An American Brat (11 page)

He'd told her about Houston itself, the unimaginable quantities of free food the desi students had ingested every evening in Houston's bars during the happy hour.

He'd told her of the unexpected pleasure he had derived from the one opera he'd been dragged to because his friend had a free ticket.

The sheer bliss of telephones that worked come cloud or drizzle, the force of the water in the YMCA showers, electricity that never fluctuated or broke down or required daily hours of “load shedding” were joys Feroza was discovering for herself. The enchantments of the First World.

When she had seen Manek leaning against the railing, waiting for her at Kennedy Airport, his arms and ankles crossed and pantomiming all kinds of exaggerated emotions the moment he glimpsed her, Feroza had believed he was the same old Manek.

She had been misled.

In this moment of insight, Feroza thought about some of the changes she had unconsciously noted since her arrival in New York. Manek was humbler and, paradoxically, more assured and quietly conceited, more considerate, yet she sensed that at an essential level he had become tougher, even ruthless. Her mother had been right when, after that short telephone conversation with him from Pakistan, she had asserted, with tears of happiness shining in her eyes, that her brother had changed.

Feroza vaguely sensed that America had tested Manek. Challenged him, honed him, extended his personality and the horizon of his potential in a way that had made him hers.

She thought of that evening in New York when she had known that Manek would not return to Pakistan. The sadness affected her again.

“Know something — the engine sounds like a Rolls,” Feroza said impulsively, convincingly artless and earnest. “I'm sure it will go another thirty thousand miles easily.”

But Manek was too upset to be so easily appeased. After an initial moment of silence, he launched into a ten-minute harangue on the virtues of the worn Ford and the astute bargain he had struck. And Feroza drew upon her meager resource of patience and responded to what he said with appropriate exclamations of admiring agreement.

At the end of the hectoring discourse, Manek was soothed. Feroza was driven around Boston. Up Commonwealth Avenue with its stately foreign consulates, through the winding and undulating streets of Beacon Hill, and past the exclusively priced shops and salons on Newbury Street, where a haircut cost two hundred dollars.

They drove along the Public Garden and down Marlborough Street aglow with dogwood, and Boston promptly became Feroza's second favorite city.

When they drove back over the repair-constricted bridge that led them past M.I.T., she found her initial impression of Cambridge reinforced. The squat brick buildings, the peeling frame houses, the seedy-looking shops in Central Square reminded her of the army barracks, servants' quarters, and some of the more unfortunate shopping centers on the once-fashionable Mall in Lahore.

Manek turned into the narrow lane outside Eliot House and sneaked the Ford into a dark space overhung by trees, between two cars parked on the curb.

Manek's life had been blighted the first week he owned the Ford. It stalled at traffic lights, and the engine died on deserted roads. He replaced the battery and the carburetor.

The car's performance improved, but there was another snag. Each time he parked the car it either disappeared or had the dread police ticket tucked under the wiper. And you couldn't bribe the cop with small change; he'd been warned by his compatriots not to try it.

Manek paid more in tow-away costs, fines, and repairs than
the Ford was worth. Reeling from the malign rapidity with which the fines were imposed, Manek gloomily toyed with the idea of drowning himself, the dying fish, and the ungainly albatross of a car unloaded on him by the heartless Bangladeshi in the Charles River.

That is, until Jamil, an old hand at bucking the perils of parking in Cambridge, showed him all the secret crevices in which to park a car — even one as wide and long-finned as the Ford — within walking distance of Harvard Square.

With the Ford safely tucked away, they strolled through a narrow lane congested with smart little Japanese cars seeking parking meters and emerged on Massachusetts Avenue. Stores and restaurants lined the street to one side.

“That's Harvard Yard.” Hands in his pockets, Manek indicated it with a movement of his head. Feroza looked at the unimpressive masonry peeping through the thick crowns of trees behind a tall brick wall. They crossed Massachusetts Avenue and, through towering wrought-iron gates, entered Harvard Yard.

What had appeared so unimpressive from across the street opened up to display a noble girth of elegantly apportioned space. The atmosphere around them also changed, whisking them off to some loftier dimension that insulated their ears against the din of traffic on the road and freed their minds from the mundane cares of attic dwellers with intractable fish and ornery Fords.

As they sauntered beneath the vaulting spread of newly leafed trees that permitted only a very special light to filter into Harvard Yard, Feroza absorbed some of the sense of the power and intellectual excitement of Harvard. She cast shy darts of admiration at the students, fresh-faced, tall, victorious. Feroza was glad to be wandering among these intelligent beings and felt herself suffused by an exultant glow.

Jamil, a gleaming white scarf tossed about his neck, pointed out the modern science building and the Sanders Theater. Manek remained silent, wearing the benign expression of a man content to see his niece impressed and awed by what impressed and awed him.

It was almost dark when they crossed the street to the Holyoke Center. The square was crowded. Pulling out wicker chairs, they sat at a table in the open. Self-consciously sipping coffee in the American way, without cream or sugar, the three young people felt themselves become part of the privileged throng of boisterous young eaters and drinkers.

The heady sense of freedom, of youthful happiness, deepened in Feroza. Nobody looked at them. If by chance someone did, the glance was incurious and friendly.

Feroza noticed a slender, beautiful girl with short fair hair and transparent green eyes smile at Manek.

“Do you know her?” Feroza asked, surprised.

“No,” Manek shook his head, deliberately enigmatic.

“But she smiled at you.”

“I looked admiringly at her and she smiled back, that's all.”

Warned by the expression on Manek's face, Jamil sat back in his chair and tactfully looked away.

Manek leaned towards Feroza and spoke in a low voice, “Civilized people don't kick men in the balls just because they happen to stare at them. Imagine what would've happened in Lahore! First she'd kick me, then she'd go whining to the cops wailing, ‘O menu ghoor-ghoor ke vekh raha see. He was making big, big eyes and staring at me!' I'd be soundly slapped and hauled off to the police-thanna.”

Feroza recalled the stern, watchful eyes of uncles and cousins, ever ready to pulverize young men who dared to look at her with their languishing orbs. She heard her aunt's voice, her mother's, and grandmothers', “Aren't you ashamed, looking at women? How'd you like it if our men stared at your sisters?” or, “Mind your eyes, you shameless! Don't you have mothers and sisters at home?” and other variations on the theme.

Feroza couldn't help drawing comparisons. She concluded there were so few women, veiled or unveiled, on the streets of Lahore, that even women stared at other women, as she did, as if they were freaks.

At around eight o'clock, a jazz quartet suddenly began to play on the far side of where they sat. A trumpet note, loud and pure,
spun into the air to greet the fading light, committing the evening to pleasure and beauty. The guitar, in a subtle transition, carried the note where the trumpet left off. Feroza had never expected the melody of an alien music to move her so deeply. The sensual, drawn-out blues notes throbbed in her senses and turned the dusk magical.

Feroza quietly left their table and joined the crowd that had formed round the musicians. Manek and Jamil, busy ogling the girls and exchanging snide remarks, suddenly realized she was not with them. They got up, anxiously looking about, and sought her out.

It was a mellow, spring Friday, and Harvard Square was permeated by a carnival spirit. Streetlights and lights from shops and eating places lit up the cheerful faces of the people thronging the pavement, and they cut across the serpentine streets diagonally from wherever it suited them.

A bunch of Hare Krishna crusaders were prancing about in saffron dhotis and saris in front of the Co-op store. Around the corner, on Brattle Street, a lone violinist in a long-sleeved black dress played in the recessed shelter of a small door.

And then they stood before a spectacular brown gentleman who was later introduced to Feroza as Father Fibs. Manek and Jamil were full of information about him. Father Fibs was a storyteller. It was rumored that he had given up a promising career at Harvard in order to inspire young yuppies and direct their thoughts to the finer, less materialistic aspects of life. He was reputed to be a Shakespearian scholar and sometimes, when the mood took him, had been known to render long passages from Hamlet and Othello like a virtuoso. He was a man with a vocation who followed his own heart.

Whatever the truth of the rumors, Feroza was as impressed by the tall and slender middle-aged man as she was by the blue denim outfit he wore. It was his personal uniform, studded with monograms, buttons, appliquéd butterflies, birds, and flowers. Despite the flamboyance of his clothes and his sweeping gestures, there was a disarming shyness and sensitivity to his attractive features.

Very few people were listening to him. Father Fibs had been around so long that his novelty had worn off, and the older inhabitants of Cambridge passed him without pausing.

Almost at once his practiced eye lit on Feroza. Father Fibs could tell at once that the girl would be too polite to move away while he was addressing her. His eyes remained on Feroza for the duration of the rambling story, which she found exhausting to follow.

His confidence in her was not misplaced. When Manek and Jamil grew restive, Feroza stood her ground, insistent and steadfast.

At the end of the tale, when even the few remaining listeners drifted away, Father Fibs strolled over and, considerately lowering his towering length onto some steps, started talking to Feroza.

He invited the three of them to Adams House for coffee, and Manek extended an invitation to dinner in his attic whenever it suited Father Fibs.

On the way back to the car, Feroza, unconsciously indulging her Lahori habit of staring at women, was disconcerted when each one of them smiled back. Soon she was smiling at all the women they passed, delightedly greeting those who greeted her.

“What're you doing?” Manek asked. “Don't stare at people like that.”

“They don't mind. Everyone's so friendly.”

“You're embarrassing them. If you look at them, they have to smile back. It's like holding a gun on them or something. It's rude.”

“You don't seem to mind when they smile at you,” Feroza retorted, her knowing, foxy eyes reminding him of his mother.

It had become cold, and the wind was swooshing up the narrow byways. Feroza glanced at Jamil. He was walking with his head bent against the sudden gusts, his hands in his pockets. They were, all of them, so far away from home, Feroza reflected, and yet she was happy. Impulsively she tucked her arm into Manek's, and for an instant lay her beret on his shoulder — something she would not have thought of doing in Lahore.

Occasionally sheltering her nose in Manek's sleeve, Feroza continued her uninhibited staring and smiling. Manek was too cold to notice or care. Feroza smiled, as if her cheeks had frozen in their happy contours, all the way back to the Ford.

They slept late on Saturday morning. Feroza was so cold in the unheated attic that she had snuggled into Manek's long johns and thick socks and pulled the red beret over her ears before slipping into bed with the hot-water bottle thoughtfully provided by Zareen. The bed consisted of a foam mattress that was peeled off Manek's spring mattress every evening. Once the bed was laid on the floor, there was no room to walk or even to sit at the desk.

Shivering in her flannel wrap, hugging her towel and her toilet bag, Feroza followed Manek to the improvised bathroom in the dank basement. The basement was stacked here and there with boxes, furniture, and trash bags filled with stored belongings. Cobwebs trailed from the seams on the roof, and the smell of mold and damp filled the room.

Feroza noticed the antiquated shower protruding two feet from a hole gouged out of a corner. Beneath it lay something that looked like an abandoned kiddy sandbox, decrepit with patches of rust and discolored paint. A wire ran across the corner to hold the shower curtain, which was drawn to one side, its grimy edge sticking to the gray-painted brick wall.

“I can't shower in that!” Feroza balked and stepped back.

“Nobody'll see you once you draw the curtain.”

Manek pointed out a plastic bath caddy dangling from the wobbly shower rod. “You can put your shampoo, etcetera, there.”

Stubbornly maintaining her distance, Feroza peered into the pit as if looking out for worms that might suddenly rear up to attack.

“I'll get tetanus.”

“Don't be silly.”

Feroza turned to go back. “I will not shower in that!”

“Then you'll have to sleep outside. You already stink like a goat.”

Manek rolled up the sleeve of his navy velour bathrobe and turned on the shower. The rush of water steamed almost at once.

“I'll guard the steps till you finish,” Manek said and, before Feroza could protest, closed the basement door after him.

Alternately blistered by the boiling water and yelping with shock from sudden glacial torrents, Feroza managed to get the shampoo out of her hair.

Feroza dried herself quickly; it was cold in the basement. She pulled her woolen vest over her head and saw a shape emerge tentatively from the hole in the wall in which the shower rod rested.

Feroza froze.

Not sure of its hold, the large cockroach slithered along the slimy edge.

Feroza flung her clothes on in a panicked rush and stormed up the steps. Incandescent with rage she burst into the room and glared at Manek. “You didn't even mind the door!”

Feroza flung herself on the mattress and sat in a huddled, panting huff against the wall.

“I told the boys not to go to the basement. Have a nice shower?”

Feroza turned away her face.

“You look nice and clean. Like a boiled lobster. Ever seen a boiled lobster?”

Feroza flung a slipper and, in rapid succession, a book and another slipper.

“You damn swine!”

“If you'd behaved yourself, I'd have shown you how our shower works. Or taken you to the good bathroom. Don't think you can be smart all the time and get away with it. You behaved disgustingly in front of my friend yesterday. Let this be a lesson to you. There will be many lessons till you learn to behave properly. You have to learn that in America you don't get something for nothing.”

“I'm going right back to Lahore!” Feroza was glad she hadn't mentioned the cockroach. At least she wouldn't give him that satisfaction.

Feroza's rigid profile was the color of fire. Her features looked alarmingly swollen, heavy with fury. Knowing her capacity to dig in her heels when confronted and the pride that even as a child had rarely permitted her to cry, Manek felt he might have pushed her too far, and in the wrong direction.

Since he also possessed too much pride to apologize, Manek did the next best thing. He clowned. “Oh,” he said in his breathy falsetto, wringing his hands, “Now what will I do? You want to cut off my nose and put it in my hand. You will shame me. How will I show my face to the world if you go back?”

Manek fell abruptly on his knees and, repeatedly lifting and throwing his arms on the floor, absurdly, energetically, and noisily prostrated himself before her. “Oh, say you will not go. Oh, say you will not. My honor and izzat are in your lily-white hands!”

Feroza turned her contemptuous, swollen face on him.

“You color blind or something also?”

“Oh, sorry. In your lily-brown hands … your lily-brown hands.”

Feroza battered his hands with her fleet bare feet. “You lesson-walla! You lesson-walla! I'll teach you a lesson, you lesson-walla!”

Manek made up to Feroza by taking her on a personally guided tour of M.I.T. in the afternoon. He marched her through the long, echoing halls and the auditoriums with the same reverential expression with which he had trotted her, in her high heels, down Wall Street. He held open the doors of his classrooms with a proprietorial and courteous air while she peeped through, and he became puffed up with benevolent vanity at the impression everything made on her. Feroza was profoundly affected to be in this citadel of learning to which her uncle belonged, and Manek was immoderately pleased by her response.

In an excess of self-congratulatory gratification and the affection for his niece the complacent feelings generated, Manek took her to Legal Seafood. So innocuously did he order the boiled lobster that, after a quick look at his face, Feroza decided the choice was inadvertent. Thus Manek gave Feroza her first addictive taste of the succulent Maine lobster. And, glancing at the check, he held his brow to advertise his regret.

Monday morning returned Manek to a sense of his other responsibilities and set the pattern for the next few weeks. He would awaken, examine the fish tank, and grow mournful at the demise of yet another goldfish. He became obsessed with their welfare and viewed each new catastrophe as a personal failing.

He leafed through books on the care of fish and visited pet shops for advice.

Sometimes when he returned late after working on an assignment in the library bearing little plastic pouches of fish food and fish tonics, he was stricken to discover another casualty. Those were black days, and Manek would bury himself in his books. Feroza knew enough to keep out of his way.

While Manek was out all day, Feroza watched a small black-and-white TV with the fascination of a cobra charmed by the flute, her hooded hand moving hypnotically from the bag of potato chips on her lap to her mouth.

Sometimes Feroza varied her routine and read the Harlequin romances she had discovered at a grocery store, murder mysteries, or the P. G. Wodehouse she had brought from Lahore. Her hand traveled as hypnotically to her mouth with whatever she was relishing as she read as it did when she watched TV.

When she remembered to, she put a few drops of fish tonic into the tank.

She varied her diet: during the commercials she might open a can of cocktail sausages, baked beans or sardines, sprinkle them with lemon juice and red pepper, and, to prologue the delight, eat them in tiny nibbles. For dessert she licked spoonfuls of condensed milk or opened a can of peaches and often combined the two.

Manek had stacked a corner of the wardrobe floor with canned foods and the freezer compartment in his small fridge with pizzas. Judging from his own experience, he knew how much Feroza would relish them.

Manek let Feroza eat her fill for a week and then, looking at
the empty space on the wardrobe floor and the nearly empty freezer compartment, announced, “You can open any four cans a day, whether it is soup or fruit or ham or mushrooms. No more than four frankfurters or four slices of bacon, and only one pizza a day. If you're still hungry, you can eat dal and rice, or bread and butter. You'll get fat and sick if you eat like this, and I'll get broke and thin. You'll also get fed up.”

“Never. I could eat this all my life!”

“That's what I thought too,” said Manek. “Now I can't bear the sight of frankfurters and sardines.”

Feroza could not believe her good luck where food was concerned. It was an extravagant bonus — like so many of the unexpected delights her visit to America was to provide. She had presumed that canned foods like olives, mushrooms, condensed milk, asparagus, clams, were as precious and rare in America as they were in Pakistan, to be served up only on special show-off occasions.

Feroza was curiously reluctant to venture outside the attic without Manek. She declined his offer to drop her off and pick her up from shopping malls or Harvard Square. For all her brash posturing and tossing of braids, she responded so diffidently to the friendly overtures of the other Pakistani and Indian students inhabiting the lower portions of the house that they reluctantly left her alone.

Feroza became tongue-tied and remote even with Jamil when Manek was not with her. In averting her radiant gaze and by discouraging chatter, Jamil felt she dropped a veil about her person. An intriguing veil that added to her other attractions an element of mystery.

Jamil, and even Manek, wondered sometimes if this demure creature had actually kicked that fellow at the Al-falah cinema. Manek, though, was less uncertain. He guessed that his niece's unexpected shyness and timidity had to do with being sixteen years old and finding herself in such unfamiliar and diametrically
different surroundings. But once her exuberance returned, his doubts disappeared, and Manek was sure Feroza was only passing through a phase.

Besides, ever since her experience with the scalding shower, Feroza had become passably tractable, a fact upon which Manek mused with quiet conceit. As for her shield of reserve, he thought it only proper and didn't mind it one bit.

One afternoon Manek finally accepted what had been killing the goldfish. Everyone he consulted had taken it for granted that he changed the water — it was so elementary — and he hadn't. Not since the treacherous Bangladeshi beauty left them in his charge without instructing him to.

That evening, after carefully transferring the few remaining fish to a plastic bag, Manek and Feroza scoured the tank and filled it with fresh water from the bathroom faucet.

Still, the next morning two fish died. Thoroughly depressed, Manek and Feroza concluded that the dead fish had been so contaminated by the toxins in the stale water that they could not recover.

The following afternoon Manek returned with a bottle of wine and a bag of groceries. He had run into Father Fibs, and the storyteller was to dine with them in the evening. Manek had asked Jamil, the students from downstairs, and a few other friends to join the party.

Three fish had expired that day, and Feroza had laid them out ceremoniously on a bed of pink tissue in the ornamental onyx ashtray. Manek slumped into the stuffed chair, defeated, his hand shading his brow, mourning his fish. Feroza sat at his feet, solemnly and silently commiserating.

After a few moments, they roused themselves and gravely set about preparing dinner. Manek, who had never prepared even a cup of tea in Lahore, astonished Feroza by the culinary prowess
necessity had brought forth. Not that he cooked anything as fancy as prawn-patia or Dhansak lentils. But given the bland taste of the fare available to them and the steady and relentless diet of canned foods and pizza, Manek's cooking tasted almost as good as Kalay Khan's.

Father Fibs arrived. Stooping shyly through the attic door, he was followed by the unexpected and matronly person of his chocolate brown and upright wife.

Smiling genially, Mrs. Fibs handed Feroza a gift-wrapped box of candy. She was a little taller than Feroza, about five feet six inches, and about a foot shorter than her husband.

The other students, looking like pygmies, stood up to greet the guests of honor.

Manek seated Mrs. Fibs on the dining chair Jamil had carried up for the occasion, and Father Fibs was ceremoniously directed to the stuffed chair.

It was a rather small chair for Father Fibs, and he looked as ill at ease in it as a squashed camel. When he stretched his legs, they took up all the walking space in the attic, and Manek and Feroza had to step over them to serve the drinks. When he straightened his arms, his knuckles knocked against the floor. And when, unaccustomed to sitting long in any one place, Father Fibs stood up, his head touched the sloping ceiling.

The attic appeared to have shrunk, and Father Fibs, who looked so elegant on the pavements of Harvard Square, suddenly became a lumbering and baffled bean stalk.

Mrs. Fibs talked affably, asking interested questions. But all attention centered on the colorful and alarming person of the willowy giant.

Sensing it, and self-consciously adjusting his booming voice to his restraining surroundings, Father Fibs began to talk. His voice was a husky, hesitant whisper. He told Feroza he liked her manner of speaking, her gentle ways, the movement of her yellow eyes in her brown face. He told Manek he had visited India as a
draftee and understood the background of the young men in the room. They must be rich. Only the rich sent their sons to America. Money they would surely make, but what did they plan to do with their lives?

When he was a student at one of the universities in this area — Father Fibs declined to tell them which — he had shared a room with a Sri Lankan student. He related stories of their escapades, of rows and hilarious misunderstandings occasioned by their different cultures. He told them what the man, now middle-aged, had achieved and salvaged of his ideals.

As Father Fibs hit his stride and his gestures became more comfortable, his fingers brushed the light fixture on the ceiling, displaced a brass plate recently affixed to the wall, and almost toppled the onyx ashtray. So Father Fibs tried to hold his hands clamped to his sides. His speech dried up. His tapered fingers fluttered nervously and scratched his thighs. Again he sat down, camellike, in the stuffed chair.

At some point after dinner, when coffee had been served, inspired by the expectation on the young faces at his feet, the storyteller suddenly took off on another soliloquy. His hands, like unexpectedly released birds, darted here and there and, after testing the air and adapting themselves to the confined space, coasted with the proficiency of hummingbirds. Again he loomed elegant and splendid, and his presence transformed the shrunken attic into space worthy of his inspired renderings.