I CHOOSE THE DATE of my departure to coincide with the anniversary of Nana’s death, which my mother celebrates each year with prayers and by making my grandmother’s favorite foods. It’s been three years since she died, half of which I have spent here, in her city.
I call Rekhev and tell him that I have chosen a date for my departure. “Are you there?” I ask. “Did I lose you?”
There’s another long silence, and then I hear him breathing.
“I have to go home, Rekhev,” I say.
I ask him if he will come to Bombay to see me, but he doesn’t answer. We end the conversation in a series of small, terrible silences, with no certainty of a plan to meet again.
I START THE ROUNDS of goodbyes. I begin easily, with the grocer, the vegetable man, the shops that I frequent regularly. Then I say a series of farewells to favorite places: to my train station, at Grant Road; to B. Merwan, the local Irani café; to Magen Hassidim Synagogue; to my bus stop; to the slide in the park shaped like an elephant. At ORT India, Benny Isaacs asks me when I’ll return, and I tell him that I don’t know when but that, now that I’ve lived here, I have a sense that I’ll always be coming back.
“You’ll get some kind of diploma, I hope? For all of this work you’ve been doing? Or a grade of some kind?”
I don’t know how to explain.
“Well, I hope you get an A,” he says, and I thank him for making me feel so welcome.
In Sharon’s office, I find him sitting with a group of high school students discussing the weekly Torah portion, and I’m impressed at the strength of debate that the boys bring to the endeavor.
When the boys finish and say goodbye to Sharon, I join him at his desk and tell him that I’ve decided it’s time for me to return home. Sharon tells me that he’s now making monthly trips to the Konkan Coast to give Hebrew lessons, and that he’s been teaching Benjamin and Ellis Waskar’s children. I ask him if he’ll help me write a letter to the Waskars, and he happily obliges, translating my dictation from English into Marathi. In my letter, I tell them that I am leaving soon for America, and that I will miss them. I tell them that I have discovered that Revdanda is my native place.
When Sharon finishes with the letter, he turns to me. “Have you made your decision yet? About your religion?” He smiles amiably, and I consider how to respond. “Okay, so tell me something,” he says, leaning forward in his chair. “Let’s say you’re home in New York and you want to pray, and in front of you are a church, a mosque, and a synagogue. Which one makes you want to go inside?”
I try to picture it. I think of myself in Manhattan, peering into the doorways of different religious buildings. Every way I can imagine it, I’m standing outside, looking in.
“I feel sometimes that I am expected to choose, that my parents have laid out these options for me and that I should choose. Living in India has made me very aware of the choice. But, truthfully, Sharon, I feel disloyal picking one over another. The truth is that I feel emotionally connected to all three.”
“Ah,” Sharon says. “So you have more work to do, then.”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“I wish you all the best for your journey, Sadia.” Sharon stands up and extends his hand. “May it be a happy one.”
ON THE NIGHT that I am set to leave, my apartment suddenly becomes a social space, with all sorts of people dropping by to say goodbye: Julie, my students, the man who printed my photographs of the Bene Israel. Mangoes are in season, and I serve them to my string of guests, who sit on my floor devouring the fruit and watching as I distribute the items that I have no room for in my suitcases—books, small appliances, extra clothes. I look hopefully out the door each time the bell rings, hoping it’s Rekhev, but there’s no sign of him.
Julie instructs me not to clean up anything, just to leave it to her to take care of. “Sadia, you are not finished with the packing up! Stop this cleaning and finish the suitcases!” she scolds me, taking a broom out of my hand.
She tells me that when I go I should just leave the key on the shelf where I always leave it. She will come the next day to clean up and will return the key to my landlord.
By about 11 p.m., my guests have gone, and I take one final look around the small room that has been my world these last fourteen months, at the maps on the wall, the remaining books and clothes I have left for Julie, presents for her children. I place the key on the shelf, as Julie instructed me, and I walk out the door, rolling my suitcases behind me. I hear the iron gate clang shut. There’s no way back in, I think.
I don’t see Rekhev until I am at the end of the driveway, trying to figure out how I will roll each suitcase into the street so I can hail a taxi without leaving any of them unattended. I see his shadowy form in the light of the streetlamp, the shape of his familiar satchel over one shoulder.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
“Just a few minutes. I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay.”
“I’m going to the airport now.”
He nods. “I will come also.”
Together, we hail a cab and find room for my overloaded suitcases. The driver and Rekhev have to tie the boot of the trunk to the bumper with rope and a series of knots, so that nothing falls out. We drive the hour to the airport in a tentative silence, but I’m infinitely glad for Rekhev’s presence.
Rekhev buys a sixty-rupee ticket so that he can come inside the airport to see me off, and we walk past the queue of waiting families and chauffeurs in tasseled jackets with signboards.
“I didn’t think you would really go,” Rekhev says. “Not now, anyway.”
We walk through the fluorescent light of the airport and toward the ticket counters, where I check in and pay exorbitant fees for my excess baggage. There are hours to go until my flight, which departs at nearly 3 a.m., and I tell Rekhev that he should go.
“How can I go,” he says, “when there’s so little time left?”
I nod, and we find two seats and two tiny plastic cups of tea.
We sit there in silence for what seems like an hour but is perhaps less. I’m not sure what to say.
“Tell me something, Sadia,” Rekhev says finally, looking at me. “Is this reality for you, or is this fantasy?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I first came to Pune from Jammu, the whole place felt like fantasy to me. What was real, what I understood, was my father’s house, eating my meals in my mother’s kitchen, getting a job. Pune, all of this talk of ideas, of becoming an artist, of meeting new people, all of this was fantasy. I used to take rickshaw rides at night and just look around me and marvel at all of it, at how all of it could be happening to me. It was all so new. In time, it has become more comprehensible, but I still think sometimes that I will wake up and I will be at home, daydreaming. Now I wonder if this is the same for you. When you go back to New York, will it be reality for you, or will it be fantasy? And what, then, will Bombay be?”
I pause to think it over. “Right now, Bombay feels very real. But part of me thinks that it will always be fantasy for me, especially when I return home.”
“Is home New York?”
“Yes.”
“Will you think about this moment, here in the airport, when you go back to New York?”
“Of course I will,” I say, and look at him. I put a hand on my throat, trying not to cry.
“Go now,” he says, and laughs, running his hand over his face. “Before this thing kills me.”
“Yes,” I say.
We embrace, awkwardly, and I walk quickly toward the guards without looking back. I hand over my Foreigners Residence Permit, the last emblem of my temporary citizenship here, and I walk, as fast as I can, toward the security checkpoint.
IN THE PLANE, I push my face against the small oval of the window and watch the millions of lights of my adopted city recede from view.
EPILOGUE
RETURN
WEST PALM BEACH, MAY 2003
When I got back from Ind
ia, I went to visit Nana’s grave. I flew to Miami and drove a rental car to West Palm Beach. Southern Florida, with its wide roads and low banks of horizontal shops, its ever-present air-conditioning, seemed peculiar to me now. It struck me as strange and arbitrary that Nana was buried here. When I reached the cemetery, I found a large plot of unusually flat, artificially green grass flanked by a four-lane road. I drove in slowly, registering the ornate white arch at the entrance and the orderly rows of graves decorated with plastic flowers in a way I didn’t before, when I felt cloaked in the newness of losing her. The cemetery was divided into sections according to religious denomination, marked with signposts shaped like old-fashioned road signs, black block letters on white backgrounds that read “Hope,” “Faith,” and “Devotion.” I found Nana’s plot near the intersection of two interior roads and pulled the car to one side, getting out slowly and feeling the oppressive heat of the day, cloudless and overly bright.
I thought of the last time I was here. Eleven months after Nana’s death, as Mama had promised, we gathered for an unveiling ceremony. Mama had arranged for two of my grandmother’s relatives—her niece Lena and her youngest brother, Nissim—to come from Israel and India. They were the only ones present who were already familiar with the Jewish prayers. The rest of us—my mother, father, brother, and two of my uncles—listened carefully to the rabbi as he guided us through the ritual, bowing our heads as he recited verses from the Torah. He explained that, on this day in the Jewish tradition, the period of mourning comes to a close and the burial site is transformed into a place of remembrance.
The tombstone, designed by my parents, had been set the day before and lay swathed in a dark purple velvet shroud with Hebrew characters, on loan from the local synagogue. When the cloth was pulled back, we saw that my mother and father had placed Nana’s two names, “Rachel” and “Rahat,” in Hebrew, Arabic, and English script, and I heard sounds of surprise around me when the stone was revealed. One of my uncles said: “Our father’s name isn’t on the stone. He should be there, too.” But my mother simply shrugged, acknowledging the thought yet secure in her decision. I wished that more of our relatives had been there to see it. I imagined how much Nana would have enjoyed the moment, the chance to be recognized, in death, for the plurality of who she was.
Rachel Jacobs
June 17, 1917
Rahat Siddiqi
May 16, 2000
Later that day, Uncle Nissim told me that a few months before she died Nana had called him up in India and asked him to look into how she might be buried in Israel. She told him she would call him back after she had thought it over, but she never did. At the time, his story made me think about how conflicted Nana was in her choices, how much of her I didn’t understand. Four months passed, and then I left for India.
Now, two years later, I sat cross-legged on the ground and placed a small white rock that I had brought with me from Bombay’s Chowpatty Beach on top of her headstone. I stayed there for the rest of the afternoon, listening to the sound of cars speeding by and the low, empty buzz of a nearby streetlamp left perpetually switched on. I thought about how Nana had always assured us that she would warn us before she died. I realized, as if acknowledging something that I had known all along, that she must have had a dream; she just decided to keep this last one to herself, to save us the hurt of knowing too soon. As I sat there, I made a list of all the things that I wished I could tell her. I felt grateful for the tree that my father had planted nearby the year before. When it grew dark, I got up and walked to my car. That night, I would drive back the way I came, and then head home. To New York.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some people who appear in this book do so under different names, either at their request or in an effort to protect their privacy. In a few cases, I have also changed identifying characteristics and collapsed or expanded time. Some conversations that appear in the book were recorded on videotape, others in my journals; most have been reconstructed from memory. Much of this book is based on the time line of my life and my grandmother’s life. In some instances, I have taken liberties for the purposes of the narrative. My account of events that took place in Siddiqi House is told from my perspective alone—were my relatives to serve as narrators, I am sure they would do so differently.
It was Bombay, not Mumbai, that my grandmother missed deeply, and for this reason I have chosen to use the older spelling.
Heartfelt thanks go to my editor, Jane Fleming, whose dedication and friendship have made this process a delight from start to finish. Ann Godoff provided a home for this book at The Penguin Press, and made it possible for me to tell this story. Thank you to Tracy Locke, Maggie Sivon, Liz Calamari, and their ace publicity team for their hard work and vision, and to Bruce Giffords, who expertly guided this book’s editorial production.
Carin Besser offered her insights and her keen sense of pace and structure, and showed me how text can be shaped and trimmed like footage. I am indebted to her for her active attention to tense and time in this narrative and for teaching me so much along the way. I thank her for her unfailing serenity and her continued pursuit of a better book.
My agent, Fredrica S. Friedman, convinced me that I could write this book, patiently nurtured and firmly guided a glimmer of an idea into a proposal, and encouraged me to keep pushing forward when I doubted the course.
I am profoundly grateful to all those who have shared their stories with me and allowed me to retell them, especially to those who welcomed me to participate in and photograph Bene Israel rituals, celebrations, and aspects of daily life. In particular I would like to thank: Benjamin Isaacs and ORT India, Elijah Jacob and The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Mumbai), Sharon and Sharona Galsurkar, Bunny and Krishna Reuben, Samson Massil and family, Abraham Moses, Abraham Samson Mhedeker, Samson Solomon Korlekar and family, Jonathan and Ruth Solomon, Shoshanna Nagavkar, Hannah Kurulkar and Ronen Solomon, and David, Erusha, Ellis, Benjamin, Shoshanna, and Noorit Waskar.
Rekhev Bharadwaj introduced me to ideas and worlds that I could not have imagined previously, only a few of which appear here. So many journeys—on paper, in person, and in mind—would not have been possible without him, and his point of view and collaboration continue to inspire me.
Pheroza, Jamshyd, Navroze, and Raika Godrej created a haven for me in their home and have become my second family in Bombay. The compassionate attention of Dr. Rati Godrej made it possible for me to stay healthy in India. Rachel Reuben welcomed me as a long-lost “cousin-sister.”
A Fulbright Scholarship, administered by the Institute for International Education and the United States Educational Foundation in India, created the opportunity for me to begin this project in 2001. My subsequent work in Bombay was made possible through the thoughtful mentorship of Ann Kaplan and by a grant from the Jeremiah Kaplan Foundation. I am grateful to Nathan Katz for his advice at the start of my research, and to Joan C. Roland, whose scholarship on the Bene Israel illuminated my understanding of their history. The Foundation for Jewish Culture provided fiscal sponsorship and support through the Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Filmmaking. Anne Greene and a Wesleyan Scholarship to the Wesleyan Writers Workshop gave me the opportunity to return to Middle-town at the start of my writing process. John Taylor “Ike” Williams gave wise counsel with panache. Suketu Mehta offered new ways to think about Bombay and about book covers. Richard Nash Gould, my self-appointed godfather, let me monopolize his time and his office at pivotal moments in this project, and painstakingly restored and improved the images that appear in this book. Andreas Burgess helped me develop many aspects of this book’s public face and has been a sounding board, equal parts enthusiasm and wisdom, throughout its final stages.
Hope Hall and Purcell Carson have been companions in this journey from distances as far as New York to Bombay and as close as Second Street to the Bowery; my life is enriched by their guidance, companionship, and constant support. William Elison’s careful, repeated readings
produced invaluable insights and corrected numerous errors in the text—those that remain are mine alone. Adam Chandler shared his thoughts on the importance of wrestling with notions of personal faith. Lucas Bessire taught me the meaning of fieldwork.
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 39