An American Brat (10 page)

At the darkest part of the next flight of steps, just before the bannister curved, Feroza felt something that stopped her breath. A slight buzz inside the palm of her hand on the metal railing, a subtle combination of sensations that were neither built into the steps nor inherent in the construction of the staircase. Somewhere in the uncharted space someone or something had moved closer. There it was again. The faintest suggestion of a quiver beneath her stalled feet; a barely discernible tremor beneath her fingers that, amplified by her tense acuity, traveled up her arm and shot down her spine.

Instinctively she crouched on the steps, carefully pressing her ear to the balustrade. The vibration was discernible, as of someone occasionally touching the railing, taking the steps two or three at a time, swiftly and stealthily, then stopping.

The predatory cunning deployed in the movement, the feel of mass in the vibration of the cement cantilever, convinced her that it was a man. Terror implanted springs into her feet and made her body buoyant. Feroza turned and flew up the steps. She ran up flight after flight of stairs, her heart pounding, her breath rasping in her throat, and when she felt her lungs would explode she
flung herself at a door.

She banged on it with her fists and with the palms of her hands and rattled the rod and the handle. She rammed her body into the door and screamed, “Open the door … For God's sake, open the door! Can't anybody hear me? Please, somebody …”

A form so tenuous that it could be an invention of her terror appeared to be watching her from the patch of darkness where the cement steps angled. She wasn't sure she didn't imagine a movement like a curl of smoke detach itself from the dark, a barely perceptible blur that could be a swarthy man's paler shirt.

Feroza screamed. She screamed like a siren — like an instrument fashioned to scream.

There was a sharp, metallic click. Noises from outside. A voice. Sounds blessedly extraneous to the evil whispers and rustles of the malign stairwell.

The door gave, and Feroza almost fell into the corridor. The sudden brightness smote her distended pupils and turned her eyes yellow. She shied from the shaft of sunlight slanting through a window.

Someone was chattering garrulously in a quarrelsome tone.

Feroza squinted, trying to make out the shape of the person who had opened the door.

Bit by bit an awareness of her surroundings formed about her. She felt the tile floor beneath her feet, her handbag still on her shoulder, the beret again low and hugging her forehead. She saw the green paint on the door, the green walls, the aluminum-framed, sun-glazed window, the shape and face of a Japanese man. He had begun scolding her from the moment he set eyes on her as she tumbled out of the stairwell.

The Japanese man's cantankerous voice washed over Feroza like a fresh mountain stream, like a gentle, dawn-drenched breeze, sweeping her with relief. The look of incredulity and concern that had raised his eyebrows and furrowed his brow when he first saw her was replaced by outrage. The man frowned, glaring at her, and his indignant expression soothed her, immensely reassured her.

Feroza was crying. Great shuddering sobs wracked her body. “Sorry, I'm sorry,” she wailed, unconsciously registering the man's gestures, his mannerisms. And though his features and accent were alien, the expressions on his face and the emotions that charged his voice were wonderfully familiar. He could be an uncle, a family friend. He wasn't more than thirty.

Feroza grasped instinctively that the man understood her experience, was reacting to the situation with the fears and fury born of his recognition of her naïveté and ignorance — the sheltered, overprotected condition of her young life as an Asian woman. His rage was protective, fussy, Asian. It poured out in a torrent of warning and dire statement:

“Never do that … Never! You could be murdered … No one would know. All kinds of shitty people … drugs!”

Didn't she know these were fire stairs? Didn't she know the door would open only on the first floor? Did she know she was stupid to lock herself in the fire stairs?

“Sorry, I'm sorry,” Feroza wailed again, faint with relief.

Weeping copiously, Feroza followed the stocky figure in the plaid shirt and loose corduroy trousers as he led the way, halting only when he turned to scold or demand an answer.

In this way, she gave him a disjointed account of the events; described the wholesome, helpful woman who had guided her to the stairwell and closed the door after her.

“Who is this woman? Show her to me! Right now you could be raped! You must have your head examined … You're not a baby. You got no business in New York if you got no sense.”

“Are you alone?” he asked. “Who are you with?

“My uncle.”

Feroza knew they were on the eleventh floor. Somehow, between his scolding and her sobs, she had managed to ask which floor they were on, and the Japanese man had told her.

Feroza had no memory of how she arrived at their room on the fifteenth floor.

She remembered only Manek's face. Ashen, scared. Herself uncontrollably shivering and sobbing. The Japanese man scolding him, scolding her.

As soon as the man left, Feroza crept into bed and covered herself from head to toe with the blanket. The blanket shook with the trembling of her body. Manek stroked the material where her legs were. “It's all right: You're safe now … You're safe. Don't worry.”

When Feroza awoke some hours later, her body was racked with pain. Her throat was raw and parched from shouting. Her arms, her shoulders, her fingers, her calves hurt.

Manek rushed down and across the street to bring her hot chocolate, sandwiches, aspirin. He looked wrung out, as though he had been through an equal ordeal.

“Weren't you worried about me?” Feroza asked after she had eaten the last crumb from the cardboard boxes. She was surprised by how hoarse she sounded.

“No. I'd asked you to return by about one-thirty. If you hadn't shown up by two or two-fifteen, then I'd begin to worry.”

Feroza couldn't believe she had been marooned in that hell for only half an hour.

The next morning they caught the ten o'clock train to Boston. Feroza was quiet on the train, brooding, unwilling to talk of her experience or listen to her uncle's concerned and worried homilies. Manek buried himself in the New York Times and let her alone.

An hour later they were snacking on chicken sandwiches, chips, and chocolate milk, and Feroza, caught up in the excitement of this new travel, captivated by the green, unfolding New England landscape, buried the horror of the stairwell.

Manek had moved from a room he shared with a Turkish student at an M.I.T. dorm in Cambridge once he was sure Feroza would visit.

Two weeks earlier, on an unseasonably wintry morning, he had moved into the attic of a large, drafty, two-story, three-bedroom house in a seedy part of Somerville near Union Square. He shared the house and its one-and-a-half ancient bathrooms with five other shivering Pakistani and Indian students. The attic, with a tank of goldfish, had been bequeathed to his charge by the former occupant of the attic, a silken-haired Bangladeshi beauty.

The first thing Manek did after carrying one of Feroza's outrageously heavy suitcases and sundry shopping bags up the steps, dumping them by the mattress on the floor and catching his breath, was to examine the glass tank perched on a narrow china cabinet.

“Shit.” A tiny fish, in an aqueous froth of iridescent red and gold scales, floated on the surface. Manek widened his nostrils and lightly sniffed. The murky water, topped by a film of oily patches, gave off a thin, unpleasant odor.

Manek had been away in New York for only a week, but his stock of goldfish, which had persisted in diminishing after the Bangladeshi beauty's departure, looked alarmingly depleted.

“What've you been up to?” Manek asked the lanky Pakistani boy who staggered into the room with Feroza's other obese suitcase and bits of hand luggage. “Eating goldfish for breakfast?”

Fierce strands of black, disheveled hair falling like spikes over his eyes, Jamil merely glanced at Manek. Too winded to reply, he collapsed in a tangle of scraggly limbs on a chair with lumpy stuffing.

Panting close on his heels, Feroza, still wearing the red beret she had bought in New York, threw Manek's backpack and overcoat on her substantive mound of luggage and flopped down on the mattress.

“I fed them every day like you said,” Jamil said when he could speak. “But one or two died every day. Maybe you should change the water or their food or something …”

Manek solemnly picked up the dead goldfish by its tail and, his perplexed brow creased, laid it to temporary rest in an onyx ashtray.

“I'll bury it when we go down.”

A dwindling pot of lackluster ferns by the entrance hall had perked up and flourished ever since its services had been requisitioned as burial grounds.

“Thanks for carrying the stuff up, yaar,” Manek said apologetically, suddenly remembering to acknowledge Jamil's help.

“No problem.”

Pulling down his glasses to rest on the tip of his nose, Manek looked severely over them at Feroza. “The family'd better learn to travel light if they want to come to America. There are no coolies here to carry memsahib's trunks up and down on their heads. If Jamil and I develop hernias and premature prostate conditions, it will be because of your ridiculous luggage.”

“Come on, yaar, it wasn't so bad.”

Jamil stole a quick glance at Feroza. Like any well-brought-up sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl, she pretended not to notice.

“I had to lug the bloody things from Kennedy to the YMCA in New York and then here.”

Feroza removed her beret and, with a toss of her head, uncoiled the braids she had tied in an untidy knot at the back. “I offered to help. But you always have to prove you're so goddamn strong.”

Manek thought Feroza sounded too cheerful and, considering how much he had put himself through for her sake — meeting her at the airport, showing her around New York, carrying her luggage — ungrateful and disgustingly smug.

“And what would you have done? Put your hand on your back, and said, ‘Oh, Manek, my back is breaking, the suitcase is too heavy. Oh, Manek, massage my back.'” Manek affected the girlish falsetto and the exaggerated delicacy he favored when he chose to impersonate a spoiled-brat Feroza.

Feroza sprang up to aim a kick at his shins, and her uncle nimbly skipped aside. “Hey! I'm still bruised from your last kick … What will Jamil think of your ‘hoydenish' behavior?”

None of them was sure what the word meant. Jamil swiftly shifted his darkly admiring eyes from the spirited girl.

“I know exactly how to behave, and how to behave with whom!” Feroza stood hands on hips, tossing her stubby braids and cockily facing her uncle.

To see the determined pose patented by his mother and sister incarnated in his niece, whose behavior had grown alarmingly like theirs in the three years he'd been away, shocked and intimidated Manek. He moved closer to the precariously placed tank of goldfish, crossed his legs, and affected nonchalantly to lean against it. Each muscle tensed in the effort, Manek wondered what surprises his niece might treat him to next.

“You should've seen the kick I gave that fellow at Al-falah Cinema,” Feroza continued, oblivious of Manek's complex reaction to her ebullient posture. “He had his collar up — trying to look all smart and gangee. A regular Bhattigate type, you know strutting up and down like a hero. He'd pass that close to us,” Feroza held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart, “and every time he'd go ‘pooch-pooch'!” Feroza puckered her lips and imitated the kissing sound. “I kicked him you-know-where! Another fellow there said, ‘Oh, you shouldn't have done that!' But all my school friends said, ‘Why not? She did absolutely right. He deserved it!' I think they had to take him to Gangaram hospital.”

Manek was acutely embarrassed. His niece had not only made the obscene noise and publicly referred to the unfortunate ruffian's anatomy but had also intimated she knew exactly how vulnerable what she'd kicked was. And he was shaken by the chilling endorsement of the brutality by her friends from the Convent of the Sacred Heart. If Pakistani girls taught by nuns were so vicious, what about the rest of the species?

Manek had no difficulty empathizing with the poor fellow. After all the man had only made kissing noises — not actually kissed any one of them. And who could blame the guy for acting a little fresh? It was perhaps the closest he could get to necking with an
“uptown girl” in the Bhattigate social context. But for the grace of God, he thought — not, of course, in his sophisticated new American persona but as a callow, pre-America youth.

Observing the painful emotions coloring and contorting Manek's features, and guessing part of the reason for his discomfiture, Feroza folded her knees and abruptly sat down on the mattress. She had gone too far. Finding herself awash in this exhilaratingly free and new culture had made her forget the strictures imposed on her conduct as a Pakistani girl. Reacting typically to her guilt and confusion, she raised her chin, dropped haughty lids over her amber eyes, and, turning scarlet, stared imperiously at the attic paneling.

Languid gaze averted, avid ears nevertheless tuned in, Jamil also blushed. His admiration had quadrupled. Here was the kind of girl he could die for. Join the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and shoot missiles from his shoulders at the Russian planes for. Dedicate his life to. This girl knew the true meaning of courage and honor the way a girl should!

And she was beautiful.

Taking note of Manek's embarrassment, and appreciating also the reasons for his sensitive friend's chameleonlike changes in color, Jamil made some excuse about preparing dinner and left the attic.

Manek sullenly showed Feroza where to put her things.

While Feroza unpacked, trying to stuff as much as she could in the space he had cleared for her in his makeshift closet and chest of drawers, Manek turned his back on her and scowled at the goldfish.

“Manek, look at all the stuff your sister and mother have sent you,” Feroza exclaimed.

Manek briefly glanced over his shoulder. There was a pile of books, hand-knitted garments, and parcels neatly wrapped in newspaper. There was Feroza's wistful, almost penitent face looking up at him, aching to make peace.

“Leave it all in one place,” Manek directed coldly and resumed his abstracted and glum scrutiny of the fish.

Feroza appeared to have lost the bit of deference he had
managed to wrest from her in Pakistan. In the time he'd been away, and in the short while she'd been exposed to the American culture, she'd grown shockingly brazen. She had also been disrespectful and un-niecelike before his friend.

And she interrupted him! He thought with chagrin about a fault he had already fretted about in New York. When he'd tried to explain something seriously, she'd cut in with a wisecrack or change the subject. Now, every time he spoke to Jamil, she hijacked the conversation.

Manek regretted his consideration in not drawing her attention to this intolerable habit earlier. He'd thought he must not crowd her with his advice, but she needed to be crowded with as much advice as he could cram into her.

He'd taken the knocks, learned his lessons the hard way, and here she was, being spoon-fed the beneficent fruit of his experience, he reflected bitterly.

Manek recalled the stony expressions of professors as they looked away whenever he tried to correct someone who was giving wrong answers in class. How icily they had looked down their noses at him afterwards. Nobody had told him that Americans felt so strongly about interruptions. He'd had to find it out for himself.

Manek brooded darkly on ways to improve Feroza's manners and tame her behavior. He'd have to guide her, explain things no matter how much she resented it, no matter how persistent he'd have to be. He knew it would no longer do to crack his whip, even figuratively, and say, “You must learn to respect your uncle. You must learn to listen. I've lived six years longer than you,” as he could, with a real whip, when they were children. Manek yearned for her respect and, even if he didn't acknowledge it to himself, her awe and admiration.

Manek's eye caught the poster of Bhutto that Feroza had hung from a nail on the paneling. She had removed the landlord's small, framed sketch to do so and was in the process of smoothing out the curl in the paper.

“If you hang that socialist bastard on my wall, I'll tear him to bits,” Manek said in a level voice that scared Feroza.

“Okay baba, okay,” she said and quietly rolled up the poster and tucked it back into its cardboard cylinder.

That afternoon, after they had feasted on a dish of lamb-hamburger and peas thoughtfully prepared for them by Jamil, Manek decided to drive his niece across the Charles river in his fifth-hand, two-door 1971 Ford convertible.

The foam stuffing showed through small, angular gashes in the upholstery, and the passenger door was permanently fastened with entwined wire. Jamil vaulted into the back, and Feroza, muffled up in overcoat and scarf, had to slide into her seat from the driver's side.

“So, how do you like my car?” Manek inquired of Feroza.

He sounded so hearty that Jamil, who had wondered if the afternoon's unpleasantness had been smoothed over, relaxed, and Feroza, who knew Manek better, at once became alert.

“I bought it for sixty dollars from the girl who gave me the goldfish.”

“We-ell,” Feroza said warily, trying to be both honest and tactful, “It's certainly bigger than your room, if nothing else.”

“You shouldn't judge things merely by their outward appearance. Appearances are deceptive. Listen to the engine. Even an idiot like you should be able to tell the car's okay for another thirty thousand miles at least. I'm not a fool … I've more experience than —”

“Nobody's calling you a fool, baba.”

“There you go, interrupting again. You won't even let me finish a sentence. I don't know when you desis will learn good manners. If there's —”

“What do you mean, ‘you desis'! What're you? A German?”

Manek lifted both hands from the steering wheel in a gesture combining exasperation and disgust.

Feroza, who had a mind to express herself more fully, curbed her speech.

After a half-minute of absolute silence, Manek said, “As I was
saying, if there's one thing Americans won't stand, it's being interrupted. It's impolite. It's obnoxious. You've got to learn to listen. You can't cut into a conversation just as you like. You'll be humiliated. Learn from someone who knows what he's talking about.”

And Manek's tone of voice and choice of words finally declared to Feroza all the pent-up hurt within him and the pressures he had been subjected to, not only that afternoon, not only since she'd arrived from Pakistan, but since Manek had arrived in America.

She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. His neck appeared thin and fragile beneath his curly mop of overgrown hair. His wide, bony wrists stuck out from his shirt and jacket. The lean line of his jaw, covered by slight stubble, looked uncertain.

Feroza's heart went out to him. She could only guess at how he had been taught American ways, American manners. He must have endured countless humiliations. And his experiences — the positive and the humiliating — had affected him, changed him not on the surface but fundamentally.

Manek had told her about the accident late one night in New York. They were both in their respective beds, and Feroza, who thought she would drift off to sleep as she usually did when Manek talked at night, found herself listening.

Manek had spent a weekend with a Pakistani friend in Southbridge, near the Connecticut-Massachusetts border. Walking to the bus stop, which was at a gas station on a country road, he had lost his way in the dark. A car had hit him and sped away. He was severely bruised, his ribs and elbow broken. He had lain there in the snow. The few cars that went past, their headlights shining, did not stop. He had walked six hours to get to a hospital.

This had happened almost a year ago, but he had not written home about it. It would only worry his mother. Feroza guessed that it had been more an assertion of his fierce need for independence — the challenge to cope, to fend for himself — than any inordinate concern for Khutlibai.

Sitting by him in the run-down car, Feroza recalled also how his face had shone when he told her of his travels, hitchhiking
across America with a friend. It was his first summer in the States, and he was still at the University of Houston. They'd visited the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, the caves in New Mexico. And the kindness of the people they'd met.