An American Brat (6 page)

Sudden tears welled in Feroza's eyes. She brushed them away impatiently. It wouldn't do to have a pink nose and swollen eyes before all the people coming to see her off at the airport. She looked out the window to divert her attention, and all at once it struck her that she was going far from Lahore, from the sights, the sounds, and the fragrances that were dear to her, from the people she loved and had taken for granted. Her vision grew inward and, in a strange dreamlike way, expanded to accommodate a kaleidoscope of images of the entire city and its surrounding green fields.

The sky was still a deep, translucent blue, paling only round the sun, and in the imaginatively telescoped collage of her insight, the sun's amber light nestled on the brown waters of the shallow Ravi and glowed on the marble domes and minarets of the Badshahi Mosque. It shone on the warren of narrow streets and on the wooden balconies of dilapidated buildings, and just as the glowing atash in the temple had sunk into her heart and filled it with its holy warmth the day before, Feroza felt that the dazzling sun today warmed the hearts and bronzed bodies of Lahore's seven million inhabitants.

The brand-new, tree-lined boulevards and palatial bungalows, the ancient Moghul fort and the ancient mausoleums, the new gardens with new fountains, floated radiant in Feroza's multidimensional vision. It was her city. A beautiful, lushly green and luminous city, and she would miss it. Feroza felt the warmth of
the sun nestle on the back of her head. She would miss Lahore, and her family.

But there were many splendid cities beneath the same caressing sun that she wanted to look at, many new faces in the teeming world she wished to know and love as much as she loved her classmates and her family.

Feroza shut her eyes and recited the ancient prayers from the Avesta that her grandmothers had taught her, her heart already in a tumult of nostalgia and fantastic anticipation. Even though she had not understood a word of the extinct language of the Sacred Book, Feroza had blind faith in the power of its verses and imbued them with whatever exalted concepts and spiritual longing her soul and emotions periodically required. Her maternal uncle, Behram, had given her a Romanized copy of the Avesta, with an English translation of her prayers, on her fourteenth birthday. Feroza was enchanted by their poetry and not the least bit disappointed by the meaning, despite the esoteric significance with which her imagination had endowed the words. In fact the translated verses embodied her inarticulate exaltation.

A little clutch of schoolgirls from the Convent of the Sacred Heart was already waiting at the airport. They held delicate strings of pearly jasmine buds that curiously matched their own aura of pristine innocence. They clung together, shy smiles twitching on their lips and in their eyes, leaning on one another as if each was incapable of walking by herself, the little bunch a unified entity. Some were bolder, and the painfully shy ones clustered behind them. They were all holding onto or in some way touching each other, fiddling with clothes, adjusting their long, chiffon dopattas, pushing back and smoothing stray wisps of dark hair.

With twittering, birdlike cries, they welcomed Feroza and absorbed her into their collective midst as soon as she got out of the car, their slender fingers with painted tips fluttering above her head like beige butterflies, messing her fine hair as they hung the jasmine garlands on her. They giggled, nervously remembering to
restrain their improper merriment, aware of the eyes attracted like magnets to their sheltered youth and the wealth that burnished so much unattainable loveliness. Every short while, one or the other would exclaim “Hai!” or a shocked “Alllll-ah!” or “Hai Allah!” and let escape a peal of quickly constrained laughter. Everyone could tell their talk was full of wicked mischief and innuendo. They spoke in Urdu, with the odd word or sentence in English tossed in so naturally it blended with the rhythm and the consonants of Urdu.

By an odd coincidence, most of the girls had a touch of green, gold, gray in their gorgeous eyes, and the same shy collective light shone out of Feroza's tawny irises as they leaned on each other like yielding saplings, touching, touching.

The party from the house formed another cluster near them and watched Feroza's friends and Feroza with tender smiles and alert, protective expressions. Suddenly Cyrus's brother Rohinton, a huge, stern, and taciturn man, took a couple of determined strides and planted himself in front of two men who were picking their teeth and ogling the girls with brash, kohl-rimmed eyes.

The men moved away, more stolid than docile. As custodian of the girls, the uncle was within his rights. Next Rohinton, accompanied by Zareen's brother Behram who had turned up from Rawalpindi with Jeroo, stalked a wide circle round the girls, demarcating perimeters. Their austere, threatening glares peremptorily dispersed the oglers and loafers.

Arms akimbo, massive chest thrust out, Freny also stood guard. Behram's sleek wife, Jeroo, who was addicted to chiffon saris and to fiddling with her pearls, stood with her, primly glaring about and on the lookout. They noticed a bunch of college students staring at the girls and making remarks. Mimicking the girls' gestures, two young men draped themselves about their giggling friends, smoothing their cropped hair as if they were long tresses and adjusting their imaginary scarves.

The aunts marched up to them. “Oye, shamelesses! Don't you have mothers and sisters? Go stare at them!”

The students ducked and, pretending to scold and thump their
comrades, facetiously saying, “Sorry an-tee, sorry an-tee,” pushed and shoved each other away, quickly dissolving in the crowd.

They were all grouped in a huge hall, with bunches of people gathered round departing kin like orbiting satellites. Since they were all taking the same flight to Karachi — from where some, like Feroza, would fly to other countries — there was a mad and tearful scramble to say good-bye when the flight was announced. The girls' hands reached out, reluctant to let go as Feroza pulled away, giving the impression of stretched, elasticized bodies being torn apart.

Feroza was kissed and hugged and whispered to by every member of the Ginwalla party and was now absorbed into the Parsee pack. Feroza put an arm each round Zareen and Khutlibai. Soonamai stood near them, straight and dignified. She had already hugged Feroza and held her granddaughter's small hand and pliant fingers pressed to her wet eyes. No one was dry-eyed. Zareen and Khutlibai daubed their eyes with soggy handkerchiefs, and Cyrus, who had wound his long arms round all three, briefly removed them to blow his imposing nose.

Khutlibai, Zareen, and the aunts were whispering breathlessly, as if Feroza's fate hung on the flurry of last-minute instructions they were imparting: “Don't talk to strangers; and never, ever look into their eyes!”

“A man asked your uncle Behram, ‘What is the time?' and when your uncle looked at his watch, he hit him on the head and took away his watch and wallet.”

“Someone asked your Rohinton kaka for a cigarette, and when he stopped to say, ‘Look, my good man' — you know how your kaka talks — ‘I am a Parsee; Parsees don't smoke,' the ruffian pointed a knife at his fly and took away his watch, wallet, and Bally shoes!”

“If anyone talks to you, just look straight ahead and act deaf.”

“Don't accept anything to eat or drink from strangers. It may be drugged. God knows what they will do to you.”

“Give Manek the letter first thing you do … and don't worry,
he'll take good care of you,” said Zareen, and Khutlibai promptly added, “If he doesn't, sock him one!” She winked, causing a rivulet of tears to run down her soggy cheeks.

Feroza laughed and hugged her grandmother, wondering where she'd gotten that from — one of the American series featured on TV, most likely.

Cyrus had already given Feroza one hundred American dollars (purchased on the black market), and so had Khutlibai. The khaki-clad porter wheeled Feroza's suitcases past the security men at the checkpoint and signaled to her to follow. Feroza showed her ticket, and as she went past the uniformed men Cyrus's last message — in English except for one Gujrati word — rang out: “I've sent Manek enough doria for you. Take it from him.”

Few in Lahore understand Gujrati, so Parsees use it as a secret language when the occasion demands. Conversation about dollars purchased on the black market in the presence of security men is such an occasion.

Feroza's happy little face suddenly grew theatrically wan. She shook her head in dismay and spread her hands in a hopelessly defeated gesture. She mouthed the words, “Why him?” and, in a dumb charade, pointing at her breastbone, delivered the message that was clear to Cyrus, “You should have given it to me; you know how difficult Manek can be.”

Cyrus made a sheepish and contrite face, and Zareen lightly spanked his shoulder twice for Feroza's benefit.

Other passengers were crowding behind her. Weighted down with hand luggage and travel documents, Feroza was pushed away, frantically waving good-bye.

Feroza hugged the adventure of her travel to America to herself throughout the flight. As she hurtled through space, she became conscious also of the gravitational pull of the country she was leaving behind. Her sense of self, enlarged by the osmosis of identity with her community and with her group of school friends, stayed with her like a permanence — like the support that ocean basins provide the wind- and moon-generated vagaries of its waters. And this cushioning stilled her fear of the unknown: an unconscious panic that lay coiled somewhere between her navel and her ribs and was just beginning to manifest itself in a fleeting irregularity of her heartbeat.

Feroza beamed at the women passengers and directed at the air-hostesses a gratitude that infused their drudging routine with the glamour that had attracted them to the profession in the first place. They were delicately pretty girls, their smiling faces framed by fawn scarves edged with orange, expressly designed for them by Pierre Cardin in Paris.

The PIA flight touched down at Dubai, Paris, and Frankfurt. Feroza bought the cassette player and camera for Manek at the Dubai Duty-Free. Later that evening they landed at Heathrow Airport in London. The transit passengers were instructed to leave the plane with all their hand luggage and proceed to the transit lounge. The flight for New York would take off at two in the morning: a layover of six hours.

Feroza was juggling her hand luggage and the duty-free packages, wondering how she would carry them all off the plane, when a properly polite Pakistani voice addressed her in English:

“Jee, can I help you carry something, jee?”

“It's all right.” Feroza glanced at the well-built youth for the briefest moment before sternly averting her face to address again the problem of her multitudinous hand luggage.

Just as Feroza concluded she'd been too cavalier in refusing the proffered help, the polite voice said, “Excuse me, jee,” and a navy blue cardiganed arm shot out beneath her nose to hoist the shoulder bag and cassette player from her seat.

The youth stood back, holding Feroza's bags and restraining the tide of passengers banked behind him, and Feroza stepped into the aisle with the insouciance of one accustomed to such homage. This austere and regal behavior was expected of her. A more amiable attitude might be misconstrued.

Feroza was engrossed in an Agatha Christie murder mystery in the transit lounge when a familiar, tentative voice said, “Jee …”

Feroza looked up with a start. The brawny youth in the navy blue cardigan, accompanied by another properly respectful young man, stood before her.

“Can we get you something to drink, jee? A Coke, or tea? A sandwich?”

An ominous bell, accompanied by her grandmother's voice, sounded an alarm. Feroza at once said, “No.” And a split second later, “Thank you.”

They did not look like the kind of strangers who'd spike her Coke with drugs.

“It's a long wait, jee.” The youth was unobtrusively insistent. “We wondered if you'd care to join us for a gup-shup? It'll help pass the time?”

“I'm reading. Thank you,” Feroza said primly, and at once regretted her decision.

Nose ostensibly buried in the Agatha Christie paperback, Feroza sat in the lounge feeling lonely. The transit lounge hummed with subdued conversations and the fretful cries of children. It wasn't long before Feroza drifted into a romantic daydream of the swarthy young man with the reptilian leather jacket who had been so peremptorily banished by her father from their sitting room. Her adolescent fantasy cast him in the role of her persistent fellow traveler, and the traveler in the role of the insistent Government College student. As the competing images of the young men alternated
and the imagined relationships passionately intensified, the time whizzed by.

Feroza slept very little during the twenty-nine hours it took to arrive at Kennedy Airport. For the last eight-hour lap of their flight from London to New York, they had picked up a different set of passengers. Mainly American and European. Most of the Pakistanis who had boarded the plane with her in Karachi had disembarked in London. Already the space within the aircraft, the atmosphere, had changed, become foreign. And the barely acknowledged anxiety which had assailed her the past few days, that the trip might not after all materialize, vanished. She knew she had made it to America!

By the time the plane landed and Feroza nervously stepped from the fluted corridor into the airport lounge, she was triumphant and glowing. The orderly traffic of rushing people, the bright lights and warmed air, the extraordinary cleanliness and sheen on floors and furnishings, the audacious immensity of the glass-and-steel enclosed spaces dazzled her. Burdened and awkward with her belongings, she tramped behind the other passengers, faithfully following them to the lines that had formed at the passport check. She did not see the proper young Pakistani again; he must have been swallowed up and ingested by one of the myriad lines.

It seemed to Feroza that the sallow, unsmiling officer hunched behind the counter handled her passport with aggravation. Her Pakistani passport opened from the wrong end. There was a moment of confusion. Then, starting from the back, he leafed through the pages, studying them minutely. He asked her how long she'd stay, where she'd stay, who'd support her. When Feroza told him she would stay with her uncle, who'd naturally support her, he became very inquisitive about her uncle. Was he a United States citizen, resident, visitor? How old was he, what did he do?

Feroza suddenly became aware of the pale green, almost colorless eyes studying her with startling intentness. The official repeated the question: How would her uncle support her? Feroza
was barely conscious of what she said. An odd expression flitted across the hostile man's sallow face. Thereafter he appeared to doubt everything she said with chilling implacability.

It was Feroza's first moment of realization — she was in a strange country amidst strangers. She became quite breathless. The line behind her was getting restive; some in it were already looking at her with the distrust and hostility reserved for miscreants.

“What's your uncle's name?” the man asked. He placed a slip of paper on the counter. “Write it down.”

Feroza wrote: Mr. Manek Junglewalla.

The man tried to pronounce the name. Feroza smiled nervously and tried to help him with the pronunciation. There was no answering smile in the cold, unblinking eyes staring at her, or any change in the professional set of the stern mouth.

The official carefully wrote something on a white slip and tucked it into her passport.

“Show this after you collect your luggage. You must go for secondary inspection.”

Without looking at Feroza, he handed back her passport.

Utterly confused by the cryptic instruction, her legs trembling, Feroza followed the other passengers towards the baggage claim section.

And, finding herself suddenly confronted by a moving staircase, she came to a dead stop.

A few people pushed past her to step on the escalator.

An elderly American couple, their cameras and reading glasses dangling from their creased necks, appeared to understand her predicament. They had square jaws and gentle, undefined lips with faint lines running up from them, and, as married couples often do, they looked alike. They smiled, sympathetic and tentative, and asked Feroza if she understood English.

At her nod and her diffident answering smile, the man took the duty-free packages from her hand and stepped onto the escalator. The woman took hold of Feroza's arm and, telling her to mind the cracks before the steps fell away, escorted her down the
escalator. “Now get ready to get off,” she said and held Feroza firmly round the waist. Taken unawares by the continuing momentum, Feroza all but tumbled when they got off.

Feroza laughed, apologetic, embarrassed, delighted by the unexpected adventure. And, after her chilling reception by the passport officer, deeply touched by the kindness. The woman gave her arm a squeeze, and, infected by the spirit of Feroza's wonder as her eyes again locked on the descending human cargo, the woman and her husband turned also to gaze upon the marvelously plunging staircase.

“Will someone be there to meet you, hon?” the woman asked as they neared the crush of passengers waiting by the conveyor belt.

“Oh, yes. My uncle,” Feroza said confidently.

The husband spotted their luggage and pushed through the crowd.

“You sure, hon?” The woman was concerned, but anxious also to help her husband.

Feroza nodded quickly, gratefully.

“Now, you take care, honey,” the woman said and, giving Feroza a quick hug, barreled into the thicket.

Feroza found her path to the conveyor belt blocked. Every time she tried to push through, someone or some piece of luggage intruded into the space, and she felt obliged to step back. She hovered on the fringe of the press, looking out for her luggage.

The crowd thinned as more people wheeled away their belongings. Feroza once again saw her gentle elderly friends. They were pushing their carts past parallel rows of ribbonlike customs counters. She followed their awkward, chunky figures with misting eyes and, in her heightened state of excitement and nervousness, an aching sense of loss.

Feroza's eye caught the stately progression of her outsize suitcases on the conveyor belt. Afraid they might disappear, Feroza quickly slipped through the crowd that had by now thinned and hauled them off. She was staggered by their weight.
It was the first time she had needed to handle her suitcases. She wondered what her mother had stuffed into them to make them so heavy. She remembered the books and magazines Manek had asked for, and the heavy onyx gifts Zareen had wrapped in newspaper and carefully inserted among her clothes to prevent them from breaking.

After some moments of confusion, Feroza timidly approached an immensely tall black porter with a large cart, explaining, “My bags are very heavy … Can you …?”

The porter barely deigned to flicker his lids. Gazing over her head, he trundled his cart to an elegant set of matching luggage spread before a woman in a discreetly gleaming white mink.

Feroza wondered if he had heard her.

She finally gathered the courage to ask another gray-haired woman, who appeared to bear a resemblance to the couple who had befriended her, where she had gotten her cart. The woman hastily pointed out a shining caterpillar of stacked carts.

Feroza was struggling to extract one when a breezy young man inserted a dollar bill in a slot and calmly walked away with the cart. Feroza stared at the slot-box in bewilderment. When another young man in patched jeans hustled up with the same intent, Feroza stepped right in front of the box, barring access:

“It's my turn!”

The slight, sunny-haired youth's sneakers squeaked as he came to an astonished halt.

Feroza realized how strange and rude she must sound. She caught hold of the cart handle. “I don't know how to get this,” she explained, half apologetic, half appealing for help. “Can you show me?”

The young man bent his sunny head to catch her breathy rush of words.

Feroza delved into her purse and fetched up a small wad of dollar bills of different denominations. She held them out for his inspection.

The lean young man's smoky gray eyes were appraising her with the kind of interest and candor that would have fetched him
a bullet from any self-respecting Pakistani father.

Feroza lowered her lids in confusion and unwittingly acquired a haughty air. He was half a foot taller than her five feet four inches. He appeared to her a great deal taller.

Teasingly attempting to look into her eyes, aware of her embarrassment, the youth leaned closer. He smiled flirtatiously, warmly, and, talking in an accent she found difficult to follow but pleasing, showed her how to insert the dollar bill.

Feroza loaded her suitcases and hand luggage on the cart. Her mind was now filled with images of the slender young American and his candid, admiring eyes. How easily he had talked to her, his gestures open, confident. She wished she could have responded to his readiness to be friends, but she was too self-conscious.

That was it: the word she was seeking to define her new experience. He was unselfconscious. And, busy with their own concerns, none of the people moving about them had even bothered to glance their way or stare at her, as they would have in Pakistan.

Her wide-open eyes soaking in the new impressions as she pushed the cart, a strange awareness seeped into Feroza: She knew no one, and no one knew her! It was a heady feeling to be suddenly so free — for the moment, at least — of the thousand constraints that governed her life.

The two panels of a heavy exit door at the far end opened to allow a stack of crates to pass, and, suddenly, Feroza saw Manek leaning against the demarcation railing just outside the exit. One ankle comfortably crossed over the other, arms patiently folded, Manek had peered into the abruptly revealed interior also.

After an initial start, and without the slightest change in his laid-back posture, he at once contorted his features to display a gamut of scatty emotions — surprise, confusion, helplessness — to reflect Feroza's presumed condition. At the same time, he raised a languid forearm from the elbow and waved his hand
from side to side like a mechanical paw.

Feroza squealed and waved her whole arm and, with a huge grin on her face, steered the cart towards him. She was so excited, and also relieved, to see him. Even from the distance, his skin looked lighter, his face fuller. He had grown a mustache. Knowing him as she did, his deliberate insouciance and the regal wave of the mechanical paw filled her with delight. He hadn't changed as much as her mother had imagined. He was the same old Manek, except he was really glad to see her. Three years of separation have a mellowing effect, make remembered ways dearer. Feroza's heart filled with affection for her former tormentor. Having no brothers, she hadn't realized how much she missed him.