by Bapsi Sidhwa
Zareen felt soothed by the attention. She considered Shirley very pretty. Shirley had high cheekbones, a small nose, and long, blond hair. The girls were not a bit like Zareen’s preconceived notions of promiscuous American girls, even if Feroza had made that crack about being the only twenty-year-old virgin in America. These pretty girls did not have boys hovering round them.
Chapter 28
Zareen stayed home the next day. She sorted out her shopping and packed a suitcase with gifts. It was expected of her, that she return like a female Santa Claus bearing gifts. She did not see David or either of the girls all day.
Feroza came home at about six in the evening, announcing, “I’m so hungry!” She was in high spirits. Zareen turned off the TV and followed her into the kitchen, saying, “I’m hungry too. I’ll make us a spicy pora. Would you like that?”
“I’d love it!”
Zareen took out four eggs for the omelette and rinsed a light plastic chopping board with bright vegetable designs on it. She must remember to purchase a couple. No, at least four. Her sisters-in-law and cousins would love them. And knives. A set of those expensive knives that could chop off your fingers if you weren’t careful. Potato peelers, cheese slicers. She was temporarily distracted from her worries at the thought of the pleasure the gifts would give.
“Only five days to go. It’s Tuesday today, and by next Tuesday I’ll be in Lahore,” Zareen announced, expertly chopping onions and jalapeño peppers.
Feroza looked up from the mail she was reading. “Is that all? But you only just got here!” She sounded genuinely dismayed.
David had returned. They could hear him moving around in the garage.
Zareen sighed heavily and turned towards Feroza. Holding the knife, which was plastered with cilantro and onion, she passed the back of her hand across her forehead in a weary gesture. “If you feel you must marry that man, I have only one request.”
The allusion to the subject was sudden, the capitulation unexpected. Feroza widened her eyes, pursed her full mouth in an O, and affected a visibly theatrical start.
“What?”
This is what she loved about Feroza. Even as a child, after the banging of doors, the red-faced shouting rages and shut-ins, by the time Feroza emerged from her retreat, all was forgotten and forgiven. She rarely sulked. Even after their epic quarrel the day before, she was not above a little clowning.
“Get married properly,” Zareen said. “The judge’s bit of paper won’t make you feel married. Have a regular wedding. Don’t deprive us of everything!”
Feroza remained silent and raised her naturally arched eyebrows quizzically.
“If you and David come to Lahore, we will take care of everything.”
“Mum, rituals and ceremony frighten David, he’s too private a person. We were talking about it last night; neither of us care for meaningless formalities. Anyway, don’t you think you should talk to David first?”
Zareen shrugged. “Then call him.”
David came into the kitchen looking unkempt, unshaven, and grim. Feroza noted the gold chain hanging from his neck, the star of David prominent on his chest. She appreciated at once that her mother, by constantly flaunting their religion, had provoked his reaction.
The top buttons on his plaid shirt were open and part of the shirt hung out of his pants. David pulled out a chair, turned it around, and, straddling it, faced Zareen, surly and mildly defiant. His glasses caught the light in a particular way, and Zareen noticed for the first time his resemblance to the image in the photograph Feroza had sent; something sinister in the definition of his obdurately set jaw and, with his hair grown somewhat, the cold, actorish symmetry of his profile. Zareen was taken aback by his behavior and appearance. His breath smelled of beer.
“Since you two are so sure you want to get married,” she said, concealing her nervousness and striving also to keep her tone light, “I want you to grant me a little wish.”
David looked wary. “Feroza said you want me to come to Lahore to get married?”
“Oh, not only you. Your parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts. They’ll all be our guests. I want you and Feroza to have a grand wedding!”
David remained silent and grimly unenthusiastic.
But marriages were the high point in Zareen’s community life, and she was talking about her daughter’s wedding. “We’ll have the madasara ceremony first. You’ll plant a mango tree. It’s to ensure fertility. May you have as many children as the tree bears mangoes. In all ceremonies we mark your foreheads with vermilion, give you envelopes with money, hang garlands round your necks, and give you sugar and coconuts. They’re symbols of blessings and good luck.”
David, if anything, looked more wary, and the light glinting off his glasses more sinister. Zareen had expected him to at least smile, but his sense of humor had vanished with his courtesy and sensibility. She felt she was seeing him in his true colors. “After that is done, we break a coconut on your head,” she said with acid relish.
Feroza laughed. David blinked his bewildered eyes and looked profoundly hurt. “She’s only kidding,” Feroza said.
“Then we have the adarnee and engagement. Your family will fill Feroza’s lap with five sari sets, sari, petticoat, blouse, underwear. Whatever jewelry they plan to give her must be given then. We give our daughters-in-law at least one diamond set. I will give her the diamond-and-emerald necklace my mother gave me at my wedding.
“Now, don’t look so worried,” Zareen said, noting David’s ghastly pallor and tightly compressed lips. “And tell your mother not to worry either. We’ll be like sisters. I’ll help her choose the saris. We get beautiful saris in Lahore, Tanchoi, Banarasi silks.”
The more defensive, startled, and confused David appeared, the more Zareen felt compelled to talk. Feroza signaled her with her eyes and, when that did not deter her, with gestures of her hands and small amusing protests, “Mum, you’ll scare him witless!” And to David, “It’s a lot of fun, really!”
“Of course it’s fun. We’ll give your family clothes — suit-lengths and shirts for the men, sari sets for the women. A gold chain for your mother, a pocket watch for your father. Look here, if your parents don’t want to do the same, we’ll understand. But we’ll fulfill our traditional obligations.”
David was angry. He sat there, exuding stubbornness. Not mulish balking but the resistance of an instinct that grasped the significance of the attack. He realized Zareen’s offensive was not personal but communal. He knew that a Jewish wedding would be an equally elaborate affair, and though he didn’t want to go through that either, he felt compelled to defend his position.
“My parents aren’t happy about the marriage, either. It’s lucky they’re Reform Jews, otherwise they’d go into mourning and pretend I was dead. We have Jewish customs, you know. My family will miss my getting married under a canopy by our rabbi. We have a great dinner and there’s a table with twenty or thirty different kinds of desserts, cake, and fruit. Then there’s dancing until late at night.” David stopped to catch his breath and looked angrily at Zareen. “I belong to an old tradition, too.”
“All the better,” Zareen said promptly. “We’ll honor your traditions.”
Zareen felt an exhilarating strength within her, as if someone very subtle was directing her brain, a power she could trust but not control.
His nostrils pinched and quivering, David felt the subtle force in Zareen undermining everything he stood for — his entire worth as a person. He wasn’t sure what it was — perhaps a craftiness older people achieved. His mother would be a better match for Zareen. He had seen her perform the cultivated rituals of a closed society, fending for itself in covert and subliminal ways that were just as effective and difficult to pinpoint.
“Next, we come to the wedding. If there is a wedding,” Zareen said solemnly. “You’ll sit on thrones like royalty, under a canopy of white jasmine, and the priests will chant prayers for an hour, and shower you with rice and coconut slivers.”
<
br /> “I thought you said the priests refused to perform such marriages.” David was sarcastic, a canny prosecutor out to nail a slippery opponent.
“I know of cases where such marriages have been performed,” Zareen said, as if confessing to knowledge better left concealed. “Feroza’s grandmother has ways of getting around things — she’s president of the Anjuman. The ceremony won’t make you a Parsee, or solve Feroza’s problems with the community, but we’ll feel better for it; so will Feroza.”
“Feroza’s grandmother is what?” David turned to Feroza for enlightenment.
Using the closest example she could think of, Feroza explained, “Grandmother’s like a tribal chief.”
Zareen was taken aback. As far as she was aware, tribesmen inhabited jungles and mountain wildernesses, observed primitive codes of honor, and carried out vendettas. A far cry from the Westernized and urban behavior of her sophisticated community. But noticing David’s flattering interest in what Feroza was saying, she didn’t dispute it.
“You’ll have a wonderful time,” continued Zareen compulsively. “Every day we’ll sing wedding songs, smother you in garlands, stuff your pockets with money and your mouth with sweets.” She talked on and on. “I can just imagine Feroza in a white Chantilly lace sari embroidered with gold and sequins.”
David folded his arms on the back of the chair and let his chin rest resignedly on them. He imagined his mother talking the same way. She’d want him to get married under the wedding canopy in the synagogue in which he’d had his bar mitzvah and with the same rabbi performing the marriage.
David’s blue eyes glazed over. Feroza glanced at him and felt bewildered and mortified by her mother’s conduct.
Laura came into the kitchen in a boyish night shirt, apologized for interrupting Zareen’s animated monologue, and withdrew with her cup of coffee.
Zareen said, “Such decent girls. They don’t have boyfriends to distract them from studies. They seem to know there is a time and place for everything.”
“They don’t need boyfriends,” Feroza said complacently. “They’re lesbians.”
Zareen did not immediately register what she heard. She had read the word once or twice in magazines but never heard it pronounced. She became acutely uncomfortable.
“Lovers,” Feroza added helpfully. “But why? They’re pretty enough. They can get droves of boyfriends.”
“Some women just prefer women. Others are fed up. American boys change girlfriends every few months. All boys are not like my David. The girls can’t stand the heartache. It takes them months to get over it. Laura says, ‘If Shirley gets my juices flowing, why should I mess around with boys?’ Either way, they get on with their lives.”
Zareen wanted to throw up. She couldn’t tell if Feroza was trying to impress her with her newly acquired worldly wisdom, or deliberately insulting her. Feroza had been properly brought up to be respectful, sexually innocent, and modest. That she could mention such things in her presence shocked Zareen.
Above all, Zareen was dismayed at her own innocence. In all the time she had stayed with them, she hadn’t suspected the truth. What goings-on! Feroza was living with a boy and a couple of lesbians. She wouldn’t dare mention it to Cyrus, or anyone. How could she face the disgrace of nurturing a brat who looked her in the eye and brazenly talked about women’s juices? She tried not to show how hurt she was.
But Feroza gauged the measure of her pain. Not able to do anything about her mother’s attitude, for the past two days Feroza had helplessly watched David’s slowly mounting perplexity, disillusion, and fury. And suspecting that Zareen had just destroyed their happiness by her talk about diamonds and saris and superior Parsee ways, Feroza had instinctively hit back.
The assaults were too vicious, the hurt too deeply felt, for either to acknowledge her wounds.
Zareen continued talking, but she was distracted. A little later she said, “I’ve kept you long enough, David. You’re almost asleep.” She stood up. “Well, good night.”
David nodded without looking at her or attempting to sit up. Feroza glanced at him, surprised and reproachful.
When Zareen left, David swung himself off the chair and, avoiding Feroza’s anxious and wistful eyes, stretching his back and rubbing his neck, went into his room and shut the door.
Feroza’s heart pounded and her body felt dull and heavy. She sat at the kitchen table for a long time, her face red and frozen. The tears came slowly.
Chapter 29
Zareen switched off the bedroom lights. She hoped the Valium would work before Feroza came into the room. Her mind seethed with a tangle of images. She covered her eyes with the sari scarf in a bid to empty her mind.
Just before she drifted off to sleep, a memory floated up of the idea, vague and unformed, that had calmed her on her second night in Denver. The idea had ripened unconsciously, and its subtle force, combined with her recent fear, had directed her actions. A set of words began to synchronize with the rhythm of her easing mind, “If you can’t knock him out with sugar, slug him with honey.” Except she’d knocked out her daughter as well. But she must, in any event, protect her from the calumny that would destroy her.
~
In the few remaining days of her visit, the guilt and remorse passed. David’s surly behavior and coldly clenched jaw vindicated her guile. She felt that she had exposed the wickedness hidden him, and she hoped that Feroza was noticing his mean and unpleasant behavior.
The day before Zareen was to leave, David started calling Feroza ZAP. The first few times, Feroza laughed her special musical laugh with its infectious undertones and explained to Zareen that ZAP stood for Zoroastrian-American Princess, an innovative spin-off on JAP, Jewish-American Princess. Zareen knew too little of the Jewish-American culture to appreciate its humor.
But after a few repetitions, the clever ZAP spin-off palled. And when David started calling her “Apple of Mommy’s eye,” Feroza turned her offended face away and gazed resentfully into the middle distance. There were periods when she and David did not talk. A pinched look around her eyes and an uncertainty in them dimmed their yellow luster.
Feroza’s eyes had always revealed her feelings. It upset Zareen to look into them now. They reflected her sadness and resignation and betrayed an occasional flicker of fear Zareen had never seen in them before. Why should her fearless daughter be afraid? She was glad she had hidden those ugly pamphlets Freny had sent.
All the lights in the house had been turned off. Zareen, unable to sleep, had a sudden vision of her daughter as she had seen her at the Denver airport. Feroza had been radiant. Zareen recalled the catch in her heart at the sight of Feroza’s loveliness, and the same emotion, an almost unsustainable wave of pleasure and tenderness, tinged with the new dread — swept through her again.
And in its wake arrived a sweating and guilty wave of panic.
In her excitement at being in America Zareen had forgotten old ways. Her daughter’s unhappiness had been brought about by Zareen herself, and no one was to blame but she. She had forgotten how malign the admiring and loving eye of a mother could be. To admire one’s own child so lavishly was to tempt fate — to cast a spell more potent than the evil eye of envious ill-wishers.
Zareen sprang out of bed anxiously and hustled a bewildered and groggy Feroza into the kitchen. She turned on the stove and placed an old griddle on it.
Almost asleep on the kitchen chair, rubbing her eyes, Feroza followed her mother’s movements vapidly.
Zareen took out three jalapeño peppers from the refrigerator and steered Feroza to stand by the stove.
“Oh, Mum!” Feroza protested in exasperation and bowed her head as she used to. “I can’t believe you still accept this nonsense.”
Holding the peppers in her fist, ignoring Feroza’s drowsy protests, Zareen solemnly drew seven circles in the air over Feroza’s head, all the while whispering a hodgepodge of incantations. “May the mischief of malign and envious eyes leave you, may the evil in my loving e
ye leave you, may any magic and ill will across the seven seas be banished, may Ahura Mazda’s protection and blessings guard you.”
Then she cast the peppers on the hot griddle and, with a dark look, watched them sputter, shrivel, and char to cinders.
“Hey, what’s going on?” David stood in the door. The room was filled with an acrid stench.
“Mum’s removing evil-eye spells,” Feroza said, laconic and wry.
“At this time of night?”
Zareen cast a brief, baleful look at David. She removed the griddle from the fire and, bending over in her dressing gown, tapped its edge on the tiled floor and emptied its contents.
The charred remains of the peppers looked like tortured beetles. In a gesture that appeared needlessly vicious to David, Zareen crushed the remains of the peppers beneath the grinding heel of her slipper.
“Oh, God!” David said, contemptuous and aggravated. “What are you? A witch or something?”
Zareen gave him a fierce look. She pointed a trembling finger at him. “You get out!”
David stepped back, scowling and confused, and almost stumbled off the step leading to his room. He closed the door with a thunderous slam that shook the fragile walls and windows.
Zareen had already checked her baggage. She stepped into the security section at the airport and placed her purse, a packed canvas carry-all, and two bulging shopping bags on the conveyor belt. After it passed through the screening, she collected her hand luggage and turned to look at David and Feroza one last time.
David stood in his faded and torn denim shorts, his arms folded, his muscular legs planted like sturdy trees. Standing forlornly by him, Feroza looked pale, insecure, and uprooted.
As Zareen waved and smiled, an ache caught her heart and the muscles in her face trembled. Covering her head with her sari palu to hide her crumbling face, Zareen quickly turned away.
