The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir

by Shepard, Sadia

  “My dear Ali Sahib,” she begins. How should she say it? She looks out the window of her second-floor room at the courtyard below and watches the sweeper sitting on his heels, making rhythmic strokes with his long broom—right to left, left to right, and back—inching backward, erasing steps.

  She doesn’t hear the door to her hostel room open. Ali has the footfall of a cat. In three quick strides her husband is behind her chair, silent, watching the tentative strokes of her pen.

  He snatches her letter and her application in one hand. “What is this?” he demands, waving the papers out of her reach.

  Nana looks up at him, frightened, trying to grasp them back. She doesn’t have any words.

  “Is this what you think of me?” he asks. “To leave without telling me?” He crumples the application and her letter and sits on her bed, folding her into his arms and crying. He holds her face in both of his hands, covering her mouth with his. “Meri jaan, what if you died? I would die, too.”

  Nana looks up at him, her eyes filling with tears. She loves him too much for her own good, she thinks. It’s a trap.

  “Forget all this,” he says. “I will bring you to stay near me, in Jamnagar, where I can see you.”

  Her husband is at the time the customs collector of Jamnagar, Nawanagar State, in Gujarat. The Jam Sahib of Nawanagar is his good friend, and they have a very good hospital there. Almost immediately, plans are put in motion for Rachel to go to Jamnagar and study nursing. Ali tells her mother that he has decided to sponsor Rachel’s education in honor of her late father, his friend. Rachel’s mother is grateful.

  Ali watches her attentively now, looking for signs of flight. She takes in his attention like water.

  RACHEL IS MISERABLE in Jamnagar. The nursing classes are in Gujarati, and she speaks only English and her mother tongue, Marathi. She misses Cama Hospital and Bombay. She misses her family. She studies hard but can’t keep up. She fails her exams that year. I try to imagine my grandmother as a girl, staying up all night to prepare for an exam. I cannot produce the image in my mind.

  One afternoon, the Jam Sahib’s car arrives for her. “Rachel Bibi, you come to the palace,” says the driver. Rachel does as she is told. She ducks her head and slips inside. It is a beautiful imported car, with real leather seats. The driver tells her that the Jam Sahib’s wife, the Maharani, has sent for her. The Maharani is having a baby, and she wants a lady nurse to help her. Until that moment, Rachel thinks that her husband has sent the car to the nursing school. Now she wonders to herself what he will think of her going to the palace alone. There are very few motorcars in Jamnagar. As they drive to the palace, she recognizes her husband’s car coming toward her in the opposite lane. He sees Rachel when the two cars pass one another and looks her dead in the eyes. She is frightened. He asks his driver to pull to the side of the road and waves to the Jam Sahib’s driver to halt his vehicle. He gets out and raps his knuckes on the glass, asking Rachel to roll down the window. He immediately demands to know what she is doing inside of the Jam Sahib’s car, and she tells him that the Maharani sent for her and she is on her way to the palace. He forbids her to go.

  Her husband sends her back to the school in his car to find another nurse, and goes himself to the palace to explain.

  NANA TOLD THESE STORIES often enough that I began to play the alternate scenarios in my mind, thinking back upon these moments when her fate swung arbitrarily, turned like a hinge. What if my grandfather had not entered her room while she was writing him the letter? Minutes later, she would have been able to conceal it, and could have turned in the application the next morning, as she’d planned. She might have served in World War II, pretended she was never married, and returned to marry someone from her own community. What if her husband had not been passing the Jam Sahib’s car at that exact moment? I imagine how she could have delivered the Maharani’s baby and easily become the family’s private nurse. Would she have met a young man in the court and lived an entirely different life?

  “The Jam Sahibs in those days, they used to be fond of giving favors,” Nana explained. “I think he was worried, what if the Maharani took a liking to me, then she’d be always sending the car, I would be over at the palace all the time. He was very jealous, my husband. He didn’t like other men to see me.”

  Nana picked up a ball of wool and two knitting needles from her bedside table.

  “If he hadn’t been passing right at that time, I would have gone. . . .”

  WITHIN A YEAR, Rachel is back in Bombay, back at Cama Hospital, where she will work for the next several years. Now her husband’s visits are more frequent. They are always unpredictable, catching her unaware. Sometimes he brings a new pair of earrings for her in his front coat pocket. His visits leave her feeling thrilled and guilty. The stones in her ears catch the light, refracting it across her ceiling like stars. She turns her head and watches the lights moving, winking at her.

  In 1943, when my grandmother is twenty-six, she becomes the head matron of Cama Hospital, her highest professional achievement. Rachel spends night shifts alone in the maternity ward, visiting with women, checking their charts. She thinks of how many babies her mother lost without the benefit of doctors and nurses, and she feels good about her work. One morning, as she does her rounds, one of her patients motions to her.

  “You were so kind to me last night. Thank you for rubbing my back,” she says.

  Rachel nods and moves on. How odd, she thinks, I didn’t rub her back last night. As she takes another woman’s pulse, the patient smiles at her, patting her hand.

  “Thank you for the water, dear.”

  Rachel begins to realize that many of her patients in the maternity ward mistake her for another nurse. Several people describe a beautiful young Anglo-Indian woman with wavy brown hair, dressed in a nurse’s three-cornered white hat with matching white dress. Her name is Rose.

  Rachel cannot understand who the other nurse could be. She checks the schedule again. There is no mention of a nurse named Rose. From time to time it happens once more: patients thank her in the morning for something she didn’t do, or ask for Rose by name. Rachel asks the older nurses and learns that Rose had been a nurse in Cama Hospital in the 1920s. Her death was mysterious, something people talked about quietly. After she died, an army officer came to pick up her belongings from the ladies’ hostel. People said that Rose had been pregnant with his baby and when he refused to marry her she had an abortion. She didn’t survive the operation. People say that her ghost haunts the maternity ward, looking after pregnant women. Only pregnant patients see her.

  Rose begins to appear to Rachel, late at night. Rachel feels a presence and looks up and sees Rose there, working diligently, always just out of reach. When Rachel tries to speak to her, she turns a corner, vanishes. Rachel begins to worry that she is sleep-deprived, seeing things that are not there. She begins to feel weak, strange, not herself. She cannot place what it is. One evening she looks up and sees Rose looking at her. Rose places her hand low on her abdomen and smiles, a slow, peaceful smile. Rachel wakes up the next morning and stares at the beams of the high ceiling. She speaks out loud, with only the walls of her room to hear her: “I am having a child.”

  She surprises herself, feeling, instead of dread, a welling up of relief. The waiting is over. She can no longer conceal her marriage. She is going to have a baby.

  She enlists her sister, Lizzie, to help her tell her mother about her marriage. When Mumma hears the news, she weeps. Hot tears wet the lap of her sari.

  She says, “It is good that you will have a child.”

  My grandfather builds Nana a house by the ocean, on Worli Sea Face in Bombay. He names it Rahat Villa, in honor of her new name.

  Rachel becomes Rahat. Jew becomes Muslim. New eclipses old. Things will be different now.

  “GO TO SLEEP, beti, it’s late now.”

  Nana and I were sitting in the dark. There was no sound but the snow-wind, whipping around our old house.

&n
bsp; “I’ll go.”

  “Sleep, sleep.”

  I waited to hear Nana’s breathing, to make sure she was still here.

  “You too.”

  7

  INFLUENCES

  PUNE, NOVEMBER 2001

  I cannot remember a time when I felt more alone.

  In the evenings, the sameness of my room becomes suffocating, and I walk to the end of Law College Road. In a tiny, dusty cybercafé with three working computers, I read the news from home and assure my friends and family that I am fine. They write asking what kind of impact the World Trade Center attacks have made in India. Tony wants to know if it means that I’ll come home sooner. I’m not sure what to say in reponse. Here life goes on as before, I tell them. People casually recount endless stories of floods and epidemics that have wiped out entire populations, bombs exploding on trains. The numbers are staggering, and then life moves on. My friends from home find these ideas odd. They tell me how New York feels different now, and I try to imagine it. So much has happened in the world in the two months since I left everything familiar. I have the incongruous feeling that I have stepped through a trapdoor in the universe into a parallel world.

  Outside the cybercafé, I watch groups of young men wander down Law College Road, walking toward what seems to be an outdoor café, a three-sided wooden stall with a low bench in front for sitting. It reminds me of a puppet-show stage. They sit in various configurations around the stall, drinking from tiny tin cups, leaning on one another casually, two or three sitting on a motorbike. They are always deep in conversation, and I wonder what they are talking about. I wish I could join them, but it seems too forward, and I feel shy. In the daytime, I approach the café and look inside. Inside the stall, constructed like a simple wooden crate, are three large empty black cauldrons, too heavy to steal. Curiously, the proprietor is not there. His business seems to operate only after 11 p.m.

  One night, my curiosity gets the better of me, and I wander past the stall. I try to introduce myself to a group of the male film students, who refuse to shake my hand and merely nod in my direction. I stand next to two girls sulking to one side, and try to make small talk with them, to little effect. I notice that when the students are speaking to one another informally, teasing each other and slapping each other on the back, they speak Hindi, but when they start a conversation they do so in English. One of the boys mutters, “Yes, the American,” and the others laugh. Another approaches me with his hand extended. “I must apologize for my friends; they are being rude. I know better; I have a brother in Connecticut.”

  What looks like a tea stall is in fact a coffee stall, selling milky, sweet Nescafé, which the students sip out of small, chipped cups while complaining about the stacks of books in their rooms that they should be reading. At midnight, the female students grumble about their curfew, but I realize, feeling somewhat pleased, that I am not confined by the same rules. I notice Rekhev sitting on one side of the coffee stall, explaining the concept for a short film he is going to direct to three fellow male students, who listen with rapt attention.

  “You see, a boy—who is also an old man—tries to tell a story. The film will be in two parts, and the first part will deal with the ritual of the boy going to school; the second part will be a visual storybook. We will use mythologicalreferences as riddles, some of them from Somdev’s book Kathasaritsagar, and some from Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars.”

  “Your ideas are so damn complicated,” I hear one of them say, shaking his head with admiration. “We’re not all geniuses like you, yaar. . . .”

  I sit down, and the young men return to an earlier thread of conversation in Hindi that I can’t understand. Rekhev opens a large green notebook and writes something in it with a fountain pen while I sip my coffee. Then he closes his notebook and fixes me with a stare.

  “Do you know the work of Robert Bresson?”

  I feel grateful that someone has asked me a question, grateful at the prospect of having a conversation with someone. I say I remember seeing his films in college but don’t remember them vividly at the moment. Rekhev frowns at me.

  “Have you read his book, Notes on the Cinematographer ?”

  I shake my head to say no.

  “We’re very influenced by this book here. What are your influences?”

  “Influences?” I repeat dumbly.

  “Who are the artists and writers whom you most admire?” he asks me, looking serious.

  I am embarrassed that I don’t have a ready answer.

  “Tell me something. Have you heard the music of John Cage?”

  I have. I tell him so and see something flicker across his face.

  “I have read his book Silence. I have read another book by him also. I am very fascinated by him. But I have not been able to hear his music. Tell me what it’s like.”

  Rekhev is familiar with Cage’s famous piece 4’ 33‘, where Cage sat in front of his piano for four and a half minutes of silence, but is most taken with Cage’s experiments with the notion of chance and how they might apply to filmmaking. I’m not sure how to describe the music. I try for a few minutes, and then remember a story that a professor of mine once told me, about a performance that Cage gave at a small New England college in the middle of the woods. I describe how the professor was walking through the forest when he happened upon the artist standing quietly with a group of four or five people and recognized him. “Cage! My God, this is fantastic!” he said. “What are you doing here?” John Cage turned to him slowly and said: “I’m working, Tim. I’m in the middle of a performance.” And the professor realized that he had walked into the middle of one of Cage’s pieces.

  The story makes Rekhev smile. I realize how much I miss New York.

  I SPEND MY DAYS in the Institute library making notes on the book that Uncle Moses gave me about the Bene Israel. Before I return to Bombay and try to introduce myself to the community, I want to feel grounded in their history. Only a few other books have been written, some of which I brought with me from Nana’s bookshelf. Each book begins with the same story, the story of a shipwreck, the Bene Israel leaving the ancient land of Israel in a boat that crashed on the beaches of Navgaon, a tiny village 160 kilometers south of Bombay. There are very few pictures, almost no contemporary ones.

  “When did it happen, Nana?” I can hear myself asking.

  “Two thousand years ago, beti,” she says.

  Two thousand years. I try to picture it now, spreading both palms over my books, one finger for every two centuries. I can do it no more easily now than I could as a child.

  The twelve tribes of Israel, the original Jewish people—ten of them lost, imagined, and sought after, even still. The Bene Israel believe that they are one of those lost tribes, cast out to wander the earth in search of a new home. I can no longer recall where the stories my grandmother told me blend with what I have read; nor can I distinguish the history of the lost tribes from the dissemination of their legend.

  According to their oral tradition, the Bene Israel who survived the shipwreck settled into life along the Konkan Coast of India and lived there peacefully for generations. Separated from their religious texts, they practiced only what they remembered of their religion, observing the Sabbath, abstaining from eating fish without fins and scales, and circumcising their male infants on the eighth day after their birth. Over time they forgot the language of Hebrew and adopted the local language of Marathi. But they remembered the opening sentence of the Shema prayer—the central tenet of the Jewish religion—which they recited during rites of passage, times of trouble, and celebrations: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”

  In the early nineteenth century, Christian missionaries from the Church of England, Scottish Presbyterian, and American Congregational missions working in Bombay and in Raigad District heard mention of the Bene Israel. They were intrigued to hear that the community members observed the Sabbath and knew a few words of Hebrew. When the missionaries came in contact wi
th the Bene Israel, the community told them that their ancestors came from a country to the north. They described the shipwreck that had brought them to India, as the story had been passed down to them. They explained how the seven surviving couples buried those who did not survive in two large mounds and settled into nearby villages, and how for centuries they lived in isolation from other Jews.