An American Brat (14 page)

“You don't need to pay,” the manager said, a dangerous inflection making his voice hum with menace. “Get out.”

The manager took a small step, and his hand darted to the back of Manek's chair.

For a split second, Manek looked confused. Then he shot up like a startled goose just as the manager yanked the chair out from under him.

Convinced all eyes in the room had witnessed their humiliation, her face flaming and head bent, Feroza quickly followed Manek out.

“I've never been so humiliated in all my life!” Feroza said as they scrambled into the car.

Manek remained quiet.

It was only after they had merged with the traffic on Sturrow Drive and were coasting along beside the Charles River that Manek deigned to speak.

“The first lesson you learn in life is to be humble. If you weren't so proud, you wouldn't feel so humiliated, and you'd have enjoyed the wonderful dinner.”

Manek's profile was as unrepentant and clear as the sunny faces of the students in the boats bobbing on the Charles.

“These people are so damn rich that one little steak won't matter to them.” Manek did not sound bitter, only quasi-profound.

Feroza had been the recipient of this quasi-profundity quite frequently of late, and she listened to him with mounting irritation.

“You've got to skim what you can off the system, otherwise the
system will skin you. I learned this the hard way,” said Manek the Sage. “After the accident, I had only the tuition money. Hardly any insurance. It would've taken our family seven generations to pay the hospital bills. It taught me many things. It's lucky for you I've taken the knocks and you're reaping the rewards. I'm giving you a crash course. It's the best way to get over culture shock. Pampering only prolongs the agony. I didn't have anyone to take my hand and guide me and say, ‘Look, sweetie, this is how you open a wrapper, and this is how you open a jar!' But you're young, you can be molded. You'll do all right if you learn humility.”

About a week before their departure for Twin Falls, Manek observed Feroza licking the rice off her fingers in an Indian restaurant. He looked at her until she became aware of his gaze. “You've got to stop eating with your fingers,” he said. “It makes them sick.”

And, in her last three days in Cambridge, he banned the practice even when they were alone, overriding her protests by saying, “It's all very nice and cozy to be ‘ethnic' when we're together, but those people won't find it ‘ethnic,' they'll just puke.”

Had he prepared her enough? Had he overlooked something vital? Could anyone be prepared enough? He'd done the best he could. Once Feroza lived with Americans, she'd recall everything he'd taught her quick enough. She'd learn a lot besides.

Twin Falls and the local junior college were exactly as Manek had imagined them. The small-town atmosphere on campus was genial, relaxed, and wholesome. Feroza wouldn't find it too difficult to cope, considering the crash-course in American survival she had been subjected to — and the surprising capacity for adaptation she had revealed.

Feroza was hurt. Why did everybody refer to her college as school? Once she had taken her matric exam she had hoped to be rid of school forever. Was a junior college then merely an extension of school and not a college? She was also quite bewildered by the profusion of buildings and roads and had no sense of where she was most of the time.

Manek explained that in America people referred to even Harvard and M.I.T. as “schools,” and he assured her she would find her way blindfolded in a few days.

The counselor smiled and stood up when Feroza and Manek entered her small, sun-bright office crowded with files and books. “You must be the new Pakistani student. I'm Emily Simms,” she said, extending her hand. She looked admiringly at Feroza's embroidered shirt and came round her desk to examine it. “Now isn't that pretty?”

The alert, short, and comfortably slender woman put Feroza at ease at once. Feroza guessed she must be her mother's age. After a few pleasant remarks, Emily said, “We don't get many foreign students, but we do have a few. We sure are happy to have you with us. Once you've adjusted and know your way around, I think you'll enjoy Southern Idaho College and Twin Falls. It's not a very large town, but it's safe and everybody's friendly.” The counselor smiled, responding affectionately to Feroza's eager expression.

“That's why I selected the college for her,” said the solemn
uncle. “We come from a conservative background, Mrs. Simms, and I think my niece will be happy here.”

“We'll do our best,” said the counselor. “Anytime you have a problem, just come right in and we'll sort it out.”

Emily tucked Feroza's arm beneath her protective wing and walked them to the neat, two-storied brick-and-glass dormitory. Feroza found its simple straight lines elegant and architecturally satisfying.

The counselor introduced them to Jo, Feroza's roommate. Jo had a large, sullen face and a wary, hostile air that prompted Manek to take Feroza aside and anxiously warn, “Watch out for your valuables. Be careful with her. You don't have to be rude, but don't get too cozy right away. She could be a bad influence.”

How bad, Feroza was soon to discover. She often wondered what Manek would have done had he known. As it was, Jo had burst into the room a few minutes later to shout furiously, “What the fuck! The damn toilet flooded when I flushed!”

Manek had just left to buy something from the campus bookstore, otherwise Feroza might have had to listen to more words of dire warning.

Feroza was more surprised, though, by Manek's blushing unease in Jo's presence when he took them both to lunch at a small Mexican restaurant. He was diffident and embarrassingly anxious to make a good impression on the large, unsmiling girl. Wisps of blond hair escaping from a ponytail and tickling her face, Jo chewed gum and looked at them with an insouciance that bordered on disdain. “Where are y'all from — Mexico?” she asked eventually and appeared to unbend a little when Manek told her they were from Pakistan. Feroza was flattered to be mistaken for a Mexican.

After this clarification, Jo began responding to Manek's questions with more than just a monosyllable. And when she cracked an unaccustomed social smile, Manek became so touchingly pleased that Feroza realized the dimensions of the gora complex that constantly challenged his brown Pakistani psyche. And he'd been so prompt to accuse Feroza of her awe of the whites!

Manek spent three days at a motel near the campus, helping Feroza during the orientation. He stood in line to collect forms and helped get her registered. He bought the prescribed books, paid her college and board fees, and opened a bank account in her name. They explored the campus, visited the library and the dorm laundry, checked out the classrooms, and met some of Feroza's teachers. Saying, “Where do you want this socialist crook strung up?” Manek even helped hang Bhutto's large poster on the wall next to Feroza's bed.

After instructing Feroza on all matters he could think of, Manek gravely requested her lumpish and indifferent roommate to look after her. “Could you help her with the laundry if something goes wrong with the machines? I've shown her once or twice, but she is a bit confused. Would you also show her where to get things?”

Jo nodded briefly and said, “Yeah,” with all the enthusiasm of a cat charged with training a pup that has not been housebroken.

By the time Manek finally called for the taxi to take him to the airport, it was clear that he had changed his mind somewhat about Jo. His parting words to Feroza were, “You're lucky you've not been palmed off with some Japanese or Egyptian roommate. Jo's a real American; she'll teach you more than I can. Just remember everything I've told you. Don't become ‘ethnic' and eat with your fingers in the dorm. And don't butt in when someone's talking.”

Feroza had occasion to think of his words often.

Jo and Feroza gingerly accustomed themselves to each other's presence. Their initial conversations were hesitant, peppered with long, perplexed pauses, as each unconsciously studied the other's facial expressions and body gestures to determine the more exact meaning of what was said. Every time Jo spoke, Feroza looked at her with startled, anxious eyes. Jo sounded as if she were either quarreling or stolidly holding the lid on her irritation. Feroza took extra pains not to interrupt when Jo was talking — which sometimes led to complex and baffling pauses.

Sensing that she might be giving out the wrong signals, Jo
took care to keep her expression neutral. This gave Jo's deadpan face an inscrutable quality that made Feroza even more nervous. She took to furtively applying deodorant several times a day.

On the other hand, when Feroza spoke, Jo wondered if Feroza was being sarcastic or pulling her leg by mimicking some fancy British actress on public television. She couldn't believe that people actually said things like, “Do you mind if I turn off the light?” or, “Is it all right if I read? I wouldn't want to disturb you.”

Feroza sounded mannered even to herself sometimes. She couldn't help it. It was the only way she knew to speak English with foreigners. The English she used while speaking to her friends in Lahore was informal because it had a mixture of Urdu and Punjabi words tossed in for emphasis, expression, or comic effect. When she talked to Manek, her intonation and accent also changed — not to mention the blithe bounce of the Gujrati idiom that popped into her English. But she could hardly speak to Jo that way. Jo would understand neither the syntax nor the pronunciation and would find her even more “foreign” and tedious than she perhaps already did.

It was almost like learning a new language, and both sometimes wondered if the other knew enough English.

Jo had more of an inkling of what was happening and a notion of what Feroza might be up against, talking and dressing the way she did.

By late October, the cold was beginning to hurt Feroza. She dreaded going outdoors and avoided any excursion that might take her even a few blocks from her dorm or classrooms.

She did not know how to manage her clothes. If she insulated herself adequately by wearing Manek's long woolen underwear, two pairs of socks, and a polo-neck sweater she sweated miserably in the heated classrooms and almost fainted. If she dressed to be comfortable in class, the red overcoat and red beret afforded little protection against the icy gusts that cut through her inadequate clothing to her skin, making her so cold that she got frightening cramps in her chest and legs.

One blustery afternoon as Feroza trudged bent and dismal behind Jo to a Walmart near the campus, she fancied the wind was an enemy that lurked around corners and deliberately sprang at her to make her teeth chatter, her nose drip, and her hands and feet turn numb and blue. It did not seem to affect anyone else the way it did her.

Brooding darkly along these lines, Feroza miserably allowed Jo to open the door for her and went into the store mumbling a bleak, “Thank you.” She stamped her feet and, removing her gloves, breathed on her hands and on the glass bangles that felt like icy manacles binding her wrists and forearms.

Once she had thawed herself and removed her coat, they meandered to the warm heart of the store, where the following exchange took place between Feroza and the middle-aged, wiry little saleswoman behind the cosmetics counter.

“Can I have a look at some of those hair sprays, please?”

The glass bangles on her arms jingling, Feroza pointed at an array of hair sprays in a window behind the saleswoman. The name tag pinned to the saleswoman's pink-and-gray striped uniform read “Sally.”

“Sure you can, honey. Look all you want,” said Sally, busy with the cash register.

Feroza colored and said, “I mean, can I see some of them up close?”

Sally looked her up and down suspiciously as if measuring the degree of her “foreignness.” She got off the stool behind her register, performing the feat as if descending a mountain, plonked three brands of hair spray on the glass shelf before Feroza, and climbed back to her busy seat.

Feroza read the labels on each and, holding the can she had selected timidly forth, nervously adjusting the shawl that had slid off her shoulder, ventured, “May I have this, please?”

“You may not. You'll have to pay for it. This isn't the Salvation Army, y'know; it's a drugstore.”

Jo had registered the look the saleswoman gave Feroza and her rude behavior and had followed the exchange between them
with mounting indignation and an increasingly threatening scowl. Used to Feroza's mode of dress and more accustomed by now to her manner of speaking and asking for things, she felt Sally had been unpardonably ill-mannered and bullying. She intervened protectively, “Stop pickin' on her just because she's a foreigner! Here, lemme handle this,” Jo said, pushing Feroza aside. “How much d'ya want?” she asked and belligerently unzipped her little wallet.

After she had collected the receipt and the parcel, Jo said to the saleswoman, “You got a problem with your attitude. You have to do something about that.”

The saleswoman pursed her mouth and grimly turned her face.

Jo, who had set out to provoke her and whose face had brightened at the prospect of a battle in which the customer is always advantaged, drifted off, contenting herself by loudly remarking, “Stupid bitch!” and to Feroza, “Y'gotta learn! You don't have to take shit from trash like her!”

Jo took to dropping her jaw and saying to Feroza, “Are you for real? You don't have to always tell the truth, y'know!” or “You can't talk like that. They'll stomp all over you,” and took charge of Feroza's life.

Feroza's Pakistani outfits and outrageously dangling earrings were banished to her suitcase and her wardrobe replenished by another pair of jeans to supplement the pair she had purchased at Bloomingdale's and some T-shirts, sweaters, and blouses. But no matter what Jo said, Feroza could not bring herself to wear skirts. Instead she bought a pair of pleated woolen slacks for more formal occasions.

“What's the matter with your legs?” Jo asked one evening when Feroza had, as usual, dexterously removed her clothes and wrapped herself up in her robe without revealing any part of her anatomy. “Are they crooked or fat or something? Lemme see.”

Jo lunged across the space between their beds and swept
aside the flap of Feroza's robe. Feroza sat stunned, legs bared to the thighs, blushing. It required a monumental effort on her part not to draw together the flaps of her robe.

“There's nothing wrong with them,” said Jo in surprise. “Why d'you keep them hidden?” She pantomimed Feroza's furtive gestures.

“It's not decent to show your legs in Pakistan,” Feroza said. Recalling the Punjabi movie she had seen before leaving, she used it as an example to explain her culture to Jo. The prancing heroine had tantalizingly lifted her sari to mid-calf and, after a coy look, let it fall; the entire audience had burst into a chorus of whistles and catcalls.

From the very first day they started sharing the room, Jo's utter abandon where her large, white body was concerned had alarmed and embarrassed Feroza. When Jo undressed, Feroza would turn away on some pretext to her desk or run her hand over Bhutto's poster to iron out its creases. When Jo talked to her in a state of semi- or entire nudity, Feroza averted her eyes or stared fixedly into Jo's.

In fact, going to the washroom in the mornings was an ordeal for Feroza. Wrapped from neck to toe in her maroon robe, eyes downcast, Feroza darted to one of the unused washbasins with her toilet bag. Acutely aware of the freshly showered, gleaming bodies in various stages of undress, Feroza splashed her face, brushed her teeth, and slipped out as quickly and quietly as she had entered.

Then, at odd hours, towel in hand, Feroza lurked in the lobby leading to the washroom. She bathed only when she was sure she could lock the door and have the entire washroom to herself. Since this requirement could be met only at some unearthly hour of the night, she rarely bathed during the day.

Occasionally Feroza caught herself imagining those pink bodies, gently tracing the silken curves of the breasts, feeling the soft weight of the flesh in her hands. Sometimes she wanted to hold and be held by those soft bodies as ardently as she had dreamed of being held by the fully clothed, hard, brown bodies of the men
she had had crushes on in Lahore.

Mortified and shaken by this new aspect of her desires, Feroza tried to suppress these images. She deliberately called up the attractive faces and bodies of various young men and summoned the emotions aroused in her by them. By diligently nurturing the once-familiar passions that had shamed her so much then and now appeared blameless, she succeeded in banishing the baffling and forbidden images from her mind.