Honey, my Love,
I know my people will have and do have a lot to say. The same will be the case with your people. But so far, your mother has been kindness itself. She has, as it were, given you to me. And I must say I am lucky. Sweetheart, are you going to eat your heart and mine too for other people’s sake? If you really love me then you will have to put up with everything and that too cheerfully. . . . If I cannot smile at looking at your pretty eyes it is not worth the trouble. I want you. It is for you to choose.
I do not want you to love me because you loved me once and you feel you have to now. Whatever you do dearest, you do with a free will. Neither of us have any control over our people so what cannot be cured must be endured. Do you agree, Sweetie?
Be good and write soon.
Xxx
Hubby
This letter startles me the most. It seems that Nana considered leaving her husband for fear of what their families and communities would think. At this stage Rachel and Ali had no children; had she left him in 1938, she might have gone on to live an entirely different life. Instead, he must have persuaded her to stay.
When I reach the end of the folder, I am exhausted. I look outside and realize that I have been poring over Ali’s tiny script for the better part of a day. Julie arrives, and is concerned to see me sitting in the dark.
“You will ruin your eyes, I think so!” she says, opening up the shuttered windows, letting in the afternoon light.
There is one last letter, dated January 11, 1940. I do a rough calculation; in 1940 Nana would be twenty-three, living in Bombay. Ali would be living in various parts of Gujarat and visiting her every few months. From what I can understand from the letter, they must have had a fight on his most recent visit.
My darling wife,
I am really and truly sorry for what happened on the eve of my departure. You are a wise girl, you can realize the depth of my feeling for you. After the clouds disappeared I saw the moonlight and by Jove, what a silver lining. Your sweet kisses I will always miss till we meet again. I have discovered something—Darling, why did you not kiss me like that all these years? Is it that you too have a weakness like me to want to be kissed? X. Here is one from me.
Fond love and true kisses on your sweet lips
Yr Hubby
I close the folder, my grandfather’s words spilling through every impression I had of him as a child: the tall, magnanimous provider; the eccentric; the heartbreaker. I lie down on my slim bed, closing my eyes and trying to imagine how it would feel to receive letters like these from a man. I think about what Nana might have felt, reading these letters for the first time. Such extremity bound into one relationship. The gaps and the silences he complains of remind me powerfully of her, of how quiet she could be, of how prodding her to talk could provoke her to say nothing at all. I feel the familiar pull of missing her.
THE NEXT MORNING, I wake up early and read the last letters again. Then I flip the pile over and see something new, a thin stack of pages tucked into a pocket of the folio.
The pages are in Nana’s handwriting and seem to be ripped out of a diary. I run my fingertips lightly over the deep impressions of my grandmother’s fountain pen as if it were Braille, wondering what the unfamiliar Marathi characters mean. Pages and pages of text, written on a discarded date book: “Friday, January 28, 1949.” “Saturday, January 29, 1949.” I have to find someone who can decipher this for me. Instantly, I think of Shoshanna Auntie. Shoshanna Auntie is the head cook of ORT India and matron of the girls’ hostel. She has a soft, rounded appearance and a gentle way about her, and I like to drink tea with her in the afternoons when I’m waiting to meet with my cousin Benny Isaacs.
That afternoon, I find Shoshanna making lunch for the staff of the school. My request confuses her.
“You want me to read some Marathi for you?” she asks. “But you won’t understand what I am saying!”
True, I tell her, but you can tell me what it means, what my grandmother wrote in this book. I am slightly fearful, and hopeful, that Nana has revealed her secrets in this diary, and my thoughts leap to my most private questions about her life—if she was ever officially married to my grandfather, if she regretted her choice to leave her religion, what it was like to live as the third wife in a joint family in Pakistan. Shoshanna shrugs and says cheerfully, “As you like.” She washes her hands and wipes them on her apron, then sits down at one of the lunch tables and puts on her bifocals.
She spends several minutes looking at the pages, turning them over, studying them carefully. She seems to be having trouble making out the letters; some of them have bled into one another with age. I become more and more anxious, sitting on my hands like a child. Finally, she looks up, smiling with recognition.
“These are recipes!” she says. “These are very, very old Bene Israel lady recipes! Sweet ladhus to feed the woman after birth, halva to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. I have not seen these foods for so many years—my grandmother, no, my grandmother’s grandmother, she used to make these sweets, but no one makes them anymore!”
I’m crushed that the pages aren’t diary entries. I had wanted so dearly to have some words that Nana had written in her own hand. But then Shoshanna Auntie begins to speak the recipes aloud, and we begin to work on translating them.
A Treat for a Coconut Day
Coconut Halva
Take 2 coconuts; 2 cups of sugar; 1½ cups of mava, 4 of almonds blanched and sliced.
½ teaspoon of minced nutmeg and cardamom powder; ghee.
Grate the coconut. Make a thick syrup with the sugar and then add all the ingredients and mix well. Remove from the fire when quite thick and spread evenly in a deep dish which has been lined with ghee. When cold and firm, cut into squares and serve.
Coconut Blancmange
Take 2 coconuts; 4 spoonfuls of corn flour; 4 spoonfuls of sugar; essence of rose.
Grate the coconut. Soak half in two pints of boiling water and after ten minutes, squeeze out the milk. Keep half a cup of this milk aside. Heat the rest till it boils, then dissolve the corn flour in the cold milk and add it to the pot with the sugar. Throw in the grated coconut and stir continually till it thickens. Add the essence, mix well, and when slightly cold, pour into wet molds. Chill and serve.
I hear something of Nana’s cadence in Shoshanna’s recitation. In this litany of ingredients is a song of portions, one that traveled with Nana from her mother and her mother before her, and now finds me. I remember something that Nana said, many times: that recipes don’t just make food, but teach you patience and care. Among the recipes are things that she made when she was happy, to celebrate—my favorite is a dessert called sheer khurma, made of vermicelli noodles, cardamom, and cream. Then there are also recipes for things she made when she was sad—I remember watching her at the stove stirring a pot of shredded carrots, almonds, and sugar to make carrot halva. You have to be careful, she told me, that you don’t feed anyone else with the food you have made in sadness.
I try, unsuccessfully, to make coconut halva on my two gas burners, and I think of how Nana would scold me for trying to cook the coconut mixture over too large a flame. Hearing her small voice chiding me makes me laugh. I say a prayer of thanks for the window in my mind that Nana’s papers have cracked open.
I WAKE UP AT four every morning like clockwork, wheezing and coughing, the previous day’s exhaust printed on my lungs. Lately, in the silence of these early hours, I feel something else, the beat of my heart in my throat like a drum. I put two fingers underneath my jaw and I count. One . . . two . . . three-four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight-nine. Sometimes it feels as if my heart is skipping a beat. I’ve now been in India almost ten months, and I feel the winding down of my year abroad. It’s a tidy thought, to spend a year away, to return with vivid stories. But it’s too soon to go back, I know that now. I’m not ready to go home. The truth is that I’ve barely started what I came here to do. I have pages and pages of notes about ceremonies, rituals, a
nd traditions that I have barely begun to document. There are so many more people that I need to interview, so many more places I need to visit. I understand now why some people devote entire lifetimes to one subject. My fear of failing knocks on the door and begs to be let inside.
“When do you think you might come back?” my mother asks over the phone. She wants to be supportive, but I can hear the concern in her voice. There has been rising tension between India and Pakistan in recent months, and now the international news is full of talk of war. India has withdrawn its high commissioner from Islamabad and suggested that Pakistan’s high commissioner leave New Delhi.
“I can’t come back until I make a success of things.”
“What would be a success?” she asks gently.
The truth is that I want to be accepted here more than anything. I want to understand the story of the Bene Israel and find a way to tell it; I want Rekhev’s approval; I want the grocer and the vegetable man in Bhaji Gali to recognize me when I approach. I want to make myself understood in Hindi. I want to fit in, to live here and feel at home. I want to like myself in this place. Some days, those goals feel within reach. Other days, they’re more elusive than ever.
ONE AFTERNOON, I’m in a taxi on my way home, stopped at an intersection near Haji Ali Mosque. Scrawny boys of about twelve or thirteen press magazines and books to the windows of the cars, shiny copies of Cosmopolitan, Time, and Popular Mechanics, bootlegged copies of books written in English and set in India. A boy comes to my open window, and I shake my head pre-emptively to say: No, thank you, I’m not interested. But he persists, keeping his chin on top of his stack of books while he shows me the covers and quickly recites the titles:
“Indepreter of Maladees?” he says hopefully. “God of Small Tings?”
I shake my head. No, no. Not interested. But he sees my eyes alight on his copy of Midnight’s Children.
“Want, madam?” he says, holding the book inside my taxi and raising his eyebrows for emphasis.
No, no. I shake my head. No.
He quickly looks over his shoulder to check if the light is changing. Just as it does, he drops the book into my lap. The taxi speeds forward.
“Wait!” I call after the boy. “Your book!”
We lurch into the chaos of several lanes of traffic merging into one, and I watch out the back window as the boy hands his stack of books to another boy and runs at breakneck speed to keep up with my taxi. I hastily ask the driver to pull over to the side of the road, where we meet the boy, panting, on the other side of the intersection.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I say in English as the boy wipes his brow, still panting with exertion and looking very proud of himself.
I shake my head in exasperation at his stunt. I give the boy three hundred rupees, twice what the bootlegged book is worth. The boy looks at the money and asks me if I need change; I tell him to keep it. My driver clucks his disapproval.
“Be careful!” I call out to him as we drive away. As I look back, I see the boy waving to me in sheer delight, his right hand flopping from the wrist like a little bird.
“Bye, madam!” he calls after me. “Bye-bye, madam!”
A few days later, I see the same boy across the street from my house. This time he’s selling a series of neon-colored plastic watches, and his eyes brighten when he sees me.
“Madam!” he says, running over to me. “Want watch?”
I thank him and tell him I’m not interested. I learn that his nickname is Rintu, and that he lives near Grant Road Station with his mother, who is not in good health.
“What kind of sick?” I ask, trying to practice the Hindi I have been learning with Mr. Shukla.
He shrugs, not sure what to say. All of the street kids have a story, but maybe his mother really isn’t well. We’re standing in front of the bus station. There’s a tea shop there, which sells glass cups of hot, steaming liquid drawn from a large cauldron in the back, and grills simple sandwiches over a large, flat griddle. I’ve been tempted by both the tea and the sandwiches, but the stares of the silent men who sit watching me from the road have prevented me from going inside.
“Do you want a sandwich?” I ask Rintu, gesturing inside.
His eyes widen in disbelief. He looks hopeful and reluctant at the same time, unwilling to believe that my offer might be genuine.
“Come,” I say, and bound up the stairs.
“One sandwich,” I say to the man standing attention at the grill.
The man looks at me and at Rintu, sizing up the situation and smirking at me.
“What kind of sandwich?” he asks.
“Rintu? Tell the man what you want.” Rintu looks at the menu in utter amazement. Then he orders a sandwich with every possible item on it.
“Cheej?” the man asks me, indicating that Amul cheese, the canned delicacy of India, will cost extra.
“You want cheese on your sandwich, Rintu?” Rintu looks embarrassed, then excited. “Yes, madam,” he says, smiling.
The cook gives me a disapproving look, sprinkling shredded cheese on the bread and grilling everything Rintu has asked for—sliced cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, potatoes.
Rintu inspects the sandwich making, and begins directing the cook on how he’d like his meal prepared. Suddenly Rintu’s become a gourmand.
When the sandwich is complete, we sit in the shop and I watch Rintu eat it, his eyes getting larger as he devours the vegetables barely contained between two flimsy layers of bread. Our fellow patrons sit and watch us furtively. We leave the shop and walk toward the bus station, Rintu following behind me.
Rintu looks up at me as if he’s expecting me to deliver a final word. “What do you say?” I ask, feeling like a schoolteacher.
“Thank you, madam,” he says shyly.
THE SHARP RING of my phone punctures the morning. It’s the Bombay coordinator for the Fulbright. “Have you been following the news?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, but I’m not sure what she means. I worry that there’s been another terrorist attack.
“The U.S. Department of State is encouraging American citizens to leave India.”
“Has something happened?”
“Because of the threat of war,” she says.
“With Pakistan?”
There have been recent exchanges of mortar and artillery fire across the Line of Control in the disputed region of Kashmir, and the news is filled with talk of disintegrating relationships between the two governments. But it is hard for me to imagine that India and Pakistan would fight a third war now. It seems far worse when I read the Western news, which makes it seem as if the two countries are on the brink of launching nuclear attacks, than when I read the Indian press.
“The State Department would prefer that Fulbrighters go back to the U.S.”
“But I can choose to stay. . . .”
“They would prefer that you didn’t.”
“I see,” I say, and thank her before hanging up.
When my irregular heartbeat wakes me up the following day, I make an appointment to see a specialist at Breach Candy Hospital. He gives me a Holter monitor, a mass of wild-looking colored wires coming out of a box. The contraption is strapped to my skin underneath my salwar kameez.
“What’s that you have on your chest?” Julie exclaims when I walk in the door and she sees the surgical tape peeping out of my collar. I explain that it’s a monitor to show the beating of my heart, that the doctor is worried about me.
The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Page 31
