English Lessons and Other Stories (6 page)

I said, “Don't be so generous — give her the box of chocolates.”

She grinned mischievously, “And give the sari to Raju?”

“No — we'll find him something else.”

“I'm only joking.”

“I know your kind of joking.”

We settled on a bottle of hand lotion for Kanti instead, but I lay next to Veeru with a sense of apprehension afterwards, watching the winter sun rise over my roses and chrysanthemums as the mali tended them outside our window. Finally, I told him what I found in her luggage. He was appalled, as I knew he would be — all he kept saying was, “My daughter? My daughter reading
the Koran?” He would not sleep till I promised to watch Simran carefully for signs that she might be in danger of becoming a Muslim.

You couldn't miss Simran sitting on that bar stool in the residence hall lounge because she was a splash of red, gold and orange in a room full of faded jeans, sweatshirts and denim jackets. She had the panicked look of a recently arrived foreign student, and I knew she came from some convent girls' school in Pakistan or India from the way she shrank backwards every time a man walked too close. She sipped her drink looking over the top of the glass, huge fish-shaped eyes darting from one speaker to another.

I was in love before I crossed the room to ask her name, introduce myself as Mirza, the head of the Pakistani Cultural Society, and ask her which part of the subcontinent she was from. When she said Delhi, India, I hesitated a bit. Then I asked, “Did your family originally come from Pakistan before 1947?”

“Yes,” she said. “Lahore.”

“Lahore! My family is from Lahore, too.”

They weren't, but I was in love, so they had to be.

She looked relieved, moving a little on the bar stool, just enough so that I heard the chink of glass bangles and noticed she had painted toenails. I hadn't seen a woman with bangles or painted toenails in North Carolina in two years — all the time I'd been there. I praised Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful, for rewarding me by sending her.

I have to say she made no attempt to be artful. She simply managed to fill my entire mind within ten minutes. I listened to her demure talk about coming to America to learn computer science and thought, “You don't know ishk yet, meri jaan. When
you learn ishk you will forget computer science and nothing but love will enter your mind.”

Aloud, I said, “It is very refreshing to find a woman from our part of the world who is interested in such important topics as computer science. Progress depends on women's education, I have always said.” Of course, I had said nothing of the kind, ever, but that was what she wanted to hear so I said it. And I added casually, “You know, I am a computer science major too — just a few years ahead of you, that's all.”

She was impressed. I could see it from the way she looked at my glasses with a new respect. I am not as tall as most men from Pakistan, and my hair is already thinning slightly though I'm only twenty-one, but I straightened up to my full height and said, “Just call me if you have any trouble with your classes at all.”

And I took the opportunity to give her my phone number and get hers. Then as I advised her about the different Indian and Pakistani cultural groups and expounded on how Indians and Pakistanis are friends in America, the American students left us alone as usual in a little island surrounded by ignorance, and together we watched them become steadily less and less inhibited. She showed a most proper disgust, and if I thought she could have been a little less curious I kept it to myself. A red-haired fellow lurched too close and I said, assuming a slight accent, “You gotta watch out for these guys.”

Over the next few weeks, I made myself indispensable to her. I advised her on everything, whether I knew anything about it or not. My older brother always said, “You have to make them think you know more than they do, or you don't get their respect.” I also know the promise of protection is the easiest way to seduce a woman — at least, any woman from my part of the world. So I offered her mine.

I showed her how to use a cash machine (I was glad she didn't ask how the damned thing worked, because I couldn't have told
her), explained the phone system so that she could call home, introduced her to the transient world of international students as if she were my personal property… and very soon everyone thought she
was
my property. All but Simran herself.

If only I had known then — she was bent on driving me mad.

She had been home only a few days when I began to notice she'd started doing some strange things. Keeping a diary, for instance. I began to watch what I said to her because I was getting the feeling she was going to write it all down in that diary. It was as if she was studying us, looking at us as if she'd never seen us before, questioning, questioning everything. I said, “Simran, it's really not ladylike to ask so many questions.”

“Not ladylike, Mummy!” She let out a peal of laughter. Was it my imagination, or did she laugh a lot more and louder since she came home? Even her limbs imitated American indiscipline; her gestures were wider, and when she wore a sari I was dismayed that she no longer walked with a graceful glide, but strode as firmly as any shameless blonde woman. For this I sent her to America?

I found some comfort in the thought that her behaviour did not seem to be that of a woman who wishes to convert to Islam.

Try as I might, Simran never seemed conscious of the fact that I am a man. The same girl who told a friend she felt uncomfortable talking to a male professor without the door of his office open or another woman present regarded me as if I was an amusing younger brother. She allowed me to bring her laddoos
from an Indian store in Raleigh, and to buy her chocolates from Woolworth without attaching any significance to my actions. I started buying more expensive gifts, as if my job in the Union cafeteria made me a millionaire. Did she need film to send pictures home to her Mummy and Daddy? I bought her a dozen. Did she not have a poster for her little dorm room? I bought one for her. Did she need a calculator? I held forth for an hour on the relative merits of different brands and then I ran out and bought her the most expensive one.

I always knew where to find her — wrapped in a shawl in a corner study carrel on the third floor of the library, reading and reading as if her life depended on it. The books she was reading had nothing to do with computer science — I can't remember what they were, but I'm sure they must have been where she learned the tricks that she used later to drive me to do the things I did.

The semester was coming to an end when she told me her parents had decided they could afford to spend the money for her to fly home for the three-week break. I was distraught. No warning. No discussion of how I might be feeling. No concern for my well-being while she was gone. No “Mirza, how will you survive?” All she said was, “If I wasn't going back to India, I'd take a train and go all over looking at this country, talking to everyone, everyone along the way. Why don't you do that, Mirza? It might be fun!”

Sometimes she really made me angry with her suggestions. Why didn't I do that? Because the only country I would want to explore would be Pakistan — that's the only country that is beautiful. And besides, having spent all my money on her, I didn't have much left to go anywhere over the three-week break. Instead, I would stay on the empty campus in my room, as I'd done many times before — only this time I would have her to wait for.

But would she wait for me? I began to worry. She was nineteen years old. I asked some friends in the Pakistani Cultural Society and they thought Sikh women are usually married by the time they are twenty. Could it be that her parents wanted her to return to India to be engaged or married? It would, after all, be wiser if she were not dangling before every man's nose in this fashion. I thought I must tell her my feelings and discuss — what? — marriage? I suppose so. But somehow I had a difficult time imagining her, a Sikh, married to me.

A few days before she left, taking the Amtrak train to New York to fly home, I gave her an English translation of the Koran. I don't know what she thought when I gave it to her — all I know is that she treated it like all my gifts before; she was too kind to refuse them but she could not imagine the feeling that drove me to give her anything — everything. I walked back to my cell in the dorm and picked up the campus directory. Idly, I looked up her name and noted that her permanent address and phone number in Delhi were listed. I copied them carefully — as though I were in any danger of forgetting them once I had seen them! Then I sat down to write love poetry to my oblivious beloved.

Veeru is not accustomed to being challenged in his own household, and that, too, by his daughter. Almost in the first week she was home they began to argue regularly, and it made me anxious about her future. I told him we should try and introduce her to some nice families, maybe get her engaged before she went back to America. In my way of thinking, he'd brought it on himself by wanting her to have this American degree. I never studied in America, and I have been content because I have always known instinctively and naturally just how far I can push the men around me, when to be winsome, when to be silent, when to become
visibly sick with internal pain rather than unbecomingly obstinate. In four months in “the States,” as she called it, Simran had lost all restraint, all decorum.

I had always been careful to find out what she was reading and to know what she was thinking. I'd bought some of her books myself — introduced her to great literature: Sir Walter Scott, Lord Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, the Brontës and Charles Dickens. But now I felt shut out as I looked at the titles she was reading — all American sidewalk psychology and all this American liberty theory that only America with all its land and so few people can afford. I didn't want her to spend her time shopping like all her old friends from college in Delhi did till they were decently married off, but it is a big responsibility to have an unmarried daughter, and I didn't want to be blamed if she went astray.

I'll never forget the moment I knew she had betrayed our trust, the money we had wasted on her education, the way we had borne the dire predictions of our friends in sending her abroad to study. All in one moment, I knew we had created a monster, an ungrateful, rebellious, selfish monster and we had no one to blame but ourselves. The knowledge came to me the moment I picked up the telephone and heard a male voice interspersed with static say, “May I please speak to Simran?”

I said, “She is not here.”

And I slammed the receiver back on the hook. I saw Kanti looking at me with surprise from the kitchen and I said shortly, “Wrong number.”

I had to protect my daughter's reputation.

I had only been in Grand Central Station once before, when I arrived in the States and took the train to Raleigh two years ago.
It's a comforting place for me, grimy and garish with lots of beggars — Americans call them “homeless people” — just like home. I had taken advantage of a Christmas discount and traced my beloved's last journey to this place. I don't know what I had in mind going there — it just seemed better to leave the campus than spend my time listening for the tinkle of glass bangles, lying in her spot on the third floor of the library.

I decided to get some coffee (Americans have no idea how to make tea) and a donut. It's a strange thing about donuts. Americans have twenty names for the different kinds of donuts, more than they have for the relationships in their families. So I just pointed when the girl at the counter asked what kind I wanted. She looked at me nervously. I suppose my eyes looked a little bloodshot — I had been trying to stay awake at the same time as my Simran and sleep at the same time as she did, too.

I sat in the glass booth dubbed a café, gazing past a long line of telephones, and afterwards I would have taken my return ticket and wandered back to the platform for the Raleigh train, but I felt a tap on my shoulder and some fellow with a Yankees jacket over baggy corduroy trousers said in Urdu, “Are you from India or Pakistan?” I drew myself up proudly and said, “Pakistan.”

“I too am from Pakistan,” he said, lapsing into English. And he placed his tray on the table next to mine and slipped into the seat beside me so we both sat looking outward at the great hall milling with people.

“In Pakistan there would be many more people at a train station,” I mused, companionably.

“You are missing home?” he said sympathetically.

“Yes, of course,” I said, not without a twinge of guilt, for I really hadn't thought of my family ever since I met my new love.

“You want to call home? I have a credit card.”

“You are very kind, but how could I use your credit card?”
I was somewhat surprised. We Pakistanis usually have a little less trust of strangers than he exhibited. Usually we will at least ask one another's village of origin before offering hospitality.

“Well, it is not really my credit card,” he explained. “It is a credit card number you can use for the phone. And then you can call anywhere you like and never have to pay.” His glee began to remind me of an American TV commercial, so I stopped him with a line I'd heard them use. “So what's the catch?”

He closed his eyes with all the sanctimony of a Christian at prayer and said, “Allah is my witness, no catch. Here, you go and try the number. If your call goes through you can pay me only ten dollars — not even enough for one call, leave alone all the calls you can make for free with this number.”

I knew I was placing myself in danger. I was a computer science major — did he think I didn't know how easy it is to trace a call with a bum credit card? But my obsession was strong in me and I yearned for one syllable of Simran's voice, so I made my way to the phones and tried the call, billing it as swiftly as my fingers could enter the code to some fat rich American who could well afford it.