The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir

by Shepard, Sadia

  I waited for the arrival of the bride and groom with my cousin Sartaj and his new bride, Fatima. Sartaj was tall, with a trim goatee and short-cropped hair. He was only a few years younger than Uncle Salman and was starting to work as a banker in Karachi. Fatima held her dupatta halfway across her face while she smiled into the cloth, too shy to speak. I had heard my mother say that she was just nineteen and did not speak much English. I could see part of her face through the cloth; her large, dark eyes rimmed with kohl, and her shiny black hair pulled into a ponytail. Her face was so pale that she didn’t look Pakistani to me; her skin wasn’t brown like that of the rest of my relatives. I smiled at her, and she smiled back, tentatively.

  “So, Sadia,” he said, “are you going to be friends with my wife?”

  It must have been an idle comment, but I took this question very seriously, turning it over in my mind.

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “I will.”

  “Good,” said Sartaj amiably. “That’s settled, then.”

  I looked at Fatima, her eyes lowered in modesty, and had the impression that she had a quieter temperament than Shehzadi.

  The night was a burst of color—flashes of blinking lights, red silk, and fireworks. My eyes took everything in, assembling detailed notes that I carry with me still. Uncle Salman approached the house on a white polo pony, his turban dripping roses, his eyes showing amusement at and appreciation for the proceedings. In front of him, Cassim sat astride the horse, surveying the crowd, a tiny decoy to deflect the evil eye from Uncle Salman. Cassim took his role very seriously, sitting straight up in his saddle, tipping his tiny head at the crowd below, and waving. The horse was flanked by Uncle Salman’s baraat, a group of male relatives who clapped and sang as he dismounted and walked through Siddiqi House to the backyard, where he sat on a dais and waited for Shehzadi’s arrival. The walls, the platform, and the ceiling were covered in strings of fresh roses. We were enveloped in their scent. The sound of drums echoed throughout the space as Shehzadi entered the tent under the protective embrace of her female relatives holding an elaborate cloth above her head. She was dressed in a gorgeous hand-block-printed wedding outfit. Instead of the traditional red and gold, she had opted for an outfit chosen by my mother in shades of dark rose and deep purple. A long chain linked the large gold ring in her nostril to a set of small diamonds hanging in her hair above her ear, and her eyelids were shadowed with shiny metallic powders. I had never seen anyone so beautiful.

  The wedding ceremony itself was shorter than I was expecting. A small mirror was placed underneath Shehzadi’s veil. She looked into the mirror and saw Salman for the first time in several weeks. Cassim, ever vigilant, peeked into the mirror after him. There, in that very public moment of intimacy, rested the possibilities of the life unfolding before her feet. She was asked if she accepted this marriage, and she nodded. Two male witnesses from Shehzadi’s family and two from our family signed the marriage document. The maulvi intoned his prayers in Arabic over a handheld microphone. Man and wife. They did not kiss, or even touch. When the ceremony was over, they continued to sit on the dais and people took their picture. Nana asked Cassim and me to sit at Uncle Salman’s and Auntie Shehzadi’s feet while relatives and friends approached the couple and congratulated them.

  “Bee-yoot-iful bride, she is ve-ry fair. . . . Mubarak, mubarak,” the aunties said as they went by.

  Even though she might have been happy, Mama told me that Shehzadi was supposed to look sad about leaving her parents’ home, and she was supposed to look down as a sign of modesty. I imagined how frustrating it must be to have to look down while people are talking about you. I crossed my fingers and hoped that she was happy, even though she couldn’t show it.

  Nana had made sure to invite every person in the extended Siddiqi family, every last cousin and distant relation by marriage. She had tracked down all the servants who had ever worked for the family, their families, and the people my grandfather helped move from India to Pakistan. Uncle Salman was Ali Siddiqi’s last son, and in this moment, the house rose to its full potential, brimming with all ten of its children, all three of its mistresses, prayers, song, long trays of food, and flashbulbs going off late into the night. My mother said the event would have made my grandfather proud. I had the unshakable impression that this grand performance was a taste of things to come, that the opulence of this night was merely a foreshadowing of the glamorous life Uncle Salman and Auntie Shehzadi were about to embark upon in America. It never occurred to me that this night might have been something else, a grand finale to Siddiqi House, to my grandfather’s legacy, the highest fulfillment of my grandmother’s promise to raise her husband’s children as Muslims.

  Cassim and I tried to stay clean and pressed throughout the night, but it was impossible. By the end of the evening, we were covered in the red stains of roses, our fingers tender from their thorns, our necks heavy with garlands, our fancy clothes crumpled and marked in too many places to count. When I look back at this night, I see it through strings of flowers, bruised and sweet. Since that evening, the idea of Pakistan, of Islam, has forever been linked in my mind with the perfumed excess of roses, their sweet stickiness. I would be reminded of this association when I visited Sufi shrines as an adult, carrying red petals in a wide, flat tray on my head, bowing over the saints’ graves, my offering spilling out.

  ON THE PLANE ride back to Boston, I tried to write my report for school in my blue notebook, drifting in and out of sleep. Half Pakistani, half American. Half Muslim, half Christian. Half-half.

  “Have-have, sweetheart,” Nana said, elbowing me awake, offering me her slice of plane-food cake.

  “Thank you, Nana.” I smiled, half awake.

  I slipped my head onto her shoulder and inhaled the comfort of her scent: rose talc, rose soap, and rose water.

  Reverse order: Karachi, Cairo, Frankfurt, New York, Boston. Home again.

  9

  SHANTARAM’S POND

  PUNE, DECEMBER 2001

  Shantaram.”

  A voice startles me, and Rekhev sits down next to me. He has an unsettling way of appearing seemingly out of nowhere, when I least expect it. Sometimes I am tempted to mention it, but something stops me, as if I might break a spell and then he will no longer appear.

  I’m sitting on a crumbling stone step next to the empty cavity of an old man-made pond, a hole in the ground filled with vines and weeds. This is my favorite place at the Film Institute. If you look carefully, you can make out the borders of the original structure, the steps, and a crumbling statue of an elephant—a concrete relic from the Institute’s days as a film studio, cracked in places, with green spilling out. Healed and solid in my mind, the place is easy to imagine as the setting for a Cecil B. DeMille movie, with bathing beauties sitting poolside in high heels. I wonder what its Indian equivalent might have been. I like to go there in the afternoons, to read and write, until the mosquitoes become too persistent.

  “This pond is named for him,” he says, looking straight ahead, as if I had asked him a question. “Shantaram was a film director who worked here in the days when the Institute was a film studio.”

  “Did he use this pond in his films?”

  “See the ramp there? That must have been to wheel cameras in and out. You can see an alcove there. It must have been used as a small shrine, a kind of temple. . . .”

  We sit looking at the pond in silence for a few moments.

  “Place memory,” he says. “The imprint of past action on an environment. We are surrounded by ghosts here.”

  “It feels that way,” I say, nodding.

  “Do you see those trees there?” he asks, gesturing across the pond toward a gathering of large, tall deciduous trees. They look like ficus trees, with large green leaves and knobby, wise-looking trunks. “Pipal trees,” he says. “It is believed that the god Brahma resides in the roots, the god Vishnu in the trunk, and the god Shiva in the crown. People believe that the god Krishna breathed his last underneath a
pipal, and that the tree is invested with a sacred thread. In the Konkan, where your Jews originally resided, I have read that people who are wishing for a particular outcome used to worship the tree, and walk around its base several times a day. There is also a belief there that the spirits of the dead are reborn in their descendants, especially if they have wishes that remain unfulfilled. Sometimes if a child resembles a relative who has died it is believed that the ancestor has returned to the family in the form of the child. You are seeking a ghost, aren’t you? Perhaps that’s why you like to come here.”

  I wonder for a moment if Rekhev talks this way to the other students, if they accept his long-winded theories as easily as I do.

  THE NEXT TIME I see Rekhev, a week later, he is sitting on a campus bench, reading a book. He nods at me and goes back to his reading. I sit down and reach into my handbag, sifting through its contents, not sure what I am looking for.

  “You’re always looking in that red bag, as if it might have answers,” he says, not looking up. “You look tense.”

  “It’s my pictures,” I say. They seem flat, hollow somehow. “They’re no good.”

  “You should read for a year in India before you take out your camera,” he says. We are silent for a few minutes. Then he gets up, shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand and not looking at me.

  “Come,” he says, and I find myself walking down the long campus path and Law College Road next to Rekhev. I’m not sure where we’re going, but there’s something compelling, urgent even, about his invitation. We reach an old stone bungalow set back from the road. The building is surrounded by leafy trees and flowering bushes. A curved signboard in an arc over the entrance reads “Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Founded 1917.”

  We enter a large, dark room lined with glass-paneled bookshelves. On the right side is a long, low table holding academic books and journals published by the Bhandarkar Institute Press. I scan the titles: Recent Trends in Indology, The Bhagavadgita as a Synthesis, The Vedic Sacrifice in Transition, and Ancient Indian Insights and Modern Science.

  “There’s a Mahabharata department here where scholars have been working on a definitive edition of the Mahabharata since 1919. They finished the main text in the late sixties and are now working on the epilogue. Everything you could possibly want to know about India, to ‘understand’ it, lies here.”

  Rekhev moves slowly around the room, piling books of folklore in front of him. I sit down at one of the long desks and take in my surroundings. I feel as if I have been let in on a secret. Rekhev pulls out a large green volume, which he presents to me. The spine reads Natya-Manjari Saurabha: Sanskrit Dramatic Theory.

  “It’s fragile,” he says. “Be careful.”

  Once Rekhev has assembled a large pile of books in front of himself, he begins to work through the stack systematically, taking notes in a large hard-bound notebook with an old-fashioned fountain pen. I fight my impulse to read his notes over his shoulder and try to concentrate on the volume in front of me.

  I open the book, curious why he has given it to me, and read about the five stages of dramatic plot construction in Sanskrit plays, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar words. The first stage, prarambha, is the beginning of action, where the dramatic hero’s search for some great fruit, or goal, is identified. In the second stage, prayatna, or “effort,” the hero recognizes that the achievement he is seeking will not be possible without using appropriate upaya, means. The hero investigates the means available to him and determines a course of action. The third stage, praptisambhava, “the possibility of attainment,” occurs when a particular means becomes available. This is a stage of hope, expectation, and anxiety. The fourth, the niyata phalaprapti, “ordained attainment of the fruit,” occurs when the hero’s desired achievement is within grasp. He may visualize the achievement in his mind, or have a vision of his goal attained; the hero’s objective will become a reality in the final stage, the phalayoga, “the accomplishment or attainment of the fruit.”

  As I am reading, I come across an illustration, folded into the body of the text. Captioned “Dramatic Plot-Construction: Relations and scope of Arthaprakrtis, Avasthās, Sandhis-Sandhyaṅgas,” it shows some kind of man-made structure spanning a body of water. The construction has five arches held aloft by six pillars, and each arch is marked with a series of letters in Devanagari script. The building blocks of each arch are also marked with letters, as are the bricks above the arches, which form the top half of the bridge. It seems to be some kind of diagram.

  Rekhev leans over my notes. “You found the drawing.”

  I nod.

  “So—have you identified your goal?” he asks me.

  “What?”

  “Let’s have tea,” he says. “I have some ideas to tell you.”

  On our way to Lucky, Rekhev asks me if I have read The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I tell him that I recall vaguely what I learned in college about Campbell’s theory regarding the universality of myth.

  “This idea is very exciting to me—the idea of a folktale as a structure. The ordinary world is established, and then comes the call for adventure. The hero denies that call. Again it comes, and the hero finds motivation to meet the call. He encounters threshold guardians, who express doubts. He

  meets allies, tricksters, and shape-shifters. The hero meets a mentor, a fallen hero, someone who has already gone through a journey and knows routes, how to kill the villain. The mentor gives a sword to the hero, who is able to conquer the villain and return to the ordinary world with an elixir. In many ways, it closely mirrors Sanskrit dramatic theory. I always imagine my life like that, moving through time in a series of progressive stages.”

  We enter the café, and Rekhev chooses the table where we sat before, orders two cups of tea. He takes out a cigarette and lights it, offering me the pack. I shake my head no.

  “The mentor is a kind of guru?” I ask.

  “Perhaps, but a guru does not always come in the form of a wise old bearded man. A guru is not always someone who gives you something. He or she can also be someone you take something from, or someone who makes you realize something. The guru can even start a process without being aware of it.”

  “Do you think I am following this model? In India?” I ask.

  “By being here, maybe you are writing your own story with each step you take, what do you think? Your grandmother gave you the call for adventure, the impetus. I could be a trickster in your path. I could also be an ally.”

  “So who is the villain? The mentor?”

  Rekhev taps the burning tip of his cigarette on a small metal tin filled with the stubbed-out butts of previous patrons, and pauses for a moment.

  “Perhaps you have not met them yet, perhaps you have. And perhaps you never will, not in predictable forms. Ultimately, the whole myth, every character, is you. You may find that mentor or that villain in the world, or you may find it within yourself. In Greek tragedy, the hero is the source of the tragedy. In the West, I find that your dramatic searches, whether in books or in films, are driven by a single emotion. Whereas in India the hero often finds the source of his information in one person.”

  “So I am walking across that bridge.”

  “We all are,” Rekhev says, pausing again. “What was she like, your grandmother?”

  I think for a moment, trying to figure out how to summarize her. For some reason, I find myself wanting to tell Rekhev details about Nana that I don’t normally mention, tiny details that I never think of in succession. I want to create a portrait of her for him, an image that I can hand across the table.

  “She had a bookshelf in her room where she kept small items she brought back from her trips abroad . . . odd things, a dog made of seashells, a teacup with the King of Sweden on it, a model of Big Ben. She didn’t see kitsch. She didn’t read it that way. She would knit baby clothes in strange colors, pastel greens and bright, bright yellows. My mother would say, ‘Amma, why did you choose this yarn?�
�� and Nana would say, ‘Because this is such a beautiful color!’ ” I laugh, imagining her holding the balls of yarn and gesturing at my mother with them. “She had an entirely different aesthetic from her daughter, from anyone in my family.”