by Bapsi Sidhwa
A few guests were gathered at the long buffet table covered with lace tablecloths. Armed with a duster, her stiletto heels sinking in the grass, Zareen kept the flies off one end of the table and her eye cocked on the kites wheeling high above like vigilantes of the enormous azure sky. She hoped the duster and the crowd would keep the kites, which up close were as big as chickens, from swooping down on the food.
Zareen had wrapped the rich palu end of her yellow tanchoi sari round her neck to free her movements. Except for her gold bangles, her shapely arms as well as her velvety midriff were defiantly bare. Since Feroza was too excited and Khutlibai and Cyrus too busy talking to and serving the guests to notice or comment, Zareen did not get to deliver the retorts she had prepared.
The wizened little ayah whisked the flies at the other end of the long table. She obligingly lifted the net doilies, trimmed with beads, from the dishes when the guests wished to help themselves to the food. It was the usual auspicious-occasion fare: sweet vermicelli sprinkled with fried raisins and almonds, thick slices of spicy fried salmon, and fruit. Round stainless steel platters contained yogurt as firm as jelly, upon which a thick skin of clotted cream had formed. The yogurt had been sweetened and set the night before and strewn with red rose petals just before the dish was carried out. Deep silver dishes heaped with plain white rice and the special-occasion yellow pureed lentil — the combination known as dhan-dar — formed the main course. The aroma of the fried fish and spices hung in the scented air, whetting appetites. Emptied dishes were promptly replenished by the bearded and harried cook, whose portly frame was mummified in a white apron that reached almost to his ankles, specially stitched for the occasion by the nearsighted ayah.
The children ran everywhere, drinking colored sodas directly from the bottles, and the women, flaunting a slightly risqué air, drank Murree-beer-and-7UP shandies. Cyrus’s unabashedly fat sister-in-law, Freny, who lived twenty-five miles from Lahore in Kot Lakpat, persuaded Khutlibai, who hated beer, to try a little of the mixed brew.
The men strutted on the lawn with their froth-topped beer mugs as if they were toting weapons. They had the jaunty, faintly guilty mien of men who are up to mischief — and that despite the Drink Permits in their pockets.
Once the food and drinks were consumed, the bustle to and from the garden increased. Feroza went in to brush her teeth and check her last-minute packing. Her two bulging suitcases stood in a corner of her room. She slipped a cardboard cylinder containing a handsome poster of Bhutto, right arm raised and mouth arrested mid-speech, into one of them.
Zareen examined the silver prayer-tray to ascertain that it contained everything needed for the auspicious sagan and placed it on the small, brass-inlaid hall table.
In the garden, Khutlibai was regaling relatives with the latest family health and news bulletins. Cyrus’s mother, Soonamai, a thin, bamboo-straight, wonderfully dignified, and tactful lady, sat next to Khutlibai, obviously enjoying her company. The two shrewd old women got on very well when they saw each other, which, by tacit agreement, was not often.
Soonamai visited Cyrus and Zareen only rarely because of her dependence on Rohinton, her eldest son, to transport her from Kot Lakpat, where she lived with him and his redoubtable wife with so much discretion that Freny considered her mother-in-law her best friend.
Suddenly an indefinable noise stopped their breaths. Almost at once they realized that the Market mosque’s stereo system was being tested. The air was blasted by a cough. And when the assistant maulvi cleared his throat in a loud “ahun-haam!” with impressive squelchy undertones, the feat was broadcast from the eight most powerful stereo amplifiers in Lahore, mounted right on top of the mosque’s minaret.
The maulvi made a few announcements that rent the peaceful afternoon, “A girl, age five, who answers to the name of Shameem, is missing. She is wearing a red cardigan and gold earrings … A boy, age three, who answers to the name of Akhtar, is missing. He is wearing a white shirt and blue knickers …,” and then the Main Market maulvi proceeded to shred the afternoon completely, when, accompanied by a children’s choir, he began to sing religious songs.
The guests gathered on the Ginwalla lawn all had their own street-corner mosques with their own resident maulvis and stereo systems, but they had never heard such a nasal, grating voice or been subjected to such uninhibited disregard for the esthetics of a tune. The assault on their ears was intolerable. They could hardly hear themselves speak. Since it was Friday, the head maulvi, his invited cronies, and sundry bearded cheerleaders could be counted on to keep the stereo system booming all afternoon.
It was pointless sitting outside. Led by Khutlibai, followed by Soonamai, the party drifted indoors. In any case, it was time they thought about leaving for the airport.
In her trendy new denim shalwar-kamiz and cashmere cardigan, Feroza stood on the little wooden pallet in the sitting room, happily receiving travel money envelopes and hugs.
Khutlibai, who had modestly hung back because she was a widow, was persuaded by Zareen and Soonamai to launch the good-luck ceremony. She stood before her granddaughter while Zareen stood at hand, holding the prayer-tray. Khutlibai put her thumb into the red paste in a silver container and left her imprint on Feroza’s forehead. Feroza leaned forward accommodatingly, and Khutlibai pressed the rice she held in her palm on Feroza’s forehead. Quite a few grains stuck to the drying paste, and Khutlibai was pleased. It meant as many blessings on the child.
She next popped a lump of crystallized sugar into Feroza’s mouth, handed her a coconut, and bestowed a long list of specific blessings. May you return home safe and soon. May you marry a rare diamond among men. May you have many children and become a grandmother and a great-grandmother, and live in contentment and happiness with all your children and their children. May you live a hundred years and always be lucky like me, and happy and God-blessed … Aa-meen!
Then she garlanded Feroza and finally, expertly cracking her knuckles on her own temples to remove the envious and evil eye from her lovely granddaughter, stepped back.
Soonamai’s turn was next. One by one the aunts came up, performing a much shorter version of the ceremony, mainly blessing and hugging Feroza and presenting envelopes anointed with the auspicious red paste and thick with cash. The uncles also gave her hugs, while the cousins, fingers stuck in mouths and noses, looked on with envy.
At a little after two o’clock, a stately cavalcade of nine cars, their chassis swinging low from the loads of passengers and luggage, drove out of the gates of the Ginwalla residence.
Feroza sat snugly ensconced between her grandmothers in the Toyota. Covering their heads with their saris, stroking Feroza’s arms and thighs, the two old women prayed for her safety during her dangerous voyage and for her protection from unknown perils once she reached her destination. She knew from their sibilant whispers and inclination to rock that they were going through the proscribed seven Yathas and five Ashem Vahoos for the benefit of the traveler.
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 to
day 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.
Chapter 5
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 c
ountry 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.
