An American Brat (23 page)

Gwen petted her, saying kind things to her in her comforting voice, affectionately allaying her fears and soothing her unhappiness.

When Feroza, her storm spent, stopped crying, only sucking in her breath with an occasional shudder, Gwen pulled her to her boyish chest and gently rocked her. “He's not your type, baby,” she said. “You know he's not your type.”

Feroza could feel Gwen's heart throb against her temple. Her chest was shallow, her ribs surprisingly birdlike, a cage too brittle to contain the vigorously pulsating organ. Feroza had a touching impression of the fragile girl's vulnerability then, of all that Gwen might have gone through, of the strength required of her to be where she was, where she wanted to be. And she understood the courage of the heart beating so stoutly in its bony cage, even as the monotony of its throbbing filled her with its tranquility.

Feroza could have lain there, drawing on its strength, but Gwen leaned back and held Feroza by her shoulders. Supporting her so that Feroza had to sit up, the older girl's small, wise eyes looked close into Feroza's. “You can't allow yourself to be hurt like that by Shashi,” she said, shaking her head. “It's like being bruised by the breeze. The guy just circulates — he can't help it anymore than the breeze.”

Feroza did not stop seeing Shashi. She could no more stop seeing him than she could the mirrored library building. In any event, one did not sever ties with Shashi; he wouldn't allow it.

Shashi gauged the irreconcilable shift in Feroza's feelings. It made him unhappy, and he regretted it. He could not clearly understand why it had occurred and was confusedly, vociferously repentant. But Shashi, being the evanescent, adaptive creature he
was, soon accepted the situation and in doing so merely changed the grip, the nature of the tie that bound them, so that they would remain good friends.

After all, Feroza was in his bouquet of mountain wild-flowers. She didn't wish to be torn from it nor did Shashi want her to be. The flowers bloomed and distilled their fragrance in the currents of the friendship Shashi generated, in the quick-witted air in which he circulated, and Feroza's place in the setting was secured by the friends she had made and the ideas and discussions to which she contributed.

Feroza's insatiable excitement about the various knowledge Shashi had made her alive to, bound her to him in a way their romance never could have.

Shashi had graduated in hotel management but could not yet see his way to abandoning his college life and earning his living. He had enrolled in the master's program in business management. He was also taking classes in psychology, philosophy, and creative writing.

The fall term was coming to a close, and the campus was filled with activity. The students were taking exams, handing in their papers, preparing to leave their dorms and rented apartments for the winter vacation, and making plans for Christmas.

Feroza had decided to spend her holidays in Lahore. Her family had been sending clamorous letters for over a year and were anxious for her to visit.

In any case, Gwen and Rhonda would be gone. Jo, who was phoning less and less frequently, would not be in Boulder. Feroza might have visited Manek, but he was busy moving to Houston, finding a place to rent, and settling into the position he had accepted with NASA.

Manek received his doctorate. The family in Pakistan did not know what a landmark occasion it was in America. And it was only after the event, when he saw how many relatives of students had descended on M.I.T. for the ceremony, that Manek himself became aware of it. He called Feroza the day after, “You didn't even come for my graduation!” he said bitterly and hung up.

Feroza had tried to reach him many times on graduation day
just to have the pleasure of saying, “Oh, Dr. Junglewalla, how is your pulse this morning?” but he had not been in his room.

Manek's work on his thesis in chemical and structural engineering and the recommendations from his professors were excellent. The engineer at NASA who interviewed him hinted about sponsoring his citizenship if things worked out as satisfactorily as he expected. Manek was already in touch with a lawyer, and he would soon be in a position to apply for his green card.

Feroza became increasingly excited as the date of her departure drew near. Thoughts of Khutlibai, of Cyrus and Zareen, of her relations and friends, came to the forefront of her mind and hovered there. She wondered how she had borne being away from them so long. Her mind was already traveling, preparing her for the quantum change, transporting her to Lahore before her arrival.

Feroza was received at the airport with garlands. The portals of the house had been strung with a perfumed chain of red roses and the floor before it made auspicious with stencils of fish, flowers, and lettering in English reading “Welcome.”

After her stay in the New World, with everything in it scintillating and modern, Feroza was struck by the mellow beauty of their ancient door. Like her father, she had considered her mother's pride and happiness in the acquisition a piquant oddity. But now she stood in awe before the two worn panels, wide open in their carved and painted frames. She had been instructed to wait as Zareen and Freny rushed inside to fetch the ingredients of welcome.

Freny, stouter than Feroza remembered her and as assertive as ever, held the ceremonial silver tray while Zareen circled an egg seven times round Feroza's head. She sacrificed the egg by cracking it on the floor, its contents neatly spilled onto newspaper placed to one side of the threshold.

Feroza held out her hands to receive the coconut. She leaned forward so that Zareen could anoint her forehead with the red paste and press rice on it. Zareen invoked Ahura Mazda's blessings, which, except for variations occasioned by Feroza's travels, were the same as on all her birthdays. Zareen ended by proclaiming, “May you go laughing-singing to your in-law's home soon; may you enjoy lots and lots of happiness with your husband and children.”

Again Feroza leaned forward, this time to receive the lump of crystallized sugar Khutlibai popped into her mouth.

Khutlibai drew circles over Feroza's head with her arms, loudly cracked her knuckles on her temples, invoked more blessings, and stood to one side blinking back the tears of happiness flooding her eyes.

Zareen poured a little water from a round-bottomed silver mug onto the tray. Divested of egg, coconut, and sugar, it held only residual grains of rice. She circled the tray seven times round Feroza's head to banish the envious eye and tipped its contents on either side of the door.

Protected against evil and welcomed by propitious spirits, Feroza stepped through the rose-scented entrance of her home. The family surrounded Feroza affectionately, much as they had Manek. There were a great many questions and a vigorous exchange of views. Fresh details of Manek's marriage came to light and led to a string of hilarious anecdotes. The family feasted, laughed, and gossiped late into the night.

After the initial wave of euphoria, Feroza perceived that many things had changed. Time had wrought alterations she could not have foreseen — while her memory had preserved the people and places she knew, and their relationships with her, as if in an airtight jar.

It hurt her to see both her grandmothers look significantly older. Perhaps her concept of what age looked like had changed in a country where seventy-two-year-olds jogged like athletic young things. Khutlibai had stopped dying her hair and though her short, gray hair looked thicker and fluffed handsomely about her head in jaunty waves, it made the wrinkles on her face seem more resigned. Her back, however, still emerged sturdy and dependable from the monumental pedestal of her rump and hips.

Ill-mannered though it might appear and disagreeable as it was to her, Khutlibai visited her son-in-law's house often to see her granddaughter. She held the girl's hand in both of hers and pressed it to her eyes. Her gaze lingered on Feroza's vibrant
face, and her shrewd eyes were luminous with pride and love. She saw life and intelligence shining in her face, but there was too much life there, she thought with a trace of unease, too much intelligence — more than might be good for her granddaughter.

Khutlibai and Zareen went into convulsions of laughter at the funny way Feroza had of describing her adventures in America. Zareen was astonished at the change in Feroza. Was this flaming, confident creature, who talked so engagingly and candidly and had acquired a throaty, knowing, delectable laugh, the same timid little thing who had refused to answer the phone?

As the days passed, Zareen wondered if she hadn't made a mistake after all in sending her daughter to America. But seeing that Cyrus was quite at ease with the transformation in their daughter, she kept her thoughts to herself and even checked her mother from voicing her misgivings.

Soonamai's cataracts were ripening. It broke Feroza's heart to see her self-contained and dignified grandmother groping for things, having to rely on the negligent care of others.

People appeared to have forgotten Bhutto and his martyrdom. The concerns that had mattered to her, and had once again risen to her consciousness, had been replaced by other pressing issues. Something called the Hadood Ordinances had been introduced by General Zia in 1979 without anyone knowing what they were. The Federal Shariat Court, to oversee the Islamic laws, had also been established.

The new mischief in their midst had sneaked up on them unawares and surprised them one day when they read about the Famida and Allah Baksh case. The couple, who had eloped to get married, had been accused of committing adultery, or zina, by the girl's father. They were sentenced to death by stoning. On an appeal to a higher court, the charges were dismissed. Fortunately, stoning to death was declared un-Islamic because there was no mention of it in the Koran.

But the shock that provoked the massive wave of public indignation came with Safia Bibi's case. The blind sixteen-year-old
servant girl, pregnant out of wedlock as a result of rape, was charged with adultery. She was sentenced to three years rigorous imprisonment, fifteen lashes, and a fine of a thousand rupees.

Safia Bibi's father, in bringing charges against her assailant, had been unwittingly trapped by the Zina Ordinance. It required the testimony of four “honorable” male eye-witnesses or eight female eyewitnesses to establish rape. The startled women, who had enjoyed equal witness status under the previous law, realized that their worth had been discounted by fifty percent.

Since it was scarcely possible to produce four male eye-witnesses given the private nature of the crime, the blind girl's testimony against the assailant was not admissible. Being sightless, she was not considered a reliable witness. Since rape could not be proved, she was charged under a subcategory of rape: “fornication outside the sanctity of marriage.”

Safia Bibi was not punished, thanks to the pressure of the legal community and the women's and human rights groups. The women came out on the streets, burning their veils, voicing their protests, and beating their breasts, and Zareen was among them. The verdict was rescinded.

Jehan Mian, a pregnant eleven-year-old orphan, was similarly charged. In view of her “tender age,” the judges reduced her punishment to ten lashes and one year rigorous imprisonment, to go into effect once her child was two years old.

Feroza found the judges' compassion revolting, a society that permitted such sentencing, criminal. The addition of zina altered the entire legal picture of sexual crime. The victim of rape ran the risk of being punished for adultery, while the rapist was often set free.

Yet there were many apologists, upright men learned in jurisprudence, who agreed with the letter of the law, if not its spirit. They produced a litany of precedent and dire argument to support the verdicts. The gender bias was appalling.

All this had been set in place shortly after Bhutto's hanging. “You should have sent me newspaper clippings,” Feroza said to her mother. “I want to know what's going on here. After all, it's my country!”

Zareen did not mention the innuendo, the odd barb, that had suddenly begun to fester at the back of her consciousness—the insinuation that her patriotism was questionable, or that she was not a proper Pakistani because she was not Muslim. What was she then? And where did she belong, if not in the city where her ancestors were buried? She was in the land of the seven rivers, the Septe Sindhu, the land that Prophet Zarathustra had declared as favored most by Ahura Mazda. What if, on the strength of this, the 120 thousand Parsees in the world were to lay claim to the Punjab and Sindh? The absurdity of the idea kindled Zareen's smile.

But such comments were a passing thing, she thought, discounting the remarks made by people who did not matter to her or Cyrus, blaming them for the zealous Islamization fostered by General Zia, which encouraged religious chauvinism and marginalized people like her — the minorities — and made them vulnerable to petty ill will.

Some of Feroza's school friends had entered the Kinnaird and Lahore Colleges and were preparing to graduate. Some had disappeared into their ancestral villages, and a few had married in Lahore. They talked about babies, husbands, and sisters-in-law and took her unawares by their gossip about people Feroza didn't know and their interest in issues she couldn't follow. Feroza felt she had grown in different ways. Her consciousness included many things they had no concept of and were not in the least bit interested in.

When Feroza talked about the condition of blacks and Hispanics, the poverty, and the job insecurity prevailing among even the whites in America, her family and friends looked at her with surprised, unsparing eyes. They had their own vistas of uncompromising poverty and could not feel compassion for people in a distant, opulent country that had never been devastated by war, that greedily utilized one fourth of the world's resources and polluted its atmosphere and water with nuclear tests and poisonous pesticides that could serve as well to obliterate Third World pests like themselves.

After seeing the filthy conditions in the tattered jhuggees that had sprung up on the outskirts of the Cantonment and between Ferozepore Road and Jail Road, Feroza understood their reaction. Poverty had spread like a galloping, disfiguring disease. Every kind of poverty in the United States paled in comparison.

Yet it did not mean that the condition of the poor in America was trifling, or the injustice there less rampant. Feroza tried to clarify her thoughts. Poverty, she realized, groping for expression, was relative.

A friend who was now at Kinnaird College described a house she had visited in one of the poorest ghettos in Harlem the summer before. The family had electricity, running water, a fridge, and a car. The concept of refrigerators and cars stood at the very limit of extravagance and, in comparison to the people who dwelt in the rag-and-tin lean-tos and in infested, stinking jhuggees without bathrooms or electricity, undeserving of sympathy.

Did that mean they should care less for people's suffering elsewhere if their degree of deprivation appeared to be less? Were compassion and caring rationed commodities that could not bridge national boundaries? A car in America did not signify riches, she explained. It was like an extension of the body; to be without one was like missing an arm or a leg. She spoke from experience, she said. She didn't have a car, and she felt crippled.

Feroza, who had been scathingly critical of America, of its bullying foreign policy and ruthless meddling in the affairs of vulnerable countries, in her discussions with her roommates and the new friends she had met through Shashi, found herself defending it in unexpected ways. Which other country opened its arms to the destitute and discarded of the world the way America did? Of course it had its faults — terrifying shortcomings — but it had God's blessings, too.

Feroza was disconcerted to discover that she was a misfit in a country in which she had once fitted so well. Although Zareen had not mentioned the slighting remarks, having dismissed them
as too cranky and trivial to countenance, Feroza's subconscious had registered subtle changes in her mother's behavior. She could not have put her finger on them, but they were there in the wariness that sometimes flickered across Zareen's face and in a barely noticeable hesitation in her choice of words. Feroza, absorbing the undercurrent at some hidden level of her consciousness, found her sense of dislocation deepen.

And there was the question of marriage. Zareen hinted at it casually and then broached the subject unequivocally. There were some wonderful boys she had in mind.

“How can I give up my studies at this point, Mum?” Feroza protested. “There're only two years left. Let me graduate at least.”

“What's this new graduate-shaduate nonsense? We send you to America for a few months, and you end up spending almost three years! Your father and I offered you our finger and you grabbed our whole arm! Enough is enough! You have to listen to us. It's time you settled down.”

“I'm not settling anywhere without a career,” Feroza said. “I don't want to be at the mercy of my husband. If I have a career, I can earn a living, and he will respect me more.”

“Respect you? Nobody'll marry you if you're too educated. I'm not educated and I don't have a career, but I'd like to see your father disrespect me! Or your uncles disrespect your aunts!”

“You've never worked, Mum. You don't know how thrilling it is to earn your own money. And spend it.”

Zareen looked at her daughter, surprised at what she had said. It occurred to Zareen that in her many more years on earth, she had missed out on some things. Feroza had said “thrilling,” but she understood that she had meant more. The money Feroza earned and spent must give her a sense of control over her life, a sense of accomplishment that Zareen had very little experience with.

“Okay, baba, finish your studies,” Zareen said. “I know how obstinate you are.”

Khutlibai and Soonamai, each in turn, and together, stroked
Feroza's arm and expressed the wish dearest to their hearts. They wanted to see Feroza married and settled before they passed away. Couldn't she give it a thought for their sakes?