“Ibrahim! What are you doing here?”
He jumps up with a start.
“I was planning to surprise you!”
It occurs to me that he could have been out here any number of times, peering at me through my back window. The thought makes me shudder. Then I get angry.
“Ibrahim, go home. And please leave me alone. You really scared me. Please go now.”
“Miss Sadia . . .”
“No, really, it’s late. Good night, Ibrahim.”
I go inside and shut the door.
THE NEXT MORNING there is a note underneath my door.
Dear Miss Sadia,
Last night I played a funny joke on you that I thought was funny and now I see that it was WRONG. I told my girlfriend (I have a girlfriend) and she said that I should have not done that. Please accept my apology. I should not have scared you. You looked scared! Ha-Ha. Ha. Your friend,
M. Ibrahim, Professional Photographer
Flat No. 2218
On campus, I find Rekhev sitting underneath a large, knotty tree outside the auditorium, a meeting place known as the Wisdom Tree. I sit down and tell him what happened, and he listens carefully, staring at a point in the distance. When I have finished, I ask him what he thinks I should do. After a minute or so, he lights a cigarette.
“Sometimes it might be better for you to distance yourself from people. Fewer complications.”
THE ONLY REMAINING FAMILY I have left in India is my grandmother’s brother Nissim, who lives in Hyderabad, India, and a cousin by marriage, Uncle Moses, who lives in Pune. My hope is that Uncle Moses may be able to introduce me to other people in the Jewish communities of Pune and Bombay.
I call him and explain who I am to the woman who answers the phone. May I come to visit? She gives me a series of convoluted directions, and the next day I bundle myself and my camera equipment into an auto-rickshaw with my dupatta tied around my head and over my mouth, the way I see other women do in Pune, to try to filter the thick, soot-filled exhaust hanging over the road like fog.
A woman greets me at the door of a large concrete apartment building. She is attractive, about fifty years of age, with her hair cropped in a short, modern style and an open, friendly face. She explains that she is Moses’s daughter Nina and warns me that her father is not in the best of health, that his moods can be unpredictable. She leads me into the living room, which is decorated with two couches wrapped in protective plastic, and offers me tea, which I gratefully accept. Then she disappears to another room to boil water, and I am left by myself in the living room, a large room with one wall covered in plants, the other walls decorated with an occasional picture and a series of hanging plates.
A few minutes later, Uncle Moses enters the room with the help of a cane. I stand to greet him, and he says: “You’re Rachel’s granddaughter. From America.”
I nod and say yes.
“So you want to know about Jews!” he bellows at me, sitting down and fixing a piercing look at me.
“I do.”
“Well, you’re not pointing those things at me, I can tell you that!” he shouts, motioning toward my camera bags.
Nina calls to him from the other room, a note of warning in her voice: “Daddy . . .”
“It’s a terrible topic, Jews. Terrible topic,” he mutters, shaking his head.
Nina comes into the living room with tea and a plate of sliced pink cake. “Daddy, be nice.”
“You should change your topic!” he says, and thumps his cane on the floor.
“Why do you say that?” I ask.
“It’s a small community. Most people have gone to Israel; the ones who are left fight with each other. ‘Who owns this?’ ‘I want this’—all that sort of thing. They are all in each other’s business. I used to see these people regularly,but I’m too old for all of that. My religion is in here”—he points at his heart—“and in here!” He points at his head. “I’m through with all of this nonsense. Everybody is old now. All the Jews are old.”
“That’s why I want to do this project, Uncle Moses,” I begin. “Twenty or fifty years from now, these communities won’t exist the way they do now. Are there Jewish people in Pune that you think I should meet? That I might be able to interview for my project?” I ask, sounding hopeful.
“You have paper? Write this down!”
I take out my black notebook and a pen.
“I called the synagogue and told them about you.” He shakes his head. “They said: ‘ “Sadia” is a Muslim name! Why does she want to come here and take pictures of our synagogue?’ They’re sensitive because of the attacks on New York. I told them about your grandmother. I said she was my wife’s cousin, what’s wrong with you? Better you go to Bombay. Many synagogues are there. And I have something for you. This is everything you need to know. A cousin of your grandmother’s wrote it. Read this.”
He hands me a copy of a small book from his side table, entitled The History of the Bene-Israel of India, by H. S. Kehimkar, written in 1897 and published in 1937.
“Kehimkar didn’t make any of this up! He wrote down our history, it’s all there.”
“Thank you, Uncle Moses. I’m grateful for your help.”
Uncle Moses grumbles and nods. “Yes, yes.”
“Is there anyone in Bombay that you think I could meet? I’ve read that there’s a Jewish vocational school, a place where people go to learn Hebrew. Do you know anyone who works there?”
“My son’s the head of it! Benny Isaacs is his name. Tell him you’re his mother’s cousin’s granddaughter. Mother’s cousin’s granddaughter, you hear me? Everyone in Bombay is leaving for Israel. Who’s left? I don’t know why you bother with it.”
He gets up and goes to his room to lie down. Nina smiles, apologetically.
“Daddy has a mind of his own,” she says to me.
6
THREE PARENTS
CHESTNUT HILL, 1992
Nana ran our house. Its movements and cycles chimed according to her schedule, to the meals that she prepared, to the buzz and drone and constancy of her washer and dryer. Her kitchen, a windowed perch, overlooked the long L-shaped driveway in our backyard, pointing toward the carriage-house building where my parents kept their office. There my mother and father tended to a young staff of architects and designers who sat bent over building plans and annual reports; they met with clients, and pasted images onto white boards for an endless series of presentations. In the evenings, after the other adults went home, Cassim and I liked to hang around there, drawing houses on rolls of newsprint paper, making collages out of old magazines. But the real center of our house was Nana’s kitchen, where she coordinated the comings and goings of our household, fed us, and kept us well. This was her life’s work.
Three parents. Three religions. It sounds fantastic and unusual to me now. As a child, it was merely our topic sentence. Whereas other children we knew had two parents, perhaps two pairs, Cassim and I had three: a grandmother,
a mother, and a father. Two related by blood—my grandmother and mother; two related by temperament—my grandmother and father; and two related by devotion—my mother and father. An idea to explain our private world grew like an insatiable, invisible beanstalk in the spiral staircase of our house. This idea became so central that, to my amazement, I cannot trace its beginnings. Throughout our childhood, my brother and I repeated it back to one another.
“Judaism is the law, Christianity is compassion, Islam is the law and compassion.”
For me, over time, Nana became synonymous with the law; Abba, with compassion; and Mama, with the law and compassion combined.
Nana was the ruler of the morning, the keeper of the kitchen, the protector of the rules of the house. On her watch, my brother and I woke up at 6:30 a.m., showered, and dressed for school, then rapidly ate a few morsels of a meal she had carefully designed to help us fulfill our highest mission, to study well. “Car’s here!” came my father’s booming cry, which always meant that I had dallied
too long upstairs, as usual, trying to decide what to wear. As we tumbled out the front door and into the carpool van, Nana stood at the front door, holding plates of our half-eaten breakfast in her hands— Cream of Wheat, fried bananas with brown sugar, baked eggs with cream— pleading with us to eat only one more bite. “Have-have, take-take,” she would say as she watched our passage down the long driveway. I knew, as I watched her figure receding through the back window of the van, her arms still holding two white plates, those half-moons of regret, that I had violated my part of the bargain once more.
On those mornings, I promised God that I wouldn’t disappoint Nana again. She didn’t know much of what went on once we were outside her purview, but she knew that my mother and father worked very hard to put Cassim and me in the best school, and that in the best school tremendous learning took place, and from learning would come great opportunity. She kept every school trophy either of us ever won, dusted and polished, in a proud line on one of her bedroom shelves. She had little idea what they meant; what mattered to her was their height, shine, and the fact that her grandchildren had received praise. The spectrum of possibility open to us was beyond her grasp or expertise, but this she left to my mother and father to oversee.
My father’s dominion was the early evening, when we returned from school, dragging piles of workbooks, confounded by problem sets and term papers. Abba had an uncanny ability to right confusion, to lay out a plan to tackle the tasks that overwhelmed us, to make outlines, and to reacquaint himself with high school subjects so that he could guide us. I was a fast learner in English and history, and a terribly slow one in math and science. I was resentful of having to do something that I was so clearly bad at; I insisted that I would not need these skills as an adult. My father, the architect, showed me patiently how he needed math to practice his art.
Later, I would recognize that feeling of resentment as the same powerlessness and discontent that accompany losing a job or a lover. In college, I would curse my childhood reluctance to wage war with these tiny demons as I struggled with the figures and physics so integral to comprehending cameras. I would be too quick to accept the mystery of light refracting off mirrors to make an image, even though I knew it was an evasion. “It just works,” I would say out loud in empty classrooms, not trying harder to understand.
My brother, younger and quicker than I was, would run up the staircase when we entered the house to sequester himself in his third-floor bedroom, insistent that he needed no help. He would emerge several hours later. Some days he entered the dining room enthusiastically, settling himself in his seat and piling his plate high with food. “Done!” he would say, grinning. Other times he would sheepishly reveal that he had been staging elaborate battles with his action figures and had accomplished nothing at all.
On those nights, Abba would look at him and say gently, “But, Casu, you’re making life harder for yourself.” I would look away, hoping that Abba wasn’t going to ask me how I had spent my afternoon. I am three and a half years older than Cassim, a big enough difference that my father let me police my own time. As a gesture of faith, he no longer checked in on me before dinner to make sure that I was not simply staring out my second-floor window. After our meal, if he sensed that I was avoiding a particularly terrible task, he would amble into my room.
“How’s your math going, Sadu?” he would ask.
“Fine,” I would say, attempting to sound unfazed.
He would casually look over my shoulder at the blank page in front of me and nod, stoically accepting my lie.
One night he said: “You have a little of what I have, you know, Sadu.”
“What’s that, Abba?”
“I see you expend a great deal of energy avoiding what you don’t want to do. But I think you’ll find in life that if you first tackle the thing you want to do least, you will give it the most energy you have. The things that come easier for you will happen quite naturally.”
It was one of the truest things my father ever told me, and of course I was not ready to hear it, not yet. I didn’t know how to admit that the very act of trying to solve these problems on my own gave me a feeling of distinct and irrational terror.
“Shall we try and tackle this together?” he asked, sitting down. “I’ll get you started.”
I knew that after he left my room my father would return to his office to work on drawing plans and balancing his accounts until midnight. He would then sleep for four hours and return to his office to put in two hours of work before he started to help Nana with breakfast at 6 a.m. I felt guilty for delaying him, and, simultaneously, giddy with relief.
My mother was the queen of our house, the mistress of the day and the night. She had the ability to make everything feel special, as if instead of a mundane family meal we had entered a magical dinner party, created just for brilliant children. My job was to lay the table, and I carefully counted out the silverware—one, two, three, four, five—and pulled out five place mats, alternating English roses one day with printed Pakistani squares of cloth the next day. “Fantastic!” she would exclaim, looking at the finished table with pride.
When we sat down, my mother said grace.
“Dear Lord,” she began, “of all nations and all peoples . . .”
Mama’s blessing was a reference to my father’s grandmother, who was called Pie. A devout Episcopalian, she began every meal with a prayer, and when my mother joined the family, Pie amended her grace with the hope of making Mama feel more included. Mama loved telling us about Pie, about how, after she and my father were married, Pie and Nana became fast friends, partners in crime even. In one of my mother’s favorite stories, one day my father received a call from the Denver Botanic Gardens. Pie and Nana had been caught whacking leaves off the trees with Pie’s cane, so that Nana could make baked fish in banana leaves for Sunday lunch. When my father went to pick the two ladies up, he found Pie giving the security guard a piece of her mind. “I’m on the board of the Botanic Gardens, young man!” she said. “And my friend here needs banana leaves for her recipe!”
It was at the dinner table that we had a kind of family meeting. My mother asked each of us about our day, and we entertained her with stories of our friends, teachers, and auditions for the school play. Nothing could dissuade her from the idea that Cassim and I were the most perfect, well-behaved, intelligent children our school had ever seen. If someone—a rival, a peer, an unpleasant teacher—had upset us, she was never without a plan of attack. We spent the dinner hour devising strategies. Mama almost always had a solution. And if she didn’t have one, she had spells.
“I will put a spell on that person,” she said, in response to a vexing disagreement I was having with my drama teacher. “We must be kind to her, poor thing.” It was in these moments that I learned the great strength of high-mindedness.
Cassim and I had moved beyond the age of belief in Mama’s spells, but we never shook the notion that she wielded the tremendous power of impeccable instincts. When she was excited, she illuminated the room. She would tell us stories of her days at the office—days spent mired in conflict with surly employees and fussy clients—which made us laugh. To our delight, she was always victorious. When she had recently returned from a trip to New York or Karachi or London, she was filled with tales of her adventures, of nearly missed planes, of lunches with politicians, of visits to village workshops where folk artists shared their stories with her. Mama was working on a series of books about Pakistan—big, beautiful illustrated books. In them, she showed her Pakistan, a side she was frustrated that no one in America knew existed. It was one of majestic mosques and palaces, vast and stunning landscapes, and winding lanes crammed with the curious wares of the marketplace. Once a year we accompanied our mother and father to Pakistan, where they took rolls and rolls of pictures for the books.
“My books are my real work,” she said seriously one evening, punctuating one of her stories. I knew that she wished she could work on them all the time. “In Pakistan, I
would never have worked, I would only have made art.” When she said this, I know that she was testing the idea out loud, imagining the life she might have lived had she stayed in Karachi, had she not married my father.
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