Side by Side

by Anita Kushwaha

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think he got it from me. The nervousness. The sadness. The worrying all the time about every little thing and every big thing. They say children are like little sponges. I should have done a better job of protecting him, of sheltering him from my worries, but I think he soaked them up and never squeezed them out.” A beat. “I am to blame.”

  “No, Dad,” she reassures him. “You’re not. It’s no one’s fault.”

  “Look at this picture!” He lifts up the album close to her face. She turns away. “Look at how happy he is! Look how perfect!”

  “Dad, please,” she says. “Put it down.”

  Slowly, he lowers the album and lets it rest in the bowl formed by his crossed legs.

  “I know we want answers,” she continues after a short pause. “I know we want to understand where things went wrong. I’m just not sure we ever will. Blaming yourself isn’t going to help.”

  Yes, the survivor in her agrees, its voice small and still. Listen to yourself, Kavita.

  She keeps her eyes locked on her father’s face, broken by loss. Those words don’t apply to me, she tells it.

  That’s right, says Anchor. It pulls, pulls, pulls.

  “I am his father. It was my job to protect him. I should have paid more attention.”

  “Well, I’m his sister, and I didn’t do any better.”

  “We are both failures, then.”

  She might have challenged him with a look if she did not agree, at least as far as the matter concerned herself.

  A silent minute passes.

  “I need a new album,” her father says at last.

  “We can go together.”

  “Challo,” he says, tilting his head to one side.

  “Wait. What about Mom? We shouldn’t leave her on her own.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In Sunil’s room.”

  He nods, tensing his mouth.

  “Have you talked at all?”

  He shakes his head. “Not since the memorial. Part of me thought this would bring us closer together. Maybe we would help each other, like in the old days before you kids were born. But she just ignores me now. So I leave her alone. What can I do?”

  “Maybe she’s waiting for you to make the first move.” She clutches inside, the way she had as a girl whenever her parents would fight, which happened often enough to gnaw at her sense of safety. Back then, she moved between them like a needle and thread, desperate to mend the latest tear in their marriage.

  “What can I do?” he shrugs. “She never listens to me anyway. I am glad you are here, beti. You have always been the peacemaker in this family. You should have been a therapist.”

  A flash of a frown, then she recomposes herself. “I’ll go. I won’t be long. Call my cell if you need anything.”

  “Okay, beti.” He gazes at the album again. “Maybe buy two albums. Remember to ask for a receipt.”

  She grins at him and says, “I’ll remember.”

  Squinting against the partial sun as though her eyes are no longer used to outdoor light, she walks with pace, trying to generate some lifelike heat within her sedentary skin. A wince as she walks through Sunil’s empty parking space in the driveway, avoiding the oil patch that is all that remains of his sky-blue car. Another as she steps over the curb and glimpses herself and Nirav sitting to the right, news-punched, on the night the police came. Then she rolls over another memory as though tipping into a pothole. It surprises her, thrusts her off balance, makes her wobble.

  “Remember that summer you made a skate ramp at the end of the driveway, Bear? You must’ve been about eleven or so. I guess I was about six? You made me watch for cars. I was so scared you were going to hurt yourself, but you were always taking risks like that. Your skateboard went flying and you landed on your ankle. I can still see you clutching your high-tops, rocking side-to-side. I could see the tears in your eyes, but you kept your voice calm and told me to go inside and get Mom. We got into so much trouble. And you got a cast. I was so proud to be the first to sign it.”

  Could that really have been almost twenty years ago? Do these pothole memories always wait here? How does her mind choose which memory is visible or felt?

  Why the dip in the sidewalk across the street, in front of the Cyr’s split level, where they played hacky sack while waiting for the school bus? Why the stop sign on the corner where the station wagon blew a tire and Sunil taught her how to change a flat in minus twenty degree weather, their hands pink and protesting, their throats sore with winter wind so cold that it seemed too bare to hold oxygen. Why the countless night runs they took through the streets of their neighbourhood, which were such a part of their summers until she moved away with Nirav, that she sees now like time-lapsed videos, the past superimposed over the present?

  Will she always stumble into these dips, loose-ankled? Will the memory reel always through her off balance when she does?

  Stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jean jacket, she rubs the rakhi with one hand, clutches the blue river stone with the other, and carries on to Zellers.

  Half an hour later, she is back at home, fumbling for her keys, when she freezes. Muffled shouting pounds the front door. She hurries inside. At the top of the stairs, she finds her mother and father wrestling with the orange photo album as if it is a rope and they are playing a hostile game of tug-of-war.

  “Let go!” her mother yells.

  Kavita drops the plastic bag of albums and bounds upstairs, two at a time. They pause and stare at her. The anger drops from their faces, leaving behind only self-conscious surprise. She grabs the photo album and hugs it to her chest. “What’s going on?” Her gaze darts between them.

  “I came upstairs and I found him taking apart our family albums. I knew he was going to ruin them, the way he ruins everything. I had to stop him!”

  “I was not going to ruin anything,” her father says. “Beti, you know what I was doing. Explain it to her.”

  “He’s just making an album of Sunil’s pictures, Mom. It’s a nice idea, don’t you think?”

  “No!” her mother cries. She gathers as many albums as she can carry. “He doesn’t deserve to look at these pictures. He doesn’t deserve any piece of my son!”

  “Mom, please, don’t say that.”

  “You lied to me! You said we would have a better life here. You took me away from my family! With family around us Sunil would have been happy. He would have had more people to talk to. More people looking out for him….”

  “You could have left at anytime but you knew no one would take you back.”

  “Stop!” Kavita cries. “Please. You don’t mean it. Everyone, just calm down.” She lowers the album she has been clutching to her chest like a shield to the floor and reaches for her mother’s forearm. With the other, she reaches for her father’s hand.

  “Please, don’t fight. We’re all we have left. We need to stick together. We love each other.” Wide-eyed, she waits.

  “I have never loved him,” her mother says. She wriggles free of Kavita’s grasp, fills her arms with albums, and rushes down the hallway.

  Kavita lets go of her father’s hand, disorientated, as she processes the melee. Her father disappears into his bedroom a few moments after her mother, shutting his door with a clack.

  A few albums remain scattered on the carpet. Kavita leaves them where they lay and trudges down the front stairs to the foyer. She takes a seat, hunching on the second last step, and reaches for the plastic bag. She draws out one of the new albums and starts turning its empty sleeves.

  “This is what we’re like now,” she says to Sunil.

  Black Gloom spreads from her centre, outwards, like a drop of India ink in water.

  They stayed together for Sunil, it tells her. They loved him more.

  She swallows, hard.


  You promised you would look after them. But you can’t look after anyone. You didn’t save him, and you won’t save them either.

  Kavita stares ahead at the dusty base boards until the heaviness subsides enough for her to resurface. The album is still in her hands. The empty album. The album that will remain empty because there is no family left to fill it with memories. No family because her parents won’t try. No family because her parents can’t see her needing them to stay together. Can’t see her needing them to help clear the rubble instead of create more. Can’t see her at all. She is hurting too, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Not to them or Nirav or Chi.

  It would have mattered to Sunil. But he’s too far from her now. He’s too far from her because she didn’t keep her promise. The black voice is right. She didn’t keep him safe. She failed him. She keeps failing.

  Blaze awakens, begins to rise. Her hands feel hot and tight, her fingertips itchy and swollen, as quick waves of energy gather, build. Her heart beats strongly through her scar. It doesn’t hurt enough. Not nearly enough.

  She grips one of the album’s glossy pages. Balls a fist around it. Rips it from the album’s spine. Then another, and another, and another. Until there is nothing left to tear apart.

  She blinks out of her stupor. Observes the mess around her feet, distantly, as if it was made by someone else. Sees a red smear at the crook of her right hand, the tender skin between her forefinger and thumb, torn and bleeding. When did that happen? She lifts the cut to her mouth and presses her tongue against it.

  Then, with the taste of metal on her tongue, she calmly closes the pageless album, as if doing so is the most ordinary thing in the world.

  8.

  ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER WEEK, and another two more, all passing in restless sleeping at night, tired waking at dawn, and restless tiredness all through the day.

  There were the crushing business-of-death appointments to confront—the reading of Sunil’s will at Mr. Desjardins’s office, “liquidating assets” at the bank, transferring car ownership, meeting with the accountant to file the last taxes, returning government-issued documents, applying for the callously named “death benefit” at City Hall, and on and on. Part of her felt relieved as she completed the tasks, and yet, their completion also left her feeling slightly paralyzed, as if Sunil were vanishing a little more every time she drew a line through another item on her list, the way an antacid tablet fizzed in a glass of water until it was gone, and she, like the water that overwhelms the tablet, was the one responsible for Sunil’s dissolution. It was hard to reconcile the two: her duty, and this act of erasure.

  After her parents’ fight, silence resumed its noxious reign of the house. Each of them more or less kept to themselves. Kavita thought of them and herself as trapped in a kind of prison, each in solitary confinement, always using different rooms at different times, their paths almost never intersecting. When their paths did cross, they never crossed for long. If they talked, they never talked about what needed to be said.

  The thinking side of her asserted that she should engage them, draw them out of their caves of sorrow, get them to eat more and talk more and move more. But the feeling side of her could not bear to be in the same room with them for longer than a few minutes at a time. They were bounded by grief but also torn apart by it. Every time she looked into their wounded eyes, she knew their pain, and it was more than she could stand.

  Her mother kept to her routine of napping on the floor of Sunil’s bedroom with his ashes tucked safely on his bed. Her father had finished his album project and moved on to checking out books on Buddhism from the library. Days earlier he even came home with a guide book about monastery tours in Dharamsala. Kavita didn’t ask about it. If he was planning his Great Escape, she didn’t want to know.

  She cooked dal and rice or kitchari every few days or so in case her parents craved something other than toast and bananas and ginger tea. (Although she stocked those items too.) She herself never ate more than a few mouthfuls at a time. Got a strange sense of ecstasy from her hunger pangs, like a self-flagellating monk, because, just like the monk, she knew she deserved to suffer, that her suffering was an expression of love. With every hollow groan of her stomach it was as though she were paying off the debts that Anchor hissed in her ear, crumb by crumb, pound by pound. That week, she started cinching up her jeans with a belt.

  To pass the time, she limped through long walks, smoked, texted Chi, brooded, denied her hunger pangs, emailed Chi, lost time in flashbacks, took scalding showers, ruminated, shopped for things she didn’t need online, left voicemails for Chi, thought of every big and small fight she’d ever had with Sunil, lost time in weeping, read obsessively about suicide and bereavement and trauma, lost more time in weeping, occasionally hit herself to decompress, slept (except at night), watched more Buffy than was healthy (especially at night).

  All the while, she kept an open line of one-way communication with Sunil.

  The one advantage of Nirav’s sparse visits was that she didn’t have to pretend to be cheerful or functional for long intervals. Most of the time, she was free to be haunted.

  She became numb to Nirav’s excuses for not visiting more often. “I have an early meeting” was as popular as “I have to work late.” Although because they involved work, she empathized with him, if only a speck. After all, she hadn’t rejoined the world as a productive member of society, yet. The thought of going back to work was more insurmountable now that it had been weeks ago. Sometimes it felt as though she might never hold down a job again. All the steps involved in getting through a full day felt as long as a marathon to her. How had she ever done it before?

  Other excuses, she had little sympathy for, like, “I have a footy match” or “I’m going to play Snooker with some mates” or “I’m too tired.” Whenever he mumbled these excuses, she dismissed them, telling herself she didn’t care, it didn’t matter if he showed up or not, she was handling things well on her own, everything was fine, and, usually after a quick strike to the head, she more or less believed herself.

  One day, the police inspector rang their doorbell. He was holding a white plastic bag. Her thoughts shot to the white plastic bag Sunil had given her, the one full of sleeping pills, the one she had gotten rid of. While rationally she knew that the white plastic bag in the inspector’s hand was a different white plastic bag, knowing this didn’t stop her insides from reacting with panic. “The rest of your brother’s belongings,” he told her. What he said after that, she couldn’t remember.

  Back in her room, she knelt by her bed and laid out his things with the care of an archivist handling lost treasures.

  His wallet—curved, worn brown leather, a graduation present. Car and house keys held together on the plastic Taurus keychain she got him from a Hallmark store years ago. And his cell phone.

  His cell phone. The repository of their pleas. She picked it up. It was off. Had it been off the whole time? Was the battery dead? Before turning it on, she hesitated. It doesn’t matter, she thought. It doesn’t change anything. Stop torturing yourself. But reasonable thoughts were easily overruled by her beastly need to know. She pressed the power button. It flickered to life. Which probably meant it had been off the whole time.

  25 missed calls, she read, heart sinking.

  5 new messages.

  The glare of knowing began to sting her eyes.

  This meant that while they were reaching out to him, Sunil had remained fixed on his plan. She had an answer now, and it proved her earlier assertion to be correct. The answer didn’t matter, it didn’t change anything, and it certainly didn’t make her feel any closer to closure. All Kavita felt was torture at the hands of a past she couldn’t alter.

  She deleted the messages. They served no purpose anymore. She didn’t need to hear their pleas, veiled with false cheer and calm, as they gently tried to ease Sunil home. She relived the futility of that
helpless time enough as it is. She would never forget it.

  Once the voicemail was empty, she dialled his number. The voicemail message was the only place the sound of his voice existed anymore. They weren’t like other families who videotaped every event, momentous and mundane. The idea of spending money on a camcorder seemed like a frivolous waste to her frugal immigrant parents, who sacrificed everything—including trips back to India for births, wedding, and even funerals—to save for Sunil and Kavita’s educations. Pushing down a violent surf of grief, she dilated her eardrums and listened, her heartbeat a slow throb in her throat. “This is Sunil,” he said. “Leave me a message and have a good one.”

  His voice—easygoing, healthy, alive—vacuumed to her hollow centre, where spun against her insides, like a cold wind twisting against the walls of a cave, with nothing to break it, nowhere for it to escape.

  Next came the beep and she hung up.

  On Thanksgiving she drove up to Gatineau Park to see the hawks, one of their Thanksgiving traditions, a favourite of Sunil’s. She followed the road that sliced through the hills surrounded by mixed forest on either side, so dense and lush it was almost possible to forget the fetters of urban life in the deep green of pine needles and the rose tone of cliffs. Every now and then, the trees would clear, revealing a small dark pond or cattail-hemmed marshland. At one point, she thought she spotted a beaver, but then again it might have been a deadhead bobbing in the water.

  She parked in the grass alongside the road a few minutes away from Champlain Lookout. The trails were always frenzied during the holiday. Everywhere she looked there were families; small ones, big ones, some with dogs, others with strollers, others still with coolers and cameras, although considerably more with camera phones.

  She wanted to hate them. Their togetherness and full bellies and smiles and laughter and posing for group photos and the fact that they had things to be thankful for. Since Anchor and Blaze and Black Gloom had colonized her insides, she could remember only distantly what gratitude felt like. Something like a long breath of relief exhaled skyward, the gentle sag into a loved one’s arms, the happy idiot feeling of luck. She wanted to hate the other families for showing off.