The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir

by Shepard, Sadia

  The missionaries established primary schools in Bombay and in the Konkan, several of which employed Bene Israel men as teachers, and many of which taught Bene Israel children. These schools taught the Bene Israel English as well as the Old Testament, and in the stories of the Bible the Bene Israel recognized strains of their own oral histories. Instead of providing an impetus for large-scale conversion to Christianity, contact with missionaries served as a catalyst for the Bene Israel’s increased communication with other Jewish communities, in India and in other parts of the world.

  By the late nineteenth century, most of the community had relocated to the urban center of Bombay. In fewer than a hundred years, the Bene Israel had transformed themselves from a largely rural, Marathi-speaking, agricultural population to a Marathi- and English-speaking, middle-class, urban one. I realize, poring over census reports from the 1930s, that Nana’s family would have been typical of their time. Her parents and grandparents may have been raised in villages, whereas Nana and her siblings grew up as urban children, attending weddings and community festivals at synagogues packed full of parishioners in Pune and Bombay. Nana reached adulthood at the height of the Bene Israel community, when it numbered over thirty thousand members and enjoyed the cosmopolitan, secular nature of pre-Partition Bombay. Her father’s friends included Hindus, Christians, Jains, Sikhs. One of his closest friends and business associates was a Muslim, Ali Siddiqi. That man would become Nana’s husband, my grandfather.

  EVERYTHING I READ describes the migration of the Bene Israel from India to Israel in the same way. A Zionist federation from Israel made its first trip to India to recruit Indian Jews in the 1940s, as Indian independence and the creation of Israel were both becoming a reality. The Bene Israel considered its offer and, for the moment, decided to stay where they were.

  In 1947, the story began to change. The British were preparing to end 240 years of colonial rule in India, to hand power back to Indians and create a new, independent nation. Amid rising tension and fighting between its Hindu and Muslim populations, there was increasing talk of dividing the country in two, of creating a new country, Pakistan, for India’s Muslims. As the English spoke of leaving for England, the Muslims for Pakistan, and the Hindu majority was forming a new government, the Bene Israel began to re-examine their future in Bombay. They started to think more seriously about joining the world’s Jews in Israel.

  Nana told me that her older brother George was one of the first Bene Israel to leave India for Israel, settling on land reserved for champions of the Zionist cause. He was joined in a slow, steady trickle two decades long by the rest of his family—except for Nana and her younger brother, Nissim, who never emigrated to Israel. When Nana went to Pakistan, Nissim stayed in India.

  I write in my notebook: “What about the other Bene Israel who stayed here?” There is very little record of their imprint, their tangled comings and goings, their holidays, their sites of worship, the places and people that have defined them. This is what I want to record, to preserve. I am interested in what remains. Is it possible, I wonder, for me to walk backward, to find the paths my grandmother didn’t choose?

  I NOTICE REKHEV sitting across from me in the library and wave in his direction. He looks up at me and slides a book across the table. It is a book about Amrita Sher-Gil, a half-Hungarian, half-Indian painter. I read about her early years as an art student in Italy and France in the 1930s. I look at her paintings, which seem like copies of other artists. Then a change. She comes to India in 1934 and begins to study Indian art. She incorporates elements of Mughal miniatures, the Ajanta paintings. She marries her first cousin, a doctor, and they move to her family home in Uttar Pradesh, later to Lahore. She is famous for her wit, and for her affairs. She sleeps with both men and women. At twenty-eight, she dies mysteriously. Some say of complications as a result of an abortion, others of syphilis. The lesson stops there. I look at her picture, tracing her Hungarian parent in her face, then her Indian one. A half-half person. Like me.

  I get up from my chair at about 5 p.m., curious whether Rekhev will walk out at the same time. When he does, we walk in silence, a two-person procession out of the library.

  There is a special-day feeling, a school’s-out feeling. I’m not sure where we’re walking to. We pass a small cigarette stand, and Rekhev buys a half-pack of cigarettes and matches. I have heard that there is a temple down the road, past the teahouse, but I have not been there. I ask him if it’s far.

  Rekhev shakes his head solemnly as if to say, No, it’s not far.

  “Are you busy?” I ask.

  “I thought perhaps I would take you to where I buy books, a man on Karve Road.”

  “Oh, I see,” I say, flattered that someone wants to take me somewhere.

  “But first, if you like, the temple,” he adds.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  It is quickly apparent that we are not wearing appropriate shoes; we’re both in sandals. It is a steep hill, and the sun has not gone down yet, making the trip hot.

  “We should have waited,” Rekhev says.

  We make our way up the path to a small clearing with some rocks and take in the wide panoramic view of green and brown hills that surrounds us.

  “Come, let’s sit,” he says, and sits down, taking out a cigarette. I laugh at the idea of getting exercise and smoking at the same time, but he doesn’t see the humor.

  “What are you learning about these Jews?” he asks me after a few moments, looking at the valley below.

  “They believe they were shipwrecked here, two thousand years ago,” I say. “Seven men and seven women survived the shipwreck; they believe the entire community is descended from those seven couples.”

  “Is it truth?”

  “I don’t know. But they believe it.”

  Rekhev looks up. “That’s a very Indian idea, you know, to believe you’re from somewhere else.”

  “How so?” I say.

  “We’re a mixture, none of us are really from here. Naipaul wrote about this. People cling to these ideas about coming from somewhere else, there are all kinds of folktales about it—coming here by sea, descending from Greeks. There’s a community here in Maharashtra, the Chitpawan Brahmins, who also believe they came here by shipwreck. What did you think of Amrita Sher-Gil?”

  “She seems like she was terribly confused.”

  Rekhev relights his cigarette, which has blown out in the wind. “Perhaps you will find the analogy too obvious, but I had this thought—half-Indian girl, coming here to find out who she is. When I was in school in Delhi, I used to visit her paintings on Sundays. There’s a room in the art museum there devoted to them. Before that, I had only ever seen them in a book. I was so amazed to see them up close. I think, if you like, you can take Amrita as a kind of guide.”

  Rekhev smokes his cigarettes in quick succession, one after another. I realize on his fifth cigarette that he is not really smoking, just puffing through them without inhaling. I ask Rekhev about his family. His mother is a teacher. His father is in government service. He has not been home in a year and a half.

  “Don’t they want you to visit?” I ask.

  “They know I don’t travel much,” he says.

  Rekhev is curious about Pakistan. I tell him about Siddiqi House, the house in Karachi my mother grew up in with her mother, her father, her nine siblings, and her father’s two other wives. Ten children in total, five of which were Nana’s.

  “They all lived there together?” he asks.

  “My grandfather Siddiqi was eccentric,” I reply.

  Rekhev’s family was originally from a village near Rawalpindi, in what is now Pakistan, and settled in Jammu after Partition.

  “How do you find it different from here?” he asks me. The big differences seem too obvious to mention: The call to prayer. Guards with automatic rifles at the house gates. Gardens strung with roses for elaborate wedding celebrations. My strongest memories of Pakistan are set in the crowded corridors of my mother’s fa
mily home.

  “You don’t walk in Karachi,” I say.

  “It’s important to you to be on your own, isn’t it?” he observes.

  “I suppose so.”

  “A kind of test.”

  I nod and look out at the hills below, following the path of an ox and its owner as they make their way along a distant route.

  “My father’s mother told me our family had a beautiful garden, in what’s now Pakistan. They say it’s been razed to the ground,” he says, putting out his cigarette on a rock.

  I ask him about Jammu and Kashmir. He tells me about commuting to the army school he attended as a child; the quick dip-down reflex before he sat down, checking for bombs. He was four feet tall for most of his childhood and adolescence.

  “This high,” he says, placing his hand below his shoulder. I counter with the confession that I was five foot nine and a half inches, as tall as I am now, when I was thirteen.

  “I like people with complexes,” he says, and smiles.

  8

  SIDDIQI HOUSE

  KARACHI, 1983

  It is hard to say which side is the front of Siddiqi House; both sides have equal and opposite driveways and neatly trimmed grass lawns, facing parallel streets. This design, conceived by my grandfather, gives the home the feeling of two people with their backs against each other, arms crossed, each refusing to acknowledge what the other one sees. At both entrances, the words “Siddiqi House” appear, white plaster letters laid atop a background of pale yellow, with the date when the house was built inscribed into each set of gates: 1948. It’s a large, imposing structure built with the rounded edges of the Art Deco style, and looks more like an apartment building than a house for a single family.

  Siddiqi House was built on the foundations of an old bungalow that belonged to a former British officer. My grandfather bought the house after Partition and began to expand it immediately, step by step, for his family to settle in. His plan was that, by the time he was finished building the house, each branch of his family, each of his three wives and their children, would have their own separate apartment, their own entrance, and a piece of propertyin their own name. But while my grandfather was alive, the entire family lived together in one large flat, spilling on top of each other, trying to stay out of each other’s way. The construction was built upward, stories on top of stories, creating an orbit around my grandfather, who called out orders, wearing his trademark white sharkskin suit, bright red fez, and black-and-white spats. My mother describes how in those early years the Siddiqis lived surrounded by the noise and traffic of workmen, just as they lived with the call of the sugarcane-juice wallah, the fruit seller, and the barking of dogs at dusk, and how that feeling of chaos never left the family.

  WHEN I WAS eight years old and Cassim was five, my mother’s youngest brother, Salman, was engaged to be married. Nana’s other children had married people of their own choosing, but she wanted to do things right for her fifth and last child. She arranged a match for him with a Pakistani girl named Shehzadi from a family of Mohajirs like us, Muslims originally from India. Though Uncle Salman lived near us in Newton and his fiancée was from Pakistan, Nana wanted to host the wedding at Siddiqi House. She wanted to preside over this last of her children’s marriages in a style that her husband would have appreciated, with receptions at the homes of his important Parsi friends and parties in the gardens of five-star hotels.

  None of us could have known it then, but this would be the last wedding of our immediate family that we would celebrate in Pakistan. After Uncle Salman’s wedding, the family would be too widely dispersed, our connections to Karachi too tenuous for us to travel such a long way.

  Like everything to do with our family in Pakistan, the wedding preparations had a life of their own, an internal disordered logic. The planning was made more challenging by the fact that there were three factions of the family living inside Siddiqi House, two of which were in the midst of a long-standing feud, the origin of which few remembered. As the date grew closer, Nana’s set of Samsonite suitcases became progressively more filled with requests from Karachi: a Casio synchronizer, Betty Crocker cake mix, Chanel N° 5.

  The trip to Karachi from Boston was a series of journeys compounded into one: Boston to New York, New York to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Cairo, Cairo to Karachi. My teacher had given me an assignment, to record my trip in a bright blue spiral notebook. I kept it tucked under one arm as Cassim and I followed Mama through the maze of security checks at Boston’s Logan Airport. Mama was petrified of airport security—too many questions about how long she had lived in the U.S., why she was going back to Pakistan, who her husband was. She shuddered when she saw Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi families—in sweater vests crammed over their saris—carrying bulging parcels tied with string, the fastidious block-lettered addresses of their destinations taped to the sides of their suitcases; Mama believed we would be treated better if we were well dressed. I was in a plaid pinafore dress and tights with Mary Jane shoes. Cassim was tucked into a new blue sweater and matching pants. Mama was in a dark green salwar kameez, and had ten gold bangles on her left wrist. She was too superstitious to remove them, and so we traveled through the airport setting off security buzzers along the way.

  When we got to Frankfurt Airport, we quickly went to find the long black couches, the ones where we could stretch out our whole bodies and lie down almost flat. For the duration of our eight-hour layover we would make these couches our base camp. Mama and Nana laid out a blanket for us to lie on. Among all of the airports we had been to, I had decided, the chocolate here was best. Mama and Nana always bought three or four bags of sweets to give to my uncles and aunts and cousins, purple tins of Nestlé Quality Street, Roundtree Fruit Gums, tubes of Smarties, and Crunchie bars wrapped in gold foil. Cassim and I each chose a chocolate bar to eat on the plane. I did so with great deliberation, finally settling on a long milk chocolate rectangle in a gorgeous lavender-colored wrapper. Cassim clasped a Flake bar to his chest, smiling. His new shirt would be covered in its melted threads before long.

  I was allowed to walk alone in the airport if I told Mama and Nana exactly where I was going and came right back. I was fascinated with the clock shop, where cuckoo clocks covered every surface. I liked to make sure that I was in the shop at the change of the hour, so I could see all of the clocks go off at once. I settled on the one that I wished I could take home, small, with a green A-line roof and three short gold-colored chains hanging down from what looked like a porch. On the stroke of the hour, a thumb-sized ballerina-like doll in a cloth skirt would emerge and twirl around to a tiny, tinny song, one plastic arm outstretched in a wave. Then, as quickly as she had appeared, she would retreat to the inside of the clock, and the little door would snap shut. I wondered if she ever felt sad that she couldn’t leave her mountain. “Goodbye!” I whispered as I saw her retreat the last time. “I am going to Pakistan!” I returned to the couches by way of the electronic walkway, gliding past people on foot on my left and right, giddy with the rush of motion.

  I had heard my mother’s friends in Karachi joke to one another about PIA’s many nicknames. Instead of “Pakistan International Airlines” they called it “Please Inform Allah,” or “Perhaps I Arrive.” Nothing connected to PIA ever seemed to run on time. The aging aircraft and everyone on board seemed to exist in a transitional space between the West and the East, not quite here or there. Businessmen—some who had emigrated to New York or London, some returning home from a trip—looked uncomfortable as they settled in for the all-night journey in their dark wool suits. The other mothers and children slipped us sidelong glances, sizing up my mother and us, her American-born firangi children. The lady stewardesses wore a uniform adapted from a traditional salwar kameez to look something like a short tunic and pants with a pre-folded miniature shawl pinned in place. After they pantomimed the safety procedures, they turned on the movie projectors to display an image of Mecca. Mama instructed us to close our eyes as the Travele
r’s Prayer boomed over the loudspeaker.