An American Brat (20 page)

The very next morning Khutlibai and Zareen launched a discreet search for a suitable wife for Manek. A week later Manek was whisked off to Karachi and surreptitiously shown several girls at weddings, navjotes, and parties. The girls, pretty in their good-occasion saris, eyed him with flattering interest. His family connections and his education at M.I.T. made him quite a catch, and his decision to live in America was icing on the cake. Most girls at these functions hoped to be whisked off to America, the land of their dreams, by this young knight in shining armor (represented by a suit from Sears) and a bright future. The bolder ones talked to Manek, while the less bold grabbed any handy child to twirl around and hug and kiss. Others addressed each other in cooing voices and giggled loudly in his presence. He noticed them all and was surprised how eligible he was.

Khutlibai and Zareen sent out feelers to the families of the girls Manek had liked. Of the five feelers that were sent out, two tactfully rejected the tentative offer, but three showed definite interest. Of these three Manek chose a slight, velvet-eyed, fair-skinned girl with a nightingale's voice and a ready smile.

Aban was distantly related to the Junglewallas.

While the search was on for a suitable girl for Manek, Feroza was visiting with Jo's family in Boulder, Colorado. When she read the letters she received from Zareen and Khutlibai about the excitement and fun she was missing, the strategies and huddled conferences, the hilarious consultations with Manek and his witty comments on the candidates, Feroza was torn by conflicting desires. She wished she had gone with Manek to Pakistan, and at the same time she knew she could not have borne to miss the escapades and adventures she was enjoying with Jo and her family and finding so incalculably enlightening.

Jo's father could trace his lineage to a stock of sturdy English farmers from the Midlands, her mother to thrifty vine growers in the south of France.

Thrifty and steady though her lineage was, Jo's mother was a compulsive gambler. As inclined to hop a plane to Las Vegas or Atlantic City as she was to dip into their restaurant's cash register, Mrs. Miller was the cause of the ever-present and gnawing anxiety of Mr. Miller.

Mrs. Miller was also given to sneaking off to Denver in her Thunderbird for the races whenever she could manage it. Twice, against the expressed preference of Mr. Miller, she took the two girls with her on a sporting spree. Since horse-racing in Pakistan had been banished to the out-skirts of the cities by General Zia, thereby discouraging the less rabid frequenters, Feroza enjoyed the sport with all the zest of one partaking of forbidden fruit.

Picking a sadly gaunt and docile-looking brown animal out of compassion, Feroza and Jo won a hundred dollars each on their joint bet of five dollars. Mrs. Miller sighed, shrugged, looked at the girls pityingly, and said, “You wanna know something? It's the worst thing that could happen. When luck favors you like this the
first time round, it's only to snare you! But enjoy yourselves while you can.”

They did.

As they drove back through Denver's downtown, Feroza caught her breath at the sight of the soaring skyscrapers suddenly twinkling with lights, and her heart lifted as it had in New York. This was the America she had imagined herself in; not the dreary, alternately frozen and slushy byways of Twin Falls with its squat structures and inhibiting outlook.

Feroza turned to look back. Beyond the skyscrapers was the jagged wall of mountains, spectacular in the sunset, dwarfing everybody and everything with its billowing mass.

Feroza fell in love with Denver.

A couple of weeks later, when Jo, at some glancing reference by her father to Twin Falls, remarked, “I'm not going back to that dump! I'm gonna look around, maybe at the University of Denver,” Feroza decided she would do the same.

The University of Denver was one of the few colleges in the United States that offered an outstanding undergraduate course in hotel management. And just as Manek on learning of Feroza's acceptance to the junior college at Twin Falls had felt it was providential, coming as it did on the heels of the anxious spate of letters from Khutlibai and Zareen, so Feroza felt her switch to the University of Denver was ordained by divine decree.

Both girls filled out forms and applied for admission to the course.

Jo's mother indulged her passion for gambling without noticeable neglect to her responsibilities. She was the restaurant's cashier, cook, waitress, and solicitous hostess. Jo's father shared the duties. He evidently enjoyed the time he spent at work more than did Mrs. Miller.

Since the restaurant did not serve breakfast, Mr. Miller opened the kitchen at around ten o'clock. He locked up around midnight, after the last customers had left and after placing the cash in the safe. Theirs was a small family business, employing a staff of three or four people who had been, for the most part, with them
since the restaurant's inception. Millers' Home Cooking was known for the taste, standard, and predictability of its wholesome meals; they had a regular and faithful clientele and an increasing circle of new customers.

Mr. Miller had survived a short stint in Vietnam. Within three months of his enlistment, he had sustained an injury skidding on a slice of cucumber in the army canteen. He had been laid up in the hospital for a month and, a few months later, discharged from further duty. Mr. Miller had required extensive surgery on his left knee, which had left him with a pain in his leg and a tendency to limp when he was tired.

Feroza found Mr. Miller kind and generous. When work was slack, as it was later in the afternoons, he brought the girls slices of strawberry pie and always managed to lead the conversation to complaints about his gambling wife and the money she was siphoning from their cash register. Often he would limp into the girls' room, strawberry pie in hand (he made the pies himself), and say, “You won't believe this … Guess how much she took today? I went out to get the paper and when I got back, the cash register was empty, cleaned out — nothing but small change. I wish we'd have a real live holdup — a robber with a loaded gun. At least I'd have a fighting chance! But with Teresa, I can do nothing.”

“She doesn't neglect anything, does she?” Jo said once. “So why complain.”

Mr. Miller kept a loaded pistol beneath the cash register in the restaurant in the wistful hope that his fantasy about the holdup might be fulfilled some day.

Feroza found Jo's parents preternaturally understanding and unobtrusively hospitable. It was refreshing. The hospitality of her aunts and uncles in Karachi and Bombay could become cloying and oppressive, and, of course, everybody considered it their bounden duty to offer up advice on how to conduct every aspect of your life, undeterred by lack of qualification, expertise, or experience.

Although she had long ago guessed from Jo's unrestrained
behavior that the Millers did not meddle in their children's affairs, or impose restriction, it nevertheless amazed her to observe them at such close quarters and discover the way they associated with each other.

The Millers exercised what she could not help but consider a remarkable discretion and forbearance. It astonished her that they were on speaking terms at all with their daughter and that their relationship worked so smoothly and without traumatic scenes featuring heart attacks and lachrymose bouts of sustained melancholia. She could almost see her grandmothers (not to mention stricken aunts and uncles) collapse, with hands on hearts and wounded looks, if she had exhibited a fraction of Jo's blithely independent attitude and disregard for their opinions — opinions and advice that they considered not only their duty to dispense, but also an unalienable right, considering their long years of worldly experience and their even longer memory of traditional wisdom and ways, the centuries-old legacy of their revered forebears.

Feroza's parents, her aunts, and uncles, for all their assertions of being broad-minded and modern, would expect unquestioning obedience on certain matters, like the relationships between various family members, and between boys and girls, and would view with consternation any straying from the established path.

And, surprisingly, even though Feroza found the Millers' way of life admirably tolerant and eminently desirable, she could not imagine it transposed to any community, whether it was Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or Parsee, in her part of the world. What would life be like in her family and in Lahore without the extravagant guidance and dire warnings, the endless quoting of homilies, and the benign and sometimes not so benign advice, inquisitiveness and interference?

Unnatural.

Impossible and, in a way, given the intricately woven context of their social and familial fabric, dreary even to contemplate.

It was only after Feroza met Jo's sister Janine — who flew in
from California for a week — and her brother Tom that Feroza grasped the astonishing truth that far from being the star delinquent of the family, Jo was, in fact, the most balanced, ambitious, and promising star on the Miller horizon. It soon became apparent that Jo was her parents' confidant and the one on whom they pinned their hopes and aspirations for the growth, perpetuity, and inheritance of Millers' Home Cooking.

Jo's sister Janine had straight ash-blond hair that swung thick about her shoulders, large green eyes, and a lavishly contoured and sensual mouth. She was as beautiful as Feroza had imagined — except when something happened to ignite her combustible passions. Then her face turned fiercely melodramatic, and it terrified Feroza to look at her. Feroza made a point of never being alone with her. Janine also had a whining grating voice that got on everyone's nerves — but got her her way — and a fund of expletives so fantastic that even Jo pricked up her ears and, quietly attentive, learned from her guru.

Jo had a strong sense of family, as was evident from the way she remembered each of her nieces' and nephews' names, preferences, and caprices, and one Sunday afternoon, loaded with presents — some pilfered and some purchased from their race winnings — Jo took Feroza with her to Denver to visit her brother Tom.

Tom's was the only shabby home in a well-maintained, upper middle-class neighborhood of smooth lawns and trim, glossy-leafed trees.

They turned into the drive, and Feroza at once saw the large man with a graying stubble, sprawled in a chair beneath an anemic fruit tree. The yard was overgrown with weeds. The house badly needed a coat of paint.

Tom was drinking beer out of a can, and the gritty soil near his long legs was strewn with empty beer cans. His navel, and the pink hairy bulge above it, showed through a missing button on his red-and-brown plaid shirt. The shirt and shorts were stained where beer had dribbled.

Approximately halfway between the man and his house an unruly tree hung gloomily over a large car. Feroza could tell by the car's long ugly fins that it was an ancient model, older perhaps than Manek's Ford back in Cambridge. Feroza noticed a small grubby face peering out of its shadowed interior.

In fact the yard was littered with children who were either bawling or brawling. A pale child with a runny nose and strawlike hair flung herself at Jo. Jo swung her up, then down between her legs, and, twirling round and round with her niece, clasped her in a huge hug. More nieces and nephews crowded round Jo, clamoring for her attention. Feroza noticed that two or three of the children were not familiar with Jo and stood at a small distance, wistfully sticking their fingers in their mouths, as Jo dished out the kisses, hugs, and presents.

Jo managed to find presents for them, too.

A harried woman with sparse, frizzy hair came out shouting at the children. She wore a skimpy, sleeveless top over baggy draw-string pants. The door gaped behind her, and the dim space inside appeared to be cheerless. Although she saw Feroza and Jo, and was having her sister-in-law visit after more than a year, the woman did not greet them. Their presence unacknowledged by her, the distracted woman scolded, spanked, and dragged a howling child indoors.

Jo and Feroza hung around for about an hour, making desultory conversation with Tom. On closer inspection Feroza thought he was good-looking, and although she was probably seeing him at his worst, there was something appealingly vulnerable about him. He talked in a defensive way, rubbing his nose with his thumb every short while, as if challenging Jo to contradict him. He had fancy business schemes and plans in mind and was about to implement them with the help of partners. He apparently knew a lot of rich people who wanted to do business with him.

But for most of the visit, Jo played with the children. They saw and heard the woman at intervals, and Feroza was surprised that they had not been offered even a cup of tea.

Jo explained that some of the kids were foster children.

Feroza at once felt she might have misjudged the couple and had come to hasty and judgmental conclusions. They must be kindhearted beneath their gruff and rough exteriors to provide care for the abandoned children.

When they were about to leave, the man shouted, “Elly, they're going! Are you gonna haul your ass out or not?”

Elly came out, wiping her hands on her shapeless cotton pants. She offered them an abstracted, unwilling, little smile and said to Jo: “Oh, you're going? Too bad you can't stay. How're Mom 'n' Pop?”

On the way home, Jo told Feroza that the children had been farmed out to Tom and Elly by the county for a fee.

Feroza couldn't understand the way the family unit she had just witnessed was structured, or how it sustained itself. Obviously Tom was not a steady provider, and she suspected that he drank too much. She was tormented by what she had seen. What would happen to the children? It was so unlike anything in Pakistan. She had never heard of children being sent to foster homes. If a man could not for some reason provide for his family, usually because of sickness, death, or some other calamity, his wife and children would be provided for by relatives. Children were not given up for adoption or “farmed out,” so long as there were family members alive. Men didn't go to seed the way Tom had because of drinking problems: few Muslim men drank. She had heard of very few cases of alcoholism, and these existed only among the fashionably wealthy, who could afford the black-market rates demanded by their affliction. She wondered, was this the price one paid for the non-interference and the privacy she was beginning to find increasingly attractive?

After a few days spent in aimless vacation leisure, Feroza and Jo received letters stating that their applications had been accepted by the University of Denver and that their credits were transferable. Feroza and Jo leaped and pranced with a sense of release and exhilaration. Jubilant, they packed small bags and shot off on a tour of the Grand Canyon.

A little before the new term began, the girls rented a small
basement apartment in a building near the campus. From her very first day at the University of Denver, Feroza sensed she was in the right place, that her life would develop in unexpected and substantial ways. For one thing the cosmopolitan variety of students — black, Hispanic, Arabic, Irani, and some unmistakably Pakistani and Indian — filled her with suppressed excitement. Besides, after Twin Falls, Feroza found the sheer size and complexity of the University exhilarating.