An American Brat Read Online Free Page A

“So what? Don’t you know the bastard had drawn up a hit list? I was on it! You’ll be surprised at those who were on it: many of them our friends. I’ll see to it the bastard’s hanged.” He was the chief prosecuting attorney.
    Feroza shut her ears. She was racked by the discord in her perceptions. Uncle Anwar was an old family friend, someone she trusted and couldn’t bear to think of on anyone’s hit list.
    But a martyr’s claim exerts its own logic. When Zareen came into her room to persuade Feroza to join them for dinner, Feroza told her, “I don’t want to see their faces!”

    Feroza spent the weekends at her grandmother’s and most evenings at the houses of her classmates. She spent more and more time sulking and reading romances and detective stories in her room when she was home. She locked her door.
    Zareen was used to Feroza’s flashes of temper, which vanished soon after they appeared, but she was perplexed by the acceleration of her fury and the duration of her prolonged rages. Neither the pressure of the exams nor the political situation could account for her behavior. Feroza had usually taken her exams with an aplomb that had perturbed her parents. Politics, considering how it affected each individual’s personal life, was a national passion. But previously the shared passion had always drawn the family together.
    Cyrus guessed that Feroza’s sulks and truculence might have as much to do with the expulsion of that Government College lout as with politics. But he kept his own counsel and prudently permitted his wife to fret and hypothesize.
    Feroza’s behavior recalled Zareen to the trials of Feroza’s childhood, which she had all but (and gratefully at that) forgotten.
    Feroza had been a stubborn child — with a streak of pride bordering on arrogance that compelled consideration not always due a child. Awed, Zareen often wondered where she got her pride.
    Driven to exasperation, Cyrus had once spanked Feroza when she was about four. He stopped only when he noticed theblood on her tiny clenched lips. He never struck her again. It was a contest of wills over some trifling matter, and Cyrus had wanted his daughter to apologize. “Say sorry … say sorry,” he had demanded, shaking her, pausing, and striking her. Lynx eyes blazing in her furious little face, Feroza did not cry or even wince. When he saw the blood, he gave up, horrified to have lost control over himself.
    By this time Feroza was being invited to an increasing number of birthday parties, and Zareen discovered that she was also antisocial. Invariably the anxious hostess called the next day to inquire if she or someone else had offended the child? Feroza had stayed in her corner with her ayah and couldn’t be coaxed to play games. She had not come to the table, even when the candles were blown out and the cake cut. No matter how hard they all tried, Feroza did not smile or say a single word all evening. At the end of this litany, the caller invariably sounded more aggrieved than anxious.
    Zareen was mortified. She knew exactly what Feroza had put the callers through. Feroza’s steady gaze and queenly composure was disconcerting in a four-year-old.
    Zareen bought increasingly expensive birthday presents.
    Then Feroza bit one child, scratched another, tore an earring off a little girl at school with part of her ear still in it, and Zareen’s tepid belief in astrology became passionate. She discovered Linda Goodman’s Love Signs, and the book became her gospel. The text appealed to her mind because it advised the mother of a Scorpio child to buy a strong playpen and stock up on vitamins, and to her heart because it instructed the mother to sit in the playpen taking vitamins, while the child wreaked whatever havoc it was destined to.
    Absorbing the spirit of the text, Zareen barricaded herself behind the mental equivalent of a stout playpen. She learned