The Girl From Foreign By Sadia Shepard,
Penguin, Rs 450

Reading The Girl From Foreign in the shadow of the recent terror attack on Bombay can be an uncanny experience. Jewish institutions in India were one of the targets of the terrorists, and Sadia Shepard’s book, which is set in Bombay, is about the community of the Bene Israel Jews living there. As a foreigner travelling in Bombay, Shepard makes note of the familiar landmarks — the Taj Mahal hotel, the Gateway of India — all of which now have disturbing associations for us. Even an apparently innocuous remark such as “For centuries, it was the Gateway that first greeted visitors to this city as they arrived by ship”, can have an alarming resonance for one reading it after November 26. But Shepard is not talking of events that happened in 2008. She lived and worked in Bombay on a Fulbright Scholarship between 2001 and 2003 and it is on her experiences during this period that the book is based.

The Girl From Foreign is dedicated to “Nana”, Shepard’s maternal grandmother, and the book is as much about her as it is about the author herself. Growing up in Boston, the daughter of a Protestant father, who converted to Islam after marriage, and a Muslim mother, who had her family in Pakistan, Shepard discovers at the age of 13 that her grandmother is not a Muslim like the rest of the family, but a Jew. So begins the granddaughter’s search for the forgotten past of Nana — a past frozen in a “brown vinyl album”, in scraps of letters, and pages from a diary containing recipes for traditional Jewish delicacies. To breathe life into the stories narrated by Nana about her life in India, Shepard travels to Bombay, where Nana had lived for a few years after her marriage. Officially, Shepard’s project in India, as outlined in her proposal for the Fulbright Scholarship, was “to study the Bene Israel community, which my maternal grandmother was descended from”. But the “Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories” also becomes the quest for a “Sense of Home”. Shepard’s mission might not seem exceptional in a globalized world but what makes her expedition remarkable is the sincerity she brings to it. Shepard’s self-consciousness about the cliché inherent in such a journey also makes it interesting.

It helps that Shepard has an intelligent interlocutor in her Indian friend, Rekhev Bharadwaj, who systematically undercuts her enthusiasm by pointing out how very “American” it is. And it is to Shepard’s credit that she records his criticisms with as much care as she takes in documenting the lives of the Bene Israel community. However, in spite of Rekhev’s beratings, which become sharper as he gets more attached to her, and despite the smelly bathrooms, the pollution (which literally causes her heart to skip beats) and the violent groping in local trains, Shepard persists. She moves from Pune, where she had first landed, to Bombay, and succeeds in locating the villages of Nana’s parents with nothing except a few names from Nana’s conversations, one or two obliging dreams, and a taciturn Rekhev to guide her.

Running parallel to the history of Nana are the stories of the Bene Israel Jews in India. The members of the community believe that they were shipwrecked on the Konkan Coast more than two thousand years ago. Most of them settled on the seaside villages and started working as oil-pressers. Taking the cue from the surnames of Nana’s parents, denoting the villages they came from, Shepard travels along the Konkan Coast, looking for villages bearing the names of Chorde and Bhorupali. In Chorde, she comes across Abraham Chordekar and his family, which lives by supplying kerosene to the village. They pose for Shepard. “None of the family members smile. All except Mr. Chordekar look directly into the camera” (picture). If Shepard is left none the wiser about her ancestors after the visit, at least she has an eloquent photograph, which seems to speak of loss, resilience and a lingering decay. The village of Revdanda proves to be luckier for Shepard. The journey to this place had portended well, not the least because Rekhev had agreed to accompany her. Here they find the affluent family of David Waskar, who still continues the ancestral trade of oil-pressing. They revisit the Waskars during the Jewish festivals of Sukkot and Simchat Torah. Later, Shepard discovers that the synagogue in Revdanda, where she had felt so much at home, is also the one to which her great-grandparents had belonged.

When India achieved independence, the Jews here were given the option of migrating to Israel. Some did, while others stayed back. For most belonging to the latter group, Israel is the promised land even today. David Waskar laments that his sons want their children to leave for Israel when they grow up because of the better educational and employment opportunities available there. The younger generation seems to sustain itself on this dream, although it might be hard to square the reality of their lives in India with their imagined future of improved prospects and prosperity in Israel. However, for older men like Waskar, “Israel is my fatherland, but India is my motherland.” He can imagine no life apart from the one he lives in India. “We get along with everyone,” he says. The problems of Israel, its hostilities with the Muslims of Palestine, do not quite seem to bother the Bene Israel Jews. At the same time, one recalls that Shepard is given the snub by the authorities of a synagogue in Pune when they hear her Muslim name.

Nana left for Pakistan with her Muslim husband, Ali, at the time of Partition and found herself sharing space with his other two wives. In her old age, staying with her children’s families in America, she craved to return to her husband’s home in Pakistan while in her mind she took refuge in Rahat Villa, the house in Bombay Ali had built for her. Nana remained divided between her Muslim and Jewish identities till the end but asked her favourite grandchild to travel to India, where she had lived as Rachel Jacobs till she became Rahat Siddiqui. Re-living Nana’s lives in India and in Pakistan, Shepard feels the urgency to select her religion. But the thought of having to choose one faith over the other leaves her feeling constricted. She would rather drift in and out of her different identities, meeting people, asking questions, while she carries her “inheritance”, Nana’s story, as the Holiest of Holies in her heart.

The Partition was a decisive moment in Nana’s life. Had it not happened, she would have stayed on in India, lived close to her Jewish family in her beloved Rahat Villa, and not have faced the painful complexities of life as the wife of a polygamous Ali. But the Partition did take place and that made all the difference. At this juncture of history after the Bombay tragedy, as India ponders the questions of nationalities and religious beliefs yet again, Shepard’s memoir causes the reader to reconsider the notions of home, exile and strangeness. Can religion determine the choice of one’s home? If Hindus belong to India, Muslims to Pakistan, and Jews to Israel, then how is it possible for someone like David Waskar to call India his motherland? Was Nana an Indian or a Pakistani? Or, did she rightfully belong to Israel all along? Carrying over her skills as a documentary filmmaker to her writing, Shepard leaves the tales and the images she has gathered to speak for themselves.