Seventeen Things about My Friend Farzana

Neha Chaudhary-Kamdar

3. Farzana’s brother, Aslam, is missing. It’s not the first time this has happened.

4. Farzana and I grew up together in Hyderabad, right off the city’s commercial center, where, in the early nineties, a row of crumbling buildings with onion domes and marble façades were renovated into offices and restaurants. The last such edifice, doilies of rust blooming across its cladding where a water pipe had burst, was gutted and converted into a four-star hotel on the upper floors and a burger joint on the lower, its sign advertising Authentic Mutton-do-Pyaza Burgers, Better Than New York!

I liked Hyderabad, despite my mother’s complaints. “Of course you love this dead-end of a town,” she would say when I came home in the evenings, my knees scabbed with mud from playing lingocha in the empty lot down the street. The hiss of curry leaves in oil provided a background score to her tirade: “What’s it to you? I’m the one who has to get out of the house at six-thirty in the morning. I’m the one who has to change two buses to get to work, rubbing shoulders with all sorts—vegetable vendors, washerwomen—as if there’s no difference between them and me. And for what? I was a gold medalist in University. People in Bombay or Delhi might have appreciated the true worth of my work, you know? But we’re here.”

My mother’s outbursts were really meant for my father. His contentment in his low-ranking government job struck her as unambitious and she found his refusal to seek a transfer to another city frustrating. She spent three evenings a week tutoring high school students in Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton (“Don’t marry young, Bela, I wish I had taken the time to finish my Ph.D.”) and had read out the AM and PM English bulletins on public radio, a post she’d held for almost two decades. The latter was a job with few perks besides the occasional moment of prestige. Every now and then, people looked at her reverently when they learned that this middle-class woman read the English bulletin for radio. She basked in the glamor this afforded, wearing her pride as though it were the diamonds my father never bought her.

5. Farzana’s family was middle-class too, but less so than ours. Her father, a portly man whose button-down bush shirts stretched taut across his belly, was a bureaucrat at the State Secretariat. Our homes stood across the street from each other like identical twins, but the similarity diminished over the years. Her father’s burgeoning fortune revealed itself in the embellishment of spare rooms, round terraces, and columned balconies on the compact original structure, until their house looked like something out of a dark fairy tale. “It’s like a tower of matchboxes,” my mother would say, peering out of the window night after night, the lights turned off so no one could see her. “So ostentatious. It’s all bribe money, I’m sure.”

Farzana’s mother was nothing like mine. She was a languorous, fair-skinned woman who arranged the hours of her day around cooking meals for the family, taking naps, and coddling her son, Aslam. She was often in the kitchen when I went over, kneading refined flour for romali rotis, the ample white flesh of her arms indistinguishable from the mass of dough her fingers were plunged in. “My Aslam has such a healthy appetite,” she would say, half-complaining, half-indulgent. If Farzana happened to be around, she would roll her smoke-gray eyes at her mother and declare that her brother’s appetite was insatiable because he had always been overfed. “Yet, somehow,” she added, “I’m the one who ends up feeling like the sacrificial goat.”

Neha Chaudhary-Kamdar earned her MFA at Boston University, where she was awarded the William A. Holodnak Prize for Fiction. She often writes about the lives of women in India, where she grew up. Neha lives in Berkeley, California, and is working on her first novel.

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Editor’s Note

Seventeen Things about My Friend Farzana

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