“Oh, sweetie, you must take care,” she said, sounding concerned. “You must take alcohol and wash it, take some iodine and apply it. It will sting, but it will make it better.” She was attached to tubes in a hospital, but she was still a nurse.
“I will, Nana. I will.” I was crying, but I didn’t want her to hear me. “It’s not that bad. I miss you.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No, it’s fine, Nana. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“When are you coming?”
“Next week,” I said, making it up.
“When are you coming?” she said again. I couldn’t tell if she couldn’t hear me, or if her drugs were making her foggy.
“Next week.”
“Tomorrow?” she asked.
“Next week.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. “I’m waiting for you.” I leaned my head against the wall of the phone booth and tried not to cry. “You are my sunshine,” she said, before she hung up.
MY PHONE RANG AT SIX the next morning. I was dreaming about Karachi. Nana was in the garden of Siddiqi House, hanging up clothes to dry on the clothesline. Nana is fine, someone said. What were we so worried about? We were being silly, my dream self said. In my sleep, I picked up the telephone receiver, knowing somehow that it was my mother. I will tell my mother the good news, that Nana is fine, I thought. Then I heard a rustling, my mother’s voice, and I was instantly awake.
“Mama?” Suddenly the 6 a.m. light was seeping into my room, and I couldn’t make it stop. I felt myself pushing at the air around me.
“She’s gone.” Mama’s voice was like the voice of someone being strangled. “Take this,” I heard her say, and she passed the phone to my cousin Salim. I let Salim hear the sounds I was making before I could register what I was doing. He listened to me until he couldn’t bear it any longer.
“She was my grandmother, too, you know,” he said curtly, and handed the phone to my uncle Salman.
I should have stayed. I should have stayed. I should have stayed.
ON THE PLANE TO MIAMI, I ran my fingers across my knuckles, feeling the embedded sand still trapped in the surface of my skin. The last time I talked to her, imprinted in my fist. I crossed the country on a last-minute ticket, a trip I might have taken just as easily the week before. I stared out the oval of my window and let the hum of the airplane match the one I heard in my chest. My father picked me up at the airport, looking worn and hollow. We didn’t know what to say, what to talk about on the way home. He told me that Cassim was arriving later in the day, that my mother was not doing well, that he was worried about her. I felt swollen, as if the slightest knock would render me liquid.
When I saw Mama, I was startled. She seemed so much younger, like a little girl. She was lost; seeing her like that terrified me. I hugged her and tried to comfort her, but I didn’t know how.
“It was a test,” she said, over and over again. “But the resident didn’t check her chart. He didn’t see that she was allergic to heparin. Her blood got too thin. She wasn’t supposed to go now,” she kept saying, over and over. “It wasn’t her time. She didn’t have a dream.”
I sat on Mama’s bed, then lay next to her, as I did when I was small. She read the Qur’an, laying a dupatta over her head and closing her eyes.
She told me that tomorrow we would drive to West Palm Beach, where two of my uncles were living, that Nana would receive a Muslim burial.
“But she wanted a Jewish burial,” I said, alarmed. “Your father promised her.”
Mama shook her head. “My brothers were in charge. It is the way she would have wanted it, for her sons to arrange it.”
“But she wanted to die as a Jew.”
“I know,” Mama said quietly, and explained what happened that last morning, while I slept in California. A week previous, Mama had arranged for the young rabbi from the local synagogue to come and visit Nana, to talk to her about Judaism’s view of the afterlife. Their appointment was for 11 a.m., and when he arrived, he found my mother, my father, and two of my uncles at Nana’s bedside, Nana attached to a life-support machine. My mother asked the rabbi if he would read Nana her last rites in Hebrew, which he did.
“We tried to figure out how to give her a Jewish funeral, but the rules here in Florida were so hard to understand, so different for us. We wanted to bury her the way we know how, with women that she was close to washing her body, preparing her. We wanted to bury her in a pine casket, the way we would have done at home. The way her mother was buried.”
“But we should do something, something Jewish,” I insisted.
“In Judaism, there’s something called an eleven-month ceremony,” Mama said. “We unveil the tombstone eleven months from now, and convert the resting place from a place of mourning to a place of reflection. We can do that.”
I spent hours in Nana’s room. I opened up her bureau, slowly, as if she might still catch me. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the idea of her burying secret things into the folds of these drawers gave me comfort, the idea that there were still layers to uncover even though she was gone. In a tea tin, the red paint cracked with age, I found a curious-looking key; it was three-cornered and made of brass. I slipped its chain around my neck, feeling its coolness and wondering what it was for. In the bottom drawer of her bureau I found the baby clothes, now complete. White, pale green, pink. I lay on her bed, her sheets still smelling of her, and covered my head with her pillows. So this is grief, then. This is what it means.
THE NEXT DAY, we drove to West Palm Beach for Nana’s funeral. I tried to get used to the idea that I would be one of the five women elected to wash Nana’s body. I was frightened to see her in death. In the gathering hall of the cemetery, my uncles’ wives had laid the floor with white sheets. According to custom, we were all dressed in white kurta pajamas, save the Western guests, who stood out awkwardly in black. People, familiar and unfamiliar both, rose to greet my mother, who could barely look at them. All around me was the sound of weeping, discomfort. A tiny Pakistani woman walked deliberately with a cane to embrace my mother. She spoke in Urdu, pulling my mother’s face close to hers with both hands. She had bright blue eyes; they were streaming with tears. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I saw my mother’s gratitude, how hungrily she embraced her in return.
Mama told me that this was Ruko Apa, a cousin of her father’s and a friend of my grandmother’s from Karachi. She had been living in Chicago for the last several months, with her son. When she heard the news of Nana’s death, two days previous, she implored her son to start driving. They had driven eighteen hours to be here today. Ruko Apa knew the rite of washing the body. She had come here to lead us in the ritual. She had brought sweet attar from Mecca for Nana’s body. Come, she said. It’s time.
I followed two of my aunts, my mother, and Ruko Apa into a separate space, cold and white, where I saw Nana’s body laid on a piece of marble, her tiny frame covered in a sheet.
Ruko Apa instructed us, but I couldn’t understand her Urdu. I followed the motions of her arm, the way she soaped a cloth and ran it over Nana’s shoulders, her back, but I was always the last to complete my part of the task. As we navigated the details of the ritual, the prayers, the careful execution of each step, I felt afraid to touch her, but I kept my hand on Nana’s shoulder, not wanting her to feel left behind. I closed my eyes and said a small prayer; I told her how much I missed her.
When the washing was complete, I stayed in the room. I kissed Nana on her forehead, the way I always had before I left for school. I told her how wrong I was, that I should have come earlier.
In the hall, we waited, sitting on the floor, for the grave to be dug. Then we heard the sounds of disorder, men talking, disagreeing with one another. My father and brother went to offer their help and see what the trouble was. The grave had been dug, but my cousin Sartaj felt that it had been dug in the wrong direction, that it did not face Mecca, the way it should. Which way is east? I hea
rd them asking each other. Which way is east? Who has a compass?
I could feel the women around me getting impatient.
“Such a shame,” I heard someone say.
It took another hour to redig the grave facing the right way. We waited, and prayed, and I felt Nana looking down at us, watching our confusion. My father, my brother, my uncles and cousins carried her casket above their heads, walking Nana’s body to her grave site. The imam recited the prayers and we bowed our covered heads.
When it was all over, Nana was covered with a pile of earth.
“I don’t want to leave her here,” my mother said, looking up at my tall father, her voice rising and breaking. “How do I leave her here?”
My father folded my mother into his chest. They stayed there for a few moments. I felt the same sense of panic.
We walked to our car and drove back to Miami. There were four of us now, once and for all, not five.
25
DEPARTURES
BOMBAY, MAY 2003
I change the date of my return ticket to New York. Once, twice, then a third time. March becomes April, and I feel the heat of Bombay’s streets rising to almost unbearable temperatures once again. I wipe sweat from the back of my neck with a handkerchief that I now carry with me for this purpose. I am staying to shoot Leah and Daniel’s wedding. I watch them shop for their new life in Israel, filling out Leah’s paperwork at the Israeli Consulate, lining their suitcases with spices. I hear both of them talk excitedly about their new life ahead, stories that hint at the titillating prospect of unfettered time together. Two nights before their wedding, I shuttle between their mehndi ceremonies, held in neighboring synagogues, blessing the bride, then the groom, by placing a morsel of jaggery in each of their mouths and throwing rice over their shoulders, accompanied by the pulsing beat of the latest Bollywood hit songs. On the day of their wedding, I dress up in a pale green silk salwar kameez and stand at the front of the synagogue, greeting guests and videotaping the ceremony like a relative. I’m amazed at how many people in the community I now know—how many people I have photographed, how many know me. I watch as Leah approaches the bimah, shyly but deliberately, and Daniel serenades her. She is dressed in the ornate white lace gown Judith and I helped her choose at the Catholic bridal shop, and swathed in a large veil that cascades from an ambitious topknot at the top of her head. I watch as Leah and Daniel recite their prayers, as Daniel places a ring on Leah’s henna-covered hand, and as they sign the marriage contract and walk around the synagogue, thanking their well-wishers. At the reception, in a nearby marriage hall, an emcee enthusiastically narrates the proceedings, shouting “Mazel tov! Mazel tov!” as Leah and Daniel enter the brightly lit tent and sit on red-and-gold thrones decorated with garlands of roses. Their first kiss takes place in the middle of a raucous chair dance, both hoisted up high above their guests’ heads in red plastic chairs. Daniel places his lips over Leah’s for a brief and awkward moment, and the crowd cheers. The next day, they fly to Israel.
Later in April, at Passover, I photograph over a hundred Bene Israel women sitting cross-legged inside a tent in the yard of Magen David Synagogue, beating balls of unleavened dough into wide, circular sheets of bread. Tip-tap, go the balls of dough as they hit the backs of the pans before they are rolled flat, in a syncopated rhythm through the large tent. Tip-tap. Tip-tap. “Matzah!” one woman calls out once her bread is flat and ready to be brought to the oven. “Matzah!” another woman echoes, and a boy comes running with a plate on which he places the flattened dough, taking it quickly to the back oven to be baked and prayed over.
In this way, winter becomes spring. The rains will come soon. I missed them last year, while I was in Massachusetts, and Julie tells me that on certain days in July you will be barely able to walk down the street for the water rushing past your feet. I think about the fall, High Holidays once more, followed by the temperate winter, those rare months when it’s possible to go out in Bombay in the middle of the day. Then the cycle will repeat. The inevitability of my return to the United States is an idea now making itself felt, but by May I’m still not ready to go back. Not yet, I think, pushing the thought out of my mind, making lists of photographs I need to take, interviewsthat I hope to record. But when? I hear another voice ask. When will my work here be finished?
“Come home, Sadia,” my mother says on the phone. My father doesn’t say it, but I can hear in his voice that wants me home too. Stubbornly, I hang on.
REKHEV RINGS MY DOORBELL one afternoon, and when I go to the gate to let him in, I see that he looks distracted, strange.
“Are you all right?” I ask him, and he tells me he was up all night working with an editor on a new short film. It’s an adaptation of a folktale, he tells me, based on a story he grew up with. He hooks up my video camera to the television and shows me a rough video copy of the film. I watch, mesmerized, as images from Rekhev’s notebooks come to life—a book whose pages fall upward into the air, a girl who becomes a tree. Even in this rough state, I can tell that the film is going to be beautiful, and I get very excited, asking him how he did certain things, telling him what I think he should do next.
“I’m happy to show this to you,” he says. “It’s just an exercise, but I’m starting.” He gets up and lights a cigarette. He sits by the window, and I watch as he blows long plumes of white smoke between the iron bars of the grate. The room is quiet except for the tinkling recorded signal of a truck in reverse. Something about his silence makes me sit up straighter. “Sadia,” he says, “I have something to tell you.”
He turns and faces me, and I feel a strange sensation at the base of my skull, something like vertigo. “I think you should stay in India,” he says finally. “Don’t go. Stay in India for a year and live with me.”
“Live with you?” I ask. I want to make sure that I heard him correctly.
“We could go to the Konkan and rent a small house. Like Sangeeta’s place in Revdanda. Or Bombay, the Himalayas, anywhere you like. You can work on your projects and I will work on mine, and it will be a good life. I will teach you many things. I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m asking you to stay for one year.”
I think about the shape of that imaginary year and its inevitable complications, what it would look and feel like. I feel slightly taken aback by the boldness of his offer, but also by his intuition that I might be drawn to such a plan. We have read the same novels.
“And at the end of that year? What then?”
“At the end of that year, you can go home and return to your plans, to your life in America. That’s all I ask. A year.”
I feel a crushing sense of regret at the consequences of calling out what we are, and what we are not, into the open air of this room; I would have happily lived longer in our unnamed state.
“Don’t say anything now,” he says, rising to go. “Think it over.”
I WALK THROUGH BOMBAY, thinking over Rekhev’s idea. I find myself retracing my steps, the paths that I first walked in Bombay when I arrived eighteen months earlier. I walk along Marine Drive to Cama Hospital, where Nana served as head matron, across the dirty sand of Chowpatty Beach. I walk to the Gateway of India, along the quiet lanes of Colaba near the Taj Mahal Hotel, and think about how Nana longed for this city, its crowds, its elegant streets. I came here trying to find the paths that Nana didn’t choose, but now I wonder if, in leaving her city, in missing this place, I will come to understand her in yet another way.
Crossing my street to the tea shop one afternoon, I see a woman who looks familiar, the American-looking woman I’ve seen before, dressed in a salwar kameez. Upon closer inspection, she appears to be older than I by about ten or fifteen years, and I see what I imagine to be the marks of her life here, the way she has adapted her facial expressions to make herself understood, the fact that she has traded the bright colors of the recently arrived for the muted browns and beiges she wears now. I notice how expertly she wends her way through the crowd, motioning to her driver that
he should meet her at the end of the block. I see how nearly invisible she makes herself. Perhaps she has an apartment near here. A membership at one of the former British clubs. An Indian husband. Indian children. I wonder when her parents stopped asking her when she was coming home, when this became her home. She registers my watching her and turns to look back at me—a sort of mirror. She takes in my appearance, my similar clothing, my American sandals, and she waits, standing perfectly still, asking to be considered. For a moment, as I look at her, I see a path opening up in front of me, the chill of recognition, and then, as quickly as it arrived, the feeling fades. Her driver waves to her from his parking space. “Madam!” he calls, and she climbs into the car and speeds away.
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