An American Brat (28 page)

These performances for the edification of the youngsters were staged with such regularity that the behavior of both the young and the old was almost automatic, entailing no untoward effort.

Their parts played out satisfactorily, the children were summarily dismissed, together with the white-liveried and crisply turbaned new servant, who was passing the drinks and hors-d'oeuvres. Now the formidable think tank of uncles, aunts, parents, and friends, talking vociferously, settled down to the solemn business of thrashing out a strategy.

All options were considered, angles analyzed, opinions aired. “If this David fellow says this, you say that! If Feroza says that, you say this!”

Zareen was alternately instructed, “Be firm. Exercise your authority as her mother!” and “If you can't knock him out with sugar, slug him with honey.”

They further confused her by directing, “Don't melt if she cries. If Feroza throws a tantrum, throw one twice as fierce!” and “But be careful; if you're too harsh, she'll rebel. Once she becomes naffat, she won't care if you or I approve or disapprove.”

The Pakistani student in the seat next to Zareen's covertly eyed her from time to time. Intimidated by the range and ferocity of her grimaces, he quietly ate his dinner and, once again contorting his body to accommodate it to his narrow seat, fell fitfully asleep. Clutching her handbag beneath her sari, Zareen dozed on and off.

Zareen awoke near the end of her long journey to the sound of the wheels being lowered with a grinding noise and a shudder. A few minutes later, the plane tipped its wings to circle the Mile High city. Peering at it through her window, Zareen saw the mountainous, almost uninhabited spread of the new country, so different from the crowded vistas of her flights over Lahore and Rawalpindi with the untidy rectangles of flat roof-tops and flat fields. Even from the sky, she could see that this was an extraordinarily clean part of the planet, as if new and little used, and the mountains appeared to have been arranged by landscape artists.

The Boeing lost height rapidly, and all at once they were flying over clusters of toylike skyscrapers, just as she had seen them in photographs; banked up against the mountains, the city looked flattened and dwarfed. Then they were sweeping over a rush of clearly demarcated roads winding round sloping doll's houses and tiny blocks of emerald lawn.

Thus it was that after again praying eleven Yathas and five Ashem Vahoos, jet-lagged and duty-bound Zareen landed at the Denver airport.

Half an hour later she emerged, groggily steering her luggage, and spotted Feroza right away. Conspicuous in the thick fence of pink faces behind a railing, Feroza's dusky face glowed with affection and delight at the sight of her mother.

A little knot of love and happiness formed round Zareen's heart. She paused deliberately, looked away, and then looked sharply at Feroza to catch that fleeting instant when a loved face, seen after a long interval, reveals itself as to a stranger before settling into the familiar groove of habitual association.

Feroza wore a light brown tank top and, as Zareen had expected, no makeup. Her plump, well-formed shoulders and arms were chocolate dark with suntan, and her body radiated a
buxom brown female vitality. But her most striking feature, even at that distance, were her eyes, a luminous yellow-brown, lighter than her skin or the hair falling about her shoulders, lighting up her face. Zareen held her breath. Her daughter was beautiful.

And then Feroza was hugging her and taking her traveling bag from her hands and brushing the tears from her eyes.

A nondescript young man in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, crowned by an unsparingly short and conservative haircut and wearing steel-rimmed glasses, smiled awkwardly and picked up Zareen's suitcases.

Feroza said, “Mum, this is David, David Press.”

The little knot of happiness and love in her heart was nudged aside to make room for a harder substance as Zareen assessed her adversary. The photograph had been misleading. David bore little resemblance to the confident, actorishly handsome image. His shy blue eyes blinked with anxiety to be liked behind the unadorned squares of glass.

“How are you, David?” Zareen said, outwardly calm, coolly holding out her hand with the three diamond rings.

David, divesting himself of the two heavy suitcases and hastily wiping his hands on his pants, took her hand gingerly in his and shook it formally. “Welcome to America,” he said and then mumbled something neither Zareen nor Feroza could decipher.

As they followed David to the little Chevette in the parking lot, Feroza whispered, “He's had his hair cut. He's all dressed up in long pants for your sake.” She gave her mother a nervous hug.

Zareen decided to postpone any thinking on the matter for the moment and face the situation after she'd had a cup of tea. She glanced at the straight-backed, square-shouldered, muscular young man walking with a self-conscious spring to his step ahead of them and, turning to Feroza, said only, “You've become very dark; your grandmother won't like it. You'd better bleach your face or something before you come home.”

To go downtown, Feroza turned south on Monaco and then west on Seventeenth Street, with its large stone and frame houses.
She wanted to impress her mother with the more alluring aspects of the city before taking her to her modest home on East Edison.

As they drove past the sprinklers raining on manicured lawns, Zareen talked about family members, relating amusing anecdotes, and addressed herself exclusively to Feroza.

David sat quietly in the back with whatever bits of luggage could not be crammed into the car's small trunk.

Abruptly they were among the tall buildings downtown, and Zareen stopped talking to gape at the looming skyscrapers that had looked so toylike from the airplane.

David suddenly came to life in the pause. “All this is recent construction,” he said and, as Feroza drove around a large circle, doggedly pointed out landmarks. “That's City Hall. That domed building — that's the State Capital. That's the Denver Art Museum. It's ugly,” David ventured apologetically, and Zareen, who was impressed with the ten-floor-high fortress with pencil-thin slits for windows that looked like gun-turrets and reminded her of the picturesque forts around Peshawar, wondered at his aberrant taste. “I like it.” Zareen was curt.

“That's the Denver Center for the Performing Arts,” David continued compulsively, and Feroza noticed his voice was a bit shaky. “Where the Denver Symphony plays … They have small theaters where plays are performed, dance and ballet.”

“Umm,” Zareen said. Even the “Umm” sounded terse.

“Can you see the tall building there with all the glass?” David leaned forward and pointed a taut finger at the windshield. “That's the Seventeenth Street shopping mall; the area with the lamp-posts has been blocked off for shoppers and people who just want to stand around and look.”

And then David abruptly discontinued the tourist-guide bit and quietly said, “Look at the sunset.”

It was dusk. They had moved a little away from the tall buildings beginning to twinkle with lights, and they saw the mountains and clouds caught in a still and glorious explosion of scarlet, pink, and steel gray. Once again Zareen felt that the city, enormous as it was from close quarters, was dwarfed by
the powerful mountains ranged behind it.

But once they were past the awesome sunset and masonry downtown and Feroza headed south on University Avenue toward the campus, Zareen continued directing her remarks at Feroza and subconsciously registered the unexpected row of mellowed stone houses, the Cherry Creek Shopping Mall, the astonishing cleanliness everywhere.

Soon they arrived in a street lined with bookstores, restaurants, and stores selling athletic supplies, hiking, and mountaineering equipment. David pointed out a stately building of rust-colored stone with small, recessed windows, flanked by two other equally stately buildings of gray stone and said, “That's the University of Denver.”

They entered a residential area crisscrossed by a checkerboard of streets, and Feroza turned into a shallow drive, announcing, “Here's where we live.”

Zareen realized that “we” included David. She cast a startled glance at her daughter, and Feroza quickly added, “Four of us share, Mum. David lives in the converted garage. Two girls, Laura and Shirley, share a room. They didn't want to be in the way when you came. You'll see them tomorrow.”

Zareen regarded the house with raised eyebrows. Coming as she did from a part of the world where houses have thirteen-inch-thick brick walls and reinforced concrete roofs, her daughter's dwelling looked like an oblong shack of wood and cardboard set up to be blown away by the huffing and puffing nursery-rhyme wolf.

But once she stepped inside Zareen was pleasantly surprised by the thickly carpeted interior, the evenly hung drapes, the comfortable furniture, and she fell in love with the large green fridge and matching dishwasher in the spacious kitchen. She touched the shining surface of things with delight, appreciating the materials that could be kept so easily clean without the help of servants. She was quite civil to David, but with an inflection that left him a bit breathless and fumbling, as both he and Feroza showed off the house.

Feroza made a pot of tea, and after a decent interval, David left them to talk. Almost at once Feroza asked, “Mum, what d'you think of him?” She was a little crestfallen when her mother said, “It's too early to tell. We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

The next day, refreshed by her sleep, Zareen launched what she believed was a mild and tactful offensive. She lauded the virtues and earning capacities of three marriageable Parsee boys in Lahore. Each of their mothers had expressed an ardent desire to make Feroza her daughter-in-law. Two other worthy mothers of handsome and wealthy boys in Karachi had expressed similar aspirations.

Feroza kissed her mother fondly and teased, “I think I'm too young to settle down with mothers-in-law. Besides,” she said, indicating with a shift in her tone that she was serious, “David's mother, Adina, is really quite sweet. I've met her, and we often talk on the phone. She and Abe, David's father, live in Boulder, near Denver. They are not rich, but they are respectable people. His father is a bookkeeper at Con Edison, the electricity company.”

This gave Zareen the opening she was looking for. “You're too precious. We're not going to throw you away on the first riffraff that comes your way.”

Feroza's shining eyes lost a part of their luster.

“You know what we do when a proposal is received,” Zareen continued, ignoring the change in her daughter's regard, warned though that she must be more guarded in her choice of words. “We investigate the boy's family thoroughly. What is his background? His standard of living? His family connections?”

A well-connected family conferred advantages that smoothed a couple's path through life, and not only their own life, but the lives of their children! What did she know of David's background except that his father worked in some Con company? Of David's family connections? His antecedents?

“What do you mean, ‘antecedents'?”

“His ancestry, his khandan.”

“Oh, you mean his pedigree?”

“If that's how you like to put it.”

“Don't be absurd, Mum,” Feroza said. “If you go about talking of people's pedigrees, the Americans will laugh at you.”

Cut to the quick, Zareen plucked a tissue from the box on the kitchen table. “It's no laughing matter. You'll be thrown out of the community! Do you know what happens to girls who marry out? They become ten times more religious!” And then, like a magician conjuring up the inevitable rabbit, she ominously intoned, “Take Perin Powri. Like most of you girls, she never wore her sudra or kusti. After her marriage to a non, she wore her sari Parsee-style, and her sudra covered her hips! Her kusti ends dangled at the back! Till the day of her death, she missed her connection with community. She would have given anything to be allowed into the agyari.”

“We're having a civil marriage in any case; a judge will marry us,” Feroza said. “That way I can keep my religion, if it matters so much to you. Of course you know David and I are Unitarians.”

“Unitarians!” Zareen wrinkled her nose disparagingly. “You sound almost as if you've converted! My dear, your judge's marriage will make no difference to the priests. They won't allow you into any of our places of worship, agyari or Atash Behram.”

Zareen moved her coffee mug to one side and placed her arms on the table, “Do you know how hurt and worried we all were when we got your letter? I couldn't sleep. And your father, I never thought to see him so shaken and grieved! Your poor grandmother actually fainted! She told me to beg you on my knees not to marry this boy. You know she adores you. You won't be permitted to attend her funeral rites — or mine or your father's!” She picked out the last tissue and wiped her eyes. “Do you know how selfish you are, thinking only of yourself?”

Zareen blew her nose and addressed herself to what caused her — next to the thought of her daughter's outcast status — the most anguish. “It is not just a matter of your marrying a non-Parsee boy. The entire family is involved — all our relationships matter.”

Zareen tried to describe how much pleasure the interaction with a new bunch of Parsee in-laws would bring the family. More wedding feasts, more cozy friendships, more bonding within the
community, more prestige. “You are robbing us of a dimension of joy we have a right to expect. What will you bring to the family if you marry this David? His family won't get involved with ours. But that doesn't matter so much … What matters is your life — it will be so dry. Just husband, wife, and maybe a child rattling like loose stones in this huge America!”

Feroza despaired of bridging the distance that suddenly yawned between them. “You'll have to look at things in a different way … It's a different culture,” she ventured desperately.

“And you'll have to look at it our way. It's not your culture! You can't just toss your heritage away like that. It's in your bones!” Zareen thumped the table with conviction and tried to look as if she'd settled the argument.

Feroza stared at her mother. Her face had become set in a way that recalled to Zareen the determination and hauteur with which her daughter had once slammed doors and shut herself up in her room.

“You've always been so stubborn!” Zareen said angrily. “You've made up your mind to put us through this thing. You'll disgrace the family!”

“I'm only getting married. If the family wants to feel disgraced, let them!”

Zareen checked herself. She recalled the sage advice of the assembly; she must not push her daughter to rebellion.

“Darling,” she said, “I can't bear to see you unhappy.” She buried her face in her arms and began to sob.

Feroza brushed her lips against her mother's short, sleek hair, and putting her arms round her cried, “I don't know what to do. Please don't cry like this. It's just that I love him.”

Zareen reared up as if an exposed nerve had been touched in her tooth. “Love? Love comes after marriage. And only if you marry the right man. Don't think you can be happy by making us all unhappy.”