An American Brat (4 page)

Zareen blew her nose and splashed her face. She looked into the mirror and was filled with pity for her reflection. Although her eyes were puffy and her nose red, it was still an adequate face. Zareen turned slightly to look at the delicate curve of her cheek and jaw, at the slight bump broadening her nose just where it should to give her fine eyes an erotic quality, and was gradually reassured. She touched up her lipstick, sprayed herself with perfume, and, her heels sounding her resolution on the bathroom and dressing room floors, marched into the bedroom.

Zareen noted that her mother had removed her dentures. They lay on the bedside table in the bowl provided by the ayah. Zareen dragged the rocking chair forward and, maintaining a formal distance between them, sat down, defiantly rocking.

Khutlibai had poured her soup into the saucer and was making a blubbery sound as she drew in air with the scalding broth.

“Stop making that disgusting noise, Mumma.” The rocking chair and her mother's dentureless mouth gave Zareen an advantage. “I hate it; it makes me feel sick. Sometimes I feel so ashamed of you.”

Khutlibai stared at Zareen in utter amazement. She averted her eyes and sat forward, her back stiff. “I never expected to be insulted in my son-in-law's house!”

Khutlibai swung her feet off the bed and stood up with a swiftness remarkable in one who had sunk into it so heavily a short while before. Drawing herself up to her full five feet two inches, the lower edge of her shawl resting on the projecting shelf of her bottom, Khutlibai trudged with tragic and affronted majesty to the door.

Hastily putting her cup down and full of contrition, Zareen rushed to block her exit.

Khutlibai gave her daughter a brief hurt-puppy look and, moving
her legs in a stiff, pistonlike gait that was curiously submissive and hopeless, trudged back to the bed. She sat down abruptly, her feet dangling, her shoulders fallen, her mouth collapsed, looking unbearably wounded, sapped, and mortified.

“Mumma,” Zareen said, thoroughly abashed, holding out the cup with dregs of the broth still in it. “Here, finish this.”

Her mouth slightly gaping, Khutlibai eyed Zareen meekly and obediently drained the contents.

Zareen sat down next to her and put her arm round her mother's shoulders. She pressed her wet cheek to Khutlibai's and, in an awkward, sideways motion, kissed her eyebrow and the hollow near her temple. Zareen felt her mother's cheek twitch with a persistent tic; it was as if the altercation had reversed their roles.

Zareen felt intolerably sad.

At word of Khutlibai's imminent departure, the bearded cook, the sweeper, and the balding gardener, sporting new tennis shoes but no socks, gathered outside the main door.

Bundled up in her coat, shawl, and muffler, Khutlibai emerged from the bedroom, preceded by Zareen and followed by the ayah.

The sweeper, very dark and stocky with a mop of straight hair slanting rakishly across his forehead, clicked his heels, saluted, and stood at grinning attention. The message of Khutlibai's remedy had been conveyed to him. The boy stood next to his father, shivering in his ladies' cardigan, the black thread conspicuous on his left big toe.

Instead of her usual chuckles and affectionate banter, Khutlibai smiled in wan approval at the toe, which was beginning to swell on account of the tourniquet and was turning blue in the cold.

The dejected angle of Khutlibai's head, and the motion she made to touch it, indicated to the sweeper that though she appreciated his antic attention, she was unable to respond as she usually did because of unwonted circumstance.

The sweeper at once became serious and, gesturing with reassuring, open-palmed motions of his hands, inquired, “Is everything all right, baijee? You are visiting after so long; have you forgotten us? If we have offended in some way, I beg forgiveness.”

Khutlibai affectionately stroked the grubby jacket covering his arm, saying only, “Live long, son.” Then, gathering all the servants in the orbit of her tragic gaze, she commented, “You know how it is. It is not good policy to visit a son-in-law's house too often. It is better for all concerned this way. Our elders knew what they were about when they made such traditions. May God never show us the day when we might need to depend on our married daughters and son-in-laws.”

The servants murmured agreement and deferentially touched their foreheads. The blast of a musical horn from a passing minibus on the road appeared to further salute the wisdom of her utterance. Zareen looked away, prim and remote.

Khutlibai reached into her handbag and, licking the tips of thumb and forefinger to separate the crisp fifty-rupee notes, distributed them among the servants. The blue-eyed Pathan chauffeur, who had the fierce loyalty and light skin of the tribes in the northern areas, shepherded his charge into the car, lifted her shawl clear of the door, and shut it.

The servants hung around to wave good-bye. Zareen stood a little apart, unsmiling, and, as soon as the car began to move, strode inside.

Cyrus's car turned into the drive almost immediately after. The cook opened the Volkswagen door, salaamed, and took the briefcase from him.

Cyrus located his wife in the bedroom. “Old lady's been visiting?” he inquired, removing his jacket and tie.

“Umm.”

“Had a bit of an accident I think … Her blue-eyed boy knocked down a cyclist. I heard him swearing.”

Zareen glanced at him briefly to indicate her interest.

“Don't think he was hurt,” Cyrus assured her.

Zareen stopped paying attention and picked up his jacket.

“You're in a good mood,” Cyrus remarked. “What's the old woman been up to?”

“What can she be ‘up to'?” Zareen's tart voice expressed her displeasure.

“From the grins on the servants' faces, Queen Victoria's been dispensing largess.”

“You can't grudge them the odd tip.”

“I don't grudge them anything. It's just that every time she comes and goes, there's a minor insurrection. Last time the sweeper asked for a raise. Before then the cook demanded a new stove. God knows what it'll be today. The gardener will probably ask for more manure.”

“Poor thing, she hardly comes because this is how you talk!”

“You know I'm always polite to her. Next time I won't rush about trying to make her comfortable if this is your reaction to the effort I make.”

“You think she doesn't know how you talk behind her back? She's more sensitive than you think.”

“Sensitive!” On his way to slipping into his pajamas, Cyrus briefly flashed his bottom at his spouse to express his opinion of his mother-in-law's sensitivity. He resumed his seat on the bed, darkly saying, “This house is chock-full of her spies!”

“Look, I'm not interested in your paranoia!” Zareen shouted. Banging the dressing room door shut, she darted into the bathroom and occupied her all-purpose perch.

Khutlibai phoned the next morning. Could Zareen visit her? She would have come, but it wasn't proper to visit a married daughter day after day.

“Mumma,” Zareen said. “Nobody cares about such things anymore.”

“Whether they do or do not, I will do what is right.”

“You know Cyrus loves to see you,” Zareen said warmly. “We don't care much for old-fashioned thinking; you know that.”

“Yes, yes. You and your Ping-Pong are the only modern ones in the whole world … We are all stupids.”

Zareen was relieved. Her mother had recovered from her heart-rending docility of the day before.

But when Zareen drove to the sprawling old colonial brick house on Punj-Mahal Road the next afternoon, Khutlibai greeted her on the whitewashed veranda in a subdued and chastened manner. Although she had grown up in the old bungalow, Zareen did not feel comfortable in it anymore. In fact she could not bear to be in the narrow room with the tall walls that had been hers for so many years; it had been completely repossessed by a gloomy battalion of Khutlibai's old cupboards.

Khutlibai and Sorabji Junglewalla had moved into the house, which was brand-new and considered modern then, straight from their honeymoon in Kashmir in 1940. The house had been completely renovated in two phases, once during Sorabji's last years and once after his death, when a portion of the dining room roof, with its parallel rafters, came crashing down on a summer's night.

Zareen followed her mother inside. Khutlibai was being hospitable and was treating her daughter with the consideration she reserved for friends and acquaintances. She was also wearing her dentures, something she often neglected to do if only her daughter was visiting.

Khutlibai bustled about in her velvet slippers, fetching and slicing the cottage cheese she had made from buffalo's milk that very morning, opening cabinet drawers to pick out the best silver and the daintiest napkins. Ordering her ancient cook, Kalay Khan, who looked like a butler left over from the Raj in his white tunic and red cummerbund, to bring tea and onion pakoras, Khutlibai ushered her daughter into what she preferred to call the drawing room.

The walls of the drawing room were decorated with dour portraits of dead ancestors, and the massive round-topped gold frames were hung with fragrant jasmine garlands. As always Zareen stopped before the arresting portrait of her great-grand-mother Putlibai.

The life-size face tipped forward almost at the level of Zareen's eye. The photographer had caught the yellow eyes in the gaunt, high-cheekboned face in a miraculous shaft of light, and the magnified irises glowed as if alive. The piercing eyes dominated the portrait, the room, and the aged house with their eerie amber luminosity.

Zareen respectfully touched her bowed head to the icon. Raising her eyes, she saluted also her arrestingly handsome and noble-looking great-grandfather Faredoon Junglewalla, whose larger portrait hung above Putlibai's, safeguarding her in death as he had in life.

Both figures were enshrined in family legend. The pioneering couple, accompanied by Putlibai's mother, Jerbanoo (a remarkably tempestuous lady whom Khutlibai was said to take after), had traveled from their ancestral village in Central India to Lahore by bullock cart at the turn of the century. The family business, a provision and wine store, was founded by Faredoon Junglewalla during the British Raj, its fortune vastly augmented by his son, Behram. Zareen muttered a short prayer for the benefit of all her ancestors' souls.

When the two women were comfortably ensconced on the drawing room sofa before their TV trays, Khutlibai again broached the subject that occupied all her thoughts: when was Feroza going to America?

“Next Friday,” Zareen said, giving her mother a stealthy sideways look. She was sure Khutlibai already had all the information she required from Feroza. She must also know how eager Feroza was to go, and how excited. Zareen waited for her mother to direct the dialogue to suit her sense of occasion.

“And where will she stay? Who'll look after her? I'm so worried: a raw, unmarried girl traveling so far by herself. Have you made proper arrangements? Will she stay in a good, safe hotel?”

“Of course not.” Raising supercilious eyebrows to mark her irritation, Zareen looked away deliberately. “Why should she stay in a hotel when she can stay with her uncle? She will stay with Manek. I have talked to him. He will come to New York to receive
her. He'll take good care of her. Now don't worry.”

Zareen was aware, at the periphery of her vision, of the slowly dawning creases of astonishment beginning to wreathe her mother's mobile features. She braced herself.

“Manek?” Khutlibai sounded astounded. “You're going to leave her care to Manek? God help the child!”

And Khutlibai brought her considerable histrionic abilities to bear as well on what she said next. “Don't you remember how he chased her all over the neighborhood with a shotgun? Luckily she wasn't seriously injured. And how he made her run round and round the compound, cracking that hunter's whip of his? Ask me how many times I've had to save her from being maimed. I didn't tell you this, but one time he helped her up a tree and began sawing off the branch she was sitting on! I'll tell you how he will look after her. He'll push her into the nearest well!”

“I doubt there are any wells in America,” Zareen said dryly. She was already beginning to feel battle-weary.

But Khutlibai was in full throttle. “With no one to look out for her, he will bully her to his heart's content. No,” she switched to emphatic English, “I will not permit it to happen. I will put my foot down!” Khutlibai raised a leaden leg and clumsily thudded it down. The flimsy TV table tipped precariously. Zareen and Khutlibai both reached out to prevent the dishes from crashing.

“It's all right, Mumma, I'll get it.” Zareen said, bending swiftly to retrieve the teaspoons, forks, and spilled pakoras from the carpet.

Khutlibai looked on, flustered and contrite.

Quick to grab the unexpected advantage she had suddenly gained and in the same warm tone of voice and reassuring manner, Zareen said, “Mumma, I wish you could have heard Manek yourself; if only it weren't so difficult to get through to America. I could tell he's changed! He sounded quite responsible and dependable. I think he has matured!”

Zareen's liberal and impressive use of English words, and the conviction vibrant in her voice, communicated to her mother some part of the excitement and awe she had felt after her conversation
with Manek.

“I think he's going to surprise us all,” Zareen said, surprised by the emotional charge in her voice. Simultaneously her eyes filled with tears of relief and thankfulness at the thought of the alteration America had wrought in her brother.

The new subtleties Zareen had detected in the modulation of Manek's voice had indicated self-reliance, a novel consideration for her anxieties and feelings, and an even less-expected ability to actually reassure her and convince her of the sincerity of his intent to look after Feroza. These nuances in the inflection of his vocal cords had been absorbed by Zareen's eager ears as promising signs of the evolution that a stay in the mind-broadening and character-building horizons abroad was meant to confer upon the unrefined native sensibility.