The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - STORY TELLING

  1 - THE PAINTED CITY

  2 - SHIPWRECKED ANCESTORS

  3 - THE GIRL FROM FOREIGN

  4 - LUCKY CHILD

  5 - M. IBRAHIM, PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER

  6 - THREE PARENTS

  7 - INFLUENCES

  8 - SIDDIQI HOUSE

  9 - SHANTARAM’S POND

  10 - RICHARD AND SAMINA

  11 - ANXIOUS-TYPE NATURE

  PART TWO - FIELDWORK

  12 - THE DIRT COLLECTORS

  13 - HINDI LESSONS

  14 - NATIVE PLACES

  15 - SECOND-CLASS CAR

  16 - OMENS

  17 - JEWS AND INDIANS

  18 - WHICH CASTE

  PART THREE - DEPARTURES

  19 - PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

  20 - NANA’S PAPERS

  21 - TRAVEL ADVISORY

  22 - HIGH HOLIDAYS

  23 - LEAH AND DANIEL

  24 - WHICH WAY IS EAST

  25 - DEPARTURES

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A NOTE ON TYPE

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Sadia Shepard, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Photographs courtesy of the author

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Shepard, Sadia.

  The girl from foreign : a search for shipwrecked ancestors, forgotten histories,

  and a sense of home / Sadia Shepard.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-436-23776-5

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Nana

  When I think of Bombay now, at this distance of time, I seem to have a kaleidoscope at my eye; and I hear the clash of the glass bits as the splendid figures change, and fall apart, and flash into new forms, figure after figure, and with the birth of each new form I feel my skin crinkle and my nerve-web tingle with a new thrill of wonder and delight. These remembered pictures float past me in a series of contrasts; following the same order always, and always whirling by and disappearing with the swiftness of a dream, leaving me with the sense that the actuality was the experience of an hour, at most, whereas it really covered days, I think.

  — Following the Equator, MARK TWAIN

  And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

  —Austerlitz, W. G. SEBALD

  PROLOGUE

  ARRIVAL

  It is the sounds we hear as children that shape us.

  It is the snap-crush of spices under the heel of my grandmother’s hand. It is the slip-splash of her fingertips, sliding fish into turmeric water. It is the thwack of her palms, clapping chapattis into life on her flat stone, a perfect circle, every time. It is the swish of her sari, the click of her knitting needles, the tap-tap of the soles of her feet hitting the soles of her sandals. There lies my grandmother’s Morse code.

  Her voice is quiet and fierce as she braids my long hair, telling me fragments of stories, pieces of her life in India. In my child’s ears she whispers her dreams—strange, frightening dreams that have come to her in sleep since she was a child, predicting every death in our family. She weaves these dreams and these stories into my braids. They are mine now, tied with red ribbons.

  Listen carefully. These are the sounds of my house.

  Downstairs my father is teaching my six-year-old brother, Cassim, to ride a bicycle in the driveway. Cassim is too small; he is falling off the bike and laughing; my father is calling out to him to look straight ahead, don’t look down, there you have it. “Stay straight! Stay on the driveway!” My mother is in the kitchen, talking on the telephone to her brothers in Pakistan. It is afternoon in Boston, the middle of the night in Karachi; she is shouting in Urdu to be heard across the distance. “I’ll be arriving on the sixteenth of next month! What do you need from here? Send the driver to the airport!”

  YEARS LATER, I visit Bombay as an adult, and the city seems strangely familiar, like the end of an interrupted conversation. Its smell: burnt tea, freshly lit fire, fish splayed open and hung out to dry on long sticks, those pungent antennae. Its noise: the cacophony of car horns, the flight of birds overhead, the blaring pop song wailing ever present in the background. Its light: the haze of morning giving way to the splintering bright of noon, and then 5:30 p.m. high tea, when the city looks like a giant, writhing picture show, chaos bathed in a patina of dusty gold.

  The stories my grandmother told me are outlines, marks in black ink on a page, the salient details. Bombay was my birthplace. My mother had twelve children; six of them died. Everything Nana told me about her life was a remnant, a piece of a phrase. Whenever Nana told me stories, I badgered her for details, as many as I could think to ask. I worried that someday, when I needed to tell these stories to explain who I am, I would wonder about the color of the dress she wore in a certain black-and-white photo and she would no longer be alive to tell me. The sum total of what I could imagine about India was contained in my grandmother’s brown vinyl album, hundreds of tiny prints with scalloped edges. What comes in between these details is my own invention; the shape and shade are the work of a grandchild to embroider. I’ve spent years trying to paint the colors in.

  A Fulbright Scholarship allowed me to quit my job, put my belongings in storage, and buy a one-way ticket to India. Now that I’m here, the possibilities are dizzying. I look at the new stamp in my passport, trace the embossed letters with my fingertips, curious about what the next year will bring. In the upper left-hand corner of my visa is an “R,” for “Research.” So mu
ch of what I want to know about my grandmother and my ancestors is a mystery, a well-guarded secret. I am here as an amateur detective on that most American of journeys: a search for the roots of my own particular tree. This is a reverse migration. I have returned to the land that nurtured my grandmother and my mother, to walk where they walked, to make my own map within their maps. In my shoulder bag I’m carrying a curious collection of objects: a crumbling mimeograph of family names, five yellowing books with beloved cracked spines, a handful of sepia photographs of unfamiliar faces.

  I feel very far from Chestnut Hill, from the white clapboard house where I was raised, the tiny eyes of Mughal miniature paintings, the watchful, gilded gaze of my father’s great-great-grandmother’s portrait. The presence of that house stays with me, the happy disorder of holidays unfolding in the embrace of its deep, wide doorways and dark wood. It was a solid kind of place, anchored by my three parents: my father, my mother, and my maternal grandmother, Nana. As a child I thought of our home as a miniature kingdom, ruled by a fierce and benevolent triumvirate. It’s the prospect of adulthood that has brought me here, seeking Bombay, the backdrop of the stories I grew up with. I want to know if it exists, the mythic home my mother and my grandmother spun in their stories. I want this city to fill the gaps in my understanding and make me whole.

  As my taxi speeds through Bombay traffic, a memory of Nana’s voice, its quality of hushed electricity, rings in my ears:

  “Your grandfather built me a house in Bombay, facing the ocean. You could hear the sound of the waves as you slept, as if you were sleeping in a ship. . . .”

  WHAT I KNOW ARE FRAGMENTS. I am here to weave them together, to create a new story, a story uniquely my own.

  PART ONE

  STORY TELLING

  1

  THE PAINTED CITY

  CHESTNUT HILL, 1985 ⁄ BOMBAY, SEPTEMBER 2001

  In the upstairs front hallway of my childhood home near Boston there hung a large, vivid portrait of my mother. It was painted by Bombay cinema painters, those billboard romantics, homesick for undivided India. I remember when the painting first arrived, a sticky evening in 1985, my brother, Cassim, my father, my grandmother, and I impatiently waiting at Logan Airport among a throng of expatriates from the Subcontinent—a sea of brown faces and my tall white father, forming a ring outside of International Arrivals, there to meet the night flight from Karachi. The double doors swung open with a mechanical snap and thud; the passengers began to pour through. Signs with handwritten names went up like a flock of birds, flap-flap, higher! Higher! And cries of “Over here! Over here!” And “There she is!”

  Mama emerged with the portrait under one arm and a look of happy triumph on her face. We soon saw why. She had asked the painters to right the hand that fate dealt her—in the portrait she’s fairer, thinner, and richer. Her dark hair is lit with shades of gold, and her right hand cups her slim cheek, as if she is lost in thought. A pair of shoulder-length diamond earrings graze her collar. It’s a remarkable likeness; there’s something unmistakably familiar about the heart-shaped face, the mischievous angle of the chin. And yet to accept it as an accurate representation of my mother is to accept a double reality, the Indian shake of the head, back and forth, right to left, yes and no both.

  The city in the background of the painting—blue, tented, the skyline punctured with minarets—I have always assumed to be Bombay, the city she and my grandmother left behind during Partition, the city my grandmother missed deeply. There’s no doubt that it’s a dreamlike, hazy rendition of pre-Partition India, a likeness of my family’s remembered home. This mythic city is the stage set of the stories I was told in childhood, a place frozen in time. It cannot, by necessity, be the India I walk through as an adult.

  I ARRIVE IN BOMBAY on a sweltering day in September 2001, fifteen months after my grandmother’s death. I have received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in India for a year. The contents of my New York apartment are now packed into a storage space; with me I have five cameras and two suitcases stuffed with supplies. I’m hoping to use the time here to discover how to navigate the places of my grandmother’s childhood and to fulfill a promise that I made to her before she died, to learn about her ancestors. For the beginning of my scholarship, I will be based in Pune, a city 170 kilometers to the southeast, but my first destination is Bombay, my grandmother’s hometown.

  I decide to spend the night in Colaba, a part of Bombay frequented by Western travelers. It is only a few days after the World Trade Center attacks, and I push thoughts of the chaos back home into a corner of my mind as I walk along the Causeway, a roofed path where hawkers sell cheap clothing and knickknacks. I pass stacks of newspapers in English, Marathi, and Hindi, all running the same images of smoke and debris.

  I find a room in an old guesthouse. I set my bags down and shower, dressing in a worn cotton salwar kameez left over from one of my trips to Pakistan. Around my neck is something I found among my grandmother’s papers—a tiny, bent copper key on a long gold chain. I have no idea what it’s for, but I’ve been wearing it as a sort of talisman, a reminder of her, since she died. I like the idea that something of hers will make the journey back, with me.

  I walk into the bright heat of the day, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to go to Worli Sea Face—a mostly residential part of the city that faces the ocean. As we drive the crowded streets, fragments of my grandmother’s stories come back to me. I remember a conversation we had—how many times?— as we stood by the stove, peeling buds of garlic and ginger and mashing them to make a paste, that sharp concoction that formed the basis of everything we ate. The story always began the same way; I always asked the same questions.

  “Your grandfather built me a house facing the ocean on Worli Sea Face. It was a beautiful white house with three stories and two gardens, one front and one back. You could hear the waves crashing on the shore. It was like sleeping in a ship. A big ship. On the front was the name of the house, Rahat Villa.”

  “Named for you, Nana?”

  “Haan, named for me. My husband named the house for me. Your mother was born there, and we lived there until we had to go to Pakistan. My mother and my brothers lived with me, and I was independent then, it was my own home. It was not like in Karachi, with so many wives, so many children.”

  “Nana, why did you marry Grandfather if you knew he was already married?”

  “That’s not a story for a young girl.”

  I have told the taxi driver everything I know: Worli Sea Face, a big white house, Rahat Villa, facing the ocean. As we drive beside the shore, I see now that there are precious few private homes left; they have been replaced with high-rises. I have a sinking feeling. Perhaps it’s not here; perhaps it’s been torn down. We reach the end of the buildings facing the water, and I ask the driver to go back the way we came, slower this time. I see an Art Deco bungalow,white stucco, but it’s two stories, not three. Is that it? No, she said three, with a garden in front and a garden in back. And a shrine. I remember that there was a tiny Sufi shrine, a small alcove built into the wall, which my grandfather had restored.

  And then suddenly I see it. The house looks familiar, as if I have seen it a million times, and I realize that I must have seen photographs of it, pasted into my grandmother’s album. Where it should say “Rahat Villa” it now reads “Shandilya Villa,” but it is unmistakably the same house. I ask the driver to stop and I send him away, before realizing that I don’t know where I will find a taxi back.

  But I’m here. I walk up the driveway, toward the house, with the sea at my back. There’s the carved gazebo on the front lawn, ringed with knotty trees, and the grand front door, dark wood with a brass knob. There’s the wall where my mother peered into the neighbor’s yard, crying out for her ayah, her nurse Lucy, who was offered more money to work for the family next door. There’s the covered veranda where my great-grandmother grated coconut.

  A watchman approaches me slowly, curious about my purpose.

  “Mr. S
handilya hain?” I ask. “Is Mr. Shandilya here?” I guess that the new owner has named the house after himself.

  He waves me ahead, and I approach the side entrance. It occurs to me after I have rung the bell that I have no idea what I will say. A houseboy opens the door, and I repeat my question: “Mr. Shandilya hain?”

  There is some confusion. There are, apparently, two Mr. Shandilyas, one elder and one younger. Asked to clarify, I request to see the elder Mr. Shandilya. I am ushered into the hallway, and I am surprised again by how familiar it all seems. There is something in the heft of the white marble and the intricate pattern of the lattice that is Nana all around me. She chose these walls, these mantels and fixtures, and these choices were gestures of permanence—strong, heavy, timeless materials. The six years she lived in this house with her first two children, her mother, and her brothers was the only time she ever had a place of her own, something she would try to replicate for the rest of her life but would never find again. Her husband, the provider, was a rare visitor to Rahat Villa in those days. He would arrive unannounced, then leave with little warning, for his other homes, his other wives and children. When Nana left Bombay for Karachi after the Partition of India, she left behind her birthplace and her community for a new life; she became the third wife in a joint Muslim household, all three families under one roof.