The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir

by Shepard, Sadia

  “I am Julie,” she says. “I work here. I come in?”

  “You work here?” I say, a little confused, sleepy.

  “I am your maid.”

  I stand aside and let her in, rubbing my eyes. She is carrying a small plastic bag, which she takes with her inside my bathroom; she closes the door. She emerges a moment later wearing a different, older salwar kameez and carrying a bucket of milky white water. The smell of ammonia rises from the bucket.

  “Any mens are here?” she asks.

  “Just me,” I say.

  She disappears inside the bathroom again and emerges a moment later, without her salwar pants on. She giggles.

  “If girls only are here, I am cleaning without pant. If mens are here, I am putting on pant,” she explains.

  I watch as she squats and expertly swings a gray rag from right to left, swabbing the floor clean as she moves backward.

  I’m not sure where to go. After I dress in the bathroom, I sit at the table while she goes about her work, lifting my feet when she reaches the area near the table. It seems rude to sit and make notes or read while she is cleaning my floor, but I don’t want to get in her way, and it seems equally awkward to sit and watch her. I shuffle between the options and then try to make conversation.

  “So how long have you worked here?” I ask.

  “I am working here four, five years. One Germany girl was here, one English girl was here. French principal is upstairs. I work at French school. Main job. Thirteen years I am there.”

  I remember that my landlord mentioned that his daughter teaches at the Alliance Française; perhaps there is some connection.

  “Are you friend of Lindsay’s?” she asks me suddenly.

  “No . . . I don’t know Lindsay. Was that the girl who was here before?”

  Julie seems relieved.

  “‘Julie,’ she said, ‘you don’t come every day, this is small room, you come three times a week.’ Then, one day, she go. Monday she is here, Tuesday she go.”

  It occurs to me that perhaps this is why the apartment became available so quickly.

  “She just disappeared? You don’t know where she went?”

  “I am not knowing anything. I am only maid. Mr. Murdeshwar is saying, ‘Where is Lindsay? Where is Lindsay?’ Xerox Wallah, across the street, he is saying, ‘Where is Lindsay? She is owing me a hundred fifty rupees!’ Dhobi Wallah saying, ‘Where is your madam? I have her clean clothes!’ Everyone asking for Lindsay. I say, ‘She go!’ I don’t know where.”

  “What did Lindsay do while she was here in India?”

  “She came for job. Then she left that job. She is staying home, she is asking Mr. Murdeshwar for cable TV. Then she does some yoga studies. She is going to ashram. She is mixed up with some no-good peoples, I think so. She takes up another job, then, one day, she go. I don’t know where. . . .”

  I’m fascinated by what became of my predecessor. I ask about her habits, trying to solve the mystery of her sudden disappearance.

  “Lindsay is very fond of bread. All the time eating bread only. And sweets. Lindsay is getting fat in India, I think so.” Julie giggles—a soft, warm, contagious sound. I’m not sure why, but I’m laughing, too. “Lindsay is very fond of my chicken. ‘Please, Julie, make chicken. Make chicken,’” she says, imitating Lindsay. “Sometimes I am making.”

  Julie finishes the floor and cleans the bathroom. Watery sounds emerge— sloshing and rinsing, a rag hitting the floor, being hung up to dry. After she finishes, she changes into her other outfit and walks quickly through the room to the door.

  “I come day after tomorrow. Okay-thanks-bye.”

  ONE MORNING, the phone rings. It’s a man asking for Lindsay. I tell him that Lindsay has moved away, and he asks me if I’m a friend of hers.

  “No, why do you ask?” I say, and he offers me a job as an extra in a Bollywood film. If I’d like, I can meet him and his partner at Churchgate Station the following morning, where a busload of young Westerners will supposedly be driven to Ahmedabad in a luxury coach to appear as background players in a scene meant to take place in Europe.

  “You’ll like it,” he says, his tone ingratiating and slightly predatory. “Lindsay liked it.”

  I decline politely and hang up.

  Each visit, Julie tells me more about Lindsay, or the peculiar habits of her other clients. She tells me, in bits and pieces, about her life. Her name is Julie Rocky D’Souza. “Julie” is short for “Genevieve,” which she pronounces “Jen-vee.” She is a Christian, originally from Mangalore. “Rocky” is her husband’s name, and hence her middle name. Rocky is in the electricians’ union, and has a good stable job that she hopes he will be able to pass on to their son when he retires. They have two children, a girl of thirteen and a boy who is eleven and a half.

  Julie and Rocky’s union was a love match, at least from his side.

  “My husband saw me at festival time, with my mother, at Mount Mary Church, Bandra. He saw my hair. I had very long hair at that time, to here it is coming.” Julie points to her waist. “I did not see him, but he remembered me. He was all the time asking for me. Finally, my mother agreed to the match.”

  “Did you get engaged?” I ask.

  “I was engaged,” she says, as if I had doubted the fact. “I am going Chowpatty, I am going Gateway, I am going Marine Drive, Juhu Beach. I am doing all these engaged things.”

  These are the sites of courtship in Bombay, where couples go to steal moments of relative solitude, to join the throng of sweethearts sitting side by side, hand in hand. All of these places command ocean views; in each of them, men and women sit looking at the water, a wide slate on which to imagine their futures together.

  “Did you like your husband? Before you were married, I mean?”

  “I am not liking mens. I am only liking girls—my sisters, my mother. My husband was mad for me, he was mad for my hair when we were married. ‘Leave it open! Leave it open!’ he would say. I am only thinking that he is little bit dark. But he’s a good man,” she says, genuinely. “He is a good father, good husband. He is never beating me, he is offering me money when he has it. But I have my own money. I have been working since I had nine years. Sometimes my husband is drinking. He is throwing money in the beer bar. Then he is saying, Julie, I need some money. I say, Where is your money now? I will not give it. Now he is good. He is not drinking for the last one year.”

  “Really? For a year?”

  “He is a good man, Rocky,” she concludes. “Okay-thanks-bye.”

  I BEGIN TO LOOK FORWARD to Julie’s visits. She has a comforting presence, and I like to listen to her talk. While she works, we chat about her life, and I ask her questions about how things work in Bombay. I ask her where to buy a toaster, how to get my knives sharpened, where to get a sari blouse stitched.

  One day, when she notices that I have gone grocery shopping, she says: “How much you pay for tomato? How much per kg?”

  I tell her I’m not sure—maybe thirty rupees?

  She shakes her head, admonishing me.

  “Where did you buy?”

  I tell her where I bought them: at the third stall from the left in the vegetable market.

  “You are paying too much. You are paying foreigner rate. I take you.” On her next visit, Julie walks me to Bhaji Gali, quite literally Vegetable Alley. It is a long, crowded, narrow passage of fruit and vegetable sellers that links Grant Road Station and the next major thoroughfare, about a ten-minute walk from my studio.

  “This is my madam,” she says to the man I bought the tomatoes from, introducing me. I smile and nod. She points to the staples, and he weighs them on scales: tomatoes, potatoes, onions. Then she says something to him in Marathi that I don’t understand; from the looks of it, she is giving him a hard time for overcharging me. I feign innocence, feeling like a small, grateful child. After that, the vegetable man charges me Julie’s rates.

  Since we are next to the train station, and Julie will go home to Bandra from
here, I ask her why she doesn’t do her shopping in Bhaji Gali.

  “I have my own market. Price in my locality is cheaper than here,” she says.

  “Why is that?” I ask.

  She gives me a patient look, as if she is speaking to her thirteen-year-old daughter.

  “Because I am poor and you are rich, no?”

  I DECIDE TO TRY TO find a Jewish school in Bombay where I might be able to volunteer. I think that perhaps if I have some way of interacting with people, some way of contributing, I will be less of a visitor here. It’s for this reason that I go to ORT India in Worli, Bombay, a Jewish vocational school located coincidentally just a few hundred yards from Rahat Villa. It’s only when I get there that I realize why the school sounds familiar: my uncle Moses, the one who thought my project was such a waste of time, had told me that his son Benny is ORT’s director.

  ORT is housed in a tall gray concrete tower, several stories high, and offers several different programs, from what I can tell from the sign. There’s a beauty school, a travel-agency training program, a nursery school, and a bakery, as well as a Jewish library. I tell the receptionist that I’d like to see the director, and she asks me who I am.

  “Tell him his cousin from America is here,” I say. Her eyes widen.

  After a few minutes, an attendant in a gray uniform comes to fetch me and takes me to Benny Isaacs’s office, a large, sunny room with a wide desk, several phones, and bright color posters of Israel.

  “What’s this about you being my cousin?” Benny Isaacs says when I enter.

  He is a tall, well-dressed man in his late fifties who looks unmistakably like one of my grandmother’s brothers, my uncle Solomon. I haven’t seen Uncle Sol in years, but I remember his face, and I find the resemblance remarkable—the same light brown skin, rounded nose, glasses, and gray mustache.

  I introduce myself and explain who I am, that I am Rachel Jacobs’s granddaughter. If I am not mistaken, his mother, Lily, was my grandmother’s first cousin.

  “Quite right!” he says, slapping his desk. “I remember your grandmother! She was an elegant lady.”

  The attendant places a cup of milky tea and a puffed pastry in front of me, and Benny points to the pastry with pride.

  “Baked here on the premises!” he says. “In our kosher kitchen! So tell me,” he says, leaning forward, “what can I do for you?”

  I explain to Mr. Isaacs about my Fulbright and what I’ve come to do in India, and tell him that I am hoping to get involved with a school, to do some volunteer work, perhaps with a youth group, if there is such a thing. Mr. Isaacs tells me that he is sending a youth delegation of fourteen Bene Israel students to Israel in a few weeks. As chance would have it, he has been looking for a way for the group to explain their history to the various Israeli student groups they will be meeting while they are touring the country. He asks me if perhaps I could help them develop some kind of presentation.

  “Like a play!” he says. “You know, funny, serious—to show about our history!”

  “What do the students know about their history?” I ask him.

  “Not much. And people will be asking them, ‘How did your people come to India? What is the story?’ All that. Do you know anything about dramatics?”

  I tell him that I used to do some theater in high school and college.

  “Excellent! Why don’t you write a play, direct it, and we’ll put it on in Israel?”

  I learn that the Overseas Resource Training Institute of India provides young Bene Israel men and women with skills they hope to take with them when they immigrate to Israel. I begin to spend my afternoons here, and each time I walk through the building I marvel at the endless codes the students in the travel-agency department are learning how to punch in to find low fares, the strings of numbers and letters of C++ programming they are typing in the computer center, and the fierce concentration of young female students armed with scissors who pore over the rows of mannequin heads in the beauty school. The walls are decorated with bright murals painted by children, and fading color photographs of important religious sites in Israel.

  My actors are a group of fourteen college students in their late teens and early twenties—nine confident, gangly young men and five very shy young women. I think of my earliest questions about the Bene Israel, about what they look like, as I notice that their dark hair and their light brown coloring are similar to the pictures that I’ve seen of Nana’s family in Israel. My male students dress in white or gray dress shirts and dark slacks, the consistent uniform of urban India; the young women wear salwar kameezes in solid colors with matching dupattas. Unlike mine, which are cotton prints bought off the rack, the young women’s suits are handmade, bordered with lace or appliquéd flowers.

  I am assisted by two pleasant male teachers in their late twenties, Samson and Sharon, who have been tapped by Mr. Isaacs to supervise the project and act in the play. Samson is a sprightly, enthusiastic computer instructor with short, straight black hair, who laughs easily. Sharon’s long, curly black beard, kippah, and round, scholarly-looking spectacles give him an air of seriousness that is quickly dispelled by the friendliness of his demeanor. His eyes are black and shiny behind his glasses, showing his amusement and interest in everything going on around him. He teaches Hebrew to a group of young men and acts as a sofer in the community, a certified Jewish ritual scribe. Both Samson and Sharon make an effort to make me feel welcome, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the pantomime drills I introduce to try to get the actors warmed up. They encourage their students to follow suit, with mixed success.

  Our meetings take place in a dark conference room decorated with curtains that feature miniature blue Stars of David. My play is a series of short vignettes chosen to represent the highlights of Bene Israel history. The group leaps awkwardly from an imaginary ship hitting the Konkan Coast to the circular motion of pressing seeds into oil, to picking up heavy, make-believe suitcases to show the arrival of the Bene Israel in Bombay in the 1850s, and lifting them again to show the community-wide migration to Israel beginningin 1948. Throughout the rehearsal, the actors are in constant movement, from sea to land, village to city, India to Israel.

  When the students are speaking the lines that I have written, they stand stiffly, facing the audience, with their arms by their sides. The boys speak loudly, but the girls can barely be heard. When I ask them to intersperse Hebrew songs and prayers at appropriate moments in the narrative, however, they brighten, singing heartily and confidently. They tell me the names of their songs, and I write them down phonetically. Hebrew songs with Indian melodies, passed down 150 years ago by visiting cantors from the Jewish community in Cochin. I am struck by which fragments of their history these young people hold; many of them have not heard parts of the legend, yet they can tell me the Marathi names their ancestors used, even if these names have not been in use for over a hundred years. My knowledge of our common ancestors is gleaned primarily from ethnographies of the community written by Western women in the 1970s and 1980s. I find myself wondering how different the community was twenty years ago, when those scholars were working in Bombay.

  At lunchtime, Samson, Sharon, and the students pile into the ORT cafeteria, reflexively touching the mezuzah with their right hands and kissing their fingers as they walk in the door. The ORT cook, Shoshanna Auntie, is an older lady with the protective demeanor of a den mother. She replenishes communal bowls of rice; dal; and cucumber, tomato, and coriander salad after the students spoon large helpings onto their own plates, joking among themselves. I listen to their conversations, trying to understand the unspoken allegiances between different members of the group. Toward the end of the meal, I ask the students if they are planning to settle in India or in Israel. A long silence settles on the room.

  “Well?” Sharon says, looking around the room. “Why are you all so quiet? What do you think?”