An American Brat (21 page)

No one, though, would have guessed it from her conduct. Paradoxically, she was for the most part confused and awkward and so overwhelmed by the activity going on around her, the waves of confident new students' faces and the maze of buildings, that she retreated like a timid clam into her haughty shell.

She latched onto Jo fiercely, like a child, and even regressed sometimes to holding her hand or hanging onto her shirt. Jo, with her innate familial and domestic impulses, was indulgent and tolerant.

For the first few weeks, the girls went to Boulder over the weekends, but soon Jo became less and less inclined to visit her parents. One fall weekend, Jo took her sleeping bag and backpack and went camping in the mountains to view the foliage with some new friends. Feroza had been transported by the fiery colors of the trees. She had not expected this blazing beauty in trees that had looked so commonplace in summer. She yearned to steep herself in the magic of the leaves and abandon herself to the wilderness with Jo. Jo had invited Feroza to go along, but shy at the thought of exposing her sensibility to strangers, resentful of their claim on Jo's time, Feroza made an excuse and backed out at the last minute. Jo did not press her as she might have in Twin Falls. Feroza, though she did not admit it even to herself or fathom the jumble of reasons why, was terribly hurt.

One afternoon the following week, Jo burst in through the apartment door, excited as of old, hollering, “Feroza! Feroza! Hey, listen to this. I'm goin' on a diet!”

“So, what's new?” Feroza asked, shuffling dispiritedly into their tiny living room, blurry-eyed and in her robe. She had in mind Jo's recurrent resolutions to go on a variety of diets in Twin Falls.

These resolutions had followed a cyclic orbit something like this:

Fantastic new guy, a fireworks of passion, pledges of eternal love. Diet.

Eternal love waning by the end of the month; Prince Charming transformed into a douchebag. Diet kicked in the teeth.

Compensatory eating binges, horror about weight gained, frenzy of passion with fantastic new love. New diet.

“This time it's different,” Jo said, triumphantly hoisting a large packet from Walgreens above her head. “I'm gonna stick with the plan. I've just seen the doctor. He's gonna help me.”

“This time you must,” encouraged Feroza.

Jo stuck with the diet: little packets and potions of protein drinks, and pathetic morsels of prescribed foods. By the end of the month, Feroza was impressed by Jo's persistence and her regular visits with the doctor and became more encouraging.

Feroza found herself on her own much of the time as a perceptibly shrinking Jo cavorted with new-found confidence and new friends. Had it not been for Shashi's determined advent into her life, Feroza might have clung longer to the umbilical cord by which she had attached herself to Jo.

A sinewy and outrageously gregarious youth from India, Shashi was a year ahead of Feroza in the hotel management program. Intrigued by the attractive new girl from his part of the world and by the challenge her haughty reserve represented, Shashi had persisted in talking to her after the English class they shared twice a week.

Shashi had a lean, handsome, dark brown face and a tangle of straight eyelashes that cast a deceptively somnolent veil over his inquisitive eyes. He penetrated Feroza's reserve in a matter of days, as he knew he would. Not that Shashi came by this confidence through any conceit; it was only natural for people to respond to his indefatigable interest in them. Shashi's readiness to accept people without reservations made him a cherished companion, and he collected friends as one gathers bouquets of wildflowers from mountain slopes in springtime.

Shashi gave Feroza his notes and copies of the assignments
and term papers he had completed the previous year. He also introduced her to his spiraling circle of Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Tibetan, Pakistani, Indian, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, black, and white friends.

For Feroza it was like stepping through Alice's wonderful mirror. Each day brought the gift of a tentative new friendship, a provocative bit of knowledge, a mad burst of pure laughter. It wasn't that Shashi or his friends were so funny; rather, something locked within Feroza opened up, allowing her access to happier places within herself.

And this shift in perspective was taking place in her mind as well. Her impulse to acquire knowledge, to figure out things, was stimulated by her studies, challenged by discussions among her new friends, by the books Shashi recommended or loaned her. She ventured into psychology, into philosophy, into literature.

She read books by a variety of new influences: Naipaul, Bertrand Russell, Styron, Desai, Plato, Rilke, Heller, Achebe, Forster, García Márquez.

Feroza found her days filled with excitement, joyous activity, and ascending wonder. It was as if her combat with Manek and his efforts to instruct her, her year in Twin Falls, and her exposure to Jo, were a preparation for the way her new life was unfolding. Otherwise she would have been too shy to embrace the new encounters, too timid to delve into unexplored ideas or grasp the opportunities suddenly falling about her like gifts from the sky.

It was the first time Feroza found herself making friends on her own, without Jo. And the feeling she'd had about Denver and the University — that she was in the right place and that her life would bloom — now appeared affirmed.

It gave Feroza pleasure to introduce Jo to her new friends. Shashi took to dropping in at their apartment as frequently as did Jo's merry-go-round of steadies, and the three of them established an easy camaraderie that included their various friends.

And though Feroza and Jo didn't know how to express it, or even feel the need to, each accepted that the other had enriched her life, extended it to harmonize with and revel in the exotic.

It did not take much to persuade Feroza to transcribe some of the assignments Shashi had given her and hand them in as her own work. Without this lapse — which she understood was not too rare, among the Pakistani and Indian students at least — she would not have been able to cope with her blossoming social life, or read, or consider the assortment of jobs available. Feroza's expenses had increased commensurate with her expanding social commitments. It was also costlier to live in a big city.

Feroza considered waitressing, working in a bar, becoming a salesperson or selling tickets at an amusement park. These jobs were within her range — if she took the chances the other foreign students took — and was prepared to work for less than minimum wage.

Feroza found the very concept of these jobs breathtaking, beyond the compass of the possible in Pakistan. There were no waitresses in Pakistan, only waiters. Since there were no bars, there were no bartenders. Even had the jobs been available and the stigma attached to them had not existed, Feroza would have found working at these professions in Pakistan intolerable. Her slightest move would attract disproportionate attention and comment, for no other reason except that she was a young woman in a country where few young women were visible working.

This focus would always isolate her, keep her removed from the variety of human contact she felt was at the very heart of living. The liberating anonymity she had discovered within moments of her arrival at Kennedy airport, when no one had bothered to stare at her and the smoky-eyed American she was talking to, still exhilarated her. In Lahore these contacts would have been noticed and would have drawn censorious comment. Within the heady climate of her freedom in America, she felt able to do anything.

In this respect, Shashi's lack of inhibition fascinated her much as the young American's consummate unselfconsciousness had.

With Shashi's encouragement, Feroza started working in a bar close to the campus (no one asked her for her age when she applied for the job) as assistant to the bartender, who was also a
student. Feroza enjoyed the convivial, dusky atmosphere, the strangers who spoke to her so readily and her fleeting contact with them. She delighted in serving the colorful drinks with fancy names like piña colada, screwdriver, margarita, and strawberry daiquiri.

Shashi, and the friends she had met through him, dropped by for an occasional chat. They couldn't afford the drinks, but sometimes they ordered one to share. If Shashi was alone, he lent a hand as they chatted, and the bartender usually slipped him a drink.

Like thousands of other Hindu families, Shashi's had fled Lahore at the time of the Partition of India in 1947. They had been allotted some land as compensation for the urban property and business they had left behind. With the money and jewelry they had salvaged, the family set up a small cloth shop in New Delhi. Given their background and the necessity that drives refugees and new immigrants, their business had prospered.

The spirit of enterprise that drove his family was in no way lacking in Shashi. Feroza saw him in action once. In the snow-packed Denver winter, he sat blue-lipped and shivering in the entry of a suburban shopping center, an almost transparent white dhoti tied between his legs like an exotic diaper. Partially visible through the white sheet thrown across his shoulders his ribby brown torso looked stiff and cadaverous. His feet were unshod.

The chattering of Shashi's teeth, like woodpeckers drilling, could be heard a block away. Americans in hooded goosedown parkas and fur-lined boots were aghast at the sight of this touchingly young and emaciated version of the saintly Gandhi so perilously close to freezing. Only the movement of the whites of his eyes beneath his somnolent lids, and the chattering of his teeth, betrayed any indication of life.

Next to him, propped up in a empty bottle, was a stick with a scrap of paper glued to it. The paper fluttered when people went in and out of the doors. Those who were in a hurry, or who lacked the means to help such desperation, scurried past, eyes guiltily averted, counting on others to help.

There are always kindhearted and generous people, and sooner or later, one of them would stoop to read the lettering on the paper. The message was printed with a marker: “Not received money from home in 3 months. Floods have swept away my village and buffaloes. No clothes and no food — kindly HELP.”

Since there had been news of recent floods in Bangladesh, the message, combined with the horrendous condition of the youth, achieved immediate credibility.

Feroza suspected that the communique on the note varied according to the nature of the latest catastrophe, which in some shape or other could always be counted on to afflict their part of the world.

Once the near-cadaver was resuscitated, and usually it was by someone who could afford to resurrect him, Shashi, with his glib tongue and persuasive ways, got not only whatever he required but also what his brand-name-conscious relatives in Delhi wanted.

Shashi went on a Spartan diet each year after Thanksgiving, and staged the drama every winter. Horrified Americans, shopping for Christmas, bought him enough sweaters, jackets, shirts, and slacks to see him through spring, enough garments appliquéd with alligators and Polo ponies to satisfy his kin.

His benefactors also wrote checks to the University of Denver to pay for his tuition, with an added amount thrown in to make them feel they were doing something noble in the name of their vague and cherished notions of Gandhi.

In return, Shashi showered them with gratitude and a touching profusion of bizarre blessings picked up from Delhi street beggars rendered into English: “May you live long, sir/ma'am. May you have many sons and grandsons. May they prosper and look after you. May God part the skies to pour wealth upon you.”

Feroza felt that Shashi earned every ounce of the clothes he acquired, every morsel of the food he shared with his friends. Having absorbed the attitudes about money and the exploitative “system” preached by Jo and Manek, Feroza appreciated Shashi's methods. She knew that Shashi received very little
money from home; the State Bank of India barely allowed any foreign exchange to go out of the country. His family could have transferred “black money,” but they didn't. They had complete confidence in his resourcefulness.

Shashi had a sharp, quick, probing mind, and Feroza's relationship with him was airy, flirtatious, fun. It was easy for Feroza to be with Shashi precisely because he was so at ease with her. Feroza came to realize that Shashi's interest in women was powered more by curiosity and an appreciation of their otherness — their softness, beauty, and gentler ways — than by the tempestuous urges that appeared to ravage his more susceptible compatriots.

Shashi's temperament did not permit him to be possessive. This lightness, this freewheeling congeniality, rubbed off on Feroza; she understood that freedom, dear as its discovery in America was to her, was also an essential condition of any relationship.

Feroza had grown up, like most young girls in the Subcontinent, believing that everything she expected of life would be hers after marriage. The denial of even her most insignificant wish was followed by comments like: “You'll reign like a queen in your husband's house. You can do as you wish once you're married.”

Statements like this made marriage seem to all the girls to be the ideal condition of existence. Their marriages would unshackle them, open their lives to adventure and knowledge of the world, give them the freedom that is each individual's due.

Manek Junglewalla was married in Karachi the following summer.

Khutlibai and Zareen, complaining at every step that Manek was running them ragged, were in a glorious frenzy of preparations for the wedding. Khutlibai's house took on a festive air. There were many ceremonies connected with the wedding to be arranged for, many sets of clothes to be prepared as gifts for relatives. Khutlibai's house was overrun with children on vacation while their mothers spent their days preparing for the celebrations.

A tailor was engaged. He sat on a white cloth spread in one corner of the veranda floor before a table fan, whirring the handle of his sewing machine. A pious woman, distantly related to Soonamai, was making scores of sudras from the finest muslin. She occupied the guest room and could be heard ripping the material into half-yard pieces from the forty-yard thaan, wrapped around a board. Rohinton had bought it from a factory in Kot Lakpat and saved Khutlibai almost two hundred rupees.

In fact, the zip of cloth tearing became intrinsic to the exuberant spirit of the house as the women made small cuts with scissors and, curling the edges, ripped the cloth apart. They divided some of the thaans into bedsheets and pillowcases, and the silks and satins into blouse pieces and petticoats.

Jeroo, who had a flare for anything to do with precious metals and gems, flew in from Rawalpindi to help select the jewelry sets for Aban and her mother from among Khutlibai's heirlooms. She also assisted Zareen with the shopping and the matching of petticoats and blouses for the sari sets.

Freny firmly helped the more dithering members of the family arrive at decisions and generally threw her officious and solid weight around, as was her wont.

Two weeks before the wedding, the advance party of relatives and their children boarded the air-conditioned coaches of the Tezgam train to Karachi.

In Karachi, Freny took charge of the large triple-storied bungalow in Clifton provided for their use by Khutlibai's widowed cousin. Freny managed the servants and, with the help of a slender stick she occasionally waved about, the children. She was promptly bequeathed a new title, General, which she accepted as graciously as she had her nickname Allah-ditta. Even the servants started calling her General Sahib.

Behram Junglewalla was urgently summoned to Karachi by Jeroo, arriving with Bunny and Dara a few days before they were due. His presence was required to shore up his wife's shaky authority.

Left to the mercy of her in-laws and being temperamentally unsuited to stand up to the more powerful personalities around her, Jeroo had been reduced to a state of stammering and trembling. When not weeping in her room, she went about her business with pink rims round her eyes, tight-lipped and dour.

Behram staunchly championed Jeroo and had a stern word or two for Freny and Zareen. Zareen, finding herself at a sudden disadvantage, summoned Cyrus to shore up her authority.

After discharging their duties, the brothers-in-law hung about the house enjoying the waves of chatter and laughter, the discussions and emergency consultations, the rainbow display of saris being folded and unfolded so that they appeared to flow like silken rivers from one room to another.

Some evenings, Cyrus and Behram were invited for drinks on a Greek ship by a hospitable cousin. The ship was docked in the Karachi harbor, and the cousin catered for the shipping line in Karachi.

As scheduled, Rohinton arrived with his and Cyrus's mother, Soonamai, a week before the wedding. He had not been summoned because Freny felt quite competent to stand up to anyone and maintain her own authority.

While Soonamai Ginwalla, whip-slender and considerate, dignified
the ceremonial occasions with her discretion, Rohinton played his part by swelling the crowded rooms with his portentous presence. Soonamai's counsel was sought by everyone because she knew the niceties of traditional rites and, with her tactful ways and sympathetic outlook, was able to smooth out friction before it escalated into an all-out war.

When a wedding loomed, most families went to Bombay, the sari and jewelry Mecca. Zareen warned Manek that his bride and her mother would have to make do with what was available in the shops in Karachi and Lahore, since he had not given them enough notice to get visas, nor time to travel across the border.

“She's marrying me, not the saris,” Manek retorted succinctly, and his wise and witty words (attributed to his education at M.I.T.) were repeated with gusto among his relatives and friends.

The quip also made the rounds of the girl's family, and Manek's intelligence and sagacity were volubly admired, while Manek's family tactfully camouflaged any pride they took in the comment with playfully disparaging remarks.

Aban's mother, a gentle, docile creature, was diligently quoted. She approved the boy's sentiment utterly. What use had her daughter for saris when she was getting such an educated and well-brought-up husband? Her daughter had enough saris.

Pleased by the comment, and not to be outdone, Khutlibai was heard to observe that khandani families always showed their good-breeding no matter what. Her daughter-in-law would be welcome if she came with nothing but the clothes on her back. She would cover Aban with diamonds. She had set aside a flawless three-karat solitaire for her youngest son's wife.

That was very generous of her, the girl's mother was reported to remark. But no jewel could compare with the diamond Aban was getting in the person of her handsome and educated bridegroom.

Manek returned to America a married man. He phoned Feroza, smugly saying, “Well, boochimai, what've you been up to?”

Feroza screamed with joy at the sound of his voice. She had
missed his calls. She wanted to be told every detail of his marriage, what had happened, who said exactly what to whom in the inevitable dominoes of one-upmanship within a family of so many cousins, each related to the other in three different ways, and what had transpired between the girl's family and theirs.

Khutlibai had lost her cool, Manek said, and had given him a dressing-down in front of everybody on the day of the madasara ceremony; he had merely stated his skepticism about the mango he was being coaxed to plant in their garden to ensure his fertility.

The petty skirmishes between Zareen and Jeroo had exploded atom-bombically on the morning of the engagement. Freny had added fuel to the fire by waving her hands about and loudly siding with Jeroo, and his mother had fainted in the drawing room when her entreaties for peace on the propitious day had gone unheeded.

The subsequent flap, during which Soonamai applied cologne-watered handkerchiefs to Khutlibai's head and Behram massaged the soles of her feet, brought a contrite end to the sisters-in-law's inauspicious quarreling.

The bride's parents had conducted themselves with exemplary civility and docility, but her two moronic sisters had been inappropriately rowdy. They had pushed him fully clothed into the Karachi Sheraton's swimming pool at the end of a party given by the bride's uncle.

Cy had been full of his usual frivolity —

“Who's Cy?” Feroza interrupted.

“Your pop.”

“Cyrus-jee, to you,” corrected Feroza, tagging on the honoring suffix “jee” to express the extent of her censure. “My father would slap you if he heard you call him ‘Cy' and ‘pop.'”

“No, he didn't. But he foamed a bit at the mouth and threw a fit.”

“You don't have to be so damned American.”

“When in America, be American. Haven't you —”

“Oh God! I'm going to hang up or throw up!”

“Okay, okay … As I was saying, Cyrus-jee was full of his usual foolishness. But I was surprised by Rohinton's behavior.”

The normally sober and prudent Rohinton had abetted his brother's frivolity. They had arranged for Manek and Aban to ride in a decorated horse-drawn coach to the Fire Temple in Saddar Bazaar after the nuptials. The gaunt and elderly horse pulling their carriage had balked at the attention of a mischievous crowd of street urchins and goondas who ran alongside hooting and making smacking noises. Manek said that he was waiting for the day Feroza got married to return the compliment.

“I'd like to see how Cy reacts when his own daughter and son-in-law are ridiculed on their wedding day!”

“Oh my God,” Feroza exclaimed, “I think I really missed something!”

“Yes, you did,” commented Manek laconically. “But I must say, I didn't hear a peep out of anyone saying they missed you. Not even from your grannies.”

Of course she didn't believe him. “Jealous? Is someone's bottom burning?” Feroza said, translating the Gujrati idiom into English.

Manek and Aban had received enough practical gifts and pareekas of cash to set up house in America. If Feroza had her eye on the three-karat blue diamond, she could forget about it. Her grandmother had given it to his wife; also the diamond and emerald bracelets.

Feroza groaned, “Oh God, you must be really mad to think I'd mind. For your information, Granny told me she'd kept them especially for your wife. You don't know what she's kept for me!”

“I know, a kiss and a kick!”

“Oof,” Feroza said, pretending to fan herself at the other end of the line. “It's so hot — somebody's bottom is burning!”

“Not mine. Must be yours.”

Manek had left his wife patiently waiting beside her packed suitcases back in Karachi. She would join him in a few months, after he got his doctorate and had found a job.