An American Brat Read online

  AN

  AMERICAN

  BRAT

  Also by Bapsi Sidhwa

  The Pakistani Bride

  Cracking India

  The Crow Eaters

  Water

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ©1993, Text by Bapsi Sidhwa

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300,

  Minneapolis, MN 55415

  (800) 520-6455

  www.milkweed.org

  Published 2006 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen

  Interior design by Corey Sevett

  The text of this book is set in ITC Galliard.

  06 07 08 09 10 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN-10: 1-57131-049-5 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-57131-049-1 (paperback)

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-57131-829-9

  Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges support from Anonymous; Emilie and Henry Buchwald; Bush Foundation; Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; Cargill Value Investment; Timothy and Tara Clark Family Charitable Fund; Dougherty Family Foundation; Ecolab Foundation; General Mills Foundation; Kathleen Jones; D.K. LIght; McKnight Foundation; a grant from the Minnesota State Arts board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders; Sheila C. Morgan; Laura Jane Musser Fund; an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art; Navarre Corporation; Debbie Reynolds; Cynthia and Stephen Snyder; St. Paul Travelers Foundation; Eleen and Sheldon Sturgis; Surdna Foundation; Target Foundation; Gertrude Sexton Thompson Charitable Trust (George R.A. Johnson, Trustee); James R. Thorpe Foundation; Toro Foundation; Weyergaeuser Family Foundation; and Xcel Energy Foundation.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the first edition as follows:

  Sidhwa, Bapsi.

  An American brat / Bapsi Sidhwa. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-915943-73-5 (cloth) 1-57131-005-3 (paper)

  I. Pakistanis—Travel—United States—Fiction. 2. Teenage girls—United States—Fiction. I. Title

  PR9540.9.S53A82 1993

  823—dc20

  93-27523

  For

  Noshir

  Minoo

  Feroze (alias Fred)

  And in memory of Laurie Colwin.

  AN

  AMERICAN

  BRAT

  Contents

  Title page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Zareen Ginwalla hurried into the hall when the bell rang, waved the cook who had popped out back into the kitchen, and opened the portals of their home to her husband. Zareen never thought of the entrance as a mere ingress. The ancient door, grooved by the centuries and touched by vestiges of faded dyes, was too resplendent to allow for that.

  But as Zareen stretched to her toes to kiss Cyrus, the usual lift to her spirits that the antique conferred was missing. She dutifully helped her husband out of his navy blue blazer and, as she handed him his cardigan, gave vent to the emotion that had been agitating her all afternoon.

  “I’m really worried about Feroza.”

  Cyrus, whose canny instincts had registered the clouds lurking behind his wife’s abstracted welcome, at once grew wary. In any event it was not customary for Zareen to greet him at the door, cardigan in hand.

  Guarding his eyes Cyrus raised his chin — ostensibly to loosen his tie — and wondered if their daughter had told Zareen what had happened a few evenings back, when he’d been constrained to put his fatherly foot down. If so, he’d better watch out. His shoulders stiffened; it was purely reflexive, accustomed as he was to attack before his wife got him on the defensive. On the other hand, if Feroza had said nothing, which it occurred to him was more likely, he’d better be circumspect.

  “What’s wrong?” Cyrus inquired cautiously, his voice conveying just the right tinge of mild concern.

  “She’s becoming more and more backward every day.”

  Set in tight-lipped censure, Zareen’s face betrayed the hours spent in solitary brooding and the dark anxieties her brooding had spawned. Cyrus, who thought his daughter was if anything too forward, maintained his guard. He examined his fingernails cursorily, made a discreet sound in the back of his throat, and raised his eyebrows a fraction.

  “She won’t even answer the phone anymore! ‘What if it’s someone I don’t know?’” Zareen mimicked her daughter in English. “I told her — don’t be silly. No one’s going to jump out of the phone to bite you!”

  Her high-heeled slippers clicking determinedly beneath the hem of the printed silk caftan she usually wore in the house, Zareen followed her husband into the bedroom. She always wore high heels, “to measure up to my husband,” and removed them only when she got into bed or stepped into her bath.

  It had been a typically gorgeous winter’s day, bracing, bright, and windless — except for an occasional breeze that sighed through the chrysanthemums in their neighborhood and masked the reek of exhaust fumes from the buses and rickshaws on the road. Even though the sun was about to set and most of the gas heaters were off, Zareen did not feel the need of a shawl.

  Cyrus sat on the bed to remove his shoes, avoiding contact with the film of Lahore’s ubiquitous dust that veiled their polish, and Zareen fetched his pajamas and slippers from the dressing room.

  She continued: “I went to bring Feroza from school today. I was chatting with Mother Superior on the veranda — she was out enjoying the sun — and I had removed my cardigan. Feroza pretended she didn’t know me.

  “In the car she said: ‘Mummy, please don’t come to school dressed like that.’ She objected to my sleeveless sari-blouse! Really, this narrow-minded attitude touted by General Zia is infecting her, too. I told her: ‘Look, we’re Parsee, everybody knows we dress differently.’

  “When I was her age, I wore frocks and cycled to Kinnaird College. And that was in ’59 and ’60 — fifteen years after Partition! Can she wear frocks? No. Women mustn’t show their legs, women shouldn’t dress like this, and women shouldn’t act like that. Girls mustn’t play hockey or sing or dance! If everything corrupts their pious little minds so easily, then the mullahs should wear burqas and stay within the four walls of their houses!”

  When alone, Zareen and Cyrus conversed mostly in Gujrati, interspersed with odd snatches in English. That their most trivial conversations often took a political turn was not surprising. In Pakistan, politics, with its special brew of martial law and religion, influenced every aspect of day-to-day living.

  C
yrus had stretched his lank, pajamaed frame on the bed and locked his hands behind his head. Zareen fretted about the room, plumping pillows, shifting magazines, talking as she unnecessarily tidied the immaculately ordered room.

  “It’s absurd how things have changed. I was really hopeful when Bhutto was elected. For the first time I felt it didn’t matter that I was not a Muslim, or that I was a woman. You remember when he told the women in Peshawar to sit with the men? That took guts!”

  They had watched the rally on television. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, riding the crest of his popularity, had dared to fault the gender segregation practiced by his volatile tribal supporters in Northwest Frontier.

  “Even Ayah and the sweeper’s wife asked, ‘What are these women’s rights?’ Our women’s committees were making real progress. He was open-minded — didn’t force religion down everybody’s throat. Now it is as if none of that happened.

  “Could you imagine Feroza cycling to school now? She’d be a freak! Those goondas would make vulgar noises and bump into her, and the mullahs would tell her to cover her head. Instead of moving forward, we are moving backward. What I could do in ’59 and ’60, my daughter can’t do in 1978! Our Parsee children in Lahore won’t know how to mix with Parsee kids in Karachi or Bombay.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cyrus said. “When the time comes, they’ll learn in two minutes. Everybody’s feeling frustrated, not only women. Your Bhutto also let us down, asking the army to control law and order! Didn’t he know he was inviting martial law? Nationalizing even the cotton gins, ruining the economy.”

  Cyrus spoke bitterly, reflecting the sense of betrayal that straddled the country. Bottled up for thirteen years of martial law, their dreams had soared like genii with Bhutto’s electoral victory. The return to democracy had made Pakistanis feel proud again, a part of the modern world community.

  “And the idiot prohibited drinking in clubs!” Cyrus said, as if this measure capped all offenses. Lately political discussions with Cyrus took this turn.

  “What do you mean my Bhutto; he was as much yours then! He was forced to by the fundos,” Zareen retorted. “You know what he said when they accused him of drinking: ‘Yes, I drink! Yes, I drink whiskey: not the blood of poor people!’” Zareen sounded absurdly theatrical even to herself.

  Cyrus struck his forehead and groaned. “If you repeat that once more, you’ll turn into a green parrot and fly away — or I’ll commit suicide.”

  Surprisingly, the enforcement of prohibition was also a sore point with the wives in their intimate circle of affluent Muslim friends. Unable to congregate over drinks at the Punjab and Gymkhana clubs, the men drank instead at each others’ homes. Since the men didn’t drink after dinner, the food was served late — around midnight. The resentful wives sustained themselves on juices, sodas, and soup until then. Like Zareen, they felt they were forced to chaperone their men on an endless round of evening binges.

  “It might do you all good to drink less,” Zareen said, pursuing this train of association to its conclusion.

  “I thought we were talking about Feroza,” Cyrus said mildly, directing his wife to less hazardous ground. “Let’s stick to that. I think Feroza is confused by these sudden switches in attitude. She probably feels she has to conform, be like her Muslim friends. There are hardly any Parsee girls her age. She wants you to be like her friends’ mothers, that’s all.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though.” Cyrus twisted his neck to follow Zareen’s restless passage across the room. “Zia or no Zia, I’d much prefer she stay narrow-minded and decently dressed than go romping about looking fast and loose.”

  “What d’you mean?” demanded Zareen, turning from straightening the portrait of Zarathustra to glower threateningly at her recumbent spouse.

  Cyrus lay back and shut his eyes.

  “It’s okay for you to run around getting drunk every evening, but I must stop wearing sleeveless blouses.” Zareen’s voice sawed like an infuriated bee’s. She would have much preferred to shout, but she was conscious of the servants in the kitchen. “I know you think my sari-blouses are short, but they’re not half as short as your sister’s cholis. At least I don’t run around flashing my belly button.”

  While Zareen paused to marshal her inflamed thoughts, her gaze fell on her husband’s hapless shoes. She picked them up by their laces and dropped them, clattering, outside the door for the cook or ayah to clean. “If you think I’m going to cater to this … this mullah-ish mentality of yours, you’re mistaken,” she said, slamming the door shut. “I’ll dress the way my mother dresses, and I’ll dress the way my grandmothers dressed! And no one’s ever called the Junglewalla women indecent!”

  Zareen marched across the room and looked down at Cyrus. “More than can be said for this mullah lying on my bed. Get out of my bed, you mullah!”

  At the sudden increase in the volume of her voice, Cyrus opened startled eyes and winced to see his diminutive spouse towering over him, arm flung out and finger pointed at the door.

  Cyrus raised his head from the pillow, partly to defend himself against his wife’s unexpectedly belligerent posture, and partly to display his hurt countenance. “I never said anything like that. Of course you’re all one-hundred-percent decent women. They’re my family, too, damn it. And you’re my wife!”

  He spoke with such vehement conviction and injured pride that Zareen became confused. She imperiously raised her chin — and found herself glaring sternly through the window at their gardener’s bald head.

  A ragged turban partially covering his baldness, the gardener stood on the tips of his bare toes on a rickety stool. He was trimming the gardenia hedge with a hefty pair of shears.

  Zareen made a mental note to get him a pair of tennis shoes. She had also been late in getting the servants their yearly supply of coats and sweaters from Landa Bazaar, that bonanza of secondhand American garments that rained on Lahore every winter and clothed its freezing populace to bizarre effect. One occasionally saw bearded clergy and hardy villagers floating about in outmoded women’s coats in startling colors.

  “So?” Cyrus inquired amiably, stacking the pillows behind his back to sit up. The question was meant both to recall Zareen to her initial mission and to offer her a chance to disclose the strategy she had evidently worked out to countermand Feroza’s alarming backwardness.

  Zareen made an effort to compose herself. She bent to adjust the knob of the gas heater and, steering her thoughts back to their original track, sat down on the bed facing her husband. Her hands in her lap, her dark eyes filled with candor, she tilted forward. So intent was she on her choice of words that she was unconscious of the silken thrust of her caftaned bosom and its effect on her husband.

  Cyrus slyly lowered his eyelids.

  “Jana,” Zareen used the endearment persuasively, “I think we should send Feroza to America for a short holiday. She’ll be taking her matric exams in a few days. She’s been so depressed lately. You’re right, it’s these politics.” When Dorab Patel, one of the seven judges on the supreme court bench who was distantly related to Cyrus, had told them how Bhutto was being treated in jail, and how thin he’d become, they had all been depressed.

  “I think Feroza must get away,” Zareen continued. “Just for three or four months. Manek can look after her. Travel will broaden her outlook, get this puritanical rubbish out of her head.”

  Manek was Zareen’s younger brother, only six years older than her daughter Feroza. Considering the furthest Feroza or Zareen had ever traveled was across the border to Bombay, the suggestion to send their daughter off by herself to the United States was audacious. Zareen looked at her husband anxiously.

  Cyrus shifted his position to settle a little lower amidst the pillows. “Okay, I’ll think about it,” he said, and Zareen, who had expected a flat “no,” was so taken aback that she walked meekly into the bathroom, bolted the door, and collapsed weak-kneed on the pot (as was her wont when she sought seclusion) to ponder the consequences of her an
xieties.

  She, of course, had no notion how relieved Cyrus was that Feroza hadn’t told her mother anything about the incident involving the young man. Cyrus wrapped a scarf cut from an old satin sari round his eyes and, curling up to a soft pillow, his mind full of silken images of his wife, drifted into sleep.

  Almost a week earlier, Cyrus had driven home from his sporting goods store on the Mall to see his daughter talking to an unknown young man, a rugged-looking fellow with shirt cuffs rolled up to display broad wrists and thick forearms.

  The winter days in Lahore are short. It was dark enough that February evening for Cyrus to look through the net screening into the sitting room without being seen. Feroza and the muscular youth sat across the room from each other, a large Persian carpet demarcating a salutary space between them. Feroza sat back in her stuffed chair demurely enough, but Cyrus did not like the way the young man leaned forward, sitting on the very edge of the three-piece sofa. His black leather jacket, crumpled and carelessly cast aside, looked reptilian and lewd.

  By the time Cyrus had tiptoed past the window and entered the kitchen from the side of the house, his fertile imagination had bridged the distance between them. He envisaged the man’s face close to his daughter’s, his rough-trousered knees touching hers.

  Zareen was out, and the bedroom lights had not been switched on. Cyrus parted the bedroom curtains in the dark and peeped through the split in the sitting-room curtains. They sat exactly as he had left them: Feroza well back in her chair, attentively listening, the young man on the edge of the sofa, earnestly talking.

  The fellow was persuading Feroza to act in the annual Government College play. Obviously Feroza had refused, but the lout persisted. Couldn’t he take “no” for an answer? Would he ask his own sister to act in front of that mob of sex-starved hoodlums?