room on the second floor with one bed, three plastic chairs, a big tin trunk, and a large television.
“From the Gulf,” she says, patting the television with admiration. “Come, sit over here.”
We sit on her bed, and she instructs me to undress. She pulls her belongings out of her trunk and finds a white sari petticoat for me to wear. She finds a dark purple sari and begins to wrap it around me. But my arms are far too big for the armholes. She can’t understand why the blouse won’t fit.
“It’s because you’re so much smaller than I am. . . .” I say, resorting to English. “There’s no way it will fit. . . .”
“Arre . . .” she says, rolling her tongue in exasperation.
She goes to the window and starts yelling at Ellis, working in the courtyard of the synagogue. She motions for me to come to the window, and I hastily pull on my kurta so that I can stand beside her.
She points to me, says something I can’t understand, and throws her hands in the air. Ellis nods as if to say that he understands and gets on his motorbike. What on earth is going on? I wonder.
Sangeeta instructs me to sit down, and pulls out a box from her trunk. She pulls out thick black eyeliner, a pot of bright red rouge, a crimson lip pencil, and a dark shade of lipstick, and asks me to close my eyes. She moves slowly, drawing a line with the lip pencil around the perimeter of my lips, and then fills in the empty space with the lipstick. She takes the eye pencil and draws a bold line across each of my eyelids and, finally, pats my cheeks with the rouge. I shudder to think of what all this must look like. Another box reveals the gold earrings and gold chain that she must have worn for her wedding. As she begins to place the earrings in my ears, I stop her.
“Are you sure?” I ask her, and she nods emphatically.
There’s a knock at the door, and Ellis’s wife, Noorit, arrives, with a white parcel of cloth in her hands. I finally understand what’s going on. It seems that Sangeeta dispatched Ellis back to the Waskar house to bring Noorit with a sari that might fit me. But Noorit, though slightly larger than Sangeeta, is still tiny. I don’t want to disappoint these ladies, but I can’t imagine this working.
Together, the three of us struggle to fit my arms into another blouse. Noorit takes the blouse in her teeth and breaks the stitches to make more room. We push my arms into the holes and begin to try to make the sari of a woman half my height wrap around my much taller frame. We have to keep the ill-fitting blouse together with large safety pins, which we cover with the pallu, the decorative border of the sari.
When we are finished, Sangeeta combs and braids my hair and pronounces my transformation complete. Then she instructs me to sit, stand, and wave while she shoots me on her video camera. She asks Noorit to hold the camera while she sits next to me, holding my hand. I look at myself in the mirror. I have dark, thick lines of lip liner around my mouth, and two large circles of rouge on my cheeks that make me look like an old-fashioned porcelain doll.
“Is it too much?” I ask, looking at the women.
“No, no, no,” insists Sangeeta, proud of her work. “Bee-yootiful.”
When we go downstairs and into the synagogue, I feel shy to see Rekhev. He looks startled by my appearance.
“Someone really ought to take your picture,” he says. “I’ve never seen you look quite so . . .”
“Strange?” I say.
“Really strange,” he says, and we both laugh.
PEOPLE BEGIN TO ARRIVE at the synagogue for the evening Maariv service, mostly young men and teenage boys and a few women from nearby villages. The men are wearing kippahs and prayer shawls over their pressed shirts and pants, and the women are wearing their good silk saris. The women look approvingly at my outfit, and don’t seem to be alarmed by my makeup. From time to time I catch Sangeeta looking at
me and smiling with approval. Benjamin leads the recitation of the Amidah prayer on the bimah, the dais in the center of the synagogue, which is followed by Attah Hareita, a collection of Biblical verses in praise of God and the Torah. After Benjamin reads each verse, the verse is repeated by the other worshippers. It seems it would be disrespectful to videotape such a private experience as the congregation in prayer, but Benjamin and Ellis remove all of the Torah scrolls from the Ark and are joined by the men of the congregation, and I begin to shoot again. Benjamin and Ellis begin to walk around the interior of the synagogue, holding the Torah scrolls and leading a small procession that orbits the room, seven times. Benjamin calls out a line, and his words are repeated, like a call and response, by those walking behind him, who clap their hands in time to the music. As the group moves about the room, the procession gains greater momentum, their voices rising in pitch and volume. The men are sweating and look jubilant. Some pick up their small children and dance with them in their arms. David Waskar sways in time with the music, laughing, his grandson Israel perched on top of his head as if riding a wave. When the group reaches the crescendo of the song, seven men throw their arms over each other’s shoulders to create a tight, revolving circle and spin faster and faster, like a top. Benjamin calls out, “Simchat Torah!” and the men shout, “Hai! Hai!”
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 33