An American Brat (33 page)

Zindabad!:
long live!

Zurvan:
an obscure Zoroastrian concept of Time and Timelessness (eternity), with half his face in light and half in shadow. As a principle, Zurvan is the father of Good (Ahura Mazda) and Evil (Ahriman).

I received valuable assistance from the Bellagio Study Center. Among my fellow sojourners there, I thank Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for her intense recreation of New York, Penny Eileen Bryan for her descriptions of Denver, and Pat Auster Vigderman, my fellow Bunting Fellow, for details about Boston and Cambridge. I also thank Don and Joanne McClosky for their help with my software, Sissela and Derek Bock for seeing me off at some unearthly hour, John and Dagmar Searle and Lee and Stephen Whitfield for continuing their friendship, and Gianna Celli and the others associated with Bellagio for their unfailing care.

I will remember 1992 for the shadow of grief it cast at my friend Laurie Colwin's tragic and untimely demise.

In this age of technological complexity, there is a whole new series of debts I owe, and my largest debt is to Neville Patel for his instant and constant assistance. I also thank Lois Mervyn and Imad Mirza at the USIS in Lahore, and Jack Moudy, in Houston.

With each passing day, I feel I owe more to my family and friends. Among those friends I have not thanked before, and who are very special, are Jean-Pierre and Fransoise Masset, Afsar and Riza Qizilbash, and Nasreen Rehman. I also thank Rosellen Brown, always generous, for offering valuable suggestions, Marv Hoffman for his sympathetic perspective on our increasingly intolerant times, Robert Baumgardner for enlivening the linguistics scene in Lahore, and in Houston Aban Rustomji and Arna Setna — that rare species who helps everyone. I thank Ann Zimmer for advising me on the American character in my novel
The Bride
when she and her husband were in Pakistan, and Nick and Sheila Platt for their support and encouragement.

A special thank you to Aasma Jehangir for information on the Hadood Ordinance, and Walid Iqbal for his help with translations.

At Milkweed, I thank my friends, my discerning and considerate editor Emilie Buchwald, and the wonderful and generous friends of Milkweed.

Born in Karachi and raised in Lahore, Bapsi Sidhwa has been widely acclaimed as Pakistan's finest contemporary novelist. She is the author of four novels:
An American Brat, Cracking India, The Bride,
and
The Crow Eaters.
Her work has been published in translation all over the world.

Sidhwa served on the advisory committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on issues of women's development, and her novel
Cracking India
has been made into the film Earth by Indian director Deepa Mehta.

Sidhwa has taught at Columbia University, the University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College, Brandeis University, and Southampton University in the United Kingdom. She has also been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them a NEA fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the Sitara-I-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest honor in the arts. She lives in Houston.

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