by Bapsi Sidhwa
Chapter 3
For three successive evenings, they waited for the urgent trunk call to America to materialize. Each time Zareen booked the call, the rushed operator gave her a cryptic number and informed her that she was thirtieth or fortieth in line. By the time Zareen finished asking, “How long will it take?” the operator had hung up.
On the fourth evening, Cyrus took matters in hand.
“Operator,” he said with solemn authority, “there’s been a death in the family. I need to speak to the party at once. His mother’s died.”
“I’ll try my best, sir.” The operator was properly grave and respectful of the bereaved family’s feelings and of their need for urgency.
“You shouldn’t have said that.” Zareen’s dark eyes were filled with reproach.
“Look,” Cyrus said. “Do you want the call, or not? You have to be smart, that’s all.”
“If you’re so damn smart, you could have got rid of your own mother. You won’t feel so smart if mine finds out.”
But before Cyrus could come back with a rejoinder, the phone rang. Zareen pounced on it. She heard the operator’s remote voice say, “Call from Pakistan, sir,” and Manek was on the line.
“We are sending Feroza to you,” Zareen said.
“You don’t have to shout just because you’re twenty thousand miles away. I can hear you as if you were next door.” Then, abruptly, Manek asked, “Why?”
“What d’you mean ‘why’! For a holiday, what else. Just for two or three months … Is it okay? Will you look after her?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. Taken aback by the unexpected call, and the even more unexpected nature of the call, Manek didn’t sound as enthusiastic as he might have.
Zareen’s heart sank. She had counted on his three years in the New World to change him. He hadn’t changed one bit. “What do you mean, ‘yes-yes,’” she said. “I’m not sending my child so far if you’re not going to look after her.”
“I’ll look after her. Don’t worry, just send her.” Manek had by now digested the news, and he sounded as hearteningly eager as Zareen could have hoped. She at once detected the new warm note in his voice and was as elated as she had been despondent a moment earlier.
“I’ll look after her. Let me know when she’s coming. I’ll go to New York to meet her.”
Having been away almost three years, Manek was eager to see anyone from home. He was overwhelmed by an entirely unexpected surge of affection for Feroza.
“Here,” Zareen said, speaking into the receiver, as astonished by his sudden enthusiasm as she was by her conviction of his sincerity. “Talk to Feroza.”
Feroza glowed. “I’m so excited,” she shouted.
“Don’t yell,” Manek said. “You’re puncturing my eardrum. Why do you Third World Pakis shout so much? Everybody’s not deaf.”
Feroza directed a bloodcurdling shriek into the receiver.
“Stupid girl. D’you know how much your screeches are costing your parents?”
“So? You’re not paying. And what do you mean, ‘Paki.’ What’re you, some snow-white Englishman?”
“Oh God … Please don’t bring your gora complex with you.”
“Why should I have a gora complex? I’m quite light-skinned.”
“If that’s what you think, you’re in for a big shock.”
“Black, brown, white are all the same to me,” Feroza said, adopting her grandmother’s expedient piety. “We are all God’s creatures.”
“Stop it. And listen — get rid of your ‘white-man’ complex before you come to America.”
Feroza hugged and kissed her parents. She sought out her ayah and hugged her until the old woman trilled, “Stop it, bus kar — you’ll squash my bones and ribs.”
They heard the gentle click of the latch when Feroza finally went into her room; she did not lock her door.
Feroza slipped under her quilt fully dressed, her eyes wide open, her mind throbbing with elation. She was going to America! She found it difficult to believe. She repeated to herself, “I’m going to America, I’m going to America!” until her doubts slowly ebbed and her certainty, too, caught the rhythm of her happiness.
To the land of glossy magazines, of “Bewitched” and “Star Trek,” of rock stars and jeans …
A week later Cyrus came home with a fat envelope containing the green-and-white Pakistan International Airlines ticket for Feroza. Feroza clutched the envelope to her heart, whirling with pleasure. And then, glancing at Zareen and Cyrus, she asked, “Why am I a Paki Third Worlder?”
~
Zareen heard two sharp blasts of the horn; it was her mother’s Toyota. By the time Khutlibai, shepherded by her chauffeur and bundled up in sari and overcoat, got out of the car, the welcoming committee of servants had flung wide the portals of the house and lined up to receive her.
The cook, the gardener, the ayah, and sundry children from the servants’ quarters salaamed and fussed over Khutlibai with broad, affectionate grins. Zareen moved forward to kiss her mother on her discreetly rouged cheek.
Khutlibai received the kiss coolly. She inquired about each servants’ health and their families’ welfare, sharing good news with gladness, commiserating with misfortune, when she noticed the inflamed sty that almost shut the sweeper’s son’s eye. “Let me look at it,” she said, putting on her half-moon glasses and beckoning to the boy, who was shivering in a lilac ladies’ cardigan. Khutlibai placed her hand beneath his icy chin and peered at the sty. “How long have you had it?”
Embarrassed by the unexpected attention, the boy shuffled his bare feet and said, “It’s been … maybe … a month.”
The cook said, “I told his father to bathe his eyes with salt and hot water — “
“Not salt. Boric powder,” Zareen asserted, attempting to stem the flow of advice. She knew how easily it could turn into a bizarre and uncontrollable flood.
Zareen had become averse to advice on medical issues ever since she’d had a kicking, braying, and protesting donkey milked for six consecutive days. This horror had been perpetrated at Khutlibai’s insistence when Feroza had whooping cough. The Gulberg Market populace had gathered for half an hour each morning to witness the hazardous and noisy extraction of the two measly tablespoons of milk. Whoever said Cleopatra bathed in asses’ milk didn’t know what they were talking about. The daily pandemonium would have wrecked the pyramids and turned the Egyptians into twitching idiots.
The donkey’s milk had proved no more effective than the rides in a glider advised by Feroza’s pediatrician, Dr. Anwar. Zareen and Feroza had glided, petrified, in the eerie silence of the rarefied air above Lahore for an hour each day for ten days.
The whooping cough had run its course and petered out at the end of its natural cycle of six months.
“I know a remedy,” the ayah piped up, transferring the shivering boy’s chin to her calloused hand and squinting shortsightedly at the inflamed sty. “In my village we rub it with the sole of an old shoe.”
“That too,” Khutlibai agreed, “but the only sure cure I know is to tie a black thread on the opposite toe. Which eye is the sty in?” She drew the boy to her. “It’s in the right eye.” Turning to the ayah, she instructed, “Tie black thread — ordinary sewing thread will do — round his left big toe.”
The sty disposed of, Khutlibai proceeded to issue the latest Junglewalla news bulletins. Her brother might visit next month from Karachi. Her cousin Sillamai had undertaken to construct a fire temple in Delhi. Her granddaughter Bunny had been second in her class; Behram had called from Rawalpindi to give her the good news, but the credit went entirely to her daughter-in-law Jeroo. She supervised the children’s homework every single day. The comment was not lost on Zareen, who had no reason to doubt that her mother disapproved of the way she brought up Feroza.
Then, responding to the servants’ queries about her health, Khutlibai said she was as well, by God’s grace, as could be expected at her age. The cold hurt her old joints. Her heart
sometimes beat too fast and sometimes too slow, but she did not complain. It was His will.
Khutlibai cast faintly skeptical gold-flecked eyes at the clear sky to indicate His whimsy and finally turned her attention to Zareen.
“Is your husband home?”
“He had his lunch and went back to the shop,” Zareen said, alluding to Cyrus’s sporting-goods business.
“Good.” Khutlibai nodded, approving more her own timing in avoiding him than his diligence.
“Feroza hasn’t come back from school, has she?” she inquired next.
“It’s only two-thirty; her school is over at four.” Zareen was wary now.
“Good, good,” Khutlibai nodded cryptically. “I want to talk to you alone,” she said and headed straight for the bedroom.
It was severely cold. That morning the grass on the lawn had been silvered with frost, and a fine crust of ice had formed on the Volkswagen. The gas fire was on in the bedroom. Zareen helped Khutlibai out of her coat, drew back the quilt on the bed closest to the heater, and, pushing the pillows against the headboard, prepared a snug roost for her mother. Khutlibai sank into the bed with a sigh. Removing her feet from her flat, black velvet slippers, she lifted them laboriously onto the bed. She leaned back on the pillows, and Zareen drew the goose-down quilt up to her waist.
Zareen sat down on the bed, facing her mother expectantly, and Khutlibai closed her eyes to indicate her exhaustion.
The frail old ayah, tightly wound up in her white cotton sari, had followed them into the room with a small bowl for Khutlibai’s dentures. Khutlibai liked to remove them when she napped, which she sometimes did when visiting in the afternoon. The ayah asked if she could get Khutlibai some tea, or would she prefer hot soup?
“What kind of soup?”
“Chicken,” Zareen cut in impatiently, and peremptorily dismissed the ayah with instructions to bring two cups.
Khutlibai’s slightly protuberant brown eyes grew sharp in her foxlike face. She had light skin to match the eyes and wavy brown streaks in her graying hair. In a community where light color is at a premium, she had been considered beautiful in her youth. She was still a handsome woman in a comfortably corpulent yet imposing way. Her back, supported on the protruding pedestal of her ample rump — of which her deceased husband, Sorabjee Junglewalla, was reputed to have been both proud and fond — was broad and stately.
“What’s this I hear,” Khutlibai said, coming straight to the point and fixing Zareen with a challenging and retaliatory look, “Ping-Pong is sending my granddaughter to America?”
“Yes,” Zareen said, “we are,” ignoring the humor at her husband’s expense and the jibe at his sporting-goods business. She knew Khutlibai used the nickname when she wanted to be particularly offensive, and Zareen’s brusque dismissal of the ayah had offended her.
“Oh, it’s we, is it? And Ping-Pong and we don’t bother to consult with our elders or our older brother?”
“Mumma,” Zareen was firm, “I’m the one who’s keen that Feroza should go. Not Cyrus. I’ve had a hard enough time persuading him, and don’t you give me a hard time too! You’ve no idea how difficult Feroza’s been of late. All this talk about Islam, and how women should dress, and how women should behave, is turning her quite strange. And you know how Bhutto’s trial is getting to her.”
Knowing that nothing would alter Khutlibai’s opinion as conclusively as her son-in-law’s opposition to a plan, Zareen had looked straight at her mother and glibly lied.
“Is the poor child’s behavior so unpardonable that you have to banish her from the country? If you can’t bear to keep her, I will,” Khutlibai said, rejecting the bait. The matter was of too much moment for her to be so easily diverted. “She’s too innocent and young to be sent there.”
The there was pregnant with unspeakable knowledge of the sexual license allowed American girls and the perils of drink and drugs. Compounding the danger were vivid images of rapists looming in dark alleys to entice, molest, and murder young girls.
“Where’s the hurry to get rid of her? You’ll be rid of her anyway once she’s married.”
“She’s only going for three or four months, Mumma!” Zareen protested and explained at greater length how upsettingly timid and narrow-minded Feroza was becoming.
But Khutlibai had her own ideas about what was narrow-minded and what was not. And she was aggravated by Zareen’s interpretation of events. “You’ve never shown much sense where Feroza’s upbringing is concerned. Jumping into this committee with Nusrat Bhutto, and that committee with Mumtaz Karamat, and not bothering about the child. And then you get her all fired up with this political nonsense. Who is this Bhutto to you that you get so worked up? If I hadn’t been around, God knows who’d have taught my granddaughter to pray. You’ve stopped wearing your sudra and kusti; you prefer to show your skin at the waist. What kind of example are you setting for your child?”
“Mumma, even Cyrus’s sisters don’t wear sudras beneath sari-blouses any more.”
“If they jump into a well, must you also jump into the well?”
This was Khutlibai’s standard rejoinder to arguments of this nature. She had an arsenal of favorite Gujrati homilies that she hauled out and fired like heat-seeking missiles at her stewing daughter. However standard or clichéd the homily was, it never failed to swamp Zareen’s mind with crushing memories of childhood routs. Her eyes began to smart.
“But this I did not expect, even from you,” Khutlibai continued. “Instead of guiding your daughter correctly and checking her behavior, you are encouraging her to go wrong! Thank God she has shown more sense than you, that’s all I can say.”
It was amazing how her mother could still turn her into a whiny little four-year-old. Zareen’s lips were quivering. She cast her eyes down, sniffed, and stood up.
“Here, sit down,” Khutlibai ordered, but the ayah came in just then with the soup, and Zareen escaped to the bathroom.
Zareen blew her nose and splashed her face. She looked into the mirror and was filled with pity for her reflection. Although her eyes were puffy and her nose red, it was still an adequate face. Zareen turned slightly to look at the delicate curve of her cheek and jaw, at the slight bump broadening her nose just where it should to give her fine eyes an erotic quality, and was gradually reassured. She touched up her lipstick, sprayed herself with perfume, and, her heels sounding her resolution on the bathroom and dressing room floors, marched into the bedroom.
Zareen noted that her mother had removed her dentures. They lay on the bedside table in the bowl provided by the ayah. Zareen dragged the rocking chair forward and, maintaining a formal distance between them, sat down, defiantly rocking.
Khutlibai had poured her soup into the saucer and was making a blubbery sound as she drew in air with the scalding broth.
“Stop making that disgusting noise, Mumma.” The rocking chair and her mother’s dentureless mouth gave Zareen an advantage. “I hate it; it makes me feel sick. Sometimes I feel so ashamed of you.”
Khutlibai stared at Zareen in utter amazement. She averted her eyes and sat forward, her back stiff. “I never expected to be insulted in my son-in-law’s house!”
Khutlibai swung her feet off the bed and stood up with a swiftness remarkable in one who had sunk into it so heavily a short while before. Drawing herself up to her full five feet two inches, the lower edge of her shawl resting on the projecting shelf of her bottom, Khutlibai trudged with tragic and affronted majesty to the door.
Hastily putting her cup down and full of contrition, Zareen rushed to block her exit.
Khutlibai gave her daughter a brief hurt-puppy look and, moving her legs in a stiff, pistonlike gait that was curiously submissive and hopeless, trudged back to the bed. She sat down abruptly, her feet dangling, her shoulders fallen, her mouth collapsed, looking unbearably wounded, sapped, and mortified.
“Mumma,” Zareen said, thoroughly abashed, holding out the cup with dregs of the broth still in it. “Here, finish
this.”
Her mouth slightly gaping, Khutlibai eyed Zareen meekly and obediently drained the contents.
Zareen sat down next to her and put her arm round her mother’s shoulders. She pressed her wet cheek to Khutlibai’s and, in an awkward, sideways motion, kissed her eyebrow and the hollow near her temple. Zareen felt her mother’s cheek twitch with a persistent tic; it was as if the altercation had reversed their roles.
Zareen felt intolerably sad.
~
At word of Khutlibai’s imminent departure, the bearded cook, the sweeper, and the balding gardener, sporting new tennis shoes but no socks, gathered outside the main door.
Bundled up in her coat, shawl, and muffler, Khutlibai emerged from the bedroom, preceded by Zareen and followed by the ayah.
The sweeper, very dark and stocky with a mop of straight hair slanting rakishly across his forehead, clicked his heels, saluted, and stood at grinning attention. The message of Khutlibai’s remedy had been conveyed to him. The boy stood next to his father, shivering in his ladies’ cardigan, the black thread conspicuous on his left big toe.
Instead of her usual chuckles and affectionate banter, Khutlibai smiled in wan approval at the toe, which was beginning to swell on account of the tourniquet and was turning blue in the cold.
The dejected angle of Khutlibai’s head, and the motion she made to touch it, indicated to the sweeper that though she appreciated his antic attention, she was unable to respond as she usually did because of unwonted circumstance.
The sweeper at once became serious and, gesturing with reassuring, open-palmed motions of his hands, inquired, “Is everything all right, baijee? You are visiting after so long; have you forgotten us? If we have offended in some way, I beg forgiveness.”
