by Bapsi Sidhwa
Suddenly Cyrus sensed Feroza’s hesitation, and before she might imprudently commit herself, he thrust his neck and fiercely scowling features through the curtains. Holding the maroon fabric clenched beneath his chin, he rumbled, “Who is this fat man? Tell him to get out!”
The young man, who was no fatter than any other weight-pumping Punjabi, was so startled by the apparition glaring at him out of the curtains that he froze on the edge of his seat. Feroza likewise froze against the back of hers.
Cyrus stared at the petrified youth for an interminable moment and then swiveled his fearsome eyes to Feroza. Some trick of light had turned them into sunken hollows and his own long, craggily handsome face chalky.
As abruptly as it had appeared, her father’s hideously grimacing and pallid face disappeared.
Feroza shot out of her chair. “I think you’d better go,” she mumbled, breathless, flushing with embarrassment.
The youth, gray behind his inherent tan, stood up looking dazed. Collecting his black leather jacket, he meekly followed Feroza through the double doors and down the veranda steps.
The young man’s bicycle appeared to be perilously close to Cyrus’s menacingly parked Volkswagen — as if the angry little beetle had been restrained at the very last moment from mangling the cycle to pulp.
Feroza fiddled with the shawl covering her chest and shoulders. Twisting on the balls of her feet, she finally looked up at the handsome youth. Her eyes unnaturally bright, her face abnormally red, she said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ll be able to act in the play. You know how it is — my father won’t like it. Please don’t come again. Don’t phone, please.”
She sounded so formally correct, so hopelessly resigned, that, recovering his poise at this trusting display of her embarrassment and misery, the young man said, “I understand.”
He looked into the almond brilliance of Feroza’s eyes longer than he ought. Hearing a man clear his throat and cough significantly, the young man sighed. Almost shuddering with the effort, he slid his arms into the leather sleeves of his jacket and turned away to do up the zipper.
Feroza stood wretchedly as the wide-shouldered figure mounted his bicycle and, without once turning to look back, rode forever out of her life.
Chapter 2
Cyrus was glad Feroza had not discussed the incident with Zareen. Alarmed as Zareen was by Feroza’s sudden timidities, she might not have agreed with his stand. But he would not have his daughter fool around with Muslim boys — or any boys.
Zareen did not know the way the men talked about women. He remembered how the boys at Saint Anthony’s, his old school, and later at the Hailey College of Commerce had talked about bold girls who acted in Government College plays. He knew Zareen would be as irreconcilably opposed to their daughter marrying outside the faith as himself. But in her sudden crusade to champion “forwardness,” Zareen might be complacent about Feroza’s taking part in a play, believing their daughter would come out of the experience unscathed to marry a suitable Parsee boy at the proper time.
After seventeen years of marriage, Cyrus felt he understood his wife well enough. Zareen’s complacence stemmed from her confidence in Feroza’s upbringing. Every Parsee girl grew up warned of the catastrophe that could take the shape of a good-looking non-Parsee man. Marrying outside her community could exclude the girl from community matters and certainly bar her from her faith.
Further, Zareen was an innocent. Eleven years younger than Cyrus, she had married too young, at seventeen, to have any concept of the vagaries of the sexual drive and the tyranny of restrained passions.
And Cyrus had noticed Feroza’s reaction to the husky youth. Although she was a year younger than Zareen was when she married Cyrus, Feroza seemed, somehow, more sexually ripe. What with the onslaught of television and the American and British videos, it was hard to keep young girls as innocent as one might wish. Despite all their careful indoctrination — Zareen’s, her grandmothers’, her aunts’ — it would not be as easy to keep Feroza out of harm’s way as they had presumed when, in keeping with the times, they had decided to let Feroza graduate before getting her married.
~
The morning after Zareen had voiced her concern and presented her strategy to her husband, she was racked by doubt. Perhaps her suggestion had been too extreme. She developed one of her splitting headaches.
Zareen swallowed a couple of aspirins and, after instructing her ayah to see that no one disturbed her, lay down with a dark green silk scarf over her eyes. She took a few deep breaths and forced herself to become still and quiet. Muffled spurts of gnashing sound came from the gardener, who was mowing the lawn. Sparrows were creating a din in the gardenia hedge, and other birds whistled and trilled with astonishing sweetness. She heard them only when she shut her eyes. What did these birds look like, Zareen wondered.
Tires squealing, a car careened madly round and round the Main Gulberg Market traffic circle. Zareen awoke with a start. The shrill ferocity of the noise made her heart pound. The “Toyota crowd,” Cyrus called them: the show-off newly moneyed. Although the title was apt, Zareen suspected her mother’s new Toyota had contributed to her husband’s inspiration.
In the quiet that followed, as if sleeping on the issue had helped solve her problem, it occurred to Zareen that she was in need of loftier counsel than the rational consolations Cyrus had served up. She recalled guiltily that she had not visited Data Gunj Baksh’s shrine since Cyrus’s appendectomy more than a year ago.
Zareen silently begged the Muslim saint’s forgiveness for the neglect and, mentally ticking them off, prudently thanked him for his past kindnesses. Then, without thinking it the least bit strange, she switched to her own faith and said a short Zoroastrian prayer, invoking Sarosh Ejud, the Angel of Success Who Protects Mankind With Effective Weapons.
Given the medley of religions that exist cheek-by-jowl in the subcontinent and the spiritual impulse that sustains them, people of all faiths flock to each other’s shrines and cathedrals. They came to the fifteenth-century sufi’s shrine from all over Pakistan, and before Partition they came from all over northern India. When Sikh and Hindu pilgrims from across the border in India visit the temples and gurdwaras in Pakistan, they never fail to “pay their respects” to the Muslim mystic known for his miraculous power to grant wishes.
By the time Feroza returned from school, Zareen’s headache had been banished by her resolve to visit the shrine.
Zareen waited impatiently for Feroza to finish her tea and, saying, “Your matric exams are close. I think it’s time we went to Data Sahib,” hauled her daughter off to the mystic’s tomb.
While they waited for the driver to park the car, Zareen and Feroza walked to the gargantuan vats of cooked rice lined up on the dirt path that ran along the rutted parking lot. The fine dust churned up by the cars had spread over the whole area and hung suspended in the air like a mist.
The stout, scruffy-looking man Zareen always dealt with greeted her. He shooed away the other salesmen crowding them and, pulling his vest down over his massive stomach and greasy lungi, led his customers to his stall.
Zareen stretched her neck and expertly sniffed as the man slid back the immense copper lids from the steaming vats of aromatic rice for her inspection.
The large yard in front of the green-domed shrine was as always teeming with pilgrims and beggars. A group of about ten Quawali singers, idly circled in front by squatting villagers, were vigorously clapping their hands and singing devotional songs in praise of the saint and his Beloved. Zareen and Feroza wondered if it was one of the more famous groups who performed on TV, but their salesman didn’t think it was.
Holding aloft and punching a gigantic pair of tongs, a long-haired holy man, intoxicated by Godly fervor, twirled and circled the ring of onlookers, his dancing feet raising little puffs of dust.
Zareen selected one vat of sweetened yellow rice and one of aromatic rice with chick-peas. They covered their heads with their dopattas and stood to one
side as a rapidly forming line of beggars, daily-wage laborers, and poor pilgrims held out their ragged shirt-flaps and veils for the ladled rice. After a few minutes, Zareen left the driver to oversee the distribution, and the women went into the lane of flowers and shrine shawls.
Carrying small newspaper-bags filled with rose petals and garlands, they were walking towards the steep flight of steps that led to the women’s section when the news zipped through the premises like an electric charge that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s sister was at the tomb.
Caught up in the swell of a sudden crowd, Zareen and Feroza were sucked deeper into the fragrant lane of flowers and gaudy shawls. They pulled their veils forward over their faces and draped them to cover their chests. Zareen held on to Feroza, her eyes stern and darting, warning off any mischief.
The men around them appeared to be well behaved. They kept their eyes averted and their hands to themselves. Ahead of them Zareen noticed three or four foreigners making their way, their light heads bare, and she recognized the profile of the woman from the American consulate. They often met at parties. The woman turned slightly and spotted Zareen. They smiled at each other, shrugging, and made good-natured, bemused faces at their common predicament.
Hanging on to each other, mother and daughter were swept to a place where the lane widened to form a square in front of the shrine. It was a side entrance to the saint’s tomb that they had not known about.
The crowd was already quite large. Feroza and Zareen backed up to where a knot of women, their sympathetic, uplifted gazes intently focused, were holding their own against the pull and sway of the crowd. Zareen and Feroza raised their faces, and their eyes automatically fastened on the object of the crowd’s intense scrutiny.
There was no mistaking her. The jailed prime minister’s sister was standing at the top of an abrupt flight of steps. She had a thick, straight, tall body and the same features and glowing complexion as Bhutto’s, except that the mold of her countenance was washed by a resigned melancholy they could not even bring themselves to conceive on her brother’s confident and handsome face.
Her pain wrenched their hearts. Her head covered by a dun-colored shatoose, the woman clung to the latticework of a wide, ornate silver door. It had been installed by Bhutto some years ago, when he was prime minister, as a mark of his gratitude to the saint.
His sister’s eyes were closed, and her lips trembled in prayer. The concentrated intensity of the crowd’s focus appeared to form a nimbus about her, and her pale profile was clearly visible as she turned her head from side to side to press one cheek and then the other to the ornate gate.
The shouting and talking that had accompanied them in the narrow lane was muted in the square. The press and the restless movements of the assembly were also stilled.
In some form or other, the motley crowd standing in the square had heard the elite bitterly complain that Bhutto had aroused aspirations he could not fulfill. He had promised them roti, kapra, makan — bread, clothes, shelter — which he could not provide.
The images from the television screens, from posters, newspapers, and public rostrums, from the fermenting cauldron of the rumor mills, swirled in the minds of the crowd.
Some men shouted, “Bhutto Zindabad! Long live Bhutto!” and old women, bandy-legged in their loose shalwars, with labored, crablike movements, lumbered up the steps to pass their gnarled hands over his sister’s shawl and sigh, “We pray for your brother. Don’t fret, he will be free. Allah is merciful!”
~
Feroza banged shut bedroom doors, whipped open car doors, and smashed shuttlecocks over the net at her startled adversaries. She avoided meeting her parents’ evening guests, who had become almost a part of her extended family, and stopped listening to the political arguments that became so heated over dinner. On the few occasions she sat with them, she ventured to speak out, a contribution not encouraged in someone her age.
Their guests wrangled about Bhutto’s deeds and misdeeds during his prime ministership, the Islamization of state institutions by General Zia, and which way the verdict in the Bhutto trial for the murder of a political rival would go.
The arguments turned into acrimonious screeching sessions as the trial progressed. Every so often one of the guests would bang down on the table and loudly proclaim, “I’ll never eat in this house again!” and promptly turn up the next evening.
They debated which of the panel of seven supreme court judges hearing the case were for Bhutto and which were opposed. A judge believed to be unbiased, one of the few whom Bhutto’s paranoia had not antagonized, had a stroke and later died. Another reached the age of retirement.
One of the diners and imbibers asserted that the defending lawyer was in cahoots with the prosecution. Why else would Yahyah Bakhtiyar drag the trial on and on? Another confided that a Bangladeshi holy man had advised Bhutto’s wife, Nusrat, and his daughter, Benazir, that Bhutto’s stars would dramatically improve if the trial stretched into the New Year.
The day after their visit to Data Sahib’s tomb, Feroza heard her mother’s passionate voice above the squabbling. “It’s immaterial whether the court finds him guilty or not guilty. The trial’s a farce — the death sentence has already been passed. He will become a martyr!”
Feroza understood her mother. She had also witnessed the emotion of the crowd at the shrine.
The lawyer Feroza had always known as Uncle Anwar, tall, long-faced, bespectacled, the pace of the tic in his left eye betraying his emotion, shouted, “So what? Don’t you know the bastard had drawn up a hit list? I was on it! You’ll be surprised at those who were on it: many of them our friends. I’ll see to it the bastard’s hanged.” He was the chief prosecuting attorney.
Feroza shut her ears. She was racked by the discord in her perceptions. Uncle Anwar was an old family friend, someone she trusted and couldn’t bear to think of on anyone’s hit list.
But a martyr’s claim exerts its own logic. When Zareen came into her room to persuade Feroza to join them for dinner, Feroza told her, “I don’t want to see their faces!”
Feroza spent the weekends at her grandmother’s and most evenings at the houses of her classmates. She spent more and more time sulking and reading romances and detective stories in her room when she was home. She locked her door.
Zareen was used to Feroza’s flashes of temper, which vanished soon after they appeared, but she was perplexed by the acceleration of her fury and the duration of her prolonged rages. Neither the pressure of the exams nor the political situation could account for her behavior. Feroza had usually taken her exams with an aplomb that had perturbed her parents. Politics, considering how it affected each individual’s personal life, was a national passion. But previously the shared passion had always drawn the family together.
Cyrus guessed that Feroza’s sulks and truculence might have as much to do with the expulsion of that Government College lout as with politics. But he kept his own counsel and prudently permitted his wife to fret and hypothesize.
Feroza’s behavior recalled Zareen to the trials of Feroza’s childhood, which she had all but (and gratefully at that) forgotten.
Feroza had been a stubborn child — with a streak of pride bordering on arrogance that compelled consideration not always due a child. Awed, Zareen often wondered where she got her pride.
Driven to exasperation, Cyrus had once spanked Feroza when she was about four. He stopped only when he noticed the blood on her tiny clenched lips. He never struck her again. It was a contest of wills over some trifling matter, and Cyrus had wanted his daughter to apologize. “Say sorry … say sorry,” he had demanded, shaking her, pausing, and striking her. Lynx eyes blazing in her furious little face, Feroza did not cry or even wince. When he saw the blood, he gave up, horrified to have lost control over himself.
By this time Feroza was being invited to an increasing number of birthday parties, and Zareen discovered that she was also antisocial. Invariably the anxious hostess called the next day to inquire if she
or someone else had offended the child? Feroza had stayed in her corner with her ayah and couldn’t be coaxed to play games. She had not come to the table, even when the candles were blown out and the cake cut. No matter how hard they all tried, Feroza did not smile or say a single word all evening. At the end of this litany, the caller invariably sounded more aggrieved than anxious.
Zareen was mortified. She knew exactly what Feroza had put the callers through. Feroza’s steady gaze and queenly composure was disconcerting in a four-year-old.
Zareen bought increasingly expensive birthday presents.
Then Feroza bit one child, scratched another, tore an earring off a little girl at school with part of her ear still in it, and Zareen’s tepid belief in astrology became passionate. She discovered Linda Goodman’s Love Signs, and the book became her gospel. The text appealed to her mind because it advised the mother of a Scorpio child to buy a strong playpen and stock up on vitamins, and to her heart because it instructed the mother to sit in the playpen taking vitamins, while the child wreaked whatever havoc it was destined to.
Absorbing the spirit of the text, Zareen barricaded herself behind the mental equivalent of a stout playpen. She learned to keep in the good graces of her daughter, bolting at the first hint of debate, and left the disciplining entirely to her mother. Cyrus had in any case decided to keep his hands, and will, off their daughter.
But Khutlibai, notoriously short on patience, could summon up oceanic reserves of that virtue where it concerned her granddaughter. And she lavished on Feroza a devotion that turned her youngest son, Manek, into an embittered delinquent and an implacable enemy of his pampered niece. With only six years between them, Manek and Feroza grew up more as siblings than as uncle and niece. Their hostilities often assumed epic proportions.
By the time Feroza was eleven, she had been forged by the alchemy of her uncle’s sinister ingenuity, the burgeoning strength of her resourceful genes, and the extravagant care lavished on her by her grandmother into a wise, winning, and, at least overtly, malleable child.
