“Well, I’m looking for my lost family, actually, in a way. My grandmother was from here, from Bombay. She was from a small community here that practices Judaism. I am here to learn about them, and to learn more about my grandmother.”
“We’re not so very far removed from that in my family. My granddaughter has married a Jewish person, someone she met here in Bombay, and they have moved to Israel.”
“Did she marry an Indian Jew?”
“No, no, an Israeli Jew. He was working here in Bombay. My granddaughter is in the law, and she met him in her company. Oh, we were not very happy about it all. We were all against it, especially my husband. The Jewish religion is so different from ours! But my granddaughter said, ‘No, Ma.’ All my grandchildren call me ‘Ma.’ She said, ‘Jews are just like Hindus—they are very family-oriented.’ Now my granddaughter and her husband live in Israel, and they are quite happy, they have two children. If they like each other, who are we to say different?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, extending my hand, “I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Sadia.”
“I am Mynavathi.”
“That’s a beautiful name. Myna, like the mynah bird.”
“I used to chatter like a bird when I was small,” she says, getting up and giving me a twinkling smile.
Somehow, I can imagine it.
“I hope you find what you are looking for, Sadia.”
“Thank you,” I say. “You, too.”
PART THREE
DEPARTURES
19
PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
KARACHI, JUNE 2002
I have never traveled to Pakistan without my mother and grandmother, and never as an adult. This trip will also be the first time I have traveled to Pakistan from India, a replication of the journey Nana made after Partition with her two children, my mother and her younger brother Sibtain. The flight between Bombay and Karachi is a mere hour and fifteen minutes, a span of time almost too short to comprehend the gulf that separates the two. Both are cities by the sea, both are bustling metropolises, and when I have been asked about Karachi while living in Bombay I have been tempted to bridge the gap. “It’s like here,” I’ve heard myself say. “Karachi is the financial center of the country; the television industry is there. It’s fast-paced; people come from other cities to work there, to reinvent themselves.” But I know that the two cities, though linked, are wholly different. They are like distant cousins who share familial traits but were raised apart.
In Bombay, I line up for the security check with the ubiquitous Australian and Israeli dreadlocked backpackers, outfitted in tank tops, short skirts, and the occasional Indian scarf. My own arms and legs are covered in a long, loose salwar kameez. My bags are filled with embroidered Indian purses for my female cousins, sweets for my aunts and uncles. I wonder what they will think of my gifts—what I can bring them from Bombay that they don’t already have in Pakistan.
From the moment I board the plane, I am aware that I have entered a culture different from the one of the airport. There are fewer people in Western dress; I hear Urdu spoken all around me. Two young women in matching makeup and headscarves say salaam to me as I take my seat next to them. As the flight takes off, they bow their heads and I hear them murmur the Traveler’s Prayer. Islam shifts from a faraway idea, a hidden aspect of my life among the Bene Israel in India, into the center, the forefront of my mind. I close my eyes and instinctively repeat the First Kalimah, the prayer my mother taught me to say as our childhood flights to and from Pakistan took off.
I look out the window and imagine my grandmother on a flight like this one, her arms wrapped protectively around her two children as she watched her birthplace—grand colonial structures, dense slums, the sweeping arch of the Queen’s Necklace hugging the bay—recede and become incomprehensibly tiny.
Nana told me how she learned that she was leaving India for Pakistan— she was instructed by her husband to gather a few clothes and belongings together for a two-week trip. “Things are not safe in Bombay,” he said. “I think we should visit my sisters in Karachi, leave town for a little while, until the violence calms down.”
Nana had an ominous feeling; there was too much uncertainty in the air. She went to the bank and withdrew twenty thousand rupees, more than she had ever carried on her person at one time. She hastily filled a trunk with the family silver: goblets, table settings, picture frames, a ceremonial sword given to Ali by the Jam Sahib of Jamnagar, her grandfather’s walking stick, and a set of ornate water pitchers, shaped like a family of penguins. Under her sari she wore every piece of gold jewelry her husband had ever given her, necklaces heavy around her neck, a pouch of rings and earrings strapped around her waist.
“You haven’t brought any valuables, have you?” her husband asked when she reached the Bombay airport. “It’s not safe. What have you packed in the trunk?”
“Just some clothes for the children,” she lied, rushing ahead to speak to one of her husband’s nephews, Aijaz. She pressed a wad of bills into his hand quietly.
“I need you to get that trunk on the plane,” she told him. “Bribe anyone you have to.”
Nana met the other two Mrs. Siddiqis and their children on board. In India they had lived separate lives, with separate, independent households. Now they were traveling as one family, with three wives, one husband, and several children.
“It’s temporary,” Nana reassured herself. “This will pass, and we will all return to life as before, in India.”
Once they were in Karachi, the newspapers and radio broadcasts were filled with news of communal unrest back home. The Siddiqis tried to acclimate to life as houseguests in this new, unsettled reality. A few weeks after they arrived in Karachi, my grandfather received the news that the properties he had placed in the care of his Hindu business partner had been confiscated, declared Evacuee Property. Overnight, their financial situation had changed. Ali sat at his sister’s dining room table, his head in his hands. He would have to start all over again.
“I have the silver,” Nana said quietly.
“What do you mean?” her husband asked.
“Look,” she said, opening the trunk. “It’s all here.”
“How the hell did you manage it?”
THIS STORY, Nana’s account of Partition, was the only time I ever heard her use the word “hell,” and she always laughed after she said it, as if she were still marveling, all these years later, at her feat. How the hell did you manage it? It’s this phrase of my grandfather’s, repeated by my grandmother, that I think of when I think about Partition. The silver was only a remnant, a sentimental reminder of their life before, but these objects, over a period of years, began to accrue a significance that far exceeded their monetary value.
As my plane nears Karachi, I wonder how much it has changed since 1948. I see the blurred, dusty edges of the city, a wide expanse of low concrete buildings. Almost everything is the color of sand, but for the occasional daub of blue of a hotel swimming pool. From here, Karachi looks like dice shaken and scattered on the desert.
I AM FLYING TO KARACHI to attend the wedding of two cousins. My mother has also asked me to look in on Nana’s flat in Siddiqi House, to make sure it is in order. My aunt Zaitoon, one of the last Siddiqis still living in the family home, has been collecting rent for the flat from long-standing tenants for the last fifteen years, and the money has been accruing in Nana’s account at the Habib Bank. But there are other reasons, reasons that I keep to myself. After nine months of living in India and learning about Indian Jewish life, I want to find out what it feels like to spend time with my Muslim family in Pakistan. I want to see the place that Nana came to when she left Bombay, to imagine what it might have been like for her to leave home, now that I’ve made a home in her city.
Two of my second cousins, Saira and Asad, are getting married. Though the two met as teenagers and this was technically a love match, the general assumption is that the marriage was arranged.
“Did the
y choose it, or did their parents?” I ask one of my aunts on the phone.
“It’s an arranged-cum-love marriage,” she says.
As I walk through the Karachi international terminal, I am acutely aware that I am the only non-Pakistani, the only foreigner, and the only woman traveling alone that I can see. When I was a child in the 1980s, every major airline flew to Karachi. Now there are far fewer; the main flights in and out of the airport are operated by PIA, Emirates, and SriLankan Airlines. The airport has been refurbished in bright, gleaming marble, and I am surprised, again, by the sight of a McDonald’s outside. A line of men wait behind a metal fence, holding signs with names written in English and Urdu. Many men wear long beards, prayer caps, and white kurta pajamas, traditional South Asian Muslim garb that I rarely see outside of Muslim neighborhoods in Bombay. I notice a dark stain, like a shadow, on some of their foreheads, a callus of piety formed as their heads touch the ground five times a day. I am aware of a multitude of eyes on me, a flash of curiosity about why I’m here. I scan the crowd for a familiar face; I am not sure who is picking me up.
“As-salaam aleikum, Sadia Apa!” comes a friendly young voice. It’s Aliyah, the daughter of my first cousin Farah. Aliyah is seventeen now, and looks more grown-up than I remember her; I can tell that she is going to be a beautiful woman. I’m taken aback by how much more assured she looks, with her confident way of throwing her dupatta over her shoulders and the direct, steady look of her eyes, but she has the same wide-open, curious face that I remember from previous visits, the same excited, breathy way of speaking quickly, the same quick laugh. When she was thirteen, she pulled me inside her room, sat me down on her bed, and showed me the copies of teen magazines that she kept underneath her bed for safekeeping. It was only a few years ago, but it seems like a long time now.
Loping behind Aliyah are her two younger brothers, Saleem and Naeem, good-looking, lanky kids with spiky hair and a mischievous air, as if they might crack a joke at any moment. They are close in age, and I’m embarrassed that I can barely tell the two apart.
“Walaikum asalaam!” I stammer, and smile.
On this trip I will see my Pakistani American cousins, who are in town for the wedding like me, as well as my Pakistani cousins, who were born and raised in Karachi. It used to be that they aspired to come to the United States to study and work. Now stories of the prejudice Muslims are facing in the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks have made them want to pursue their education at home or in the United Kingdom. In the car ride back to their house, Aliyah, Naeem, and Saleem fill me in on who is in which school, pursuing which degree; who is married or engaged; and who has decided to wear the hijab since my last visit.
As I settle into the backseat and watch Karachi speed by the car window, I remark on the number of trees, more than I remember.
“Enjoy them,” Saleem says. “This is the last green that you’ll see in Karachi.”
Familiar landmarks, neon signs. Fewer words in English, more in Urdu script. I chose my outfit carefully this morning, a white salwar kameez with a blue border and a matching blue dupatta, but already I realize that I am hopelessly out of fashion, and anticipate that I will be taken hastily by my female cousins to boutiques and tailors to supplement my awkward wardrobe. Even the feeling of being different here is an old, childhood feeling, like re-entering a memory.
Aliyah, Saleem, and Naeem are the grandchildren of my mother’s half brother Waris, the elder son of Bari Amma. Until several years ago, Waris and his wife, Mehreen, still lived in Siddiqi House, but they have since moved to a newer part of the city, into two handsome modern bungalows, side by side: Uncle Waris and Auntie Mehreen in one, their daughter Farah and her family in the other. Their son lives in the United States with his family, while their other daughter lives in another part of Karachi. For the first time, my first stop here will not be the ritual multitiered visit to the various flats of Siddiqi House, the complex negotiation of different entrances and exits, navigating in which order to visit the elders of the family. Instead, we pull into Uncle Waris’s driveway so that I can say my salaams to him and to Auntie Mehreen before putting my bags down in my cousin Farah’s house, where I will be staying for the next week. The chowkidar opens the house gate and nods to us. I try not to stare at the large gun strapped casually across his chest.
Uncle Waris and Auntie Mehreen’s house is long and white, with a large, well-kept lawn in front and a wide veranda. As I come through the screen door to their parlor, I recognize the angular early sixties furniture in protective plastic that they kept in Siddiqi House, as well as the pictures they had on the wall—the same formal wedding portraits hung just a few feet below the ceiling. On a side table, there is a single black-and-white portrait of my grandfather, imposing and elegant, the same picture that used to sit on our library bookshelf in Chestnut Hill, common to all of his children’s homes.
It has been several years since I have seen my uncle Waris—not since he attended a family wedding in the U.S. He is now the eldest male member of the Siddiqi family, and he wears his stature well; he is as tall as I remember and dressed entirely in bright white, from his hair and beard to his kurta salwar.
“Beti!” he says, offering me a seat. “Welcome, child.”
He tells me that I should call my mother to let her know that I have arrived safely; a car bomb exploded in front of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, and she will be anxious.
My cousin Sartaj, his wife, Fatima, and their three daughters are visiting from Georgia, where they own and operate a small grocery store, and enter the room from the kitchen when they hear me saying hello. Sartaj and Fatima have become increasingly involved in the Muslim community in their neighborhood in recent years, and they wear their new roles with authority; my mother has told me that they regularly speak about Islam at schools and community centers. Fatima is a small, fair-skinned woman with a direct gaze and a strong presence. I remember how shy she was when I first met her at Uncle Salman’s wedding. Fatima has worn a headscarf for the last several years, one of the first women in my mother’s family to do so, and she can clearly articulate the reasons for her choice, citing passages from the Qur’an.
I remind myself not to hug my older male relatives, several of whom have become more conservative in recent years and do not generally touch people of the opposite sex. I sit on the floor opposite Sartaj and wave an enthusiastic greeting, putting my arms around Fatima when she comes forwardto embrace me. It has been two years since we have seen each other, since Nana died, and I am happy to see them again.
“Your mother tells me you are in Bombay,” Sartaj says. “How do you find it?”
My instincts tell me that I should tread carefully when talking about India, aware as I speak of the strained relationship between the two countries.
“I love it,” I say. “It’s a very exciting city—very diverse, with people from all over Asia, all over India, and a great number of foreigners.”
“Really?” Fatima says, looking curious.
“You’re on a scholarship?” Sartaj asks.
“I’m studying at the National Film and Television Institute of India, on a Fulbright Scholarship,” I say. I don’t tell them about my project. I don’t say that I am studying Jews. I want to get to know them better, and I don’t want to say anything that will alienate them—not yet.
“Do you like it better here or there?” Sartaj asks, and I’m not sure what to say.
“I have not spent time here in a long while. I’m looking forward to getting to know Karachi a bit more.”
“But you like Bombay,” Sartaj says.
“Nana was from there, and she missed it all of her life. It means a great deal to me to be in her city. I feel connected to her by being there.”
“Ah, you miss your grandmother,” Fatima says, looking at me kindly. I remember how Fatima guided me after Nana’s death and showed me how to perform the Muslim prayer with the rest of my mother’s female relatives, and I nod, suddenly worried
that I might cry. In India, when I talk about Nana with the Bene Israel, I do so to explain why I am in India. Nana is an abstraction, an idea. Here she is a person, a departed matriarch.
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 26
