The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir

by Shepard, Sadia

  “I am here to see the doctor,” I stammer, feeling shy.

  “Brother!” she calls, and then turns back to me. “Come, child,” she says, putting her hand on my shoulder, and I feel instantly reassured.

  I sit in their dark living room, waiting and looking at an odd collection of painted ceramic tiles hanging on the wall. The door opens, and I hear a man say: “Enter!”

  I walk in and sit down on a small bench, taking note of my surroundings. The doctor is a kind-looking man who appears to be in his late sixties and is wearing a tan safari suit. His examination room is a kind of study, with books lining the walls and a large desk covered in papers. The only indications that he is a doctor are the stethoscope hanging limply around his neck and an ancient-looking medical chart hanging on the wall.

  He examines me, shining a small light in each of my eyes and sticking a tongue depressor inside my open mouth so he can look at my tongue, searching for clues.

  “Why are you here?” he asks me after a few minutes.

  “Why am I here in India, or here in your office?” I ask him.

  “Both,” he says. “India first.”

  I tell him about my project, then about my health.

  “Every week I find myself coming down with something. I’ve never been like this before. I have asthma attacks most mornings, and I can’t seem to stay healthy for very long. In the daytime I feel like I need to sleep, but I can barely sleep at night.”

  “Where do you take your meals?”

  “I eat in the hostel of the Film Institute.”

  “Ack, the worst. No nutrients there. Are you taking multivitamins?”

  “No.”

  He gives me a disapproving look and draws blood from my arm.

  “Are you traveling?”

  I tell him I have been commuting to Bombay every week by bus.

  “You are trying to live like a real Indian, eh? You have a viral infection, very common with the change of season,” he says. “And allergies. Probably to dust and the like. You are not used to this environment and this level of pollution. This work you are doing in India, it’s based in Pune or Bombay?”

  “Both. But increasingly I think it’s based in Bombay,” I say.

  “The back-and-forth is bad for your health,” he says. “You should try and stay in one place. Also, I sense that your nature is an anxious one. You are worrying yourself sick.”

  He gives me a prescription for an antibiotic and a long list of vitamins.

  He guides me back to the living room, where I find his sister waiting for me. “Drink juice!” he tells me. “Eat steamed vegetables!”

  Through the open door, I see Rekhev in the garden, pacing around the small courtyard.

  “May I show you something?” the doctor’s sister asks me, motioning to her kitchen. “Come, come.”

  In one corner of the room she has created a small shrine, decorated with flowers, miniature pots, and plates that carry oil and water and flowers as offerings.

  “Do you know about Sai Baba?” she asks.

  “I don’t,” I admit, feeling sheepish and wondering where this is going. I know that Sai Baba is a revered Hindu saint, but not much more.

  “How old do you think I am?” she asks, looking at me inquisitively.

  She looks to be in her late sixties, but it seems hardly appropriate to tell an older woman how old she looks. I’m reluctant to do so.

  “I don’t know, how old?” I say.

  “Guess!” she says, delighted at the game, her eyes sparkling with amusement.

  “Sixty-five?” I say, tentatively.

  “No, really, how old?” she replies, her smile deepening.

  “Sixty . . . seven?”

  “I am eighty-two. I’ll be eighty-three in three months.”

  It really doesn’t seem possible that this sprightly woman could be eighty-two. Nana was eighty-two when she died, her body knotted in pain.

  “Oh, I used to be like a regular person,” she adds quickly. “I had aches, I had suffering. But then I made pilgrimage to Shirdi. There is peace there, and that peace came into my life. You cannot imagine how wonderful he is. My life since that day has been very different. Three times a day I do puja here, to honor him.”

  “That is remarkable, Auntie.”

  She walks me to the door, pressing a short autobiography of Sai Baba into my hands. “Faith, child. It takes all forms.” She smiles sweetly at me, and raises one hand in a wave as I walk into her courtyard to find Rekhev.

  Rekhev glances up at me, looking worried.

  “I ran into one of my teachers here,” he says.

  “What did he say?” I ask.

  “He was concerned, he said: ‘Are you sick?’ I said, No, my friend is sick. ‘I see,’ he said, like he could tell you were a woman. You know, I’ve never taken anyone to the doctor in my whole life. My father’s good at these things, finding train tickets, doctors. I’ve never done these things in my life.”

  As we walk home, I start to feel wobbly, conscious of trying to keep one foot in front of the other, and counting the minutes until I will be safely in my bed.

  “It’s very stressful, you know, being your friend,” he tells me on the way home.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “I normally distance myself from these attachments, from people. You want to know someone who understands how India works, and you think that’s me. But I don’t understand how India works any more than you do. You and I, we are both expatriates here. I am not a tour guide.”

  “I never asked you to be my tour guide,” I snap.

  “No, but that’s what you want. Someone to write home about.”

  I feel suddenly exhausted.

  “What’s that in your hand?” he asks.

  “It’s a book about Sai Baba; the doctor’s sister gave it to me.”

  “Are you acquiring another religion, then?” he asks.

  I nod, too tired to argue.

  We walk the rest of the way in silence. Rekhev drops me at my gate, and I head inside by myself, dreading the effort of opening the lock. Everything feels too heavy.

  The next day, I purchase the medication and vitamins recommended by the doctor, and for the following three, I have bouts of fever and nausea; my asthma attacks are my early morning alarm clock. On the fourth morning, I manage to put on clothes and walk to the phone booth to call my parents. Their voices are bright and clear, and I try to make mine match theirs. It’s so hard to describe my life here, what it feels like, how I am spending my time. I don’t know how to account for my days. My mother can hear the frustration in my voice.

  “How long have you been in India?” she says abruptly.

  “Three and a half months.”

  “And you feel like that’s a long time.”

  “It feels like forever.”

  “What are you frustrated about?”

  “Well, I feel like I came here to do something, and I thought I understood what it was. But I don’t know how to find what I came here for. I’m not sure if it’s even here.”

  “Look, you’re pretending you’re in New York, setting up meetings, commuting to another city, making phone calls, trying to take pictures. It’s too hot, for one, and you’re making yourself miserable. Remember, a week there is equal to a day in New York.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. You’re imposing your own sense of schedule on the place, but it’s not meant for that. Everything moves on a different time-table there. Accept that, don’t try and change it. Your primary responsibility right now is to make yourself well. Do that, and then you can do good work.”

  I begin to argue, and then I back down. I know that she’s right, in that annoying way mothers often are.

  It takes me almost two weeks to feel the outlines of myself re-emerging from the thick fog I feel surrounded by. I can barely lift my head; food seems like a capricious friend. I retrace my steps to the doctor’s house; he tells me that my blood work show
s a very low white-blood-cell count.

  “Something about how you are living is making you unwell,” he says thoughtfully. “You’re wearing yourself down, not eating well, not sleeping well. That has to change.”

  “Do you think I’m allergic to India?” I ask him.

  “Don’t worry so much, my dear,” he says reassuringly. “There’s no such thing as being allergic to India.”

  ONE NIGHT, I dream of Nana.

  In the dream, she looks healthy, perhaps sixty years old, the way she might have looked when I was a baby. She is cooling herself with a fan made of thin, fragrant sandalwood. Flap-flap, goes the sound as the fan hits her collarbone. We are sitting in an opulent living room that I don’t recognize, surrounded by gilded Baroque-style furniture, drinking tea. There are one or two Pakistani women present, who are listening to Nana with rapt attention as she narrates one of her dreams. Nana is wearing a shiny green silk sari and emerald jewelry. Her lips are painted red with lipstick, something I never saw her wear. It’s as if death has rendered my grandmother in brilliant, incongruous colors.

  “I am trying to cross Lamington Road; all five of my children are around me, holding on to my sari; I am wearing a white sari. All the children are little, and I cannot keep track of them all at once. My husband has just died, and I am thinking to myself: How will I bear this life alone? How will I do it?” She pauses, making long swooping gestures with her fan. “And then he appears to me, he comes up beside me and places his strong hand underneathmy elbow, like this.” She demonstrates. “And he leads me across the street, just like that.” She looks at me and smiles softly. “And then he is gone.”

  The dream fades, and I find myself awake, staring at the rotations of the ceiling fan. Woosh-woosh. The pigeons flutter outside my window, trying to land on the angled slats of opaque glass again and again. Flip-flap, go their wings. A soft, fluttering sound of regret. In the swamp of my sickness, I cannot remember if this is a story that Nana told me about one of her dreams, or if the dream is mine alone. Lamington Road. I have never heard of the place. It sounds like London.

  The next morning, my fever breaks and I feel well enough to sweep the dust from my bedroom floor out into the yard. As I open the door and take in mouthfuls of new day, I feel drunk with the inhalation of fresh air. I put on the geyser to heat water for my bath and lay out clean clothes for the first time in a week.

  I go to the library and look up Lamington Road. It’s in Bombay. Nana always told me she would send me messages in my dreams. Now I am sure that she is telling me that it’s time to move.

  PART TWO

  FIELDWORK

  12

  THE DIRT COLLECTORS

  BOMBAY, JANUARY 2002

  I feel anonymous living in Bombay. No one knows me here. I think to myself, I could stay inside all day and not speak to anyone. But I’m wrong. Bombay comes right to my door and knocks to be let inside.

  My new home is a one-room studio apartment inside a three-story bungalow called Bilva Kunj, on a street in the Gamdevi neighborhood called Pandita Ramabai Road, which connects the busy intersection of Nana Chowk to Bombay’s famous Chowpatty Beach. On my left side is Laburnum Road, named for the long-departed laburnum trees planted by the English. My landlady, the elegant Mrs. Murdeshwar, tells me that the laburnum trees used to shade the private residences of the neighborhood. Directly across from me sits a temple, whose keepers rise at dawn to light incense and lay flower garlands at the feet of their goddess. In the morning, the road is lined with the compact parcels of sleeping men, arranged in columns alongside the stone walls that border the street, cocooned neatly in white cloths, like caterpillars. A one-armed man lives in front of the house, where he props himself up on his intact elbow, his keen, watchful eyes surveyingeveryone who enters and exits my flat—a silent witness. Another man paces the block most afternoons; he’s tall, with a gray beard and a brown-checked shirt. Each time I see him, I hear him speaking to himself in multiple languages, gesturing as if to an unseen audience.

  It’s January now, cool enough that I can walk around Bombay in relative comfort. People tell me that these temperate weeks will be fleeting, so I try to take advantage of them, getting to know the old Jewish quarter of the city on foot, taking portraits of the synagogues and their caretakers.

  The day after I move to my new apartment, I hear the first knock. A man selling Hindi and English textbooks, brightly colored booklets with pictures of nouns—“A is for Apple, B is for Boy.” The man thumbs through his collection, fanning them out over his slender extended arm.

  “No, thank you. No, thank you,” I say repeatedly. “No, thank you. No children here.” I shake my head for emphasis and shut the door.

  Another knock. Someone who has something to do with the television. He comes in and fiddles with my set, murmuring the entire time. The telephone man; the electrician; the air conditioner repairman, who takes apart the entire unit to very little effect. All sorts of people parade through my tiny room in the mornings, sent by my kind landlord. The bell starts ringing in the morning, and some days it doesn’t stop until early afternoon. I have heard the tales of people in Bombay waiting months, years even, for a cylinder of cooking gas, and I understand more fully that the handsome rent I am paying is partly for the ability to move into a situation that is already set up.

  One morning, I answer the door to find a boy of about thirteen or fourteen holding a typed, laminated letter and making wild hand gestures. He points to his closed mouth and makes a guttural sound, bugging out his eyes for emphasis. I cannot for the life of me figure out what’s going on. He hands me the letter. It reads:

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  I am deaf and dumb. I cannot talk! Please give me a charitable donation that I will use to help myself out of my current miserable situationand help others like me. Your donation goes to deaf and blind trust, which has been established by Gov’t of Maharashtra, 1983 (Borivali, Mumbai).

  Kindly see fit to donate generously.

  As with the kids selling candy on the New York City subways who say they are subsidizing their high school sports teams, I sense something is amiss here. But I have to admit: the scheme has originality. As I try to decide if I should give him money, the boy places the tip of his tongue on the roof of his mouth, showing me the back side of it, pointing and hopping from one foot to the other. I see that he is attempting to convince me that he has no tongue.

  “One minute, one minute,” I say, closing the door while I look for some bills.

  I rustle around and find some loose notes, which I give to him. Instantly businesslike, he calmly straightens up and hands me a sheet of paper, a roster of people’s names and addresses. He hands me a pen, and I write: “Sadia, Gamdevi, Bombay, Rs. 100.”

  The next day, there’s another knock. The same boy, the same routine.

  “I gave you money yesterday!” I say, showing him my name on his petition. “See?”

  He looks at my signature and nods, shrugs, gives me a look as if to say, I guess you have a point. He gathers up his laminated letter, clipboard, and pen, and walks calmly to his next destination.

  The following day, I am woken up by a knock at 7 a.m. In no mood to haggle with the boy again, I open the door and am surprised to find a pleasant-looking woman in a floral salwar kameez. She appears to be in her late thirties, and has wavy light brown hair that she wears in a braid down her back.