The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir

by Shepard, Sadia

  Time slips forward, and I experience it in a way that I never have before, without calendars. I notice the rising heat as January becomes February and February becomes March, but this, too, feels familiar. Bombay is a kind of home to me now. Nana is a part of my present. I spend my days photographing and videotaping Bene Israel families and celebrations, and now people know me. I’m the teacher from ORT India, the American girl with the camera, the one whose grandmother was a Bene Israel.

  “Why don’t you take up a job here?” Rekhev asks me one afternoon, echoing my own thoughts. “You could teach full-time at the Jewish school, or work for a filmmaker.”

  “And what about my life in the U.S.?”

  “Is it asking for your return?”

  It’s true that I have nothing concrete pulling me back to New York—no job, no relationship, no apartment. What would be the harm of staying here, I wonder, for another year, perhaps two?

  One day, I see a white woman, presumably American, dressed like myself, in a modest beige salwar kameez with a printed dupatta thrown over one shoulder, her brown hair in a ponytail. I can see that she’s not a tourist, here for a yoga retreat, or on her way to an ashram. Something about the way she walks, adeptly dodging men on the street, keeping her eyes straight ahead, tells me that she lives here, and I wonder what her life is like—if she’s married to an Indian, if she has children, if her center has shifted from wherever she was from before to here. I wonder if I could do the same thing, if someday my friends in New York will say to one another, “Whatever happened to Sadia?” and the answer will be that I went to India and never came back.

  NOW, ONE OR TWO afternoons a week, I accompany Leah or her mother on one of their shopping errands, and learn how a Bene Israel wedding is put together. Meanwhile, Leah is preparing for her IATA exam at ORT India, which will certify her to work in a travel agency in Israel if she so chooses. Leah’s reasons for wanting to migrate are not spiritual. Her concerns are more practical, economic. One afternoon, Leah and I go in a taxi to pick up the wedding invitations, up a long flight of stairs to a dusty old print shop. There are sample cards in Hindi, Marathi, and English script, with icons of birds, wedding bells, and flowers. Leah pays for several boxes of formal wedding cards, separating them into two piles, one for her family and one for Daniel’s.

  I see how efficient Leah is at getting around Bombay, the only place she has ever lived, and I admire her impulse to move to Israel, as much as I don’t quite understand it.

  “Basically, taking my education here, the jobs I was getting, I was not satisfied,” she explains during the taxi ride home. “Then I thought, ‘Going to Israel and getting a good job is good.’ So I was planning for career only to go to Israel. Then . . .” She laughs nervously, her practical nature dissolving at the thought of her fiancé.

  “And then what happened?” I ask her, poking her in the shoulder to tease her.

  “Then I saw Daniel. . . .”

  BACK IN LEAH’S APARTMENT, her mother looks agitated, crisscrossing the imaginary quadrants between living and cooking spaces.

  “We have a lot to do. Leah, Joseph, you have to help me. . . . We have to deliver half the invitations to Daniel’s family in Thane. . . .”

  I offer to take the invitations to Daniel’s family. Leah’s eyes light up at the idea.

  “Then you can meet him, Sadia,” she says, with a smile. “You can talk with him, find out what he’s thinking.”

  DANIEL MEETS ME at Thane Station in a rickshaw, and he seems much different from my students at ORT India. He seems more confident, and more comfortable talking to an unfamiliar Western woman. On the way back to his house, Daniel tells me that he has been living on his own in Israel for the last two years. I wonder how he feels about his upcoming marriage, if this is something that he chose, or something that his family wanted. I hope, for Leah’s sake, that he wants to get married.

  I deliver the wedding invitations to Daniel’s mother, a jolly woman with glasses and curly dark hair. She kisses me on both cheeks and tells me how happy she is to meet me. Their apartment is located in a relatively new stucco complex with a courtyard. The place is quite large, a marked contrast from Leah’s apartment, with two bedrooms and a large living room. I notice a tiny Hindu maidservant scurrying in and out of the kitchen with a broom. Daniel translates his mother’s Marathi into English for me, and over tea I learn that Daniel’s mother is a widow who lost her husband several years ago. She tells me that her older son and his wife and baby son live nearby, and Daniel, of course, lives in Israel. Her two sons are her greatest joy in life. She was not supportive of the idea of Daniel’s moving to Israel when he first broached the subject, three years ago; she didn’t want him to be so far away from her. But now she is proud that he has relocated there and is doing well. With the addition of an Indian Jewish wife, she will consider him settled, and she will be content. Has she been looking for a long time for his wife? Not long, she says, with a shake of her head. She announces that she is going to the market to buy groceries, and instructs Daniel to host me properly and offer me some cake.

  “So, Sadia,” he begins, as he sits down and pours me more tea, “you’re the famous American photographer. . . .”

  “Hardly,” I say, laughing.

  “But really,” he says, “everyone is talking about you these days. About how you’ve come to take photos and do interviews with the Bene Israel. You are doing a kind of study, is that right?”

  “A personal kind of study, I suppose.”

  I tell Daniel about Nana, and about why I came to India, which intrigues him. “So she was a very important person for you, then,” he says, and I nod. “May I ask you a personal question?” I say yes. “Do you think your grandmother wanted you to marry a Jewish person?”

  In this way, Daniel and I fall into an instant friendship, talking frankly about life and family and his plans for the future. I tell him that I think it might have made Nana happy if I were to end up with a Jewish person, but that she wasn’t one to insist on her opinion, or even always make it known.

  “And have you ever considered marrying?” he asks. “If you don’t mind my asking, that is.”

  “Once,” I say. “I considered it. But then I realized that I had more traveling that I needed to do, more work.”

  “Ah, you’re a dreamer, I can tell,” Daniel says. “This is my trouble, too.” He sighs and looks out the window. “But this is why Leah is a good match for me.”

  I feel suddenly as if I am a spy, sent from the other side, but I’m thrilled to find myself in such a position.

  “Did you want to have an arranged marriage?” I ask, casually.

  “Arranged marriage is the best thing, I think,” he says, nodding. “Somebody my mummy selects for me. Because she knows me better than anybody else. So she knows my . . . with what sort of girl I can spend the rest of my life. She’s the best judge. So I left it on her to decide.”

  Did he ever consider any Bene Israel girls living in Israel? I ask him.

  “I met some Bene Israel girls who were born in Israel,” Daniel tells me. “But basically I found them to be more Israeli than Indian. . . . I’m not saying that I think Indians are better, but . . . there are certain values. I feel more comfortable with the idea of having an Indian Jewish wife.”

  Daniel begins to tell me what led him to move to Israel, how through the study of the Torah he began to learn about the importance of the Holy Land.

  “In the Torah, so much importance is given to a Jew going to Jerusalem.” He taps his heart three times with his right hand. “I started to feel that, although I liked India, I was meant to wrestle with the questions of the Torah there, not here.”

  “I’ve noticed that sometimes people don’t distinguish between the Israel of the Torah and the modern nation-state of Israel. Are they different?”

  “But it’s not something you can separate, Sadia. Ever since the destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersal of the twelve tribes of Israel, we h
ave been longing to go back there, to be reunited in Jerusalem. Even at weddings—even at my wedding—we will crush a glass. Why? To remember the destruction of the Second Temple, even in a time of great happiness to remember that sadness. We pray facing Jerusalem, even now. Israel now— it’s a redemption, it’s a renewal.”

  “Do you worry about the violence there? Do you worry about raising your children in a place of such uncertainty?”

  “I want to raise my children in a Jewish country, with Jewish schools, where they will learn to speak Hebrew, not like I do, but as a mother tongue, alongside Jewish children from all over the world. I want that for them.”

  “Was it difficult to make the adjustment from India to Israel?”

  “Actually, Sadia, this was the second time that I migrated.”

  “The second time?”

  “The first time I tried was three years ago,” he explains. “I went with one suitcase, with hardly anything in it. I found a place to live and a job, and at night I used to sit in my room and cry, missing my mother and India.”

  After a month, he came back home to Thane, feeling defeated. He worked in Bombay for another year, saving up money, learning Hebrew, and studying the Torah. At the end of that year, he was resolved to try again, and this time he made a success of things. He found work in a hotel, and shared an apartment with several other men about his age. But something was missing. His mother began to send him photographs of young women in the Bene Israel community.

  “This is Leah,” he says, showing me the two photographs of Leah and her family in Magen Hassidim Synagogue that served as his introduction. Leah is wearing makeup in the pictures and looks happy and attractive. He smiles as he looks at them, and I realize that they hold the same power for him as his photographs did for her.

  “What happens after the exchange of pictures?” I ask. Daniel explains that if both families are amenable to the match, a visit is arranged. The prospective bride and groom are given a few minutes alone.

  “When we met for the first time, I could tell that she was very much tense and all. She asked me, ‘How is your nature?’ I told her that I’m a cool guy; there are no dos and don’ts in my house.”

  “You could tell that Leah wasn’t sure?” I ask him.

  “Generally, you go to see a girl, a girl sees a boy, and you don’t immediately give the answer, yes or no. The bride’s family says, Okay, we’ll tell you afterwards. . . .”

  “But with Leah?”

  Daniel blushes deeply. “At that time I felt that it was . . . it was on. Very much on.” He smiles. “And then . . . I was on the top of the world!”

  Daniel sings this last part and actually giggles. The spirit of his excitement is infectious.

  I RETURN ONCE A WEEK or so for lunch with Daniel and his mother. I shoot interviews with each of them, and volunteer to help Daniel memorize his wedding song, the traditional Bene Israel hymn that all bridegrooms sing as their brides walk into the synagogue. It’s a gorgeous, lilting song about the beauty of the bride as she walks toward the bimah to meet her future husband and recite the marriage vows. Daniel has trouble mastering the difficult tune in conjunction with the words, but by my fourth visit to Thane he’s making progress.

  “I think I’ve got it.” He stands, closes his eyes, and sings the words with affection. When he’s finished, I clap to show my enthusiasm.

  “You’ve done it, Daniel! Leah will be really impressed.”

  “I hope so,” he says. “Sadia, do you think that she’ll like Israel?”

  “I haven’t been there, Daniel,” I say. “I don’t know.”

  “I worry that she will miss India a lot,” he says. “Her mother and her friends and everything. But for me, now, Israel is home. I hope someday that it will be for her, too.”

  24

  WHICH WAY IS EAST

  MIAMI, MARCH 2000

  Lately, I wake up with the same thought, as if I am trapped in a specific moment that I have lived through. It’s not quite a dream; more the feeling of inhabiting a memory. the feeling of inhabiting a memory.

  Though I know I’m in Bombay, for the first few moments that I am awake I feel convinced that I am in Nana’s room on Aragon Avenue in Coral Gables. I can remember the sense of her nearness, and I stay there for a few moments, unwilling to wake up. I recall her small frame next to me in the bed, the sound of her knitting needles clicking by my ear. In this reminiscence, it is March 2000. My parents have left the Boston area to teach architecture at the University of Miami.

  Nana can no longer stand the cold Boston winters and wants to be closer to her sons, now living in other parts of Florida. My mother, father, and grandmother are living in an apartment for the first time. It is a place my father took sight unseen: an L-shaped apartment in a four-hundred-unit pink stucco building, with a steak house on the ground floor and palm trees all around. Miami seems like a foreign country after Boston, and I can’t quite make sense of my family’s creating a life here. My father’s mahogany colonial furniture looks ridiculous, too large and old-fashioned for this place. My mother’s miniature paintings from Pakistan look out of place, relics from another reality.

  I have flown home for a visit from graduate school in California. I’m in a master’s program at Stanford, learning how to make photographs and documentary films. I am twenty-four, Nana is eighty-two. I am trying to record Nana’s stories, prodding her to talk into my little tape recorder. There never seems to be enough time. There are doctors’ appointments, my mother needs help with the laundry, dinner needs to be made, and Nana can do very little now without resting. Her knees seize up, and her back bends over her cane. Her soft, tiny body is becoming smaller. She is stubborn as always and doesn’t like to admit it, but she is in pain, and I can see it.

  This afternoon, I am determined to stay home with Nana in her bedroom and coax her to tell me about her life. In her bedroom she keeps the old wooden dresser with five drawers. They are hard to pull out now, filled with Nana’s treasures: postcards, balls of yarn, gifts not given, safety pins, greeting cards, birth certificates, old photos, recipes. In this new apartment, this piece of furniture is the only site of her history, the only place with sedimentary layers of objects. Nana is pushing the top drawer closed when I enter, and she looks up at me quizzically while she brushes her hair with a small brush. My mother has told me that Nana has always worried that if I know the truth about her life and the mistakes she made as a young person, I won’t respect her. I want her to know that I am anxious to know everything, that nothing she can say would ever affect what I think of her. Sometimes I am able to coax her into talking—and she will speak firmly and fluidly—but this happens rarely and with little warning. I stand there at the mirror watching her while she brushes her hair, wondering what kind of mood she is in.

  “Nana, I want to interview you.”

  “Me? What for? I have nothing to say.”

  “That’s not true, Nana, you have quite a lot to say.”

  She puts down the brush and looks at her hands, thinking. Then she opens the bottom drawer and pulls out three sets of knitted woolen baby clothes. One is white, one is pale green, and one is pink.

  “Do you like them?” she asks me softly, placing them on the bed carefully. “I am almost done with them.”

  “They’re beautiful, Nana. Who are they for?”

  “They’re for your baby.”

  The idea of my producing a child hovers over the abstract of my future like a remote mirage—something I hope for someday, when I am grown up. I realize suddenly that Nana knows she will not be there when the time comes for me to have a baby, that these baby clothes are Nana’s last project, and when she finishes them she will leave us. My eyes sting with this new knowledge.