An American Brat (19 page)

“Yes, but,” Jeroo chimed in, and winding a long string of pearls round a manicured finger, she stayed with their main concern, “what about schoolgirls and boys having sex as casually as if they're shaking hands? And the terrible muggings and rape? Na, baba, I'd prefer to keep my Dara safely in Pakistan, foreign-education or no foreign-education!”

The round-shouldered, bespectacled, and serious fourteen-year-old, sitting next to his father, looked startled and dismayed, his dreams of travel abroad abruptly shattered.

“Don't listen to what everybody says,” Manek said, considerately looking at both Jeroo and Behram. “You can live as morally or immorally as you want. I'll tell you something though —”

Manek leaned forward conspiratorially and cast furtive eyes at the door. Behram at once locked the door. The family, too, edged forward on their chairs and sofas, and those tucked away in corners took quick strides to settle cross-legged on the Persian rug at Manek's feet. Satisfied that no undesirable person was likely to overhear him, Manek parted with his breathless secret:

“America is Paradise!'

The expression on his face, the awed tone of his voice, the energy that seemed to emanate in a glow of happiness from him convinced them of the truth of his statement and, without him needing to spell it out, communicated his fear: that the riffraff would take any means of transport available and fly, sail, swim, walk, or ride to swamp the New World by the millions from China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh once they knew how wealthy America was, and in how many ways a paradise.

“Now wait a minute,” interjected Cyrus's portly brother Rohinton, his attitude still hostile from the quip about his wife's red handbag and the crude allusions to her marvellous bosoms. “I have also been to the United States. You are reacting like a new convert, exaggerating the good points and ignoring the faults.”

Rohinton looked round the room, gathering with his challenging eyes a consensus for his opinion. His glance came to rest on Cyrus. Cyrus sat with his long legs casually stuck out. He acknowledged his brother's gaze pleasantly but with reserve. How could he validate Rohinton's statement: he had never been to America. Besides, it had been a long day and he was not up to rocking the overloaded family boat.

“But you haven't lived there,” Manek said. He stood up from his perch between Khutlibai and Zareen to take up the challenge. Sliding his hands into the side pockets of his comfortable kurta, he said, “You haven't gone to college there. You are only speaking of impressions!”

Freny nudged her husband to keep quiet. It was Manek's evening, and he was still glowing from the secret he had divulged for their benefit.

“Of course, you have to know the system,” Manek continued and, shifting his eyes from Rohinton, turned on his heels to survey his audience and be surveyed by them. “You have to learn to function within it, otherwise you can have a hard time, like I did in the beginning. But if you want to understand what makes America tick, if you want to ‘succeed,' you have to go when you're young and get your higher education there. It's difficult for an old dog to learn new tricks — you'll be like a fish out of water and lose all your money like thousands of other middle-aged and muddled-headed desis already have!”

Manek was by now speaking from the heady confidence of his just-returned status, the feel of his hands in the pockets of his starched kurta, and the lightheadedness of jet lag.

The older dogs pursed grim mouths, projected defiant jaws, and prepared to bare their fangs. But they were quickly restrained by warning looks and surreptitiously applied pressures and nudges from their various wives.

Judging that he might have been a bit tactless, Manek smoothly shifted gears and gave an account of the mistakes he had made and the hardships he had endured. He told them about his accident in New England and that he had not written home
about it in order to spare his mother. And when the approving murmurs had subsided, Manek gave an account of the humiliation and privation he'd endured in the South as a Bible salesman.

None of them had any idea how impossible it was to live on the income the State Bank of Pakistan allowed a student. Manek knew that at the conversion rate of fourteen rupees to the dollar, it was a princely sum by Pakistani standards. The family probably thought he was living like a prince in America. Not at all. He was living like a pauper. Why else would he, who was considered a heathen in the Bible Belt, sell Bibles? Perjure his soul by lying that he was a Christian? And sometimes risk his life against attacks from farm animals? “You can't imagine how tight-fisted and difficult some of those farm people are,” he explained.

Manek had taken an intensive three-day sales course in the basement of the Peach Tree Hotel in Atlanta one summer. The course was offered free, and he had toiled with forty other ambitious potential Bible salespersons and shared a cramped motel room with one of them.

What had made his discomfort intolerable was the ubiquitous and intrusive presence of the Indian family of Patels who owned the motel. Manek knew that the Gujrati Indians, almost all of them named Patel, owned sixty percent of the motel business in the South; it did not surprise him that one of them should own the one he was staying in.

In fact, because of the shared last name and the staggering number of motels owned by the Patels, the police in California had at one time suspected that they were an Indian version of the Mafia. Why else would anyone bother to acquire an unrewarding chain of seedy motels?

A year of surveillance had revealed to the California Crime Detection Agency that the Patels were a particularly docile community. They often pooled the money they brought from India to buy the motels and, by working long and hard hours, turned a modest profit from the business. The only violence they could be accused of were stray and unverifiable instances of self-inflicted
injury — harmless but rather vicious-looking wounds and neatly fractured bones — that enabled them to file claims and live off insurance for a while. They were not above an occasional case of motel arson for the same purpose. For the most part, their crimes were petty and limited to the white collar variety: fiddling with accounts, pilfering from cash-boxes, and cheating on tax. Some indulged in a bit of pimping to supplement their frugal motel incomes.

The moment Manek opened his mouth and spoke, the Atlanta Patels could tell from his distinctive accent that he was a Parsee. Their well-meaning interest in a stranger who shared their language irked Manek. Especially in view of his strained circumstances and the duplicitous nature of the path he was embarked upon as a Zoroastrian selling Bibles.

Exhausted at the end of the second day of the course, Manek pretended a headache to avoid another invitation to supper.

“It will be a simple, vegetarian meal,” the older Mrs. Patel had declared the night before. Manek had no reason to doubt her word.

But the announcement of a headache misfired. It brought a pack of six Patels flocking to his aid, vocalizing between them six different kinds of medical advice, and Manek's headache threatened to bloom into a full-blown attack of neuralgia.

The eldest Mrs. Patel declared that a headache could be caused by an empty stomach; it would disappear after dinner. If it didn't, he should rub his temples with Tiger Balm or Deep Heat. The youngest Mrs. Patel cross-examined him to see if he had assaulted his stomach with junk food.

Manek confessed he had eaten a cheese and bacon hamburger.

A firm believer in an Aruvedic theory that the root of all ailments lay in abused and malfunctioning stomachs, the younger Mrs. Patel offered to bring him easop-gol. “It's a miracle fiber,” she declared, touting the redoubtable virtues of the humble husk. “Mix one tablespoon of the husks in a glass of water — it'll turn into a kind of jelly — and drink it at once. It'll cure you if you have
a runny tummy, and it'll cure you if you are corked.”

One reflective patriarch, caste marks accentuating the lines on his forehead, counseled that the best cure for headaches was to walk barefoot on the grass in the early morning dew, and a rakish fellow in baggy jeans suggested that there was nothing as effective as a strong dose of Scotch.

Their Indian slippers slapping the hall floors, there arrived a twittering and contentious pair of middle-aged Patels. Talking alternately and together, their mouths red with the betel-leaf paans they were chomping on, they advised Manek to:

Soak his feet in warm water.

Cold water.

Tie a handkerchief tight round his head.

Place a hot water bottle on his forehead.

An ice-pack over his eyelids.

Take an aspirin and lie flat on his back in a darkened room.

However, the Patels all agreed that the worst possible thing was to retire on an empty stomach.

By the end of the unforeseen consultation, Manek had a raging headache. Unable to withstand the onslaught of the pain or the Patels, he docilely sat down to dinner and wondered if they would rely on friends and kin instead of doctors even when one of them was mortally ill.

At the end of the course, relieved at last to be finished and also rid of the Patels, Manek drove a beat-up truck to sundry small towns and farms in Georgia and the Carolinas with the gilt-edged Bibles.

At each town, Manek called on the Baptist minister, ferreting out the names and incomes of the families most likely to buy the Bible and the locations of motels not owned by flocks of Patels.

Armed with nothing but his briefcase and the information he had garnered from the ministers, Manek braved a hellish menagerie of farm dogs and stray bulls to push the door bells of his wary and bleak eyed potential customers.

Once the door was opened, Manek wedged his toe in the threshold as he'd been advised to and disarmed the hostile
potential customer by asking, “Are you Mrs. So-and-so? The Reverend So-and-so, of this-or-that-church, told me that you were a family of practicing Christians with good Christian values, and that I might call on you.”

If he was not invited in at this point, he would ask for a glass of plain water.

Once he was ensconced in the kitchen with his briefcase and his glass of water, Manek might inquire: “How is little Jim (or Bill or Barbara) doing? Have you started him on solids?” Or remark: “The Reverend told me Kevin is a mighty smart boy for his age.” And, as the mother (or mother and father) preened, he'd drive the nail home with a coy, “Like his parents, I believe …”

At some point, Manek would say: “I took the God-given opportunity provided by this Bible (a casual wave of his hand in the direction of his briefcase) to drive through your beautiful countryside and meet you good folk.”

After dropping this enigmatic hint, Manek would talk of everything — the drought, the flood, their children, the produce, local politics, farm subsidies — of everything but the Bibles. The more time he spent with the confused, bemused, and bewildered family, the more hope there was of a sale.

At strategic moments Manek might request another plain glass of water and be rewarded by a hearty meal instead. He chalked this up as a plus, second only to a sale. But sometimes the door was heartlessly slammed in his face, and he was left to fend off the farm dogs as best as he could with his briefcase and the bulls by leaping over fences. A pit bull had latched on to his haunches in Arkansas, and a terrier to his ankle in Louisville.

Sometime past midnight, when the women in Khutlibai's drawing-room began to sniff and discreetly wipe the tears from their eyes and even the men were not dry-eyed, Manek once again skillfully shifted gears and talked to the assembly about his triumphs.

It is to Manek's credit as a raconteur and as a compelling purveyor of dreams that no one yawned. With rapt and serious
faces, the family listened to his plans for his future in America. And when Manek solemnly announced that he had come to Pakistan to marry a Parsee girl and take her with him to America, the familiar faces brightened and their smiles and nods conveyed the measure of their gratification and approval.

“I've told my Dara, and I'm telling him again in front of all of you,” Jeroo declared, showing the pale palms of her hands and speaking in English. “When he goes for foreign education he can have whatever fun he wants. But when he wants to marry, it must be to a Zarathusti. He will be happy only with a Parsee. Isn't that so?” Jeroo, the assiduous supervisor of her children's homework, had been reassured by Manek's views on marriage and had undergone another change of heart. She looked appealing at Manek.

Khutlibai, in her role as matriarch, felt duty-bound to buttress her daughter-in-law's sentiment. “Even if we have to drill this into our children's heads a thousand times, it will never be enough.”

Manek nodded, looked gravely at the round-backed adolescent squirming on his seat beside his father, and said, “I'll keep an eye on Dara when he comes to the Yoo Ess of Ay — as we say in America. Don't worry.”

Jeroo made the traditional circling motion with her jeweled hands and cracked her dainty knuckles on her temples to ward off any evil to the paragon. Reverting to Gujrati, she said, “May I die for you. You might be the youngest, but you're such a good influence on the children; a fine example for them to follow.”

The faces circling Manek beamed with admiration and racial pride, their faith in the future of their minuscule community affirmed by the decision of this scion of the Junglewalla family, the unlikely standard bearer of noble tradition. And with his ready offer to keep an eye on Dara, Manek was proving himself a champion of their community's future.

The sleepy-eyed cook, Kalay Khan, refilled the empty glasses. The wide-awake and excited kinsmen and kinswomen raised frothing beer mugs to their lips and drank loud and flattering toasts to Manek's courage and wisdom in breaking new ground and
exploring noteworthy frontiers, and they inwardly congratulated themselves that he had, after all, turned out quite well for one who had shown so little promise.