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A
MERICA.

The word comes to me as I am dozing off to sleep,
comes accompanied by an electric charge that jolts me awake.

America. A way out. If I am to get away from my
dead-end life, I will have to find my way to America, land of
self-invention. This is the only place I know where one can start
anew and I desperately need to start afresh, because my life in
Bombay feels chewed up, used up and I am only twenty years old. I am
close to graduating from college and even my lifelong dream of
getting a job at
The Times of India
, has suddenly lost its
sheen. As long as I am unmarried, I know that economics and social
convention will dictate that I continue to live at home and that if I
do that much longer, I will end up in a crazy asylum. Because I just
can't deal with the shit at home any more. My nerves are shot;
each time there's a fight at home, I begin to drop things, like
I'm in a fucking Groucho Marx movie.

I'm twenty years old and I'm tired.
All the things that I thought would save me—music, books,
politics—have be-friended me for a while but ultimately, I've
had to come back and face myself. After years of looking forward to a
job and the independence it would give me, I'm facing up to the
facts: I do not feel prepared to enter the work world and as long as
I'm living at home, I will never be truly free. Dad will
continue setting curfews for me, Mehroo and Freny will continue
cooking and cleaning for me, Kamala will wait on me, mummy will
alternate between pulling me towards her and pushing me away. Nothing
will change. I will never find out who I am, who I could be without
all these people around me.

It is not in my nature to flee into the dark
night, to slip out without leaving a forwarding address the way Amy
has done.

Nor will I be able to settle in nearby Pune or in
New Delhi without embarrassing my family, without setting the
neighbours' tongues wagging. There will be rumours that I have
fled home because I am pregnant or because of a falling out with my
family. After all, Bombay is the glittering jewel in India's
crown, Bombay is the place where the rest of India mi-grates towards.
To leave the city and settle in one of the lesser places would be a
slap in my father's face, a repudiation of the life that I have
here.

No, if I want to get away I will have to move to
the Big En-chilada, I will have to seek out a life that is so clearly
superior and dazzling compared to what I have here, that it will
arouse no suspicions. I have to run away to America.

One thing I am sure of: I do not want to take the
route that Amy chose. Like Amy, I want to run away from home but I
want to do it legitimately and not under the cover of anonymity. Nor
do I want to leave a trail of unanswered questions in my wake, like
Amy has.

Amy is a distant cousin who lived two buildings
down from us. Despite the differences in our age—she was almost
eleven years older than me—we were close. She was a shy,
soft-spoken, highly sensitive young woman, with a mind as sharp as a
knife. As far as I knew, she never had a boyfriend. Our bond was our
love of stories—I loved listening to them and Amy was a born
storyteller. In fact, I fancy that it is storytelling that helped Amy
get away, that she learned how to escape by becoming a character in
one of her own stories.

From the time that I was a kid, Amy would spend
every evening at our home, not returning to her parents' home
until it was night-time. Each evening we had to beg her to eat dinner
with us because she would protest and lie and say she'd already
eaten. ‘Come on, Amy, be sporting, please,' dad would
insist and she would demur and finally consent.

But before we'd sit down for dinner, Amy and
I would spend an hour or so together, with me sitting on her lap in
the wooden rocking-chair on the balcony. ‘Hey, Amy, tell me
about Kirin,'

I'd say and she would launch into a story
about the little boy that she used to tutor who lived halfway across
the city from us but whose life came alive for me because of Amy's
stories.

It took me years to figure out that Kirin always
seemed to be facing the same dilemmas and struggles that I was facing
at any given moment. Like many shy people, Amy was a good observer;
like many masterful storytellers, Amy knew how to weave the strings
of my life into whatever tale she was spinning that day.

Those sessions on the balcony, when it was just
the two of us, were different from the stories Amy would tell the
adults.

With me, she was vulnerable, intuitive,
unfailingly kind. But when she entertained the adults with her
hilarious descriptions of her job at the bank and how she was forever
making a fool out of her dim-witted branch manager, Amy was cutting,
biting, sarcastic, outrageous. Babu, dad, and the rest of them would
roar with laughter at some of her tales and gasp with disbelief when
she went too far at spinning circles around her clueless boss.
‘Careful, Amy,' dad would sometimes feel compelled to
say. ‘It's not good to make fools of people all the time.
Sometimes one gets caught in one's own web.'

So in retrospect, there was plenty of warning
about how secretive and manipulative Amy could be. Still, the whole
family was in shock when Amy simply disappeared one day. She called
one of her relatives a few days later to say that she was okay but it
was useless looking for her, as she was going far away. She did not
explain her reasons for leaving as stealthily as she had.
Occasionally, she would phone our house and ask to speak with dad or
Mehroo but when they asked for her whereabouts, she would get evasive
although she once said she was in an ashram in the Himalayas.
Sometimes when she called, she spoke in different accents. One time
she told Mehroo to please only speak with her in English because she
had forgotten Gujarati.

Amy has become an enigma, a puzzle, a gaping wound
in all of our lives. She has walked away from us without an
explanation and we don't know why. Although I'd already
outgrown our evening storytelling sessions by the time she ran away,
I still miss her. I see how the adults miss her on special occasions,
how someone mentions her name during a Navroze dinner and how Freny
still sends over a gift to Amy's parents on her birthday. I
resolve that when I run away from home I will do it in broad daylight
and with the blessings of my elders.

Before this minute, I have never entertained the
idea of going to America. The few times someone has suggested it to
me, I have laughed because my odds of getting there are about as
great as my odds of walking on the moon. But then again, I have never
before experienced a surge of desire and longing as strong as I am
experiencing right this minute. I have never wanted something so
badly that it could make the sweat pour down my face, have never had
my very eyelids forced back open with ambition and hunger. My heart
has never whimpered the way it is doing now, my brain has never
before wound itself around the maze of my life and figured a way out.
Every cell of my body has never tilted in one direction before, every
throb of my blood has never beat in unison, and my body has never
tingled with fear and excitement the way it does now. In the middle
of a hot Bombay night, surrounded by the snores and breathing of
those I love most in the world, I have allowed my treacherous heart
to dream of abandoning them all. I have

allowed myself to wish for the impossible. And
therefore, I must now make it possible.

Dawn approaches and I'm still awake. I know
this will not be easy. Even if I manage to convince my family to let
me go, even if I can thrust the knife deep into their hearts, there
are still a million obstacles—getting an American university to
accept me despite my so-so grades, figuring out how to jump through a
hundred bureaucratic hoops, filling out countless forms, going around
to the various Parsi trusts trying to raise the thousands of dollars
to pay for my education.

It is too early in the morning to wake dad up and
besides, I need to think about this for a few days before I breathe a
word to anybody. But despite all the fears and doubts that are
already beginning to settle on me like soot, I remind myself of one
truth: When I went to bed last night, I was bitter, washed up,
directionless and at the end of my rope—a basket case at
twenty. This morning, I have woken up a new person—ener-getic,
purposeful, ambitious. Someone who is looking forward to her life.
Someone who cannot be counted out yet.

And only one thing has made the difference:
America.

I'm sorry, Mehroo, for what I'm about
to do, for the dagger I will be thrusting into your heart. I have
always wanted to protect you but I guess I can't protect you
from myself, from this hot blood that flows through my veins, from
this heart of desire that sings its songs of longing to me in the
middle of the night. I will be your betrayer, your killer, the one
whose name will be a permanent wound on your lips.

Forgive me, daddy, for plotting to abandon you,
less than five years after you've lost your brother. I know now
that I cannot fill his place. I know that more than any of the
others, you will understand because where did I learn to dream but in
your lap, from where did I learn that happiness is not a four-letter
word but from your valiant, if futile, stabs at it? Forgive me, my
kind, generous father, for the loneliness I will leave in my wake,
like the contrails of a jet plane. I know you will understand but
even understanding will not reduce the pain.

I have to turn away from you, Freny, for I cannot
look you in the eye. My promise of being a son and a daughter to you,
made not too long ago at Babu's funeral—what of it now?

Charred it is, from the newly ignited fire of my
ambition and longing.

Goodbye, Roshan, you should be pleased to see me
go. All the indignities, the unfavourable comparisons that you have
suffered all your life should vanish like a plane in the sky, as soon
as I am gone. You can be the baby of the family again, you can be the
object of all their hopes and desires, your old glory restored,
untarnished. I am the thorn in your side—my going away will
allow you to bloom.

Sorry, mummy, sorry for a million fights, a
million words said and a million left unsaid. I guess I know now that
I'll always love you and that I'll never be able to save
you. I never wanted it to be this way between us but this is how it
is, this is the reality and I must accept, accept, accept it.

Goodbye everybody, here's a kiss from your
Judas and a thousand apologies—as Peter Sellers would say—for
the confusion, the bewilderment, the hurt, the bruised pride that I
will cause. I know this is useless but here's my explanation,
here are my reasons why and perhaps you will understand and perhaps
you will forgive…

Because I am restless and I have reached a
dead-end and my future in Bombay seems to lead to just two hellish
places: jail or the asylum, and because I want to know what one
moment of perfect silence, of a perfect peace, sounds like and
because I am torn by paradox—I want to reject this adult role
of peacemaker, of being the carrier of other people's grief
that has been my role for so long and because I want to be an adult,
want to iron my own shirts and clean my own plates and make my own
decisions—and because I want to know who I am away from all of
you who have made me who I am and because I cannot bear the sound of
Mehroo's coughing and mummy's screaming and daddy's
subdued silences and because I want to see what the world has to
offer before I settle down at
The Times of India
and because I
yearn for privacy and freedom, for a room of one's own and I
know that none of these will be possible in Bombay, my Bombay of
gossip-ad-dicted neighbours and crowded rooms and inquisitive
relatives and although nothing in our culture encourages it, I want
to discover who I am without the protective shell of your love, I
want to taste freedom, I want to meet the Thrity who is not
somebody's daughter or niece or cousin, who is not the logical
inheritor of a family business, who is not a card-carrying member of
the middle-class, who is not fixed in time and place by the accident
of her birth. I want to be fluid, like water, like the wind, I want
to belong to nobody but myself, I want to belong to no place and
everyplace. In my narrow, hard bed on a sweaty, hot Bombay night, I
lie with my eyes wide open and dream of inheriting the world.

Do you understand? Or are you offended? I know
that by offering understanding, I must risk causing offence. But that
is not my intention. I know you are not used to hearing me speak this
openly, this candidly, about myself. In our house, we talk of each
other—we complain about or declare our love for—each
other. We do not begin too many sentences with ‘I'.

I guess I am breaking all the rules, all the old
taboos at one time. I want perfect communication, I want to hurdle
over the glassy walls of silence that I've

built around myself, I want self-revelation, I
want confession, I want therapeutic healing, I want absolution.

Not even a step into America yet, and already I'm
sounding like an American.

T
HE IMMIGRATION OFFICER AT THE American
Embassy is young, blond, and brash. He has cold blue eyes and sports
a goatee whose yellow hairs are made invisible on a face that has
been broiled pink by the hot Bombay sun. He and his fellow officers
sit behind a thick glass panel that's obviously meant to
protect them from the Indian hordes that stand before them, desperate
for a visa to the Promised Land.

I watch him as he rejects the visa application of
the man in front of him. ‘Next,' he calls, already
looking past the applicant.