And the World Changed (10 page)

I felt something break inside me when I saw Dossa crawling out from under the table and through the back corridor, as my grandmother walked behind her to shelter her until they both reached the back door. I saw my grandmother bend down and help Dossa stand up. My uncle who was right outside the back door nearly picked up Dossa as he led her away to what we hoped was safety in India.

A month later, I stood at the same back door holding my father's hand. We were facing a man holding the hand of his daughter. The man was begging my father to find him some space for his family. My father was explaining that he couldn't. The girl was younger than me but I knew we could be friends. She looked as if she liked reading and listening to stories and making them up. The man wept as he turned away. The girl turned around and we waved at one another. My father was crying. His beautiful dark face looked as if someone had smeared dead gray ashes across it. Many years later I learned that my father had turned the top floors of the school where he was the Principal into a place of sanctuary for refugees.

My mother told us about the horrors that the refugees
who were now citizens of Pakistan had lived through. She was among the many citizens of Karachi—old and new—who set up work places where women who had become refugees could work and make new lives for themselves. There was agony but there was also hope. One of the first Pakistani patriotic songs I heard (I think it was the National Anthem for a brief time) was composed on our piano. People question that but I remember sitting quietly in a corner listening to the different variations of the melody and the words. But the wars continued and my mother got tired of trying to explain to me why people kill one another, why people hate, why we didn't stop such things and other such questions. One day she said, “Find the answers for yourself.”

1958–1961

I used to imagine that Nasima and Arjuman, who had traveled with me from Pakistan to Lebanon, were somehow two parts of the little girl at our back door. It was their gift of friendship and laughter and serious discussions about the what and the why of Pakistan that made Pakistan truly one of my lands, a
desh
for me. I don't quite understand the concept of nations. Lebanon was the heartbreakingly beautiful land where I saw a boy, his face masked with blood, leap from a balcony moments after men in uniforms had entered the building. I stood below, surrounded by the aroma of strong coffee and the smell of freshly shaved wood, a loud thud interrupting the sounds of Fairouz singing as the boy fell to the sidewalk. That day I learned about the cruelty of men toward boys who could be their sons. It was the first time I heard the indescribable scream of a woman as she watches her child being killed.

Beirut was the city where I passed a wall of lemon trees on my way to the lighthouse and saw two women embracing and weeping. I wanted to console them but didn't know how and for what. One of them turned to me and said, “
Binti
, daughter, we
cry for our lemon trees we will never see again in our home. Our Palestine.” The other woman showed me the key to the house she had left behind. The house, she had just learned, didn't exist anymore. I didn't have any words, so I did what I had seen a woman do to another woman who had lost her husband, her two children and her old father on their way to Karachi from Bombay. She had wiped the grieving woman's face with her bare hands. Six months later, I tripped and hurt my knee. I went to the student health services and the nurse who treated me was the woman with the key.

The campus of the American University of Beirut was where a young woman was pointed out to me on my first day at the University. I was told, “She was there. She watched as her father was hanged. She insisted on going. She is carrying on the fight.” I don't remember her face but she had a body that said, “I refuse to break.” And yes, I often saw her laugh and smile. And then there was the funeral of a classmate that I didn't attend. One of my friends told me that the mother had screamed at the corpse of her son, not only for dying but also for having killed other mothers' sons. Later, I heard the same story during the Nicaragua war between the Sandinistas and the Contras, and then during the Zapatista uprising for justice.

1962–1963

From the Cedars of Lebanon where the gatekeeper Humbaba fought Gilgamesh and his beloved companion, Enkidu, to Durham, North Carolina, and a campus graced with “ye olde Europeanne” buildings that reminded me of the castles and churches of my childhood fairy tales. A beautiful campus with a glorious library. I boarded a bus to go to the house where I had been invited for tea. Being a rather nervous rider, I sat in one of the first rows of the nearly empty bus. The driver pulled over, came to me, and said quite gently, “Don't you know the rules?”
I shook my head. He bent down, picked me up, 78 pounds of a sari-wrapped bewildered graduate student, and placed me most carefully on a seat at the back of the bus. The books and movies at the USIS in Karachi and the professors from the United States in Beirut had not told me about segregation. I told my hostess about the incident. She said, “Oh dear, I am sorry. Only colored servants take that bus.” I showed her my brown hand. She smiled, shook her head, and remarked that she was surprised that the bus driver hadn't realized that I was a foreigner. Foreigners were to be treated with the same respect as whites. Otherwise there would be international incidents.

One Sunday afternoon, late in the summer of my year in Durham, I stood on a sidewalk on the main street next to an African American family—a grandmother, a grandfather, a father, a mother, and two boys. Both boys had their grandmother's smile. The mother admired my sari and asked me if it was handwoven. We carried on a conversation as we watched a phalanx of policemen approach the group of young people trying to enter a restaurant across the street. When the first “thwack” of a baton against human flesh reached us, the grandma moaned and nearly fell over. The mother held her up. The four men stood still, their fists so tight that their arms were shaking. I remembered standing on the terrace in my mother's home in Mumbai (that is how my grandmother always pronounced the city), watching the police beating up processions of people calling out for freedom, calling out Gandhiji's name. Neither the people being beaten up in that procession in Mumbai, nor the people on that street in Durham raised a hand against their attackers. I haven't yet decided if that is really the only right way to defend ourselves.

When I ended up at the Duke Hospital after completing my thesis, the bus driver who had placed me so gently but firmly at the back of the bus came to visit me with a bunch of hand-picked flowers. He said that I should get well soon and that he was very sorry to hear about the war between India and China. I told him that my paternal great-great-grandmother was Chinese,
and ever since I heard about the war, I had chilling nightmares about dragons and tigers tearing at one another.

1968–1970

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

Memories for stories

1. Demonstrations against the War in Vietnam. I meet a man at a party who has walked in all the antiwar demonstrations in Berkeley. At the same party, his son tells me with great delight that whenever a woman teacher in Mexico was mean to him and his other American friends, they would call her “an ugly
puta
.” According to him, they should know that Americans are to be respected. Disrespect toward Americans would earn them the title “whores.”

2. People in Karachi have a difficult time believing my letters about Berkeley. Especially when I write that there are
gora
, “white” young men and women in ragged clothes (some deliberately torn or patched) begging in the streets around the University.

3. Coming out of the library one evening with no one around, I see a lone policeman enter the lane. He lobs a canister of tear gas at me and laughs. The horrific sound hastens the notorious “Rustomjis always get deaf as they age” process for me.

4. Entering a women's restroom in Dwinelle Hall at the University of California late one evening, I find a woman with a mop in her hand. She has tears on her face. She turns to me and asks, “How is this going to help end the war? I won't be paid extra for this extra work. The war won't end. My boys will die in that place while you march and dance in the streets.” She points to the row of toilets. They are filled to overflowing with garbage, with rotten fruit, newspapers, old clothes, chicken bones, even pages torn out of books. Angry students have filled up the toilets as a sign of protest against the war-mongering authorities.
The woman throws down her mop and walks away.

4. Bumper stickers. “Mary Poppins Is a Junkie.” I have to have this one deciphered for me. “Question Authority.” I am confused. Is this a car driven by a person who is an authority on questions or is the person telling us to question people in authority? I am told that Berkeley is a War Zone.

5. Sitting in a professor's office translating the
Gita
with other students as a car comes hurtling down across the green lawn and stops just short of plowing into the office window.

6. Walking down University Avenue in a sari. A young woman stops me and says, “Free yourself. Get rid of all those yards of clothing.” The woman is wearing a long skirt from India. Is she a friend or foe?

7. Listening to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at Jock and Emily Brown's house where I live. Jock Brown goes to Vietnam to protest the war his country is waging against Vietnam.

8. Reading James Baldwin and learning more about the war I saw in North Carolina.

9. The smoldering anger, fear, frustration in Lebanon turns further inward. Civil War. One more motherland that has nurtured me in flames. Blood doesn't put out fire. I read: The Worst Wars Are Civil Wars. And later: All Wars Are Civil Wars. I still wonder at the different uses of the word “civil.”

10. I watch televised images of the American war in Vietnam as I learn to translate the
Mahabharata
and
Iliad
. Women from both fighting sides stream onto the battle field of Kurukshetra, mourning their dead. Achilles mourns the death of his beloved companion and drags Hector around in the dirt as his old parents watch in horrified grief, and Vietnam is transformed into a blazing fire of trees and human flesh. There must have been sounds with those images but all I remember is silence as the pictures flashed across the screen while I translated, word by word, the stories of other times, other places where fires of wars raged, the innocent and the guilty were killed and glorious words were spoken. One night, after completing a very long
paper, I dream that I am running with the women on the field of Kurukshetra, I am screaming, my hair is unbound, I wear no ornaments. Hecuba appears calling for her son. A woman stops me and says, “Who are you on this land? You were not walking with us to Oklahoma.”

1975

A student sat in my office at Sonoma State University. He looked like a grown-up version of a Renaissance cherub. There was a sweetness to him that needed protection, yet there was nothing childish about him. He told me the following story. After his first tour of duty as a Marine, he had volunteered to go to Vietnam again. He couldn't remember what fired his zeal. Yes, he said, he had seen war, both the inhuman and the human side of it. Toward the end of his second tour of duty, he and his buddies were pulling out bodies from a village set on fire by the Americans. He said, “We burned it by mistake and we were now trying to save as many of those villagers as we could. We were carrying the burned but alive bodies to the boats. I was carrying someone very light. I looked down and saw that I was carrying an old woman. She looked exactly like my grandmother back in Michigan. Old, wrinkled, wiry, and beautiful. She died in my arms. I went out of my mind. I was sent back home.”

He made me realize how some people eat war and grow fat and greedy for more, how others eat war and are killed and how some transform the poison of war into
amrit
, nectar, not only of immortality but also of peace. And then he and his wife gave me a beautiful silkscreened banner with the image of our Lady of Guadalupe. They had decided to earn their living making and selling banners with the symbols of all the world's religions.

The last time I saw the student, he had graduated and was selling his banners on Telegraph Avenue. He no longer reminded me of a cherub. He had the detached, loving look of a bodhisattva.

1987

My mother died. The day after the funeral we found out that the Karachi policemen had towed away the cars parked outside our house during the funeral. The mourners weren't happy but they will most probably recall the day my mother was taken to the
dukhmo
, the Tower of Silence, as the day the police towed away their cars, and hopefully they will smile even as they shake their heads.

As I touched my mother's wedding ring and her glasses—I had never seen her without the ring and seldom without her glasses—I could hear her talking to me. And what struck me was how often she had spoken to me about the utter horror and uselessness of war and the evils of injustice. She never said, “That's how the world is.” She always implied that our lives would be rather worthless if we didn't work against evil. I was six years old when the United States dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I looked at my mother. Her calm, rather stern face was absolutely still. Absolutely without a trace of emotion. I remember thinking that this was how my mother would look when she died. My mother was born in Japan.

SEPTEMBER 2000