The Film and TV Institute of India, or FTII, is the host institution for my Fulbright Scholarship, and it is where I plan to base myself for the next several months. When I was applying for the Fulbright, a former professor of mine suggested that I contact the director of the Institute, and I arranged to come here through a series of letters. Did I plan to take classes at the Institute? the director wanted to know. I told him that mostly what I was looking for was a library, a place to stay, and the chance to interact with other young filmmakers. “Young filmmakers we have plenty of,” came the reply, “when they’re not on strike, that is.”
The Institute is a public government institution based on the grounds of a former film studio. Students from all over India take a rigorous exam for the chance to secure one of the coveted spots in the program. A degree from FTII means access to the competitive world of the Indian film industry, and its students become leaders in paths as varied as the Indian avant-garde and the highly lucrative Bollywood blockbuster. When he was first appointed two years ago, the director had tried to introduce some unpopular changes, among them a hike in the annual fees, and the students had rebelled.
The details of my Fulbright project, as outlined in my proposal, are vague: I’ve told the United States Educational Foundation in India that I intend to study the Bene Israel community, which my maternal grandmother was descended from—a tiny community, mostly in Bombay, who believe they are one of the lost tribes of Israel. I plan to document the Bene Israel in a series of still photographs and a documentary film. I have with me too many cameras: a video camera, a 16mm Bolex, a Super 8mm camera, a medium-format still camera, a 35mm camera, and, last but not least, a point-and-shoot, which I carry at all times, afraid of missing something. At customs in the Bombay airport, I aroused a certain amount of curiosity: what did I plan to do with all of this equipment? The officer saw the title of my research project on my visa: The Jews of India. How many Jews are there in Bombay? he quizzed me. Thirty-five hundred, I replied. I don’t know much more than that, but the answer granted me access to the throng of the airport and the teeming city outside it.
Pune has one of the larger Bene Israel populations outside of Bombay, and it seemed a more manageable place to begin my research. I have confidently told the Fulbright’s administrators that I am in close contact with Bene Israel community leaders, who are eager for me to interact with them and tell their story. But the truth is that all I have is a list of hastily scribbled phone numbers from my grandmother’s old telephone diaries, the name of an elderly cousin by marriage, and two ethnographies written by anthropologists in the late 1980s. There is very little information about the Bene Israel in print, and almost no record of what they look like.
I had half expected to arrive in this strange city and muddle my way to the campus in a prepaid black-and-yellow taxicab. My mother is terrified by the idea of my taking a taxi by myself in India. As I collect my bags in the claim area, I can hear my mother’s voice:
“If you were going to Pakistan, I’d have you fetched. But here you are going to India. . . .”
I say, “But we’re from India, Mama. We were from India before we were from Pakistan.”
“True,” she relents. “But, still, we don’t know anyone there.”
I chose India to fulfill my promise to Nana, but there’s another reason, one I feel almost guilty about. I have a mobility here that I will never have in Pakistan. In Pakistan I am Samina’s daughter, I am Rahat’s granddaughter, I am the American cousin, the unmarried oddity, the occasional visitor. When we arrive in Karachi, we are met by my mother’s friend Nariman’s head servant, Sajjad, no matter what kind of ungodly not-morning-not-night it is. As we drive to Uncle Nariman’s house, I always look out the window and marvel at the new buildings that have sprung up since my last visit. On my last trip I was astonished to find a gleaming McDonald’s as we left the airport, surrounded by huddles of small children begging for change. I do not walk in Karachi; if I need toothpaste or saline solution, I go with a driver or a relative to find it. This is a stifling kind of luxury, knowing that in an unsafe city you will always be safe.
In India I have a sense that I will have the freedom of anonymity, something I have not experienced in Pakistan. The danger and the potentials keep me alert. As we load my bags into the back of the FTII minivan, I notice a woman about my age nimbly get on a motorcycle and speed out of the parking lot. So much looks the same about the two countries: the Pepsi ads, the crush of people, the dust. But I have the palpable sense that things are different here, that I am different here.
The driver takes me through the city, and I look out the low windows of the van at Pune. Nana spent part of her childhood here, and she was tremendously fond of the place. She used the British spelling, Poona, and she pronounced it “Pooh-nah,” not the modern Marathi spelling, Pune, which some people pronounce “Pooh-nay.” I know how she spelled it from writing addresses on her letters toward the end of her life, when her eyesight worsened and her handwriting disintegrated. Until a few years ago, she had a first cousin who lived here named Lily. I make a mental note to look up Lily’s husband, who is still alive. I stick my hand out of the window and feel the air, somehow thicker than New York. There are trees, more of them than I would have expected. It is a low city, with no tall buildings in sight.
When we reach the Institute gate, the watchman gives me an envelope with my name on it and a key inside. He gestures down a slight, sloping hill with his flashlight and follows us on foot as the driver goes slowly down a long driveway of red earth. I see a group of concrete apartment buildings set in a kind of hollow, surrounding one small, undernourished tree with a rope swing. He drives me straight to one of the many doors. There is a flash of white cotton on the step, a form that shifts into the shape of three small, grimy, beautiful little girls. Two of them flee when they see the car, but one of them sits fixed in the beam of the headlights. She has a pixie’s grin and impossibly long eyelashes. She looks up into the light and cocks her head to one side, daring the watchman to shoo her away. The watchman blinks his flashlight and mutters something, and the little girl disappears as fast as she appeared, a sprite.
A long bolt opens my door. There is a fluorescent-tube light and the smell of camphor. I open the heavy padlock to my cement-block room and crawl onto the cot provided for me, fully dressed. That night, I dream of Nana.
IN THE DREAM, I am in the house I grew up in, in Chestnut Hill. There is a party going on; the house is filled with people in suits and brightly colored salwar kameezes. Someone, a messenger, comes to tell me that I can talk to Nana, and I shake my head no, I didn’t make it to the hospital in time to see her. But the messenger insists that she’s there, she’s up in her room—I can go and talk to her, but I must hurry. I walk up the spiral staircase to the second floor. I push the door open, and Nana is sitting upright in her bed, her bearing almost regal, dressed in a blue silk sari. Her long silver hair is gathered in a bun—the way she wore it when I was small—and she has a curious smile on her face. She gestures for me to sit down.
“Listen. There is something I need you to do for me.”
I sit, and she begins speaking, slowly.
We have a conversation that is based on something that happened the last time I saw her, three months before she died. At the time, Nana appeared diminished, weakened by age and illness. We were sitting side by side on the sofa, talking about my plans for the future, when she placed a hand on my arm.
“Promise me one thing,” she said, her voice suddenly serious. “Go to India, learn about your ancestors.”
I looked at her, blinking quickly, trying to hold back tears. I knew what she meant—that this was something she wanted me to do after she was gone. Nana had never asked me for anything before.
“Of course, Nana,” I said. “I promise.”
“Then all of this will be worth it,” she said, leaning her head back. “If you tell my story.”
I WAKE UP DISORIENTED, the cloud of heat
settled on me like a film. The room is very dark, with heavy brown curtains blocking the light; when I draw them to see what is outside, dust covers me and I instantly start sneezing. I see the room now for the first time. It contains a long, narrow cot, a wooden desk, a chair, and a derelict, moss-colored couch. By the door there is a bathroom, and I peer inside it, only to move away from the smell as quickly as I find it. I move the desk and see its imprint marked on the floor; this room has not been inhabited for some time. There is a knock at the door, and I answer it. A small man in dirty blue shorts, with a bucket of black water and a scraggly hand broom, gives me an apologetic look. He motions to ask if he can come inside. I hesitate, and then I let him in. I watch as he sloshes the black water around the bathroom, swirling it with the broom. The floor looks worse when he has completed this task, and I try to tell him so, but he doesn’t understand. I shake my head to say, “Never mind.”
He leaves, and I dress carefully, draping the dupatta shawl of my outfit over my right shoulder and patting my unruly hair down in the bathroom mirror. I am tall, at least a head taller than most Indians. My hair is curly and loose. I play a game I have played since I was a child. Would I fit in better here if my hair were stick-straight? If I were shorter? If my skin were darker? Or is it something else, something less tangible?
I walk into the courtyard and see now what I could only partially make out last night. I am staying in a compound, with perhaps a hundred pale blue stucco rooms and apartments facing a small driveway that leads to the main road. I walk up the driveway and look at the impenetrable traffic of Law College Road, with the imposing Institute gate straight ahead of me. Motorbikes, rickshaws, and cars whiz by me at alarming speeds. I see two male students about my age walk unperturbed into the street and stop at the yellow line, letting bikes and cars dodge them by inches on either side. They wait about a minute and then zip across the street, nearly colliding with a man on a motorcycle, his four tiny children huddled behind him. The young men reach my side of the street, and one of them looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt.
“It’s not a river. You won’t drown, you know,” he says, waving his right hand dismissively.
The young men brush past me and enter the compound. I stand there feeling stupid for a few moments. I know how alien I look. I am paler and taller than anyone on the street, and in my outdated salwar kameez, I can be pegged for an outsider right away. I hate that. At home, in New York, I am invisible. Here I am foreign, or, as I will come to be known, the girl from Foreign. I brace myself and dash across the street, panting from the effort when I reach the other side.
I try to enter the gate of the Institute and am stopped by an officious guard in a khaki uniform demanding to know who I am. I produce my scholarship letters, explaining that I am the recipient of a research fellowship and will be a visiting student at the university for one year.
“Madam, you are not in the register.”
“Could you check again, sir? I am here for a meeting with the director of the Institute. I have been invited here.”
I show him my sheaf of papers, which he waves away.
“You come tomorrow. There is no record of you.”
“But I was fetched at the airport. I am on a fellowship. To study here. I am a student.”
“You are from Foreign?”
I nod. He disappears inside an interior office.
I sit on the bench near the gate, watching the students spill into the street. They come in pairs and threes and fours, some laughing, some holding hands. Everyone reminds me of someone, and I feel homesick.
Pune is in the western state of Maharashtra and is dominated by remnants of British order. It came under British rule in 1817, and it was here that officers created a large military cantonment and set up residence in the summers to escape the heat and crush of Bombay. Wide verandas pour into the street, covered in romantic-looking vines. Though the main avenues look like those in most Indian towns—painted billboards, new fast-food restaurants—the side streets still retain a sense of what Pune might have been like when it was a retreat, lined with green trees and flowering bushes. I wonder how it looked when my grandmother visited relatives here as a child. I pick out a stone house with a date over its front door: 1917, the year Nana was born.
The guard returns and tells me that the director has gone for a meeting in Delhi and will not return for five days.
“May I stay where I am until the director comes back?”
“This is not a matter for me to decide.”
“Does that mean yes?”
The guard shakes his head back and forth, yes and no both, and disappears into the office again.
I stumble back to the street and walk against the traffic, the way my parents taught me when I was a child. The rickshaws are producing a fog of carbon monoxide fumes, and my throat itches with the taste of exhaust. Two ragpickers amble alongside the street, hauling their bundles on their backs and picking up stray bits and pieces of color. Mothers are doing their day’s shopping with their children in tow, tugging at the fall of their saris, asking for candy. I am not sure where I am heading, but I want to find a newspaper and some food.
I come upon a vegetable seller, her meager wares laid out before her on a patterned bedsheet. Four cucumbers, a handful of small red onions, bunches of coriander, bunches of limes, and a handful of tangerines. I gesture to the tangerines and ask how much they are.
She looks up at me. She is probably not much older than I am, but her history is written in lines upon her forehead and rings her eyes with red. She looks at me curiously, her head cocked to one side to take in my face, my unfashionable salwar kameez. And then she stretches her arms on either side of her as if she is an airplane, and she makes strange mechanical noises, tilting her body to one side and then to the other, listing right and then left, making louder and louder sounds, a kind of growl coming up in her throat. Then she mimics hitting a tall tower, forming the shape of the tower with her hands, showing me how tall, how long. I realize, with a mixture of horror and surprise, that she is performing an imitation of the World Trade Center attacks. Boom! She pauses and becomes a second plane, hitting the second tower. Boom! She’s smashed into a million pieces twice over. She laughs, looking at my sickened reaction. She throws her head back and laughs wildly and points at me.
“Amreeka! Amreeka!” She laughs, and starts making the plane noises again, trying to establish a connection.
I nod at her, trying to tell her that I understand what she is trying to say, asking her to stop. I start to cry.
“Amreeka,” I repeat, nodding. “Amreekan,” I say, pointing to my chest.
And then she looks at me anew, with a question mark on her face. She puts one hand on her heart, and the other in front of her, as if to say, Stop, enough. She shakes her head back and forth, the unknowable shake, everything at once. She is trying to have a conversation with me. She is trying to tell me that she is sorry.
I nod, thanking her, and wander farther down the street, in the direction of a phone booth, a rickety stall by the side of the road.
It’s not only that Mama didn’t teach me her language. She might also have taught me the hand gestures, the head toss, the way to walk in leather sandals, picking up the sole of the shoe a little bit each time with a small squeeze of your first and second toes. Whenever I ask her about why she didn’t teach me these things, she says the same thing, “I didn’t want you to be different from the other children in your school.” But of course I am different. I am different at home and I am different here. At home it is unusual, interesting to be different, a cultural curiosity. Here it is merely uncomfortable.
I take a seat in the phone booth and look up the phone number of one of the two Pune synagogues in my notebook; I dial the number of its director. I explain who I am and why I have come to India, and ask if I can make an appointment to come and see the synagogue the following day. I hear him put the phone to one side and say to someone else in the room: “It’s a Mu
slim name. ‘Sadia’ is a Muslim name.”
Someone else says something muffled that I can’t hear. He returns to the line, polite and firm: “I’m afraid it won’t be possible. You will please call back in one week’s time.”
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 3
