The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir

by Shepard, Sadia

  “Your mother is Jewish or Muslim?” Sharona asks. “Of course, according to Jewish law, she’s Jewish.”

  “Well, my mother was raised a Muslim, and she’s a practicing Muslim now. She’s curious about Judaism, but she feels comfortable with her faith.”

  “And your father?”

  “My father is Christian.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m here to learn more about my grandmother’s community, about what she left behind.”

  “You know, Sadia,” Sharon begins, looking thoughtful, “your situation is much more complicated than I realized. You have a choice to make, isn’t it.”

  “You think she has to choose, Sharon?” Sharona asks, picking up her daughter and bouncing her on her knee.

  “I think she absolutely has to choose.”

  “Do you think you have to choose?” Sharona asks me.

  “I didn’t think so before I came to India, no. In America people sometimes grow up with more than one religion. Not often three religions, but there it’s more common to acknowledge more than one tradition. Here I have begun to question that. I wonder if I should choose.”

  “Sadia, may I speak frankly, as your friend?” Sharon asks, and I tell him I would be glad if he did.

  “I think, Sadia, that if you are not going to go into depth, then you can be quite comfortable with all three religions in your life. There are certainly a great number of things that Judaism and Christianity have in common, and a great number of things that you will find similar in Islam and Judaism. But if you look at all three in depth, I think you will see that there are also a great number of contradictions. So that, if you believe fully in one, you cannot believe in the others.”

  “Sharon, give her an example, so she understands,” Sharona says.

  “Oh, I’m not smart enough to do that,” Sharon says modestly.

  “Of course you are!” Sharona and I say in unison, asking him to continue.

  “Well, okay, it’s like this. In Christianity you have the Holy Trinity. If you believe in the Holy Trinity, then you believe that the divine can take forms that are holy besides God. This concept comes into conflict with the concept of monotheism, in my opinion. In Islam, from what I have read, the Muslims believe that Prophet Muhammad was the last prophet, and there will be no prophets after him. And they believe in Moses, that he was a prophet, and they believe in the Book of Moses. But if you follow the Book of Moses, then you believe that God has said that he has laid down these rules and they should not be changed. In Halal, in the concept of Halal, it says that you can eat the blood of an animal, but in the Book of Moses it says expressly that you cannot eat the blood of an animal. So this is a case of revision. There is a Muslim gentleman downstairs, and he gives lessons in the Qur’an. We meet quite often, and he gives me books about Islam—he is often trying to convince me to turn to Islam. And we have good discussions. Basically, he tells me stories from the Qur’an, and I listen, and privately I break apart those stories and put them into contexts that I understand, placing the different pieces of information in different places in my mind, like shelves. If you speak to anyone of any of these three religions, they are always going to feel preferential to their holy book. I am a Jew, so of course I think the Torah is correct. But I think the thing that you should do is to get yourself a copy of the scriptures and read for yourself. And teachers—get yourself good teachers. You might find a very good Christian teacher and a bad Jewish teacher and you will end up a Christian, or vice versa—it is important to find good teachers and then decide for yourself. You have a lot of work to do, Sadia.”

  “I think you’re right,” I say.

  “What kind of person will you marry?” Sharona asks. “Will you marry a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure,” I say. “I suppose I will find someone and then we will have to decide how we’ll raise our children.”

  “I am not sure that you should wait until you marry to start this,” Sharon says seriously.

  “You should know who you are before you marry,” Sharona says, matter-of-factly.

  “You should learn about religion, and then choose a person from within the faith that you feel most tied to,” Sharon says.

  “Sharon and I, we are raising our children in a Jewish home. You would not want to marry someone and then study religion and realize that you do not respect the religion of the person you married. . . .”

  “Oh, I see,” I say, smiling. “I see what you mean.”

  “You have a lot of work to do,” Sharon repeats. “I don’t want to seem like a spokesman for Judaism, but for me, the Torah makes a lot of sense.”

  LATE THAT NIGHT, later than Sharon and Sharona would prefer that I travel on my own, I hail a cab and am filled with the usual apprehension that I feel entering Bombay taxis after dark. “Remember to write the cab number down!” older people often say, and I am amused at the thought of finding myself in a tricky situation, fearing robbery or worse, with the number of the vehicle carefully printed in my notebook. Most often the fear dissipates quickly after the ride begins, and I feel silly for being worried.

  “Which country, ma’am?” the taxi driver asks soon after I get in, and I expect that our conversation will follow well-worn patterns: where I am from, how I like India, and what his impression is of the United States.

  “U.S.,” I say, watching the crowded streets of Byculla pass by my window.

  I look for the sights that have become familiar and favorite: the window into an old man’s apartment lined with a gigantic collection of commemorative plates, the makeshift wooden stall no larger than four feet wide that sells pet fish out of a large stagnant-looking aquarium, behind a sign that reads “Fish Paradise.”

  I know that Sharon and Sharona would have preferred that I stay the night. The truth is that I have a lot to think about. Our conversation has left me with many unanswered questions, and I want to make sense of things in my head, on my own.

  “What is your caste?” the cab driver asks.

  Of course, I think. How fitting that he would ask me this tonight.

  I am not sure how to answer the question. For one thing, his query might imply that he assumes that I am Indian, or part Indian, and I feel flattered, accepted even by the assumption. But it could also be that his English limits his ability to phrase his real question, and that he’s just curious about why a young woman is traveling alone late at night. Either way, it is not a typical start to a conversation. To ask someone’s caste is a loaded question, and, in most circles, plainly rude.

  I decide to answer him with the truth.

  “My mother is Muslim, my father is Christian. My grandmother was Bene Israel; they are a small Jewish caste in Maharashtra.”

  “Haan,” he says, nodding, as if he knows whom I am referring to. I wonder if he does.

  “And you? What are you?” he asks.

  “I am studying religion.”

  “It is good to study,” he replies. “I am Brahmin. We are study caste.”

  “Yes,” I say, not sure what else to say.

  “Hindus are very good people. No drinking, no bad words, no fighting, no . . . bad words . . . no drinking. . . .”

  I have heard these arguments before. “Don’t leave out vegetarian,” I add, looking out the window as streetlights streak past my view.

  “Haan! No meat!”

  “Right.”

  “Muslims are bad people,” he says, taking on a more serious tone. “They are all terrorists. What do they want? I don’t know what they want. Can you tell me what Muslims want?”

  “It’s a complicated question,” I say. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  “They attacked your country. They attacked my country also.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “You are married?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not married?” he asks, turning in his seat to look at me, as if he can’t believe my answer.

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nbsp; “No, not yet.”

  “What is your age?” he asks.

  I hesitate, reluctant to tell him.

  “Twenty-eight,” I say finally.

  “Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho . . .” he says regretfully, shaking his head and knocking his temple with his left hand, as if his head is a block of wood. “Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho . . .”

  I think of Tony, whether if I had never come to India we would be engaged by now. The driver pulls his composure back together in order to deliver some statistics.

  “In India, in village, people marry at eighteen. In city, people marry at twenty-four, twenty-five. When do people marry in States?”

  “It depends. Sometimes twenty-five, sometimes thirty, sometimes later. It depends.”

  “What caste will you marry?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I say. “I will wait and see.”

  “Your mother is Indian?”

  “She was born here.”

  We pull up next to my house, and I instruct him to drop me at the gate.

  “This is your mother’s house?”

  “Yes,” I lie. “She’s inside.”

  “She must be wanting you to find hus-band,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “No?”

  “Good night,” I say, counting several small bills to give to him.

  “You should find hus-band from the same caste, it is better.”

  “Good night,” I say, annoyed, slamming the door on the way out.

  I unlock the black iron gate of Bilva Kunj and drag my feet the ten steps up the driveway to the door of my apartment. Once inside, I drop my bags, shed my shoes, and sit on my bed, turning on the television. It’s late morning in New York. A thirty-eight-day standoff between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has come to a close; thirteen of the militants inside the church have agreed to be deported to various countries. I fall asleep, and dream that I am walking in Manhattan, trying to cross Canal Street on a Saturday afternoon. As I walk, I hear the cries of the hawkers around me interspersed with my sandals hitting the pavement, and a constant refrain, like a heartbeat: “Which caste? Which caste? Which caste?”

  SOMETIMES, AFTER I HAVE finished my vegetable shopping, I stop in at B. Merwan, an old Irani café behind Grant Road Station, whose décor does not seem to have changed much since it opened in 1914. B. Merwan’s table-tops are made of marble, and its wooden chairs are dark and well worn by a steady stream of ancient-looking customers, almost all of them men, who come faithfully each day. It’s dark inside, and a few patrons seem permanently in place—I wonder if they ever go home. The menu features a steady diet of milky tea, coffee, eggs, and bread for under twenty rupees each, a fraction of what it might cost elsewhere. I come to B. Merwan for its famous milk cake, and to read. Because I know that the look of the place has not changed since it opened, I know that this café existed, in much the same way it does now, when Nana lived here.

  One day, I notice an elegant elderly woman in a sari drinking tea by herself at a table adjacent to mine. Her white hair is pulled back in a bun.

  “Excuse me, but where did you get your bracelet?” she asks, pointing to the black elastic hair band I wear on my wrist, and I take it off and show her.

  “Actually, it’s a hair elastic,” I say. “I keep it on my wrist so I don’t lose it.”

  “Oh, I see,” she says. “I asked because we have a shop at home, and the black people are always asking for rubber bracelets to wear on their wrists, but I cannot find them. They believe they will not get electric shocks if they wear them. It’s not true, of course, but they believe it.”

  “Where is your shop?”

  “Back home, in South Africa.”

  “Are you from South Africa?”

  “I’ve lived there all my life.”

  “But you have family here that you visit?”

  “My family is lost.”

  It takes me a moment to register what she’s said.

  “Lost?” I ask.

  The lady pauses for a moment, with a strange smile on her face. I recognize the look, one of an older person who has decided to let someone younger in on a secret.

  “My grandparents were brought from Assam to South Africa during the time of indenture. This was in the 1860s. They thought they were going on a month-long holiday. The British rounded up so many people and told them this story. My grandparents took all six of their children, and they went. They didn’t know they were going to work in the sugarcane fields. They were fooled; they signed a contract—they couldn’t read, they didn’t know what they were signing. The British were very cunning, also very cruel. For years, my grandparents and my parents kept up with the family back home, they wrote to my uncles and aunts in Assam. They knew all the family news. Then we didn’t hear from my uncles for some time. When I was going to India for the first time, I said to my father, ‘Why don’t you give me the address? I’ll see what’s happened to them.’ We came by ship, in 1963. When we arrived in Bombay, I showed my family’s address to the Tourist Office here. They said, ‘How long has it been since you have heard from them?’ I told them that it had been several years. ‘But don’t you know?’ they said. ‘This whole area has been flooded.’ So that’s how my family was lost. The rest of my family was in South Africa. Quite a lot of us.”

  I scoot my chair closer to hers and rest my elbows on her table.

  “And when it came time for you to marry, you found other people from the same community?”

  “Oh yes, we wanted to stay to our own kind. Actually, my mother was from Amritsar. My father’s family was from Assam. My grandmother, my grandfather, they all had Chinese eyes. As children we were confused; we used to say, If you are Indian, why do you have Chinese eyes?”

  “You have beautiful eyes. How do you think you got your gray eyes?”

  “I have diabetic eyes! My eyes have turned a different color with time. If you see in my passport, or photographs from my wedding, I had black eyes.”

  “Really? I have never heard of that.”

  The waiter puts a dish of milk cake in front of her.

  “Oh, perhaps you don’t want that—there’s so much sugar,” I say, conscious of her diabetes.

  “Why not?” she says, with a girlish shrug of her shoulders. “You know, you only live once . . . and you only die once.”

  “Quite right,” I say. “Plus, you’re on holiday.”

  “Indeed. When I came to India for the first time, it was on holiday. I had never been here before, but somehow I liked it. It all felt very familiar. I didn’t feel out of place. I came with my three sisters, my cousins, my sister-in-law.We thought, We may never come again, let’s make the most of it. We stayed three months. We went to Kashmir, to Simla, all over. Now I try to come here once a year. I go to Bombay, to Delhi, other places.”

  “What do you do when you are here?”

  “Oh, I visit places. I go shopping, of course. After all, I am a lady!”

  “You wear saris always?”

  “Oh yes. All we wear back home is saris. My grandmother, she brought India with her, you see. She never left her food, her ways, her Gita. She taught us everything. After the contract was finished, my grandmother saved money her whole life to come back to Assam. She used to tell us stories of the rains, of the floods. In those days, Assam was always having floods. She was crying of home until her dying day. But she never saw India again. My grandfather died, and it was too difficult to travel. . . .” She gets a faraway look, then interrupts herself to focus back on me. “What brings you to India, young lady?”