by Bapsi Sidhwa
And saying “Lift your trotters, lift your trotters,” Manek hurried Feroza past the enticing window displays of dresses, shoes, sportswear, and jewelry on Fifth Avenue and Madison.
The next morning while Feroza was still in bed, Manek warned her that he was going to take her to a very special place.
Feroza took pains with her outfit, and after a frugal breakfast of bagels and cream cheese at the YMCA cafeteria, they rushed off to catch a bus.
Manek trotted Feroza in her high heels, turquoise shalwar-kamiz, and red overcoat through the narrow limestone-and-granite gorge of Wall Street. His face was radiant with an expression one expects to see only in holy places. “Do you know, more money changes hands here in one hour than in a whole year in Pakistan?”
“Really?”
Later that afternoon, when they inadvertently found themselves on Lexington Avenue outside Bloomingdale’s, Feroza glued her nose to the plate glass, enchanted by the apparel on the skinny mannequins, the colorful patent-leather shoes, and the gleaming handbags. She refused to budge.
Exasperated and impatient, Manek said, “I wish you wouldn’t waste my time gaping at junk.”
“You call this junk?”
Feroza’s voice was hushed with awe, and when she turned to him, her face was as reverent as his had been on Wall Street.
Feroza went into Bloomingdale’s. It was like entering a surreal world of hushed opulence festooned by all manner of hats propped up on stands and scarves and belts draped here and there like fabulous confetti. The subtle lighting enhanced the plush shimmer of wool and leather and the glowing colors of the silk. Feroza felt she had never seen such luxuriant textures or known the vibrant gloss of true colors. And it was merely the entrance foyer that had affected her so.
Feroza moved amidst the dazzling wares, oblivious of Manek’s grumbling rumbles. Disconsolate and defeated, he limped behind her like a weary ghost. It was hot inside. Manek removed his coat and glumly followed the direction of Feroza’s gaze as she sought out other vistas, bewitched by further displays of merchandise that appeared to attract his witless niece with a suctionlike force. His heart sinking, Manek followed Feroza into the disorienting maze that he knew was specifically designed to snare harebrained spendthrifts like his obdurate charge.
“There’s no logic to this place,” he grumbled. “We could lose each other here. The damned place is like a spider’s web, luring you in.” And as Feroza, insensible of his counsel, floated deeper and deeper into the web of racks and counters, in desperation he cautioned, “Look, don’t panic if you lose me. Just ask someone to point out the Lexington Avenue entrance and stand outside it. Will you remember that? Lexington Avenue.”
Feroza nodded absently, and Manek’s gloom deepened.
All at once Manek’s nostrils flared and twitched. Slightly knitting his brow he sniffed, once, twice, like a bloodhound who has unexpectedly lit upon a promising trail, and with profound certitude he announced: “I can smell a desi!”
Feroza paid him scant attention.
“I bet there’s an Indian or Paki in the room. One can smell a native from a mile.” Again his nose twitched. “You wait here, I’ll be back soon,” he instructed, and sleuthed off to prowl the twilight periphery of the elegantly embellished space.
Having carefully scouted the area with his nose, like a hound on a promising trail, Manek found himself exactly where he’d started.
“It’s you,” he said to Feroza, surprised. “You’re the smelly desi!”
Feroza was shocked out of her trance by the accusation. She looked at Manek startled and uncomprehending. Her red coat lay on a stack of marked-down purses on a table, and dark stains marked the cloth under her arms.
“Don’t you use deodorant?”
Feroza raised her arm and ducked quickly to sniff.
“I can’t smell anything.”
“You can’t smell your own smell, stupid; people are going to start fainting any minute.”
“It’s this damned nylon-satin kamiz,” Feroza said matter-of-factly. “It starts smelling if it becomes hot. I can’t help it. As if you never sweat!”
“That’s the trouble with you desis. You don’t even know what a deodorant is, and you want to make an atom bomb!”
How could Feroza tell him of the countless times her mother and grandmother had soaked the underarms of her garments in an ammonia solution to get rid of the odor that clung to her clothes even after they were washed? It was an odor she was accustomed to, accepted by her young friends as natural to their years, and in summer they showered twice and sometimes even thrice a day.
Two hours later Feroza emerged with a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, a navy blue polka-dotted shirt, and a stick of deodorant.
~
“I wish you’d learn to keep your eyes on things that’ll benefit your brain,” Manek said after he had dragged Feroza out of Bloomingdale’s, “instead of clogging it with passing fancies and expensive habits. Did you have to buy Gloria Vanderbilt? Will anyone even notice the tag? Cheaper jeans would fit you just as well.”
And, determined to indoctrinate his niece with culture and improve her mind, Manek quick-marched Feroza through a whirlwind tour of all the major museums in New York. Each time they were “done” with a museum, he scratched it off the tourist guide list with the ballpoint he kept tucked behind his ear.
They embarked on the cultural mission by covering a strip along Fifth Avenue, from about One-hundred-fortieth Street to the Sixties, and Manek pointed out the mansions of the famous that look out on Central Park. Feroza, who had heard of the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies ever since she could remember, was duly impressed.
Manek pointed out, with a trace of irony, that many of the elegant mansions had been made over into museums, and that the Museum of the City of New York had been built from scratch to resemble the made-over mansions.
They visited the Museo el Barrio, devoted to Hispanic-American art, and the Jewish Museum in the Warburg Mansion. The spectacular Guggenheim, with its impressive spiraling interior, delighted Feroza more than the paintings on its curving walls. They took a bus to the Museum of Modern Art and even dashed off to the Military Museum in the permanently docked aircraft carrier Intrepid on the West Side.
Manek and Feroza would begin the tour of each museum by exploring the main lobby, then peek into a few rooms leading from it, and hunt out the restrooms and snack bars.
Then they would walk or take a bus, preferring either means of locomotion to the sinister labyrinths of the subways, and rush off to another museum.
Feroza enjoyed the escalators they rode up and down, and delighted in being treated to a cup of tea in the Palm Room at the Plaza Hotel as much as she appreciated the length of the footlong hot dogs in the cafeterias and delis.
If a display caught her eye or her imagination, as it did in the Egyptian and African sections in the magnificent Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manek became impatient and hurried her to some other section or work of art, remarking, “If you go into a trance in front of everything, we won’t see New York in a hundred years. I’m not spending good money on your stay in the YMCA just so that you can vegetate. You’ll have plenty of time to turn into a cauliflower or an okra once you’re back in Lahore.”
Manek was much more tolerant of her dalliance before the dinosaurs and stuffed gorillas at the American Museum of Natural History on the other side of Central Park. In fact, at one point, Feroza gave him a little nudge and slyly remarked, “Let’s move on before you turn into a gorilla or something.”
Feroza, still disoriented by her sudden swing from Lahore to New York — a trajectory that appeared to have pitched her into the next century — and the ten-hour lag she had not yet adjusted to, had a surrealistic impression of blurred images: a kaleidoscope of perceptions in which paintings, dinosaurs, American Indian artifacts, and Egyptian mummies mingled with hamburgers, pretzels, sapphire earrings, deodorants, and glamorous window displays.
On the fourth day of her tou
r of New York, Feroza balked at the thought of visiting yet another museum and stubbornly insisted on window-shopping on Fifth Avenue and ogling the strands of pearls and diamonds displayed at Tiffany’s. Manek, dragging her away by the scruff of her red-coated neck, preached her a catechism on the value Americans placed on time.
“Why is Pakistan so backward?” he asked.
Feroza knew better than to answer.
“Are we stuck in the Middle Ages because we were colonized? Because we are illiterate? Because we don’t have enough technology to make atom bombs?”
Feroza, distracted by the elegant skirts and jackets displayed at Christian Dior’s and worn by the assured women stepping briskly past in a variety of sneakers, started guiltily. Manek was looking at her with a curious expression. She promptly and obligingly agreed: “Yup.”
“What’s this new ‘yup-yup’ business you’ve learned? You’re not a puppy!” Manek appeared to be disgusted and hurt. “You’ve not listened to one word I’ve said.”
Feroza hastily caught his arm. The echo of his words lingered somewhere in her mind. “We’re backward because we can’t make atom bombs?”
“No,” Manek said, instantly mollified, and happily continued airing his views as they were jostled among the throng of shoppers, office workers, pooper-scooping dog-walkers, and vendors on the pavement.
“It’s because we squander time! It is the single most precious commodity besides money, and we act as if we are millionaires in eternity. But time is running out … and time will catch up with you. Then you’ll say — “
Manek slowed down, hunched his shoulders, and, acting out his impersonation of an old and palsied Feroza, wrung agitated hands beneath his penitently bowed head: “Oh, Manek, I wish I’d done thissss … ! Oh, Manek, I wish I’d done thaaat, instead of wasting my precious time and money on idiotic baubles … Oh, Manek, I wish I’d listened to you!”
Manek was completely intoxicated by the rich brew of humor, wisdom, and histrionic talent he projected. A few alarmed tourists gaped at him because of the high-pitched and quavering sounds he emitted — no doubt wondering, Feroza thought, if he was one of the lunatics forced out of the notoriously over-full asylums of New York. But the native New Yorkers, pledged to their purpose, saw him only as an obstruction and swerved past, unheeding.
“By which time you will be toothless and penniless,” continued Manek, “and it will be too late. You’ll have squandered your life!”
Feroza was irritated by the gradual switch from the general to specifically herself. And embarrassed.
“Behave yourself,” she scolded, turning round and stepping away from him. “People are looking at us.”
“Oh, no!” Manek exclaimed in the same shrill, breathless contralto in which he had warbled earlier and ended his impersonation on the same quavering, indeterminate note: “They are Americans. They will not waste their time on ussss. Only illiterate natives like you, from Third World countries, waste time …”
Feroza felt her face flush. She aimed a swift kick at his shins, and when he cried, “Ouch! What’re you doing?” she hissed. “You Third World native yourself! It’s my time, and my life, and I’m answerable to no one but my parents and my God!”
And later that evening, when Feroza adopted the classic pose of the bemused New York tourist and bent back awkwardly to ogle the skyscrapers beginning to blaze their lights, Manek preened and glowed as if he were the architect of the fabulous city.
It dawned on Feroza that Manek was not showing her around as much as showing off America. She observed him from the corner of her eye for a while, and, with the impact of a zap of lightning, it struck her that Manek might not want to return to Pakistan. She felt an unexpected and almost tragic sense of loss.
Feroza carried the conviction of Manek’s impending severance like an ache within her as they ambled through the streets and avenues, heading in the general direction of the Y. Feroza found herself wanting to indulge Manek. She glanced at him frequently out of sad, affectionate eyes and cast the same melancholy gaze upon the very different world they had suddenly stumbled upon on Eighth Avenue.
It took a few moments for the difference to register, and when it did, Feroza’s native curiosity became at once alert. She absorbed the sleazy atmosphere, rife with titillation and novelty, through all her excited and amplified senses.
Their spirit of daring and adventure heightened by a voyeuristic sense of guilt, Manek and Feroza walked past small dark video parlors flashing lewd advertising, interspersed by grubby pawn shops, cheap hotels, and bars. Manek knew the delis had sold the beer in brown bags to the furtive men who drank it slyly on the street.
“Look after your purse,” Manek cautioned, and Feroza clutched her odds-and-ends-swollen handbag to her stomach as if it were a football and she the center forward about to be tackled.
“Not like that, idiot,” Manek said, “someone will think you’ve got thousands of dollars in it … Just remain alert. Keep your eyes open, we are in a very interesting part of New York … See that fellow wiggling his bottom in the tight jeans?” With a slight inclination of his head, Manek directed Feroza’s attention to a young man drifting ahead of them aimlessly. “He’s a male prostitute.”
Hugely satisfied by the astonishment unhinging his niece’s jaw, he cryptically said, “You’ve a lot to learn, boochimai.”
After a little while, it occurred to Manek that the lissome women with the plunging necklines and fabulous bosoms strutting about so gorgeously on high heels were transvestites. He nudged Feroza and, with an unobtrusive movement of his chin in their direction, whispered, “I think these are American-style heejras.”
Feroza looked about with eyes widened to absorb knowledge nothing had prepared her for. Feroza was woolly about the distinction between eunuchs and transvestites, and the heejras in Lahore were about as different from these glamorous creatures as earthworms are from butterflies. The Lahori variety looked much more like men with long hair, many of them balding, dressed up as women. This made their coy antics ludicrous and amusing, perhaps only because she had been accustomed to seeing them as clownish figures since childhood.
Whether it was a mad June noon or a freezing midnight in December, come earthquake, flood, tear gas, or riots, if a son was born in a palace, hovel, or hospital, the heejras would materialize clapping hands, and hoarsely singing their congratulations. And sometimes they would claim a child as their own: they would know, no matter how secretly the baby was delivered, if it was a heejra, a fifty-fifty.
As they walked further, Feroza felt she had gained so much knowledge — of the type denied her in Lahore — in the past few days that Manek did not need to point out the pimps with their gold chains and open shirt collars or the miniskirted prostitutes who were decidedly less alluring than the elegant transvestites. Feroza also began to notice odd embraces and movements in shadowed spaces.
“What’re you doing?” Manek said. “Don’t stare, it’s dangerous— they don’t like it.”
Standing in a dark corner, a young man in jeans, wearing a hooded jacket over his T-shirt, caught her attention. She noticed him because, unlike most people on the sidewalk, he was not merely loitering. He looked like he was there for a purpose: focused, alert as a panther — and as dangerous.
She observed other young men in their twenties and thirties, wearing jeans, sneakers, windbreakers, and warm-up jackets, occupying corners and recessed doorways, some of them darting from one place to another making brief contacts. It was like surveying a clandestine army of commandos. People seemed to converge suddenly on key figures and as swiftly move away, as if quick transactions were being accomplished.
Feroza felt a sinister prickling in her spine. She felt she had descended into a pit and was looking at something she was not meant to see.
A young man with a white face loomed abruptly towards her out of a dark doorway, and though his eyes were not clearly visible, she could tell they were fixed on her with such wariness and menace that she
involuntarily gasped.
And then Manek had his arm round her and was quickening his stride to rush forward, pushing her to cross the street, saying, “Don’t look at him. Don’t look back. Try to behave normally.”
It was not possible to cross the street because of the traffic. They had scuttled along the road some ways, and when they felt they were safely past the dangerous territory, they got back on the sidewalk.
Manek slid his eyes about furtively by way of example. “I told you, don’t stare at people! Especially if they’re doing something funny — it’s an invitation to attack. They feel you’re snooping, or violating their privacy. At least don’t let them know you’re looking. Avoid eye contact. That fellow was a drug dealer — very dangerous.”
As Manek told her about lookouts, runners, and drug dealers — whatever little he knew about them embellished by his imagination — Feroza realized her earlier instinct to liken the young men to commandos was accurate. She had witnessed a subterranean army of the drug Mafia.
Except for a marked increase in the number of the human derelicts, who, Manek explained, were “bag ladies” and the homeless, Manek and Feroza were surrounded by the same cast of seedy characters as before.
Still on Eighth Avenue, they crossed Forty-second Street to the Port Authority bus terminal. The interior of the terminal appeared stark in the neon lighting, and from its squalid center sprang a fetid stench that made Feroza reel. She sensed the terminal was the infested hub of poverty from which the homeless and the discarded spiraled all over the shadier sidewalks of New York. Ragged and filthy men and women were spreading scores of flattened cardboard boxes to sleep on in the bus terminal.
