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Meanwhile, I struggle to learn Marathi, so that I
can converse with the middle-aged woman who works as a servant in our
home.

Every once in a great while, it occurs to me that
I lead a schizophrenic life: I am a Parsi teenager attending a
Catholic school in the middle of a city that's predominantly
Hindu. I'm a middle-class girl living in the country that's
among the poorest in the world. I am growing up in the country that
kicked out the British fourteen years before I was born but I have
still never read a novel by an Indian writer.

But this is what it means to be a secular
Bombayite, I tell myself—to take all the contradictory parts of
your life and to make a unified whole out of it; to know that you are
a cultural mongrel, the bastard child of history and to learn to be
amused, even proud of the fact.

Because the alternative is unacceptable. If,
instead of bemusement you allow yourself to feel rage at being the
product of a colonial education system that scarcely prepares you for
the realities of living in your own country, if you question why you
know the words to every Bob Dylan song instead of the words to songs
by—but there you see, that's the problem, you don't
even know who your country's Bob Dylan might be—then you
are asking questions whose answers you will not be able to handle.

And the story is complicated and it is hard to
know who is implicated in it. The British, with their famous
declaration of building an Indian elite who looked Indian but were
English

‘in taste, in opinions, in morals and
intellect,' yes, of course the British are implicated but
that's too easy. And then you examine the complicity of those
Irish nuns whom you adored as a child and who left their green,
fertile island to come to this dry, sunbaked subcontinent in order to
educate the pagans and you are swept in a tidal wave of mixed
feelings, resentment and good will battling each other for supremacy.
But wait, the moving finger moves on and now it points at your
community, the chauvinistic old women who kept framed photographs of
‘apri' queen on their peeling walls, and the old Parsi
men who carried parasols in order to protect their light skins so as
to distinguish themselves from the Hindu hordes, and your parents,
who insisted you take piano lessons instead of learning to play the
sitar, as many of your Hindu friends did. And finally, you yourself
are implicated because surely you could have sought out the novels of
Tagore as you did those of Hemingway, surely you could prevent the
others from teasing the Hindi teacher in ways you would not dream of
teasing those who brought you the works of Shakespeare?

The only hint of my childhood love affair with
Britain now comes from adoring The Beatles and the Fabs are not
really British any more, seeing how they now belong to the world and
seeing how George Harrison himself was infatuated with India.

I subscribe to a youth magazine called
J.S
., which features full-size blow-ups of pop stars like Peter Frampton
and Gary Glitter, that I paste on the walls and ceiling of my small
study.

A moment of reckoning arrives along with a huge,
glossy poster that I have traded for a Queen album. The poster has
the Jackson five on one side and the Osmonds on the other. I know
that my decision to honour one or the other group on my wall will say
something about my musical taste and sophistication and I know that
in order to be considered cool and sophisticated, I must choose the
Jacksons. But my heart belongs to Donny. Call it puppy love.

The punk movement that is sweeping across the West
does not reach us. As always, we are about five to ten years behind.

We are still singing
Puff the Magic Dragon
at school picnics, although thanks to Jenny's worldliness I am
also playing air guitar to Queen's
Bohemian Rhapsody
.

But the biggest influence on my life is Bob Dylan.
The nuns had taught us
Blowin' in the Wind
in school and
we all know Peter, Paul and Mary's airy-fairy version of it.
But I don't really discover the raw power of Dylan until
Arvind, my pen pal in Calcutta, plagiarizes the words to
Dylan's
Shelter fromthe Storm
and tries to pass them off
as his own. When, embarrassed by my effusive praise, he finally
confesses the poem's true author, I check out
Blood on the
Tracks
. And fall in love with the ingenious word play, the
effortless rhymes, the worldly humour and yes—even the voice.
Soon, I am greedily seeking out every Dylan album that I can find.
And my own poems begin to change. Gone are the earnest, Robert
Frost-in-fluenced poems about hard-working old men and rainy nights.

Suddenly, I am writing about one-eyed gnomes and
moth-ball mirrors and the Ticks of Tanzania.

Discovering Dylan also unwittingly provides me
with the perfect weapon in my ongoing battle with my mother. Mummy is
convinced that Dylan, with his nasal whine, is a joke on her,
somebody whom I've invented with the express purpose of
irritating the hell out of her. The voice of a generation, the
conscience of a nation, the bard of the 1960s is reduced in my
mother's mind to a toad with laryngitis. ‘Listen to the
lyrics,'

I say, in an unconscious echo of the words spoken
by Diana's older sister a lifetime ago. But mummy has a ready
answer: ‘If God had wanted us to understand what he's
saying, he would've given him a better voice.'

Mummy is trying to end my friendship with Jesse.
After a year of singing her praises she has suddenly turned on her
and is bad-mouthing her to anyone who will listen.

Jesse has become good friends with my mother's
nephew, who lives around the corner from us. They often meet at the
bus-stop near his apartment building and ride together to college.
This has my mother apoplectic. She is convinced Jesse will scheme to
have her poor, innocent nephew fall in love with her and then break
his heart. All of my mother's shame at having grown up poor is
now brushing up against Jesse's privileged, affluent
upbringing. She casts this budding friendship between Jesse and her
nephew in sinister, suspicious terms. ‘Everybody knows she was
in love with that Muslim fellow in her hometown,' she says,
contempt dripping from her voice like fat trimmings. ‘Now to
get over him, she's trying to trap my poor Dinshaw.'

My father, Mehroo and Babu stare at her blankly.
They have no reason to dislike Jesse—other than the fact that
my nightly chats with her make me skip dinner—and they don't
think Dinshaw is the unworldly saint that mummy is making him out to
be. She turns away from them with dissatisfaction, her hissing hatred
needing a better audience.

She finds it in her sister Villoo. ‘Do you
know what that wicked son of yours is doing, nachoing, dancing with
that Godless girl?' she says. ‘You know she's an
atheist? Says so herself, and wah, that too with pride. You mark my
words—she is going to use our Dinshaw and then abandon him like
a ba-nana peel in a garbage dump. She's not in our
league—every-body knows her father is worth millions.'

Villoo aunty says a reasonable thing. ‘If
she's such a bad girl, why do you let your Thritu be friends
with her?'

I want to applaud Villoo for her logic. But mummy
speaks first. ‘My Thritu is not having an affair with her. She
is not a boy, who will go all lattoo-fattoo over some arrogant
Godless girl. But he's
your
son. Follow my advice, don't
follow, what do I care?'

Dinshaw's sister, Persis, gets into the act.
So does her best friend, Shinaz, a nice-looking woman with a hooked
nose that she generally keeps hidden behind an embarrassed
handkerchief. They are good girls, respectable, sexually
inexperienced, conventional, who accept without question the
authority of their priests, parents and teachers. Jesse's very
existence, the way she carries herself—her jaunty, assertive
walk, the joyous angle of her head, her eccentric

crackle of laughter, her merciless mimicry of the
affected, pseudo-British way in which upper-class Parsis speak—is
an affront to them. In my kinder moments, I understand how
threatening and alien someone like Jesse must appear to them, how she
must make their own lives seem so miserably constricted and small and
without possibility, how she must make them wrestle with sleeping
dreams they don't even know existed.

But my charitable moments are few. I love Jesse
too much to be kind to her detractors. Most of the time, I fight
battles on her behalf, battles that she is blissfully unaware of
because I cannot bring myself to tell her how much resentment she
inspires in people who barely know her.

‘What the hell does she think wearing those
pink pants?'

Persis says.

‘I tell you, this girl has no sense of
taste,' Shinaz adds.

‘It's not taste. It's shame. She
has no shame,' Persis says, as if she is a world-wide authority
on the matter.

‘What does shame have to do with how you
dress?' I say.

‘Someone might say the way the two of you
dress, in your short dresses and all, is shameful.'

Persis addresses the air, the way she does when
she's very angry. ‘Just listen to her,' she says,
not looking at me. ‘Always leaping to Jesse's defence,
right or wrong. Totally and utterly brainwashed. Now she, too, is
running around wearing keds and all. And talking like this to her own
cousin, for the sake of someone she barely knows. Well, we'll
see when she comes running back to us in two-three months.'

Shinaz fixes me a baleful look which I ignore.

My cousin Dinshaw is a strange fellow and
apparently does not share my need to defend Jesse against his family
the way I do. In fact, he goes out of his way to create
misunderstandings and ill-will. It appeals to his sense of humour
that his new friend arouses so much negativity within his family.

So he goes for the jugular—or rather, for
the nose. Shinaz's nose.

he tells his sister in a conversational tone. ‘She
said it was more hooked than the hook on Captain Cook's arm.'

World War III has just been launched.

My mother stomps around in a cloud of fury,
refusing to even acknowledge Jesse's presence when she runs
into her on the street. Persis is dripping venom and outrage. ‘Who
does she think she is?' she mutters repeatedly. ‘The
bleddy bitch.

Shinaz plays the part of a beatific martyr as if
she was born to play the role. Villoo aunty mutters every foul word
and curse she knows, going back to Jesse's great-grandfather.

I fight back with what I think is scientific
detachment. ‘Look, I know Jesse's patterns of speech,
okay? She'd never say something stupid and crude like that. If
she wanted to insult Shinaz, she'd think of something better
than a silly, personal insult.' My words land without even
creating a ripple in their rage.

Things get so out of hand that I finally confront
Dinshaw.

‘Why don't you tell Persis the truth
that you made this shit up?' I say. ‘Here they are hating
Jesse's guts because of you and your damn lies.'

But Dinshaw only winks. He is enjoying himself.

Mummy finally takes it upon herself to tell Jesse
what Dinshaw's whole family thinks of her. She accuses her of
playing with her nephew, of insulting family friends. She returns to
our apartment smug and full of herself. ‘Told her off, got it
off my chest,' she brags. ‘My family—we are honest,
direct people, unlike some I could mention,' and here she
throws a glance at Mehroo. ‘If we want to say something, bas,
we just say it, regardless of consequences. I just spoke my mind. She
just listened chup-chap. After all,

what could she say? But it will teach her not to
try any stunts with my family.'

I am mortified, repulsed by my mother's
language and at how completely she has turned on Jesse. This is not
the first time mummy has turned on an erstwhile friend but her
unpre-dictability has never impacted on me before.

I know that my friendship with Jesse is over. I
mourn its passing, going over each sweet memory, holding it in my
mind like a piece of hard candy in the mouth. Anyway, I should've
known. If there's any goodness in my life, it will be taken
away.

That's just the pattern to my life, as
irreversible as the patterns on a zebra. It has always been this way.
I was foolish to think that the friendship with Jesse was truly a
break from the past, that the sheer fun and joy of it would propel me
into a different future.

Two days later, Jesse bangs on the balcony door. I
do not answer. I know she wants to tell me off, to make formal what I
already know in my heart. Mummy is off visiting her mother, as she
does each evening. Mehroo looks at me inquiringly when I don't
answer Jesse's shouts, but she doesn't say anything.
Finally, the calling and knocking stop. The next day, she knocks
again. This time, I go to the balcony, dragging myself there. I feel
numb, without hope. There is a metallic taste in my mouth, as if I've
gnawed on tin.

Jesse looks angry. Well, after what my mother did,
who can blame her? ‘I called and called yesterday but you
didn't answer,' she says. She waits for me to say
something but I just shrug lightly.

She starts again. ‘You have been avoiding
me. Why?'

She won't make this easy for me. ‘Well,
after what my mother did to you…' I say.

She interrupts me. ‘But that was between
your mother and me. Why have
you
been avoiding me?'