“On board, there were games and dances, and we met students from all over Europe and the world. I spent a great deal of time talking to a friendly Danish boy named Steen, who was heading to Arizona and told me that he thought I was very pretty. No one in Pakistan had ever thought I was pretty—this was an exciting development. One morning, almost two weeks later, I woke up to hear shouts from the front of the boat; America was within sight. I ran to the front deck, watched, mesmerized, as the Statue of Liberty came into view. It was just like the picture in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We had arrived in Manhattan.
“The ship docked at New York Harbor and was met by a team of people from the exchange program, who all wore yellow shirts and went around with clipboards, passing out name tags and envelopes of information. Uzma and I stood next to each other and waited.
“A man with a loudspeaker announced Uzma’s name. Next to the man was a pleasant-looking couple with two teenagers in tow, the Parsonses. Uzma’s American family.
“I kissed Uzma goodbye and sat on one of my trunks, nervously waiting for my own host family to arrive. What could be taking them so long? After two hours, all of the students were gone and the dock was empty, littered with baggage tags. I sat with my chin in my hand, wondering what to do. The man with the loudspeaker approached me with a curious look.
“‘What’s your final destination, young lady?’ he asked, looking at his clipboard for my name.
“‘Manhattan,’ I replied.
“The man looked carefully at my name tag and consulted his list.
“‘Oh no, young lady. You better put on your red shoes and call for Toto. You’re not going to Manhattan, New York. You’re going to Manhattan, Kansas!’”
The party guests erupted, looking at each other, and my mother, in wonder. Red shoes. Toto. Manhattan, Kansas.
“The man handed me an envelope that contained fourteen dollars and a bus ticket to Kansas, and fetched a taxi to take me to Port Authority Bus Terminal. I spent the next three days with my face pressed against the glass of a Greyhound bus, watching America unfurl before me. I had never seen anything so green, or so wide. People were very friendly to me on the bus, but I was careful not to speak to any strange men. A very nice woman from Missouri shared some of her sandwiches with me. She said: ‘I have a daughter about your age at home, and you look awfully homesick sitting all by yourself.’ I changed from a bus to a train in Kansas City; I couldn’t believe how big America was. Finally, I reached Manhattan at four in the afternoon on August 18, 1961.
“There at the platform was the entire Manhattan High School Marching Band, playing ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and waving a huge banner that read ‘The Little Apple Welcomes Samina!’
“Manhattan was smaller than anywhere I had been previously, and I couldn’t get over how clean it was, with rows of houses with no fences; I had only ever seen compound walls. And there was so much grass! I was from the desert, and I was amazed by all of the lawns and trees. There were no beggars, no poor people in sight, and everybody seemed to have a car. Everyone was smiling, and they all knew my name. There was a beautiful brown-haired girl in a matching yellow skirt and blouse who walked to the front of the crowd and extended her right hand.
“‘I’m Susie Beck, student body president of the senior class, and we’re here to welcome you to Manhattan. We hope you’ll be really happy here.’”
Mama pressed her hands together and looked around the room, her eyes shining.
“It was nothing like I’d expected America to look like. But there I was.”
A couple of the guests turned to Nana. Wasn’t she afraid to let Samina go?
“Yes,” Nana cried, shaking her head at the thought. “She was such a headstrong girl, and it was such a long way!”
BY THE TIME I was old enough to wonder about it, my parents’ life together made sense; it had a rhythm and an order. My mother had learned the Lord’s Prayer and how to make a Thanksgiving turkey, my father knew the proper way to salute a Pakistani elder or, if need be, play a game of cricket. But what had compelled them to choose each other?
My parents met as graduate students at Yale—my father was studying to be an architect, and my mother was studying art and design, postponing her arranged match in Pakistan. My mother had mixed feelings about getting married, but had agreed to the engagement. Her fiancé, Hussain, was a medical student eight years her senior who had studied in the West, and my mother felt that marriage would give her stability and the freedom to pursue her goals in Karachi. In the late sixties, Pakistan was a new nation, and my mother was filled with plans. She hoped to work in public television and to create a magazine about Pakistan. She had no intention of settling permanently in the United States—but she thought she might experience romantic love just once before she got married. She wanted something to look back on as she grew old in Pakistan.
My mother first noticed my father’s red bandana and cowboy boots while riding in the Art and Architecture Building’s elevator. At six feet six inches tall, he towered over her, and she thought that he was the most handsome American she had ever seen, like a real-life Marlboro Man. My father says he’d admired my mother from afar, but was cautioned against becoming interested in her. “She’s got a guy back home,” the other students told him. “She’s way out of your league.”
My parents spoke to one another for the first time in a photography class. My father took carefully composed, carefully executed pictures of buildings and landscapes. My mother took all of her pictures on a single trip to Pakistan and returned with stacks of negatives, which she spent the next three months printing in the darkroom. Her prints were flawless, and my father asked her how she did it. What f-stop did she use? What kind of photo paper? Samina just shrugged. It came easily to her.
My father was mesmerized by my mother. He asked her if she would like to accompany him to Winter Carnival at Dartmouth College, from which he had graduated the previous year, not quite believing she would agree. Many men at Yale had asked her out—football players, law students, a doctoral candidate in philosophy who slipped ten-page love letters underneath her door every day for an entire semester. She went on dates to see what these men were like, but she was never interested. There seemed something different about Richard, something kind, thoughtful, worth knowing. She decided to choose one American man to have an affair with, and she picked my father.
The way my mother tells it, she suspected that my father was simply interested in her exotic looks; in those days, she wore her long black hair loose, down to her knees, and colorful, hand-block-printed Pakistani clothes. So, in preparation for the date, she made a visit to downtown New Haven and bought a weekend’s worth of American clothes. When my father pulled his car up to International House, he found my mother in a pink turtleneck, a tweed skirt, and brown boots that reached her knees.
My father says that he decided just days into their relationship that he wanted to marry my mother; she was completely unlike anyone he’d ever met. She was focused, ambitious, confident. They were from drastically different places, but in that car ride from New Haven to Hanover, they found certain commonalities. They both had had difficult, charismatic fathers who died young; selfless, caring mothers who kept their emotions to themselves; and younger siblings that they worried about. They both cared a great deal about art, good books, and making their communities better. They both were in love with graduate school.
I was always intrigued by my father’s ability to recognize in my mother someone that he wanted to spend his life with. How did he manage to convince her that he was destined to be more than a memory?
After her graduate work, my mother moved home to Karachi and did start a television show, in which she traveled through the countryside, introducing different regions of Pakistan to its people. After he graduated, my father worked in a small architectural firm in Denver and saved up money to bring my mother back to the U.S. One day, to his boss’s surprise, he announced that he was quitting to go to Pakista
n and get married. He sent a telegram to Karachi to let my mother know which day he was coming. He imagined that he would be garlanded at the airport and welcomed as a son. Instead, he found himself alone at five in the morning in an unfamiliar city, surrounded by beggars tugging on his sleeves and taxi drivers offering him rides to hotels. The call of the muezzin sounded, crackling over the loudspeaker,and most men vanished to pray. He was left in the terminal wondering what to do, faced with the sobering thought that perhaps marrying Samina would be more complicated than he’d thought.
He stumbled with his bags to the taxi stand and directed the driver to my mother’s house, speaking the few words of Urdu he had learned: “Bridge ke pas”—“near the bridge.” When they finally found it, he woke up the gate man and tried to explain that he was a friend of Samina’s. My mother came down in her nightdress and a robe, with her long hair in a braid down her back. She put her hands through the bars of the gate. She told him, “I’m so sorry, my brothers wouldn’t let me come and fetch you at the airport. We’ve been fighting about it for days. They said it wouldn’t be appropriate.”
That first night, my mother put my father up in a garage apartment adjacent to her home—where he would be out of sight from her gossiping relatives. The next day, she found him a flat nearby to stay in. To justify his presence in Karachi, my mother arranged for him to take music lessons, explaining that he was an American student who had come to learn from a sitar master. The neighbors said, “That Samina is up to something,” and watched her closely. She hired a group of mural painters to come and paint a village scene on one of the walls of his new apartment. She surrounded him with a group of her friends, so that they traveled in a pack of young people, going to concerts, even to the disco. To see each other privately, they had to make elaborate arrangements, design complex alibis. My mother had said he was a talented musician, so her brothers wanted to hear Richard play. She had to keep finding new reasons why he couldn’t give a concert.
It took my father a year to convince my mother to return to the States, and to convince Nana that he would be able to take care of her. He studied the Qur’an, he went to mosque with her brothers. Once my mother had agreed to marry him, he had to go to see Hussain, her fiancé, and convince him to let her break the engagement. Mostly, he says, it was thanks to Nana that he was able to do it all. Even then, the two of them had a special bond; she was on his side.
My father visited Nana in the afternoons. They would have tea together in the long parlor of Siddiqi House, their silences filled with the constant whirring of the ceiling fans. My father told Nana about his family in Denver, about how they had arrived in the United States in the 1600s from England and had moved from the East Coast to Colorado in the 1800s. About how close he was with his two sisters and one brother, and how he saw his future with my mother.
One day Nana asked him, “Are you sure, Richard? Are you sure you want my daughter? Because you are talking about taking her very far away, and she’s a difficult child. You had better be sure that you want her.”
When I ask him what he said to that, his answer is always the same:
“I told her the truth. I told her that I couldn’t live without her.”
NO ONE TALKS about it much anymore, but when the time came, my mother’s brothers objected to the idea of my parents’ getting married in Siddiqi House. Once Nana had given her blessing to the marriage, there was little they could do to stop it, but they didn’t want to be perceived as condoning the match by hosting the wedding. Though Nana pleaded with them, it was no use—they would not allow it. Instead, my parents were married a world away, on a hillside in my father’s native Colorado, without the flashes of cameras and the glint of heavy sets of jewelry, without the decorated tents, the trays of food, the week of escalating celebration.
There is a film of the ceremony, in Super 8mm, that I’ve watched hundreds of times. They were married in 1973, standing with their friends in a circle, in a meadow down the hill from my great-grandparents’ home in the Rocky Mountains. Nana came from Pakistan to the United States for the first time to attend the wedding. I remember her telling me that she had never seen a wedding so informal, “like a picnic,” she said, with people standing outdoors in their sandals. My father wore a navy blue three-button suit, his hair almost down to his shoulders. He walked, with his siblings behind him, his mother and grandmother in pastel suits, down the hillside to meet my mother, who wore a white-and-gold sari. Her long hair was parted in the middle and wound in a thick coil at the nape of her neck, encircled in a garland of wildflowers. A friend of my parents’ from the Yale Divinity School crafted a service using readings from the Bible and the Qur’an. To honor Nana’s connection to Judaism, they broke a glass.
A YEAR AND a half later, I was born in Denver.
11
ANXIOUS-TYPE NATURE
PUNE, DECEMBER 2001
A knock on my door punctuates my hazy awareness of morning. It’s late, too late to be sleeping, but I can’t seem to muster the energy to wake up and get dressed, face the world. Lately I’ve been falling sick repeatedly. Illness takes hold in an entirely different way here from back home—it catches me quickly, without warning, and I feel caught in an endless cycle of headaches, fevers, and sore throats. I’m not sure what to report in my e-mails to friends. The Parliament of India in Delhi has just been attacked by terrorists, and there is speculation that India and Pakistan might go to war. I think about when I left New York three and a half months ago, kissing my friends goodbye as if I would see them in a matter of days, not months, with only the haziest impressions of what I was leaving them for. I thought that I could replace missing Nana with being here, as if I could fill up the hole created by her absence with stories. I’d thought that something grand was waiting for me here, something out of one of my mother’s famous anecdotes. In New York, my plan made sense. Now I feel foolish.
I’ve been having trouble feeling accepted by the Jewish community in Pune. When I visit the synagogues, I feel like an interloper, a tourist. I’ve been making increasingly frequent trips to Bombay, where the community is more used to visitors and I have an easier time talking to people. There I can slip into the back of a synagogue and feel relatively unnoticed. I travel to Bombay on the night bus to avoid the traffic and heat and to fill up the hours of my insomnia, but the dust of the roads, the pollution created by the trucks and rickshaws, and the nights without enough sleep are wearing on me. Going to Bombay and back leaves me exhausted, but I feel mollified that at least I’m doing something to further my project.
The knock comes again, louder this time. I put on a robe and answer the door. It’s Rekhev, scowling at me.
“You should read these,” he says, handing me several heavy books. He looks at me sharply, noticing the contact sheets strewn all over my desk. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks.
“I’m not feeling very well,” I admit. “I’m not sure why.” Every day now, I wake up with new, unfamiliar ailments: rashes, sore throats, eye infections. I have acquired what feels like asthma, something I have never experienced before. It’s as if my entire body is allergic to India, as if my constitution was made for another climate. I feel trapped in a constant cycle of sickness and miniature, fleeting recoveries. Just as soon as I feel well again, I fall ill.
A few days later, Rekhev knocks on my door again. He is disappointed that I haven’t read the books.
“What are you doing in here all day, then?” he asks.
I tell him that lately I don’t have the energy to do much of anything.
“Come with me,” he says, firmly.
“I can’t, Rekhev, I really don’t feel well,” I say.
“I’m taking you to the Institute doctor; he lives not far from here.”
We walk together through the leafy side streets to a residential bungalow. The doctor’s house is one story, set back from the road with a small courtyard in front. Rekhev finds a bench in the yard and opens his book. I ring the doorbell.
> An elderly lady in a pale pink sari opens the door. Her gray hair is pulled tight into a low bun, and her eyes are bright with curiosity. I assume she might be the doctor’s wife. “Yes?” she asks.
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 13
