by Pasha Malla
They high-fived.
Rick’s turn. He handed Ash an envelope. Cash?
‘Just a little something to help you get back to yourself,’ Rick explained, beaming at his own largesse.
The card featured a person of ambiguous race and gender gazing anthropologically at the First World from beneath a straw hat.
‘UNICEF,’ provided Rick.
Inside was an inscription:
To my dearest Ash,
Congratulations! You’re in a creative writing workshop at the library tomorrow. I hope it provides the regeneration you need.
From one artistic spirit to another,
Rick.
Rick had his arms out for a hug. Ash allowed himself to be clutched for a two-count.
‘Figured it would be good for you,’ said Rick. ‘If I ever get down, all’s I need’s a little push in a creative direction. Luckily I’ve got your mom!’ Who offered her cheek for a kiss.
‘Right,’ said Ash. ‘Well, thanks.’
Meanwhile Mona had opened her gift from Rick: a box set of Law and Order, a show that Ash knew for a fact she loathed.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Because you’re a lawyer,’ Rick explained.
‘Great,’ said Mona, and winked at her brother as she fell into Rick’s embrace.
—
ONCE PRESENTS WERE DONE, it was time to start dinner. Ash rinsed the turkey in the sink while his mother hauled out the required groceries and supplies. The plan, as always, was to eat precisely at 5 p.m., with the rest of the evening dedicated to the unbuckling of pants and naps and, probably, Ash moaning that he’d eaten too much.
They’d just gotten going on the stuffing (bread in the food processor, everything from scratch!) when Mona appeared in the doorway in full make up, hair falling elegantly to her shoulders, and announced she was going out for coffee with an old friend.
‘Ran into them at the gym,’ she said casually, eyes flitting between her mother and brother. She went to wait by the front window, peeking through the curtains every few minutes and relentlessly checking her phone.
‘You think them is a him?’ Ash whispered to his mother.
‘I think,’ she replied slyly, ‘that your sister deserves to be treated nicely today.’
A car pulled into the drive and Mona raced to it. Ash recognized the guy driving: an old boyfriend whose picture still graced the bulletin board in his sister’s bedroom, and whom the whole family had adored.
Ash’s mother wagged a spatula at him. ‘Let’s not get too excited.’
So she hated Harj too! Ash had never loved her so deeply.
Rick had taken Burt to the ravine, so Ash and his mom were left alone with Schoenberg’s Christmas Music on the stereo for their food prep. She gutted a squash; he chopped onions and sage. The old routine. For the first time in months, Ash felt happy.
‘You remember the first time we teamed up like this?’ she asked.
‘I was in high school. Grade ten or eleven, maybe?’
‘You were sixteen, with dreams of being a chef, and wanted some on-the-job training. No, wait. That wasn’t until later.’ His mom covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Remember, before that, how you went on that kick about being a house-husband?’
‘No! What?’
‘Oh, Ashy. You did! You’d decided that you were going to marry a banker and write books and raise the kids and cook and clean. Not sure where you got the domestic instinct from. Not like I ever set much of an example in that realm.’
‘What are you talking about? You were a great mom. Are, even.’
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m the best. All I’m saying, Ashy, was that I was never much of a Martha Stewart around the house. An academic first and a homemaker second, maybe.’ She laughed. ‘Though I must have been better than Brij.’
‘Oh god. Worst ever.’ Ash’s eyes began to water—the onions.
‘I hate to speak ill…But around the house the man was beyond useless.’
‘I once caught him vacuuming the sink. He’d dropped something down the drain and he had the whole vacuum up on the counter trying to suck it out.’
‘I suppose it’s cultural. He’d never had much occasion for housework in India.’
Ash wiped tears on his shoulder. ‘Onions,’ he explained.
His mom handed him a Kleenex, then took one and dabbed her eyes too. Sniffed, shook her head. Laughed again, but a little more sadly.
Ash studied her. Why the sudden nostalgia? His memories of his parents involved either one or the other—never both, never together, even when they were married. And post-divorce their relationship had consisted mostly of terse exchanges from each other’s doorsteps as they traded custody of their kids. Yet here was some echo of whatever had come before that. Maybe before him.
His mother blew her nose and moved to slicing potatoes. They worked in silence for a while. Ash crammed handfuls of stuffing into the turkey. She laid out the spuds in a dish and got a cheese sauce going on the stovetop, stepped aside so he could put the bird in the oven. The music switched over to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
‘What else?’ he said.
‘Nothing for now. We can do the veggies in an hour or two. Do you have work to do?’
He watched her sauce the potatoes and sprinkle paprika overtop. ‘Do you know anything about this novel Brij was writing?’
‘Oh, god. Was he still talking about that?’
‘The guy hiking up into the mountains? Amarnath?’
‘Right, and the whole impotency epidemic.’
‘Sorry?’
She wiped a finger around the edge of the pot, tasted the sauce, frowned, nodded. ‘He finds the lingam melting, and when he comes back down he turns impotent and infects every man he sees, and they infect everyone else, so the women of Kashmir take over and bring everyone together—as far as I remember it. God, this was years ago. But he used to talk about it all the time. Really thought he was onto something.’
Ash stared. ‘That’s what happens?’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. I found a piece of it, I guess. It’s just the guy, the hero, climbing up to the temple, though he never gets there. But it’s about impotency? How does it end?’
‘Oh, he’d never written a beginning, as far I knew. He just used to brag about his Great Indian Novel at parties, swaggering around after a few drinks telling everyone that it was going to be his ticket out of medicine. But then his career got in the way. Stopped even mentioning it before you kids were born. Though he did end up writing something?’
‘He started to. I have no idea if he ever finished it.’
‘Maybe,’ said Ash’s mother, ‘he just ran out of time.’
—
IN THE INTERVENING HOURS, while the turkey sizzled and the house flooded with its rich odour, Ash went downstairs and scrolled through the pages he’d typed to find some clue of what was to come—not an end, another beginning.
The text ended with the hero at the mouth of the cave:
And he gazed in upon the blackness there and squinting saw it, his goal, and readied himself to enter, and entered.
And when he reappeared
End of page, end of section. And when he reappeared everything changed, Ash guessed, and typed, and stared at for a while. Was this right? He tried to keep going: The hero stepped—no, ‘stepped’ struck a false note. The hero…what? Ash frowned. The cursor blinked. Went, strode, descended—nothing felt right. So what to write?
Ash’s phone buzzed. The number was Indian. He answered with a sigh. ‘You just calling to say good night?’
Matt sounded panicked: ‘Bro, I need to talk to you.’
‘The connection’s terrible. Where are you?’
‘Goa, at a resort.’ A crackle, words were lost. ‘Something bad happened.’
‘God, what did you do now?’
‘Dhar, honestly? Shut up. This is serious.’
Ash closed his laptop.
‘So we h
ad Christmas with a guy I thought was Russian and was going to kill me, except he gave me weed, and then Mieke and I went—’ The line sputtered. A few syllables broke through: ‘Lagoon…swimming…somebody…frigging murder him!’
‘Slow down, I can’t hear you at all.’
‘I’m telling you how it was!’
‘I’m confused. Does this have to do with the Russians?’
‘No! No, this was—’ The rest was mangled.
‘Hold on.’ Realizing that the weak signal might be on his end, Ash took his phone out of his room and up a few steps from the basement. ‘You there? What happened?’
A digital garble.
Ash continued up to the kitchen. ‘Hello?’
No answer. The line was dead. Matt was gone.
—
‘EVERYTHING LOOKS PERFECT, GUYS,’ said Mona, her face aglow in the candlelight. Since returning from her coffee outing she’d been giggly and light, and the way she held her belly as she sat seemed less to leaven the burden than to honour it.
The table was laid archetypally, as if to tantalize a Dickensian urchin peering through the window. At the centre sat the turkey, glossy and golden and platonically trussed, surrounded by carrots, peas, leeks, a big bowl of stuffing excavated from the bird, scalloped potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, and candles burning like the signal fires of an imminent attack. Everything was the same as it had been through Ash’s childhood, save the glassware: gone was the elegant crystal that their mom saved for special occasions, replaced with blue, chunky handblown stuff—the stuff of Rick.
Mona tilted a bottle of pink wine in Ash’s direction. Rick, whose wife had died from cirrhosis, didn’t touch alcohol, so neither now did his mother—such solidarity. With his sister also abstaining, drinking alone risked seeming wounded. Yet so did resistance. In the end Ash accepted half a glass, neighing, ‘Whoa,’ in what he hoped was a carefree way.
‘Merry Christmas,’ said Rick, lifting a can of organic root beer. ‘To you all. Great to have the family together for the holiday.’
‘And it’s so nice, Rick,’ addended Ash, ‘to have you here with us.’
Mona kicked him under the table. Ash rolled his eyes, sipped the syrupy rosé.
‘Last Christmas, when it was just the two of us,’ said their mother, ‘we did an all vegan meal. Got a turkey made out of—what was it, honey?’
‘Tofu and gluten,’ said Rick. ‘And the sides—your mom did the spuds with soy milk and cashew cheese. Tasted exactly the same.’
‘Pretty close, anyway,’ she said, eyeing the bird with what seemed like relief.
Mona carved and served while the sides were passed around. Ash accepted his standard leg and two slices of breast while Rick made a great show of refusing turkey, yet painted his plate with gravy. As Ash watched everyone fill their plates, Matt’s hysteria on the phone came paddling into his thoughts. He took a big drink of wine to drown it.
The conversation turned to food: reminiscences of past triumphs and failures, comparisons with the current meal, murmurings of approval that Ash dismissed with self-critique—‘bird’s a little dry, potatoes underdone’—which caused Mona to threaten him with the carving knife. ‘Would you just shut up and appreciate a compliment for once in your stupid life? Everything is delicious.’
Since most of the food memories were from before his time, Rick kept torpedoing the discussion with embarrassingly territorial references to more recent Christmases. ‘Remember the year at my brother’s? That whole dishwasher ordeal?’ he said with a sad, private laugh to be shared only with Ash’s mother. Then he peered around the table: the man had a story to tell. Dare they pry it out of him?
Ash shifted focus: ‘Do you cook much wazwan anymore, Ma? I swear you got to the point where your rista was as good as any Kashmiri’s.’
‘Oh, no. Indian food doesn’t agree with Rick’s tummy.’
‘Hey!’ Rick threw up his hands. ‘If Ash wants to eat Indian while he’s staying with us, why not? Could do that tomorrow, after your writing class.’
Ash reached for the wine. He could sense the barbed edges of a nasty kind of drunk prickling within, and was aware of his sister eyeing him warily as he refilled his glass. He sipped twice and continued: ‘I remember being in India and Brij’s sisters spending hours teaching you to cook. They were really like family to you, weren’t they?’
Rick went to the fridge for another root beer.
‘And progressive, too. I mean, making Muslim-style dishes among Hindus wasn’t exactly popular back then, was it? But that was just our family, I guess. I mean, they welcomed you right away, even though you were from a totally different culture.’ He tipped back his glass. ‘Like you were one of the family. Right?’
His mother nodded.
Ash reached again for the wine. Mona yanked it away. He laughed. ‘What are you, my mom?’
‘Come on now,’ said his actual mom.
A big gulp of root beer seemed to have rallied Rick, who returned with renewed purpose. ‘Was that in Srinagar?’ This he rhymed with tree-bagger.
‘No,’ said Ash, ‘we couldn’t go there—to Srinagar. Unless we wanted our heads lopped off and marched around on spikes, I mean.’
‘He’s being silly,’ said his mother. ‘It was never that bad.’
But here was an opportunity to play the pedant, whether Ash knew what he was talking about or not. ‘Kashmir in the mid-eighties, Rick, would have been on the cusp of a civil war. And Hindu families like ours weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms.’
‘Like Northern Ireland. With the Catholics and Protestants.’
‘Oh, Rick,’ said Ash with a sad laugh. ‘Much, much worse than that.’
But this did not have its desired, discomfiting effect. Rick leaned in. ‘How so?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Ash. He glanced at Mona for help.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘keep in mind that Muslim Kashmiris had it bad too.’
‘Now they do, you mean,’ said Ash. ‘Because the economy’s collapsed.’
‘Sure,’ said his sister. ‘The state’s really fallen on hard times. But then too. And here’s the thing Brij never talked about. All that communal harmony? That everything was fine and dandy until militants were shipped in from Pakistan and Afghanistan—’
‘To wage holy war,’ said Ash.
‘Jihad,’ confirmed Rick.
‘What I’m saying,’ said Mona, ‘is that Brij liked to tell us that everything in Kashmir used to be perfect. Perfect for Pandits, maybe, who lived in comfort with the Muslims under their thumbs. Those so-called Troubles were also a popular uprising, the oppressed people finally having enough of being ruled and doing something about it.’
His mother interjected: ‘And no offence to your father, but the Dhars weren’t exactly refugees. They were very affluent and had opportunities elsewhere in India. Or overseas.’ She helped herself to more potatoes. ‘Not only did your dad’s family not go through any of this, it was only when they couldn’t return that they really began to care.’
A posthumous takedown! And Mona was shaking her head in a doleful sort of agreement.
‘There’s a whole narrative here that Brij never really acknowledged,’ said his sister. ‘Instead we get this utopian ideal of a place—paradise on earth, as they say—ruined by foreigners. So there’s not only class and religious issues at play, there’s also xenophobia.’
‘Wow,’ said Rick. ‘So much to learn.’
And all so repulsive, Ash thought: with the patriarch out of the picture they could at last dismantle his legacy. He snatched the wine and filled his glass, and while he chugged it eyed the three other people around the table with the disdain of impending conquest. But just as he emptied his glass, his phone rang from the counter, and instead of eviscerating them all for their heresy he scampered away to answer it—Matt, he figured, with an update on whatever ‘memory’ he’d manufactured for himself now.
But the screen displayed a 519 number, and not one Ash
recognized. He took the phone into the living room and answered in his most cloying phone voice. A full minute into seasonal bromides he realized the woman on the other end was Sherene.
‘So,’ she said. ‘You avoiding me?’
‘Sorry, my phone’s been weird,’ he lied. ‘What number are you calling from?’
‘My parents’ landline in Windsor. Home for the holidays until tomorrow, then heading to London to spend New Year’s with my sister. That’s the real London, U.K.’
‘You guys do Christmas?’
‘Jesus’s birthday isn’t just for Hindus anymore.’ Sherene moved away from the phone to yell at someone—possibly her dad—in Farsi. Ash felt a little twinge of envy. She returned: ‘So what’s going on in fake London? Was Santa good to you?’
‘Get this: my mom’s boyfriend’s present was a creative writing class. At the library.’
‘That’s great!’
‘Great? Seriously? Do you know what sorts of lunatics sign up for these things? Guys with rope for belts sharing their ten-thousand-page conspiracy manifestos. Or cat ladies writing stories about their cats—from the cat’s perspective. Kill me.’
‘No way. This could be good for you.’
‘How so.’
‘Get you out of the house a bit. You haven’t been out, have you? Are you washing?’
‘I’ve washed.’
‘Not daily though.’
‘I’ve washed as needed.’
‘Time to break out the rope belt!’
‘Are you on your computer? I can hear you typing.’
‘Just seeing if there’s any room in that class.’
‘Wait. Why?’
‘Solidarity, sweetie. Me and you.’
‘No. What are you doing? Don’t do that.’
‘London’s on my way back to Toronto. Look, here it is: ten to four tomorrow. I could totally make it, my flight to Heathrow’s not until Monday. And look, there’s space.’ Sherene paused. ‘I’m serious. If not me, who will you make your snippy comments to?’
‘Snippy? Not clever?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. Maybe if I was scripting them.’ Despite himself—despite everything—Ash laughed. ‘This is a fiction workshop, right? Do you even write fiction?’