I have been preparing myself to lose Nana as long as I can remember; to know her is to be acutely aware of the fragility of her body and the strength of her will. One of her doctors told me on my last visit that the fact she is alive in the face of such extreme pain—in her knees, in her back, in her legs, which are swelling at the indignity of too many drugs to regulate too many ailments—shows just how strong her determination is. Recently we learned that she has tiny tears on the inside of her kidney, a hereditary illness that she was born with. It’s her resolve that I now see changing, the decision of a person who believes that the work she was put on this earth to do is done.
“Nana, tell me a story,” I say, trying to change the subject, lifting her legs, heavy with swelling, one at a time, and placing bolster pillows underneath each one. I rub her legs in long motions, from thigh to ankle, trying to draw out what hurts her.
“Tell me the story of how your ancestors came to India. Tell me about the shipwreck.”
“What for, sweetheart?” she asks, folding up the baby clothes. “Why do you want to hear that story again?”
“I want to hear you tell it,” I say. “Like you used to tell it in Chestnut Hill.”
She lets out a small sigh and begins her story. She tells me that her ancestors left the land of Israel and were shipwrecked off the coast of India. Seven women and seven men survived; they lived in coastal villages, pressing seeds into oil for their livelihood, and remembered only one Jewish prayer.
“There was once a ship, a ship that left Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple, two thousand years ago. A ship that sailed for forty days and forty nights, until it crashed on the Konkan Coast, near Bombay. . . .”
Shema Israel: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
This story: my inheritance and my mystery.
That week, we spent several afternoons pasting stacks of small black-and-white photographs into plastic albums.
“Don’t worry about this,” she chided me. “Never mind.”
I wrote in pencil on the back of each photograph whatever she remembered about the image, the year it was taken perhaps, or a place, a person’s name. I was most fascinated by the earliest images, the ones taken in India, candid windows into her youth that came before the formal portraits from weddings and birthdays in Pakistan. In one picture, Nana appears as a very young girl, swinging on a swing with a friend or cousin, her braid swinging; she’s in motion and laughing. In another, she and her husband are sitting on a hillside and smiling, posing with another couple. My grandfather rests a dapper-looking hat jauntily on his knee.
The later pictures were color snapshots of Nana from the 1980s and 1990s, taken when she was living in my uncles’ various homes in Florida, Texas, and New Jersey. It is not the custom for a woman to live with her daughter and son-in-law, and each extended stay was an attempt to live with one of her sons. Inevitably, she came back to us in Chestnut Hill, to her room at the top of the staircase. Cassim and I were her special projects, the two children she was given free rein to spoil and discipline as she saw fit, and when she returned she fussed about the kitchen, making breakfast and clipping coupons as if she had never left. To us she was more than a grandparent, she was our constant source of support; and I hated to think that she didn’t think we were enough.
In the two years after my parents relocated to Miami, Nana did more of this shuffling from place to place, spending months at a time in her sons’ homes. I visited her in each of these places, and I saw how her other grandchildren respected her from a distance but saw her as old, something separate from their present lives. They didn’t engage her in conversation or ask her advice, and she didn’t have authority in those households the way she did in ours. No one wanted to hear her stories. The subject of Nana’s Judaism raised too many unanswered questions: if she was Jewish, what were they? She retreated more and more into her bedroom, into an interior world of television and memory.
But more and more, Judaism was on Nana’s mind. She began to confide in my mother that she worried constantly about death—not the physical pain of dying, but the prospect of meeting her parents in heaven. She was terrified to face her mother and father with the decision she had made to leave the religion of her birth.
My mother took her to the library to borrow books on Judaism, to a local synagogue to meet with a young rabbi.
“My husband promised me a Jewish funeral,” Nana told her one afternoon, driving back from the synagogue in the car. “He promised me that if I raised you children as Muslims I could die as a Jew.”
It made my mother upset to hear her mother talk about dying.
“Shhh, now, Amma. Don’t talk about that.”
THE LAST TIME I saw Nana was in Miami, and I took her to an appointment with a physical therapist who was helping her to strengthen her back and unlock her knees. The therapist’s office was a generic-looking place in a strip mall, but the man was kind and patient with her, showing her how to do the exercises. He took me aside when Nana was changing back into her street clothes at the end of the session, looking concerned.
“I can tell that you two are close,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “It’s nice to see her.”
“Listen, I need your help. She comes here, but she doesn’t do the exercises at home. She’s giving up, giving in to the pain.”
“I see.”
We took a taxi back to my parents’ apartment, and I looped my arm around Nana’s small back, holding her close as we rode, something I had never done before.
“The physical therapist says that you don’t do your exercises, Nana.”
“Never mind,” she said stubbornly, looking out the window. “What’s the use?”
“Don’t say that.” I felt myself getting upset. “I need you to be well for my graduation, to come to California.” My graduation from Stanford was in three months, and we had spoken about her making the trip. I knew that she didn’t quite understand what I was studying, but it seemed like an event that she would appreciate, with red robes and flags, a football stadium filled with relatives, the kind of America that she aspired to for her grandchildren.
“I’ll try,” she said absentmindedly, patting my knee. “Let’s see.” We rode along in silence.
That night, I tiptoed into Nana’s bedroom. Nana had asked if, this visit, I could stay with her in her room, instead of sleeping on the couch, and I was touched that she wanted to be near me. I entered her room and heard the quiet, raspy sound of her breathing; I was afraid of disturbing her fragile body. She smelled like comfort and rose talc. As I slipped into the bed I woke her, and I held my body still, hopeful that she might fall back asleep.
“I could have stayed,” she said.
I let her words hover in the dark for a moment, wondering what she meant.
“Stayed where, Nana?”
“Bombay,” she said. “I owned my house, Rahat Villa, and my brothers were there, my mother was there. It was 1948, and I could have stayed. As Rachel Jacobs, I wouldn’t have had to go to Pakistan. I could have lived my life in Bombay.”
“Do you mean that you wish you had never left India?” I was shocked to hear her express regret for her life in Pakistan with my grandfather, the decades that had come after Partition.
“I should have stayed.”
MY LAST DAY IN MIAMI, Nana found me writing down notes from one of our conversations in one of my notebooks and stood next to me, quietly, not wanting to disturb me.
“Do you need something?” I asked her, and she shook her head to say no.
Then she said, “Come, let’s have a cookie.”
I followed her to the kitchen, curious about what she meant. She had never volunteered such an activity before.
We each took a cookie from the kitchen cupboard, and then she motioned for me to sit next to her on the couch.
“So,” she said formally, once we were both seated, “what are your plans?”
“For my life?”
“Well, soon I will finish graduate school . . .” I began. “And then I’d like to get a job, perhaps in New York.”
“What will you do there?”
“I will make films,” I told her. “Documentary films.”
“Will you write books? Like your mother?”
“Yes, I hope so.”
“Promise me one thing,” she said, placing a hand on my arm, her voice suddenly serious. “Go to India, study your ancestors.”
Nana had never asked me to do anything before, nothing more than to set the table, or to call when I arrived somewhere. But the idea opened up before me, curious and unfolding, persistent and asking for recognition.
“I will, Nana,” I said, clearing my throat. “I promise that I will.”
I returned to California with pieces of Nana’s stories scribbled in notebooks, recorded on tiny tapes, and I called her and told her that I would be back in Miami for the summer. I told her that I wanted to do more interviews. I asked her if she would teach me how to knit, and she scoffed.
“You and your mother, you have no patience!” she said, but I assured her that I wanted to try.
“And to cook,” I told her. “Nana, you never taught me how to cook.”
“Studies are more important.”
“But my studies are almost finished,” I told her. “Now I want to learn.”
TWO MONTHS LATER, Nana went to the hospital for a series of routine tests on her kidney, and ended up staying there for more tests, then for monitoring. Once she was inside the hospital, it was difficult for her to come out. She had contracted an infection that necessitated that she stay. I spoke to my mother frequently. Is she all right? I asked. Do you need my help? No, no, Mama said, sounding distracted. It should be fine.
SHORTLY AFTER THAT, my mother came to San Francisco for some meetings at Berkeley. Tony and I met her in a restaurant on Sunday morning for brunch. It was a sunny place, the walls painted a bright yellow and decorated with paintings of sunflowers. I wanted her to like the place I had chosen; I wanted her to like Tony.
She seemed anxious. “It’s very nice,” she said, looking at the menu. “I’m sorry, I can barely concentrate, I’m thinking about Nana.”
“How was Berkeley?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice level. We were both worried that Nana wouldn’t be there when Mama returned, that she should not have come on this trip.
“Good,” my mother replied.
I wanted to say, Take me with you—but I didn’t. I was one month from graduation, wading through the last weeks of my thesis. We both understood that if Nana took a turn for the worse I would fly to Miami, but we didn’t discuss what the criteria would be for me to leave school early.
“You have a big week coming up?” my mother asked.
“I do,” I said. I didn’t ask myself until later if this was true.
Tony squeezed my hand under the table and turned his chin toward me, smiling, his light brown hair falling in his eyes. He was always so comforting, even when I couldn’t express quite what was wrong. I smiled back, quickly, grateful for his company, and we returned to talk of books and films and weather.
For the rest of the day, I couldn’t work. My thesis was a 16mm film about the small town of Stewart, Mississippi, which was being demolished to make room for a four-lane highway. I had spent weeks interviewing the older residents of the town about the fact that the buildings they had grown up in were about to be razed. That afternoon, I watched the footage slide back and forth over the wheels of my editing machine. The words didn’t make much sense to me. I had interviewed other people’s grandmothers, I realized.
I forgot to eat dinner. Late at night, I took a handful of Nana’s sev puri mix out of a carton she had sent me and leaned my head back, tipping it into my mouth, the way I had seen her do. I decided that I would eat it in tiny handfuls until it was gone. I need to concentrate, I told myself. Nana would want me to work. My mother’s cell phone didn’t always ring in the hospital, but I tried her late that night. She told me that Nana was okay, that Nana had been awake to see Mama when she reached the hospital. Then I slept, knowing that Mama was there to take care of her.
On Monday, I called again and didn’t get any answer. I went to the library and tried to read; in conjunction with my film, I was writing a paper about the residents of Stewart and how they had lost their town. I was reading books about the theory of landscape, about how we are formed by the buildings, the trees, the slope of the hills that surround us. I lost myself in these books. When I walked out of the library, the bulk of the day was behind me, and I felt sad, disoriented, betrayed by the sunlight. What time is it? I wondered. It was three hours later in Miami. Three more hours into evening. I called my mother, suddenly terrified. She picked up. I was so worried, I said. But Mama made everything all right.
“Nana’s okay,” she said. “We were having some tests done—did you call?”
“I called earlier today, in the morning,” I said. I should have called again in the afternoon, I thought. But Nana was all right.
“Should I come there?” I asked. “I can come there.”
Mama hesitated. “No,” she said. “You stay there. It’s so expensive. Do your work.”
“But you’ll tell me if I should come?”
“I will,” she said. “I’ll ask Nana if she wants you to come.”
A week went by. I found some pictures of Tony and me dressed up, from a Viennese ball we had gone to at Stanford. Tony was wearing a rented tuxedo and a dark pink bouttoniere that matched my long dress, his hair cut short for the occasion, making him look more like the pictures I had seen of his dad in the navy. Standing next to me, he looked tall; not as tall as my father, but lanky and WASPy like him, his posture erect and his gaze straightforward. Nana will like these, I thought. I found a card, and I wrote to her about Tony and school and the film I was making. Just this once, I didn’t simplify. I wrote in my own handwriting, my small scribbled lines, instead of the large rounded letters I normally wrote to her in. A few days later, I asked Mama if Nana had looked at the card. “We will have a Ph.D. in the family,” she had said to Mama, proudly. “Do you have a Ph.D.?” Mama had said no, smiling. “See?” Nana had said, shaking her head and raising her eyebrows, impressed.
That spring, I had started to ride an old used bicycle to get from my room in graduate student housing to my department on the Old Quad. My friends found it quaint, my late start on the bicycle. Didn’t you ride one as a kid? they asked me, laughing. Sure, I said. Just not between then and now.
One morning, on my way to school, I thought about Nana, about all of the things I wanted to tell her. I pushed very hard on the pedals to go faster, to feel the wind whip through me; I wanted to see everything go by faster than I could make it go. I saw my route down the path, and I took it. I saw my turn, left through the arch. I saw a tiny rock, nothing really, out of the corner of my eye. I should avoid it, I thought. I should call Nana, I thought. Suddenly I felt myself slipping, the bike coming down with me, my hands hitting the gravel. The rocks on the ground sliced through my jeans, scraped through the skin of my knees and shins. Tiny rocks were embedded in my palms, in my knuckles, caked and sealed with dirt and blood. I was covered in dirt, the way I never had been as a kid, when I was too timid to go so fast. I threw my bike to one side and walked to my department, holding my arms around myself. I called Nana’s hospital room from the phone in the basement of the building. Her voice was strange, crackling into the line.
“Sweetie,” she said.
“I fell, Nana.”
“What’s that?”
“I fell. On my bike, on the ground. I cut up my hands.”
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 37